An Unfinished Chapter Closes

Sipping the first bit of coffee Saturday morning, a news wire headline snapped me wide awake with a shock. Slobodan Milosevic was dead.

A flood of questions and emotions come over me quickly, all at once. Was it suicide? How? What did this mean? Was he really gone? Were his wars really over now?

Many memories of my time in the Balkans during the wars of the 1990s flashed through my mind. The emotional parade ended rather quickly with the feeling that it was over. It was finally over. Truly, there was a lack of justice in his untimely death. But for a lack of a better word, there was a sort of closure when I read he was dead.

Old pal Adam LeBor has a brilliant op/ed piece in today's New York Times about how the Balkan dictator got away. It helps with that feeling of unjust closure.

Mr. Milosevic's death is a psychological as well as a political watershed. This is a time for both closure and commencement in Serbia: closure of an era rooted in myth, victimhood and maudlin self-pity, and a long overdue commencement of Serbia's coming to terms with its own past and the bloody role its politicians and generals played in fomenting war. Now, more than ever, Serbia can — indeed must — finally break free of Slobodan Milosevic's dark legacy, so that the country can take its rightful place in Europe. Posted by Jim at March 15, 2006 08:22 AM