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Milosevic Sees Swinging Fortunes with the West
THE HAGUE, June 30 (News Agencies) - The last time indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic was in The Hague, he rang the death knell of the former Yugoslavia, refusing as Serbian president to agree to a last-ditch plan to keep the union together in 1991.
But as Yugoslavia's deadly disintegration unfolded, Milosevic soon moved from spoiler to peacemaker.
The West -- which shunned intervention but clamored for a negotiated end to Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II -- rehabilitated the Belgrade hardliner, seeing him as a stabilizing force in the Balkans.
Milosevic negotiated the Dayton peace accords on behalf of recalcitrant Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, ending the war in Bosnia in 1995, earning him warm praise and a partial lifting of sanctions against his rump Yugoslavia.
The pendulum swung back after Milosevic unleashed his military, police and paramilitary forces against ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999, forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and killing untold numbers of military-aged men and boys.
When Serb troops killed 45 ethnic Albanians in the village of Racak on January 15, gruesome media images tipped the balance of indecision, and NATO unleashed a 78-day bombing campaign that finally forced Milosevic to pull out his troops in June.
Now the man who dreamed of a greater Serbia has become the U.N. war crimes tribunal's highest-ranking prisoner, facing the rest of his life behind bars if convicted of crimes against humanity -- including the Racak massacre.
The war crimes tribunal is preparing further indictments against Milosevic for his role in the Bosnian and Croatian wars, helped by his own admission that he bankrolled Serb fighters in conflicts that cost 200,000 lives.
U.S. Senator Joseph Biden, hailing Milosevic's extradition Thursday as "one of the most significant events in post-war European history," called him "one of the most dangerous and maniacal European leaders since Hitler."
Milosevic's transition to international pariah accelerated rapidly after his indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in September 1999.
Vojislav Kostunica, his successor following last year's elections -- and the mass uprising that forced him to acknowledge his defeat -- moved fast to re-establish the links with key Western countries that were broken off during the Kosovo war.
The indicted Milosevic became a bargaining chip between Belgrade and the West over desperately needed aid, whose resumption was conditioned on his extradition to The Hague.
The transfer on the eve of a donor conference in Brussels generated more than a billion dollars in international pledges to build Yugoslavia's shattered economy.
Forensic experts searched for evidence in the international war crimes tribunal's identification center, in a morgue in the Bosnian town of Visoko on June 29. The forensic team found more than 60 bodies believed to be Bosnian Moslems killed by Serb forces in 1992 and thrown into the Piljak pit in the Serb controlled part of war-torn Balkan country. Slobodan Milosevic was still behind bars in The Hague on Saturday, facing charges of crimes against humanity.
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