Surrounded by controversy since becoming Serbia’s president in 1989, Slobodan Milosevic has even managed a controversial death. On trial over the past four years for alleged war crimes, Milosevic died in a detention block at The Hague on Saturday, reportedly of a heart attack. Questions have since arisen surrounding the prospect of him either having been poisoned or having taken his own life. Either way, his death angered chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte, who felt she had been robbed of bringing a guilty verdict against the late Serbian ex-president. That verdict would have delighted the opinion shapers of the European Union and its journalistic hacks in the West.

But was Milosevic truly guilty—or was he scapegoated to humble a traditionally loyal friend of Anglo-America, the Serbian peoples of the Balkan Peninsula?

“Behind every hero stands a traitor.” So goes an old saying in the Balkans. As renowned commentator on the Balkan nations Fitzroy Maclean observed, the difficulty is to determine which is which. Was Milosevic a hero or a traitor to his fellow Serbs and the peoples of old Yugoslavia?

Milosevic came to power as rumbles started to vibrate apart the Iron Curtain that had protected postwar Yugoslavia, under the strong-willed resistance by Marshal Tito until his death in 1980, from incursion by the Soviet Union. Milosevic was elected president of Serbia in 1989.

When Germany united, East with West, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, that nation found a newly focused voice in foreign policy. It was to the Balkans that the German government turned its first attention in this respect.

Within Yugoslavia, former Nazi supporter Franjo Tudjman was elected president of Croatia in the spring of 1990 only months after the Berlin Wall fell. Tudjman was supported by Germany and the Vatican, against all other world opinion to the contrary, when Croatia seceded from the Yugoslav federation in 1991. Those familiar with the results of the Vatican and Germany working their policies in tandem regarding the Balkan Peninsula shuddered at what might come next. They did not have to wait long to see their worst fears materialize. The history of the 1930s and ’40s was about to be repeated. One of those who remembered that history was Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. He determined to resist this trend.

Soon after being elected, Tudjman commenced a purge of Serbs in the Serbian-dominated region of Vukovar within Croatia. When the Yugoslav federal Army marched into Vukovar to contend with the situation, in 1991, it found the streets strewn with the corpses of Serbian civilians slaughtered by the Croats.

In 1993, Tudjman followed up the slaughterous attacks in Vukovar by moving in on another Serbian enclave within Croatia, Krajina.

Similar purges occurred in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, and in the Albanian-dominated breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999.

The success of the effort to remove the largely non-Catholic Serbian population from Vatican/German-supported Croatia may be measured by current demographics. Before the war, there were 600,000 Serbs living in Croatia. Now there are fewer than 100,000.

In the widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 1999, of which the most significant examples occurred in the Croatian regions of Vukovar and Krajina, large numbers of Serbs were murdered or forced to flee, expelled from their traditional homelands.

During this time, Slobodan Milosevic became a familiar figure to news watchers as the Balkan wars raged throughout the decade. He railed against the illegal nato wars which were conducted on the European Union’s behalf without any benefit of a UN resolution in support. However, the pro-Croatian, pro-Albanian well-oiled EU spin machine, supported by dubious anti-Serb reporting from the Western press, resulted in Milosevic and his fellow Serb patriots, traditional allies of the West in two world wars, being viewed as pariahs.

Now, following the death of Milosevic, once again that anti-freedom-loving machinery of spin has cranked into gear. As British political economist Rodney Atkinson snapped in response to this latest exhibition of extreme journalistic bias, “In the week of the death of Milosevic, anti-Serb propaganda reaches a peak with not a single word of praise for a people who have in all three European wars of the 20th century proved their anti-fascist credentials. Instead it is the propaganda of Croatian fascism, German imperialism and bbc appeasement which defends the attack on Yugoslavia (illegal on at least seven counts under international law) and its breakup into the same petty nationalist states with clerical fascist governments which Nazism and fascism constructed in the 1940s” (www.freenations.freeuk.com).

Whether or not Milosevic died of natural causes, or was poisoned or committed suicide, the fact remains that the extent of the deceit perpetrated by the mass media concerning the Balkan wars and accusations of Serbian culpability remains. In the meantime, that first foreign-policy goal of the united Germany has resulted in that nation now being granted the virtually imperial post of high representative in Bosnia. This is tantamount to transforming Bosnia-Herzegovina into a colony of the German-dominated EU. And Kosovo is well on the way to becoming the EU’s next Balkan colony.

With Albania, Croatia and Slovenia already not much more than vassals of Berlin, it only remains for little Montenegro and a struggling, divided Serbia to capitulate to EU dominance—and then Milosevic’s worst dreams, were he alive to see it, will have become a reality. The power that sought, in two great world wars, to dominate the Balkan Peninsula and to suppress the Serbian allies of the free West will have achieved its imperialist aspirations. But this time, it had its traditional enemy, the Anglo-Americans, fight the wars in its stead, the taxpayers of its traditional enemy nations pay for those wars and much of the following reconstruction—and the diplomats of its traditional enemy nations massage the agreements and treaties into position to virtually hand the Balkan prize over on a silver platter.

In the words of Rodney Atkinson describing this remarkable process currently rebuilding the ancient Vatican/German-dominated Holy Roman Empire, old Yugoslavia will shortly be “governed by an anti-democratic pseudo elite bent on surrender to that new combination of German imperialism and European fascism which is the European Union” (ibid.).