March 29, 2006

A five part series on Yugoslavia. The Dominion (Canada)

 

 

 This is an outstanding five part series on Yugoslavia. After reading this, no one can say, "I didn't know."  
 

This link:  http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/22/peace_from.html takes you to all the series. 
 
The Dominion - Canada's Grassroots Newspaper
 
A five part series on Yugoslavia that covers the following:  

Part 1:  Milosevic the Guilty? http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/17/milosevic_.html

Part 2:  The Origins of the War in the Balkans http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/18/the_origin.html

Part 3:  The Media War http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/19/the_media_.html

Part 4:  The Good Guys http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/20/the_good_g.html

Part 5:  Peace from Above http://dominionpaper.ca/media_analysis/2006/03/22/peace_from.html

"In 1999, NATO planes dropped twenty thousand tonnes of bombs on targets in the former Yugoslavia, killing upwards of 3,000 human beings and injuring thousands more. Targets included power plants, hospitals, industrial infrastructure, schools, churches, historic sites, water and sewage facilities, apartment buildings, temporary housing for refugees, traveling refugees, the state television station, bridges, and socially-owned, worker-run factories."

March 28, 2006

Ceku must face justice

 



http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/492868.html

The Halifax Herald

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA | Tuesday March 28, 2006

Opinion

Ceku must face justice

By SCOTT TAYLOR / On Target

LAST WEEK, I just happened to be in Belgrade attending a conference on the future status of Kosovo when the funeral for former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was held.

True to form, the western media's coverage of these events presented accused war criminal Milosevic as evil incarnate and the Serbian people, by extension, as something bordering on the subhuman.

Almost entirely lost in the frenzy to heap responsibility for a decade's worth of death and destruction into Slobo's coffin was the announcement that the Albanians in Kosovo have just selected a new prime minister.

To have examined this development in the slightest would have served to spread around some of the blame and to illustrate that the Serbs certainly did not have a monopoly on war crimes during those bloody civil wars. In fact, if one only casually glances at the resume of the incoming prime minister, Agim Ceku, it becomes apparent that his election flies in the face of international justice, foreshadows more violence in Kosovo and ignores the sacrifices and valour of our Canadian Forces.

In summary, Ceku, an Albanian Kosovar by birth, began his military career as an officer in the former federal Yugoslavian army. When the initial Yugoslav breakup occurred in 1991, Ceku was quick to switch his loyalty to the Croatian cause. As a colonel in the Croatian army, Ceku commanded the notorious 1993 operation in what is known as the Medak Pocket.

It was here that the men of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the savagery of which Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then trained by U.S. instructors as a general of artillery, was still at large. In fact, he was the officer responsible for shelling the Serbian refugee columns and for targeting the UN-declared "safe" city of Knin during the Croatian offensive known as Operation Storm. Some 500 innocent civilians perished in those merciless barrages, and senior Canadian officers who witnessed the slaughter demanded that Ceku be indicted. Once again, their pleas fell of deaf ears.

Just a few months after the Storm atrocities, Canada's own Louise Arbour began making a name for herself as the chief prosecutor for the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Despite the Canadian connection to these alleged crimes, Arbour and her lawyers chose instead to pursue more "politically prominent" individuals such as Milosevic, and other senior Serbs, while nothing was done to bring Ceku to justice.

Fast-forward to January 1999, and the world's attention begins to focus on a war-ravaged Kosovo. With the blessing of the U.S. State Department and NATO, Ceku takes his retirement (at age 37) from the Croatian army and is pronounced supreme commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Throughout the air campaign against Yugoslavia, Ceku was portrayed as a loyal ally and he was frequently present at NATO briefings with top generals such as Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson (see photo at http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/pictures.htm).

Under the terms of the June 1999 Kosovo peace deal, Ceku's Albanian guerrillas were to be disarmed and reconstituted into a UN-sponsored (non-military) disaster relief organization known as the Kosovo Protection Corps. But despite the fact that they now collected UN paycheques, Ceku's men never gave up their guns - nor their quest for a Greater Albania

From the armed Albanian incursions into southern Serbia in 2000 - and Macedonia in 2001 - right up until the violent pogrom unleashed against Kosovo Serbs in March 2004, Ceku's brand of violence, hatred and ethnic cleansing has remained unchanged.

Now he is being hailed as a political leader, and the world is once again turning a blind eye to his crimes.

Hopefully, Canada at least will respect the eyewitness testimony of our own peacekeepers and finally insist that Ceku face the same justice that was demanded of Slobodan Milosevic.

Presenting the soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry with a belated Governor General's unit citation for the Medak Pocket battle will remain a hollow gesture until Ceku is held responsible for his atrocities.

( staylor@herald.ca
)

Lies and Myths about Milosevic and the Serbs

 



["I never saw the Yugoslav Federal Army mistreat anyone in Kosovo" ]

 

http://www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2006-03-27.html

Free Nations


LIES AND MYTHS ABOUT MILOSEVIC AND THE SERBS

by Rodney Atkinson

Dateline 27th March 2006

"I never saw the Yugoslav Federal Army mistreat anyone in Kosovo" Roland Keith, Commander in the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission, 1999.

In the week of the death of Milosevic anti-Serb propaganda reached a peak with not a single word of praise for a people who have in all three European Wars of the 20th century proved their anti-fascist credentials. Instead it is the propaganda of Croatian fascism, German imperialism and BBC appeasement which defends the attack on Yugoslavia (illegal on at least 7 counts under international law) and its break up into the same petty nationalist states with clerical fascist governments which Nazism and Fascism constructed in the 1940s.

So the EU (under German direction) the USA and the UN conducted the most illegal war of all time, without UN approval, destroyed the most ethnically mixed State in the Balkans (Serbia) and brought about the most ethnically and religiously pure state of Croatia and a religiously divided Bosnia. The UN has failed to disarm the KLA who have now invaded Macedonia - with the weapons that the UN was supposed to remove from them! Now, having allowed the Kosovo Muslims to drive out most of the Christian Serbs from Kosovo, the UN seems bent on removing Kosovo from Serbia. This in religious and cultural terms would be like removing Kent from England or Texas from the United States, with Canterbury and Houston becoming Muslims cities!

Throughout the 1990s, the BBC, the British press and the Western media in general have lied and deceived, covered up the truth, broadcast fabrications prepared by anti Yugoslav forces, ignored historical fact and have been willing victims of one of the most successful propaganda missions of modern times. Here are some of the myths and lies which now pass for "facts" in the media today.


Milosevic "started the wars against Bosnia and Croatia"

Serbs were not the aggressors but the defenders of their internationally recognised State of Yugoslavia against foreign powers (principally Germany and the USA) who financed insurrection by Bosnian Muslims, Croatian nationalists (using the same "U" emblem as the Ustashe fascist allies of Germany during the second World War) and Kosovo Muslim Albanians. All three of these groups had provided the Nazis with Waffen SS divisions against our allies, the Serbs, between 1940 and 1945).

Milosevic was a "fascist"
He was in fact the exact opposite, his opponents in Croatia and Bosnia being the historical fascists whose 1990s actions were based on precisely the same imagery, ideology and in some cases even the names of their fascist movements during the second world war. Milosevic could be described, as the whole of Yugoslavia was during the cold war, as a "Reform Communist".

Milosevic was a dictator.
He was elected three times, with the same lack of Western democratic niceties which we praised in the election of Yeltsin and Putin!

He persecuted the Kosovo Albanians.
The exact opposite was the case for the Kosovo Liberation Army had been murdering Serbs and Albanian Kosovans for years. In this they had continued the ethnic cleansing of Serbs started by the Nazis and fascists during the Second World War and carried on by Tito (a Croat) after the war. There were Albanian Muslims in Milosevic's Government - but that did not stop the gradual ethnic cleansing of Serbs from their historic homeland (and centre of Orthodox Christianity) in Kosovo by the KLA, rightly described by international observers as a terrorist organisation.

The KLA has now invaded Macedonia, where Albanian Muslims are creating "a third Albania"!

Both the Commander of the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission in 1999 (just before Yugoslavia was attacked) Roland Keith and the former Canadian Ambassador in Belgrade James Bissett have condemned the war and defended the Yugoslav Government. Bissett said that the 1999 attack was a "put up job" and quotes the most revealing admission by the former British Defense Minister, Lord Gilbert, who told the British House of Commons in July 2000 that the terms that NATO sought to force upon Milosevic at Rambouillet were deliberately designed to provoke war.

Commander Keith described the KLA as a terrorist organisation which had a grip on most villages in Kosovo. He had direct experience of grotesque lies told by villagers about ethnic cleansing and he said he never saw the Yugoslav Federal Army mistreat anyone in Kosovo.

Milosevic would have been found guilty of war crimes.
In fact the trial and Milosevic's detailed and penetrating challenge to prosecution witnesses had made a complete fool of the kangaroo court which had effectively kidnapped him in Belgrade (using the same anti-constitutional methods as the European Union did to destroy the sovereignty of the nation states of Europe - Presidential or Crown Prerogative!)

Milosevic was not accused in the International Court in The Hague but by a "special Tribunal" set up by the anti Serb forces. Blair and his partners in the illegal war were indicted at the REAL International Court - but refused to turn up.

The evidence at the trial proved Milosevic's guilt.
Far from that the Court was repeatedly unable to make any connection between Milosevic's orders and the assumed "atrocities". Indeed several Serb army personnel gave evidence that Belgrade had always insisted that soldiers who committed crimes should be brought to justice. The Court case also revealed that Lord Paddy Ashdown had lied to the Court and one of the Prosecution's star witnesses exonerated Milosevic and said he had been tortured to make him provide evidence against the accused.

