His Willing Executioners

Newsweek, April, 2001 by Michael Meyer

Sarajevo. Srebrenica. Vukovar. Kosovo. It is impossible to calculate the toll exacted by Slobodan Milosevic. A quarter of a million dead. More than 3 million refugees. Countless homes and villages burned, lives and families broken, a nation destroyed. Wars so murderous, so unbridled, so extraordinarily vicious as to draw in Greece, Spain, Germany, the United States. Even now there is no end in sight. Milosevic will be tried for corruption. He will be judged for crimes against humanity.

What can you say about such a man, beyond these raw facts? Milosevic is one of those rare abstractions, whose objective biography means almost nothing. He is our postmodern Eichmann, today's banality of evil. It means little to note that he was born in 1941, in the gritty Serbian industrial town of Pozarevac, or to chart his rise through the Communist Party. Like Hitler, his reality is as a force, a catalyst ...