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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
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