What about the war time atrocities?
Most were myths, the rest questionable. The Sarajevo market bomb was not set by Serbs but by Bosnian Muslims, as the UN later confirmed. The skeletonic "concentration camp" victim was a hoax, as the BBC's John Simpson confirmed. The "10,000 deaths in Kosovo" was proved a complete myth. The Srebrenica "massacre of 8,000 Muslims" consists of some 2,000 bodies including Serbs who died in battle over a long period. Teenagers among the dead were commonplace especially among Croat and Bosnian army troops. The "International Community" never describes the massacres of Serb villagers around Srebrenica before the Yugoslav army moved in, nor the evil Muslim Commander Naser Oric who, Roland Keith testifies, carried out those raids and showed journalists video tape of the beheadings he ordered. Oric withdrew his troops from Srebrenica before the Serbs arrived. His army was later caught and badly defeated - which explains the origins of the Bosnian bodies found.

What about ethnic cleansing?
Why should the leader of Yugoslavia break up his own country? Only the Croats (who drove out 400,000 Serbs from the Krajina) and the Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians (who drove out a similar number of Serbs) had a reason to do so - and they did. It was in fact the federal Prime Minister of Yugoslavia who happened to be a Croat who ordered the army into Slovenia and Croatia. And it was another Croat President Tudjman who wrote a constitution which described the Serbs as an "alien minority". He then drove 40,000 Serbs out of Croatia - the first ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia.

What about political bigotry?
Anyone reading Milosevic's historical speeches would recognise someone who lacked political, racial or religious bigotry - unlike the extreme bigotry of his opponents President Tudjman of Croatia ("genocide is a natural phenomenon commanded by the almighty in defence of Roman Catholicism") and President Izetbegovic ("There can be no peace or co-existence between the Islamic Faith and non Islamic institutions"). So why were Izetbegovic and Tudjman not put on trial in The Hague?

In the light of such hypocrisy it is not surprising that one of the most criminal war Commanders - General Agim Ceku, who at various times fought in the Croat and KLA armies, murdered hundreds (at the Medak Pocket) and ethnically cleansed hundred of thousands of Serbs (from the Krajina) and has been indicted at The Hague, is also on the payroll of the UN in the "Kosovo Protection Force"!!!!!!

For further evidence of the massive fascist attack on Yugoslavia over the years please read the following papers - all but the first one are on this website:

The Illegality of NATO's War against Yugoslavia www.ukconservatism.freeuk.com/archive27.html

Canadian Ambassador and Kosovo Commander explode myths of Yugoslav War
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2004-10-14.html

John Kerry gets funds from Terrorist KLA
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2004-10-18.html

The Carcass of Yugoslavia
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2004-12-08.html

Illegal Yugoslav War a boost to Islamic Extremism
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2005-08-15.html

Kosovo - German Imperialism to defy UN?
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2005-09-03.html

The Vatican and Islam
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2005-10-22.html

German Nazis aided Croat Fascists in 1990s.
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2006-03-15.html







March 27, 2006

New Europe: "Out of Milosevic" by Aleksandar Mitic

 

March 26- April 1, 2006. Issue Number 670

 

Page 2 - Opinion

 

 

Out of Milosevic

 

By Aleksandar Mitic

 

The EU Council of Ministers was right this week in promising strong support to Serbs in coming to terms with the legacy of Slobodan Milosevic, but in order to achieve this, Brussels must first free its current policies from the 1990s double standards and stereotypes about a "rogue Serbia".

 

Consider the timing of the current "pressure package" on Serbia. The Montenegrin government has been calling for independence for over five years now – but the referendum is scheduled at a time when the volative Kosovo status talks are heating up. Bosnia has filed a lawsuit against Belgrade in front of the International Court of Justice in 1993 – but the proceedings and the verdict will be given during the Kosovo negotiations. The "Dayton Peace Accord" in Bosnia had been in place since 1995, but the pressure on Republika Srpska to accept constitutional changes have stepped up only now, during the Kosovo talks. Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic had been indicted for war crimes since 1995 but Belgrade is being given a strict deadline to locate and to arrest the runaway general or face disruption of EU integration talks – you guessed it, exactly at the beginning of the Kosovo status talks.

 

One might argue that all this is pure coincidence based on unfinished business, but most will agree that the current approach towards the Kosovo status talks smells too much like bad timing and double standards.

 

With Pristina, it is a wholly different story -- as if Milosevic was still in power in Belgrade. Criminal activities are tolerated, controversial, "lesser evil" politicians are pushed to power, the lack of results on the ground is masked by rhetorical goodwill of the UN and the Kosovo leadership, while threats of violence by "frustrated Albanians" are tolerated and even used as arguments to speed up the status process. The pressure is put on the Kosovo Serbs instead.

 

Still living in enclaves and ghettos seven years after the war, the Kosovo Serbs have rejected further participation in the Kosovo institutions in protest over the persistent discrimination and attempts to use them as a "multiethnic decor". In the two years in parliament, not a single amendment they had proposed has been adopted. It seems highly unlikely that they will return to parliament now, just for the sake of "fulfilling the standards of multiethnic institutions". They do not see their place in the Kosovo assembly which ignores their legitimate interests, proclaims "independence as the only solution", puts portraits of war crimes indictee Ramush Haradinaj on its walls and elects Agim Ceku, a general suspected of war crimes, for Prime minister.

 

Kosovo Albanians, on the other hand, are praised for their "political maturity" even as  all reports suggest international standards are far from being achieved. At the time of his death in January, Kosovo president Ibrahim Rugova was dubbed "the Gandhi of the Balkans", although he never genuinely condemned anti-Serb violence or ever stood for any other than his own fellow Albanians. Rugova's "pacifist" policy is praised as a model for Kosovo, but then a month later, it is the warlord and war crimes suspect Ceku who is elected Prime Minister.

 

And what about war crimes hypocrisy? Although Serbia extradited all of its Kosovo war crimes indictees to the The Hague tribunal, had the courage to open its mass graves and to organize local war crimes trials, the Albanians are still getting preferential treatment: nobody is pressuring them to face their own crimes, indictee Fatmir Limaj is freed of all charges, former Prime minister Ramush Haradinaj is set free until trial and allowed to participate in political life, and Agim Ceku, accused by Serbia of massive crimes against humanity in Croatia and Kosovo, is elected as Prime minister of Kosovo with the backing of the international community.

 

Moreover, statements urging the Serbs "to accept reality" abound. Some senior Western officials, including a foreign minister of a EU country, are suggesting that independence of Kosovo is inevitable, although the negotiations on the status itself have not even begun and despite the dangerous repercussions of such a precedent.

 

This is not the way to help Serbia's pro-European government and the democratic forces of a a country which Brussels sees as the future backbone of economic growth and political stability in the region.

 

Neither helpful are the extremely meager carrots offered to Serbia: selective softening of the Schengen visa regime, limited aid funds, a regional free trade agreement – way too little for the "crucial year in the Balkans".
 

And then came "absorption capacity"…

 

Aleksandar Mitic is the Brussels correspondent of the Tanjug news agency, a lecturer at the University of Belgrade and an analyst of the Institute 4S.  

 


March 26, 2006

Indicted war criminal Agim Ceku still collects a UN paycheque

 

http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/sept01/hed4073a.shtml

The Halifax Herald Limited, September 10, 2001


Contributed

Indicted war criminal Agim Ceku still collects a UN paycheque

By Scott Taylor ON TARGET

WITH SOME 200 troops now on the ground in Macedonia, as part of NATO´s latest intervention force, it´s about time somebody started seriously questioning Canada´s long-range Balkan policy.

Throughout the decade of bloody civil wars in the 90s, which accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Canadian soldiers have been on continuous deployment to the region. Originally serving as UN peacekeepers (who evolved into NATO peacemakers by the time of the Kosovo crisis), Canada´s military had become a belligerent in this complex conflict. Despite our oft changing role, one constant that has remained is the reality experienced by our frontline soldiers, which is rarely reflected by the Western (read: U.S. State Department inspired) media portrayals of the ongoing Yugoslavian tragedy.

The most vivid examples of this dichotomy became evident during the 1999, 78-day NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. As cockney spokesman Jamie Shea took to the airwaves to demonize the Serbian people and justify NATO´s attacks, respected veteran officers such as General Lewis Mackenzie and Colonel Don Ethell spoke out to publicly denounce Canada´s participation in the bombing. Having witnessed first-hand the multi-factional hatred which pervades the Balkan theatre, Canadian soldiers are unwilling to assign blame and/or take sides in this brutal civil war. However, driven by U.S. interests and fuelled by a jingoistic media corps, NATO leaders have not been so hesitant to play favourites.

This current crisis in Macedonia originated last March with Albanian guerrillas attacking from inside NATO-occupied Kosovo. The guns carried by the Albanians were the same weapons that NATO was to have removed from the Kososvo Liberation Army (known as the UCK) back in 1999. However, over the past two years with a powerful 40,000 strong occupation force, NATO has been unwilling and/or unable to strip these Albanian (UCK) guerrillas of their arsenal. Only now that a wave of terror has been successfully exported into heretofore peaceful Macedonia, and the UCK have seized control of some 30 per cent of Macedonia territory, has NATO decided to intervene.

The Canadian Combat Group which has been hastily dispatched from service in Bosnia to participate in the Macedonia mission is equipped with new Coyote reconnaissance vehicles. These state of the art armoured personnel carriers have been roundly praised by NATO spokesmen for "providing a vital asset in monitoring the flow of illegal arms across Macedonian/Kosovo border."

Disgruntled Macedonian citizens are correct in asking "if such a surveillance capability existed within NATO´s arsenal-why wasn´t it employed to prevent Albanians from entering Macedonia in the first place?"

A similar stumper could be posed to NATO spokesmen regarding their reluctance to arrest the UCK´s military figurehead General Agim Ceku, an indicted war criminal. Many of our peacekeepers witnessed the barbarism committed by Ceku´s troops in Croatia in 1993 and 1995 and it is largely on the strength of Canadian soldiers testimony that The Hague War Crimes Tribunal has been forced to issue this rogue commander a sealed indictment.

Agim Ceku, an Albanian Kosovar by birth, began his military career as an officer in the former federal Yugoslavian Army (JNA). When the initial Yugoslav break-up occurred in 1991, Ceku was quick to switch his loyalty to the Croatian cause of independence. As a colonel in the Croatian army, Ceku commanded the notorious 1993 operation now known as the Medak Pocket.

