Milosevic, Butcher or Victim

I’ve reached the end of “Milosevic.” It seems that Slobodan Milosevic’s life was at least in part controlled by his wife, Mira. However, considering that his religious father left his family when he is still young and his mother was protective and dogmatic and also both of them committed suicide, it may be little wonder that, for him, Mira, another dogmatic woman, was the only person he could completely trust.

And was he “the butcher of the Balkans”? He displayed strong hatred toward the Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic. Was it Milosevic’s tactical maneuvering just to stay in power? I do not know. But more prominent to me is the hypocrisy of some of the leaders of the West.

After Milosevic signed the Dayton agreement 0f 1995, which ended the Bosnian war, Douglas Hurd, a former British foreign secretary, approached him for a deal to privatize Serbian state companies, along with Pauline Neville-Jones, who had acted as the head of the British delegation at Dayton. And Bill Clinton’s phone call to chitchat with him?

At the time of the publishing of this paperback edition (2003), Slobodan Milosevic was still in the dock at The Hague. He would die there in March 2006. The Yugoslav leadership had produced a statement, signed by Federal President, Vojislav Kostunica, Serbian President, Milan Milutinovic and Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, that said, “The criminal proceedings before the Belgrade Distric Court against Slobodan Milosevic, former President of the Republic of Serbia, FRY, and President of the Socialist Party of Serbia, were not undertaken in response to the demand of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia…” And another brief document made it clear that “Slobodan Milosevic will not be handed over to any judicial or other institution outside the country.” See what happened to him…