Of blood and liar - the legacy of Milosevic

Stefan wrote in my blog questioning my agenda when I posted a WSJ Opinion column on Milosevic's death and implying I am either a propagandist or a sheep "twisting" history.

I made a point to mention Milosevic's death in my blog and how he cheated his victims again when he died before justice is served to him by first hand stories of the bloody attrocities the Serbs led by Milosevic instigated and fueled the Balkan war, and meeting face-to-face with ppl who are victims or have to defend themselves and their families during the war.

Someone I know has his parents forced out of their house and made to walk thru a minefield at midnite, and by the grace of God live to tell, their house plundered and consficated by the Serbs. I also know someone whose house were bombed mercilessly and most of his childhood frens died during the war to defend themselves and their families, while he himself had to fight as a soldier during the war.. all he can show while I was there are the tombs of ppl he knew and love. Listening to Sarajevo inhabitants who were totally helpless when the hills surrounding the city were surrounded by Serb and Yugoslavian armies rolling bombs in used tyres down to a city full of helpless victims.. observing to these first hand stories I find these victims as more forgiving then if these attrocities were to happen to me and my people.

Here I posted an article written by Lord Ashdown published in the Independent, who were there and knew the man and the liar that he was, first hand.

Paddy Ashdown: Bloody legacy of a man whose talent was lying
Published: 13 March 2006

The legacy of Slobodan Milosevic was blood.

Blood and chaos. Most of the blame for the strife and the thousands of deaths that followed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia can be laid at his door, although Franjo Tudjman [the Croatian leader] was also culpable.

Milosevic was an opportunist rather than a nationalist, but he unleashed the forces of Serb nationalism. In Croatia the response was Tudjman. In Bosnia it was genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Milosevic brought shame and disaster on the great Serb people. They are now known in far too much of the world as the people who perpetrated aggression and killing at places such as Srebrenica.

Milosevic started off with a country that included Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia, and ended with a small Serbia. A joke used to do the rounds that Mira, Milosevic's wife, comes into the bedroom saying : " Sloba, there are troops in the garden." He replies: "Don't worry, they're guarding the borders of Yugoslavia."

In the end the Serbs realised who he was, which is why they got rid of him. But Milosevic fooled too many Western statesmen for too long. The intervention came too late. The scales fell from the eyes of the international community over Kosovo. If they had realised earlier he was not part of the solution but part of the problem, tens of thousands of people would have lived and millions would not have been driven from their homes.

Milosevic was subtle and wily, but also charismatic and charming. His biggest advantage was his ability to lie straight in your face. I spent a day seeing the Kosovan Albanian villages being shelled by Serb artillery. The next day he flatly denied to me it was happening, until I told him I had seen it - and then he made up some excuse.

The people in the Balkans are the world champion conspiracy theorists and will come up with conspiracies about Milosevic's death. But whom does his death serve? It doesn't help the trial at The Hague. He and Tudjman have cheated justice.

His death is a kind of closure of the Balkan wars, but the real closure will not come until his henchmen, Mladic and Karadzic, are brought to justice.

(Lord Ashdown is a former high representative of the international community in Bosnia)

Balkan Ghost

I woke up this morning to the news of Milosevic’s death at the Haque, just a few months before the U.N. tribunal decision on his war crimes. It was just two weeks and three Mondays ago when there was a victim protest against him in front of the courtroom at the Haque.

It seems Milosevic caused as much problems while he was alive as when he is dead. Apparently there’s a dispute by his family and his Russian ally that he might be poisoned or given the wrong medicine. As the article below aptly put it, he was luckier compared to all the victims of the genocide and ethnic furies that he instigated and the many many many lives he and his followers destroyed.

Here’s the excerpt from the WSJ opinion column.

Balkan Ghost
No one now disputes that stopping Slobodan Milosevic was the right thing to do.

Monday, March 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
In the end, Slobodan Milosevic was luckier than his victims. The former Serbian leader died at age 64 in his prison bed early Saturday, apparently of a heart attack, though full autopsy results are pending. Death was his small victory over the U.N. tribunal that now can't complete the first-ever war crimes trial of a former head of state.

As Serbian leader after 1989, Milosevic unleashed the ethnic furies that sparked the bloodiest conflicts in Europe since World War II. Yugoslavia was the West's great failure for most of the 1990s. "This is the hour of Europe," proclaimed Luxembourg's foreign minister, Jacques Poos, in 1991 when the Croats and Serbs came to blows. Yet not until after Srebrenica and its 7,000 dead men and boys in 1995 did the U.S. step in and lead an ineffective Europe to stop the fighting.

For too long, U.S. officials convinced themselves the Balkan wars resulted from implacable hatreds and nationalism rather than Milosevic's autocratic ambitions. But when NATO finally used force--with U.N. support in Kosovo only after the fact--his regime fell and the furies ended.

Today the new post-Milosevic arrangements in the Balkans are imperfect, sectarian tensions are raw and democracy is fragile. Western troops are still needed on the ground in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. But no one seriously questions whether outside intervention was the right thing to do. The tragedy of the Balkans is that it took so long for the West to generate the nerve to stop the man who died on the weekend as a largely forgotten war criminal.