Slobodan Milosevic 'The Butcher Of The Balkans'

Karadzic, Milosevic, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Honecker, Ulbricht, Hitler

 

For those of you who are taking a lazy Sunday afternoon, I have put together my own personal notes, as well as an excellent must read from Christiane Amanpour, about the deceased ex-President of former Yugoslavia, and the truth about what took place, during his disgraced reign.

Roger Simon: "It is worth noting at this time that that mass murderer died in his cell because of American power, initiated by President Bill Clinton. Clinton followed a policy of attacking fascism at its roots which President Bush has expanded. From the perspective of history it will seem that both men had substantially the same idealistic foreign policy views. Present day critics who are enraged at the two presidents from both sides will seem almost silly in their partisan inability to take the larger view."

I ignored the story of his death yesterday, partly because I thought that my own hatred of the dictator would prevent me from writing anything coherent, and partly because I had the inclanation to accompany the post with the photograph of colorful fireworks, which would have been somewhat distasteful, at least on the day of his death.

Communism, which I abhor, took the lives of members of my family in the years immediately after WWII, whilst making others suffer tremendously, brought us Slobodan Milosevic, the The Butcher of The Balkans, who shall be remembered in history, side by side with the totalitarian thugs such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, et al.

The man who delivered the blow of a staggering 150 billion percent inflation into the heart of Central Europe, and the atrocious ethnic cleansing of Muslims, had a powerful and effective propaganda machine. The media was severely censored during his ten year reign, and showed only what Milosevic allowed the public to see. The opposition to his totalitarian regime was powerless, and could only demonstrate on the streets of the capital, Belgrade, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands.

This propaganda constantly and incessantly reinforced the nationalistic slogans, the repercussions of which are felt, even today, with 30% of the Serbian population still supporting Milosevic. They perceive him to be a hero, and are convinced that he aimed to save Serbia from the flood of Muslim immigrants, illegally crossing the Albanian border.

The US bombing did not help to change that perception. Even those who were not Milosevic supporters, could not forget the three months of relentless bombing in the Spring of 1999, day in, and day out. People are human after all, and resentment sets in after a while, allowing propaganda to take effect.

During the horrific inflation culminating in a horrendous 150 billion percent, the shops were empty. Food was scarce, if at all. If someone did not spend their salary immediately, and I mean immediately, in the sense of literally running with the paycheck to the bank and then with the cash to the nearest shop, the monthly salary would reduce within hours, to the mere value of a box of matches.

This was an economic disaster which a certain generation will simply never recover from, no matter what the future brings.

The black market flourished. Foreign currency, especially Germany's Deutsch Mark became effectively the official tender. But of course, exchanged only in small amounts at a time because of the hyper-hyper inflation. Petrol was sold only on the black market. There were queues for milk and bread; some had to rise in the middle of the night and queue to get the essentials. Especially the old, the sick and small children suffered most. The remaining wealth and savings were wiped out. Milosevic blamed the sanctions for the peril that ensued, and most of his supporters remained loyal.

You have to know that the former Yugoslavia was a different country prior and during the years of Tito's reign. Tito was Croatian and literally shifted Serbia's entire industry, factories etc. to Croatian territories, during his reign, leaving previously vibrant economies in virtual ruins, which had to subsequently rise from the ashes once again.

My great uncle was the Prime Minister of the old Yugoslavia, between the years of 1935-1939, when we were still civilized and had a truly democratic Parliament, and this was the country Tito inherited after the war. Even though Tito, responsible for many atrocities carried out especially immediately upon entering  the capital Belgrade after WWII, when he executed without trial, one hundred of the most influential Serbs, including my grandfather, carried on throughout his reign, seemingly kept the country in a far better socio-economic shape than it's Eastern European neighbors.

Yugoslavia, even though under communist regime, had more freedom than any other Eastern European country like Poland, the former Checzoslovakia or Hungary. One could travel abroad freely without the necessity of a visa, and passports could be obtained without any difficulties. The salaries were high, based on the economy being in decent shape, largely as a result of favorable foreign loans and grants. One could obtain foreign label clothing, the latest western literature, music, movies, and generally most branded consumer goods.

Freedom of speech however, and general liberties denied in a communist regime, for which my father fought for all his life, was one important aspect which of course was never granted during Tito's reign of terror, and left many dead and others forever missing.

CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour, reveals a bitter legacy in "The People vs. Milosevic" which I have posted for you below. A brilliant, unbiased as well as accurate review of the events that took place in the former Yugoslavia, for those of you who want to know the truth, it is a must read..

 

Part 1: Arrest

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- In the middle of the night on April 1, 2001, men wearing masks and brandishing automatic weapons came to the Belgrade home of Slobodan Milosevic.

They were some of the same special forces who once terrified the population of Yugoslavia.
Eighty-eight days later, under intense pressure from the United States and Europe, Milosevic was handed over to representatives of the International War Crimes Tribunal, and he was flown to a prison in The Hague.
He was charged with crimes against humanity. The reckoning had begun.
In one decade, Milosevic had taken his country into four wars, losing all of them. A quarter-million dead were left scattered across the Balkans.
Despite the blood that flowed in Croatia and Bosnia, it was in Milosevic's own Serbian province of Kosovo that the tribunal's prosecutors saw their first chance to hold him personally responsible for the crimes of war.
When Milosevic's security forces battled Kosovar Albanian separatists, observers were alarmed by what looked like civilian casualties.
A few months later, an Albanian doctor shot footage of 127 mostly old men slaughtered in the hamlet of Izbice.
What he saw would match U.S. satellite photos of graves in the same area.
Milosevic was the first-ever sitting head of state to be indicted by an international court, and he continued to deny the charges against him.
Prosecutors at the tribunal say they can prove their case. But proving a president's criminal responsibility will take more than just videotape, more than even corpses.
"Our evidences will be witnesses and documents," says U.N. War Crimes Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte. "Milosevic is personally responsibility for what he has done. All the international community will know exactly the facts, "would confirm the prosecutors' hunch. At Racak and in places like it lay Milosevic's undoing.
For his own people, there is much more than the alleged war crimes. The Milosevic years literally broke the bank. Since Milosevic started waging war across Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Serbia has been crippled by rampant corruption and international sanctions that have reduced it to poverty.
"He destroyed the Serbian state structure, and finally they destroyed of course the economy," says Serbian businessman Milorad Savicevic.
"How high is the bill?" CNN asks Savicevic.
"Depends how we measure the bill," he says. "If we measure in time, this is 10 to 20 years to recover completely, you know. If we measure in money, that's a few hundred billion dollars."
Says Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: "His legacy is the debris of an economy that should have been a strong one. The destruction of the moral fiber and strength of a potentially great people. And it is now essential that we have justice done."
Milosevic once was a hero to his people, vowing to create a strong and proud Serbia. Today the Serbian state and virtually every promise Milosevic ever made have been broken.

