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Serbia's new dawn?


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By John Metzler
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

October 11, 2000

UNITED NATIONS — It appeared darkest before the dawn. Slobodan Milosevic had shamelessly rigged another election and was hoping yet again to stand down his fractious opposition in the streets. The masses milled, the crescendo built, and then as if off cue, the dictator's military blinked and buckled. The Balkan nightmare was over. These extraordinary and tumultuous events which swamped Milosevic's regime will go into the records as the new century's first true revolution. Deja vu 1989.

But before celebrating the end of a tragic Balkan era, let us recall the cost paid most of all by the Serbs themselves for the fanatical folly of the Milosevic years.

Sadly Serbia was run by a maniacal clique of Marxists, black marketers and militiamen who turned Yugoslavia into a tragic Danubian dictatorship which has besmirched the name of not only the Serbs but indeed the region. Yet despite the crimes of ethnic cleansing and the loss of four wars, it was the blatant election rigging, which served as the final straw for the Serbian people who literally stormed the Bastille in Belgrade making way for the newly elected President Vojislav Kostunica.

As Daniel Johnson wrote in London's Daily Telegraph, "Slobodan Milosevic was the ghost of the deceased communist empire. The Serbian revolution marks the end of that eerie afterlife of the Cold War."

Yet it's naive to assume that the regime was not much deeper than President Slobodan Milosevic and his slivovitz swilling cronies--sadly more Serbs than would admit imbibed his witches brew of communism and nationalism, which was to curse the Balkans. Last year's ethnic cleansing against Kosovar Albanians finally prompted NATO's military campaign against Serbia which tightened the noose yet again.

Milosevic in trying to expand Greater Serbia, ironically shrunk its frontiers and sullied its name for a generation. The old memory of "nonaligned Yugoslavia" has been replaced by the searingly poignant image of an aggressive bully with a Kafkaesque cast of political characters letting slip the dogs of war throughout the Balkans.

Because Belgrade is without his iron hand, does not mean that Serbia has suddenly become, to quote the adage "a normal country again." Though the Butcher of the Balkans is ousted, Milosevic an indicted war criminal, will not easily be spirited away to the Hague U.N. War Crimes Tribunal.

Still the election of Vojislav Kostunica allows the Serbs to reopen the doors to Europe and to rejoin the international community. While the European Union wisely lifted most economic sanctions, and the U.S. promises a "democracy dividend," the Serbs themselves must pull together not simply for rebuilding a shattered economy, but to reconstruct a place where the ballot box replaces the police baton and civil society does not compete with a gangster culture. Yugoslavia wants legitimacy again. Moreover it wishes to fully participate in the UN in which its membership is bound in a legal limbo.

President Kostunica's Yugoslavia will be shadowed by many of the old appratchek and unpleasant bosses who served Slobodan so well; Serbia indeed will be haunted by the recent history in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.

Noel Malcolm a leading British authority on the Balkans warns, "The biggest unresolved issue is Kosovo..... Kosovo will poison Serbian politics for years to come." Why? "This will be the case under almost any government in Belgrade but the problem may be particularly acute under Vojislav Kostunica, the new president, who has campaigned on Kosovo for much of his adult life, from 1974, when he criticized Tito for giving too much autonomy to the Kosovo Albanians."

Writing in the Daily Telegraph Malcolm adds, "None in Bosnia can forget that Kostunica was an enthusiastic supporter of Radovan Karadzic during the Bosnian war; he also denounced the Dayton Accord, not because it gave too much power to Repbulika Srbska , but it gave it, in his view, too little."

To be sure, times and circumstances change; but the dogged Kostunica remains an ardent nationalist confronted by the political, economic and moral rubble of Milosevic's greater Serbia. Hopefully he's a true patriot and will take the high road.

John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.

October 11, 2000


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