Our bad conscience ” “

Forty charges for war crimes, twenty-one for crimes against humanity, two for genocide. Crimes committed between 1991 and 1999 in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. The accusations levelled against Slobodan Milosovic by Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the UN tribunal in The Hague, on 12 February, should come as no surprise. Who indeed, with a minimum of knowledge of those events – “revealing an almost medieval savagery and a calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare”, as Del Ponte pointed out in her opening statement – can claim not to have known that the mastermind of the massacres that stained the Balkans with blood in the last decade of the twentieth century was the strong man of Belgrade himself? Arraigned before the international tribunal is therefore not only Milosovic but the bad conscience of Europe and the USA, whose chanceries knew very well the mad designs of “Slobo”, but for so long went along with him in the hope that he could become the new Tito, capable of keeping the Yugoslav federation united, if not with good then at least with bad manners. How can we forget that as late as 1995, once the tragedies of Croatia and Bosnia had already taken place, Milosovic was still considered a factor of peace and stability and hence pandered to by Western governments. The Serbs turned their backs on him in the elections of 24 September 1999, not because he had brought them a harvest of deprivation and war, but because, after he had promised them the “Greater Serbia”, he had lost Kraina in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; in practice Montenegro too, by now completely independent, so much so that the official currency of the tiny republic is the Euro. The “generals” are still in service. And if Milosevic proclaims himself unjustly persecuted only for having worked for the good of his people – and in his defence will call to the witness stand Clinton, Blair, Chirac and other powerful men of the West past and present – this, after all, is still the conviction of the majority of the Serbs. They arrested him, in fact, for corruption, for misappropriation of funds, for abuse of power, not to be sure for aggression again neighbouring countries. He was handed over to the international tribunal on the orders of the Serb premier, Zoran Djindjic, disowned by Yugoslav President, Vojislav Kostunica, who is currently doing his utmost to prevent the departure to The Hague of key witnesses against Slobo. Besides, the right-hand man of Milosevic, Milan Milutinovic, is still President of Serbia and the generals that carried out the massacres are still in service or are enjoying their golden pensions sauntering through the streets of Belgrade. There are those who even claim to have seen in the capital the notorious Ratko Mladic, perpetrator of the most atrocious massacres in Bosnia. And even the great ideologue of ethnic cleansing, Radovan Karadzic, Slobo’s sidekick among the Bosnian Serbs, has never been arrested. Peace is still a long way off. In Kosovo the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs against the Albanians has now been replaced by that of the Albanians against the Serbs – forced in live in enclaves protected by NATO troops. Reconstruction has failed to take off, the economy is ruined, democracy little more than an abstract concept. As a consequence, criminal activities prosper, and the province has become the paradise of blackmarketeers and traffickers in drugs, weapons, prostitution. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the Dayton accords that de facto rubberstamped the results of the war, dismembering the country into various ethnic entities ready to renew battle as soon as the international troops have packed up their kitbags and gone home, the prospect of peace and co-existence still seems very far away. In Serbia the domestic political tensions and the economic difficulties do not give grounds for much hope. In Macedonia too the situation is far from being tranquil. The spectacular trial going ahead in The Hague thus risks being nothing but a figleaf to cover the failure of international politics in the Balkans.