It was here that the men of the Second Battalion Princess Patricia´s Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the vulgar savagery of which Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops that buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence.

Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then a general of artillery, was still at large. In fact, he was the officer responsible for shelling the Serbian refugee columns and for targeting the UN "safe" city of Knin during the Croatian offensive known as Operation Storm.

Just a few months after the Storm atrocities, Canada´s own Louise Arbour began making a name for herself as the chief prosecutor for The Hague tribunal. Despite the Canadian connection to these alleged crimes, Arbour and her lawyers chose instead to pursue more "politically prominent" individuals and seemingly little was done to bring Ceku to justice.

Fast forward to January 1999 and the world´s attention begins to focus on a war ravaged Kosovo. With the blessing of the U.S. State Department, Agim Ceku took his retirement (at age 37) from the Croatian army and was pronounced Supreme Commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK).

Throughout the air campaign against Yugoslavia, Ceku was portrayed as a loyal ally and he was frequently present at the NATO briefings with top generals such as Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson.

Under terms of the Kosovo peace deal, Ceku´s Albanian guerrillas were to be disarmed and re-constituted into a UN sponsored, (non-military) disaster relief organization known as the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC). ButCeku´s UCK never gave up their guns - nor their quest for a Greater Albania.

Although he is nominally maintaining an ´arms-length´ posture towards his former comrades, Agim Ceku is still worshipped as a saviour by both the UCK troops and Albanian-minority in Macedonia.

As this indicted war criminal continues to enjoy his freedom, bask in public attention, and collect a UN paycheque, our Canadian soldiers are risking their lives to disarm his UCK in Macedonia.

All in the name of peace and justice.

"History will prove Milosevic right"

Latest news
http://news.google.be/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=milosevic


Canadian who have 'altered the course of history'
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060323/wendy_crewson_feature_060323/20060324/

"They were afraid of pulling Russia into a larger war if they upset Milosevic, so NATO didn't want to step in to police this"
http://www.edmontonsun.com/Entertainment/Weekend/2006/03/24/1503348-sun.html



English translation of family letter read out at President Milosevic's funeral
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ml031806.htm


"History will prove Milosevic right"
http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/2294.cfm








Slobodan Milosevic coverage: When can we expect some truth from the CBC?

 
Subject: Slobodan Milosevic coverage: When can we expect some truth from the CBC?
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 21:28:24 -0600
From: Marjaleena Repo <mrepo@sasktel.net>
Reply-To: mrepo@sasktel.net
To: CBC Radio Sunday Edition <thesundayedition@cbc.ca>
CC: Rabinovich Robert <robert_rabinovitch@cbc.ca>, Jane_chalmers@cbc.ca, Richard_stursberg@cbc.ca


Saskatoon
24.3.2006

To: CBC Radio Sunday Edition

Dear Michael Enright and staff,

Your last Sunday's programme on Slobodan Milosevic’s death revealed a biased and propagandist approach to the whole tragedy of the systematic dismantling of Yugoslavia, You blame one man and one man alone, and label him  “The Butcher of Balkansâ€,  "a tyrantâ€,  “a mass murdererâ€, and throw in the suggestion that he “murdered millions,†all this in the brief introduction to the interview of your equally biased interviewee, Mr. William Schabas. You make no attempt to offer proof; yours is a guilt-by-accusation approach.

Six years after the bombing of illegal, immoral and unjust US instigated and NATO conducted war on Yugoslavia you should have had plenty of time for second thoughts, particularly as the evidence is out there, easy to locate, that both Mr. Milosevic and the Serbs have been and continue to be falsely accused.

Back in ’99 I wrote a piece, "The Media and the demonization of Serbs," which I urge you to read with fresh and open eyes.  (See below.)

Michael Parenti’s article of 2003, "The demonization of Slobodan Milosevic," adds more to the contarary evidence of Milosevic's  and Serbs' "guilt" that you and your programme so completely ignore. (See below.)

To bring the point home about the absurdity of the claims against Milosevic, I am sending Swiftian piece by Jan Oberg from Sweden, " The real story: How Milosevic was more evil than you ever knew," which I hope will tickle your funny bone, and waken your (dormant) sense of honesty and truth in broadcasting. (See below.)

I will end with the hope, which is fast fading, that the CBC  in general and your programme in particular, would pull away from the NATO/US dominant perspective on all matters regarding international affairs, ands start speaking truth to power, at last. Canadians have the right to expect more from our public broadcasting!

After William Schabas’ morally and intellectually lazy justification of the victor’s courts  such as the one that has provided “judicial lynching†(in Edward L. Greenspan’s words)  to Slobodan Milosevic, I would hope that you would soon do an in-depth interview with Professor Michael Mandel from York University’s Osgoode Hall, whose book, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity, tells all, from the perspective of international law. (You can find a review of it by Edward Herman  at 
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2004/herman0804.html )

Sincerely

Marjaleena Repo
201 Elm Street
Saskatoon, SK
S7J 0G8
mrepo@sasktel.net

THE MEDIA AND THE DEMONIZATION OF THE SERBS

by Marjaleena Repo

Tuesday, March 30, 1999

 


The Yugoslavian government has just expelled some journalists from NATO countries from its territory. This is deplored by the media as “censorship,†but in some of us it has created a strange sense of relief: perhaps now there will be a ceasefire in the 10-year disinformation campaign about the Yugoslavian conflict in general and the Serbs in particular. Or at least the “journalists†(few actually deserve the name) have to declare that what they are talking about is unverified rumour and hearsay since they are nowhere near the scene. Up to this point they have been able to create the false impression that they have witnessed the events they report on.

The Western media's relentless demonization of the Serbs of Yugoslavia has, however, produced a very predictable (and no doubt, wished-for) result: a truly genocidal assault on the Serbian people by Western military might, Canada to its eternal shame participating, breaking every relevant international covenant and treaty.

The pack-journalism over the last ten years has also succeeded in hoodwinking many Canadians into thinking that what is at stake is the good-riddance of a Serbian Hitler who has attempted a "final solution" of sorts on assorted ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. A lot of well-intentioned people are cheering the bombing of yet another pariah nation into the Stone Age. With the accumulated effects of media rumour-mongering and willful disinformation, who can blame these folks for their barely controlled blood thirst? After all, because Hitler wasn't stopped in time, millions perished in concentration camps, goes the heart-felt argument.

Yet the labelling of Yugoslavia's Serb leaders as Hitlers — and the Serbs themselves as brutal, subhuman monsters — is a familiar trick from recent history. It has been perpetuated by the various hired hands, PR firms, who have worked overtime for the various ethnic groups pushing for secession which would utterly destroy the once well-functioning, multi-ethnic Yugoslavian federation and replace it with small nation-states which ethnically cleansed themselves (Croatia, for instance, expelled between 500,000 and a million Serbs from its territory.) The media has merely carried the message of these "hidden hands" of the Balkan conflict.

The world was shocked to find out that a PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, had manufactured the "incubator babies" incident in Kuwait which precipitated the Gulf War: Iraqi soldiers ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in a genocidal fashion. Phony eywitnesses to this atrocity tearfully testified in front of U.S. politicians and the media, adding to public support for the subsequent bombing of Iraq and contributing hugely to the demonization of the Iraqis, leaders and citizens alike. Even Amnesty International was taken in by the falsehood, which was later exposed as such, but only after the military damage was done.

Yet the shock of being duped soon wore off and gullibility returned. In no time another American PR firm, Ruder Finn, working for the Croatian and Bosnian separatists, publicly bragged that it had been able to turn world opinion against the Serbs. In April 1993 on French television, James Harff, the director of Ruder Finn, described his proudest public relations effort as having "managed to put Jewish opinion on our [Croatian and Bosnian] side." This was a "sensitive matter," he added, as "the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by real and cruel anti-semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps... Our challenge was to reverse this attitude and we succeeded masterfully. At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations.... That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia.... By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. "

The PR firm was piling hoax upon hoax. The famous story of Serb concentration camps was built on a photo of a gaunt man surrounded by others, staring at the viewer from behind barbed wire; surely an image to chill one to the bones. It took years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman, in an article titled "The picture that fooled the world," described how the famous photo was staged by its takers, British journalists, who were photographing the inhabitants from inside barbed wire which was protecting agricultural products and machinery from theft in a refugee and transit camp; the men stood outside of it; and at no time was there a barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. But by that time the image had done its deed, terminally slamming the Serbs as genocidal mass murderers.

There are countless other stories, all deliberately maligning the Serbs to further the ends of military intervention. These stories and photos of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" (a la Hitler) in a civil war, in which Serbs are guilty as sin and others are their innocent victims, are repeated ad nauseam by western reporters without the slightest evidence, and have provided the ground for the public's (hopefully only temporary) acceptance of the illegal and brutal war against the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia. They continue after NATO's bombing began, unabated, with new absurdities such as the suggestion that the Serbs are really bombing themselves! Perhaps in the war crimes court there will soon be a place for journalists and PR firms who with their inflammatory reporting and fraudulent actions cause wars to begin. THE END

http://www.counterpunch.org/disinfo.html

The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic  by Michael Parenti
December 2003


U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected governments---guilty of introducing redistributive economic programs or otherwise pursuing independent courses that do not properly fit into the U.S.-sponsored global free market system---have found themselves targeted by the U.S. national security state. Thus democratic governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Syria, Uruguay, and numerous other nations were overthrown by their respective military forces, funded and advised by the United States. The newly installed military rulers then rolled back the egalitarian reforms and opened their countries all the wider to foreign corporate investors.

The U.S. national security state also has participated in destabilizing covert actions, proxy mercenary wars, or direct military attacks against revolutionary or nationalist governments in Afghanistan (in the 1980s), Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, East Timor, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Fiji Islands, Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Iran, Jamaica, Lebanon, Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Syria, South Yemen, Venezuela (under Hugo Chavez), Western Sahara, and Iraq (under the CIA-sponsored autocratic Saddam Hussein, after he emerged as an economic nationalist and tried to cut a better deal on oil prices).

