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In
mid-February, during the opening days of the trial of
Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, I spent a week in Belgrade
talking about him to friends and experts, politicians and
victims. I asked them about their reactions to his trial and
what effect they thought it was having on their country. My
notebook slowly filled up with dozens of contradictory and
confusing views, most of them, it must be said, critical of
the trial in one way or another. When I went to get a
haircut, Branko, the barber, summed it all up in the space
of five minutes. As the scissors skimmed around my left ear
he said, "Milosevic is innocent." As he moved up to the top
top of my head he declared, "Milosevic is guilty, but then
so were Izetbegovic and Tudjman."1 When he reached my right
ear he said, "Under Milosevic things were great. Now
the government will privatize our shop and then we'll lose
our jobs." By the time Branko had got to just above the nape
of my next, though, doubts began to set in. He stood up
straight and with a sharp jerk of the scissors declared,
"Fuck Milosevic!"
It is not surprising to me that Serbs are confused.2 For more than a
decade Milosevic and his cronies were constantly on television declaring
that the Serbs were being set upon by evil, genocidal
Croats, Muslim fundamentalists, Albanian drug dealers,
American scum, German Nazis, etc. Now, with Milosevic on
trial in The Hague and with the proceedings broadcast live,
he is repeating his accusations over again - and for hours
and hours nonstop.3
1.
On February 14 Slobodan Milosevic began his
defense before the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The
Hague. He stands accused of sixty-six counts of
war crimes—including ethnic cleansing in
Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, the murder of
civilians and prisoners, and, gravest of all,
genocide in Bosnia. Predictably, Milosevic
rejects these charges. He says that everyone
else was to blame, especially
NATO, that he either knew nothing about
the crimes or had no influence on the people
that committed them, and that the accusations
are lies in any case. Indeed, with an eye
perhaps to aligning himself with
anti-globalization protesters, Milosevic
shrewdly told the court on February 18 that
Yugoslavia had been a victim of a Western
“strategic concept in realizing global control.”
It was, he said, the West that was
subjugating countries throughout the world [and]
causing...conflicts between the Slav and Muslim
nations in the hope that they will kill each
other respectively or at least weaken each other
so much that control may be established over
them in such a weakened state. Kosovo and
Chechnya in that respect are undoubtedly a link
in the same chain.... |
