'Land of Mordor'

By the beginning of 1991, Serbia had become known as the 'Land of Mordor' among foreign journalists in Yugoslavia, thus honouring J. R. R. Tolkien's dark vision of a fallen kingdom. Elections in December 1990 had conferred a dubious democratic legitimacy on the presidency of Slobodan Milosevic. His victory at the polls had deepened fears among Serbia's fragile liberal establishment that this 'Emperor of the Night' would now go on to fulfil the bleakest of the prophecies which had multiplied since September 1987, the month in which Milosevic carried out a political assassination on his erstwhile mentor, Ivan Stambolic, thereby assuming the leadership of the Serbian Communist Party.
The drive towards war in Yugoslavia could not have been as dynamic as it was had it not been for the extraordinary personality of Slobodan Milosevic, the most paradoxical of dictators. He is a man without passion, without any real nationalist motivation (althought on the surface, he appears to wallow in it), and he is man who has never shown any affection on regard for the masses upon whom he depends for support. Yet he is without doubt the single most influential post-war politician in Yugoslavia after Tito. Indeed there is a strong, rather depressing case for suggesting that Milosevic may leave a deeper impression on history than Tito. Whereas the Partizan leader succeeded in ending the mass slaughter of Croats and Serbs born of the complex conflict which developed among the ruins of monarchist Yugoslavia during the Second World War, Milosevic has invoked those spirits of violence and unleashed them to turn the sleepy backwater which the post-war Balkans had become into the pathologically unstable region that it was for the first half of the twentieth century.


('The Fall of Yugoslavia', Misha Glenny, Penguin Books, às páginas tantas)