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Old 03-11-2006, 09:34 AM   #1 (permalink)
Sir, I have a plan...
 
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Location: 38S NC20943324
Slobo dead at 64. We don't still need you, we won't still feed you...

Milosevich died in his cell today, depriving the world of any real justice for his crimes. Oh well, perhaps it was painful.


Story
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Old 03-11-2006, 10:47 AM   #2 (permalink)
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hrmm i wondered if "died by natural causes" meant tortured to death
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Old 03-11-2006, 12:01 PM   #3 (permalink)
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Strangely enough,the chief witness against him committed suicide in the same prison just last week.
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Old 03-11-2006, 12:23 PM   #4 (permalink)
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Location: Ontario, Canada
Quote:
Originally Posted by blar
hrmm i wondered if "died by natural causes" meant tortured to death
I don't think of torture as a typical Dutch means of treating prisoners.

Welp, he was gonna die in prison at some point any way, he just saved all concerned a bag of cash. First good thing he ever did.
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Old 03-11-2006, 01:34 PM   #5 (permalink)
Kick Ass Kunoichi
 
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Location: Oregon
Quote:
Originally Posted by highthief
I don't think of torture as a typical Dutch means of treating prisoners.
Yeah, definitely not...the Dutch just don't do torture. Unless you consider torture a diet of salted herring and potatoes...
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Old 03-11-2006, 02:46 PM   #6 (permalink)
Apocalypse Nerd
 
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Quote:
Last Train To Serbia



Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his cell in The Hague this morning. Doctors are saying that natural causes claimed the man called "the butcher of the Balkans."

I've been rummaging through my old laptop, looking for an e-mail I sent to my folks in October, 2000, when a popular uprising ended his 13 years of iron reign. I'd spent that summer reporting from Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, as it appeared that Milosevic was trying to draw his little neighbor into another Balkan war. The Serbians weren't exactly passing out visas to American reporters, and we were all growing restless as Slobo's plans to steal an election started backfiring. The miners were revolting. Crowds stormed Parliament. We needed to get into Belgrade.

This is what I wrote home back then:

First in was a guy from London. He bought a forged visa and took the night train from Podgorica. He was in Belgrade for days before the revolution, and had this incredible exclusive, how kids and miners and crackers from Cacak were overthrowing Slobodan Milosevic. Except his newspaper was running out of money, and cut off his cell phone, so he lost most of his advantage. A couple of reporters from familiar American papers went next. They did what I was unwilling to do: pay about $2,000 for the right documentation and an escort by former Tigers -- the brutal paramilitarymen who used to run with Arkan, the now-dead, baby-faced killer. The Tigers would flash state security badges and road blocks would open. Totally safe, I was told. I wanted no part of that.

Finally, when I heard from my fixer that a rival was about to fly on a dubious visa, I called the desk one more time, and said I was going. Just take your translator, they said, since you've never been there, you don't speak the language and you used to collect records for a living (they didn't say this last one).

So Friday night I made my move. Twenty four hours before, when this 'spontaneous' storming of the Yugoslav Parliament occurred -- it was more of a diagrammed play -- someone broke into their Interior Ministry and lifted all these visa stamps and ink pads. Perfect-looking stamps from Paris, London, The Hague, of all places. These people knew what to steal.

The stamps made it quickly down to Montenegro where there was a ready, paying audience and went on the market for about $750. So I worked until about 2 a.m. writing the day's events from a flat in Podgorica, where I watched the BBC, had internet access and a short-wave, taking feeds from a stringer I found in Belgrade, who was in all the right places. I was going in.

I was to fly the next morning at 8 a.m. About 6:30 my fixer-translator showed up, and he looked like hell. There's been a problem, he told me. After the guy doing my passport finished stamping it with a Serbian visa, he'd gone out drinking, then got into a fight. Spent the night in jail. My passport was locked in his apartment.

Luckily my fixer had a friend in the police department, who organized a little raid, during which he grabbed my passport. My fixer then produced the passport wearily from his pocket - he'd stayed up all night making this work. But he was too exhausted to make the trip with me.

I was on my own.

Jump ahead to the Belgrade airport. I'm sitting on my luggage, reading Cider House Rules, with a dubious visa in my passport and the phone number of a friendly driver in my pocket. I'm trying not to look like how I feel. A uniformed woman who reminds me of the evil Col. Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love, barks Journalists, and points to a waiting area, where Serb airport police are going through a stack of reporters' passports.

Mine is near the end, and I get to meet the other characters on the flight, all of whom have under similarly dodgy circumstances. And as it turns out, none of this sweat and expense is necessary - we all get in, the right paperwork or not. Thanks for your contribution to the local economy. The guards -- two young women and a guy - are laughing giddily, as they pronounce our names and papers. Or maybe they're laughing at the fact we'd just spent what to them is nearly a year's salary on these bogus visas that are no longer required. With 580 journalists flooding in over three days, they just opened the gates, not sure what to do with us. Our admission was probably calculated; the Democratic opposition needed us there to start writing about the revelations of Milosevic's thievery. And we know something about thievery.

