Many of the dead were children. Soldiers routinely raped women before executing them. There can be no doubt, too, that President Reagan was an avid supporter of the implicated military forces, that he supplied them with weapons and that he actively sought to discredit human rights investigators and journalists who exposed the crimes. But for Milosevic and four of his henchmen, there are war crime indictments. On May 27, they were formally charged with the murders of 340 named ethnic Albanians and the forced deportation of some 740,000 others.
Accountability requires at minimum a recognition of responsibility.
With his jovial style, Reagan was a principal culprit in that sorry reality. But worse, the continuing blindness to the U.S. role in crimes against humanity in Central America in the 1980s has brought that weakness and deceit into and through the 1990s, now as a permanent trait of Washington's political class. Without doubt, it is safer for an American journalist or politician to wag a finger at Milosevic or at the killers in Rwanda or at the Khmer Rouge than it is to confront the guilt that pervaded Ronald Reagan's presidency. Nothing makes them madder than to hear their hero disparaged. Ironically, many of the conservatives who today advocate rock-hard moral values and who deplore fuzzy moral relativism embraced exactly that sort of situational ethic in the 1980s.