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NEWS & LETTERS, March 2003
Our Life and TimesMilosevic trial undermines wall of silenceby Kevin A. Barry The trial of Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic has
been going on for over a year now. Neither the way the judges have allowed
Milosevic to browbeat witnesses, some of them still traumatized by torture, nor
the fact that Western complicity with Milosevic is not part of the proceedings,
can take away from its historic importance. For the man sitting in the dock is responsible for
nothing less than two wars, the Bosnian and Croatian Wars of 1991-95 and the
Kosova War on 1998-2000. These resulted in the deaths of 200,000 people, the
often permanent expulsion from their homes of millions more, and the rape and
torture of thousands. The victims of Milosevic's plan for a "Greater
Serbia" came from the ethnic and religious minorities of the former
Yugoslavia, Bosnian Muslims above all, but also Kosovars and Croats. The trial has offered a few surprises, such as the
testimony of a Serbian private, unable to sleep after carrying out orders to
murder a group of Kosovar Albanians in 1999, including an infant. He volunteered
to testify even though this meant his own self-incrimination. The wall of silence and denial that persists among Serbs
has also been undermined by a few high officials, who provided evidence on
Milosevic's direct responsibility for the crimes in Bosnia and Kosova. In a
separate trial, Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic pleaded guilty, thus
becoming the highest-ranking official to admit publicly that she
"collaborated closely with Slobodan Milosevic in the conception and the
execution of the objective of forced ethnic separation." One survivor, Jadranka Cigelj, the author of ROOM 102,
wrote after visiting the Milosevic trial as a spectator this winter: "I was
one of 37 women held in the disused mine of Omarska where thousands were
murdered outside my home town of Prijedor. I was taken there on June 14, 1992. I
was raped the first day and repeatedly for the next eight weeks. "I can smell the scorched earth. I can hear the
screams of people dying to the accompaniment of the national songs the Serbs
played on the stereo as they tortured them. I can see the nights we would lie in
Room 102 worrying whether we would be taken out of the cell by a Serb guard. We
never talked about the rape. It was an unwritten rule among the women, for to
talk about it would have destroyed our morale." A few months ago, the anarchist writer David Watson
published a careful critique of the way in which much of the Left has ignored,
or worse, attempted to defend Milosevic as a victim of Western imperialism:
"The Milosevic trial, like the entire Western intervention in the Balkans,
is too little and disastrously too late....Today, significant vestiges of
Milosevic's project remain intact. The 1995 Dayton Accords ratified the
destruction of the Bosnian synthesis and the conquest of territory through
ethnic cleansing by recognizing the ethno-exclusive Bosnian Serb 'entity,' a
functioning product of genocide....Despite the terms of the agreement, and in
contrast with the Albanian Kosovars, hardly any Bosnian Muslims have been
allowed to return to their homes." "Leftists in the West who participate in genocide
denial and directly or indirectly champion Milosevic and his cronies by
promoting his claims undermine that necessary process." (See his "Milosevic
'Crucified': Counter-Spin as Useful Idiocy," FIFTH ESTATE, Fall 2002.) Since the murderous September 11 attacks, liberal pundits have wrung their hands over where a tolerant, democratic version of Islam that recognized women's rights could be found. It is truly amazing that Bosnia, a multiethnic democratic society with a Muslim majority that welcomed Christian Croats and Serbs as well as secularists into its leadership, even as Serb fanatics were murdering its people, specifically targeting Muslims, is so rarely mentioned in such discussions. However, doing so would also require dealing with the West's failure to support or protect Bosnia during the years of genocide, 1991-95, and its forcing of the Dayton Accords upon that long-suffering land. |
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