shades of Iraq today...
canada.com
Though the one-time tyrant would almost certainly have been convicted in his war-crimes trial, in a sense he was winning. Not by acquitting himself of having been a murderous thug -- Perry Mason would have had trouble taking him off that hook -- but by showing up the cupidity, stupidity, complicity and hypocrisy of those who were presuming to prosecute and judge him. He was winning the most important part of any war-crimes trial, the history lesson.
What was emerging from Milosevic's trial was this: Throughout the Balkan conflict, the West made either the wrong choices or, at best, the right choices too late. Chiefly we were misled by our bias for multicultural models of nationhood.
This bias made us reluctant to support Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian ambitions for independence in 1990-91. A prompt and unequivocal Western endorsement of self-determination might have averted bloodshed altogether, but we didn't want to see the multicultural federation of Yugoslavia, a model we favoured, break up into its ethnic/religious components.
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Whole news item from link...
Slobodan's enablers
George Jonas, National Post
Published: Friday, March 17, 2006
If Slobodan Milosevic's body had been found by a butler in an English country house, the Butcher of the Balkans could have qualified as a corpse in an Agatha Christie novel. The key ingredients were there. The ex-dictator's demise last Saturday was likely due to human agency. Many people wanted him dead, and they all had the opportunity to kill him. What's more, some comments reported bore an uncanny resemblance to the false clues Miss Christie might plant in a Hercule Poirot mystery called, say, The Clairvoyant Toxicologist.
- Nervous houseguests gather at breakfast the day after the body is discovered. Apparently, Mr. Milosevic's blood contained a drug that hadn't been prescribed for him. This drug, rifampicin, could have played a role in the heart attack that apparently killed him.
- Suicide, offers prosecutor Carla Del Ponte immediately. She doesn't explain why the mere presence of an unprescribed drug in someone's body wouldn't be just as consistent with human error -- or with murder.
- A Dutch toxicologist named Donald Uges confirms that the rifampicin he found in Mr. Milosevic's blood was self-administered. He doesn't say how he could possibly determine this just from finding traces of a substance in a blood sample. Then, not content with divining who administered rifampicin to Mr. Milosevic, the clairvoyant toxicologist also divines why. It wasn't to commit suicide, as fellow clairvoyant Carla Del Ponte believes, but to be sent to friendly Moscow for treatment.
Pure Agatha Christie -- but, alas, sans butler, Mr. Milosevic's remains won't make it for a Poirot mystery. His body was, in fact, discovered by a prison guard in The Hague, so the puzzle of how the one-time tyrant of the former Yugoslavia met his death will probably be explored by a disciple of Oliver Stone -- a Serbian disciple, in all likelihood.
Though the one-time tyrant would almost certainly have been convicted in his war-crimes trial, in a sense he was winning. Not by acquitting himself of having been a murderous thug -- Perry Mason would have had trouble taking him off that hook -- but by showing up the cupidity, stupidity, complicity and hypocrisy of those who were presuming to prosecute and judge him. He was winning the most important part of any war-crimes trial, the history lesson.
What was emerging from Milosevic's trial was this: Throughout the Balkan conflict, the West made either the wrong choices or, at best, the right choices too late. Chiefly we were misled by our bias for multicultural models of nationhood.
This bias made us reluctant to support Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian ambitions for independence in 1990-91. A prompt and unequivocal Western endorsement of self-determination might have averted bloodshed altogether, but we didn't want to see the multicultural federation of Yugoslavia, a model we favoured, break up into its ethnic/religious components.
Shades of Iraq today.
In 1991, U.S. secretary of state James Baker favoured the status quo. Then, when war became inevitable, we prolonged the conflict through a vapid UN arms embargo imposed on all factions -- which gave an edge to the better-equipped Serbs. As late as 1995, British foreign minister Malcolm Rifkind and U.S. secretary of state Christopher Warren were holding press conferences explaining why the arms embargo against Bosnia had to be maintained.
Thanks to our humanitarian-pacifist folly, the savage war had an extended run, especially on the Croatian front, probably costing thousands of lives. By giving the green light to Milosevic and his followers, Western elites directly contributed to the ensuing massacres.
Worse followed. The U.S., slow to protest against the ambition of "multicultural" Yugoslavia to forcibly keep in its fold three nations that wanted to separate, came down like a ton of bricks on ethnic Serbia for its far more legitimate ambition to preserve the country's territorial integrity against the secessionist guerillas of Kosovo. Washington, which resisted recognizing real nations such as Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia until April, 1992, was quick to launch Stealth bombers to ensure the autonomy of ethnic Albanians in a Serb province. As a multiculturalist thug, Milosevic was a protected species; as a nationalist thug, NATO declared an open season on him.
In the end, the West's policy didn't even amount to a defence of a multicultural ideal. As events unfolded, NATO's bombers were raining destruction on Serbia's bridges and factories, not to forestall the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Kosovo, but to ensure the ethnic cleansing of Serbs.
Why the West felt obliged to choose sides between Serb and Albanian ethnic national ambitions in Kosovo -- and, if it did, why it chose Albania's side -- remained a mystery. Those who had an answer concluded that it was the flower-child generation that had taken over NATO and the Clinton White House attempting to appease the Muslim world. Did 9/11 teach squishy liberals that Osama bin Laden & Co. couldn't be mollified by America's support for Muslims against Orthodox Christians in the Balkans? Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
But the West's folly didn't end there. After the people of Serbia finally threw Milosevic out of office in 2000, the U.S. aggravated its wrong-headed policy by bribing (in effect) Serbia's new government to extradite the former strongman to The Hague. By the time Milosevic was shipped to the war-crimes tribunal, few Serbs supported him, but even among those who would have gladly tied the knot around the ex-communist dictator's neck, many regarded selling Milosevic to a UN court a disgrace.
So who, if anyone, killed Milosevic? Should we suspect his Bosnian, Croatian, Slovenian and Albanian enemies or his Serb and Russian communist or nationalist friends? How about his embarrassed Western enablers? An Oliver Stone clone wouldn't want to overlook the UN types, the prosecutors and judges, concerned about being bested by a butcher-turned-country lawyer. Neither would a homicide investigator. |
