For many ordinary Serbs, who were far from the rapacious payola and murderous thuggery that surrounded the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, their president was a strong, doughty leader in whom they took great pride.
It took a long time for their faith in their president to finally disappear. First he led them into economic ruin, appropriating their foreign currency savings to bolster the his failing financial policies. Then he led them into military defeat and humiliation.
They supported Milosevic when he said that he would do everything in his power to stop the break-up of the Yugoslav Federation. However, most of them could never have dreamed just how evil that “everything” would turn out to be.
Milosevic lost his presidential election last year because ordinary Serbs had become fed up with his errors and miscalculations. For the first time, in Vojislav Kostunica, the formerly fragmented opposition had a credible candidate around whom a large percentage of the voters was prepared to rally. They had become used to stories of how Milosevic and his cronies, but particularly his immediate family, had abused their positions to enrich themselves. They had had enough.
But even when the ex-president was in jail on charges of embezzlement, they did not want to see him sent to The Hague to answer charges of genocide before the international war crimes tribunal. They refused to believe that the butchery which Western sources constantly alleged, had really been carried out by their president and his henchmen. Therefore there was a strong groundswell of opinion against extradition.
In the past few months however, Serbian public opinion has changed radically, so that for the first time there is now a majority who think that Milosevic should be extradited to face world justice. What has changed their minds has been the steady flow of revelations about exactly what was done against those who opposed the will of Milosevic.
The atrocities against the Bosnian and Croatian people were tough enough to bear, but now it seems that as many as 740,000 Kosovo Albanians may have been butchered in what was the regime’s last and most revolting act of ethnic-cleansing. Serbian lorry drivers have told of having to drive refrigerated trucks from Kosovo, full of Albanian bodies and dumping them in the river Danube. Conscripts involved in the last months of Serbia’s military presence in Kosovo, have confessed to the awful brutality they witnessed and of how orders from Belgrade unequivocally encouraged the savagery.
The evidence has become too detailed and too widespread for any but the most blind Milosevic stalwarts to deny that genocide took place,
The decision by President Kostunica’s government to adjust Serbian law to allow Milosevic’s extradition is therefore welcome. He probably always knew it had to be done and wanted it himself, but he had to wait for public opinion. The way now stands open for major donors, particularly the United States to underwrite the economic rebuilding of shattered Serbia. But this is certainly not the end of the story. In months to come, from The Hague courtroom, Serbs are going to hear stories which will revolt and shame them even more.
