The UN, heavy-handed in Serbia-It was a cardinal mistake to extradite Milosevic.

Jerusalem Post ^ | 12-31-03 | SHLOMO AVINERI

[SJackson]

The recent parliamentary elections in Serbia, which greatly strengthened nationalist and anti-Western parties, are an example of how Western intervention in Serbian affairs may have negative consequences.

These elections, as well as the recent presidential election in which the indicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj, now in detention in The Hague, received the largest number of votes (but was not elected president because less than 50 percent of registered voters went to the polls), are a clear indication of the nationalist, anti-Western backlash which has characterized Serbian politics in the last years, greatly encouraged by insensitive Western policies.

NATO did the right thing to intervene in 1999 to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian atrocities. After years of idly standing by while Milosevic and his henchmen perpetrated numerous war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia, the humanitarian intervention in Kosovo set international standards which will be a future benchmark against genocide and ethnic cleansing.

In Serbia itself, intervention also led to a bloodless uprising in Belgrade, which put an end to Milosevic's rule.

But the international community went to the other extreme: from passivity it moved into high gear. The UN, whose blue helmets were complicit, by their neutrality between murderers and victims, in the massacre in Srebrenica, viewed the extradition of the fallen and defeated Milosevic as a condition for re-admitting Serbia into the family of nations.

This was a cardinal mistake. The newly elected liberal prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, inherited a country defeated, humiliated and in dire economic straits. He needed Western support, political and economic, to steer a democratically-oriented course under extremely difficult conditions. Despite Milosevic's downfall, many of Serbia's citizens, brainwashed by more than a decade of propaganda, still viewed the fallen leader as a national hero. Serbia's tortured history is replete with sagas of victimization and persecution. Instead of helping Djindjic in his difficult role, the West made economic aid contingent on the handing over of Milosevic to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. When Djindjic did this, reluctantly, he became viewed by many Serbs, including many who opposed Milosevic and his policies, as forfeiting his country's sovereignty for 30 pieces of silver.

THE FACT that at the time of his extradition Milosevic was already under house arrest and was about to be indicted in Serbia on a variety of charges – albeit not on war crimes – made many people feel that the insistence on extradition was counterproductive to a peaceful transition to democracy in Serbia. Better, many argued, to let the Serbs themselves sort out their history, incomplete as the process may be.

Since the extradition Djindjic was a marked man, especially as the democratically-elected president of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica – a dour, legalistic nationalist – opposed the extradition and claimed that it was unconstitutional.

The anger against Djindjic greatly weakened his democratic coalition, which was also torn by internal strife and accusations of corruption. His assassination nine months ago by members of the security services connected with criminal gangs eliminated the single democratic politician who, for all his faults, appeared as the only person able to lead Serbia toward a democratic transition. The government crackdown, after Djindjic's assassination, was not limited to nationalist extremists or mafia gangs: it seriously hurt civil rights in a country struggling to extricate itself from a lengthy history of autocracy.

After the successful ousting of Serbian forces from Kosovo, the international community failed once again to take the measure of the complexities of the situation: rather than easing Serbia's way in coming to terms with its defeat and history, it rubbed the rest of Serbia's pride in the dust and helped turn Milosevic – who was ousted by a popular uprising – into a national hero, and made Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, whom most Serbs abhor for his war crimes in Croatia and Serbia, the leader of the largest party in the land.

The scandal is that it is the same Western and UN politicians who did nothing when Serbian forces murdered and raped for years all over former Yugoslavia who became the most ardent proponents of bringing Milosevic to The Hague. By this they were making the transition to democracy even more difficult in Serbia.

[pepsionice]

Considering the alternative was to sit there and watch a bloodbath between these two groups. And this show would have been nighly shown by CNN until the point where you simply said enough is enough. As for the case against Milosevic....its hard to see how you let dozens of other world leaders walk off freely when they hundreds if not thousands....and you simply want to impress the media with high morals by taking Milosevic.

[Cicero]

NATO did the right thing to intervene in 1999 to protect the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian atrocities.

I'm sick of this nonsense. Slobo started out as a troublemaker, but the Serbs committed fewer atrocities in Kosovo than the Albanians.

If the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo, then how come the percentage of Albanians rose from something like 50% at the death of Tito to 90% at the time that clinton decided it would be nice to bomb Belgrade?

The Albanians in Kosovo were behaving much like the Palestinians in Israel. And they likewise included numerous terrorists who came in over the border to kill Serbs. People STILL don't understand what clinton did in the Balkans. He helped our enemies and bombed our allies.

[gershwin]

You really haven't read very carefully about events in Bosnia if you think the intervention avoided a bloodbath. Just the opposite and continuing to this day in Kosovo. In Bosnia all those "peacemakers" are getting tired, running out of personnel to keep their sloppy arrangements in place. If said intruders had minded their own business the whole thing would have been settled with minimal bloodshed long ago.

