Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic died in his cell at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague on March 11, where he was facing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Balkans during the 1990s, including the 1995 massacre of 8000 defenceless Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Milosevic's regime overthrew the multi-ethnic socialist Yugoslav republic and introduced a brutal capitalist restoration, launching Serb national-chauvinist wars on other Yugoslav republics. The following statement was issued by Hariz Halilovich from the Srebrenica Society for Prevention of Genocide.
We survivors from Srebrenica living in Australia have been bitterly surprised by the sudden death of the butcher from the Balkans, Slobodan Milosevic. While for many the title of a "butcher" has been a metaphor for the evil which Milosevic unleashed and directly controlled, for us this has had much more direct meaning. Milosevic's willing executioners and the killing machine he controlled butchered our brothers, fathers and sons. We were direct targets of his policy of ethnic cleansing and extermination.
Even while many of us wished him dead for all the deaths and sufferings he caused, once again we feel cheated by the master of evil, Slobodan Milosevic, who has escaped the sentence for genocide, including the mass killings at Srebrenica of more than 8000 Bosniak men and boys in July 1995 — the bloodiest single episode of his genocidal policy. Our sense of justice being served would have been achieved had he lived long enough to be found guilty of all the 66 formal charges. This was only a matter of time.
As the time is running out for other "heart attack" candidates — including the two most wanted war criminals, General Ratko Mladic and Dr Radovan Karadzic — we the survivors from Drina Valley are appealing to the international community and international bodies like the UN, NATO and EUFOR to intensify their efforts to arrest and bring to justice the two most senior war criminals still alive and still at large. Their arrest and sentencing will restore our belief in justice and humanity and will help us make the final closure to our losses and the sufferings we have gone through.
From Green Left Weekly, March 22, 2006.
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