By Mariam Durrani
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday Feb. 15, 2002
I once knew two sisters. We all lived on Second Street. One day, a new family moved in the neighborhood. These people were completely foreign to our little sheltered corner of the world.
The sisters, Amy and Sharon, were usually very polite to people, except for the foreigners. They took an evil pleasure in teasing the foreign children. The rest of us kids didn't say much - we were scared the teasing would also target us.
One day, when we weren't looking, Amy crept up behind one of the boys, Jimmy, and beat him up. He went home with blood everywhere, but we didn't see the fight ourselves, so we chose not to say anything. Jimmy, being new, didn't want to alienate anyone, so he kept quiet.
Sharon picked on another kid, Timmy, who was also my best friend. She had brought a bat from home and completely bludgeoned the poor guy in front of all of us.
This was more than we could tolerate, so we kicked her out of all of our secret societies and never played with her again. Sharon thought it wasn't such a big deal since Amy got away with it, and she started badmouthing the rest of us.
She actually thought she was in the right for what she did and expected us to support her. After the incident, everyone excluded both Amy and Sharon and they continued to stir up trouble for us.
What would you have done in this scenario? If you were the first boy? Or if you were Sharon or Amy or one of the neighborhood kids? And what relevance does this story have?
But here is the most important lesson from the story: Is what Amy did any less wicked and malicious than what Sharon did? The only difference is that we didn't really see when and how Amy beat up Jimmy, and now Sharon beat up my best friend, so I was more hurt to see it. However, Amy still tortured an innocent person because he was different. Shouldn't she have gotten the same banishing from our group as Sharon did?
Let's rename the girls and boys. Amy becomes Slobodan Milosevic and Jimmy represents the people of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Sharon is Osama bin Laden, while Timmy is another name for America. My simple story really doesn't explain all aspects of the conflicts between these people, but it does give you an example of how we have misjudged the seriousness of the Yugoslav atrocities when no one was looking.
In this age, technology allows us to see everything that happens in the news. I wish that 10 years ago the evilness of Milosevic's regime was witnessed on the news just as we witnessed the WTC bombing. Maybe the torture of all the Balkan people would have lasted less than 10 years. The simple act of witnessing the event has made our anger hotter and our reaction stronger.
Milosevic must never walk free. In fact, he should be burned alive and made to suffer endless tortures for the bitter racial conflicts that sparked due to his nationalistic Serbian regime.
All the countries who were previously ready to kill each other rejoiced in his arrest and trial. Ever since he was elected to the Serbian Communist Party and then president of Yugoslavia in 1990, he has tried everything to gain power for himself by stomping on everyone else. From the first day, his communist and pro-Serb mentality made Yugoslavia a terrifying place for everyone to live.
Milosevic was the head of the evil system that began a 10-year war. During this war, there were many tragedies that usually occur during war: killing, bombing, etc.
But there was an even more dangerous side of this war. Milosevic began an evil theme called "ethnic cleansing." Croats, Bosnians and Kosovans alike were deported to detention centers where they were starved, beaten and tortured. Sound familiar? Like Nazi camps?
They were all that and more. Pictures of these camps look like hell on Earth. I could see each and every bone on one man's sad body because he was simply skin and bones. Of course, there were also the comebacks from the other armies against ethnic Serbs. However, they were more along the lines of retaliation instead of extermination for being different.
But what's done is done. This war is for the most part over. Milosevic is being tried at The Hague for 66 counts of war crimes. It is said to be the biggest hearing since the trials of Hitler's henchmen.
But I haven't told you the ironic part yet. Milosevic refuses to recognize the legality of the tribunal. He says it is a ploy by the West against the Serbian people instead of justice for his actions against the Balkan States. He refuses to have a lawyer and has not yet made a plea to the tribunal.
Despite his lame attempts to trivialize his crimes, he should suffer fiercely in the hands of justice.
