Posted on 03/11/2006 8:28:04 PM PST by freepatriot32
BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - A Socialist Party aide of Slobodan Milosevic said Saturday that the ex-president was defiant just before his death.
"He told me, 'Don't you worry: They will not destroy me or break me; I shall defeat them all,'" said Milorad Vucelic of the Socialist Party, recounting a phone conversation with Milosevic late Friday. "But it was obvious he was very ill."
Milosevic, who was found dead Saturday in his cell at the Netherlands-based war crimes court near The Hague, was daily in contact with Socialist party officials in Belgrade as he carried out his own defense before the U.N. tribunal.
Vucelic said Milosevic was in "a good mood" on Friday but would not discuss his illness.
"We were supposed to talk more today but when he didn't call, I was a little worried," Vucelic added. "Then I found out what had happened."
Vucelic spoke at the Socialist Party headquarters in Belgrade, where flags hung at half-staff and a huge photo of Milosevic was on display, adorned with a black cloth.
During their phone conversation, Vucelic said Milosevic had been upbeat and satisfied with how his defense case was coming along.
Really? Your understanding of scripture and the nature of divine grace differs from my own.
Yep. I am an atheist.
For four years now, the prosecution has had their chance to present their case and prove that he was a war criminal.
They failed to do so!
My personal opinion, is that he was guilty of crimes against the people of Serbia. That is were his trial should have been conducted.
If anyone was guilty of war crimes, it would be President William Jefferson Clinton.
After four years, the courts failed to prove that this man was guilty.
I will respect the loss of someone who ruled a country rather well, and brought the people of Serbia out of the Russian influence. For that, I consider him as one of Serbia's heroes.
And yet, per your post 20, you believe that someone can be consigned to a pit of Hell. How very odd.
Will clinochio attend the funeral? We know how funerals turn into DNC Bush-bashing events when he is involved. Remeber the Wellstone and Corretta Scott King Bush-bashing events?
NIV Proverbs 20:11
Even a child is known by his actions, by whether his conduct is pure and right.
NIV Matthew 7:16-19
16. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?
17. Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.
18. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.
19. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
LOL! Poor Senator Splash, he looks so outraged! Another good one, Bender!
make me get out my voodoo doll out!
Millie, what's a cute kid like you doing with a voodoo doll?
Cool it, Bender... 
Millie can have any kind of religion she wants...
Well, voodoo is not right for a cute young woman...
#2... Should I give him a taste?
Fire away, kid!
Wait a minute...
Why am I getting all itchy?
You'll see soon enough!
Okay... Okay... I give up! 
Now, Millie, please get this woodpecker off me!
You dropped something...
May the VooDoo be with you...
That's supposed to be...
Live long and prosper, right?
Excuse me, Millie... VooDoo and prosper!
Who do voo doo?
I do... Voo Doo!
Say, Millie, could I have that to do a few spells on Zeta-Jones?
Give it a rest, Mo...
Uh...remind of this again when the islamos are sawing off your freaking head.
Uh...remind of this again when the islamos are sawing off your freaking head.
Even in direst need one should not lower oneself to accepting bloody vampires as allies.
His people continue to be victimized by Islamic terrorists, refugees pour into Serbia, a wealthy and fertile province of his homeland has disappeared behind the Islamic Terrorist curtain, and after bombing the infrastructure of Serbia, very few in the West are concerned!
I would never have suggested that we should have allied ourselves with the Serbs. But why, in the name of Western Christian Civilization would we have allied ourselves with the Albanians and Bosnians? Both have proven themselves to be our enemies, by giving aid and comfort to jihadists who want to convert, kill, or enslave us.
"But why, in the name of Western Christian Civilization would we have allied ourselves with the Albanians and Bosnians?"
Klinton, Albright, and Clark. The Three Stooges of international relations.
During the siege of Sarajevo or the mass deportations from Kosovo, the news of a sudden stoppage of the heart of Slobodan Milosevic would have occasioned a joyous holiday in many other hearts. And the idea that he might one day die in prison would have been excellent tidings for a future generation and was the intended effect of his long and convoluted trial.
