The last time indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic was in The Hague, he rang the death knell of the former Yugoslavia, refusing as Serbian president to agree to a last-ditch plan to keep the union together in 1991.
But as Yugoslavia's deadly disintegration unfolded, Milosevic soon moved from spoiler to peacemaker.
The West -- which shunned intervention but clamoured for a negotiated end to Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II -- rehabilitated the Belgrade hardliner, seeing him as a stabilising force in the Balkans.
Milosevic negotiated the Dayton peace accords on behalf of recalcitrant Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, ending the war in Bosnia in 1995, earning him warm praise and a partial lifting of sanctions against his rump Yugoslavia.
The pendulum swung back after Milosevic unleashed his military, police and paramilitary forces against ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999, forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and killing untold numbers of military-aged men and boys.
When Serb troops killed 45 ethnic Albanians in the village of Racak on January 15, gruesome media images tipped the balance of indecision, and NATO unleashed a 78-day bombing campaign that finally forced Milosevic to pull out his troops in June -- THE HAGUE (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
