Kostunica has said he favors some kind of truth commission to investigate "our crimes and the crimes of others." Again, the Susan Sontags of the world hate this idea. They *don't* want the Serbs to do what the Croats are doing - - to say "we committed terrible crimes too." They want the Serbs to say: "It was all our fault. We accept the Madeleine Albright version of Yugoslav history. We are the perpetrators and everyone else is a victim." And Serbia is no more willing to do that than Croatia - or anyone else - is.
Seth
Some Serbs, like some of any nationality (say Poles, witness the uproar over the Jan T. Gross book on the village that massacred all the Jews before the Nazis had a chance http://www.thenewrepublic.com/040901/anders040901.html ), gave into their long standing nationalist mythology around Prince Lazar and the field of blackbirds, Turks, the battle of 1389, and Albanian breeding and impaling and all that nonsense. Nobrica Cosic and the other authors of the Memorandum to the Academy of Sciences that gave legitimation to a revisionist revanchism that split asunder Yugoslav inter-ethnic comity, have alot to answer for. (See the Laura Secor Lingua Franca piece on the Praxis philosophers that added to the ideological cover. http://www.linguafranca.com/9909/testbet.html )The SPS/JUL/Serb Radical Party alliance, was in a fucked situation given the IMF indebtedness incurred in the late Tito period, and poured ethno-nationalist racist hatred into the fire. I don't discount the external factors, esp. German and US, but any reading of texts like Robert Thomas, " The Politics of Serbia in the 90's, " or the books by Michael Sells, Laura Silber, Lenard Cohen, or Julie Mertus on Kosovo, from UC Press, and numerous others shows that, the range of political alternatives in Serbia in the 90's was not limited solely to bloc that led the nation into it's disastrous corner. Giving into the worst aspects of one's political culture, whether the hyperpower most of us on the list live in, or a humiliated, self-pitying one, is never pretty. The bigger the nationalist ediface the bigger the amt. of body bags produced. Apologia for Big bullies or little bullies, bah on it!
Anyway, the the TRC in Serbia is already on the way to being established, according to this in SF Chronicle recently. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/04 /MN200131.DTL
On TRC's so far see Reed Brophy reviewing some new books in the latest Nation. He wrote,"Contra Terror in Nicaragua, " for South End Press around '84 so is no social imperialist. At least not then...
Michael Pugliese, walking down to the John Burton Federal Building to renew my Social Imperialist credentials ;-) at Nancy Pelosi's office...Will ask her staffer, Fred Ross, Jr. about his Dad and Cesar Chavez and the UFW.
p.s. Seth's main point on Croatian fascism under Tudjman is incontestible. Tudjman's regime recycled all the Ustashe ideology of the WWII period. The Serbs during WWII had many victims under the Ante Pavelic(spelling?) regime. And Tudjman was a Holocaust Rvisionist. But remember it was secret meeting between Milosevic and Tudjman at Tito's mountain hunting lodge in Karadjordevo on March 25, 1991 (described in a book I can't really recommend except for the endnotes, the bio by Dusko Doder of Milosevic) that divided up into Croat and Serb areas the desired spoils in Bosnia. You might call it their Stalin-Hitler pact. Poland and Serbia both have a rotten place in the geo-political map.