Posted on 12/31/2003 7:35:46 AM PST by 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.
Maybe because you've only been here a week or two? But seriously you need to get over your Milosevic=Hitler obsession. He's no good guy but the entire Balkans had no good guys. I suggest you read "Burn This House".
No, physical evidence establishes that there were battles between armed factions and victims on all sides. There are mass graves of Serbs killed by Croats, Bosniaks, and Albanians. One investigator, a policeman from California, who was in Bosnia in 1997 and 1998 to search for mass graves of Muslims and Croats found dead Serb soldiers, shot in the backs of their heads instead, each and every time. Yet these graves were announced, before investigation, as graves of Muslims and Croats. The truth often counters the propaganda.
Yeah, those witnesses have lied so many times. The Trepca mines were claimed by "witnesses" to be the site of mass killings and dead bodies, but investigators found absolutely no signs of any killing or bodies - not even animal bones. Serbs have been tortured into confessing in Sarajevo court of having murdered Bosnian Muslim brothers. The brothers and their families were discovered alive almost five years later by the uncle of one of the imprisoned and convicted Serbs. One of the supposedly dead brothers was buying up sheep and cattle from his former Serb neighbors when the uncle was startled to see this "dead" man alive and well. The murder trial made international headlines, yet the Bosnian Muslims were living in Sarajevo the whole time and had even joined the army. So yeah, the witnesses LIE and a mountain of false accusations has been the norm for the Balkans. Further, the families of these alive-the-whole-time men, didn't care that innocent are blamed.
One Albanian 18-year-old girl named Rajmonda, who had joined the KLA, claimed in a running documentary before and during the war that Serbs had killed her little sister. The Canadian journalist went to Rajmonda's house a few months after the war and found the supposed dead sister alive and unscathed, the home intact, and all the family uninjured in the least.
I'm sorry- I missed the volume of posts that you authored during the Rawandan massacre where you demanded intervention.
Rwanda happened in 1994 and FreeRepublic wasn't around.
We did not have large trade flows to and from the Balkans, our trade with Yugoslavia in 1990 amounted to half a Billion in exports and .7 Billion in imports - but that does not mean that we get to ignore them, only to react with shock and dismay when their neighbors, with whom we do have large trade flows or are encouraging towards market economies, get involved in their neighbor's internecine bloodfest and drag us in after them.
Our armed forces are currently deployed around the globe to try to keep lids on local disputes and insurrections in order to stop them from turning into regional conflagrations that we cannot ignore - I don't suppose the fighting along the border between Thailand and Myanmar is of too much interest to you either - but there we are. Go figure.
And if you believe Milosevic was merely dealing with an Islamic insurrection, then you should be able to come up with an amusing answer as to why the Serbians were cracking Albanian Catholic heads and even managed to destroy two Catholic churches as they were getting their silly little selves bombed out of Kosovo.
The most active KLA military commanders (Remi, Gashi, Bardhi, et. al.) have been arrested and found guilty by UNMIK/KFOR for murdering Albanians before March 23rd 1999.
2) Detailed examination of the specific body count (there was a tally posted on FR a while back) indicates that KLA/NATO action was responsible for upwards of 80% of non-combatant deaths in Kosovo and Metohija
3) One can also establish the guilt of the KLA and their allies (ie Hoplite) by careful review of the ICTY hearings and cross examination of Prosecution witnesses by President Milosevic. After 2 plus years, the Prosecution witnesses have only served to bloster the defense case.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.