RIP Mr. President

Well, being thateveryone is talking about it, i guess i might as well and join the crowd. So i'm sure you've all heard, Slobodan Milosevic is dead. Yup, he's gone. Everyone dies. He was no exception to that rule. The so-called 'butcher of the balkans' is now on every major western network headline. We hear the predictable, that he was the author of the break-up of Yugoslavia and used extreme and violent means to do so. There's something new for the Balkans, huh? Or for the world for that matter.

Milosevic was an unbelievably clever individual. Whereas dippy-doo Radovan and his big balkan hairdew repulses me, i've always been fascinated by the intensity and occassional insanity of Slobo. Mladic has his god-complex, Radovan just simply has a big head (literally and figuratively speaking) but Slobo is work of art that at times makes you laugh, even cry, and then you walk away somewhat indifferently. He never had barbarious words like Karadzic, he never showed the butcher side like Mladic and Arkan. He was too clever for that. He tricked his own people, he tricked the world, hell - i even think he tricked himself into believing he was the last gatekeeper of a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.

He's a man i always wanted to have a coffee with, not out of admiration for his leadership skills but more for his uncanny ability to tell wonderful lies....that everyone and their mother believes. I've never heard someone more convincing. I chuckle when i see him on trial at the Hague. Its like his three ring circus, and as long as he feels he's in control the man can not only bring a horse to water - but he can also make it drink. He dooped an entire nation, just as GW did with his Iraq war propoganda machine. The difference is though, most Serbs hold strong to the illusion that they were the victims, whereas at least some Americans have come around to see that GW and his white house mafia were and still are lying through their teeth, about almost everything. America and Serbia have a lot more in common than they both care to admit.

So the west will go on talking about the mad man of the balkans. The victims in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo will certainly be sorry that he never recieved the justice they believed he deserved. And the Serbs, well, you know, like most Serbs - they're going to play victim yet again. I can hear the comments streaming over the hill from Republika Radovan and Belgrade. 'He was a great Serb.' ' He wasn't the monster the propogandist west made him out to be.' 'It was all a set-up from the CIA.' The Hague killed him because they knew they couldn't get a guilty verdict on him.' But we shouldn't underestimate the Serbs. After all, it was they who ousted him with the long, sustained 'otpor' (resistance) movement in Belgrade. And it will again be the Serbs who will have to close this chapter in their history without making a martyr out a man who certainly doesn't deserve to be one.

This is a great opportunity for Serbia to move ahead, close a chapter in their bleak recent history book and sort out the house. My guess is, though, that they have for so long been in the practice of playing the victim that they will continue with their outlandish conspiracy theories, hiding war criminals, and not in any, way, shape or form acknowledge that it was them who went to war with not one, but four of their closest neighbours. Watch out Montenegro!