Wednesday, March 29, 2006

It appears that Del Ponte had little luck in Belgrade:

BBC Story "Serbia urges patience over Mladic"

I have a slight issue with this paragraph from the story:

[from story]
Mr Mladic has been on the run for a decade since he was charged with genocide and other crimes against humanity, mainly in connection with the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 in which nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Serb forces.
[end quote]

Considering that Mladic lived openly in Serbia until 2002, it's hard to call that a decade of living 'on the run.' He does truly seem to be living like a genuine fugitive now, which is an improvement. At least we can hope the man lives in constant fear of discovery; that would be a small victory for justice.

I don't doubt that the government in Serbia is stuck between a rock and a hard place--between the ultra-nationalists and Milosevic loyalists, I'm sure the Kostunica government has very little wiggle room domestically. Well, tough shit--Zoran Djindjic paid a much higher price for showing some integrity. Kostunica has tried to have it both ways for too long; now that the path he chose to negotiate between placating the West while refusing to own up to the recent past has turned out to be a dead end, he has no one to blame but himself. It has been clear for some time that merely removing Milosevic while judiciously avoiding an accounting for Serbian responsibilty for the bloody dismemberment of Yugoslavia was weak medicine for the festering disease of ultra-nationalism, self-pity, and nation-wide delusion that currently permeate Serbian society.

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