June 20, 2000

 

 

Letters to the Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43^rd St.
New York, NY 10036

Via fax at (212) 556-3622/ letters@nytimes.com

Dear Sir or Madam:

Steven Erlanger is to be congratulated for bringing to international attention the Clinton administration’s behind-the-scenes effort, with the assistance of Russia and Greece, to explore the possibility of allowing dictator Slobodan Milosevic to exit from his office as president of Serbia-Montenegro with his security and savings in tact ("Talks Reported on an Exit Strategy for Milosevic," front page, June 19).

Since 1989, Slobodan Milosevic has invaded and occupied Kosova by force and waged five Balkan wars--in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosova--resulting in the murder of more than 300,000 men, women, and children, the expulsion of millions more from their homes, and the torture, arrest, and ongoing incarceration, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law, of more than five thousand prisoners of war. Finally, in the spring of 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague indicted Milosevic for these crimes against humanity. For the Clinton Administration and other members of NATO now to conclude that peace can come to Serbia and to the Balkans by exonerating Milosevic is to demean the lives of all the Albanian, Bosnian, and other victims who have suffered and died at his hands. The victims should not have to undergo the ignominy of witnessing his exit to a safe haven--no less with the money that he and his henchmen have looted from them and from their countries’ reserves.

In addition, to free Milosevic in the name of bringing democracy to Serbia imperils the postwar peace in Kosova, the possibility for stability and democracy in Southeast Europe, and U.S. interests in the region. Milosevic rose to power on the back of a century of anti-Albanian and anti-Muslim racism and the hegemonic quest for a "Greater Serbia." There can be no peace in the Balkans without justice, and justice requires that Slobodan Milosevic be brought to trial in The Hague. It is time to put an end, once and for all, to the policy of appeasement and containment that has kept Milosevic in power ever since the West insisted in 1989 that the equal, juridical units in the federal presidency of the former Yugoslavia must remain together. It is time to insist that the future of Kosova and the resolution of the Albanian national question, which were deliberately kept out of the peace negotiations at Dayton in 1995 and at the Rambouillet peace talks in 1999 with disastrous results, be brought to the diplomatic front burner.

Genuine justice and peace in the Balkans can come only when Milosevic is apprehended, when all the civilian and military participants in the extermination of Bosnian and Albanian civilians are brought to trial, when the Kosovar Albanian prisoners of war in Serbian jails are freed, and when the Serbian people finally apologize to Milosevic’s victims--just as the German people finally apologized to the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Has our government forgotten that the world said "Never again"?

Shirley A. Cloyes
Balkan Affairs Adviser
The Albanian American Civic League