Serbian Ogres Could Have Been Stopped At The Outset

How did Yugoslavia descend into the savagery that killed 200,000 people and made 2 million refugees? It is a question of signal importance, not just for history but as a key to seeing that it does not happen again, there or elsewhere.

We now have a documented answer, powerfully convincing in its evidence. It is a five-hour television series, “Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation,” shown on the BBC and then here, between Christmas and New Year’s, on the Discovery Channel.

Western politicians and commentators who wanted to close their eyes to the horror in the former Yugoslavia have often said that it was caused by “ancient hatreds.” Americans, they said - or Britons or whoever - should not get involved in such impenetrable ethnic-religious conflicts.

But it was not “ancient hatreds” that produced ethnic cleansing, rape and concentration camps.

It was men: ambitious men who stirred up extreme nationalist emotions as a way to power. It was one man above all, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. “Death of a Nation” makes that unarguably clear.

We see Milosevic at the beginning of his manipulations: addressing a Serbian crowd in the predominantly Albanian province of Kosovo in April 1987. The crowd provokes a police detachment, mostly Albanian. A man shouts, “The police attacked us.” Milosevic says, “You will not be beaten again.” It was all arranged - and Belgrade television showed the scene with Milosevic as a Serbian hero.

That and many other scenes are amazing examples of contemporaneous footage found by the independent British producers who made the series, Brian Lapping Associates. There is even film taken secretly by Serbian intelligence. And there are gripping interviews.

Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who has been indicted for war crimes, says that when Bosnia declared its independence in April 1992, Milosevic “couldn’t care less if Bosnia was recognized. He said: ‘Caligula proclaimed his horse a senator, but the horse never took his seat. Bosnia will get recognition, but …”’

When Milosevic decided to attack Croatia in the summer of 1991, he used volunteers under the extremist paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj. The Yugoslav federal army provided weapons, uniforms and transportation. The paramilitaries burned civilians alive and left the bodies as a message.

Again in 1992, when the attack on Bosnia began, Milosevic sought to avoid responsibility. One of his aides says that he “pulled a fast one” - transferred every Serb in the federal army to Bosnian Serb forces while continuing to pay and supply them.

The first major attack was on the town of Zvornik in Bosnia: a terrifying onslaught that left 2,000 Muslim civilians “unaccounted for.” Vojislav Seselj’s paramilitaries were there, and he tells an interviewer: “Milosevic was in absolute control. It was all planned in Belgrade.”

Milosevic is not the only Yugoslav figure shown in the series as a cold-blooded manipulator, but he is special. The president of Slovenia, Milan Kucan, says: “With Milosevic you never can relax. Show him a finger, and he’ll have your arm off.”

One of the most arresting aspects of the series is the evidence of how Western weakness encouraged the genocidal aggression. Milosevic sent a secret envoy to Moscow before attacking Croatia, and the Soviet military said its intelligence showed that the West would not respond. It was good intelligence.

Karadzic, speaking to an interviewer, confirms what critics of U.S. and European policy have maintained - that we could have stopped it. “I knew,” he says, “that if the West put in 10,000 men to cut off our supply corridor, we Serbs would be finished.”

Those who are skeptical of television’s potential as a medium for sustained journalism of a high order should see this series and think again. So should those American politicians who tell us that we should be content with the degraded trash that the free market mostly brings to the screen.

There are more remarkable moments in the series than a column can even suggest. For me, the most chilling is the voice of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general, telling his men on the hills overlooking Sarajevo: “Shell the presidency and the Parliament. Target Muslim neighborhoods - not many Serbs live there. Shell them till they’re on the edge of madness.”

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