PANORAMA
Slobodan Milosevic
1941-2006
Will Serbia ever learn?
By Alex
Lekutanoy
Psychopath isn’t really the word for
him. For the people of the Balkans,
“Slobodan Milosevic” is enough, and no
other label will do.
There he sat in the dock, a pudgy
incarnation of evil, acting as his own
defense attorney, and masquerading as
martyr and mythic defender of the
Serbian people, the perennial victims of
mankind.
What must have the real victims screamed
out in their own defense before his
blood crazed paramilitary thugs
humiliated and mercilessly executed
them, taunted and raped daughters in
front of their humbled fathers,
slaughtered infants in front of their
helpless mothers, burned the elderly
alive in their homes, mutilated human
beings, gouging their eyes out and
shattering skulls at their whim?
The news that his heart had stopped cold
brought no comfort. One can only hope
that he felt a good dose of pain,
suffering, fear and loneliness.
April, 1987,Kosovo. Milosevic approaches
an angry crowd of Serbs, and told them
“No one shall dare beat you again” and
with that, the surly communist from
Belgrade was transformed into a
legendary Serb nationalist.
He returned to Kosovo on June of 1989,
the 600 year anniversary of the Serbian
defeat in Kosovo and served up a
deranged nationalist speech to a mass
rally that cheerfully wolfed it down and
begged for seconds. His demented dream
of a greater Serbia had begun in
earnest; he stripped Kosovo of its
autonomy and replaced it with a decade
of repression and Balkan apartheid to
prove it.
His state owned media dished out
propaganda seven days a week. Television
anchormen dehumanized the enemy with
poisonous demagoguery on a nightly
basis. News programs sold intractable
ethnic hatred and mythic legends of
national heroes as the only fate of the
Serbian nation. Not to be outdone, the
Orthodox Church willingly collaborated
in the collective psychosis, adding
their own paranoia and hypocrisy to the
mix.
The lazy western media lapped up the
lies and regurgitated it as fact in our
morning newspapers.
Bosnia and Herzegovina was for centuries
a peaceful tolerant multi-ethnic
society.
Sarajevo, the cultural savvy
cosmopolitan capital was its jewel in
the crown. The place where Serbs,
Muslims and Croatians had always lived
in harmony was being pounded by Serbian
irregulars armed to the teeth by
Milosevic. The people of Sarajevo
starved in squalid misery and were
forced to live under a loaded gun. The
medieval siege of Sarajevo was
relentless; shelling poured in from the
surrounding hills, while endless rounds
of shots rang out from “sniper alley”.
And as always in war, the intellectuals,
writers, and artists were silenced. It
was the flag waving thugs, and parasites
that were out in bullying droves, they had found new meaning to their
empty lives.
This organized madness lasted three
years and wormed its way into the soul
of the place until there was hardly a
man alive who could believe in
reconciliation. Do you remember
Sarajevo’s very own Romeo and Juliet?
He a Serb, and she a Muslim who tried
desperately to escape sniper alley on
foot over the Vrbana bridge, he was
killed instantly, she was shot and
managed to crawl to him, hugged him and
died.
Admira
and Bosko
The bodies lay in no mans land for days
as no one dared to recover them.
Milosevic’s forces worked overtime to
wipe out all traces of Muslim history in
Bosnia from their memories. Decimating
mosque after mosque, tearing down
monuments, libraries and universities,
even cemeteries could not rest in peace.
He turned the Yugoslav Peoples Army into
his own private Serbian death squad and
unleashed it on the rest of the former
Yugoslavia, flattening Vuckovar and
attempting to demolish Dubrovnik the
ancient beautiful coastal city of
Croatia.
His perverted mind
conceived “ethnic cleansing.”
which he used
to terrorize civilians,
forcing Muslims and Croatians to flee
their homes, creating millions of
horrified refugees. His men butchered
and ransacked their way across the
former Yugoslavia, using systematic rape
on women of all ages to ensure that they
wouldn’t come back.
Prison camps were set up to hold
captured prisoners bringing the world
shocking images of emaciated faces and
starving bodies, pictures not seen on
mainland Europe since World War II.
Who can forget the international shame
of Srebrenica, a UN designated safe area
protected by Dutch peacekeepers. General
Philippe Morillion the French commander
of the UN protection force promised the
people that he would never abandon them.
The terrified residents of Srebrenica
took him at his word, and surely some of the
8000 men and boys murdered must have
heard his voice ringing in their ears as
they were blindfolded and shot in the
back while bulldozers simultaneously dug
their graves.
Yes, this took place under noses of the
international community, and there are
photographs of Dutch officers drinking
champagne with the murderous General
Mladic to prove it.
The handiwork of Milosevic’s brave
warriors continued in Kosovo. In one
massacre, out of 48 Albanian victims, 14
were children, two babies, a pregnant
woman and a 100-year-old woman. Another
Massacre in village of Racak left
farmers decapitated, and a twelve year
old boy shot in the neck. A woman who
was seven months pregnant had her
abdomen slit open. After refusing to
sign an agreement to give autonomy back
to Kosovo, Milosevic ordered “operation
horseshoe” a mass expulsion of the
Albanian population from Kosovo sending
over million refugees into the hills and
mountains while Serbian troops plundered
their homes, and then set them ablaze.
It ended in Kosovo where it began, after
more than quarter of a million deaths in
the former Yugoslavia, the international
community had seen enough. Guilt and
shame finally compelled them to act.
NATO ordered the bombings of Belgrade,
and Milosevic capitulated.
His dead body arrived In Belgrade,
elderly men shouted Slobo! Rise Slobodan!
Old women cried their eyes out and threw
flowers on his coffin. “One sign read
“they killed a hero and made a saint.”
And another declared “you were a giant
among the world’s dwarves”.
Grief-wracked faces could be seen in
the crowd where many viewed the war
crimes suspect as a national hero
What will become of his revolting wife,
Mira Markovich “Serbia’s Lady McBeth”
who inspired her husband to be ruthless, and what of their
charming son Marko? His father
turned the former Yugoslavia into a mass
grave and this pathetic playboy of an
offspring opened up Bambi-land. Even for
a
spoiled brat of a dictator his
unconsciousness knows no bounds
At the funeral, 50,000 gathered to mourn
their hero, one lovely lady said that
“no mother will give birth to a man as
good as him” While another perpetual
victim said ”he was killed in The Hague,
yesterday it was him, tomorrow it will
be all the Serbs”.
It appears that Serbia’s collective
amnesia has not been repaired. Will they
ever, ever, learn?
If only, just for one day, we could
raise the dead, the 250,000
souls; to stand over his grave,
the mothers of Bosnia, the boys of Srebrenica, the families of Kosovo,
Vukovar, Racak and Sarajevo and declare
Slobodan, may you rot in hell!
