Europe's very own Khmer Rouge
Branimir Salevic's crocodile cries are clumsy attempts to deceive the brave Indonesian people. For 10 years Serbia has conducted a Khmer Rouge-style war against the people of the former Yugoslav Federation, a federal state which Milosevic's stupid and criminal policy has destroyed.
Today's Serbia is an obsolete residue of the communist closed world led by rat-profiled cold-blooded-killer bureaucrats generated by the Stalinist-style apparatuses, assisted by gangs of goons and sinister clowns brought to power by the civil war and a regime deep-rooted in corruption.
Contrary to the other Eastern people, who have established friendly ties with the outside world, the failing Yugoslav Serbs have locked themselves within the confines of their paranoid nationalism. The present revengeful rage has come from complacently cultivated masochism, a reiterated reminder of what is perceived as the humiliation in the Serbs' past history.
Regardless of the people's rights, where the Serbs decide they have their historical rights, their obscene feeling of racial superiority will justify the deportation or the killing of the people who are inferior in their eyes, namely the Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims.
In fact, today's retaliation against the Muslims for a defeat sustained in 1389 against the Turks must look hilarious. Serbian atrocities are evident from the following list of the massacre of hundreds of wounded Croats in Vukovar hospital, the deliberate shelling of 10,000 civilians in Sarajevo and the cold-blood slaughter of 10,000 Muslims in Srebrenica after the capitulation of the town.
The list can be extended with the massacre and gang rape of women Muslims in Foca Omarska and in 57 other death camps where torture and starvation were the order of the day. This list may also include the deportation of one million people from the Drina valley. Ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars is just one more chapter in a book compiling Serbian atrocities. To date some 300,000 deaths have been recorded.
Consistently treacherous behavior has necessitated the presence of 40,000-strong UNO peacekeeping force to enforce the signed peace agreements. The French peacekeeping force has lost 72 soldiers while 12 more have been disabled. The British force has suffered comparable casualties. At one time 175 Canadians, Dutch and French soldiers in the UNO peacekeeping force were chained to electric poles as human shields against air strikes.
Mr. Salevic, 16 nations have shown that humankind cannot take your ludicrous, bloodthirsty Great Serbia myth. Your rump evil empire is getting now just what it deserves.
LOUIS G. PAYRAUDEAU
Jakarta