The propaganda method used to discredit many of these governments is not particularly original, indeed by now it is quite transparently predictable. Their leaders are denounced as bombastic, hostile, and psychologically flawed. They are labeled power hungry demagogues, mercurial strongmen, and the worst sort of dictators likened to Hitler himself. The countries in question are designated as "terrorist" or "rogue" states, guilty of being "anti-American" and "anti-West." Some choice few are even condemned as members of an "evil axis." When targeting a country and demonizing its leadership, U.S. leaders are assisted by ideologically attuned publicists, pundits, academics, and former government officials. Together they create a climate of opinion that enables Washington to do whatever is necessary to inflict serious damage upon the designated nation's infrastructure and population, all in the name of human rights, anti-terrorism, and national security.

There is no better example of this than the tireless demonization of democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic and the U.S.-supported wars against Yugoslavia. Louis Sell, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, has authored a book (Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Duke University Press, 2002) that is a hit piece on Milosevic, loaded with all the usual prefabricated images and policy presumptions of the U.S. national security state. Sell's Milosevic is a caricature, a cunning power seeker and maddened fool, who turns on trusted comrades and plays upon divisions within the party.

This Milosevic is both an "orthodox socialist" and an "opportunistic Serbian nationalist," a demagogic power-hungry "second Tito" who simultaneously wants dictatorial power over all of Yugoslavia while eagerly pursuing polices that "destroy the state that Tito created." The author does not demonstrate by reference to specific policies and programs that Milosevic is responsible for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, he just tells us so again and again. One would think that the Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, Macedonian, and Kosovo Albanian secessionists and U.S./NATO interventionists might have had something to do with it.

In my opinion, Milosevic's real sin was that he resisted the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and opposed a U.S. imposed hegemony. He also attempted to spare Yugoslavia the worst of the merciless privatizations and rollbacks that have afflicted other former communist countries. Yugoslavia was the only nation in Europe that did not apply for entry into the European Union or NATO or OSCE.

For some left intellectuals, the former Yugoslavia did not qualify as a socialist state because it had allowed too much penetration by private corporations and the IMF. But U.S. policymakers are notorious for not seeing the world the way purist left intellectuals do. For them Yugoslavia was socialist enough with its developed human services sector and an economy that was over 75 percent publicly owned. Sell makes it clear that Yugoslavia's public ownership and Milosevic's defense of that economy were a central consideration in Washington's war against Yugoslavia. Milosevic, Sell complains, had a "commitment to orthodox socialism." He "portrayed public ownership of the means of production and a continued emphasis on [state] commodity production as the best guarantees for prosperity." He had to go.

To make his case against Milosevic, Sell repeatedly falls back on the usual ad hominem labeling. Thus we read that in his childhood Milosevic was "something of a prig" and of course "by nature a loner," a weird kind of kid because he was "uninterested in sports or other physical activities," and he "spurned childhood pranks in favor of his books." The author quotes an anonymous former classmate who reports that Slobodan's mother "dressed him funny and kept him soft." Worse still, Slobodan would never join in when other boys stole from orchards---no doubt a sure sign of childhood pathology.

Sell further describes Milosevic as "moody," "reclusive," and given to "mulish fatalism." But Sell's own data---when he pauses in his negative labeling and gets down to specifics---contradicts the maladjusted "moody loner" stereotype. He acknowledges that young Slobodan worked well with other youth when it came to political activities. Far from being unable to form close relations, Slobodan met a girl, his future wife, and they enjoyed an enduring lifelong attachment. In his early career when heading the Beogradska Banka, Milosevic was reportedly "communicative, caring about people at the bank, and popular with his staff." Other friends describe him as getting on well with people, "communal and relaxed," a faithful husband to his wife, and a proud and devoted father to his children. And Sell allows that Milosevic was at times "confident," "outgoing," and "charismatic." But the negative stereotype is so firmly established by repetitious pronouncement (and by years of propagation by Western media and officialdom) that Sell can simply slide over contradictory evidence---even when such evidence is provided by himself.

Sell refers to anonymous "U.S. psychiatrists, who have studied Milosevic closely." By "closely" he must mean from afar, since no U.S. psychiatrist has ever treated or even interviewed Milosevic. These uncited and unnamed psychiatrists supposedly diagnosed the Yugoslav leader as a "malignant narcissistic" personality. Sell tells us that such malignant narcissism fills Milosevic with self-deception and leaves him with a "chore personality" that is a "sham." "People with Milosevic's type of personality frequently either cannot or will not recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception of the way the world is or should be." How does Dr. Sigmund Sell know all this? He seems to find proof in the fact that Milosevic dared to have charted a course that differed from the one emanating from Washington. Surely only personal pathology can explain such "anti-West" obstinacy. Furthermore, we are told that Milosevic suffered from a "blind spot" in that he was never comfortable with the notion of private property. If this isn't evidence of malignant narcissism, what is? Sell never considers the possibility that he himself, and the global interventionists who think like him, cannot or will not "recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception of the way the world is or should be."

Milosevic, we are repeatedly told, fell under the growing influence of his wife, Mirjana Markovic, "the real power behind the throne." Sell actually calls her "Lady Macbeth" on one occasion. He portrays Markovic as a complete wacko, given to uncontrollable anger; her eyes "vibrated like a scared animal"; "she suffers from severe schizophrenia" with "a tenuous grasp on reality," and is a hopeless "hypochondriac." In addition, she has a "mousy" appearance and a "dreamy" and "traumatized" personality. And like her husband, with whom she shares a "very abnormal relationship," she has "an autistic relation with the world." Worse still, she holds "hardline marxist views." We are left to wonder how the autistic dysfunctional Markovic was able to work as a popular university professor, organize and lead a new political party, and play an active role in the popular resistance against Western interventionism.

In this book, whenever Milosevic or others in his camp are quoted as saying something, they "snarl," "gush," "hiss," and "crow." In contrast, political players who win Sell's approval, "observe," "state," "note," and "conclude." When one of Milosevic's superiors voices his discomfort about "noisy Kosovo Serbs" (as Sell calls them) who were demonstrating against the mistreatment they suffered at the hands of Kosovo Albanian secessionists, Milosevic "hisses," "Why are you so afraid of the street and the people?" Some of us might think this is a pretty good question to hiss at a government leader, but Sell treats it as proof of Milosevic's demagoguery.

Whenever Milosevic did anything that aided the common citizenry, as when he taxed the interest earned on foreign currency accounts---a policy that was unpopular with Serbian elites but appreciated by the poorer strata---he is dismissed as manipulatively currying popular favor. Thus we must accept Sell's word that Milosevic never wanted the power to prevent hunger but only hungered for power. The author operates from a nonfalsefiable paradigm. If the targeted leader is unresponsive to the people, this is proof of his dictatorial proclivity. If he is responsive to them, this demonstrates his demagogic opportunism.

In keeping with U.S. officialdom's view of the world, Sell labels "Milosevic and his minions" as "hardliners," "conservatives," and "ideologues"; they are "anti-West," and bound up in "socialist dogma." In contrast, Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovo Albanian secessionists who worked hard to dismember Yugoslavia and deliver their respective republics to the tender mercies of neoliberal rollback are identified as "economic reformers," "the liberal leadership," and "pro-West" (read, pro-transnational corporate capitalist). Sell treats "Western-style democracy" and "a modern market economy" as necessary correlates. He has nothing to say about the dismal plight of the Eastern European countries that abandoned their deficient but endurable planned economies for the merciless exactions of laissez-faire capitalism.

Sell's sensitivity to demagoguery does not extend to Franjo Tudjman, the crypto-fascist anti-Semite Croat who had nice things to say about Hitler, and who imposed his harsh autocratic rule on the newly independent Croatia. Tudjman dismissed the Holocaust as an exaggeration, and openly hailed the Croatian Ustashe Nazi collaborators of World War II. He even employed a few aging Ustashe leaders in his government. Sell says not a word about all this, and treats Tudjman as just a good old Croatian nationalist. Likewise, he has not a critical word about the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic. He comments laconically that Izetbegovic "was sentenced to three years imprisonment in 1946 for belonging to a group called the Young Muslims." One is left with the impression that the Yugoslav communist government had suppressed a devout Muslim. What Sell leaves unmentioned is that the Young Muslims actively recruited Muslim units for the Nazi SS during World War II; these units perpetrated horrid atrocities against the resistance movement and the Jewish population in Yugoslavia. Izetbegovic got off rather lightly with a three-year sentence.

Little is made in this book of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Serbs by U.S.-supported leaders like Tudjman and Izetbegovic during and after the U.S.-sponsored wars. Conversely, no mention is made of the ethnic tolerance and diversity that existed in President Milosevic's Yugoslavia. By 1999, all that was left of Yugoslavia was Montenegro and Serbia. Readers are never told that this rump nation was the only remaining multi-ethnic society among the various former Yugoslav republics, the only place where Serbs, Albanians, Croats, Gorani, Jews, Egyptians, Hungarians, Roma, and numerous other ethnic groups could live together with some measure of security and tolerance.

The relentless demonization of Milosevic spills over onto the Serbian people in general. In Sell's book, the Serbs are aggrandizing nationalists. Kosovo Serbs demonstrating against mistreatment by Albanian nationalists are described as having their "bloodlust up." And Serb workers demonstrating to defend their rights and hard won gains are dismissed by Sell as "the lowest instruments of the mob." The Serbs who had lived in Krajina and other parts of Croatia for centuries are dismissed as colonial occupiers. In contrast, the Slovenian, Croatian, and Bosnian Muslim nationalist secessionists, and Kosovo Albanian irredentists are simply seeking "independence," "self-determination," and "cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty." In this book, the Albanian KLA gunmen are not big-time drug dealers, terrorists, and ethnic cleansers, but guerrilla fighters and patriots.

