By DAVID HASTINGS
Former Balkans strongman Slobodan Milosevic has been sent to face justice for his numerous war crimes on a day that is full of dark portents for his native Serbia.
He was flown to The Hague yesterday, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which is regarded
by Serbs as the defining moment of their history.
It is also the day, in 1914, that a Serb nationalist assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an act that sparked the First World War.
And on that same day in 1989 - 600 years after the battle - Milosevic made an inflammatory nationalist speech to a crowd of Serbs, said to be a million strong, gathered on the ancient battlefield.
Many regard that speech as the spark for the four Balkan wars and the atrocities that took place during Milosevic's bloody tenure after the fall of communism.
During his decade of power he achieved misery, not only for the rest of the people in the Balkans but for Serbs as well.
Estimates of the number of dead in the wars vary, but it seems certain there were more than 275,000.
The term "ethnic cleansing" brought chilling reminders of the Nazis as three million people were driven from their homes.
And there were massacres the like of which Europe had not seen in nearly 50 years.
One, in which 7000 Muslim men were butchered, turned the name of the Bosnian town Srbrenica into a byword for horror.
The wars had a devastating economic effect as well.
In 1990, Serbia was part of Eastern Europe's most prosperous and vibrant economy.
But after the wars, eight years of punitive international sanctions, 11 weeks of Nato airstrikes and a decade of systematic graft, its economy is in a shambles.
Half the population is jobless or on indefinite leave from obsolete, bankrupt or bombed industries.
Milosevic has been taken to a special section of Scheveningen prison in The Hague. His 3m by 5m cell has an en-suite shower, coffee-maker and television offering a range of satellite channels, including some from the Balkans.
At present he is charged only over massacres and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people during the Kosovo conflict, the last of his wars.
Prosecutors may yet lay charges arising from the others. If found guilty he faces life imprisonment.
Feature: Yugoslavia
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
Serbian Ministry of Information
Serbian Radio - Free B92
Otpor: Serbian Student Resistance Movement
Macedonian Defence Ministry
Albanians in Macedonia Crisis Centre
Kosovo information page
By DAVID HASTINGS
Former Balkans strongman Slobodan Milosevic has been sent to face justice for his numerous war crimes on a day that is full of dark portents for his native Serbia.
He was flown to The Hague yesterday, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which is regarded
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