When prosecutors opened their case against Slobodan Milosevic on February 12, 2002, they told the court that not only would his trial provide the world with a full picture of the Âmedieval savagery that stalked the Balkans throughout the Nineties, but that they would also prove that the former Serbian president was guilty of the gravest crime known to mankind–genocide.
It is always fascinating to watch the eagerness with which so-called progressives unquestioningly accept an official history full of virtuous U.S. officials and villainous savages trying the patience of the peaceful, law-abiding Great Powers. Case in point: the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and Stacy Sullivan’s recent account of them in Foreign Policy In Focus (http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402milosevic.html). The actual sequence of events that caused those wars is very different from the reporting of the establishment media and, unfortunately, much of the progressive media. According to this story, the wars of the past decade were all started by the Serbs, who sought to destroy Yugoslavia and turn it into a mono-ethnic Greater Serbia.
During the cold war the geopolitical map of the Balkans was relatively simple. Bulgaria and Romania were in the Soviet orbit, Albania was isolated and allied only with the People’s Republic of China, while Greece leaned westward, first as part of NATO and later when it joined the European Economic Community. Tito’s Yugoslavia, occupying the greatest section of the Balkan Peninsula, was officially non-aligned.
Key Problems