Letters
Milosevic must be stopped
I’ve never written to The Bruin before, but what I’ve seen in
the news lately, specifically the war in Kosovo, has really angered
me.
I find the sheer hypocrisy of Serbian policy to be incredible.
Slobodan Milosevic has the audacity to come on camera, and complain
about how the sovereign nation of Serbia and its army are being
"illegally" bombed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO).
This is the same Serbian army that invaded the sovereign nation
of Croatia and gave support to the brutal army of Radovan Karadzic
which ravaged Bosnia-Hertzegovina.
He moans about the bombing of Belgrade, when he had no problem
with the shelling of Dubrovnik, Vukovar and Sarajevo.
I see pictures of Serbian civilians standing on bridges with
targets on their chests, daring NATO to attack them, and I think of
the irony of the situation. If these were Croats, Bosnians or
Kosovars on a bridge in their homelands, would Milosevic give a
second thought to bombing them?
I honestly doubt it.
He would probably see it as an opportunity to kill more of his
"enemies." But if you really think about it, it’s truly disgusting
that he even sees these people as foes.
Ethnically Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Albanians are not very
different from each other. Most families in these regions consist
of people from most or all of these groups.
Marriages across religious and ethnic lines are incredibly
common. Milosevic is basically killing his own people to promote
his "Serbia first" ideology.
I have heard him compared to Adolf Hitler, and while his crimes
do not match the magnitude of those of the Nazi leader, he does
seem to emulate Hitler’s crimes.
Hitler annexed Sudetenland in the late 1930s because he saw it
as an ancient German homeland; Milosevic is brutally repressing the
Kosovars because he sees their region as ancestral Serbian
territory.
Hitler attacked neighboring countries, namely Czechoslovakia and
Poland; Milosevic did the same to Croatia and Bosnia. I don’t even
have to go into the ethnic "cleansing" issue, as most if not all
students on this campus are familiar with the actions of Hitler and
Milosevic (ironically, one of the groups targeted by Hitler for
extermination was Slavs).
I, for one, am happy that NATO has at least made an attempt to
stop Milosevic. The United Nations (U.N.) is obviously unable to do
anything. The U.N. stood by while Croatia was invaded. U.N. troops
looked on while Bosnia Muslims were massacred.
Milosevic has proven in the past that he uses the time spent in
peace negotiations to gain more territory, and he was doing the
same thing in Kosovo. The U.N. did nothing to stop him while NATO
has at least made an effort.
Milosevic may not be Hitler yet – his murder toll is in the tens
or hundred of thousands. But what should the world do, wait until
he reaches the one million mark?
What then, wait until he hits two or three million and then get
involved?
Something has to be done to stop this man. I don’t know if
airstrikes alone will do it, but at least it’s a start.
Steven Grubisic
Third-year
Political science and history