Military actions allegedly taken by the Serbs, described in the vaguest terms, are repeatedly labeled "brutal," while assaults and atrocities delivered upon the Serbs by other national groups are more usually accepted as retaliatory and defensive, or are dismissed by Sell as "untrue," "highly exaggerated," and "hyperventilated." Milosevic, Sell says, disseminated "vicious propaganda" against the Croats, but he does not give us any specifics. Sell does provide one or two instances of how Serb villages were pillaged and their inhabitants raped and murdered by Albanian secessionists. From this he grudgingly allows that "some of the Serb charges . . . had a core of truth." But he makes nothing more of it.

The well-timed, well-engineered story about a Serbian massacre of unarmed Albanians in the village of Racak, hyped by U.S. diplomat and veteran disinformationist William Walker, is wholeheartedly embraced by Sell, who ignores all the contrary evidence. An Associated Press TV crew had actually filmed the battle that took place in Racak the previous day in which Serbian police killed a number of KLA fighters. A French journalist who went through Racak later that day found evidence of a battle but no evidence of a massacre of unarmed civilians, nor did Walker's own Kosovo Verification Mission monitors. All the forensic reports reveal that almost all of the forty-four persons killed had previously been using fire arms, and all had perished in combat. Sell simply ignores this evidence.

The media-hyped story of how the Serbs allegedly killed 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica is uncritically accepted by Sell, even though the most thorough investigations have uncovered not more than 2,000 bodies of undetermined nationality. The earlier massacres carried out by Muslims, their razing of some fifty Serbian villages around Srebrenica, as reported by two British correspondents and others, are ignored. The complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or 100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes unnoticed.

Sell's rendition of what happened at Rambouillet leaves much to be desired. Under Rambouillet, Kosovo would have been turned into a NATO colony. Milosevic might have reluctantly agreed to that, so desperate was he to avoid a full-scale NATO onslaught on the rest of Yugoslavia. To be certain that war could not be avoided, however, the U.S. delegation added a remarkable stipulation, demanding that NATO forces and personnel were to have unrestrained access to all of Yugoslavia, unfettered use of its airports, rails, ports, telecommunication services, and airwaves, all free of cost and immune from any jurisdiction by Yugoslav authorities. NATO would also have the option to modify for its own use all of Yugoslavia's infrastructure including roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility systems. In effect, not just Kosovo but all of Yugoslavia was to be subjected to an extraterritoriality tantamount to outright colonial occupation.

Sell does not mention these particulars. Instead he assures us that the request for NATO's unimpeded access to Yugoslavia was just a pro forma protocol inserted "largely for legal reasons." A similar though less sweeping agreement was part of the Dayton package, he says. Indeed, and the Dayton agreement reduced Bosnia to a Western colony. But if there was nothing wrong with the Rambouillet ultimatum, why then did Milosevic reject it? Sell ascribes Milosevic's resistance to his perverse "bunker mentality" and his need to defy the world.

There is not a descriptive word in this book of the 78 days of around-the-clock massive NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, no mention of how it caused the loss of thousands of lives, injured and maimed thousands more, contaminated much of the land and water with depleted uranium, and destroyed much of the country's public sector industries and infrastructure-while leaving all the private Western corporate structures perfectly intact.

The sources that Sell relies on share U.S. officialdom's view of the Balkans struggle. Observers who offer a more independently critical perspective, such as Sean Gervasi, Diana Johnstone, Gregory Elich, Nicholas Stavrous, Michel Collon, Raju Thomas, and Michel Chossudovsky are left untouched and uncited. Important Western sources I reference in my book on Yugoslavia offer evidence, testimony, and documentation that do not fit Sell's conclusions, including sources from within the European Union, the European Community's Commission on Women's Rights, the OSCE and its Kosovo Verification Mission, the UN War Crimes Commission, and various other UN commissions, various State Department reports, the German Foreign Office and German Defense Ministry reports, and the International Red Cross. Sell does not touch these sources.

Also ignored by him are the testimonies and statements of members of the U.S. Congress who visited the Balkans, a former State Department official under the Bush administration, a former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, several UN and NATO generals and international negotiators, Spanish air force pilots, forensic teams from various countries, and UN monitors who offer revelations that contradict the picture drawn by Sell and other apologists of U.S. officialdom.

In sum, Sell's book is packed with discombobulated insider details, unsupported charges, unexamined presumptions, and ideologically loaded labeling. As mainstream disinformation goes, it is a job well done.

MICHAEL PARENTI received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He is an award winning author and activist who has published some 250 articles and 19 books, including Superpatriotism (2004), and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003) which won the “Book of the Year Award†(nonfiction) from Online Review of Books. His most recent book is The Culture Struggle  (2006). Various works of his have been translated into some twenty languages. For further information, visit his website:  www.michaelparenti.org


The real story:
HOW MILOSEVIC WAS MORE EVIL THAN YOU EVER KNEW

By Jan Oberg, TFF director

"The media call him a butcher and compare him with Stalin,  Mao and Hitler. That's right, but too diplomatic. They don't give us the  the broader picture. At his death I choose to tell you  how I believe Slobodan Milosevic single-handed caused all the troubles. And I met him and many of his opponents.

Here, for the first time, the Milosevic' Master Plan is revealed and analysed in depth. When you hear that he caused four wars and ruined millions of lives, THIS tells you how he actually did it.

Here is the conclusive evidence that every massacre, all ethnic cleansing, every village that was torched and any woman who was raped all happened because of his personal cruel Master Plan and on his order. I can no longer keep silent. My findings substantiate the general media image of the YU drama.

History, economy, the activities of other actors in former YU don¹t mean a thing. He is guilty of it all and we should not be afraid of saying it aloud just because he has died. Indeed, I've found reasons to believe that he can be tied to the genocides in Rwanda and Burundi too.

It doesn't matter what the Hague trial might have concluded. U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke is right that world public opinion have already found the dictator guilty. That's what counts.

This path-breaking document concludes that we would all have lived in Greater Serbia had the U.S., the EU, NATO and the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosova not stood up as one for their deeply held beliefs in justice, peace, human rights and democracy. Indeed, they saved Europe from this new dictator who might even have dwarfed Hitler," says the author.

The analysis is in 3 parts, begin here:
http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/2006/Oberg_Slobo_1.html





March 25, 2006

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC: Death and the rain

 

 
GRANMA INTERNATIONAL/Cuba
 

Havana. March 24, 2006

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC
Death and the rain


BY ELSA CLARO—Granma International staff writer—

THERE are inopportune suspicions as to the real cause of the death of Milosevic (the fourth of Serbs imprisoned in The Hague) which, even if it was the most natural of all, leaves behind it a trail of reservations as to the legitimacy of the court that has held him for more than four years and that subjected him to a trial whose probity is questionable. Even with motives for having put him on trial for faults committed, that should have happened within his country, where legislation prevents the extradition of prisoners, and of having decided to make an exception: the placing in cells adjoining his of those who forced events into a one-way street or made themselves the decisive participants in a matter that was beyond their competence, thus rarefying results that, at the end of the day, have not turned out for the best.

There was no cleanness in the way in which the former head of state was taken to the Dutch capital. First he was pulled out of his residence and incarcerated in Belgrade. That was an initial step to facilitate his kidnapping via a nocturnal operation organized by the CIA (possibly with the help of other European secret services) and with the complicity of the then Prime Minister Zoran Djinic, who ended up being a priori assassinated by the mafia that he likewise betrayed, according to conjectures.

Djinic’s motive was to get rid of Milosevic – who continued having followers – and at the same time to obtain Western financial aid, supposedly to pull Yugoslavia out of the economic strangulation to which it was subjected by the United States and the European Union with lengthy trade sanctions. For those pieces of silver he sold the former statesman, going over the head of Vojislav Kostunitca, president of the country at that time (June 2001), in an act so contemptible and self-seeking that he broke the existing government coalition and created anarchy out of what was an already highly delicate situation for Yugoslavia at the end of 10 years of dismemberment as a country and almost three months of intensive NATO (read the United States) bombardments.

ARIADNE’S THREAD

In 1991 Slovenia affirmed its decision to become independent of Yugoslavia. The German government headed by Helmut Kohl hastened to recognize it in early January 1992, thus forcing the EU to act likewise. The United States, with Bush Sr. experiencing the hangover of the first Gulf War, did not appear to have approved that secession among his plans, perhaps because of certain fears of the conflictive and immature process of the Socialist bloc’s re-conversion or because one of his advisers had warned him that it was not a healthy idea to establish new borders in Europe.

Croatia followed the Slovenian impulse and, almost at the end of the same year, the Croats and Muslims from Bosnia-Herzegovina did likewise. To that point, a certain coexistence had been attained in Bosnia with power sharing among the three human groups that inhabited it, to an extent similar to that established by Marshall Tito when he legislated that the presidency of Yugoslavia should rotate as a way of avoiding setbacks, jealousy or envy of any of the leaders of this human mosaic.

Nevertheless, the first confrontations occurred on February 4, 1992. Almost immediately, Brussels and Washington accepted the sovereignty of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while withholding support for the new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, recreated that same month (April 1992) and made up of Serbia and Montenegro, as the legal inheritors of the former.

In the face of an imminent triumph which could have resulted in the area asking to be annexed to the semi-proscribed Yugoslavia, the West entered the scenario, affording itself the right of military intervention in an alien civil conflict. It did outside of the UN and in violation of its precepts of international law.

The NATO bombardments were directed at Serb positions in order to twist the existing reality, without having any mandate or credible excuses, but by spreading macabre stories that are still repeated to justify the unacceptable.

In spite of the power of the Western allies there was no alternative but to accede to negotiations to halt what they were contributing to make worse and which could easily have reached a civilized outcome. However, to tell the truth, that was difficult, because Washington also utilized people of the likes of Osama Bin Laden in this episode to attract to the conflict extremist Muslims (including Talibans), who participated in this allegedly ethnic war but what was one of a political-economic nature before anything else.

