"To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plan minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed … there is nothing sweeter in the world." Those were the words of Joseph Stalin before signing almost 40,000 death warrants. Some might imagine Slobodon Milosevic retiring to equally sweet dreams after a meticulous day of genocide planning.
Not so, according to the man himself. Several days ago he conceded an interview to a personal friend and colleague of mine, Giuseppe Zaccaria, the first since his electoral defeat in October of last year.
His delusions both of victimization and of grandeur would surely delight any psychiatric scholar. He haughtily denies any responsibility whatsoever in the decade long cataclysm that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and brought Serbia to the edge of civil and economic destruction. He troubles himself with no soul-searching or penitence. He had nothing to do with instigating popular support for the most outrageous slaughter of human life on the European continent since 1945.
It was the Croats, the Slovenes, and the Albanians that wreaked havoc up and down the western Balkan Peninsula. It was they who tore apart the country with their selfish dreams of independence. It was the Germans, "drunk from their victory in the Cold War, their own unification, the destruction of the Soviet Union" who responded to the sentiments of independence of the Croats out of their own greedy desire to put the entire East "under their own economic and political control." It was the rest of Europe that sat indifferently and watched his country break apart until they too became victims of the aggressive will of the United States. It was they who allowed his small Serbia to be offered in propitiation at the altar of the American Empire.
His country had remained outside the Warsaw Pact and was constructing its own system based on a market economy and national equality. It was a model for the future federation of Europe. "The protagonists of the new world order could hardly allow such a precedent: the opposition of a small Balkan country against the new wave of colonialism."
He believes that the world's accusations are aimed at the wrong aggressor. The Serbs were only trying to save the federal republic. They cared more than anyone else about saving Yugoslavia. It is a gross injustice that the West accuses them of its partition.
"Not even if you invest an enormous effort: be it financial, technological, journalistic, diplomatic and psychological" can a "good man be made bad or a courageous one a coward," but it can evidently dethrone one. For the former dictator, the election results were born of "corruption and external pressures," not the will of the Serbian people.
By means of this testimony Milosevic is indicating that, in any eventual trial before the International War Crimes Tribunal, whether it takes place in Belgrade or at the Hague, he is unwilling to take responsibility for any evil acts that were committed under his rule. He gives no importance to the "events" that occurred, but to the noble idea that inspired those events.
According to his vision of justice, he should only be judged for his great intentions shared by the multi-secular will of an entire nation. And not only that. He sees his future trial as a case against communism. And as everyone knows, communism cannot be judged for its acts, its gulags, its economic depravations, but only for its humanitarian ideals to save the downtrodden. He sells himself as the warrior who fought the battle of the oppressed against their persecutors, the poor against the rich, the little Serbia against the new American imperialism.
And what an evil imperialism indeed it is! It destroys the autonomy of the Europeans, distorts public opinion, uses lethal uranium bombs, and seeks to globalize politics effacing sacred state boundaries.
There is truly no limit to his megalomania. He believes his is "the sacrifice of a leader who has become a metaphor of the opposition to American hegemony." And how can one try and condemn a metaphor?
Austrian novelist Elias Canetti once wrote that: "The paranoiac is the
exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the
world. … One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the
two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure."
Milosevic makes the case for both.
February 2001
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