[Memes eXodus] Un unthinkable encounter

[altin topi]

Reading NYTimes "Face to Face With Milosevic" by FRED ABRAHAMS 

Two years ago, I was wandering and asking myself, with a feeble hope and a lot of anger, about the same thing, what Fred Abrahams, the former Head of Human Rights Watch Office(HRWO) for Kosovo and Albania, asked himself; whether there would be justice for the murders, rapes, mass executions, and genocide committed in Balkans, and in particular, in Kosovo. 

At the time, I was giving a hand to HRWO(NY group) from the commodity of my apartment, via Internet, helping them with the data-entry of the information (collected by Fred Abrahams and his team in Kosovo). The statistical information was based on the interviews with the ocular witnesses of the crimes and horrors perpetrated in Kosovo. But, never, in the oddest dream, I would have been able to imagine such scenario: an encounter face-to-face of Mr. Abrahams with the Dark Prince, the Voivoda of Genocide, and maybe the new Serbian Knight of the 20th century Serbian oral folklore of the Knights' Order, Slobodan Milosevic. 

Mr. Abrahams was caught by surprise, when Milosevic smiled at him. It was the weirdest thing that can happen to anybody in that situation. The question that flickered Mr. Abrahams mind was a kind of uncertain uneasiness; Milosevic leaned back defiantly, so sure of himself, and smiling at the witness, Mr. Abrahams, who, with his testimony, was accusing him of crimes against the Albanians of Kosovo. Maybe he knew something that might have surprised everybody in the war-tribunal chamber, including Fred Abrahams himself. But, it was a "surprise", somehow expected from him; a "surprise", a line of reasoning coming from a small authoritarian prince of a remote province, Serbia, the land of the Serbs, a people emotionally rooted in their mythology, and looking up to their hero, Milosevic, as the new fighter against the world, championing the insurrection of a great race, the Serbian race. 

Milosevic, now a ridiculous figure, but a defiant ridicule, came to prominence because of his ruthless and his mixed manners, seen as a kind of likable defiance which at times played at the tune of the West's views to keep Yugoslavia together; then it was thought as a great show of an astute westernized politician. Later, because of the carnage he caused in Balkans, his persona was canonized as the "Butcher of Balkans" and compared by the world media to Hitler, with a likeness of a modern Stalin. Involuntarily, Fred Abrahams smiled back to Milosevic. You cannot explain this kind of facial reaction of Fred Abrahams, he couldn't find an explanation himself; it was not an emotional reaction, but a smile caused by the rattled nerves, being in that court, sitting in that bench. Now, it was the turn of Milosevic, to use his law background, and his ability of the self-appointed lawyer, by amounting his own defense. 

After, as we should have expected by now, Milosevic spoke of global conspiracies against the Serbs. Fred Abrahams soon realized, as many others did before him, sitting in that chamber, face-to-face with Milosevic, that his cross-examination of the witnesses called to testify, his vision, and his line of reasoning, why and how the horrors were perpetrated, was of a delusional mind, of somebody who was playing for an invisible public, a public living emotionally and mentally, somewhere in  the remoteness of time, the Serbs fortified in their 14th century view of their history.

I think the best part of the encounter is the one given below, when Milosevic and the witness, Fred Abrahams, living mentally in two different worlds, were referring to these parallel worlds with no point of contact. As the author of article put it "It was as we were moving in parallel words" and "he (Milosevic) put forth arguments commonly heard from a bar stool." 

Excerpt from the article...

''You are a New Yorker,'' he(Milosevic) said after nearly two hours of cross-examination. ''How many killings and rapes, for  example, are committed every day in New York?'' 

''Don't answer that,'' Richard May, the presiding judge, said. 

Milosevic quickly returned to his theme. ''How come that you as an American, as a New Yorker, you take greater care of the human rights of Albanians in Yugoslavia than you do
about human rights of Americans in America?'' 

''Irrelevant,'' May snapped. ''Next question.'' 

The question was irrelevant to the legal charges against him. But this line of reasoning couldn't fail to impress Serbs who believe they have been unfairly singled out for attack.
Minutes later, our dance was done. I got up to leave, the armrests slightly blacker from my sweat. 

A.T.







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