Illusions and Opportunities

The righteous of the world believe they can overcome evil by confronting it, identifying its sins against humanity, holding it to account, judging and sentencing it to due penance. Take a life; take as many lives as you like. Give your own as a down payment for forgiveness. The court of world opinion surely overturns the meager support offered by a clique of like-minded supporters. You can run, but you cannot hide forever. Some kind of justice will eventually prevail. Or so goes the hope.

And the most staunch supporters of a nationalistic bully, an intransigently impenitent mass murderer will, over time, decide they have alternative options open to them. As options of alternative opportunity nothing, but nothing trumps economic advantage. Serbia has voted in a new government warmer to the West, and suddenly the image of the country as a pariah suffering the results of isolation and sanctions takes a 90-degree turn.

The massive upheavals with the dissolution of Yugoslavia with Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia finally free to express their traditional tribal loathing for one another treated the world to yet another massive break-down in civil authority and its resulting, unstoppable, brutal slaughter. No one who represents the persona of world-class infamy disappears off the face of the earth without someone knowing where they are, what they're doing.

When the time is right, the right timing makes its surprise opportunity to offer up a down payment on future respect and belonging. A nice start is the dissolution of all those tariffs and quotas Serbia has been labouring under, impacting on its trade and export potential. Despite the country's grievances against the EU and NATO supporting the recognition of independent Kosovo, it's ready to desert its champion Russia for this opportunity.

This "unseemly step", characterized by Russia's Gennady Zyuganov, as the result of "every form of rude political, economic and media pressure put on Belgrade by the West", will offer to Serbia the opportunity to rescue its exhausted economy through its future as part of the European Union. They give up Radovan Karadzic, they receive the promise of a bright economic future.

No contest.