Milosevic and horrors of ethnic cleansing

The news that former Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, also known as the 'Butcher of the Balkans', has passed away, is bound to bring some cheer to the hearts of those who suffered mutely under his iron-fisted rule in the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early Nineties, but the dictator may have taken many a vital secret on his bloody governance to his grave.

Accordingly the big question the world may have to grapple with is: has Milosevic evaded justice and accountability by going to his grave before the conclusion of his trial? By intervening with its customary devastating suddenness, has death denied the world complete knowledge of Milosevic's misdoings and prevented him from facing a full trial by due process?

Given the stark irreversibility of Milosevic's end, these may seem to be questions of more academic interest at present, but the world is unlikely to get over the feeling that it has been deprived of some valuable lessons of history.

However, Milosevic who was tried before the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, on more than 60 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, outraged the conscience of the world during his years in power, through his brutal handling of identity-based conflicts in the Balkans and it could be said that what we know of his stormy reign is not without its lessons, although in a highly negative sense.

Milosevic's bloody defence of Serbian nationalism and the savagery he unleashed in his ethnic-cleansing exercises, were horrifyingly suggestive of the anti-Jewish pogroms of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. He tried to bolster Serbian selfhood and nationalism at the cost of humanity and this is what the world would need to reflect sadly on in the days ahead, lest the obvious lessons go unlearnt.

Ethnic cleansing is the disturbing correlative of the myth of racial purity. The atrocities committed against the Muslim community during the Bosnian war of the early Nineties by the Milosevic administration, bloodily bore that out. In the course of carrying out the despicable policy of ethnic cleansing, people in the hundreds and thousands were killed and maimed or were brutalized beyond recognition.

Accordingly, these unsettling lessons of history need to be firmly borne in mind by mankind, lest the same prohibitive blunders are repeated.

The evidence cannot be questioned that the LTTE consciously followed a policy of ethnic cleansing in Lanka's North-East in the early Nineties, perhaps borrowing a leaf from the Milosevic administration. Consequently, a considerable section of the Muslim community was driven out of their homesteads and deprived of the land they had inhabited for decades.

What is important to remember is that Milosevic's ethnic cleansing didn't prevent the break-up of Yugoslavia. The lesson here is that brute force and murderous violence prevents nothing. However, humanity always wins the day and nothing heals a trouble-hit country, rankling with divisions, more than humanity and tolerance.