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Serbs must collar own evildoers By Michael Luhan The war in Kosovo has ended with the decimation and capitulation of Serbia; as Belgrade celebrates its "victory," the NATO troops that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic defiantly vowed never to accept on Kosovo soil are staging through. In the process, both Milosevic and Serbian President Milan Milutinovic became the first political leaders in history to be indicted for war crimes while in office, along with a trio of senior Serb security officials. Unable to mount any effective military effort in the fight that they dared NATO to accept, these ignoble cowards -- in league with fellow war crime indictees Zelko Raznatovic, otherwise known as Arkan, and Vojislav Seselj -- directed a campaign of rampant, bestial terror to deport an entire civilian population, and lost. Ethnic Albanian refugees will soon return to Kosovo, Serb civilians will flee their vengeance, and Milosevic and company will be disgraced has-beens. The latest round of Balkan wars appears to be over. But if the hatred and recrimination sown by these individuals is not to lead to another fratricidal conflict 50 years on, the Serbs must confront their own crimes and bring the butchers to justice. Only this way will they begin to exorcise the demons of their past and create a positive paradigm of Serbianism for the future. Although it is politically incorrect to blame an entire nation for the crimes of a few, it is nonetheless unassailably true that Serb nationalism -- with all its vile misplaced notions of nobility, honor and narod (a mystical term for "people" analogous to the Nazi Volk) -- was the root cause of the genocidal ethnic cleansing that murdered hundreds of thousands in former Yugoslavia and destroyed millions more lives. With the marked exception of a handful of outspoken dissidents, this malevolent nationalism enjoyed the overt support or passive acquiescence of most Serbs. For more than a decade, they were egged on with a steady diet of self-glorifying and self-exculpating propaganda for the frightful wrongs committed in their name by thousands of their own fathers, husbands and sons. This propaganda tapped into a tradition of myths, distortions and outright lies over centuries by Serbian historians -- many of them Orthodox clergy -- who dutifully put the interests of narod before the truth. The same phenomenon is witnessed in Croatia, where Franciscans and other Catholic clergy dutifully extolled the fascist Ustashe regime during World War II, and the contemporary neofascism of Franjo Tudjman's regime, while for decades the Vatican provided sympathetic sanctuary to Ustashe war criminals. If peaceful coexistence and material prosperity are to be secured in the Balkans, this heretical nexus of narod and religion as organizing principles of society must end. Unfortunately, Tudjman -- who emerged victorious from his ethnic cleansing campaign in Croatia -- is invulnerable to courts and has not been indicted by The Hague. By contrast, Serbia has been crushed and is now a nation of paupers dependent on handouts. The West can hence allow Milosevic and cronies to stew in their postwar squalor without aid, and the Serbian population will stew with them. That is as it should be, for it will provide Serbs the most urgent and direct inducement to do what they must in order to rejoin their place in the community of civilized nations -- collar the criminals, and thereby free themselves. This challenge is not that difficult. Serbia is not a monolithic regime like Iraq, nor does Milosevic have the same penchant for killing Serbs as does Saddam Hussein for killing dissident Iraqis. Once Kosovo has been stabilized by peacekeeping forces, his regime will no longer be able to wield threats to national security from "terrorists" as a pretext for harassing, gagging and jailing opponents. Furthermore, Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic has been validated and strengthened by his pro-Western stance and public confrontation with arch-rival Milosevic over Kosovo, and can be expected to step up his campaign to bring him down. These prospects are emboldening the fragmented democratic opposition in Serbia, which is calling for elections to hold Milosevic accountable for his deeds and sweep him from office. Their first act after forming a new government should be to issue a warrant for his arrest -- and for other Serbs under indictment by The Hague -- and execute those warrants. This way Serbia will acknowledge and confront its murderous past, the world will forgive, aid will flow, and a new identity for the nation can be forged. -- The author is an adviser to the People in Need Foundation, a Prague-based humanitarian aid and human rights organization that raised over 50 million Kc ($1.3 million) for Kosovo refugees |
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The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.