A step back in the Balkans

The arrest of (former Yugoslav President Slobodan) Milosevic in April was widely hailed as the victory of forces of freedom and moderation in Yugoslavia, now reduced to Serbia and Montenegro thanks in the main to the Nazi-style ethnic cleansing wars launched by him in Croatia and Bosnia and finally Kosovo.

In a short span of three years, he inflicted the worst suffering on Kosovo as the Serbs launched a campaign of terror and mass deportation.

Under a democratic regime, and as more and more evidence of (Milosevic's) crimes against humanity were unearthed, there was hope that he would be tried in his country by his own people who had shown extraordinary courage in voting him out in the first opportunity they got and followed it up by thwarting his attempts to subvert the election verdict to retain power.

In this positive setting comes the decision to hand Mr. Milosevic over to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Ironically, Washington's insistence on this handover and linking it to grant of financial assistance can prove counter-productive, provoking a wave of sympathy for nationalist hardliners in Serbia.

Already, the moderate President has spoken out openly against the extradition.

If the rejection of Mr. Milosevic in the elections was a triumph of democracy and reason and an affirmation that the people had had enough of ethnic wars and self-inflicted sufferings, the forced deportation of the former ruler and undoubted hero is a slap in the face for the nation.

Not just the Serbs and their allies in Russia but many in the rest of the world will have cause to wonder also at the apparent double standards that attend treatment of such "criminals".

Cold War friends and allies like Chile's Pinochet have been treated with kid gloves.

The latest beneficiary is the former Peruvian President, Mr. Fujimori, who is wanted in his country and has sought and received the sanctuary of Japan, the land of his ancestors.

-- The Hindu, New Delhi