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Last week, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić gave a speech in Kosovo where, among other things, he called the late Serbian strongman and war criminal Slobodan Milošević, who died in 2006, a “great Serbian leader,” adding that “he certainly had the best of intentions, although our results were much worse.” It was a hell of a way to describe a corrupt, nationalist autocrat who helped engineer the break-up of his own country while abetting campaigns of mass rape and genocide. The speech naturally raised eyebrows in the region, not least because Vučić — who cracked down on opposition media as Milošević’s information minister — is meant to be a “reformed” ultranationalist. It wasn’t just regional voices, however: both the US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Washington Post published articles noting the outrage from Serbia’s neighbors over the comments. Both were pieces of straight reporting, but the obvious takeaway from each — and indeed, what other takeaway can there be? — is that one should be disturbed by the praise being given to an authoritarian war criminal. This isn’t a new theme in Western establishment media, which has long been sounding the alarm over the rehabilitation of Milošević within Serbia. In the mid-2000s, Serbian prosecutors and courts took steps to shield Milošević and his family from justice for a variety of criminal acts, while sympathetic politicians rounded on the family’s critics. Newspapers warned that the election of a nationalist government to power, coupled with Milošević’s own clever manipulation of public opinion, had contributed to a revival of public standing for both himself and the values he championed. Meanwhile, Western outlets and prominent officials warned that Serbia’s refusal to deal with its past, coupled with the work of friendly media in the country, had aided this rehabilitation. This year, Milošević’s former party called for the erection of a monument to the once–unpopular strongman in the Serbian capital. His former allies, including Vučić and convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj recently won control of nearly 80 percent of seats in parliament, and have found themselves appointed returned to prominent positions. It’s hardly controversial to point out that this is not good. There are few, if any, in US or other Western establishment media circles who would disagree that the rehabilitation of war criminals and the return to prominence and power of his former acolytes is a worrying trend. So why does the press fail to apply this same analysis in the United States?