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Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and
Mary Holmes
News & Letters, July 2001
Milosevic finally extradited to The Hague
As we went to press, the Serbian government extradited Slobodan
Milosevic to The Hague to stand trial before the International
War Crimes Tribunal for his actions during the 1999 Kosova War.
The most significant mass response was not in Serbia, but in The
Hague, where hundreds of victims of Milosevic from the Balkans
gathered to applaud his arrival.
In addition to his crimes in Kosova, which resulted in tens of
thousands of deaths and the expulsion of 800,000 Albanian
civilians from their homes, Milosevic deserves to be tried for
genocide for his 1991-95 war in Bosnia and Croatia. In Bosnia,
Milosevic's forces slaughtered 200,000 people, mainly civilians,
drove two million from their homes in an "ethnic
cleansing" campaign, and set up rape camps where thousands
of Muslim and Croat women were assaulted by troops.
Only weeks ago Serbian politicians were adamantly stating that
they would "never" cooperate with The Hague Tribunal.
What has changed? Many are pointing to financial and political
pressure from the U.S. and other Western governments, but, as we
know from their decade of compromise with the Milosevic regime,
these imperialist powers have no big commitment to prosecuting
him or his lieutenants. Leading Serb war criminal Radovan
Karadzic still lives in Bosnia right under the noses of NATO
troops. As it announced Milosevic's arrival, the International
Tribunal called this situation "scandalous."
The greater factor is the change in public opinion inside Serbia
itself. During Milosevic's rule, the public was fed falsehoods
on state television. This spring, alternative Serbian media such
as Radio B-92 and the weekly VREME began to expose Serbian war
crimes.
In June, Serbian state television finally broadcast footage of a
mass grave containing the bodies of 100 Kosovar Albanians-many
of them women and small children-who had been buried secretly in
the Spring of 1999 in Kladovo, Serbia. According to the present
government's own reports, refrigerator trucks were used to
transport hundreds of bodies of murdered Albanians to secret
mass graves in Serbia. This may account for some of the 10,000
Kosovars still missing since 1999.
As Milosevic was extradited, a few thousand of his die-hard
supporters demonstrated in Belgrade. A member of the student
movement Otpor, looking on, responded: "The old fools!
Milosevic is Serbia's shame!" (LE MONDE, June 29, 2001).
As his trial moves forward, Milosevic's supporters, at home and
abroad, are sure to defend him as a victim of NATO. Sadly, a
good many of his defenders consider themselves part of the Left.
This newspaper has not allowed, and will not allow, such
monstrous arguments to remain unanswered, especially when they
emanate from the Left. We will continue to expose the lies of
outright supporters of Milosevic such as the Serbian philosopher
Mihailo Markovic. We will also refute the distortions of those
like Noam Chomsky, who formalistically argue over who has the
right to judge him, while attempting to relativize his genocidal
actions.
To evade such a critique would be to give tacit support to those
forces that are trying, at this very moment, to suppress the
Albanian minority's demands for human rights and
multiculturalism inside Macedonia. That, and not the tactics of
a small group of rebels in the hills, is the key question facing
that country. While nothing resembling Milosevic's "ethnic
cleansing" has taken place, recently there have been some
very disturbing signs. They include threats to drive Albanians
out of Skopje, the capital, as well as the
"disappearing" of politically active Albanians,
possibly with police complicity.
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