Part 2: Balkan wars

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- A few weeks after Slobodan Milosevic had been elected president of Serbia, more than a million people came to cheer him on Kosovo's field of blackbirds.

It was June 28, 1989, the 600th anniversary of the battle of Kosovo -- a legendary defeat that had come to symbolize Serbian martyrdom. And the new president was warming to that theme.
In a multi-ethnic region scarred by centuries of warfare, Milosevic -- a former communist bank official -- cast himself now as Serbia's new savior.
"Before the wars started, when our ambassador described him as a Yugoslav Gorbachev, there were a lot of misperceptions and people called him charming, because he had a certain ability to speak colloquial English," says Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
"But there was nothing ultimately very charming about what he did."
In 1989 he removed Kosovo's autonomy, turning the province's Albanian majority into second-class citizens.
"Let's face it, he enjoyed a tremendous support, and of course the people were not aware for a number of years initially that this was leading to bloodshed, that this was leading to crime, that this country will be totally isolated," says political scientist Vojin Dimitrijevic.
Milosevic's display of Serbian authority helped stoke the fires of nationalism in other parts of Yugoslavia.
One by one the republics started to break away. Slovenia, Croatia, then Bosnia. Beginning in 1991, Milosevic sent troops and paramilitaries to fortify Serb communities in both Croatia and Bosnia. This escalated into what the world quickly came to know as ethnic cleansing.
"He was a man who instituted an evil regime in much of the region," says Holbrooke. "He is ultimately responsible for these wars. He started them, or alternatively he stimulated them by his words, or by his actions".
With Serbian soldiers being killed, Belgrade's citizens began protesting the young men's deaths. They were labeled traitors and they were beaten by Milosevic's police.
"Fear was prevalent here, and not only fear from the secret police, but fear from your neighbor. It's terribly unpleasant even for physically courageous people to be regarded by their neighbors as traitors. And many of us were regarded like that," says Dimitrijevic..
In the spring of 1992, soldiers from the Yugoslav National Army joined Bosnian Serb forces in the hills above Sarajevo, raining terror on the Bosnian capital in the hopes of crushing the fledgling state.
The siege of that multi-ethnic city cost more than 10,000 lives and lasted almost four years.
In the summer of 1995 came the single worst atrocity of the entire Balkan war -- the massacre at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces. To this day more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys remain missing.
Later that year, Milosevic and the leaders of Bosnia and Croatia sign the Dayton Peace Agreement, formally ending the war.

"Due to the successful conclusion of the negotiations in Dayton, this day will enter into the history as the date of the end of the war in the area of the former Yugoslavia," Milosevic said.
With the wars now over, at home Milosevic found his authority increasingly challenged.
"Somewhere in 1998 Milosevic realized that he had really lost the initial Hitler-like support he had in the population," says Dimitrijevic.
So that year he again resorted to violent nationalism, this time in Kosovo -- the place where he had first planted those seeds a decade earlier. The ethnic Albanians he had disenfranchized then had now built their own army -- the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
"He realized that he could not prosper without the war. Whenever there was no war, he was in trouble in Serbia," says Dimitrijevic.
But the West had had enough of Milosevic's wars, and when he refused a deal that would bring NATO peacekeepers into Kosovo, NATO instead bombed Milosevic into submission.
It took 78 days for him to finally back down. But for the people of Serbia this was one defeat too many.

Part 3: Downfall

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the spring of 1999 seemed at first a gift to Milosevic, a chance for him to re-energize his people's sagging nationalism.

But after NATO bombed Serbian state TV in Belgrade, the public turned their rage upon Milosevic. Popular perception was that the president knew the building was a target, but the workers inside weren't warned. Sixteen young technicians were killed.
"Nobody believed that these people were not left there in order to have more victims for propaganda. It was their families who didn't believe it, their colleagues who didn't believe," says political scientist Vojin Dimitrijevic.
By the time NATO stopped bombing in the summer of 1999, popular anger against Milosevic was spreading around the country. He remained firmly in control, but local elections had greatly eased his grip, not only in Belgrade but also in the heartland.
Now the opposition decided to turn Yugoslavia's upcoming presidential election into a do-or-die confrontation.
"If we would lose this opportunity -- last chance -- many of us would not survive," says Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. "And it was a situation of final decision -- to be free and to upset him, to replace him, or to be dead."
The plan was ambitious and dangerous, but at election time, Milosevic played right into the hands of the opposition. He was so sure of himself that he called for early election.

On election day he was beaten in the race for the Yugoslav presidency by a respected former law professor, Vojislav Kostunica. But Milosevic's handpicked election commissioners claimed that Kostunica had received less than the required 50 percent of the vote. They ordered a runoff two weeks later.
As Kostunica cried foul, opposition leaders now saw their best chance to overthrow Milosevic. They had been working on a plan for the past 18 months.
"The idea was actively to organize people, general strike, with a deadline, one day coming to Belgrade, and we planned to take television, to take Parliament, to take some buildings, and then negotiate," says Djindjic.
Opposition leaders set October 5 for a general strike and a coordinated five-pronged march on Belgrade. The day before, at Kolubara outside Belgrade, striking workers at the country's largest coal mine clashed with police.
Incredibly, the police backed off. But a still greater threat loomed for Djindjic and the opposition: Milosevic's feared special operations unit. And the revolution was about to begin. At daybreak on October 5, a long column of buses, cars and trucks left the city of Uzice and other cities for Belgrade. With one goal in mind, convoys from all over Serbia converged on Belgrade, and they kept on coming.
Ten years after they swept him to power, the people were now marshalling all of their forces against Milosevic.
By noon half a million people jammed all the streets around the Parliament.
When dawn broke on October 6, the opposition had won.
Later on television, Milosevic conceded the election. But it wasn't over yet. Even though Yugoslavia had a new president, elections to the powerful Serbian Parliament were not scheduled until December.
Until then, Milosevic's Socialist Party still controlled Serbia's security apparatus.
Rade Markovic, Milosevic's secret police chief, would continue in office for four more months, burning papers and shredding secrets to the very end.
"All what was interesting for this criminal phase of our history is destroyed. We don't have proofs. We don't have documents. We don't have physical evidences. We must find witnesses," says Djindjic.
But as they started digging, they did find both witnesses and documents.

