Thank you for putting your bodies on the line. What a pleasure to see a population take their country back by force.
All opinions, pro and con are welcome.
Amen. Revolution Calling!
It’s just like 1989 all over again.
Now, when’s this gonna happen in the US? 
I think NATO may have just (finally) won its first colonial war. I wish the Serbians well and congratulate them for reaching the end of the beginning.
Please. If NATO hadn’t bombed the hell out of Yugoslavia, Milosevic would be nothing but a memory by now. The war allowed Slobo to rally the country around him against the US and NATO, effectively neutralizing the opposition that had been forming against him at the time.
Today was a day long overdue in Belgrade.
Really? I’ll have to check this out. Anyone got a link?
I am honestly waiting for the American people to get fed up and actually do something about… well, fuck. Everything.
–Tim
Amen, Zenster. Power to the people, especially the police and military who refused to defend Milosevic against the coup. (was it a coup?)
No, not a coup. More of a public protest that succeeded. And the polica and military didn’t exactly side with the public from the word go: they were more or less forced to chose the side that would result in the least bloodshed.
But it’s the thought that counts 
I applaud the Serbian people for rising up against Milosevic. It was a great display of people power taking back their government.
I do have one quibble: are the Serb people going to apologize to the families of the Bosnian Muslims and Croats they murdered, much like the post-war German government did to Holocaust survivors?
Meanwhile, we can only hope that the Iraqi people finally get a clue and do the same.
If the US hadn’t run the country into the ground with the sanctions and bombing, they would have.
Of course, Saddam Hussein was helped into place by a CIA-assisted coup, so I don’t believe the US is too keen to see him replaced…
It will be a little harder in Iraq. Saddam Hussein won a 5-way civil war in Iraq that went on for about 45 years. The other ethnic groups, the Kurds and the Shiite Muslims and others, are not allied against him.
It is kinda hard to ally with fellow oppositionists when you’re at opposite ends of the country… Kurds in the north, Shi’a in the south. 'S why Saddam made quick work of the uprisings that occurred after the Gulf War.
Milosevic “conceded” the election this morning, and wished his opponent well.
Translation: “Please don’t hunt me down and put me on trial!”
Let’s also discuss a theory that has met with some resistance before.
One report that made a lot of sense to me is that Iraq’s Hussein is a Sunni moslem. His opposition to Iran’s Shi’a fundamentalist regime is so desirable to US interests that we left him in power rather than face the potential prospect of a united Iran/Iraq state. Since the Sunni’s are more tolerant, this seems to make some degree of sense.
Feedback please.
PS: Personally, I say let’s blow the sh!thead away and install some other puppet or whatever it takes to stop this sick and twisted bit of history. Me? Imperialistic? Never!
PPS: Milosivic’s concession is more like, “I will make no attempt to destabilize the country with my remaining loyalists (read: kill the newly elected opposition leader) if you don’t hunt me down like a dog and hand me over to the Hague.”
Be careful what you congratulate people for.
They still hate the Kosovos and the Albanians, and probably the Greeks and Turks and Germans and Czechs.
The balkans are not going to turn into Vermont just because they had an election.
Ethnic cleansing isn’t what got the bad boy booted, it was the economy.
Exactly. Does anyone remember a lot of opposition to Slobo when he was authorizing murder, genocide and rape camps in Bosnia? No, neither do I.
The Serb people supported the slaughter in Bosnia. They were gung-ho for slaughtering Bosnians. I’d say we should keep our eyes open.
The other thing to keep in mind is that Kostunica, while more of a democrat than Milosevic*, is every bit as nationalistic. The problems with Kosovo and Montenegro will remain. He is also more interested in his country’s relations with Russia than with the West, which is probably not going to sit particularly well with the NATO countries, who he’s still pretty pissed off at. Very cautious optimism rather than euphoria would seem to be the order here.
*Of course, it’s easy to be a democrat when you’re the one winning elections. See what happens when the Yugoslav people want rid of him.
You’ll see that I congratulated goboy as being the first to bring up these sort of nagging questions.
Sad to say, but I have to wonder if there will ever be any peace there until after they’ve all slit each other’s throats.
New oxymoron = Religious Tolerance
New redundancy = Religious Intolerance
While I certainly admire the Serbs for getting rid of Milosevich, let’s not get over-enthusiastic. The parliament is still dominated by M’s party, for one thing.
Kostunica isn’t - as has been pointed out - the non-nationalistic peacemaker one might have wished for. A Danish journalist said: “Seeing banners with the slogan SSSS (“Unity strenghtens the Serbs”) in the demonstrations against Milosevich is interesting. I’ve also seen that motto bayonnetted into dead Bosnian Moslems.”
Let’s wait just a bit longer and see. We might want to start lifting some sanctions, but it would be nice to see M in Hague first. The Serbs have a lot of denazification to go through over the next couple of years.
Olentzero: The Serbs had years to get rid of Slobodan before the bombs fell. At least, bombing made it harder for him to make life miserable for anyone but the Serbs, who did - after all - elect and support him.
S. Norman