Will the new democratic Serbia be a chastened place

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON: The maths is simple: there are fewer than 10 million Serbs, and the amount of international aid at stake if they didn't hand former dictator Slobodan Milosevic over to the Hague War Crimes Tribunal by Friday was US$1.3 billion. That works out at about $135 for every Serbian man, woman and child -- a healthy bribe, but in no way evidence that guilt and repentance have replaced self-pity and denial as the dominant mode of thinking among the Serbian people.

There is little doubt that Milosevic will be convicted of horrendous war crimes and spend the rest of his life in a clean, well-lit cell, for the evidence against him is overwhelming, and the current Serbian government is more than willing to hand it over.

They want the monster out of the country for good, and thoroughly discredited in the process Milosevic's closest associates -- people like former Serbian interior minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic and ex-Yugoslav prime minister Nikola Sainovic, who directed the killing in Kosovo in 1998-1999, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and Gen. Ratko Mladic, who carried out the Srebrenica massacre -- will almost certainly end up in adjoining cells. Now that the flood gates have opened, they are no more likely to stand by each other than the captured Nazi leaders did at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-1946.

But what about the million of other Serbs who cheered them on during the decade when they ravaged the Balkans? Will they ever come to terms with what was done in their names and, for the most part, with their tacit approval?

Will the new democratic Serbia be a chastened place seeking national absolution like post-Nazi Germany, forcing its children to confront the horrors of the past and seeking reconciliation with the victims, or a place like post-fascist Italy, which simply blamed it all on Mussolini and insisted that all 50 million other Italians were resistance fighters? The answer, oddly, matters more to the Serbs themselves than to their neighbors.

The fact that Italy never apologized for all the Albanians, Libyans, Greeks and Ethiopians whom it tortured, gassed and murdered has mostly been forgotten now in those countries. The fact that Italy never punished its own war criminals or acknowledged the fascists' crimes, instead just re-cycling them as Christian Democrats in order to keep the Communists out of power, poisoned and corrupted Italian politics for half a century.

Much the same could be said of Japan. Whereas Germany, which went through all the agonies of de-Nazification, has one of the sanest and cleanest democracies on the planet, and continues to prosper mightily as a result. So which will it be for Serbia?

To be fair, Serbia's crimes over the past decade were not on the same scale as those of the Nazis in the 1940s. Nor do they bear sole blame for the catastrophe that struck former Yugoslavia in the 1990s: 75 percent for the Serbs, say, with 15 percent to the Croats and 5 percent each to Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Kosovars. But there is a huge amount of national soul-searching and repentance to be done, and it is not yet clear whether the Serbs are up to it.

The present government is split, with federal President Vojislav Kostunica, the leader of last autumn's non-violent democratic revolution, still wallowing in traditional Serbian self-pity and strongly opposing Milosevic's extradition to The Hague. Kostunica had nothing to do with the mass murders, but he doesn't want to face up to them either.

Whereas the more pragmatic Serbian government led by Prime Minister Zoran Dzindzic just wants to get on with rebuilding a wrecked and defeated country. That means doing what the rest of the world wants, in order to get the help Serbia must have, so it began to prepare the ground for handing Milosevic over to The Hague shortly after he was arrested in April.

Its main strategy, in terms of shifting Serbian public opinion out of defiance mode, has been to leak evidence of the "missing" bodies of Albanians massacred in Kosovo in 1998-1999 -- bodies that Milosevic had ordered to be dug up and transported to Serbia for reburial in order to hide the evidence of his crimes.

The key evidence was a freezer truck bearing the bodies of 88 Albanian men, women and children north to a secret reburial site near Belgrade which ended up in the Danube instead. The truck was actually pulled out of the river two years ago -- but the story told by the diver who helped recover it, Zivadin Djordjevic, was first published early this month in a Serbian magazine, Timok, whose editor is linked to the present Interior Minister, Dusan Mihailovic.

The story then took off in the Serbian mass media, with other mass graves of transported Kosovan massacre victims being discovered in the Belgrade area in rapid succession. Serbs, unable to deny the truth any longer, were duly shocked, and so the rapid hand-over of Milosevic to The Hague caused relatively little outcry.

But will this promising start lead to a full examination of the past ten years in Serbia? The conflicting attitudes were summed up two weeks ago in an exchange between Vojislav Seselj, head of the Serbian Radical Party and a man visibly in love with his hatred of all non-Serbs, and Cedomir Jovanovic, head of the parliamentary group of the ruling DOS party.

"You have been ordered to invent bodies and refrigerator trucks and to dig up bodies from graves," accused Seselj. "You have been collecting who knows whose bodies ...You are not interested in the fact that thousands of Serbs were killed by NATO bombs."

"I propose that we form an inquiry commission," replied Jovanovic, "go to Batajnica (a barracks near Belgrade whose grounds contain one of the Albanian mass graves), turn 200 metres off the road, and face the consequences of what you have done to this society." Seselj will never do that, of course.

But the future health of Serbian society depends on how many of his fellow countrymen and women make that journey, if only in their imaginations and their consciences.