Radio station says Milosevic dead

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by VetLegion
That would be Karadjic and Mladic.

I thought so. I think the number of such war criminals remaining alive hasn't been so low since at least before ww2. These two may have been real bastards but I'd have to say the scale of the offenses of the remaining war criminals alive today is diminished in comparison to the crimes of years past.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara


So . . . you mean Bush.

[Harry Tuttle]

Maybe they pulled a Napolean and poisoned him the past ten years.

God damn! Ten years. Some ****ing justice.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Originally posted by Odin
If there is a Hell I hope Slobo's burning in it.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by germanos


Ehrmmm...where to start?
Second: I (and many with me) have found it odd that the Muslim adjective was used for one party in the conflict but yet the other two main groups did not get called 'Orthodox' or 'Catholics' or whatever creed they adherred to.
Not to mentioned that many 'mixed' peopled suffered.

So unless you mean to say that your quote came from a Bosnian mullah and that all other non-croat victims in Bosnia actually are unconditionally happy with his death, I find your comment rather out of place.

The appellation "Bosnian Muslim" came from Reuters, not me.

[Chemical Ollie]

[Sava]

Originally posted by Odin


Of course he didn't start the conflict, that was done by Bosnian and Croatian nationalists. Milosevic did originally have the moral high ground, but instead of trying to be a peacemaker he excacerbated the conflict by wipping up Serbian nationalists into an even worse nationalistic mania then even the Croats and Bosnians were in. I am not saying the other side was innocent, because they weren't, but Milosevic was responsible for causing the violence to spiral out of control.

I don't see how you can place all of the blame on him.

It's not like that attacks against Serbs suddenly stopped when the Serbs started to respond.

As with any war, Milosevic wanted to win.

You can call him a war criminal all you want. How is what he did any worse than the Allied bombings of Dresden? Or the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

War sucks dude.

Milosevic has become the poster boy for the whole conflict... everything bad that happened... well... "it's his fault"... and it's wrong to say that, IMO. You are doing an injustice to history and to all the victims on both sides by simplifying it like that.

It's not as simple as that. I really wish it were.

[Dr Strangelove]

Actually IIRC Slobo's early political speeches were heavily salted with inflammatory rhetoric. I'm talking about a time before the secession of Slovenia and Croatia. He promised the Serbian people a Yugoslavia in which they would be the dominant people and in which there would be no more pandering to other ethnic groups. It's no wonder that all of the other ethnic groups opted to leave. A parallel situation would be if Bush had promise Southerners hegemony in the USA, or Blair had promised to stop the mollycoddling of Welsh and Scots, or the German chancellor had promised to return the Prussians to their old place of dominance in the German Reichstag. Maybe he just said those things in order to snatch up the Serbian vote, but them people said that about Hitler too. I don't think of Slobo as being a smart tactician. He lit the powderkeg............with a blowtorch. How tactful was that?

[Ljube]

Originally posted by alva

He was presumed innocent and since his trial is now over, he died innocent.

He can still be convicted, can't he?

Not any more. A person has to be alive to be convicted.

I had conversations with people who know Carla del Ponte, Chief prosecutor in the Hague tribunal for war crimes in former Yugoslavia. They were of the opinion, as well as I am, that Milosevic's trial was prolonged needlessly. It was her fault entirely, as it took her about 300 working days to present her case. The reason for this was her stubborn determination to try Milosevic for everything, things she could prove and things she could never prove. That gave Milosevic plenty of time for his defence and the trial dragged out for more than four years.

Instead, she could have focused on crimes she could prove and then the trial would have long been over.

A disastrous decision to deny him badly needed medical treatment in Moscow just sealed the trial which had in its last months turned into a stage performance.

[Ljube]

Originally posted by VetLegion

In my opinion he is guilty of enticing and aiding Serb rebellion in Croatia.

His influence over local Serb leaders in Croatia and Bosnia wasn't total, but was very strong. I firmly believe that if Slobo didn't want wars, they wouldn't have happened.

Yes. Instead of encouraging Serbs in Croatia to rebel, he would have done a far better job if he had come to some kind of agreement with Tudjman which could have been mutually beneficial. That's something a responsible statesman would do.

But I don't know of a single instance where he made a right decision throughout his political career.

[Ljube]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Well, Hitler wasn't convicted either and nobody cares. The evidence is out there, if you want to make a judgement it's fairly easy.

Hitler left a full confession, his political testament, in which he asserted that Holocaust was his idea and that he alone had initiated and/or ordered all crimes against humanity perpetrated by the German police and military forces in the WWII.

Milosevic never confessed to anything. To the last he denied his involvement in any crime.

[Destroyer]

Neither side is completely innocent.

But more often that not, its the completely innocent who are the first to die, via terrorist bomb, or retalitory ethnic cleansing.

The way things are going, The problem in the Balkans is just the beginning. Where ever there is trouble on this planet, its a safe bet that Islamic militants are behind it. There are few countries that are untouched by this kind of terrorism.

No one knows why they really fight or hate the other side. They are just different, and a threat to the others way of life.

10 years from now, who knows what attrocities will have been committed in the west, and what the responses will be. What happened in Bosnia is just a small part of an endless war between Islamic Militants and the rest of the world. All that happens is the guns get bigger, and more moderate people get pissed off and add to the problems.

How long until another European country votes in another Milosevic to deal with these problems?

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by Ljube



Yes. Instead of encouraging Serbs in Croatia to rebel, he would have done a far better job if he had come to some kind of agreement with Tudjman which could have been mutually beneficial. That's something a responsible statesman would do.

Well, not all was lost immediately. It took a long time for Croatia to build an army, almost five years. During that time there have been various peace talks and proposals. If Milosevic had pressured local Serbs to sign some of them, they might have gotten a lot of concessions, a really strong autonomy and so on.

They insisted on full independance though, and that meant that either Serbia would have to enter the fight when Croats mount a retaking operation, or they would lose out. That's where the lack of strategic vision is most striking. Milosevic (we now know) had no intention of engaging Serbia fully, but still he let Croatian Serbs under impression that he's there for them. One can freely say that he sold them off. But for what? I will never understand.

[BlackCat]

Originally posted by VetLegion
It is very puzzling how such an intelligent man (which he obviously was) managed to make so many strategic mistakes. He was a charmer, a manipulator and a good tactician, but he had no vision whatsoever.

One of our former foreign ministers, Uffe Ellemann Jensen, had this comment upon hs death :

"At a personal meeting with him he said things that he knew I knew wasn't true".

Despite his intelligence one could suspect that he lived in a world disconnected from reality.

[VetLegion]

Originally posted by Ljube
Milosevic never confessed to anything. To the last he denied his involvement in any crime.

I know. I see him more as a pragmatic politician willing to do anything to stay in power than an ideologue. Frankly, I don't know much about the man and his actions, let alone his thoughts or motives. That's why I was really hoping for memoirs.