Milosevic did not have quite the psychopathic power of a Saddam Hussein or an Osama Bin Laden. He was that most dangerous of people: the mediocre and conformist official who bides his time and masks his grievances. He went from apparatchik to supreme power, and though he rode a tide of religious and xenophobic fervor, it is quite thinkable that he never really cared about the totems and symbols that he exploited. In office and in the dock, he embodied the banality of evil. In the excellent 1995 book The Death of Yugoslavia, written by Laura Silber and Allan Little, and in the fine BBC TV series that accompanied it, you can actually see the petty tactics and cynical opportunism that he employed like a sluggish maggot at the heart of the state that just keeps eating remorselessly away. He apparently had only one true friend, his adorable ideologue of a wife, Mirjana Markovic, who used to cheer him up about his big-eared and stone-faced appearance and about the suicide of both of his parents. Beware of those resentful nonentities who enter politics for therapeutic reasons.
The highlights of his more lurid criminal career ought to be briefly set down before anyone tries to airbrush them. He arranged for his own entourage to be pelted with stones in Kosovo in 1987 (this we have on film) so that the provocation could appear on Belgrade television and isolate the civilized elements in the ruling party. He made a secret agreement with his equally disgusting counterpart Franjo Tudjman of Croatia for a sort of Stalin-Hitler carve-up of Bosnia, and thus empowered the very Croatian extremists who later turned on Serb civilians. He entered into a collusion with fascist and irredentist groups, among them Bosnian Serbs and Belgrade Serbs, which deliberately threw Bosnia into civil war and gave us the modern (and euphemistic) term "ethnic cleansing." He hijacked the national army of a unitary state and used it to attack the autonomous republics within that state. He very nearly destroyed two of the urban cultural treasures of Europe: Dubrovnik and Sarajevo. He emptied the treasury of Serbia and reduced its citizens to poverty and paranoia. He and Saddam were the only two heads of government to welcome the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. Eventually, he went even further and ordered the mass expulsion of the majority population of Kosovo, who were herded onto trains and forced onto the roads; an act that would, if successful, have lethally destabilized the two neighboring states of Albania and Macedonia. And at that very belated point, the Western powers decided they had had enough of him and brought about his removal from Kosovo and his removal from power.
It is worth remembering, however, how much the "realists" had relied upon him until then. Negotiators David Owen, representing the European Union, and former U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance thought he was a necessary "partner for peace." Henry Kissinger and Lawrence Eagleburger pronounced him to be the man to do business with and steadily opposed any intervention. It took an act of ultimate irrationality on Milosevic's part before NATO decided to overrule Russian and Chinese and U.N. objections and put an end to fascism and racist murder in their own backyard. And, of course, by then most of the damage had been done, and it is now the anti-realists who inherit the ghastly, laborious job of cleaning up the mess, digging up the mass graves, restoring essential services, and pacifying inflamed tribal and confessional feelings.
Some friends and colleagues of mine have testified against Milosevic and his henchmen in The Hague and had the satisfaction of seeing the slaughterers and torturers confronted by their victims. An enormous archive of atrocity has been amassed and videotaped and cataloged, and one day history will be very grateful for it. No denial or revisionism will be possible in this case. It would be nice to think that it was this relentless accumulation of evidence that stopped Milosevic, who was often confronted by former colleagues in the witness box, from making the long and self-pitying speeches that have served Saddam Hussein as a model tactic. It would also be nice to think that it is what eventually killed him. But he probably suffered his last spasm feeling sorry only for himself, and now we will have the final sordid task of preventing others from feeling a misplaced sympathy for him also.
I believe what Christopher Hitchens says, for the most part. The tragedy here is that Milosevic's enemies were just as bad as he was, matching him and more, outrage for outrage. This was not a place for the US to choose sides. In doing so, we made it worse. Those we chose as our new friends were just as worthy of a place in the dock of this tribunal as was Milosevic. Our new friends have made war criminals of us.
"I believe what Christopher Hitchens says, for the most part. The tragedy here is that Milosevic's enemies were just as bad as he was, matching him and more, outrage for outrage. This was not a place for the US to choose sides. In doing so, we made it worse. Those we chose as our new friends were just as worthy of a place in the dock of this tribunal as was Milosevic. Our new friends have made war criminals of us."
I agree - my rather simplistic view of the Balkans is that whoever has the "power" will be the "oppressor". But would we have run to the Serbs defense if we decided the Kosovars were oppressing them?
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