When the dictator died, did justice die too?

last updated 8 January 2015

Milosevic

“The Hague killed Slobodan Milosevic,” said Serbia’s Kurir in an editorial. The U.N.-run International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague claims that the former Serbian leader died of a heart attack in his jail cell. But we know that Milosevic had been complaining of inadequate treatment for his heart condition. The truth is, “the leaders of the New World Order” wanted him dead. Many of them—including Tony Blair and Bill Clinton—were afraid that he might testify about the deals they cut with him in 1995 during negotiations to end the conflict in Bosnia. The real story of the Balkan wars has died with Milosevic. Our only consolation is that the West was robbed of its chance to convict him on farcical charges of genocide.

Only a tiny minority of Serbs is mourning the tyrant, said Mihal Ramac in Serbia’s Danas. Milosevic unleashed hell throughout the 1990s as Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Macedonia wrested independence from a Yugoslavia dominated by Serbia. He blackened our reputation by bringing back concentration camps to Europe and packing them with emaciated Bosnian Muslims. And we must count “Serbs, too, among his victims.” Nobody “in the history of this country managed to impoverish so many Serbs in such a short time.”

Bosnians do not need a court to tell us that Milosevic was evil, said Ramo Kolar in Bosnia’s Oslobodjenje. “Hitler was never convicted either, and the whole world knows what he did.” The grieving widows of the 8,000 men murdered in Srebrenica have told of their loss. The residents of Sarajevo, survivors of an 18-month siege, know what they endured. And the mass graves scattered across the country tell their own tale. History is already judging the Yugoslav dictator far more harshly than the tribunal ever would have.