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Saturday
30 June 2001 Serbs
refuse to confront guilt of the violent years "HE'S A Serb, he's our president and he should have
been tried here!" shouted a young man in the sticky heat of Belgrade
yesterday. "Maybe he is guilty," said Zoran, a taxi driver gesticulating
vigorously as he nudged a battered white Audi through traffic. "But what
about the Albanians? Why haven't they been indicted? We should have killed
them all." As Slobodan Milosevic spent his first day in a cell in The Hague there was
little sense in Belgrade of a waning of the ethnic nationalism that
characterised his rule. Even Serbs who said they hated Milosevic agreed that
his main crime was stealing from the public purse and leading the country to
economic ruin. Even since Milosevic's fall in a revolution last October the media and the
public have all but ignored the most shameful episodes of recent Serbian
history. They are led from the top. The reformist Yugoslav president Vojislav
Kostunica holds many nationalist views rooted in the Nineties. Attempts by liberals to force the Serbs to face up to their misdeeds have
met with anger. When a small television station showed a documentary on the
siege of Sarajevo and re-broadcast a BBC production on the killing at
Srebrenica, angry callers inundated the switchboard. National media dropped plans to show a series on atrocities by Serbs in
the Balkans soon after the euphoria of the revolution faded. In a recent opinion poll by a Belgrade marketing agency, 85 per cent of
Serbs said they were aware of crimes committed against them in the bloody
break-up of Yugoslavia. Only 10 per cent said crimes had been done by Serbs. Asked who was the biggest Serbian hero they chose four indicted war
criminals: the former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, his
political counterpart Radovan Karadzic, the gangster Arkan and Milosevic. The
first two are on the run and Arkan was murdered. |