Word: serbians
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Once again, June 28--the feast of St. Vitus in the Christian Orthodox calendar--had written itself into the history of the Balkans. On St. Vitus day in 1389, Serbs were defeated by the Turks at the battle of Kosovo Polje, the event that launched Serbian claims to eternal victimhood. On the same day in 1914, Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo, plunging Europe into World War I. And on the same day in 1989, Milosevic--speaking at Kosovo Polje--launched his career as the defender of Serbian nationalism. Twelve years later, he finds himself imprisoned...
...midweek, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic gave U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell the assurances the American was seeking. Djindjic kept his word, despite a decision by a court, packed with Milosevic supporters, to overturn the order that would send him into exile. Vojislav Kostunica, Milosevic's successor as President of Yugoslavia, considered the handover "both illegal and unconstitutional," and the Prime Minister of the Yugoslav Federation, a comparatively powerless figure, resigned. But a majority of the ruling coalition supported sending Milosevic to the Hague, and Kostunica backed away from a threat to break up the government. Milosevic will face...
...Federal appeals court - whose judges had been Milosevic appointees, and had voted to annul last year's election result precipitating the insurrection that drove him from office - to challenge the validity of last weekend's government decree facilitating the strongman's extradition. But when the Federal court said no, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic - Kostunica's arch-rival and an enthusiastic advocate of a Hague trial for Milosevic - convened an emergency cabinet meeting. Less than five hours later, the man who had presided over a series of bloody tribal wars and his country's demise into an impoverished kleptocracy...
...accusers, the number of Serbs opposed to that outcome was surprisingly small. Their decision to extradite may have been driven by an overriding concern with their country's desperate financial plight, but Belgrade's post-Milosevic leadership has done a remarkable job over the past year in swaying Serbian public opinion solidly behind his extradition. In the end, even Kostunica proclaimed sending Milosevic for trial a lesser evil if the price was the withholding of Western...
...wanted list, doesn't quite close the brutal chapter of Balkan history that might be termed the Milosevic era. While Serbs have become increasingly comfortable with blaming Milosevic and his henchmen for many of the crimes against humanity that occurred in the Balkan wars of the past decade, Serbian society has only just begun to pose the more uncomfortable questions about collective culpability. But the trial will be a challenge to the international community, too. It was relatively uncontroversial, in the end, to bring economic pressure to bear to deliver the universally reviled Milosevic to trial after he'd been...