Butcher Boy - Slobodan Milosevic of

National Review, Feb 22, 1999 by David Pryce-Jones

Communist Yugoslavia collapsed along with its big brother, the Soviet Union, and out of its ruins stepped the chilling figure of Slobodan Milosevic. Literally overnight, he transformed himself from Communist hack into Serbian nationalist, and he has since acquired absolute power in Belgrade and a personal fortune too, in the classic gangster style. He is to the Balkans what Saddam Hussein is to the Middle East.

Violent and unscrupulous men are easily able to exploit Yugoslavia. Never a real country, and even less a real state, it has always been a scattering of different peoples, shaken by events like a kaleidoscope into fresh patterns. Serbs are Orthodox Christians, and on account of their greater numbers overall, they have taken the lead culturally and politically, and believe in their divine right to do so. The adjoining Croats and Slovenes are Catholics, while most Bosnians and Albanians are Muslims. Immemorially, invasion and conquest have settled all their mutual relationships.

In what looks more and more like the good old days, the Ottoman Turks kept the peace with their version, imperfect but workable, of a pluralist society. After the Ottoman empire broke up in the connected wars of the early years of the century, the post-1918 American and European governments agreed through several treaties to amalgamate as many peoples as possible into a new entity to be called Yugoslavia, much as a clumsy potter might try to glue together pieces of a smashed plate.

Hitler redrew these frontiers after 1941 to suit himself. The S.S. dealt with objectors. Imposing himself in his turn, the Communist Marshal Tito redesigned the country on the Soviet model, to give each of the constituent peoples its own republic, on paper independent within a federation, but in practice under strong central control. Once again the secret police dealt with objectors in what became a mini-Gulag.

Ringed by mountains, and landlocked, Kosovo is a spectacular region, and rich-famous since Roman days for its mineral deposits. As a result of the movements of history and demography, Kosovo in this century has come to be inhabited by some 2 million ethnic Albanians, but only 200,000 Serbs. In granting Kosovo the special status of "autonomous republic," Tito made a concession to its ethnic composition. Kosovar Albanians were allowed some minimal rights, at least where their language and schools were concerned. How to reconcile the 90 percent but powerless majority with the ruling 10 percent minority was, and remains, the core of the issue.

Between the wars, prominent Serb intellectuals resented the ethnic imbalance, and they proposed to resolve it by forcing Albanians to emigrate, and wiping out those who refused to leave. Milosevic is their enthusiastic heir. For the sake of a Greater Serbia, he first waged war against the Croats and then the Bosnians. Both these peoples, given the tools, are well able to take care of themselves, but for reasons that nobody has yet been able to clarify, the European powers refused to arm them for self-defense, in effect backing Milosevic. In both cases, American intervention alone brought about a stalemate, by arming the Croats and then bombing the Serbs into submitting to the Dayton Agreement, the foundation for the present surly cease-fire in Bosnia.

Well aware that he was escalating the issue, Milosevic decreed that Kosovo also was integral to Greater Serbia, and the Albanians could no longer be allowed their previous rights. This was a provocation to countries with a common border or common interests: Albania proper, Greece and Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. Ethnic Albanians also form a third of the population of Macedonia, where Milosevic can set off a full-scale Balkan war. Like Saddam Hussein, he believes he can best fulfill his ambitions by precipitating an international crisis.

In the person of Ibrahim Rugova, the Kosovar Albanians found a spokesman of stature. An academic with a training in France, and a beret aslant on his head to show for it, he insisted that civil rights had to be respected but violence avoided. Resorting to military measures to enforce his will, Milosevic exposed Rugova as an idealist, hopelessly out of touch. If the Kosovar Albanians were to gain their rights, they too would have to fight.

The Kosovar Liberation Army is a popular uprising of Albanians. Its leaders are shadowy, its members local volunteers. Possessing rifles but no heavy weapons, they are unable to inflict serious damage on Serbs who have tanks and attack helicopters. Like the Bosnians before them, they could give a good account of themselves if they were properly armed. Like the Bosnians again, though, they have been unable to find an outside power to sponsor them, and so must face their ordeal as best they can. Naturally they now reject autonomy and demand complete independence.

In Kosovo today, in one village after another, as a matter of routine, Serb police and special forces are massacring men, women, and children for no reason except that they are ethnic Albanians. An estimated 300,000 have fled their homes in fear of their lives. Fifty years after Hitler and Stalin, mass murder remains the policy of choice for Milosevic. Fifty years after the founding of the United Nations for the purpose of ensuring that organized atrocities were a thing of the past, the world community stands aside, in moral confusion. Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary general, regularly burbles that the threat of force is "essential" to bringing the two sides together. In a cavalcade of official cars, the American special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, calls on Milosevic in Belgrade, and so does the NATO supreme commander, Gen. Wesley Clark. They and the international politicians of the so-called Contact Group issue statements to the effect that Milosevic must be induced, no, really, obliged, to behave. Nothing happens. Evidently the political will does not exist in America or Europe to put a stop to this savagery.