Srdjan Bogosavljevic was talking feverishly on a cellphone which had rung twelve times in as many minutes. He had the news before all of us. As head of SMMRI, the Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute in Belgrade, he had been monitoring and polling public attitudes towards Slobodan Milosevic for years. Earlier in the day, he told a session at the International IDEA Democracy Forum, which I have been attending here in Stockholm, that the majority of the people in Serbia had turned against their self-styled “strong man” as far back as l996.But the factionalized opposition could never effectively topple him until recently.

Now, his colleagues were calling with disbelief to say that Milosevic was in the Hague, and about to be tried for war crimes and genocide. Deyan Kiyranov, the Director of the Balkans Center for Liberal Strategies, was at his side. “We started talking about his crimes back in l991,” she told a group of us anxious to get information which was just beginning to break on Euro News. “it’s been ten years…there were only 12 of us then….his arrest is completely illegal, you know. I am a lawyer, but I don’t care. He deserves to be there.”

Turning Milosevic over to the International War Crimes Tribunal was a demand that the Serbian authorities could not ignore because a billion dollars was at stake. A pledged billion from foreign donors to rebuild the devastation inflicted by NATO bombing. That was, of course, a crime in itself unleashed supposedly in retaliation for the human rights disaster fueled by Milosevic’s policies in Kosovo and in the other three wars that he helped ignite in the Balkans.

The TV news in Europe reprised archival clips of dead bodies and tortured cities like Sarajevo, but with little little explanation, or in-depth information about how the regime in Belgrade armed the Bosnian Serbs and a a number of murderous paramilitiaries like the Yellow Wasps which “cleansed ” Eastern Bosnia. There was little documentarion offerered on how they sent their army into Croatia and contributed to the massacres in Srebrenica (abetted shamefully by the UN!) The coverage was thin, with one Swedish TV reporter standing outside the prison compound in Holland asking if the prosecutors really had adequate evidence to convict. They noted that many of the records and documents had allegedly been destroyed. While Milosevic was consigned to his cell, the judges at the Hague were still weighing evidence about the systematic use of rape in the Omarska prison camp. That trial of course was barely covered.

What was missing of course was any reference to the complicity of the West in all of this, the long history of collusion, compromise and inaction that I and many others had documented in the early 90’s without much impact. No reports that I saw reminded the public that Milosevic had once been backed by Washington as a reformer. He was a banker who implemented World Bank and IMF privatization schemes, helping destroy the economy which in turn contributed to a deepening of a crisis that degenerated into armed conflict.

Anyone remember the Yugo car debacle? Lawrence Eagleburger, an Ambassador to Yugolsavia and Secretary of State under Bush the elder, who went on to work with Henry Kissinger in his consulting firm, had been on its board. I am sure there is some apprehension in the West about what secrets Milosevic might reveal in what is certainly to become a bid for martydom. Will the western press start revealing those secrets? I doubt it.

All of this had a special poignancy for me especially after I passed through the lobby of the Folkets Hus (the People’s House) conference center earlier in the day where a letter from the very late British philosopher Bertrand Russell is still on display, thanking the Center for allowing his controversial War Crimes Tribunal indicting the US role in Vietnam to hold sessions there in June 1967, on a warm day like this one.

I was in Stockholm then as a young reporter. (My dispatch about the event appears in my new collection of pieces and polemics, News Dissector (Akashic Books.com) That Tribunal lacked the force of law, or any official legitimation, and and was ridiculed at the time by the press. It was savaged despite the presence of Jean Paul Sarte, Simone du Beuvoir and many anti-war eminences. I still remember 60 Minutes star Morley Safer filming a standup denouncing it for CBS as a commie propaganda exercise. Today, his network and others acknowledge pervasive US war crimes in Vietnam, as the recent Senator Bob Kerrey incident so powerfully illustrated.

We need more coverage now that explains what much of the reporting of the Balkans never did, that this was a contest between corrupt right wing nationalists with their own propagandized populations caught in the crossfire. All of the crimes on all sides need to be retold, and re-examined, including those committed by western states that stood by and did nothing, or worse, were complicit. Just remember the Dayton Accords which legitimized Milosevic’s receipe for a Balkans style apartheid along ethnic/nationalist lines. At that time, he was a “player” that the West sucked up to.

Today, I am thinking also of the films made by SAGA, the indigenous producers in Sarajevo and other film makers like Ilan Ziv and my partner Rory O’Connor who documented some of Milosevic’s crimes and had a very hard time getting them on the air. Most channels were not intereested!

It is also time to take a closer look at the media role in covering this conflict.

More on that to come.

Stockholm, June 29, 2001.