ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

eard, and he functioned as everything, including note taker. He would take copious
notes at every meeting but he wrote so quickly that I cannot imagine they were legible. I
think it was all for show. I don’t believe Milosevic wanted notes of most of his meetings.
When I came alone, then Goran did not sit-in on the meetings, and they were only oneon-one.
This did change a bit later when Bob Frasure, our Deputy Assistant Secretary
from Washington, started coming. In those meetings sometimes Milan Milutinovic, the
Foreign Minister, and Chris Spiro who was an American advisor of Milosevic, would
join. But the whole atmosphere of these sessions was very strange. Most heads-of-state
want entourages to show their importance. With Milosevic, it was just the reverse.
The most bizarre episode I recall with Milosevic came one evening when he called up
and asked me to join him for dinner. It was very strange to be invited like this by him,
and to this day I do not know what he was trying to achieve other than to get closer to the
United States and show how he wanted to work with us. This was in the period when Bob
Frasure had started making visits to Belgrade, and the U.S. was starting to engage as the
primary mediator of the Yugoslav conflict, replacing the Europeans. So Milosevic knew
that the U.S. had become the key player on what happens in Yugoslavia. He called up,
even though Bob Frasure was not in town at the time, and asked me to come over to one
of the country houses and have dinner with him. We were having dinner, and he was his
usual, chatty self, giving the appearance of a perfectly normal person. And then in the
middle of the conversation he said, “Did you know that Warren Zimmermann tried to
have me assassinated?” I was stunned. I could not believe he said that and thought that he
was perhaps testing me in some way. I answered “Mr. President, I know Warren
Zimmermann. I know American policy. I don’t want you to believe that. It isn’t true.” He
said, “No, no. It’s absolutely true. I have evidence that Warren Zimmermann was plotting
with Vuk Draskovic to have me assassinated and we have tapes to prove this.” Vuk
Draskovic was probably the most prominent dissident in Serbia at that time, and I am
sure Warren Zimmermann met with him, but the assassination charges were of course
absurd and indicative of Milosevic’s paranoia. From that time on I realized that he was in
a completely different world. But it took a while, and incidents like this, to really
understand how he saw the world and how paranoid he was because he was generally so
good at being able to cover it up. I think he genuinely believed the Zimmermann story,
though I have no idea what kinds of tapes he was talking about. I never got around to
telling Warren Zimmermann that story. I’m sure he would have been amused by it.
Q: If he was so out of it, did Milosevic really understand what was happening in Bosnia?
PERINA: That I think he did, although of course he always tried to give the reverse
impression— that he was an outsider looking in, just like all the rest of us. I remember
that when I raised Srebrenica with him, the position that he took was roughly: “Why are
you coming to me? Why do you think I am responsible? I’m doing my best to try to calm
Mladic but Bosnia is not my country. The United States itself says this is a separate
country now, an independent country. Why do you come to me?” This was his basic
response. The difficulty there was that we did not actually have a smoking gun to tie him
to the events in Bosnia. Even later at the Hague Tribunal they had the problem of proving
that he was linked to these events because they never found the smoking gun. When
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