abstract:The history of Modern Serbia began with the fight for liberation from the Ottoman occupation in 1804 (Serbian Revolution). The establishment of modern Serbia was marked by the hard fought autonomy from the Ottoman Empire in the First Serbian Uprising in 1804 and the Second Serbian Uprising in 1815, though Turkish troops continued to garrison the capital, Belgrade until 1867.
For Serbia itself, the republic that Mr Milosevic so brutally and ineffectually sought to aggrandise in four Balkan wars, the trial will, with luck, help to provide a more accurate account of recent history than the Serbia-as-victim version that Serbs still tend to believe.
Its bombing campaign may be one of the most precise and careful in history, in stark contrast to Serbia's murderous campaign against Albanian civilians in Kosovo.
The difficulty for Serbia, as shown by Pejovic's testimony, is that it has a historyof racism not just at club level but also at international level, which Milosevic acknowledged, though he insisted that the problem "is no more than in other European countries".