Part 4: Epic corruption

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- At the same time Serbia was celebrating the fall of Milosevic, his loyalists were caught red-handed trying one last time to loot the national bank.

"The intention was to withdraw some 50 million of German marks from the accounts of the central bank and to transfer abroad, so we stopped this operation," says Mladjan Dinkic, governor of the National Bank of Yugoslavia.
"They received the order from the federal government to empty totally the federal budget."
Dinkic blocked that as well, and the next morning he and his team started digging. They would uncover epic corruption during the Milosevic era, everything from money laundering to smuggling to banking schemes.
At the center of it all, says Dinkic, was Mihalj Kertes, the head of Milosevic's customs service. "Simply speaking, public funds were used in private purposes," says Dinkic. "Customs revenues, instead to  be put into the budget, were put into the special treasury in the Beogradska Banka and transferred abroad, mostly in Cyprus. "In bags. In big bags of cash," he says.
During years of U.N. trade sanctions, the black market generated vast sums of money for the Milosevic regime.
"The market for the illegal cigarette operation was created in Yugoslavia, and he supported this because one of the main dealers of cigarettes was his son, Marko Milosevic," says Dinkic. "Let's say that between 500 million and 1 billion of German marks was the income from this illegal trade in cigarettes, which was not paid into the budget,"
Profits from the black market went to a network of paramilitaries, many of whom Milosevic had enlisted in his wars against Croatia and Bosnia -- men like Arkan, a career criminal. For Arkan's Tigers and other paramilitaries, murder and looting were part of the job.
And when the ethnic-cleansing campaigns were over, many returned to new careers in Milosevic's underworld.
"Once the decision regarding state smuggling was made, the job was given to them as people who could be trusted," said Dusan Mihajlovic, Serbia's new interior minister. "From there, ordinary criminals then grew into well-organized criminal groups."
By the time the U.N. trade sanctions were eased in 1995, a vast apparatus had developed that both supported Milosevic and depended upon him. From top to bottom, from presidential palace to cigarette kiosk, the people running this state had turned it into a vast criminal enterprise.
Arkan the hitman became a businessman and started his own political party. But according to his former associate, Arkan took his orders from much higher up, controlled by Milosevic.
"I was the connection between the Serbian secret service and him.”
Arkan dealt in black-market cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline, among other things. Until he was shot dead in Belgrade's Intercontinental Hotel in "They bring to us to headquarters here in Belgrade sacks of monies -- big sacks with money, a lot of money," says Sipka. Like other smugglers, Arkan could rely on Milosevic's cronies when he ran into trouble.
The black market and money laundering weren't the only ways the Milosevic machine amassed its fortune. Billions were taken directly from the people through shady banking schemes.
In the early 1990s, to get hold of individual personal savings of so-called hard currency, Milosevic licensed new state-approved "banks." These banks promised to pay depositors interest of about 15 percent a month.
As interest rates skyrocketed, the government printed more money and the value of the Yugoslav currency plummeted. As for the foreign currency that people had deposited with the banks -- it vanished overseas.
"We are talking about billions of dollars," says Dinkic. "According to my estimations, some 4 billion of U.S. dollars were transferred abroad."
"I tell you the foreign bankers and the foreign businessmen were very helpful to them, sympathizing, making the business," says Serbian businessman Milorad Savicevic. “Foreign banks, perhaps in London, in the United States …Cyprus, Switzerland …were helping him launder his money, essentially moving the money. I am pessimistic that we would ever know exactly what happened. Money -- finished," says Savicevic.
Milosevic may be behind bars at The Hague, but the tribunal doesn't have the power to investigate local charges.
Milosevic has denied any personal connection to corruption, but the long-suffering Serbs want his regime held to account for the vast sums of money they say were stolen.
"People expect to see those who have got very rich during these 10 years, while sending the other people's kids to the wars, and all of us to poverty, behind the bars." said Goran Svilanovic, the then Serbian foreign minister.

Part 5: Bodybags

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- As the 1990s drew to a close, former friends of Milosevic, associates, and others who may have known too much, began to die violent and public deaths.
The truth behind the bodybags began to emerge once the Democratic Opposition of Serbia took power in January 2001
Investigators then began to uncover many of Milosevic's long-suspected secrets, allegedly including state-sponsored murder and enemies lists kept by his secret police.
"We came across incredible information," says Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic.
"For example (Serbian Prime Minister Zoran) Djindjic has more than 800 reports in his dossier. (Yugoslav President Vojislav) Kostunica was third in line with 550-something, and myself with 549 reports that were dubbed onto a hard disk," Batic says.
Some political figures faced a lot more than surveillance. Vuk Draskovic escaped by a whisker in October 1999 when a truck hit his convoy, killing four of his staff.
According to the new interior minister, Dusan Mihajlovic, it was a blatant assassination attempt by the secret police.  "We have established that members of the secret service were involved, using an official truck that belonged to the service," says Mihajlovic.
Warnings and death threats would reach his most prominent public critics, including Slavko Curuvija. Curuvija was a Belgrade newspaper publisher who relentlessly denounced Milosevic, his wife and their political parties.
"He showed at one moment that one man completely alone can fight against a system which he found inhuman," says Dr. Branka Prpa, Curuvija's wife.
In October 1998, the Serbian government shut down Curuvija's Daily Telegraph. But still he wouldn't keep quiet.
In March the following year, a court in Belgrade sentenced Curuvija and two other journalists to five months in jail.
"I kept saying, 'You entered a serious political fight, that means that you'd better have some sort of place to escape to,'" says Prpa. "His answer was, 'Brance, if the state wants to kill you, you've got nowhere to hide.'"
Five days later, Curuvija was dead -- pumped full of bullets in front of his wife on their Belgrade doorstep. There was no other witness. To this day there has been no arrest.
"The murder of Slavko Curuvija is a political murder," says Prpa. "The top of the Milosevic regime were the only ones that could make such a decision, and I consider them responsible."
"There's no doubt the security police was involved, deeply involved. The question is, who gave the order, I believe Milosevic" says Djindjic.
By far the largest investigation involves not selective assassination, but mass murder, And it is being run by the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague. Central to the case is Milosevic's strategy in Kosovo.
In March 1999, in places like Izbice, Serbian forces slaughtered ethnic Albanian civilians. They were then allegedly ordered to destroy any evidence that was potentially useful to the tribunal's investigators.
Orders to dig up about a thousand corpses from Kosovo and rebury them on government-owned property near Belgrade came from Milosevic himself, according to Dusan Mihajlovic, Serbia's interior minister at that time. It might have remained a secret, but a freezer truck containing more than 80 bodies turned up in the River Danube, just downstream from the capital Belgrade.
Milosevic's interior ministry blocked any investigation into the freezer truck, but now hundreds of bodies have been dug up, and it's now emerging that moving and reburying those corpses had been a major operation.
Says Serbian Justice (after 5th October) Minister Batic: "Now I think that things have started to unwind. The freezer truck was discovered in the Danube with bodies of old people, women and children. We know that Slobodan Milosevic was the one who organized the cover-up of those serious crimes. I think that the time ahead of us will uncover the involvement of Slobodan Milosevic in various other mysterious murders.

