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The Star of The Hague
By Tim Judah
New York Review of Books
April 25, 2002 


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....


 

 

Footnotes




 


4
For a blow-by-blow account of what happened in Kosovo, see Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo (Human Rights Watch, 2001), available on the Web at www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/kosovo/.
 

 



 Originally published at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/apr/25/the-star-of-the-hague/


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