Word: serbians
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Once Slobodan Milosevic surrendered April 1 after a shootout with Serbian police, there was little doubt that he would eventually be held responsible for his actions during the long years of war in the former Yugoslavia. The only question was where he should stand trial. The Serbian government under President Vojislav Kostunica has resisted extraditing the former dictator to the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, insisting that he be tried in Serbia for alleged crimes including corruption and abuse of power. Yet the Milosevic government’s atrocities against Muslims in Bosnia and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo...
...must be very selective in the pressure that it applies. Trade sanctions, often the favorite tool of the U.S. for influencing other governments, would have their most immediate effect on the Serbian people rather than their government and would be too far blunt a tool. Instead, as it did to obtain Milosevic’s arrest, the United States should link its direct financial aid to the Serbian government to Milosevic’s speedy extradition. The U.S. could legitimately cut its aid if the Serbian government were to deny Milosevic to the Hague, and placing a specific and tangible...
...Serbian government may not be very receptive to American ultimatums, nor does it want to be seen as easily susceptible to demands made by the West. While the United States is urging the Serbian government to hand over Milosevic, the international community, especially Russia, Greece and other states more friendly to Serbia, should also use diplomatic and financial pressure to encourage Milosevic’s extradition. Pressure from the international community as a whole would be better received by the Serbian government and people than unilateral U.S. action—and given that Milosevic’s trial...
...played out in the Balkans. All day on Saturday, Milosevic and his minions remained squirreled away as the government formulated a plan and as TV cameras watched from a distance. In that vacuum, events spilled easily into farce. Loyalists, mostly elderly socialists for whom Milosevic represents patriotic Serbian ideals, built themselves a bonfire to ward off the chill, scrawling the names of their imagined enemies--Solana (Javier, the NATO Secretary-General), Klark (Wesley Clark, the retired U.S. general) and Monika (Lewinsky, presumably)--on logs before hurling them into the blaze. The supporters "love him with their heart and soul...
...because that would force them to begin to recognize that it was not Milosevic who raped and murdered his way through the last decade of the 2nd millennium. It was not Milosevic who liquidated whole towns of men and teenage boys. That work was done by unknown numbers of Serbian soldiers and paramilitaries who still walk free. No matter how much time Milosevic serves on whatever charges, he cannot even begin to make up for their bloody and inhuman cruelty...