The Day We Toppled Milosevic and How His Disciple Won

Twenty-five years after Milosevic’s fall, Serbia’s ex-propagandists run the state; Kosovo absorbs blows, and Britain’s security hangs in balance. The revolution was real, its reversal ruthless.

On 5 October 2000, Serbia staged the most elegant of Balkan miracles: a regime that had made a habit of terror collapsed in a single afternoon to a crowd that refused to go home¹. Twenty-five years later, the photographs have the untouchable glow of myth, bulldozers nosing through police cordons, union men in windbreakers, students with hoarse throats, a parliament building briefly on fire and suddenly, almost sheepishly, open.

“Gotovo je!” was the chant. He’s finished.

The assumption Western, Serbian, human was that history, having turned, would keep turning. It did not. The truly Balkan twist came later: the faces that manned the loudhailers dispersed, many to private lives; the machine that trained them returned, rebranded and a country that promised to escape the gravity of Milosevic settled back into its orbit, only with smoother manners and better English.

The inventory of that October is by now catechism. Milosevic, architect of wars from Slovenia to Bosnia, finisher of the arc in Kosovo, bled legitimacy at the ballot box on 24 September 2000 and tried to pretend otherwise. Belgrade would not indulge the pretence. On 5 October, under the pressure of numbers and a sudden shortage of fear, the edifice gave way. Vojislav Kostunica took the federal presidency; Zoran Dindic became prime minister and translator-in-chief of a reformist idea that Serbia could be ordinary, lawful, European. The lives that hinged on his survival were many; on 12 March 2003, a sniper ended them all at once. The murder’s political motive was never properly digested by the state he was trying to modernise. Serbia learned to proceed without answering the question that mattered most: who profits when reform is shot on the steps of government?