Slobodan Milosevic:The Butcher of the Balkans

From a leather chair in his spacious office in Belgrade, with a tin of his beloved cigarillos within reach, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic strives to keep the war at arm's length. In a rare interview, perhaps granted to deflect the blame for the carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he contended that Yugoslavia's bloody dissolution stems solely from the secessionist demands of the other republics. "All processes in the contemporary world tend toward integration," he said. "Nationalistic tendencies are against that general flow, that big river, that Mississippi." Confused? There is this clarifying coda: "In Serbia nationalists are not in power."

That is just...