June 28, 2001
Dictators don't operate alone. Even Slobodan Milosevic could not have ignited four wars and inspired genocide in the former Yugoslavia without considerable support from the Serbian people. That makes it all the more remarkable that Yugoslavia's cabinet has now moved to have him stand trial at The Hague court for war crimes--and that most Serbs have at last found the moral courage to condemn him.
History will record Milosevic as the architect of ethnic cleansing who stoked nationalistic hatreds to cement himself into power and launched a decade of bloodshed that became Europe's worst carnage since the Third Reich.
But a substantial part of the Serbian nation had to rise with him or Milosevic would have been just another post-Soviet apparatchik. That support during the 1990s sustained Milosevic and tarred many Serbs with his crimes as well. This tragic episode echoed the controversial thesis in Harvard scholar Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners"--that Hitler couldn't have slaughtered 6 million Jews without the help of like-minded Germans.
That said, many Serbs never supported Milosevic, and others worked against him. But only since his 1999 war with NATO over Kosovo--the conflict that led to the charges against him--has a majority of Serbs finally grown fed up enough with Milosevic to throw him out of office and applaud his jailing on corruption charges.
That took too long, and his remaining support is still fueled by nationalism and a sense of victimization. Many Serbs, who make up the vast majority of Yugoslavia's population, strongly oppose their government taking the additional step of handing him over to the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
Diehard Milosevic supporters are protesting his extradition, perhaps within days, as a sellout by Belgrade in exchange for economic aid. The Yugoslav government is under pressure to show more cooperation with the UN before Friday, when an international donors conference begins in Brussels in hopes of raising nearly $1.3 billion to help rescue Yugoslavia's crippled economy. The U.S. has agreed to attend but is linking aid payments to Yugoslavia's full cooperation with The Hague. Clearly Belgade feels the pressure.
But this is no sellout of Serbia, no national surrender. If anything, it's a national catharsis in which Serbs finally recognize how much damage Milosevic did to their nation. The UN tribunal's May 1999 indictment accuses Milosevic of crimes against humanity in the deportation of 700,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, and of a direct role in the murders of 340 people.
Unlike the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, where Milosevic's suspected role as the mastermind of ethnic cleansing remains harder to prove, recent revelations suggest he tried to cover up atrocities in Kosovo by ordering mass graves there exhumed and hidden elsewhere in Serbia. As prosecutors uncover more of these transplanted massacres--including a truck with the bodies of 86 ethnic-Albanian civilians dumped in the Danube--this has been the last straw for many of Milosevic's supporters.
Milosevic came to power in Serbia in 1987 after promising Serbs in Kosovo, "No one will ever dare beat you again." In the end, he brought shame and disgrace on Serbia, provoked wars that killed close to 300,000 people and left Yugoslavia a disintegrated, war-ravaged, pariah state.
That is his legacy. That Serbs have finally had enough is to their credit. Milosevic brought the wrath of history down on Serbia. Now he must face international justice to pay for his crimes.
