Few around the world will mourn the death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, but his passing before a verdict could be reached in his war crimes trial regrettably closes the door to final justice in his case.
Milosevic is blamed for the deaths of more than 200,000 of his countrymen during four ethnic wars in the 1990s that sundered the former Yugoslavia and made the term “ethnic cleansing” a grim part of everyday language.
The country split up into five separate republics: Serbia-Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, Croatia and Bosnia.
Milosevic’s death, apparently from a heart attack in his jail cell Saturday, leaves an unhealed wound for the families of victims of a genocidal policy to force non-Serbs out of multi-ethnic areas such as Bosnia and Kosovo. With Milosevic gone and other former Serbian war leaders still at large, there is no closure for such acts such as the July 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebernica.
That’s not to say that other ethnic groups’ hands were clean as they jockeyed for control of territory in the former Yugoslavia. (Among those thus far convicted of such crimes was Drago Josipovic, a Croat officer involved in forcing Muslims to leave Croatian areas of Bosnia.) But Serbian forces were unmatched in the scope and brutality of their actions.
In addition to war crimes, Milosevic and his close relatives and henchmen systematically plundered the public coffers with no regard for the masses who suffered in an economy left in shambles.
War-weary Serbs had tired of Milosevic’s ruinous, oppressive administration and likely would have voted him out sooner than September 2000 had it not been for the NATO bombing campaign in the spring of 1999. The defeated Milosevic stubbornly refused to leave office until Oct. 5, 2000, and then only after dissidents stormed parliament. Milosevic has been on trial before an international court in The Hague since 2002.
There are worrisome signs that Milosevic may continue to cause trouble from beyond the grave. His cause of death is disputed, with Dutch doctors saying he took an unprescribed drug that interfered with heart medications, but some Serbian newspaper headlines claimed murder.
And, televised images of grieving Serbs filing into church, crossing themselves and kissing Milosevic’s photo demonstrate he still has admirers.
The Balkans, lamentably, have a long history of resentment and revenge. That vicious cycle must be broken.