I arrive in the center of the city, check into this old hotel, and sit down at a cafe, where the first person I see is one the guys who went in with the Tigers. Effortlessly. Soon I run into the Dutch radio reporters, a lovely couple, I'd shared the Podgorica flat with. They'd tried to get in from three border points. Finally, they were let in at a fourth, across the country. They, too were exhausted, but delirious. Everyone had managed to get in, each with an amazing story, and all the work was beginning.

Everything is being re-invented. The state radio is now mentioning Vojislav Kostunica's name. Television stations cover the opposition like they are the home team -- in fact they are too homery, and have just applied their biases to the winning side. News readers speak at 400 miles per hour, looking down, moving on quickly. This is when the TVs aren't playing a popular musical form, championed by Milosevic's wife, known as Turbo Folk.

A media center is where we start off each day, learning what press announcements there would be. We get the day's planned events, formulate a strategy, then we drop it because the everything is breaking so furiously. One day I pursued four before writing a fifth. Luckily I have six extra hours each day, given the time difference. I need every minute.

Anyway, after a day and a half it's Yom Kippur. I've been working several weeks straight, and I force myself off deadline and find an old synagogue not far from the Hotel Majestic. It is down some stairs and through an old alley, then past some policemen guarding the building - those same guys we feared were going to do in the protesters - then to a man who asks my translator what I was doing there and if I was Jewish. They let me in. This tiny old temple is clean, well-lit and completely filled.

The Torah comes around as soon as I enter, and I touch it, then kiss my fingertips, wondering if I've taken the day off just to get some rest or if it is some deep religious need I'm filling. Even if the service is hard to understand, I'm going to sit there and think, and at some point the worries of the moment will lift. With no seats available I stand in back, happily, recognizing words and bits of melody if not the style of the service, with the men chanting in unison.

I find a place upstairs where these young women are sitting by the rail, their hair dyed the color of paprika. One wears a nose stud. They are about 20, and when the service ends, I ask in slow English what time the next day's events start. They answer in perfect English, and as I walk out behind them, I keep muttering, 'I can't believe we bombed these people.'

This becomes a mantra over the next few days, when one of the congregates named Doron introduces himself -- "I am computer expert and I also have small business,' he announces - and he mentions that there are only 2,000 Jewish families left in Yugoslavia. Like everyone I talk to, he is flooded with optimism. I remember a professor who told how he was saving for the day when Milosevic was finally gone. He would go out and buy a new pair of shoes. He got so carried away he bought two.

What I will remember most about Belgrade 2000 is young couples kissing in the streets, as if they have reclaimed a corner of Paris in the Balkans. After Berlin, Belgrade feels like a city of light, from both the plentiful sun, and the warmth of people who are joyous for the first time in years.

On the third day I kept hearing this choo-choo song, a children's sing song, with strange comic voices, and I found the record for sale at one of the kiosks that sell bootlegged cds and toiletries. It was done by a radio comedy group, a spoof of Milosevic and his wife in the bunker, like Adolph and Eva, wondering how they would find more votes, which countries had no extradition treaties.

Last Train to Serbia it was called. It was hysterical in any language and I remember the scene the day it came out -- young couples were laughing, an older toothless man was talking excitedly to me in Serbian, and this tiny bearded man, a street person in an over-sized coat, was dancing to this music as if it were coming from somewhere deep inside him. They had really overthrown evil. The next day, I saw the little man asleep on the sidewalk, a small tower of coins sitting next to him. I found a few Dinars in my pocket and raised his tower by a few modest stories.

The place needs care. It needs scrubbing, telephone service, more Italian chefs, though I loved the Serbian grill I had for lunch one day, my last, when my work was nearly done. We sat in an old Turkish section of town and they gave my hunks of rough bread and a mixed grill of sausages, veal, spicy hamburger and what I imagine was liver from its reptilian texture.

When I had to file stories, I was in trouble. the phones just didn't work, but then I found an internet cafe, and so while most the American press stayed at the Hyatt or the Intercontinental at the edge of the city, I remained downtown in an old suite for half the price and got on line by walking 10 minutes to this place filled with young people trying out their English on me, going online for about 60 cents a half hour, and having waiters serve me espresso and mineral water while I worked. The wiring needs work - the cell network doesn't allow you to use your phone for most of the day and night and hotels are not able to provide even low-speed connections. But while I was in the internet cafe, listening to Texas bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughan while I typed, the guys next to me were burning MP3s - downloading and copying cd-quality music off the WEB - with complete mastery of the technology.

This revolution came from the young and the hungry, powered by men from the provinces who had nothing to lose and drove tractors through police blockades. And supported by mothers who couldn't understand why authorities would call their children terrorists for belonging to student protest groups. Slobo, surrounded for years by yes men, got blindsided in broad daylight.
http://blogs.philly.com/blinq/2006/0...in_was_a_.html

Everyone dies sometime... even those deserving of a more horrid death.
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Old 03-11-2006, 04:23 PM   #7 (permalink)
Beware the Mad Irish
 
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Location: Wish I was on the N17...
May the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace. You, Mr. Milosevic, will burn in hell forever.
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