The reasons? In the first place they were frightened of the existence in the very heart of Europe of a state that called itself socialist, although the unique experience of the Yugoslavs was distinct from that of Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, and Slobodan Milosevic had already been forces to accept conditions imposed in the context of financial strangulation.

The Dayton Accords fabricated a government that is unable to function or to have resolved anything to date, given that troops are still in place in Bosnia and the scenario is one of total anomaly.

Something does seem to have occurred and is still occurring in the Serb province of Kosovo, where certain chapters of the same story have been barefacedly repeated.

The culminating point occurred in 1999 when, after giving support to the separatist Albanian Kosovars, the Clinton government ordered bombardments that continued for three months under the pretext that Belgrade was undertaking "ethnic cleansing." Strangely, enough since then and to date they have neither defended or helped the Serb Kosovars from whom they stole houses and possessions or whom they have killed and humiliated, even though the troops stationed in the area are supposedly neutral.

Those three months of 1999 and their collateral damage inflicted on individuals and civilian targets, with U.S. and NATO cluster bombs – what’s the difference – will not go down in history through the gate of decorum.

PROVISONAL EPILOGUE

The special court financed and manipulated by the United States and various of its multinationals in which Milosevic was tried is usually confused with the International Court of Justice in The Hague created by the UN in 1947 and which judges states, not individuals. There are also people who confuse it with the International Criminal Court created in Rome in July 1998. The latter is the one that George W. Bush threatened with an armed assault if it extradited even one of its soldiers, however much of a torturer or genocidal killer he might be.

The fact that it is one of the many White House falsifications admitted by its partners is borne out by what Jaime Shea stated as spokesman for the military alliance commanded by Washington:

"The International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) will only investigate (NATO crimes) if we permit it." He was alluding to charges in Yugoslavia against that military pact but above all indicates the feeling of impunity with which it acts.

Neither the first or only arbitrariness was committed with Milosevic, other equally terrible legal procedures have been experienced, but if justice is as impartial as it is enshrined to be, governments on both sides of the Atlantic that helped to destroy a country and to increase the volume of victims via illegal interventions, them should all stand trial and in authentic courts, not one fabricated by "conquerors;" in other words, the new empire.


CDSM: Letter of Complaint to the BBC

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Johnson [mailto:i-johnson@lineone.net]
Sent: 23 March 2006 22:43
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: CDSM: Letter of Complaint to the BBC



Dear Friends,
Please find below a copy of the Letter of Complaint that has been filed
against the BBC in regard to their coverage of the death of Slobodan
Milosevic.  IJ.


 BBC Complaints Department,
Glasgow,
BBC Information,
P.O. Box 1922,
Glasgow G2 3WT

22nd March 2006

Dear Sir/Madam,

We, the undersigned, would like to make a formal complaint about the very
one-sided BBC coverage of the death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic.

From the moment his death was announced on Saturday 11th March, the BBC
seemed determined to paint a  biased and factually incorrect portrayal of
Milosevic. A succession of virulently anti-Milosevic 'experts' and
politicians were wheeled out- (Lord Ashdown seemed to be permanently camped
 in the BBC studios) all parroting the same 'Butcher of Belgrade' line.

 Ashdown claimed that Milosevic's death provided us with 'closure'. But how
 impartial a commentator was Ashdown? Only last autumn, when appearing as a
 witness at the Hague Tribunal, Ashdown was exposed by Milosevic to be a
liar
 (his testimony can be found at the url :
 hague.bard.edu/past_video?09-2005.html). Milosevic also played a video tape
 in court which showed Ashdown inspecting a Kosovan Liberation Army weapons
 cache in 1998 and in which he could be heard saying he would 'do his best'
 to procure the drug-running terrorist group assistance. Why did those
asking
 for Ashdown's opinion on Milosevic not mention these revelations when
 interviewing him?

We did not see or hear a  single commentator on the BBC who put forward a
different viewpoint on Milosevic. Two of our number, the journalist  Neil
 Clark and Dr John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group have
 been asked to appear on the BBC before to talk about Milosevic and the
Hague
 Tribunal, but this time they received no invitation. There were plenty of
 other speakers the BBC could have asked too to get a better balance in its
 coverage.

For example, Professor Mark Almond, a Balkans expert from Oriel College,
 Oxford;  Ian Johnson of the British branch of the International Committee
 for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic, Misha Gavrilovic of the British Serb
 Alliance; former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who has conceded that
 the Western powers deliberately engineered the break-up of Yugoslavia and
 George Kenney, former official of the US State Department, who was due to
 testify in Milosevic's defence at The Hague. Why did the BBC not invite any
of these people to give their verdict on Milosevic?

In the week following President Milosevic's death a number of lies were
repeated on the BBC.

The first was the statement, which appeared in News bulletins and on the BBC
 News website that 'few will mourn Milosevic'. This was clearly nonsense-and
 may we say racist- the world is not just people in the corridors of power
in
 the US and Europe- but a much larger place. In many countries, like China,
 where one-fifth of the world's people live, Milosevic was regarded as a
hero
 of the anti-imperialist struggle, ditto in India, Africa, South America and
 the Middle East. Why was this global opinion not reflected in your
coverage?
 If the BBC had taken the trouble to read the comments posted on its news
 blog- it would have seen that there are plenty of people throughout the
 world who do not hold the standard Western governments line on Milosevic.
We
 enclose two tributes to Milosevic from your news blog, from a Kosovan
 Albanian and a Sri Lankan.
(1) "I say - Rest in peace my friend, Milosovich, be happy. You surpassed
 this cruel, corrupt, hypocritic world". Sridhara Senarath, Colombo & Sri
 Lanka.
(2) "With all due respects to people in various parts of the world, the
 strong condemnation of this man is solely based on what the media has
dished
 out to them, how a hostile media can turn people with no connection to be
so
 damning about the only man of that region who tried to hold it together. As
 a Kosovo Albanian when he was in power we were in peace, now after Nato we
are left with a similar fate of Iraq. Rest in peace mr President." rexep
 rexepi, Hobart.

Then there was the claim that President Milosevic was a 'dictator'.
This term was used  by Kim Barnes in her video report of Milosevic's funeral
 on the BBC News website on 18th March.  Milosevic won three democratic
 elections in a country where over twenty-one political parties freely
 operated. Even Adam Lebor, in his hostile 2002 biography of Milosevic
 concedes that the use of the word 'dictator' is factually incorrect. So why
 on earth did the BBC's correspondent use it?

Barnes also claimed in her report that 50,000 people attended Milosevic's
funeral ceremony in Belgrade. The ceremony's organisers claimed 500,000 were
 present (a figure supported by Focus News Agency), whereas the Serbian
 authorities themselves put the figure at 100,000. Gavin Hewitt in the BBC1
 News that evening talked of 80,000. From which source did Kim Barnes obtain
 her figure of 50,000?

Neil Clark mentioned BBC's one-sided coverage of Milosevic's death in an
 interview he gave for Sky News on 12th March. He also made a telephone
 complaint on the same day to the BBC line 'Newswatch'.

His  complaint was featured by Raymond Snoddy in his Newswatch programme
of 18th March, but in a most unsatisfactory manner.
Snoddy introduced the programme by asking  "How should news coverage reflect
 the death of a man who was universally reviled"! The whole point is that
 Milosevic was not 'universally reviled'. His complaint was then glossed
over
 by the BBC Obituaries correspondent and a correspondent who both  said that
 'the weight of evidence' pointed to  Milosevic's guilt. This again, was
 simply not true. A four year trial in which over 100 prosecution witnesses
 were called failed to produce a single scrap of compelling evidence that
 Milosevic was guilty of the crimes he was charged with.
The 'weight of evidence' supports Milosevic's innocence- not his guilt- yet
 one would never have thought so from the BBC's coverage.

On the day of Milosevic's funeral, Saturday 18th March,  BBC News again
showed its  bias. Reporter Gavin Hewitt, in his report shown on BBC1's
 10.15pm bulletin said  that Milosevic's funeral seemed 'more like a rally
 for Serb nationalism' -despite the picture of communist era Yugoslav flags
 flying in the foreground. Rather than concentrate on these visible
 demonstrations of pro-Yugoslavism- the BBC cameras instead zoomed in on
one,
 isolated placard showing Milosevic with Karadzic and Mladic- which Gavin
 Hewitt commented on to back up his thesis. And when the pictures of
 Milosevic's coffin being loaded into the ground were shown, Hewitt
commented
 'some of the mourners were indicted war criminals'. Were they? Can he
 produce evidence for this assertion?
Milosevic's burial was attended by a large crowd of mourners, many in tears.
 Yet rather than comment on the genuine sadness that those who were present
 at the burial felt- Hewitt instead preferred to make unsubstantiated jibes
 about 'war criminals'.

Overall, we believe the BBC's coverage of the death of President Milosevic
to have been totally disgraceful. A man who enjoyed widespread support, not
just in the former Yugoslavia, but around the world, was demonised and
 treated as if he had already been found guilty of the charges the NATO
powers laid against him.

Yours faithfully,


Neil Clark, Name & Address supplied

Countersigned:

Dr John Laughland, Name & Address supplied
Zsuzsanna Clark, Name & Address supplied
Roy Clark, Name & Address supplied
Joan Clark, Name & Address supplied
Julia Hammett, Name & Address supplied
Kim Cooling, Name & Address supplied
Stuart Carr, Name & Address supplied.



A MYSTERY AT THE HAGUE by Srdja Trifkovic




http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/The%20Balkans/A_Mysterious_Death_.html?seemore=y

ChroniclesExtra! Friday, March 24, 2006

A MYSTERIOUS DEATH AT THE HAGUE
By Srdja Trifkovic

The mainstream Western media coverage of the death of Slobodan Milosevic,
while predictably relentless in its clichés (the "Butcher of the Balkans,"
guilty of "starting three wars" and ordering ethnic cleansing and genocide
in his pursuit of a "greater Serbia," etc.), has ignored the unresolved
mystery surrounding the event itself. Having spent a week in Belgrade
talking to a score of well-placed individuals at different ends of the
political spectrum, I can present to our readers the facts of the case that
are deemed unfit to print by their Gannett, Tribune, NYT, or Knight Ridder
outlets.