Part 6: Shadows

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (CNN) -- At the end of October, when 74 pages detailing charges against Slobodan Milosevic were read to him at The Hague, he was as dismissive as ever.
"Don't bother me and make me listen for hours on end to the reading of texts written at the intellectual level of a 7-year-old child, or rather, let me correct myself, a retarded 7-year-old," Milosevic said.
The charges read in October were that Milosevic, as head of state, was responsible for crimes against humanity in Croatia and Bosnia. He has since been charged with genocide. His trial is expected to begin in February.
Whatever the outcome, Milosevic has cast long shadows over the country he once vowed to make great.
The shadows include old faces who haunt the new regime.
And even Yugoslavia's new leaders concede that many lower-profile heirs to Milosevic's empire -- his favored bankers and businessmen -- remain lynchpins of organized crime.
"Speaking about the mafia and crime, his spirit is still present. That spirit is now looking for its new godfather," said President Vojislav Kostunica.
"I think now it is more dangerous to have these financial groups which were around Milosevic continuing their work, than to have his political networks and his party -- and even to have these people from security police - acting against us," said Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.
For the Yugoslav people, Milosevic's removal from power offered great hope.
"I do believe in the future, but I believe that we have to fight for that future by ourselves, that no one will serve it to us on a plate, and that we are obliged to leave a clean space for future generations who must not be responsible for everything that took place here," Serbia is getting the chance to develop its fledgling democracy with Milosevic being held to account. The Serbian people who elected and re-elected him for a decade may start to shed the burden of collective guilt.

UPDATE ON TODAY'S COVERAGE: From the Observer on the autopsy carried out in the Hague immediately after Milosevic's death, amid claims of poisoning.

Michael van der Galien, the talented blogger from The Netherlands gives me this report via e-mail from the Dutch MSM: "Dutch news sources report Dutch doctors found 'strange substances' in Milosevic's blood - substances that neutralized the medicines they gave him against his heart disorder (how ironic; he had a heart disorder both figuratively and literally) and against his high blood pressure.

It feeds the rumors he got poisoned / he committed suicide."

He then adds this translated Dutch report:

"Juriste Heikelien Verrijn Stuart said she spoke to someone who was very close to Milosevic. From the declarations of this person can be concluded that Milosevic took the medicines which neutralized his heart-medicines, himself.
Another riddle is the letter Milosevic wrote which was made public today. In it the former President wrote tracks of a 'heavy means' were found in his blood.
Because of the fact he wrote this letter just one day before his death, one could conclude that he committed suicided, but attempted to make it look like murder, according to Verrijn Stuart."

And from the WaPo:

"Slobodan Milosevic rode nationalist pride and rage to power and led his Serb compatriots into four ethnic wars.

He lost them all. "

Check out my friend Rob Farley"s "Brief Thoughts on Slobodan" @ Lawyers Guns & Money, Kim Priestap @ Wizbang who says "Good riddance!", and Johnathan Garner @ Publius

UPDATE: The autopsy showed that Milosevic died of a heart attack:

The autopsy result was disclosed as new evidence emerged that Mr. Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president found dead in his prison cell bed on Saturday, had been taking medicine not prescribed by his physicians, including an antibiotic known to diminish or blunt the effect of the medicines he had been taking for heart and blood-pressure problems.

It was unclear why he had taken that antibiotic, but one of Mr. Milosevic's legal advisers said Sunday that Mr. Milosevic knew something was wrong, and had expressed fear in a letter written one day before he was found dead that someone had been trying to poison him. The United Nations tribunal has dismissed the poisoning speculation.

Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, said at a news conference before the autopsy result was released that she did not rule out suicide. She also said Mr. Milosevic had been thoroughly monitored by medical aides, and that it was "very strange, even if it is of course possible, that he should have died so suddenly without these medics having noticed a worsening of his condition."

From The UK Guardian: "The doctors were killing me", The New York Times "How the butcher of the Balkans changed us", and from Slate's Christopher Hitchens "No sympathy for Slobo"

Milosevic's son says his father was killed. The New York Times "Expert suggests Milosevic died in a drug ploy" Der Spiegel "Will Slobodan be buried in Belgrade?"

Comments

[DavidByron]

Here's an article which has several good comments about the Milosevic trial. For example, this quote from The Guardian

things have gone horribly wrong for Ms. Del Ponte. The charges relating to the war in Kosovo were expected to be the strongest part of her case. But not only has the prosecution signally failed to prove Milosevic's personal responsibility for atrocities committed on the ground, the nature and extent of the atrocities themselves has also been called into question...

"When it came to the indictments involving the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, the prosecution fared little better. In the case of the worst massacre with which Milosevic has been accused of complicity--of between 2,000 and 4,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995--Del Ponte's team have produced nothing to challenge the verdict of the five-year inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government--that there was 'no proof that orders for the slaughter came from Serb political leaders in Belgrade.'

So that's a lefty site and a libertarian site that both defend Milosvic against the charges of genocide.

[Catherine]

I do not think that Milosevic deserves talking about his deeds, his life, and his family. People should not be reminded what he did to Serbian people. The Hague court made his life easier, because Serbian people were not those who had judged him till the end. He should have been hanged in Belgrade (on Terazije square), so that he could be an example for what he did to us to those who think the same way as he did. He took us 13 years of life. Isnt that enough?And what about those families who lost their relatives durig the war?

[gringoman]

Alexandra,

There is a view that the nicely sanitized Clinton War ('sanitized' for U.S. voters by relentless bombing, allowing him not to have American blood shed,always good for poll numbers, while subtly continuing to emasculate the U.S. by showing such male "cowardice," )was a dastardly betrayal of the Serbs, former U.S. allies who fought the Nazis like lions. Clinton preferred the Nazi-allied Croatians and muslims, and therefore Serb atrocities got top billing over equally horrible Croatian attrocities. It appears that you see this view as gravely over-simplified, or inaccurate.

