A rchive Date
[ 19-03-2006 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Yugoslavia ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2006/03/19/1494865.html
Milosevic's legacy
Life and times of a twisted demagogue who fanned 4 wars and gave us the phrase 'ethnic cleansing'
By Eric Margolis
Sun, March 19, 2006
In an October 1988 Toronto Sun column, I warned that Slobodan Milosevic, "who raised the twin cries of 'Greater Serbia' and 'crush the Albanians,'" was a dangerous demagogue seeking power by stirring up ethnic/religious hatreds that would tear his unstable nation apart.
Few people outside East Europe took notice of Yugoslavia's onrushing crisis. At Belgrade University, however, a special assembly was called to denounce me for daring to raise alarms about the man being hailed as "saviour of the Serbs."
Far from saving Serbs, Milosevic, who died under still-mysterious circumstances eight days ago in the UN prison at the Hague, would bring ruin and dishonour onto them.
Four years later, in 1992, Yugoslavia disintegrated. Milosevic held primary - though not sole - responsibility for destroying the delicate ethnic balance created by Tito. He sought to forge a Greater Serbia out of the wreckage of Yugoslavia.
Milosevic fanned violent ethnic and religious hatred against Muslims and Croats, igniting four wars and savage ethnic cleansing that killed 250,000 and left 3.4 million homeless.
His henchmen, notably Ratko Mladic, Radovan Karadzic, and gangster Arkan, committed Europe's worst crimes against humanity since World War II. Europe and the Muslim world did nothing while gangs of his thugs blew up mosques, burned villages, raped Muslim women and herded Muslim captives into concentration camps where they were tortured, sexually abused, and starved.
The culmination of this ethnic terrorism came at Srebrencia, where 8,000 or more Muslims were murdered while cowardly Dutch UN troops watched.
Milosevic repeatedly urged his followers to "kill or send all the Turks (what he called Muslim Yugoslavs - even though they were ethnic Slavs or Albanians) back to Turkey." Finally, when Milosevic's soldiers drove 800,000 ethnic Albanians from their homes in Kosovo, the U.S., to its everlasting credit, took action.
Inside Serbia, Milosevic led a sinister regime run by gangsters and neo-fascist paramilitaries. At least two of his leading political opponents - Zoran Djinjic and Ivan Stambolic - were murdered by Milosevic's men, and a third, Vuk Drascovic, narrowly escaped being killed. Gangsters were allowed to run the legal and illegal economy and used to silence political and human rights opponents.
Milosevic is now being blamed for all of Serbia's miseries and crimes. But many others must share blame: The army and secret police leaders, paramilitary gangs, rabid nationalist, hatred-preaching elements of the Orthodox Church, and those ordinary Serbs who thrilled to the racist-religious ideology preached by the demagogue they called "King Slobo."
In the ugly wars ignited by Milosevic, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians also committed criminal acts. But the vast majority of the war's victims - around 80% - were Bosnian Muslims and Albanians, and the world rightly heaped condemnation on Serbia.
Serbs branded
Serbs, an intelligent, cultured European people justly renowned for their great courage in the wars of 1912-13, 1914, and 1939, ended up branded a nation of murderers and sadists. Milosevic's four lost wars wrecked Serbia and left hundreds of thousands of Serbs refugees.
Everything he touched turned to disaster.
I wish this clever, twisted demagogue had lived to the end of his trial and served life in a harsh prison for his crimes, an example to other despots seeking political power by whipping up race and religious hatreds.
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