[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 16]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 23058]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



  THE NEW SERBIAN LEADERSHIP: WE SHOULD TEMPER REJOICING WITH CAUTION

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. TOM LANTOS

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, October 17, 2000

  Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, the departure of Slobodan Milosevic as 
President of Yugoslavia was greeted with almost universal rejoicing. 
More than most other national leaders in recent memory, Mr. Milosevic 
has come to identified with the excesses and atrocities of nationalism 
run amuck. Mr. Milosevic encouraged and fostered excessive Serbian 
nationalism in order to further his own personal political goals, and 
he bears a heavy responsibility for the barbarities and savagery of the 
conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosova over the past decade. The 
international community recognized his personal responsibility for 
events in the former Yugoslavia by indicting him as a war criminal.
  Mr. Speaker, in Belgrade general enthusiasm greeted the news that Mr. 
Milosevic had lost the presidential elections and that the people of 
Serbia would not tolerate his continued political manipulations to 
preserve himself in power. The change is a welcome one, and one that I 
sincerely hope will lead to the restoration of stability in the former 
Yugoslavia.
  While the departure of Mr. Milosevic is most welcome, the arrival of 
Mr. Kostunica does not mean the resolution of all problems involving 
Serbia. I think it is important that we temper our rejoicing with a 
note of caution.
  It is important, Mr. Speaker, to place these changes in some 
perspective. This change is not the result of an upsurge of democratic 
sentiment, nor is it a rejection of the excesses of Serbian nationalism 
that have resulted in so much bloodshed and violence over the past 
decade. To a great extent, Mr. Speaker, it is a rejection not of the 
bankrupt policies of Mr. Milosevic, but a rejection of the consequences 
of those policies--the economic hardship created by the international 
sanctions against Serbia, the destruction in Serbia that resulted from 
the NATO campaign to halt the depredations against the Kosovars, and 
international isolation.
  Mr. Speaker, Leon Wieseltier published an excellent article in the 
more recent issue of The New Republic (October 23, 2000) which focuses 
on these critical issues and the significance of the changes in Serbia. 
I submit excerpts of Mr. Wieselteir's article to be placed in the 
Record, and I urge my colleagues to give his views the thoughtful 
attention they deserve.

                  [The New Republic, October 23, 2000]

             The Trouble with Exhilaration: Kostunica, Then

                          (By Leon Wieseltier)

       . . . The uprising in Belgrade established justice 
     incompletely. The limitations of Kostunica and his revolution 
     are disturbing. He is an unembarrassed Serbian nationalist, 
     who does not see or does not wish to see that the tribal 
     sentiment of his people, their ``national question,'' has 
     been not the solution but the problem. He translated The 
     Federalist Papers into Serbo-Croatian, but during the Bosnian 
     war he was sympathetic to the Serb separatism of Radovan 
     Karadzic, and during the buildup to the Kosovo war he was 
     photographed brandishing an automatic rifle in the company of 
     some Kosovar Serbs . . . He has declared that he will not 
     deliver the war criminal whom he has deposed to the tribunal 
     in The Hague, whose legitimacy he has contested. He is a 
     democrat who wants his country to become a member of the 
     European Union, but he welcomes the machinations of the 
     Russian foreign minister, whose government was singularly 
     unmoved by the democratic ascendancy in Serbia.
       In all these ways Kostunica seems genuinely representative 
     of his people, whose ethical energies are ominously 
     circumscribed by ethnic energies. The press accounts of the 
     election that Milosevic lost, and of the uprising that 
     followed his refusal to abide by its results, describe a 
     population that was angry about the consequences of the 
     sanctions that the West had imposed upon Milosevic's country, 
     the poverty and the pariahdom. They were also tired of 
     Milosevic's abuses of state power, especially his 
     authoritarian control of the media. What motivated their 
     rebellion, in other words, was their outrage at all that 
     Milosevic had done to them. What was missing from the hue and 
     the cry (at least as it was reported in the Western press) 
     was outrage at what Milosevic had done to others--to 
     Croatians, to Bosnians, to Kosovars. It was not his mass 
     rapes, mass expulsions, and mass murders that brought 
     Milosevic down. What brought him down were the unhappy 
     consequences for Serbia of his failure in his ugly 
     adventures. And the notion that the opprobrium that was 
     visited upon Milosevic's Serbia was in any way deserved--that 
     it was the right result of Belgrade's criminal actions--seems 
     not to have figured prominently in the thinking of the 
     Serbian crowds. They revolted against their leader, but not 
     against themselves.
       Is it asking too much that a society revolt against itself? 
     It is surely asking a lot. Yet it has happened before; and 
     there are circumstances in which a new beginning requires 
     nothing less. The weight of history is heavier for being 
     unacknowledged. In this sense, President Clinton erred 
     significantly when he remarked that ``this is just as big a 
     blow for freedom as we saw when the Berlin Wall was torn 
     down, when Lech Walesa led the shipyard workers in Poland.'' 
     This was precisely the wrong parallel. I do not doubt that 
     there are many genuine democrats in Serbia; but the striking 
     fact, the discouraging fact, about the Serbian opposition 
     during the past decade is that it has not been characterized 
     by the stringent and exalted kind of dissidence that was 
     produced elsewhere in the orbit of communism, where figures 
     arose who directed their criticism at the foundations of 
     their own societies, and who expressed their criticism in 
     ferociously universal terms. Kostunica is certainly not such 
     a figure. He is not proposing such a fundamental examination. 
     It has often been remarked that Milosevic's regime was 
     communism surviving in the form of nationalism; but it is 
     important to observe that in Serbia anti-communism, too, 
     takes the form of nationalism. For this reason, it has been 
     only partially an uprising of conscience. And for this 
     reason, one's exhilaration at the denouement in Belgrade is a 
     little spoiled. . . .

     

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