Milosevic trial ruffles Serb feathers

Serbs were also victims, say critics of the trial

By the BBC's Paul Anderson in Belgrade

The start of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic has awakened the Serbian people to 21st century political realities.

If The Hague makes the decision that Slobodan Milosevic is guilty, the whole world will recognise the Serbian people are also guilty of genocide

Branislav Ivkovic of the Socialist Party

When he was surrendered to The Hague last year, many, particularly the new democrats, thought their country was finished with the opprobrium heaped on it in the past decade.

Now it is all coming back as what newspapers are calling the "big bill of the past decade" is paid.

"The trial against Milosevic is a trial against the Serbian people," said the senior Socialist Party figure, Branislav Ivkovic.

"If The Hague makes the decision that Slobodan Milosevic is guilty, the whole world will recognise the Serbian people are also guilty of genocide."

That may explain why there has been so little internal debate about how far the Serbian people themselves were to blame for the wars waged in their name.

Miroslav Filipovic claims Serbs killed Albanian children with impunity

"There is no willingness in the Serbian people to face up to what some individuals did in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo," said the investigative journalist, Miroslav Filipovic.

"I'm afraid everything that we are doing now, moving towards democracy, opening up the country, the economic reform will be overshadowed by that fact.

"You are punished for murder everywhere, except in Serbia.

"If someone killed a child in Belgrade he would be sentenced harshly.

"If the same man killed a child in Kosovo, and it turns out the child is Albanian, he would receive an award not a punishment."

The need for punishment

Mr Filipovic's analogy is not a random one.

He published a report documenting, he says, the killing by Serb forces of 800 children younger than five.

He became a scourge of the Milosevic regime and was jailed for a short time for espionage and "spreading false information" in connection with another investigation.

Natasha Scpanovic says Albanians lied to win the media war

"Nobody will trust us here in Serbia not to do such a thing again if we don't punish those who have already done something like that," he said.

But most Serbs see things entirely differently.

In a tiny office in Belgrade, Natasha Scpanovic, from the Association of the Families of Missing Serbs, spread the photographs of hundreds of Kosovo Serbs, among them children, across a large table.

All were kidnapped by Albanians bent on revenge after Nato peacekeepers were deployed in Kosovo in June 1999, she said.

Someone saw her father being killed, but no-one has any evidence of what happened to her mother and she hopes somehow she has survived.

	Milosevic charges Genocide Crimes against humanity Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions Violations of the laws or customs of war Click here for a full list of charges

"The Albanians desecrated our graves and raped our nuns in the monasteries, and in their political struggle the whole world supported them," she said.

"They used tricks and lies and won the media war."

The Serbs say they are not the only ones to suffer selective amnesia.

They point to the absence of remorse anywhere else, and the absence of serious war crimes charges against Croatians, Bosnians and Albanians.

They particularly want the former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and the Kosovo Liberation Army political leader, Hasim Thaci, indicted.

"A truth commission in this region only has any sense if it is established on a regional basis," said Biljana Kovacevic Vuco, a leading human rights lawyer.

"After that we can start the process of moral responsibility and after that the process of reconciliation."

Reconciliation versus prosecution

According to Kosta Cavoski, a lawyer from the opposite side of the Belgrade ideological elite, the idea that Serbia should do now what South Africa did after apartheid is spurious.

As the President of the International Board for the Protection of Radovan Karadzic he has a particular interest in the question.

He said: "In South Africa none of the whites was accused and prosecuted - only obliged to give real information to find out the truth of apartheid.

"But in Serbia, foreign factors are trying to have prosecutions and so-called reconciliation at once.

"It is impossible to follow different policies at the same time."