THE MAN BEHIND THE MADNESS

By MASSIMO CALABRESI/BELGRADE

Serb fairy tales often revolve around the story of an evil wizard who can be defeated only by finding his hidden source of power and destroying it. Modern Serbia has no shortage of wicked sorcerers who fit that archetype, and first among them is Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. In the late 1980s Milosevic loosed chaos upon the former Yugoslavia by conjuring up the ghosts of Balkan nationalism. The four years of war that followed dismembered the country, killed some 100,000 civilians and turned the President into an international pariah. Within Serbia, however, his iron rule remained unchallenged--until last November, when the first sustained attempts to defy Milosevic began rocking the Serbian capital, Belgrade. During recent weeks, the protesters' calls for Milosevic to relinquish absolute rule have won support both at home and abroad, but so far the Serbian strongman remains unbowed. One reason is his hidden source of power.

The key to Milosevic's rule is located in the corridors of an imposing steel-and-glass building on Belgrade's Knez Milos Street. It is here that one can find the office of Jovica Stanisic, the most powerful man in Serbia after the President. As a deputy of Serbia's figurehead Interior Minister, Stanisic controls most of the intelligence and security within Serbia. He is also Milosevic's most important adviser. Rarely appearing in public and never giving interviews, Stanisic meets or talks daily with the President, briefing his boss on everything from politics to finance to the use and deployment of the country's 80,000-strong police force, which Stanisic runs. The combination of his access to the President, his extensive network of spies and his control over the police means he is a person Milosevic cannot do without.

Stanisic, 46, spent the first 14 years of his career working his way up the ladder of the Yugoslav secret police. In 1988 he was promoted to chief of Belgrade's security operations. It was in this position that he first caught the attention of Milosevic, who had been elected President of Serbia the year before. In March 1991, three months before the Balkan wars began, the President placed Stanisic in charge of Serbia's entire security service.

During the next 4 1/2 years, Stanisic played a central role in the Serb minority uprisings that tore through Croatia and Bosnia. His position enabled him to act as a virtual consigliere to Milosevic, implementing the President's vision of a greater Serbia by funneling arms, ammunition and support to Serbian enclaves throughout the Balkans. Western diplomats suspect that Stanisic had an important role in organizing Serbia's paramilitary infiltrations in the Croatian city of Knin in 1990 and the paramilitary operations in 1991 that preceded Serbian army incursions into the Croatian city of Vukovar. Those Serbian moves resulted in appalling atrocities, including the slaughter of 260 wounded soldiers and civilians at a hospital in Vukovar.

No one has ever been able to prove Stanisic's involvement in these terror campaigns. Nevertheless, he is regarded as perhaps the most damning link between Milosevic and the crimes committed by Serb paramilitary figures in Croatia and Bosnia. One of the most notorious of these is Zeljko ("Arkan") Raznatovic. During Stanisic's rise to the head of Belgrade's security operations in the 1980s, Arkan worked as an agent in the capital, flashing his Interior Ministry identity card or other evidence of his employment when he had run-ins with the police. When the war started, Arkan and his men were identified by numerous witnesses at the ethnic cleansings of several towns in Bosnia and Croatia. In 1992 they engineered the ethnic cleansing of Bijeljina and participated in killing and looting in Zvornik. As late as 1995 they were involved in expelling Muslims from Sanski Most. They were also spotted driving around the country in black Jeep Wagoneers with license plates issued from Serbia's Interior Ministry. "War is war," says a Stanisic defender, "so maybe they stole the vehicles. He simply doesn't have any deal with Arkan."

Friends of Stanisic deny that his ministry had anything to do with these atrocities. Foreign diplomats and independent Serbian journalists, however, say otherwise. Most believe that Stanisic's position as head of Serbian security means he had knowledge of these ethnic cleansings. And this, they say, makes him the one man who can finger Milosevic for war crimes. Moreover, his de facto control over the Interior Ministry's Public Security police places him in charge of the force that acts as Milosevic's praetorian guard. While this makes him the keystone to Milosevic's power, it also means that it would be difficult, if not suicidal, for anyone, including the President, to challenge Stanisic's position. "If [Milosevic] tried to do that," says a friend of Stanisic's, "it would mean that he went crazy."

Despite his brutal reputation, Stanisic is said to be advising Milosevic to make concessions to the enraged civilians who have been filling the streets of Belgrade for the past nine weeks. (The demonstrators are protesting Milosevic's decision to cancel the results of last November's nationwide municipal elections, in which Serbia's opposition parties won a number of cities at the expense of the President's ruling coalition.) Those who know Stanisic say he believes the protesters should be granted their victories because he is convinced that the opposition's coalition, which inlcudes several contentious factions, is inherently unstable. Once in power, the protesters' unity could evaporate and their fight against Milosevic dissolve into internecine bickering. Stanisic is also loath to approve a widespread crackdown on the demonstrators because he knows this would provoke an international outcry. Allowing the protests to become a Balkan Tiananmen Square would ruin Serbia's chances for attracting desperately needed foreign investment.

Stanisic's calculus is a shrewd one, based not on any sympathy for the demonstrators but instead upon cold self-interest. Unfortunately for Stanisic, however, this stance has locked him in a battle with a group led by one of the few people in Serbia whose power rivals his own: Milosevic's wife Mira Markovic. She is an ardent communist who acts as Milosevic's confederate and ideological mentor. The party she controls, the Yugoslav United Left, is comprised of hard-liners who are urging Milosevic to give no quarter to the demonstrators. Markovic feels that Stanisic is peddling dangerous advice and undermining her husband's authority. In the past two weeks Serbia's independent press has carried several stories on attempts by members of Markovic's party to remove Stanisic from power.

For the pragmatic Stanisic, Milosevic's wife presents a formidable challenge. Until now no one in Serbia has ever entered the political ring with Markovic, grappled with her and won. But Stanisic is not a man to be toyed with. He is a passionate hunter, and friends say that although he has little time for his hobby now, if given half a chance, he will track and kill "almost anything." Unaccustomed to being hunted himself, it is unclear how he plans to counter Markovic's attacks. But whatever his strategy, how Stanisic decides to play his cards in the next few weeks could well determine Milosevic's fate. And with it Serbia's.

--Reported by Dejan Anastasijevic/Belgrade, Alexandra Stiglmayer/Zagreb and Douglas Waller/Washington

With reporting by DEJAN ANASTASIJEVIC/BELGRADE, ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER/ZAGREB AND DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON