The end of Milosevic in the pictures from Belgrade suggest the last domino falling, ten years after similar scenes of Communism collapsing in Berlin, and Prague and Bucharest. Yet Yugoslavia is deeply different; this will never be remembered as a velvet revolution. It took ten years of appalling ethnic conflict to alienate all the neighbors, then to bring NATO’s American bombs down on Belgrade.
And in the teeming streets of Belgrade, after elections that Milosevic wanted to steal, it took the solidarity of miners and workers with students and the educated classes to take Milosevic out. They did it, said their rumpled, professorial new leader, in the name of their tortured and now widely despised nation of Serbia. “Big, beautiful Serbia has risen up,” shouted Vojislav Kostunica, “just so one man, Slobodan Milosevic, will leave.” The future of the new Yugoslavia, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Steven Erlanger, NY Times reporter
Stojan Cerovic, columnist for “Vreme”, an independent newsmagazine in Belgrade, and Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace
Senad Pecanin, editor-in-chief of “Dani”, a Sarajevo weekly publication, and Nieman Fellow at Harvard University
and TBA reporters on the ground in Belgrade.