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Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb

Yugoslavia did not fall: it was pushed.

Yugoslavia did not die: it was killed.

But in the end the primary responsibility for the Yugoslav catastrophe must rest with the Serbs and their elected leader Slobodan Milošević. It was Milošević whose bid for power drove the other republics to leave. It was Milošević who then encouraged his fellow Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to carve out territorial enclaves and who backed them with his army. And it was Milošević who authorized and directed the sustained assault on Yugoslavia’s Albanian population that led to the war in Kosovo.

Belgrade’s actions were a disaster for Serbs everywhere. [...] This course of events has further exacerbated a longstanding Serb propensity for collective self-pity at the injustice of history and it is true that in the longer run the Serbs may well be the greatest losers in the Yugoslav wars. [...] But this irony should not blind us to Serb responsibility. The appalling ferocity and sadism of the Croat and Bosnian wars - the serial abuse, degradation, torture, rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens - was the work of Serb man, mostly young, aroused to paroxysms of casual hatred and indifference to suffering by propaganda and leadership from local chieftains whose ultimate directions and power came from Belgrade. What followed was not so unusual: it had happened in Europe just a few decades before, when - all across the continent and under the warrant of war - ordinary people committed quite extraordinary crimes.

There is no doubt that there was a history upon which Serb propaganda could call - a history of past suffering that lay buried just beneath the misleading placid surface of post-war Yugoslav life. But the decision to arose that memory, to manipulate and to exploit it for political ends, was made by men: one man in particular. As Slobodan Milošević disingenuously conceded to a journalist during the Dayton talks, he had never expected the wars in his country to last so long. That is doubtless true. But those wars did not just break out from spontaneous ethnic combustion. Yugoslavia did not fall; it was pushed. It did not die: it was killed.

Tony Judt: Postwar, A history of Europe since 1945, The Penguin Press, New York, 2005.

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