Sunday Morning News

Milosevic's Rise to Power

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Slobodan Milosevic is not the only Balkan leader linked to the region's genocide and suffering.

CNN's Jim Clancy has more on that, and a profile of the man some call a hate monger.

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DUSAN T. BATAKOVIC, COUNCIL FOR DEMOCRATIC CHANGE: In a way, Milosevic is a butcher of the Balkans. Above all, he's a butcher of the Serbs; he destroyed his own nation in order to impose himself as an absolute ruler. He had good assistance in this war business. He was enterprising in Kuchun (ph), in Kujiman (ph), in Misobdeveric (ph) and some Albanian, Kosovo leaders. And I don't think that he would be successful if he was the only one.

JIM CLANCY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It is not only Serbs who hold the view that Slobodan Milosevic could not have produced three full-scale Balkan wars on his own. Leaders in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia also played their roles.

DANIEL SERWER, INSTITUTE FOR PEACE: They were trying to hold on to power; they were using nationalism to hold on to power. What was different about Milosevic was his willingness to use violence to consolidate a Serb-controlled territory carved out of Croatia and Bosnia. That was significantly different from the others, though the others rose to the occasion, of course, and responded with violence, as well.

CLANCY: However the Western media chose to portray the conflict, Slobodan Milosevic and, most notably, Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, both used state-controlled media to strike fear in the hearts of their people: fear of annihilation by the other.

In the tumult of change brought by the collapse of Communism, it worked all too well. Historians insist he has always put his interest above all others.

BATAKOVIC: While most of the Serbs believed that he's a nationalist who's pretending to be a Communist, actually he was only a Communist pretending to be a nationalist.

CLANCY: But that mask has been stripped off. What remains is an accounting for a decade of bloodshed and tragedy in the Balkans. Jim Clancy, CNN.

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