Milosevic was found dead in his cell at the International Criminal Tribunal
on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) detention unit near The Hague on Saturday,
March 11, at 10:05 in the morning. His death came less than a week after
another indicted Serb-the former President of the Krajina Serb Republic
Milan Babic-hanged himself in another wing of the same UN detention
facility. It also came a week after the Tribunal formally rejected his
petition for temporary leave to travel to Moscow for medical treatment.

Far more remarkably, Milosevic's death came a day after he wrote a letter in
longhand to the Russian foreign ministry, warning foreign minister Sergei
Lavrov that his life was in danger:

"[T]he persistence with which the medical treatment in Russia was denied, in
the first place is motivated by the fear that through careful examination it
would be discovered that active, willful steps were taken to destroy my
health throughout the proceedings of the trial, which could not be hidden
from Russian specialists . . . [O]n January 12th (i.e., two months ago), an
extremely strong drug was found in my blood, which is used, as they
themselves say, for the treatment of tuberculosis and leprosy, although I
never used any kind of antibiotic during these five years that I've been in
their prison. Throughout this whole period, neither have I had any kind of
infectious illness (apart from flu). Also the fact that doctors needed 2
months [to report this fact to me] cannot have any other explanation than we
are facing manipulation. . . . [by] those from which I defended my country
in times of war and who have an interest to silence me . . . , I am
addressing you in expectation that you help me defend my health from the
criminal activities in this institution, working under the sign of the U.N.
. . ."

Within hours after Milosevic's death was announced, his legal advisor Zdenko
Tomanovic filed an official request to the Tribunal to have the autopsy
carried out in Moscow, "having in mind his claims yesterday that he was
being poisoned in the jail." This was rejected by the Tribunal and an
autopsy was carried out by a Dutch team, in the presence of Russian and
Serbian doctors. No overt signs of poisoning were found, but the head of the
Bakulev Cardiovascular Surgery Centre, Academician Leo Bokeria, who attended
the autopsy, said that the medicines given to Milosevic might have
exacerbated the situation: "We indicated how the patient could be cured, but
no steps were taken. We warned for more than two years that something might
happen to the patient, but the leadership of the tribunal avoided facing
this." Russian diplomats at the UN described the report from The Hague as
"disturbing" and demanded a full report from the UN Secretariat.

Suspicions of foul play were fuelled by the ICTY chief prosecutor Carla del
Ponte's strange demeanor in the immediate aftermath of Milosevic's death.
She appeared almost gleeful on March 12 when she declared that Milosevic's
death may have been a suicide, and speculated that he might have wanted to
thwart the impending guilty verdict in his trial. The theme of "Milosevic
cheating justice" was duly picked up by the media pack and establishment
politicians and repeated thousands of times, creating the impression that
the trial was going well for the prosecution.
Anyone who had met Milosevic at The Hague-myself included-knew that del
Ponte's speculation was absurd. He was conducting his defense effectively
and at times brilliantly, and he was positively looking forward to the rest
of the trial-not because he expected a "not guilty" verdict (no such luck at
The Hague), but because he believed that he was contributing to setting the
record of history straight.

Canada's former ambassador in Belgrade James Bissett was one of the last
defense witnesses to see Milosevic alive. He told me in Belgrade earlier
this week that, in the course of their long meetings on February 21 and 22,
Milosevic struck him as the man least likely to contemplate suicide at the
ICTY, the prosecution team included:

"He was perfectly relaxed, not in the least depressed, and seemed to be in a
good health. He was busy trying to prepare for my testimony and he struck me
as being content with the way the trial was going. The following day,
however, around five o'clock-after we'd worked for 2 or 3 hours-he suddenly
became flushed in the face and clasped his hands to his head. I was startled
and asked if he was all right. He answered that he was OK and explained that
although his blood pressure was under control, he had these constant ringing
and echoing sounds in his head. This was caused, he said, by a problem with
an artery in his ear. He complained about it before to the Dutch doctors who
simply said it was psychological. But after increasing demands they gave him
a MRI test and found that indeed he was right there was a problem with the
artery in his ear. Artery had a "loop" in it and to correct it, surgery
would be necessary. That is why he wanted to go to Moscow to a clinic that
specializes in this type of ailment, but the Tribunal refused it."

Bissett was especially sorry to hear of Milosevic's death because it means
that the historical record that he had wanted to set down during his trial
will be incomplete: now we are not going to hear the Milosevic's story but
only the media spin, as all of the evidence in his favor has been censored:

"He knew his material. He has done a very good job of cross-examining the
prosecution witnesses and destroying many of them who appeared before the
Tribunal. He has discounted much of the case against him but the public
hears none of this because there seems to be a deliberate news blackout on
anything recorded in his favor . . . There is a sense of relief at The
Hague, because the Tribunal was having a very hard time bringing forth any
hard evidence to prove that there was genocide in Kosovo or that Milosevic
entered into the criminal conspiracy to establish a 'Greater Serbia.'
Nevertheless they would have found him guilty. He was under no illusion
about that but he wanted to put the facts on the historical record.
Unfortunately this is no longer possible and so it will be NATO's
interpretation of events that the world will have."

According to the former Yugoslav foreign minister Zivadin Jovanovic, who
served at the time of the NATO bombing, the issue is not so much whether
Milosevic was poisoned, as many Serbs still believe, but whether his death
was made more likely by the Tribunal's willful negligence. He and his
colleagues from the Belgrade Forum, an NGO critical of the ICTY, note that
there has been no serious attempt by any major Western media outlet to
examine the facts of the case, and ask who exactly stood to profit from his
death.

The suspicion of deliberate negligence is shared by many Serbs who had never
been sympathetic to Milosevic, politically and personally. They complain
that Western journalists have accepted a tad too blithely the Tribunal's
claim that Milosevic was illicitly taking powerful antibiotics that had
neutralized his blood pressure medication, allegedly in order to create the
impression that the therapy ordered by Dutch doctors was ineffective and
that therefore he should be allowed to travel to Moscow for treatment. Even
if Milosevic had been willing to risk his life by taking a powerful
antibiotic, Rifanticin, which would have rendered blood pressure medication
useless, the claim is unconvincing for three reasons:

1. Milosevic's very public alarm about the antibiotic's traces, evident in
his letter to Lavrov, does not tally with his allegedly illicit scheme to
self-medicate the drug;
2. Milosevic's premises were under surveillance and subject to detailed
searches;
3. All visitors and their possessions (briefcases, papers) are subjected to
a thorough search by the detention unit staff.

As for the assertion that Milosevic "escaped justice," impartial observers
were of the opinion that Carla del Ponte was the one losing the legal
battle. The charges against Milosevic-genocide, crimes against humanity,
"joint criminal conspiracy" to create a "Greater Serbia"-have always been
political, and they are collective by definition. They remain unproven and,
by the standards of any normal court in a normal country, would have been
deemed discredited by now. Neil Clark, who used to cover the ICTY for the
Guardian, noted that "not only has the prosecution signally failed to prove
Milosevic's personal responsibility for atrocities committed on the ground,
the nature and extent of the atrocities themselves has also been called into
question." In the worst single atrocity ascribed to Milosevic's ultimate
responsibility, that in Srebrnica in July 1995, Clark says that del Ponte
and her team "produced nothing to challenge the verdict of the five-year
inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government-that there was 'no proof that
orders for the slaughter came from Serb political leaders in Belgrade.'"
John Laughland noted that the trial had heard more than a hundred
prosecution witnesses by late last year, "and not a single one has testified
that Milosevic ordered war crimes." In Julia Gorin's view, an attempt to
create an Islamic "Greater Albania" was confused with one to create a
"Greater Serbia":

"Surely if the latter were Slobodan Milosevic's goal, he would have started
by ethnically cleansing the nearly 300,000 Muslims of Serbia. Though he
built his career in whatever dirty ways Tito's Yugoslavia allowed, he was
the least of the Balkans' villains. For most Serbs, he was not a hero until
he was called upon to defend an entire nation at The Hague. Now that
Milosevic is dead, we are spared the worldwide riots that would have ensued
had the tribunal mustered the courage to issue a verdict based on the
evidence. And we can all sleep comfortably as the disproved charges are
accepted as history."

The circumstances surrounding Milosevic's death will be brought to light
sooner or later, and the verdict will not be to the credit of the
"international community" or the concept of transnational justice. He was
guilty of many sins and errors, but they were a matter between him and his
people. The Hague was the wrong court trying to find him guilty of the wrong
crimes, and it has always been motivated by all the wrong reasons.
The verdict of history on Milosevic himself will be ambiguous because there
had been more than one "Milosevic" in his 64 years (1941-2006). His career
can be divided into four periods of unequal duration and significance. The
first, from his birth in 1941 until his meteoric rise to power in Serbia in
early 1987, was the longest and the least interesting. The only unusual
element in his early biography was the suicide of both his parents, who had
separated when he was a child. At 24 he married his only sweetheart, Mirjana
Markovic, illegitimate daughter of a high-ranking communist official. She
was neurotic, uncompromisingly hard-Left in her politics, ambitious, and
able to dominate "her Sloba" until the very end. Unstable to the point of
clinical insanity, more than any other person she had contributed to his
serious errors of judgment and eventual loss of popularity and power base.

To all appearances, until 1987 Milosevic was an unremarkable apparatchik.
His solid Communist Party credentials-he joined the League of Communists as
a high school senior in 1959-were essential to his professional advance.
After graduating from Belgrade's school of law in 1964 he held a variety of
business administration posts, eventually becoming director of a major bank
and, briefly, its representative in New York. By the early 80s he
increasingly turned to politics and made his way up the Party ladder by
forging alliances and friendships that were pragmatic rather ideological.
His name remained relatively unknown outside the ranks of the nomenklatura.

