He may or may not of had blood directly on his hands. But indirectly he definitely did. His ultra-nationalistic rhetoric and policies were to a significant extent responsible for the disintegration of Yugoslavia and polarization that occurred. And he definitely directly encouraged the irredentist aspirations of those who DO have blood on there hands. How much blood is almost immaterial - it was too much.
Don’t get me wrong - folks like Franjo Tudjman gets a nice chunk of blame as well. Milosivic didn’t cause this chaos single-handedly. But Milosevic was a populist demogogue of the worst sort.
In Bosnia, a few tens of thousands. In Kosovo, less than 10 thousand.
There were many civilians killed in Bosnia, though Milosevic didn’t have anything to do with that. There were very few Albanian civilians killed in Kosovo. There was ethnic cleansing going on in Kosovo, and still is; the Albanians aren’t the victims of it, though.
Rather, the president of Yugoslavia has little influence on the actions of individual soldiers running amok.
Oh, that’s different! Only a few tens of thousands of murders. Hardly important at all. We can overlook that.
Even if this was the case, what steps did Milosevic take to apprehend and punish these supposed “individual soldiers running amok”? Surely that was his responsibility.
tens of thousands of victims? “indivdiual soldiers running amok”? damn, their either fucking efficient as hell or (more likely), it was systemic to the military, which puts it square on the shoulders of the leaders.
Yep. It went on, on a small scale, in the Bosnian conflict. Milosevic didn’t have anything to do with that. It also went on, on a large scale, in Kosovo for the past 15 years or so. Milosevic didn’t have anything to do with that, either, and in any case it was non-Albanians who were being ethnically cleansed, and Albanians doing the cleansing.
So how many civilians has the US killed in our current jaunt in Iraq?
7,000 Muslim men and boys murdered in Srebrenica, and another 25,000 women, elderly, and children forcibly taken. That’s in one city and done in 10 days.
Summary execution of soldiers who are prisoners of war is also an atrocity. Srebenica was hardly an aberration, but merely the most egregious example of business as usual during the conflict.
Or that maybe some of us don’t buy his excuses about not knowing about it, in the same way we don’t buy Bush’s excuses about not knowing about Abu Graib, etc.
I wonder which leader of which former Yugoslaivian republic supported and armed the non-military irregular gangs of thugs in Krajiba ?
It is striking that when Serbia was forced to withdraw its support for the Krajina Serbs who were busily ethnicaly cleansing that area, that that Serb militia group was so very quickly overrun.
Milosevic was the one who provided that support, and was the one forced to withdraw it.
Milosevic was the one who autorised and supported the racist regime in Kosovo that denied ethnic Albanians any posts in public employment such as local councils, schools and even hospitals, basically if you were not a Serbian Kosovan, then you were treated in very much the same way as a Deep South black person was back in the pre civil rights days.
This was not an accident, it was a deliberate policy to ensure that the Kosovan Serbs controlled all state functions and resources, and it amounted to apartheid.
Tentative theory: Slobo was dictator of orthodox Serbia. yBeayf is an orthodox christian. Many orthodox churches here in the US (and in Serbia of course) heavily pushed the line that the Serbian atrocities were catholic propaganda against the heroic orthodox Serbs. yBeayf apparently believed those lies.
First of all, there’s no such thing as a “Kosovan”, just people who live in Kosovo. Kosovo is the Jerusalem of the Serbian people – it’s where they began as a nation. It’s not some independent land.
For decades, Albanians have been illegally pouring in, to try to gain Kosovo as part of a greater Albania. In the 90s, they began a campaign of terrorism and assassination to try to drive the Serbs out. When the Serbs quite sensibly tried to crack down on this, the Albanians appealed to the West, who then proceeded to intervene on the wrong side of the conflict. Since then, Albanians have basically had a free hand in driving out the remnants of the non-Albanian population.
No. The only references to the Serbian conflict I have ever heard in Orthodox churches have been to pray for its end, and to pray for the protection of people and holy places. My views on this matter are my own.