[dmz]

So Milosevic was merely a "trouble maker"? What, kind of like the kid down the street throwing snowballs at cars?

Can you please point out how Slobo and his gang were our "allies"?

[Seselj]

Can you please point out how they were our enemies? What threat did they pose to the US, or to any of America's allies?

[thoughtomator]

They were fighting Islamic fascists, maybe?

There is no rationale that justifies intervening in Serbia but not intervening in Rwanda, where 20 times as many people were killed.

[Hoplite]

There is no rationale that justifies intervening in Serbia but not intervening in Rwanda, where 20 times as many people were killed.

A destabilized region around Rwanda doesn't affect American trade as much as the then destabilized and "soon to be even more destabilized by 1.6 million Kosovar Albanian refugees" Balkans Milosevic was making in 1999.

[thoughtomator]

So the argument is that we attacked Serbia for economic reasons? I don't recall that as having been part of the arguments made.

We intervened on falsified reports of Serbs engaging in widespread massacres.

[Hoplite]

No - we intervened on widespread reports of Serb repression against Kosovar Albanians which were borne out by subsequent events and investigations.

Milosevic was first warned about his mistreatment of Kosovar Albanians in 1992 by Bush the Elder, and had his last real chance of keeping Kosovo in October of 1998. He threw it away in the spring of '99.

[Seselj]

Don't worry about hoplite... His argument is that Nato intervened to reverse the exodus of Albanian refugees from Kosovo. He doesn't seem to realize that this exodus happened AFTER the bombing started, ie the bombing caused the refugees, not the other way around.

[thoughtomator]

I don't recall any of the charges against the Serbs being substantiated. The only mass graves found (the most serious of the original charges), for instance, had Serbs in them.

By all the evidence available to us today, it was the Albanians killing the Serb minority, not the other way around.

[norton]

OK article except that it maintains the legitimacy of invasion in the first place.
There has never been an adequate alibi for intervention in what was Yugoslavia other than German/Croat/Albanian ambitions and Clinton's several fantasies.

[Hoplite]

The only mass graves found (the most serious of the original charges), for instance, had Serbs in them.

Then you choose to remain ignorant.

Over 800 Kosovar Albanian victims have been found in Serbia itself, transported there in a replay of Srebrenica's failed "hide the bodies" ploy. Particularly damning is a mass grave found on the grounds of the Serbian secret police, who, showing the usual motivation have failed to investigate how the corpses got there.

Btw, by the end of 2001, just over 4,200 K-Albanian victims had been exhumed from mass graves in Kosovo itself, so your views of Kosovo appear to lack a factual foundation.

You might want to rectify that situation.

[thoughtomator]

If 4200 dead were sufficient to warrant US intervention, then we would have troops in almost every nation on the planet.

In the run-up to war, the kind of numbers that were asserted by the Clinton administration were in the hundreds of thousands.

Clearly, the war on Serbia was a complete fabrication.

[Hoplite]

You don't appear to be able to follow the conversation - the war was fought to end Serbian repression of Kosovar Albanians and prevent refugees from destabilizing the Southern Balkans.

The "100,000 dead" issue arose from a statement to the effect that there were over 100,000 Albanian men unaccounted for inside Kosovo, and given Serb atrocities in Bosnia, there was reason to fear for their health.

Does the lack of finding WMD's in Iraq or the hyperbole surrounding the issue prior to our invasion invalidate our actions there?

No.

Same - same with Kosovo.

[greenwolf]

There seem to be two sides to this one. The one side includes Slick Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Wesley Clark, the KLA and AlQuaeda, and a nation of pimps and drug-dealers known as Albania, the the other side appears to consist of Slobodan Milosevic and at least one branch of the Christian church.

This one simply doesn't strike me as terribly difficult to figure out.

[greenwolf]

I don't recall any of the charges against the Serbs being substantiated.

Some are further from being substantiated than others, particularly the story of the Bosnian Serb 'death camp' at tchornopoliye. This one almost makes Joseph Goebbels look like an honest man by comparison.

[thoughtomator]

Even granting that assumption for the sake of argument, we still lack a valid basis for US intervention. Concurrently there was Saddam, violating daily his ceasefire signed with us, and with a million plus confirmed (not suspected) dead to his 'credit', and constantly threatening not only minor trade routes but in fact the entire global energy economy. Yet we did not intervene there. We watched the slaughter of six million in Rwanda and even more in Burundi and Zaire and did absolutely nothing. In Sri Lanka there were over 50,000 confirmed dead and many many more tortured, disappeared, and maimed, but to date we still have not intervened. And there were many many cases like this, worldwide - yet the only intervention was against Serbia.

What then justified attacking Serbia in the context of no action in many similar and even in far worse cases?