 |
Milosevic was doomed by press freedom
Author: Noel Malcolm
Uploaded: Tuesday, 09 October, 2001
In an article in The Sunday Telegraph, Noel Malcolm argues that a key factor in Milosevic's fall was the fact that the truth of his wars, and especially what had really happened in Kosova, was beginning to emerge
‘THE truth shall make you free' is a fine principle, but it does not always apply literally. In the case of Slobodan Milosevic, precisely the opposite effect is to be expected. His transfer to The Hague is the end-product of many factors, including external pressure and internal political rivalry. But one key factor should not be overlooked: the gradual dawning on the Serbian population of the truth
about what happened in Kosovo.
Without these glimmerings of public awareness, the political risks of extraditing Milosevic might have been judged too great. Foot-draggers such as the Yugoslav President, Vojislav Kostunica, could have argued that the extradition would bring rioters on to the streets of every town in Serbia, and few would have had the confidence to contradict him. But a string of extraordinary revelations in the Serbian media has changed the public mood. Only a few thousand die-hards demonstrated in Belgrade in support of Milosevic on the night of his departure; most of the rest of the population, it seems, already know in their hearts that their former leader has a real case to answer.
The process began in January of this year, when a group of former Serbian soldiers described to a news agency reporter how the bodies of murdered Albanians had been dug up from their mass-graves during the Kosovo conflict and taken to a mining complex to be ground up and burnt.
"This was a horrible scene," one of them said, "like a factory assembly line, but with bodies."
Then, in March, there was the interview given to Radio Free Europe by Ratomir Tanic, a Serbian politician closely involved in the Kosovo issue during the Nineties. Asked if Milosevic had a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo even before the Nato bombing, he answered with a definite "Yes". The plan, he said, had been to reduce the Albanians to less than half of the population, which meant getting rid of roughly 800,000 of them.
These revelations were made in the first place to the Western media. Their impact within Serbia was therefore very limited; for an entire decade, ordinary Serbs had been taught to believe that any story published in the West that failed to redound to Serbia's credit was lying propaganda. What really changed the mood was the discovery, reported in the first instance by Serbian journalists, of large numbers of corpses from Kosovo within Serbia itself.
Two months ago the story began to circulate of a freezer lorry, packed with bodies, which had been dumped in the Danube in eastern Serbia in 1999 (according to one witness, days before the start of the Nato bombing). Serbian radio journalists interviewed the diver who had helped recover the
lorry, and other reporters located the mass grave to which the corpses had then been transferred. New details have been added almost every day in the Serbian press.
Then came the most devastating discovery of all: a grave containing many hundreds of bodies in a police training compound, only a short distance from Belgrade. On June 13 Serbian television broadcast footage of the exhumation: the image of this sticky mass of cadavers, brought into every living-room in the land, did more to change opinion about Milosevic than any other event since the end of the Kosovo war.
There is a considerable irony here. Had those bodies remained in far-off Kosovo, the psychological impact of their exhumation would have been much smaller. It was the presence of dead bodies under the floorboards, so to speak, of their own house that made ordinary Serbs so uneasy.
Why had Milosevic gone to the trouble of organising this strange corpse-importing operation? Partly because he wanted to claim that the absence of bodies in Kosovo proved that no massacres had taken place (a crude ploy, but one gleefully accepted by some Western journalists nevertheless). But mainly because he feared the activities of the International Tribunal and its forensic experts. The irony is that his very attempt to evade their investigations has helped create the conditions that made it possible to surrender him to them.
This is, however, only the first stage of a longer process. Serbian journalists may have started to crack open the Kosovo story, but the story of Bosnia (and Croatia) remains largely closed. As recently as May this year, a Serbian opinion poll found that nearly half the population regarded the Bosnian Serb extremist leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic as "heroes".
Confronting the truth about Bosnia will be harder, not least because so much of today's political leadership will have to inspect its own past too: both Mr Kostunica and his rival, Zoran Djindjic, were enthusiastic supporters of Karadzic throughout the Bosnian war. But the process has started, and Serbian reporters are now pushing at doors which, once opened, can never be closed. One day, ordinary Serbs will be made free - free of their country's recent past, when they have learned to face the truth about it.
The Sunday Telegraph (London), 1 July 2001
|
