"Can you arrange a meeting with Milosevic?" they asked the general.
"I'll try," he replied and called the former president.
"Out of the question," replied Milosevic.
Fifteen minutes later he called back.
"Fine," he said, "make it here at my place, no witnesses, no bartender. Nobody else, just him and me."
Pavkovic called the Federation Palace.
"No," the response from the president's cabinet. "The meeting should take place here."
"Out of the question," repeated Milosevic when he received the message. Half an hour later Pavkovic was told that Kostunica insisted on the meeting. "Out of the question," Milosevic, at the end of his rope, abandoned and stripped of his powers, refused to give in.
The new president's cabinet tried once again. "Kostunica suggests that I come to the meeting as well," was the next message from Pavkovic the mediator.
And once again Milosevic curtly retorted: "Out of the question." It appeared as if the whole idea had fallen through. Then Pavkovic made an effort of his own. "Would you like me to go to Kostunica and ask him if he would please come here?" he suggested to the lonely dictator.
"Alright," responded the latter.
Several army jeeps, military vehicles and Mercedes' stopped in front of the Federation Palace around 8pm.
"It was strange," Kostunica was to say later on. He stepped into a military jeep practically alone. Journalist Milos Jevtovic, a mediator in the talks between Kostunica and the Army, was his only accompaniment. When they heard about the incident, the people in DOS [the Democratic Opposition of Serbia] trembled in fear. Entering a military vehicle on Oct. 6 and entrusting oneself to the Army did not seem like the best of ideas. The revolution could have lost not only its most popular mascot but also the only power it had managed to achieve thus far. "I had confidence," Kostunica was to say later on. "I've always trusted the Army. And I believed in Jevtovic. He estimated that it was safe to go."
Milosevic met them on Uzicka Street. Pavkovic says the reception was "hospitable." Kostunica had his own views.
"This was the first time I went to see him. And I thought, as we were walking in, I thought how earlier people from the opposition had come to see him but it was always as the opposition. I was coming as the man in power."
The two presidents and the general entered the salon. Milosevic expected Kostunica to begin the conversation. Kostunica was looking at Pavkovic. Pavkovic then said:
"Well, here we are?"
A few minutes later he left the room.
The discussion lasted one hour. Without a written record or any witnesses. Kostunica would later say, in an eyewitness account for this book, that only two issues were disputed. First, Milosevic maintained that his term in office, regardless of the election outcome, did not expire until July 2001. He also complained about the street violence, citing the case of a district official in Leskovac whose house had been burned down and his son's perfume shop on Terazije in Belgrade.
Much later, in Skopje, during the course of talks with Richard Holbrooke, the president of Yugoslavia, remembering Milosevic, told him how, on that night of Oct. 6, he reproached Milosevic for one thing only.
"I told him that he had spent hours and days talking with you," Kostunica told the U.S. ambassador to the UN, "while he did not talk at all with the opposition in his own country."
Holbrooke laughed.
"Yes, that's true," he said.
The discussion with Milosevic ended when Kostunica mentioned the decision of the Constitutional Court.
"If that is indeed the case, then the situation is entirely different," said Milosevic. "I personally have not seen it, but if that is the case, then I concede."
"I was surprised," said the president of Yugoslavia in an eyewitness account for this book. "I don't know if he truly did not know about the decision of the Constitutional Court but his gesture surprised me."
They bid each other a cordial farewell. Pavkovic thought: "Why couldn't they have done that a day earlier? Nothing would have happened."
The former president insisted that Pavkovic remain at Uzicka Street. Milos Jevtovic insisted that the general return with the new president to the Federation Palace.
"I brought them here," said Pavkovic. "Courtesy would dictate that I take them back."
In the Federation Palace, the general and the president had coffee together. Pavkovic then returned to Uzicka Street.
"General, I have nothing to seek here," Milosevic said to him. "The results of the election have been published in the Official Chronicle [of the FRY]. The only thing I can do is to congratulate Kostunica and to sign. Do you have his phone number?"
Vojislav Kostunica was freezing in his huge office when the telephone rang.
"I would like to make a statement on television," said Milosevic. "If you agree, I will cite the results of the election and publicly congratulate you."
"I agree," replied the president of Yugoslavia and hung up the phone.
Excerpt from the book "October 5" by Dragan Bujosevic and Ivan Radovanovic