His Willing Executioners.(Slobodan Milosevic)(Brief Article)

Sarajevo. Srebrenica. Vukovar. Kosovo. It is impossible to calculate the toll exacted by Slobodan Milosevic. A quarter of a million dead. More than 3 million refugees. Countless homes and villages burned, lives and families broken, a nation destroyed. Wars so murderous, so unbridled, so extraordinarily vicious as to draw in Greece, Spain, Germany, the United States. Even now there is no end in sight. Milosevic will be tried for corruption. He will be judged for crimes against humanity.

What can you say about such a man, beyond these raw facts? Milosevic is one of those rare abstractions, whose objective biography means almost nothing. He is our postmodern Eichmann, today's banality of evil. It means little to note that he was born in 1941, in the gritty Serbian industrial town of Pozarevac, or to chart his rise through the Communist Party. Like Hitler, his reality is as a force, a catalyst for recondite yearnings within the hearts of his people that he could voice and manipulate.

"No one will beat you again," he famously told Serbs in Kosovo in 1987. The crowds cheered wildly, seeming to spontaneously launch him to power. In fact, it was a farce, totally stage-managed. Milosevic's cohorts organized the rally, hurled rocks to spark a "protest" where Serbs could be "beaten"--and "Slobo" could heroically rise to his moment. Historians would often explain the wars that followed by evoking "ancient ethnic hatreds." As in Kosovo, those conflicts were also largely manufactured. Milosevic recognized that socialism was dead. To seize power, he fomented the new ideology of ethnic nationalism. He was a master of propaganda and used Serbia's captive media to promote himself and his cause of Greater Serbia.

I saw this firsthand in the tiny Croatian town of Pakrac, near the Serbian border, in 1991. Serbian separatists emerged from the Yugoslav Army base and shot up the Croatian police station. The Army, which just happened to be holding maneuvers in the area, rolled in to "keep the peace." Reporters from Belgrade's state TV and radio reported dozens of Serbs killed and thousands forced to flee under headlines reading massacre of the innocents and bloodbath at dawn. In fact, no one was killed, nor were any Serbs attacked. It was a fraud, designed to whip up national feeling. So it was everywhere.

Hence a question. While Milosevic's guilt is manifest, that of Serbs in general is less so. To what extent do they share in his crimes, to what extent were they ignorant? The dictator's arrest will thrust this issue front and center, regardless of the particular charges brought against him. Inconceivable as it may seem to a world steeped in a decade's war, Serbs themselves are curiously isolated. Visiting Belgrade after Milosevic's ouster, I was struck by how little attitudes had changed. Serbs still hold the past at a distance. They played no role, or were victims, or at worst committed crimes no different than those perpetrated by other ...