Slobodan Milosevic was one of the many monsters spawned by Communism

* Slobodan Milosevic was one of the many monsters spawned by Communism. Growing up in President Tito's Yugoslavia, he learned to follow the Party's one great rule: that the ends always justify the means. And the ends were the simple ones of acquiring an unbreakable hold on power and wealth. Perhaps anyone chasing such ends so ruthlessly is disturbed by definition, but Milosevic was a very sad case.

Both his parents committed suicide. Almost certainly he arranged the murder of Ivan Stambolic, his patron in the Party and eventual president of Yugoslavia. Tito's Yugoslavia fell apart after 1991, in a close repeat of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Big Brother it had once copied but then quarreled with. Without missing a beat, Milosevic transferred the purposes and practices of Communism to Serb nationalism, whipping his fellow Serbs up to fight civil wars against the Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, and Kosovar Albanians. The misery of ethnic cleansing and genocide engulfed all these inhabitants of former Yugoslavia until NATO interventions put an end to it. Serbs themselves eventually came to see that their supposed champion had brought them nothing but death and destruction, and they handed him over to a special court set up under U.N. auspices to try him in The Hague. His trial had lasted for almost five inconclusive years. Probably he took the wrong medication, but he may have chosen to follow the example of both his parents, in the ambiguous final act of a dark career. R.I.P.

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