Please, no more crocodile tears for this butcher
Tuesday March 14 2006
IT is hard to squeeze out even the most crocodile of tears for Slobodan Milosevic as he completes the tired character arc of tyrants throughout the ages - from zero to hero to Nero to a reviled grave.
He died well-fed and well-clothed in his sleep, a luxury denied to more than 125,000 European men, women and children who died in the wars he stoked, poked and pioneered.
Hatred
But the doors of justice for the crimes committed in the Balkans in the 1990s should not slam shut with Milosevic's coffin, nor with the handover of those indicted Serb butchers Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.
Today, there are men who helped and facilitated Milosevic's crimes at the heart of the establishment.
They would like us to forget that at the height of the shelling of Sarajevo - a democratic city three hours from Heathrow - the Tories were so complicit in the killing that the Bosnian government considered taking the British government to the International Court of Justice for aiding and abetting genocide.
To understand how this forgotten history came to unfold, you have to return to the early 1990s. Looking out on the fighting that broke out in the Balkans from the dusty offices of Whitehall, the ruling Conservative Party were - in John Major's words - "bewildered". They saw a bunch of foreigners with unpronounceable names killing each other for reasons that seemed to stretch back to 1389 and, rather than enter into the tricky business of sifting the victims from the aggressors and supporting them, they fell back on their core prejudices.
One was a belief that, as Malcolm Rifkind, soon-to-be Foreign Secretary, argued, "The furtherance of British interests ought to be the sole object of British foreign policy." Human rights? What human rights? Show us gas pipelines and corporate interests and then we're talking.
The other belief was a borderline-racist view that the Balkan people were maniacal savages who relished slaughter. Sir Peter Hall, ambassador to Belgrade, told John Major: "Prime Minister, the first thing you have to know about these people is that they like cutting each other's heads off." No point helping them - they're all mad.
In light of these principles, the Tories conveniently concluded that what was happening was a Balkan civil war where - the blue sing-song of the times - "all sides were equally to blame".
But this was not a three-way civil war between Serbs, Muslims and Croats with all sides committing crimes equally. It was a racist war waged by Slobodan Milosevic to establish from the ruins of the former Yugoslavia an ethnically pure Greater Serbia under his control, one that had been 'cleansed' of its Muslim population.
There were real villains and real victims, not the incomprehensible tribal hodge-podge presented by the Tories. As Kofi Annan explained in his post-mortem into the war, the Serbs' "central war aim [was always] to create a geographically contiguous and ethnically pure territory." Yes, when the Bosnian Muslims and Croat separatists responded to this fascistic Serbian agenda they did not always do so scrupulously, to say the least - but it is appalling to say this puts them on a par with the original and major criminals.
Confronted with this racist agenda at the heart of Europe - designed to crush the democratic, multi-ethnic republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina - it would have been terrible enough to stand by and do nothing. But the Tories, led in foreign affairs by Douglas Hurd, did something worse. They insisted on an arms embargo on the entire region to prevent weapons being sold to any side. In practice, this guaranteed that the Serbs' massive military superiority at the start of the war was maintained, and - in Kofi Annan's words - it "effectively prevented the Republic of Bosnia and Herzgovina of its right under the Charter of the United Nations to self-defence."
Milosevic said at his trial that Hurd was in effect giving him "a green light" for the killing, and in a way he was right.
The Serbs could pound away at the Bosnian Muslims - killing thousands - and the Muslims could not fight back. Some even started suggesting that the Bosnian Muslims were shelling themselves to get sympathy.
Whenever the governments of France, Germany and the US mooted an armed intervention - in line with the pleading of humanitarian agencies the Conservative government used its veto. When eventually British objections were overridden and Nato air-power was used in Bosnia in 1995, the killing ended.
