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| Jul 8, 2001 |
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| Serbia's Milosevic Has Much To Answer For |
THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS- It seems absolutely surreal that Serbia's deposed despot, Slobodan Milosevic, is now lodged here at a comfortable UN prison in the Hague, just miles from the heart of swinging, boisterous Amsterdam. My feelings about Milosevic's arrest are mixed. Way back in 1989, this column began warning of Milosevic's toxic combination of virulent Serb nationalism, Pan-Slavic, anti-Muslim racism, and totalitarian methods. I was denounced in 1989 at a special meeting at the University of Belgrade. Over the ensuing years, as I kept writing Milosevic intended to launch a Balkan blood-bath, I became the target of vitriolic hate mall from Serbs and a steady stream of death threats. Milosevic originated four Balkan Wars that killed 250,000 people and left 3.4 million homeless. It's time he is behind bars. I am waiting for Milosevic's trial to demonstrate the Serb despot's personal involvement or at least knowledge of orders to commit atrocities and crimes against humanity against Croats, Muslim Bosnians, and Catholic and Muslims Albanian Kosovars. I long to see punished the 68 other senior Serb ethno-nazi war criminals, notably Bosnian Serb leaders Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, who organized and conducted the most abominable crimes in Europe since World War II and Stalin's era. Tough UN chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, will keep up pressure to extradite Serb war criminals remaining at large. But I am also troubled by the spectacle of a man sold by his country and put on trial by a massive, faceless international bureaucratic machine that represents today's great powers. I am unhappy that the western powers had to pay Serbia US 1$ billion to get Milosevic delivered like a FedEx package. Money is the homogenized form of power. Power is what got the Serb strongman to Holland. But I would have preferred to see Britain's SAS or US Delta Force commandos go grab Milosevic and bring him to justice. I believe Milosovic and his fellow war criminals deserve the maximum punishment - including his Gorgon wife, Mila. The UN Tribunal should also prosecute other as yet unindicted Serb war criminals, notably those academics and leaders of the Orthodox Church who concocted a farrago of racist-historical-religious lies that provided Serb extremists and political gangsters the intellectual and religious justifications to massacre or 'purify the nation' of Bosnian and Kosovar 'untermensch.' But I still cannot help feeling some sympathy for this lonely prisoner in a Dutch jail. And I have a certain grudging respect for Milosevic who is refusing to cooperate with the UN Tribunal or rejects the legitimacy of the trial, showing the pride,stubbornness, and courage for which Serbs are noted. Milosevic and his supporters are now hoping to turn his trial, which could take a year or more, into a political circus in which NATO finds itself the defendant. But the steady discovery of mass graves of murdered Albanians hidden in Serbia is fast undermining Milosevic's strategy. The former head of Serb secret police recently revealed that remains of thousands of Albanian civilians - mostly women and children - murdered in Kosovo by Serb forces in 1999 prior to the NATO bombing campaign - were still secreted across Serbia. Many bodies had been dumped into the Danube, buried in forests or deep mine shafts, burned, or dissolved in acid. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims remain still missing after six years. Serbs are now learning for the first time of the atrocities committed by their former regime. These gruesome revelations, helped Serbia's new, capable prime minister, Zoran Djinjic, deliver Milosevic to the Hague. But the scores of secret graves being uncovered seems to have done nothing to change the opinions of die-hard Milosevic backers, notably in North America. In light of revelations of Serb war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, it's high time for three of his staunchest supporters - to admit in public they have been dead wrong, mislead their readers, and, as for the last-named person, helped prolong the war in Bosnia and delay NATO's taking action to end the bloodbath there. They were also totally wrong in opposing NATO's 1999 police action against Serbia, which halted Milosevic's ethnic terrorism and eventually brought him down. Lewis Mackenzie, in particular, who insisted in front of me on TV that no more than 400 Albanians were killed in Kosovo, should be forced to watch secret graves being unearthed in Serbia and read UN investigator's reports that show 12,000 Albanians were murdered, 2,000 are still missing, and 750,000 were driven from their homes in winter into the open in hopes they would die of disease and exposure. The most important lesson to be drawn from Milosevic's arrest is that other demagogues around the world should think twice before inciting racism and religious hatred, or concocting distorted histories and fake nationalist mythologies, to enflame their followers and advance their political ambitions. This is also a special warning to embattled Macedonia, which appears tempted to follow Milosevic's murderous course by launching full-scale war against its badly mistreated and now rebellious Albanian minority. Copyright eric s. margolis 2001
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