A Petty Hitler (Gen. Clark on Milosevec)

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A Petty Hitler
By WESLEY K. CLARK
March 13, 2006; Page A18
Published in The Wall Street Journal

(excerpt)

Slobodan Milosevic's death in The Hague is a real tragedy for the international community. But most of all it will be a tragedy for the Serbs themselves. It will likely be another step in a series of historic Serb failures, martyrdom and isolation, all of which Milosevic himself grandly evoked to gain and maintain his power. I knew him as a nationalist leader and wartime adversary.

Along with the other Americans on Richard Holbrooke's 1995 Balkan peace talks mission, I spent countless hours with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. As NATO's then supreme allied commander, Europe, I haggled with Milosevic about war criminals and the Dayton Peace Agreement implementation in 1997, delivered NATO's warnings and threat in 1998, implored his cooperation in heading off renewed conflict, and then, when all else failed, I led the NATO military campaign which forced him to end ethnic cleansing and remove his troops and police from Kosovo. In 2003, I faced him again when I testified for the prosecution in his war crimes trial at The Hague.

While his death at The Hague ends his interminable trial, nothing is resolved. His death only compounds many of the difficult issues still facing the international community, Europe and Serbia itself.

In his 64 years, Milosevic was an army officer, a Communist, a bureaucrat, a banker and, above all, a Yugoslav Serb who used his skills and harsh nationalist rhetoric to parlay himself into the highest office in Yugoslavia only to then alienate and attack his fellow Yugoslav citizens. In four successive conflicts which he all lost, Milosevic used war as a means of plundering and disassembling his own country. He forced millions from their homes and caused several hundred thousands of deaths. He was rational and sometimes cunning, often a brilliant tactical negotiator but ultimately a fool of a strategist, whose reckless crimes included murder and genocide, and who has cost humanity as a whole and his own Serbs dearly.

Continued @ http://securingamerica.com/node/728

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