[DavidByron]

Look at it this way. Recently the USA experienced a terroirst attack. A single isolated attack that was not state sponsored. There was no long term threat to US security and the act was carried out by 19 guys with box cutters. The US has a population of about 300 million.

Now Serbia was experiencing terrorist attacks by a much larger force that was based in a neighbouring state. The KLA was so big I've heard they had their own artilery field guns. The situation had been ongoing for years and the desired results of the attacks were the territorial integrity of Serbia. Serbia has a population of about 10 million.

Which country do you think reacted in a more measured way to it's terrorism problem?

Before you answer that let's examine the claims about Serbia's activities on the US site you linked to. Obviously since the US bombed Serbia and justified this act on the basis of Serbian actions the US is as biased a source as you could hope to find, but let's ignore that for now. What do they claim?

They make claims about actions by Serbia after the war started. They make no claims that Serbia did anything before the NATO bombings. Yes, that's right. The original pretext for the Kosovo war, the actions taken by Serbia prior to the war in response to the terrorist KLA attacks -- they don't rate a mention. They've been debunked so often it's embarassing. Instead we hear about what is supposed to have happened in Kosov after Serbia was attacked by NATO.

So now ask yourself this. If America finds invading two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and killing hundreds of thousands of people, all on the basis of a single act of terror by nineteen men is justified. What would America have done if it was attacked by an alliance of countries seeking to "liberate" a good proportion of it's homeland?

Let's say that several million Mexicans start shooting people around America for years. They are backed by the Mexican government and want to annex Texas and California. They have heavy military equipment given to them by the Russia and China, and those two countries proceed to blanket bomb American cities in suport of the Mexicans.

What would be America's response?

[Alexandra]

Saunders,

I think you are taking what David Byron said a little out of context. His knowledge of the history of the region and the conflict is quite accurate. I don't agree with your accusation which is based on the assumption that he does not acknowledge the Holocaust by default, but I am sure he is capable of answering that for himself.

Like with all civil wars, it is never a black and white issue, and I believe this is the point he was trying to make. He is not condoning Milosevic, he is trying to explain the circumstances under which Milosevic went into the region.

He is pointing out the atrocities carried out by the Croatians who were Black shirts during the war and who slaughtered the Serbs by the thousands, and who were never tried in the Hague. He is pointing out the slaughter of the 200 000 Serbs by the Croatians in Krajina in the early 90’s. He is pointing out that the Kosovo conflict had a lot to do with oppression of the 200,000 or so Serbs in that region, by the now majority 2mil or so Albanians. All of which has been ignored due to the despicable and inexcusable actions carried out against the Muslims.

The lives of the Serbs in Kosovo was not easy to say the least, in a land that had always been theirs, they were suddenly the minority. They had to live in a hostile environment, constantly harassed by the Muslims who wanted to drive them out of their homes. They raped their women and gang fought the men into submission, burning homes with people still inside, trying to force them to convert to Islam, way before Milosevic even heard of the problem.

So much hatred had built up, that something had to be done. That something however should never have been the ethnic cleansing that ensued. Your figures, although none confirmed, are way out for Kosovo, and Kosovo is what David was talking about. You made a sweeping genocide generalization which was not what he was referring to; 12 000 Albanians were killed in Kosovo, and approx 800,000 expelled, as far as my research shows. But again, whether it is 200 000 or 12 000 is irrelevant, either way it is a horrendous number.

There were territories in Kosovo where the police were not able to enter, and protect their own. Muslims ruled, and if you were a Serb, atrocities were carried out without anyone to protect them. But that doesn't mean that forcible cleansing of the Albanians was justified.

The numbers of how many Albanians live there now are not conclusive, since no official count has been established since the 80's. The Serbs were a majority in Kosovo before the WWII, as well as if we go into ancient history and the battle of Kosovo (1389) when the Serbs fought the Turks and lost. Before that the Kingdom of Serbia during Tsar Dusan, encompassed beside Serbia the whole of Macedonia up to Thessaly (now part of Greece).

Again, don't now pick at my words, this is a difficult subject for me, but in my opinion David has a good grasp of the truth, and I do not think was being disrespectful. He was simply saying that not everything is black and white in a civil war. Don’t ever think that the Albanians were as helpless as they were portrayed to be. Nor that it was an easy situation to control, considering the incredibly powerful gangs (that included women and children) who plotted the drug route coming in from Afghanistan via Albania and Kosovo into Europe. That is still a big business for that region.

I do however repeat, nothing absolutely nothing justifies genocide, and the government in Belgrade should have gone in to Kosovo, and established the rule of law, protecting their people, however difficult that may have been.

[dhimwit]

In retrospect, I have to wonder whether we slew the wrong dragon in the Kosova war.

[Saunders]

Alexandra...

Of all the distortions and outrageous statments posted by David Byron in this (and other) threads, none is as offensive and repulsive as the following:

The accusations of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo by Serbs was exagerated or even fabricated in pursuit of military goals.

Please take some time to go to Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo: An Accounting, and judge for yourself whether the reports were either "exaggerated" or "fabricated." Byron's attempt to pooh-pooh the deaths of over 200,000 and the displacement of millions under Milosevic's direct supervision is not just revolting, it's nauseating.

Reading Byron's posts leaves a lingering aroma of Holocaust denial, and I am willing to bet a considerable sum that Byron also believes, a la David Irving (a darling of the fringe left), that the reports of the mass murder of Jews during WWII was also "exaggerated" or "fabricated."

It isn't worth my time to debunk all of the silly nonsense he usually writes, but in this case I urge the readers of your blog to do a bit of research before accepting at face value his outrageous claims regarding the Serbian wars of the 1990s. Byron defends Milosevic - a communist tyrant mass murderer - in barely articulate prose, but he defends him nonetheless, and Byron deserves condemnation for it in the strongest possible terms.

[MarcH]

Alexandra,

This was a wonderful and informative post. I hope you'll write some more posts about SE and central Europe, both history and current events.

[RL]

i forgot to mention, findingkaradzic.blogspot.com
in my previous post.

it must be all of that delicious coffee with dark chocolate - chips gelato i enjoyed a little earlier today. i don't ever wish to imagine life without gelato. : )

[RL]

"Ethnic cleansing":

Zelijko Raznatovic (aka: the Notorious "Arkan")

Radovan Stojicic

Radovan Karadzic

Three suffering eternal conscious punishment in the fiery "lake of fire", one to go (Karadzic).

