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                                                                                MAN OF THE YEAR, Page 44

BILL CLINTON

The World's Other Newsmakers


By JAMES WALSH


    Karl Marx was a bearded Jehovah thundering through the
industrial age, but in outlook he would have been more at home
in knee breeches and a powdered wig. Like Jefferson and
Rousseau, he was a creature of the Enlightenment who viewed
history through a prism of universal principles and causes.
Nationalism, he believed, was an outmoded impulse that the world
would soon forget.

    Poor Marx: one more prophecy destined for the dustbin.
Poor world: one more menace to face down. No sooner did the
steamroller of communism run out of steam than the meat grinder
of nationalism began cranking up. The great year of liberation,
1989, gave way more fully in 1992 to localized fissures, war and
outright anarchy.

    Nostalgists for the cold war -- there are some -- like to
point out that the global ancien regime at least had an
architecture to it. The dismantlement of that fearful symmetry,
however, has provided an opening for freedoms where few or none
had existed for generations. In TIME's selection of
international Newsmakers of the Year, two stand out because of
the resolute ways in which they have tried to build on
democratic opportunities in Mexico and Hong Kong. The other two
are faces of the post-cold war world's micro-apocalypses: the
ringmaster of hostilities in the Balkan slaughterhouse and a
victim of Somalia's primal chaos.

    EUROPE
    The Butcher of The Balkans

    SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC is the high priest of "ethnic cleansing"

    Just a few years ago, any number of countries doted on
Yugoslavia as the Cinderella of the communist world.
Yugoslavia's rags-to-sufficiency story inspired other developing
nations, while its practice of a mere bikini kind of communism
fascinated the West. If any crisis lay in waiting, outsiders
believed, it would arise from a superpower duel for Yugoslavia's
hand in marriage. The postwar regime created by Josip Broz Tito
had been Europe's only Marxist government to resist Stalin's
importune advances. Albania broke out of the Soviet bloc 20
years later, but the cold war rivalry's choice prize in southern
Europe remained Tito's state.

    Yugoslavia's fate has been to show how far history can
defy expectations. Today the unraveled federation of southern
Slavs is Europe's ugly sister -- a cockpit of massacre and
rapine animated wholly by internal grudges. The violence that
has spread from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina is not only
a disaster in its own right and a torment to the world's
conscience, it is also a cautionary example of the ethnic blood
feuds that could yet engulf nearby parts of postcommunist
Europe.

    In this drama of substantive symbolism, no one has played
more of a commanding role than the man who came to power in the
Balkans preaching ethnic hatred: Slobodan Milosevic, the
51-year-old President of Serbia. The degree to which he has
instigated domestic strife has made him the embodiment of an
older European scourge: the spirit of tribalism, which has begun
to threaten much of the Continent again.

    In many ways, Milosevic's career has paralleled the slow,
unnoticed burning of the nationalist time bomb's long fuse. A
run-of-the-mill communist apparatchik for many years, the former
law student gradually gained prominence after the 1980 death of
Tito, whose iron grip had stifled the expression of ethnic
loyalties. In 1984 Milosevic became president of the Belgrade
city committee, rising two years later to membership in the
Serbian party presidency. Communism was losing its legitimacy,
though, and he sensed the need for a new focus if he were to
retain power. In 1989 he won Serbia's presidency by trampling
on Tito's key taboo and inflaming grievances against a cultural
minority.

    Milosevic's maiden venture in hatemongering was to target
Kosovo. Because ethnic Albanians make up 90% of the population
of this southernmost, upland province of Serbia, it had enjoyed
considerable autonomy for 15 years. Along with the heavily
ethnic-Hungarian province of Vojvodina in the far north, Kosovo
even had its own representative in the collective federal
presidency.

    Belgrade's super-Serb railed against Kosovo's Albanians in
the manner that Hitler voiced outlandish complaints about all
the supposed injustices visited on Germans by Poland and
Czechoslovakia: that is, Milosevic accused a politically weak
people of persecuting Serbs, Yugoslavia's dominant nationality.
That the province also happens to be the Serbs' proud homeland
of old, a subject of folklore and popular sentiment, made his
message a high-voltage provocation. He proceeded to strip Kosovo
of its privileges and to suppress local Albanian rights. A
European diplomat in Belgrade calls him "the man who let the
nationalist genie out of the bottle."

    Milosevic's eye for the main chance also served him when
communism performed its vanishing act all around him. Renaming
his party Socialist, he managed to stay in the saddle after
every other Marxist strong man in Central and Eastern Europe had
been toppled. But it was when Slovenia and Croatia seceded from
Yugoslavia last year that Milosevic's real talents for mischief
came to life. He charged that an independent Croatia, which had
been a Nazi puppet state during World War II, represented "some
kind of restoration of fascism." Because the Axis-allied
Croatian leadership had systematically killed Serbs, Gypsies and
Jews by the hundreds of thousands under the German occupation,
Croats today, according to Milosevic, threatened Serbs on their
territory with genocide. His 1989 rallying cry to fellow Serbs
about Kosovo -- "no one will ever beat you again" -- became the
cause for war.

    Long since then, of course, hostilities have spread from
Croatia, where at least 10,000 people were killed, to the
charnel house and moral wasteland that is Bosnia today. By
cautious estimates, at least 19,000 Bosnians, mostly Slavic
Muslims, have died -- many of them in the capital, Sarajevo --
as a result of a ferocious land-grab campaign by Serbs in the
mountainous republic. Supported rhetorically by Milosevic and
armed by the heavily Serb-officered Yugoslav army, the
insurgents have shelled, burned, looted, massacred and raped
their way to control of about 70% of Bosnian territory.
Altogether, nearly 1.5 million refugees have fled the lands that
used to compose Yugoslavia.

    What is left of the federation may be only a token
alliance between Serbia and little Montenegro, but it affords
a convenient cover for international purposes. In mid-1992
"Slobo," as the Serbian leader is popularly known, engineered
the return of American self-made pharmaceutical tycoon Milan
Panic, a Yugoslav emigre, to become federal Prime Minister and
a respectable face in the Balkan killing fields. Panic's
eventual mutiny in this role has illustrated not only how
impossible the job is but also the extent to which the many
decent or at least exhausted Serbs want to silence the drums of
nationalism.

    While Milosevic campaigned for re-election in recent weeks
by assuring his flabbergasted countrymen that U.N.-imposed
economic sanctions on Serbia have had no effect -- in reality,
industrial production is down one-third and unemployment is
approaching 40% -- Panic ran against him on an end-the-war
platform. In the end, Milosevic by all accounts resorted to
outrageous propaganda and vote rigging to clinch the Dec. 20
election, suggesting that the strong man, while still popular,
is no universal hero at home.

    In one of his typically nonconformist essays, Bertrand
Russell once dissected the fallacy of regarding oppressed
peoples as morally superior. The fact that they are tyrannized,
the British philosopher observed, does not mean that they will
perform wonders of nobility and high-mindedness once given their
freedom. On the contrary: as unfolding events are proving,
communism, even Tito's diluted