Milosevic: The End of The Line

By ROMESH RATNESAR Monday, July 09, 2001
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Justice knocked at six in the evening last Thursday for Slobodan Milosevic. It was St. Vitus' Day, a date steeped in Serbian history, myth and eerie coincidence: on June 28, 1389, Ottoman invaders defeated the Serbs at the battle of Kosovo; 525 years later, a young Serbian nationalist assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, lighting the fuse for World War I. And it was on St. Vitus' Day, 1989, that Milosevic whipped a million Serbs into a nationalist frenzy in the speech that capped his ascent to power.

A tiny fraction of that throng gathered last Thursday night...