[DavidByron]

That's quite some not widely read knowledge you have there. I am impressed.

Thanks. I had to look up how to spell "Vojvodina"! I used to read antiwar.com a lot and they have a lot of coverage of the Balkans. In fact I think the site was originally set up because of the Kosovo war. It's a libertarian site.

[Alexandra]

David, Well you certainly know all! That's quite some not widely read knowledge you have there. I am impressed.

Do you all remember the famous picture that was printed all over the world, the thin man half naked behind chicken wire, and the day after the US announced the bombings? Well, according to the investigative reports of a German journalist carried out afterwards, the photos and the video from which they were taken, were less than honest. Here is the story in text form and here is a must see video. (you have to sit through a tedious beginning of the video, but the rest is mesmorizing, and really shocked me when I first saw it) This is a part of the text, which only relates to the wire, but the video tells the best story, as it reveals all the other details of how that photo and others including the video, were made to give desired impressions:

The picture reproduced on these pages is of Fikret Alic, a Bosnian Muslim, emaciated and stripped to the waist, apparently imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence in a Bosnian Serb camp at Trnopolje. It was taken from a videotape shot on 5 August 1992 by an award-winning British television team, led by Penny Marshall (ITN) with her cameraman Jeremy Irvin, accompanied by Ian Williams (Channel 4) and the reporter Ed Vulliamy from the Guardian newspaper.

For many, this picture has become a symbol of the horrors of the Bosnian war - 'Belsen '92' as one British newspaper headline captioned the photograph (Daily Mirror, 7 August 1992). But that image is misleading.

The fact is that Fikret Alic and his fellow Bosnian Muslims were not imprisoned behind a barbed wire fence. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding Trnopolje camp. It was not a prison, and certainly not a 'concentration camp', but a collection centre for refugees, many of whom went there seeking safety and could leave again if they wished.

The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims; it is around the cameraman and the journalists. It formed part of a broken-down barbed wire fence encircling a small compound that was next to Trnopolje camp. The British news team filmed from inside this compound, shooting pictures of the refugees and the camp through the compound fence. In the eyes of many who saw them, the resulting pictures left the false impression that the Bosnian Muslims were caged behind barbed wire.

Whatever the British news team's intentions may have been, their pictures were seen around the world as the first hard evidence of concentration camps in Bosnia. 'The Proof: behind the barbed wire, the brutal truth about the suffering in Bosnia', announced the Daily Mail alongside a front-page reproduction of the picture from Trnopolje: 'They are the sort of scenes that flicker in black and white images from 50-year-old films of Nazi concentration camps.' (7 August 1992) On the first anniversary of the pictures being taken, an article in the Independent could still use the barbed wire to make the Nazi link: 'The camera slowly pans up the bony torso of the prisoner. It is the picture of famine, but then we see the barbed wire against his chest and it is the picture of the Holocaust and concentration camps.' (5 August 1993)

Penny Marshall, Ian Williams and Ed Vulliamy have never called Trnopolje a concentration camp. They have criticized the way that others tried to use their reports and pictures as 'proof' of a Nazi-style Holocaust in Bosnia. Yet over the past four and a half years, none of them has told the full story about that barbed wire fence which made such an impact on world opinion.

It was through my role as an expert witness to the War Crimes Tribunal that I first realized that something was wrong with the famous pictures from Trnopolje. As a journalist with a track record of reporting on Bosnia, I was asked to present the tribunal with a report on German media coverage of Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb accused of war crimes. Reviewing press articles and video tapes which had been shown on German TV, I became aware of the major importance of the Trnopolje pictures. The picture of Fikret Alic behind the barbed wire, taken by Penny Marshall's team, could be seen again and again.

One night, while I was going through the pictures again at home, my wife pointed out an odd little detail. If Fikret Alic and the other Bosnian Muslims were imprisoned inside a barbed wire fence, why was this wire fixed to poles on the side of the fence where they were standing? As any gardener knows, fences are, as a rule, fixed to the poles from outside, so that the area to be enclosed is fenced-in. It occurred to me then that perhaps it was not the people in the camp who were fenced-in behind the barbed wire, but the team of British journalists.[...]

I decided to go back to Bosnia, and to review the British news team's coverage of Trnopolje, in order to unravel the real story of how those pictures had come about.[...]

And he did. His story and this video prove beyond reasonable doubt that things were not as they seemed. Of course it does not mean that ethnic cleansing did not take place elsewhere, it did. But it does mean that the photos that enraged the whole world and won so many awards were maneuvered to portray a certain desired image. They were also neccessary to win the public opinion prior to the Belgrade bombings

[Stefan]

S'ok David, you did clear up the ICC thing as I wasn't sure when it was officially established.

[DavidByron]

Ok sorry! Most people don't know that the trial went badly and people get confused about the ICC and the other courts.

[Stefan]

That was sarcasm ...in case you didn't catch it.

[DavidByron]

You are mistaken.

I may be mistaken but, wasn’t Milosevic the first person to be put on trial by the “International Criminal Court”? That went well didn’t it?

Firstly the ICC wasn't started until recently. The UN set up quasi-legal tribunals for Rwanda and for Yugoslavia as special cases before the ICC was created. They were little more than victor's kangaroo courts that couldn't arrest anyone except the losers. Legally they existence was on very shaky ground. There was no treaty to set them up. They literally made it all up as they went along. It was a judicial farce.

The ICC is completely different. It's a separate treaty and has established rules which apply equally to everyone in those nations that are signatories (the US is not one).

Also the trial of Milosevic didn't go at all well.

The prosecution (which was not independent of the judges trying the case) was a joke. The witnesses were ridiculous. Milosevic - a lawyer and apparently a very good one - defended himself and regularly humiliated the prosecutions' case. Most of the witnesses against him contradicted themselves and openly lied on the stand. As a show trial it was a political disaster. As a result the reporting on the detailsm of the trial was largely dropped except to ocassionally mention it was going on.

[Stefan]

I may be mistaken but, wasn’t Milosevic the first person to be put on trial by the “International Criminal Court”? That went well didn’t it?

[DavidByron]

Some personal thoughts about Milosevic. I will keep it short: He was the Serbian Hitler.

You wouldn't say that if you knew the history of Yugoslavia during world war 2. This is the crux of my comments here: Milosevic wasn't a Hitler. the bulk of the ethnic cleansing in the wars was by Croatians against Serbs, often with tacit aproval by NATO. Now in WW2 everyone was picking sides and on the whole the Croatians were on the side of the Nazis and the Serbs against. Ancient history? It would have been except that during the ethnic cleansing of Serbs by Croats in the wars of the 1990's the Croats chose to use the same Nazi emblems and paramilitary names as they had in WW2. What message was that intended to send?

