Serbia calls convicted genocide commander's funeral private, sends ministers and state media to eulogize him anyway.

…(cont) I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this, but I want to take it from the date first. He died August 27th, eighty-four years old. The funeral the Times covered ran September 7th. Eleven days is enough time to plan a private service, or enough time to plan the other kind. Which one took eleven days?

I'm sorry, I keep going back to it, but now I want to take it from the cost. On September 4th, three days before the funeral, the European Union's enlargement commissioner canceled her trip to Belgrade. She's the one who handles the paperwork for countries that want to join the EU, and she called what was happening a glorification of a convicted war criminal. I don't know what a canceled diplomatic visit costs a country hoping to join, but I know it isn't nothing. What did private cost them, if it cost them that?

I have a folding table in my garage, the kind with legs that stick, and it takes two grown men to carry it from the garage to the driveway for the parish picnic. I keep thinking about that table, because in my experience a private thing doesn't require a lot of hands to move it. Ministers are heavy furniture too. Somebody has to decide to carry them in, and somebody has to decide where they stand once they're there. I'm sorry, I know this is the same fact I keep circling, but I keep noticing how many hands it took.

I'm sorry, one more angle, but I wrote this down, too: he was serving a life sentence, in a prison in the Netherlands, for genocide. That's the court's word, not mine, and it's the same court whether the funeral is called private or not. Does a life sentence for genocide change size depending on who's standing next to the casket?

So I'll say the fact the same way one more time, because by now I think it's the only honest way left to say it: the government insisted the funeral was a private affair.

Oh — before you go. I almost left out the part about the paperwork. The commissioner who canceled her trip, the one who decides whether a country is ready to join the European Union, made that call three days before thousands of people gathered in public to mourn him. She didn't call it private. Neither did state television, apparently, since somebody had to be there to cover it. Was any of it private, or just the part they didn't want to bill for?