Posted on 05/08/2008 1:08:33 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
BELGRADE, Serbia - The head of an ultranationalist party leading the polls going into Serbia's elections doesn't like to be compared to Slobodan Milosevic. He says the late leader wasn't hard enough during the Balkan wars and paved the way for losing Kosovo.
"Milosevic was a communist, then a socialist, but he was never a nationalist," Tomislav Nikolic, the leader of Serbia's far-right Radicals, said during an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.
Two years after Milosevic died while on trial by a U.N. tribunal on genocide charges tied to the bloody breakup of former Yugoslavia, Nikolic's party could use Sunday's parliamentary elections to regain the power it shared with Milosevic in the late 1990s.
Opinion polls give the Radicals a slight lead over a pro-Western coalition led by President Boris Tadic heading into an election that will determine whether Serbia moves toward the European Union and the U.S. or seeks closer ties with Russia.
Milosevic was widely vilified in the West for the actions of Serb forces and was pressured into signing peace deals. But nationalists at home denounced him for what they considered weak wartime tactics that lost Serb-populated territories in former Yugoslavia.
"I was very critical of Milosevic. He had stopped short all Serbian actions, which benefited our enemies," Nikolic said, referring to the ethnic wars in Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. "I would have done many things differently. I would have gone all the way."
He also blames Milosevic for the loss of Serbia's Kosovo province, a territory with an ethnic Albanian majority that declared independence Feb. 17 with backing from the U.S. and other Western powers.
After a relentless NATO air war campaign, Milosevic ended his crackdown on Albanian separatists in Kosovo in 1999 by signing a peace accord that put the territory under U.N. administration.
"Milosevic handed Kosovo to the United Nations, but he knew that that was a road to Kosovo's independence," Nikolic said.
If he does win power, Nikolic said he would never hand over the most-wanted Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitives -- former political leader Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic -- to the U.N. war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
On the question of Serbian territorial expansion, Nikolic recently explained that it would be one thru politics rather than warfare. I’m hoping to see him expand on this comment.
Most people don't know that Serbia has the largest number of refugees of any country in Europe There are around 500,000 Serbs and some others (including Albanians and Gypsies) still in Serbia from the wars in Croatia, from Bosnia, from Kosovo -- all of them driven into Serbia proper back in the 1990's. Many of these people came to Serbia with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and many still haven't recovered from losing everything -- their lives, their homes, their family members. And there isn't a single Serbian politician who can avoid addressing the issues of these refugees in some way.
I suspect that Nikolic's way of dealing with the refugees is to tell them that he will work politically to get them back to their homes. If so, that isn't "Serbian military expansionism". It is simply giving hope to people who lost all hope, along with their homes and their old lives. Is it false hope? Well, Nikolic is a politician, and I don't trust the promises of our politicians, so why should I believe the promises of any of theirs?
Fair enough.
You're right about that in terms of BiH...the Muslim-Croat federation got 51% of the territory and the Bosnian-Serb republic received 49% of the territory.
:-)
This still leaves the Hercegovi holding the unwanted Muslim baggage so to speak, hence Dodik’s popularity among the Croats.
wasn’t it divided in Muslim, Croat and Serb (all separate I mean?)
No, BiH was recognized as a sovereign state consisting of two entities (that I mentioned above).
potential time bomb, unless economy moves on and they join EU /NATO.
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