Most of the victims of the Yugoslav wars were Serbs. But where are the Croatian generals who should be hauled off to the Hague? Where is the outrage for Serbian victims?

Alexandra my impression here is that you have plenty of reasons for disliking Milsevic but those reasons are NOT the ones listed in the classic NATO propaganda texts about Yugoslavia.

Why did America decide to militarily back a group of muslims that they had previously listed as a terrorist organisation (the KLA)? Alexandra I don't know what your views are on Milosevic's policy on Kosovo before the war. But he wasn't commiting genocide. I don't know if you believe that Serbia really wanted to dominate the rest of Yugoslavia more than it already did simply by numbers and economy, but Albania certainly wanted to pursue a policy of "Greater Albania" and they are now pushing terrorists into "Macedonia" just as they did in Kosovo. Again it wasn't Milsevic who started the wars. It was the US and Germany who pushed the former Republics to move to declare independence unilaterally instead of going through a longer gradual and democratic process. As a direct result 200,000 Serbs in Krajina were ethincally cleansed.

[Tito's] policy to populate Kosovo with Muslims from Albania and further east (he was on close terms with President Nasser of Egypt and paid Muslim households money for each new child) had only one goal: Crowding-out Serbs demographically and thus breaking the umbilical cord of Serbian Nationalism.

Classic divide and conquor: back the minorities against the majority. That way the minorities have an interest in keeping you around. The British did this all over the world and the Americans seemed to do it in Yugoslavia the same way Tito did. All the US media reports were slanted against the evil Serbs and in favour of the innocent muslims and Croats. The irony of calling Serbs nazis was lost on American audiences ignorant of the history.

Albright favored the Muslim Albanians, which to this day is a mystery to me, and as such succumbed to their manipulation against supporting the Serbian opposition. It suited Albania too well to have the sable rattling Milosevic playing into their hand and painting himself into a corner. A moderate leader would have preserved a much greater Yugoslavia and retained control over Kosovo.

But IMO Milosevic was merely represented to the US as sabre-ratling when the instigation seems to have come from the muslims. For whatever reason they decided to go into Serbia and Kosovo was merely the closest pretext to hand. They'd already laid the groundwork to represent Serbs as "nazis" and Milosevic as a fascist.

I honestly don't think that any leader could have prevented war with the US over Kosovo because for some reason America wanted a military occupation of all of Yugoslavia. Divide and conquer. No Serb leader would ever have given up Kosovo willingly under any circumstances, especially so soon after the 600th anniversary.

The accusations of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo by Serbs was exagerated or even fabricated in pursuit of military goals. But even the wild claims never amounted in size to the scope of the very real attacks on Serbs in Krajina. Again maybe people disagreed with Milosevic's policies towards the independent regions but wasn't he doing the same stuff in Vojvodina?

[RL]

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."
Shakespeare

Sad, but true.

Maybe this partly explains why he (the devil) is referred to as "an angel of light" in God's Scriptures. he is a fallen angel, after all. It was the deadly sin of pride that did him in, and C.S. Lewis has a very, very convicting chapter on this deadly sin (pride), in his classic and excellent book titled, "Mere Christianity". i think that it's time for me to reread this chapter once again, and to sincerely confess and repent of the deadly sin of pride. the most difficult to conquer/ defeat sin of the seven deadly-sins, in my humble opinion.

Proverbs 3:33-35, Proverbs 16:18-19
James 4:6, 1 Peter 5:5

[Lilly]

One subject that hasn’t been touched in connection with Milosevic is his role in the exploitation of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The Serbs have never, on the whole, been highly religious. They mainly uphold traditional rites – like celebrating Xmas, Easter and other religious holidays. In Tito’s time, although it was not strictly forbidden, but God forbid if a teacher was seen to go to church or somebody from the army or police, he would have been punished or dismissed. In smaller cities it was certainly worse than in larger cities. It was not advisable for someone to go to church, or to be baptized or married in church. Party members watched who was visiting a church or celebrated religious holidays. In schools children didn’t get any religious education, as in other Communist countries.

Milosevic, riding on the nationalistic propaganda started to exploit the Church. The clerics and the church were given a prominent place. It started to be fashionable to be baptized and go to mass. People who never believed in God started to fill up churches, only to observe the rites. It was funny how some former Communists started to be bigger Christians then the true believers. Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia who came to Serbia, a number of them clerics, have been among the staunchest nationalists. They were placed at different churches in Serbia and they all started to praise Milosevic as their savior. The Church never supported the opposition. They knew who to bat for. Churches began to be erected, and the government supported it. The preachers after mass indoctrinated the masses about the justification of the war, they blessed soldiers who went to kill innocent civilians and loot.

Milosevic has never been a religious man, but it served his purpose to have the Church as his ally. As in all nations, where you need to reach the educated as well as the uneducated, this support is imperative to keep up your propaganda. This propaganda lingers on, since if you tell a lie a 1000 times (as he did through the media) it becomes the truth.

[Raimondo]

An often overlooked fact about those dark times in the former
Yugoslavia, was the fact that literally a few miles away the
Europeans sat sipping their capuccinos and ignoring the horror all
together. The US had to intervene from across oceans and continents.

I remember doing exactly that. I enjoyed sitting at a caffe' in the
small town of Gorizia where my aunt and uncle own a summer home,
while we knew that across the border in Nova Goriza things probably
weren't all that peachy. It was a beautiful day and the capuccino was
very good. At the Italian parliament the, "Onorelvoli", leftists,
centrists, and right wingers were all on vacation for at least two
weeks.

Aahh...Old Europe...They sure have their priorities straight!

[RL]

the ayatollahs in the islamoterrorist republic of Iran also supported the Albanian muslims, with lots and lots of weapons, guerilla-training from the Qods Force ("Jerusalem Force") division of the IRGC, and financial and other means of support (ie. diesel and kerosene). Their (IRI) fully-loaded cargo aircraft used to make regular flights to support the Albanian muslims. a friend of mine who is a Lt. Col. in the SF has told me on several occasions that the Albanian muslims are some of the nastiest and most vicious soldiers he has ever been around during his entire military career in service to our truly blessed and great country (USA). Albright's position shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody; she does NOT subscribe to a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung, which makes clear distinctions between: good and evil, right and wrong, black and white.

