Issue 139 - May 23, 1994

Serbia resembles a dead sea stretched between threats of banditocracy, urbicide and the a war breathing its last

A series of incidents in the federal and republican assemblies, was topped last week (Wednesday, May 18) with another scandal which consisted of pouring water, jostling and cussing one's Communist mother.

The shadow of a possible war is always hovering over Kosovo, but it is fading, partly because the war option has exhausted itself first in Croatia and then in Bosnia, and partly because of the general belief that Serbia cannot sustain several fronts, and that its warring ambitions have been exhausted under the surveillance of the international community and because nobody is ready to risk a war which could engulf the Balkans

Professor Mirko Pejanovic, a member of the Presidency of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and, Miro Lazovic, the Speaker of the Parliament of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who represent the Serbs in the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina, have recently returned, via Ljubljana (where this interview was conducted), from the official visit to Moscow where they met Vitaly Churkin and the highest representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church.

By starting the war, Milosevic has obviously only developed former Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic's well-known idea of Serbs as losers in peace, so that it follows that war is the Serb's greatest natural resource. Milosevic then decided to use this comparative advantage and set his people doing that which he believes they are best at. Apart from Cosic, does anybody else know something about the Serbs?

Last week the District Prosecutor's Office in Sabac charged a Yugoslav citizen with war crimes committed against the civilian population in inter-ethnic conflicts on the territory of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This is the first such indictment in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY)