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Jewish World ReviewApril 6, 2001 / 13 Nissan, 5761
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Slobo's rightful place:
In the dock
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
YUGOSLAV President Vojislav Kostunica deserves a round
of applause for his arrest of deposed dictator Slobodan
Milosevic for corruption.
Correction: He deserves half a round. The other half
should come only when Belgrade's new leader announces he
is extraditing Milosevic to The Hague in the Netherlands
to face the International War Crimes Tribunal.
So far, Kostunica has just said no. The Hague, he
argues, is a political tribunal that's biased against
Serbia, the major power in what's left of Yugoslavia.
Besides, if anyone's going to try Milosevic for war
crimes, says the man who unseated him in September, it
will be his fellow Serbs.
Kostunica's argument is faulty. It may not be
politically correct in Serbia for Milosevic to be
extradited by fellow Serbs, but Yugoslavia is a member
of the United Nations and as such is obliged to turn
over anyone on its territory whom The Hague has indicted
for war crimes. It's also part of the price Yugoslavia
must pay to return to the fold of civilized nations.
But the strongest argument in favor of extraditing
Milosevic is that history demands it. This is the man
who plunged Yugoslavia into chaos, who sanctioned the
worst hatred and slaughter in Europe since the Nazis,
who was ultimately responsible for tens of thousands
murdered, tortured, starved, systematically raped and
otherwise deprived of humanity.
This is the despot whose brutal record includes
political assassination, total disregard of the
international community and untold millions worth of
property stolen or torched homes and histories
destroyed. All in the name of ethnic cleansing.
Croats and Bosnians and, more recently, Kosovo Albanians
engaged in the same heinous crimes against neighbors of
differing ethnic persuasions. Yet in the end, it was the
haughty Milosevic who called the evil tune that set
Yugoslavia back by decades.
There was a time when unseated dictators had two
futures: Either they were dragged through the streets by
their heels, or they passed into oblivion, sipping cool
drinks in Florida or playing roulette in Monte Carlo.
The first still happens. The second is increasingly less
likely. Even the Swiss are ready to cooperate in
freezing ill-gotten gains.
The world now demands justice hence the court in The
Hague. But this final reckoning extends beyond deposed
dictators or ordinary limits of time. Witness how 60
years after the horrors of World War II, Holocaust
survivors and non-Jewish slave laborers are finally
being granted compensation. Or how banks and governments
that covered up what they owed victims have been forced
to admit their crimes.
Each day seems to bring some new insight into evil that
will, perhaps, help us to avoid repeating
it. "Neighbors," a stunning new book by Jan Gross,
reveals how in 1941 half the population of the Polish
village of Jedwabne brutally murdered the other half
all Jews, a horrid secret that few had ever spoken of.
History demands justice. For that reason alone, Belgrade
should ship Milosevic and his blood-drenched baggage to
The
By Richard Z. Chesnoff
JWR contributor and veteran journalist
Richard Z. Chesnoff is a senior correspondent at US News
And World Report and a columnist at the NY Daily News. His latest book, recently updated, is Pack of Thieves: How Hitler & Europe
Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History.
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