MILOSEVIC'S DEATH: A Political Assassination Blamed on the Victim

 

MILOSEVIC'S DEATH: A POLITICAL ASSASSINATION BLAMED ON THE
VICTIM

By Sara Flounders
Co-Director, International Action Center

In the summer of 2004 I met with former Yugoslav President
Slobodan Milosevic in Scheveningen prison when I was
approved as a defense witness. Before I could get in, I
had to pass four totally separate check points, unable to
take in anything but papers. Each level of security was
more rigid than the one before.

No one who has met with President Milosevic over the past
four years would believe he would risk killing himself
rather than finishing his trial. And no one who visited
Scheveningen in The Hague would believe the outlandish
claims that somehow he was able to smuggle in
un-prescribed medications on a regular basis. They would
instead suspect that the authorities were desperately
trying to cover up their own crimes.

My role as witness was based on my trip to Yugoslavia in
the spring of 1999, during the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing. I
visited bombed schools, hospitals, heating plants and
market places, recording the harm done to civilians. In
addition, I had written since 1993 on the
behind-the-scenes U.S. role in the strangulation and
forced dismemberment of Yugoslavia.

Even after my name was accepted as a defense witness, it
was a complicated and lengthy procedure to make the visit.
Though all was approved on the day of the visit, it still
took four hours to get through the checkpoints into the
special unit inside the prison where the defendants for
the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) were kept totally segregated from
general population and closely monitored.

Scheveningen prison is a maximum-security high-tech
facility. Milosevic and other indicted prisoners are
housed in a special prison unit within the larger prison.
This section is spread over four floors with 12 cells
each. The unit is specially patrolled by United Nations
guards. Cameras are everywhere. Every movement of the
prisoners is monitored and controlled. When the president
was first placed in his cell, lights were kept on 24 hours
a day and every motion was monitored.

WHERE DID RIFAMPICIN COME FROM?

Now the Dutch authorities claim that Milosevic was taking
a rare, difficult-to-acquire antibiotic used to treat
leprosy or tuberculosis that has the unique ability to
counteract the medicine he was taking to control his high
blood pressure. How did this medicine, rifampicin, get
into Milosevic's system? He was held in a maximum security
prison in triple lock down in a special contained unit
within a larger Dutch prison once used by the Nazis to
detain Dutch resistance fighters.

When rifampicin was found last Jan. 12 in Milosevic's
blood, the ICTY kept the report of the blood tests secret,
even from Milosevic and his doctors, who were complaining
that something terribly wrong was damaging the defendant's
health. While the prisoner and his defense committee and
assistant lawyers were demanding health information, the
ICTY officials sat on this report. If ICTY officials
responsible for Milosevic's health really believed he was
sneaking toxic medications into the prison, why hadn't
they publicized this report much earlier?

DELAYS HURT MILOSEVIC

Equally outlandish are the claims that Milosevic staged
his illness to delay the trial. The prosecution delayed
the trial, first by adding charges against the president
regarding Croatia and Bosnia when they realized they had
no war-crimes case on the original Kosovo charges, then by
bringing hundreds of witnesses to generate 500,000 pages
of prosecution testimony from February 2002 to February
2004.

Each time Milosevic was too sick to continue in court, the
prosecution moved to impose counsel and to take away the
prisoner's right to present his own defense. Milosevic was
determined to use the trial as a platform to defend not
only himself but the people of Yugoslavia, and to indict
the U.S., Germany and the NATO powers for their role in
the criminal destruction of his country. He welcomed the
trial as the only platform where he could make the
historical record. In his words to the court he constantly
described why, despite his bad health, he was determined
to continue.

When I met Milosevic it was in the special room that was
the only place where the ICTY allowed him to work or have
the court papers to prepare for his defense. Whenever his
blood pressure rose and he was unable to continue the
court sessions, he was also barred from any access to his
defense materials.

During each step of the trial Milosevic's cardiovascular
problems, especially his high blood pressure had resulted
in several delays in the trial. At each step the ICTY
officials tried to use the issue of his health in constant
efforts to deny him the right to conduct his own defense.
Neither the illness nor the delays helped his defense.

The ICTY charged that Milosevic was secretly medicating
himself and avoiding taking prescribed medicines.
Milosevic answered this charge himself for the court
record on Sept. 1, 2004: "You probably don't know the
practice in your own Detention Unit. I take my medication
in the presence of guards. I'm given them. I take them in
the presence of the guard, and the guard writes down in
the book the exact time when I ingested those medicines."

Despite the life-threatening cardiovascular risk raised in
every dispute with the prosecution, tribunal officials
refused even to secure regular check-ups of the
president's health condition. They also denied access for
months to specialists who were willing to come to
Scheveningen, delaying his care.

The president's own explanation of his problem was more
consistent and credible than the ICTY's. In a letter
addressed to the Russian Embassy two days before he died,
Milosevic writes that he has taken no antibiotics in more
than four years. He asks why the medical report on the
discovery of rifampicin was kept secret from him for
almost two months. He writes that he believes that "active
steps are being taken to destroy my health." He warns that
he is sure he is being poisoned and that his life is in
danger.

A POLITICAL TRIBUNAL

The ICTY's handling of President Milosevic's death has
been like its handling of the entire trial: an attempt to
blame the victim for the crime.

The ICTY is not a real international court, with the
ability to try any accused war criminal. It is a political
court set up by the UN Security Council at the insistence
of Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 1993 in
violation of the UN Charter. Its scope is limited to
trying the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and the vast
majority of prisoners are Serbs. It is a propaganda
apparatus and internment camp for political prisoners
disguised as an unbiased court. It aims to punish the
victims for the crimes committed against them and to
absolve the imperialist powers who invaded, bombed,
dismembered and forced the privatization of the Socialist
Federation of Yugoslavia.

When Milosevic discussed the trial with me, his scope of
historical knowledge, his energy despite his illness, cut
through my own jet-lag and fatigue from the four-hour
entrance hurdle and allowed us to finish the interview
with enthusiasm for the next step of the tribunal.

Now the world is asked to believe that Milosevic is
responsible for his own death. It is a scenario so
incredibly complex, an elaborate suicide story that is as
improbable as the charges he was facing. The
bought-and-paid-for corporate media is accepting and
propagating the story of his death in the same servile
fashion they accepted the very existence of this illegal
court and the justification for the destruction of
Yugoslavia.

Milosevic is now gone. But his summation answering two
years of the prosecution case and his opening defense
speech live on. He has left a ringing indictment of U.S.
and European big-power intervention in the Balkans in a
historic document in an "I accuse" format. His speech,
which contains extensive documentation and factual detail,
has been published in Serbian, Greek, French, Russian and
English. This response, "The Defense Speaks-for History
and the Future," (IAC 2006) will stand long after the
tawdry war propaganda has collapsed.