The results ? our major foreign-policy failures concerning: Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, the islamoterrorist republic of Iran, the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, Iraq, regularly appeasing the evil islamonazi-terrorist arafat etc . . .

You reap what you sow, a transcendent truth of the Word of God.

God Bless Dr. Condoleezza Rice.

[Washington]

Excellent post Alexandra.

[Michael Galien]

No thanks,

Here is a somewhat better translation:
Second paragraph
Juriste Heikelien Verrijn Stuart said she spoke to someone who was very close to Milosevic. From the declarations of this person can be concluded that Milosevic took the medicines which neutralised his heart-medicines, himself
Seventh paragraph
Another riddle is the letter Milosevic wrote which was made public today. In it the former President wrote tracks of a 'heavy means' were found in his blood.
Eight paragraph
Because of the fact he wrote this letter just one day before his death, one could conclude that he committed suicided, but attempted to make it look like murder, according to Verrijn Stuart.

Some personal thoughts about Milosevic. I will keep it short:
He was the Serbian Hitler.

[Alexandra]

David,

I do not personally remember much as I was very small when I left, but my close and wide family circle carried on the fight for liberty, and certainly my father until his dying breath.

You are of course entirely right when you suspect that not all is as black and white as often portrayed. But before I go any further, Milosevic and his wife Mira Markovic (she has played a central role), were as bad as they are portrayed to have been. In that sense, as I have said above, Amanpour provides an accurate account of the Milosevic era.

What is of course missing is the whole baggage carried from the 30's and 40's and prior to that. The terrible crimes and large scale genocide committed by the Croats against the Serbs; the unspeakable atrocities carried out by the Croatian blackshirts during WWII. Don't forget, Tito was Croatian and literally shifted Serbia's entire industry, factories etc. to Croatian territories, leaving previously vibrant economies in ruins. My grandmother's brother was the President of the old Yugoslavia, 1935-1939, when we were still civilized and had a truly democratic parliament, and this was the country Tito inherited after the war.

During the 1970s the economy began to weaken under the weight of foreign debt, high inflation, and inefficient industry. Also, he was under increasing pressure from nationalist forces within Yugoslavia, especially Croatian secessionists who threatened to break up the federation. Following their repression, Tito tightened control of intellectual life, such as my father's in particular. After Tito's death in 1980, the ethnic tensions resurfaced, helping to bring about the eventual violent breakup of the federation in the early 1990s.

Tito also knew only too well how important Kosovo was in the eyes of the Serbs, historically and nationalistically, as you rightly pointed out. And yes, you are welcome.

His policy to populate Kosovo with Muslims from Albania and further east (he was on close terms with President Nasser of Egypt and paid Muslim households money for each new child) had only one goal: Crowding-out Serbs demographically and thus breaking the umbilical cord of Serbian Nationalism.

Then there are course the five hundred years of Turkish Muslim occupation; and perhaps most indicatively for the Serbian strength of character, their defiant ability to preserve and keep the Serbian Orthodox religion alive throughout those FIVE Centuries.

Milosevic only lit the fuse. A Mandela chose not to. That's in a nutshell the tragedy. It was easy for the West and for America in particular to appreciate Appartheid, it was not as simple to reduce Yugoslavia's conflict into a single label.

Albright favored the Muslim Albanians, which to this day is a mystery to me, and as such succumbed to their manipulation against supporting the Serbian opposition. It suited Albania too well to have the sable rattling Milosevic playing into their hand and painting himself into a corner. A moderate leader would have preserved a much greater Yugoslavia and retained control over Kosovo.

Ah well, it goes on and on...

Thanks Michael, I just posted the update.

[Michael Galien]

Darn Alexandra, great post!

For who is interested: the news that the Dutch sources brought out (poisoning) is to read on:
nos journaal

Now you might think; but that's in Dutch... How am I supposed to read that? Very simple: use altafista Babel fish:
translation

For the lazy people; I will translate a few paragraphes from NOS journaal (major news station, comparable with CNN, FOX, etc) with Altavista; I admit I'm too lazy to translate it myself (it's a little babelish at times, but still quite good readable):

Headline:
' Milosevic died none natural dead '

story:
There are indications that Slobodan Milosevic did not die a natural death. In his blood tracks of medecines which neutralise the medicines he took for his heart disorder and high blood pressure, have been found. Sources confirmed that to the NOS.

Juriste Heikelien Verrijn Stuart said that she spoke to someone who stood very near to Milosevic. From the declarations of this person can be concluded that Milosevic swallowed the medicines which reduced the impact of the heartmedicines himself.

A another riddle is the letter of Milosevic which has come to light just today. In this the former-president writes the day before his dead that tracks of a "heavy means" have been found in his blood. From the fact that this letter has been exactly written one day before his death, one is able to conclude that he committed suicide, but according to Veery Stuart Verrijn it needed to look like someone murdered him. "then he outsmarted the Tribunal once again."

Okay... I took some paragraphs and corrected the translation a little bit - babel fish is a very nice site, but some help from somebody who actually speaks the language is quite useful. I tried to 'correct' as little as possible - that is why it still sounds quite strange.

[RL]

ayatollah khomeini and ayatollah khalkhali have welcomed this evil genocidal monster into their presence, in a fiery hell, for the rest of eternity. Nobody escapes the perfectly just judgment of the Only perfect Judge. Nobody.

"Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment."
Hebrews 9:27

Thank You Dear Lord for your holy and perfect justice. Amen.

[Jeremiah]

Milosevic is dead. May your people rest in peace.

[DavidByron]

Well I was wondering what you thought of all this. I my view Milosevic was innocent of the charges and was simply a scapegoat for American imperialist aggression. But since he died while in prison -- very conveniently -- the trial that had so far looked like it was going to end in his aquital, is over.

There's a lot of inaccuracies and false insinuations in those reports as far as I know. What do you think about them Alexandra? By posting them in full it makes it sound like you endorse their contents.

Do you agree with the NATO propaganda that characterised the Yugoslav wars as all being the fault of the Serbs? While the Croatians were going around flaunting their Nazi-era emblems?

By the way -- when were you living in Serbia? It's not clear from what you've said how old you were at the time. I assume you were not there at the time of the wars? I've never been to Serbia of course but it's a story that has interested me so I'd like to hear any inside information you have.

I guess for most people his death is just a footnote of American mythology. Another "bad guy" that wonderful America "took out" like a cheesy cop movie. I figured you might have a more precise view.

And by the way -- from my ancestors to yours -- thanks for the Battle of Kosovo.