Then came the turning point. As president of the League of Communists of
Serbia, in April 1987 Milosevic traveled to the town of Kosovo Polje, in the
restive southern Serbian province of Kosovo, to quell the protests by local
Serbs who were unhappy with the lack of support they were getting from
Belgrade in the face of ethnic Albanian pressure. When the police started
dispersing the crowd using batons, Milosevic stopped them and uttered the
words that were to change his life and that of a nation. "No one is allowed
to beat you people; no one will ever hit you again," he told the cheering
crowd.

Used to two generations of Serbian Communist leaders subservient to Tito and
reluctant to advance their republic's interests lest they be accused of
"greater Serbian nationalism," ordinary Serbs responded with enthusiasm. The
word of a new kind of leader spread like wildfire. Milosevic's populism
worked wonders at first, enabling him to eliminate all political opponents
within the Party leadership of Serbia at a marathon 30-hour Central
Committee session in September 1987. A huge rally in Belgrade's Confluence
Park (1988) and in Kosovo to mark the 600th anniversary of the historic
battle (1989), reflected a degree of genuine popularity that he enjoyed in
Serbia, Montenegro, and Serbian-inhabited part of Bosnia and Croatia in the
late 1980s.

Far from proclaiming an agenda for expansion, as later alleged by his
accusers, his speech at Kosovo was full of old ideological clichés and
"Yugoslav" platitudes:

"Equal and harmonious relations among Yugoslav peoples are a necessary
condition for the existence of Yugoslavia and for it to find its way out of
the crisis and, in particular, they are a necessary condition for its
economic and social prosperity . . . Internal and external enemies . . .
organize their activity against multinational societies mostly by fomenting
national conflicts. At this moment, we in Yugoslavia are behaving as if we
have never had such an experience."

The precise nature of his long term agenda was never stated, however,
because it had never been defined. He was able to gain followers from widely
different camps, including hard-line Party loyalists as well as
anti-Communist nationalists, because they all tended to project their hopes,
aspirations and fears onto Milosevic-even though those hopes and aspirations
were often mutually incompatible.

The key issue was the constitutional framework within which the Serbs should
seek their future. They were unhappy by Tito's arrangements that kept them
divided into five units in the old Yugoslav federation. Milosevic wanted to
redefine the nature of that federation, rather than abolish it. Then and
throughout his life he was a "Yugoslav" rather than a "Greater Serb." In
addition he was so deeply steeped in the Communist legacy of his formative
years-and so utterly unable to resist the pressure from his doctrinaire
wife-that even after the fall of the Berlin Wall he kept the old insignia
with the red star, together with the leadership structure and mindset of the
old, Titoist order.

The tensions of this period could have been resolved by a clear strategy
once the war broke out, first in Croatia (summer 1991) and then in Bosnia
(spring 1992). This did not happen. In the third phase of Milosevic's
career, from mid-1991 until October 5, 2000, a cynically manipulative Mr.
Hyde had finally prevailed over the putative national leader Dr. Jekyll. As
the fighting raged around Vukovar and Dubrovnik, he made countless
contradictory statements about its nature, always stressing that "Serbia is
not at war" and thereby implicitly recognizing the validity of Tito's
internal boundaries.

Anticipating the onset of the second stage even before it became fully
apparent, and to many raised eyebrows in Washington, I opined that
"Milosevic is cynically exploiting the nationalist awakening to perpetuate
Communist rule and his own power in the eastern half of Yugoslavia." (U.S.
News & World Report, 18 June 1990), that he "needs outside enemies to halt
the erosion of his popularity." (U.S. News & World Report, 12 November
1990). In the end, for Serb patriots it turned out that "trusting Milosevic
is like giving a blood bank to Count Dracula" (the Times of London, 23
November 1995).

By blithely recognizing the secessionist republics within Tito's boundaries,
the "international community" effectively became a combatant in the wars of
Yugoslav secession. Its "mediators" accepted a role that was not only
subordinate, but also squalid. Lord David Owen, prominent among them,
conceded that Tito's boundaries were arbitrary and should have been redrawn
at the time of Yugoslavia's disintegration: "to rule out any discussion or
opportunity for compromise in order to head off war was an extraordinary
decision," he wrote, "to have stuck unyieldingly to the internal boundaries
of the six republics within the former Yugoslavia as being the boundaries
for independent states, was a folly far greater than that of premature
recognition itself." But in all his deeds he and a legion of other mediators
nevertheless stuck, unyieldingly, to that formula.

Milosevic's diplomatic ineptitude and his chronic inability to grasp the
importance of lobbying and public relations in Washington and other Western
capitals had enabled the secessionists to have a free run of the media scene
with the simplistic notion that "the butcher of the Balkans" was
overwhelmingly, even exclusively guilty of all the horrors that had befallen
the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, far from seeking the completion of
a "Greater Serbian" project while he had the military wherewithal to do so
(1991-1995), Milosevic attempted to fortify his domestic position in
Belgrade by trading in the Western Serbs (Krajina, Bosnia) for Western
benevolence. It worked for a while. "The Serbian leader continues to be a
necessary diplomatic partner," the New York Times opined in November 1996, a
year after the Dayton Agreement ended the war in Bosnia thanks to
Milosevic's pressure on the Bosnian-Serb leadership. His status as a
permanent fixture in the Balkan landscape seemed secure.

It all changed with the escalation of the crisis in Kosovo, however. His
belated refusal to sign on yet another dotted line at Rambouillet paved the
way for NATO's illegal bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999. For one last
time the Serbs rallied under the leader many of them no longer trusted,
aware that the alternative was to accept the country's open-ended carve-up.
For one last time they were let down: Milosevic saved Clinton's skin by
capitulating in June of that year, and letting NATO occupy Kosovo just as
the bombing campaign was running out of steam and the Alliance was riddled
by discord over what to do next.

The ensuing mass exodus of Kosovo's quarter-million Serbs and the torching
of their homes and churches by the KLA terrorists did not prevent Milosevic
from pretending that his superior statesmanship, embodied in the
unenforceable UN Security Council Resolution 1244, had saved the country's
integrity. The ensuing reconstruction effort in Serbia was used as a
propaganda ploy to improve the rating of his own socialist party of Serbia
and his wife Mirjana Markovic's minuscule "Yugoslav United Left" (JUL).

For many Serbs this was the final straw. Refusing to recognize the change of
mood, in mid-2000 Milosevic followed his wife's advice and called a snap
election, hoping to secure his position for another four years. Unexpectedly
he was unable to beat his chief challenger Vojislav Kostunica in the first
round, and succumbed to a wave of popular protest when he tried to deny
Kostunica's victory in the closely contested runoff.

His downfall on October 5, 2000, followed a failed attempt to steal yet
another election. It nevertheless would not have been possible if the
military and the security services had not abandoned him. There had been
just too many defeats and too many wasted opportunities over the previous
decade and a half for the security chiefs to continue trusting Milosevic
implicitly. Their refusal to fire on the crowds-as his half-demented wife
allegedly demanded on that day-sealed Milosevic's fate. After five months'
powerless isolation in his suburban villa he was arrested and taken to
Belgrade's central prison. On June 28, 2001, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic
arranged for his transfer to The Hague Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, in
violation of Serbia's laws and constitution.

The final four years of Milosevic's life were spent in prison. During this
time a haughty and arrogant know-all of previous years rapidly evolved into
a hard-working and efficient lawyer who conducted his own complex defense.
He was helped by an indictment that was hastily concocted by del Ponte's
predecessor Louise Arbour at the height of the bombing campaign in May 1999
to serve political, rather than legal purposes.

In preparing his defense Milosevic was initially guided by personal motives.
By the end of 2003 or early 2004, however, he came to realize that,
regardless of his own destiny, what he was doing had a wider historic
significance. He was accused of "genocide," a crime that places collective
stigma on a nation, not just its leader. Furthermore, the accusation of a
"joint criminal conspiracy" with the purpose of creating a "Greater Serbia"
was expanded by the Tribunal into an attempt to misrepresent two centuries
of Serbia's history as an open-ended quest for aggressive expansion, with
Milosevic but the latest link in that chain. As John Laughland wrote in the
Spectator last year, even more than the gross abuses of due process which it
is committing, the Milosevic trial has shown the futility of trying to
submit political decisions to the judgment of criminal law:

"Because it seeks to comprehend war as the result of the decisions of
individuals, and not as the consequence of conflict between states, modern
international humanitarian law sees trees but no wood. In the Milosevic
trial, the role of the other Yugoslav leaders in starting the war especially
those who declared secession from Yugoslavia is grossly obscured, as is that
of the countless Western politicians and institutions who were intimately
involved at every stage of the Yugoslav conflict, and who encouraged the
secessions."

Finally grasping the extent to which his trial was also the trial of the
Serbian nation as a whole, Milosevic succeeded for the first time in his
life to transcend the limitations of ideology and egotism that had blinkered
him for so long. He turned the trial, heralded by the Western media class as
a new Nuremberg, into a political embarrassment for "the international
community." His defense, effective and at times brilliant (one prosecutor
acknowledged that "there's no doubt who's the smartest guy in the
courtroom"), finally blended Milosevic's personal interest with the interest
of his people. When I met him at his cell in June 2004 he told me that he
may never get out of there, but he was certain his "refutation of [chief
prosecutor Carla] del Ponte's ridiculous indictment would set the record of
history straight."

Milosevic's death makes that certainty well justified, even if "the record
of history" comes too late to alter the unjust and untenable temporary
outcome of the wars of Yugoslav succession. It is to be feared that those
who had collectively invented a fictional character bearing the name
"Slobodan Milosevic" in the 1990s will use the historic man's death as a
welcome opportunity to put the finishing touches on the caricature, and
promote it as the final, approved and unalterable likeness.

********************

Dr. S. Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor
CHRONICLES, 928 N Main Street, Rockford, IL 61103, USA
voice (815) 964-5054 fax (815) 964-9403 cell (312) 375-4044
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi