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

The legacy of the ICTY trial

 

Hunt for Justice: The Louise Arbour Story
http://thechronicleherald.ca/Entertainment/492190.html

NWO La Cosa Nostra - has pulled the chain on Milosevic
http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_3649.shtml

Milosevic Lawyers Want Medical Records Unsealed
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=tri&s=f&o=260502&apc_state=henftri260500

Unanswered Questions
http://www.iwpr.net/?p=tri&s=f&o=260500&apc_state=henh


The death of Milosevic and the death of Yugoslavia
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/8820/1/314

Slobodan Milosevic and the Dead-Sure Tribunal

from the most Dead-Sure prison of Europe

A self-made demise?
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg18925443.700-slobodan-milosevic-a-selfmade-demise.html

Milosevic believed was being poisoned in ICTY - witness
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/tanjug031506.htm

Slobodan Milosevic and the Dead-Sure Tribunal
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3018/1/157/


Milosevic was not the only one in the court to be cheated of a verdict
http://news.serbianunity.net/bydate/2006/March_22/11.html

'Hunt For Justice '
http://www.canada.com/topics/entertainment/story.html?id=f92adc37-3628-4e5a-b932-abeac3b44177&k=48002

"We don't see how the death of Milosevic could in any way change the
international legal obligations of Serbia and Montenegro"
http://www.newsone.ca/piercelandherald/stories/index.php?action=fullnews&id=162623


The failure of ICTY rigging forces
http://www.nhandan.com.vn/english/news/220306/domestic_the.htm

NATO's War of Aggression in Yugoslavia: Who are the War Criminals?

March 24, 1999-March 24, 2006


Serbia Will Not Be Cowed
http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve06/1266milosevic.html

NATO's War of Aggression in Yugoslavia: Who are the War Criminals?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20060321&articleId=2144


The War Lovers
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=8744

David Binder : '93 Pulitzer Should Be Revoked

 

Former NY Times Reporter: '93 Pulitzer Should Be Revoked

By Sherrie Gossett

CNSNews.com Staff Writer

March 22, 2006

Washington (CNSNews.com) - Castigating the press for "journalistic
crimes" committed during its reporting on the Balkans wars of the
1990s, retired New York Times reporter David Binder claims the 1993
Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting awarded to both the Times
and New York's Newsday "should, in all fairness and honesty, be
revoked."

Binder was speaking at a press conference for the release of a new book
criticizing the war reporting. Binder wrote the foreword to the book by
Peter Brock, titled "Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and
Tragedy in Yugoslavia."

"What we're looking at here is a series catalogued by Peter Brock of
journalistic crimes," said Binder. Before mentioning the reporting of
the Times' John F. Burns and Newsday's Roy Gutman, Binder evoked the
memory of what he called Walter Duranty's "phony reporting" for the New
York Times in the 1930s as an example of an undeserved Pulitzer.
Duranty was criticized for having been too deferential to Joseph Stalin
and his plan to industrialize the Soviet Union.

"What Peter [Brock] has unraveled and disclosed in this book involves
at least a couple of Pulitzer prizes that should in all fairness and
honesty be revoked." Binder confirmed to Cybercast News Service that he
was referring to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting,
awarded to Burns of the New York Times and Gutman of Newsday for their
reporting in the Balkans. Brock devotes considerable space in his book
to criticizing the reporting of Burns and Gutman.

Binder noted that the Times has gone through "agony" in recent years
over the "terrible professional behavior of its staff members" and with
"what has gone on under its masthead."

"[E]xposure is the best remedy," said Binder.

"I think Peter Brock's book helps a great deal to confront these
egregious crimes of journalism. I think it should be shoved under the
noses of editors all across the press, at least the editors who are
dealing with foreign news ..." said Binder.

The Pulitzer Board at first voted to award the prize solely to Gutman,
according to Binder. "The New York Times got so agitated that John
Burns was passed over that they started lobbying the board. The
Pulitzer is an extremely political award in many if not all cases.
There are all kinds of backstage manipulations that go on."

The centerpiece of Burns' Pulitzer entry was a seven-hour interview
with a captured Bosnian Serb -- Borislav Herak -- who in graphic
statements to Burns, confessed to dozens of murders, including eight
involving rape. Burns' Nov. 27, 1992, article was described by the New
York Times as offering "insight into the way thousands of others have
died in Bosnia."

However, more than three years after the publication of Burns' story,
the Times on Jan. 31, 1996, described Herak as "slightly retarded" and
reported that Herak had retracted his confession and claimed it had
been beaten out of him by guards.

"I was tortured, forced to confess," said Herak. By that time his
testimony already had been used to convict Sretko Damjanovic for the
killing of two Muslim brothers who were later found alive. Both Herak
and Damjanovic, who also said he had been "tortured" into providing a
false confession, were sentenced to death by firing squad.

Author Peter Brock described Burns' interview with Herak as "a
manipulated confession and interrogation in which Burns was the key
participant." Brock faults Burns for failing to tell readers that the
interview took place with a Sarajevo video production crew present and
that "interrogations were conducted by [government] investigators and
by Sarajevo film director Ademir Kenovic."

He also argues that "vital pieces" of Herak's story were missing.
"[T]here was no evidence, corpses or victims, or eyewitnesses to
implicate Herak, except for hearsay from Bosnian government
'investigators,'" Brock writes.

Brock also faults Newsday's Roy Gutman for being unduly influenced by
government propagandists including one source who operated under four
different aliases. Gutman was criticized for not exercising enough
scrutiny before repeating allegations of atrocities and statistics of
the dead and tortured.

Gutman won his Pulitzer partly for "electrifying stories about
'concentration camps'," notes Brock, who criticizes the reporter for
the prominence of "hearsay" and "double hearsay" in his stories, as
well as gratuitous use of the language of the Nazi Holocaust.

Gutman's first five stories about the alleged Omarska concentration
camp in Bosnia were actually filed from Zagreb, in Croatia, Brock
complains. It was Gutman's sixth story on the subject that finally
carried an Omarska dateline, Brock wrote, and that was after the prison
had been shut down.

Both Binder and Brock accuse the press of falling into "pack
journalism" and playing the role of "co-belligerent." The reliance on
Croat and Bosnian Muslim propaganda resulted in distorted reporting
that exaggerated the Serb role in the three-sided conflict and ignored
ethnic cleansing of Serbs, according to Binder and Brock.

Brock went so far as to say the $3,000 Pulitzer Prize money awarded to
Burns and Gutman was "blood money."

"What we're talking about in terms of what I call crimes of journalism
was only ten years ago," said Binder. "It wasn't so long ago that
these, I think revolting things, were happening -- revolting bias,
revolting suppression of other sides of the story."

During his recent appearance at the National Press Club in Washington,
D.C., Binder said it would take "at least a decade" before historians
"clear out that wretched underbrush of lies and concoctions" from
"despicable" politicians "like Richard Holbrooke," an international
negotiator during the administration of former President Bill Clinton
and "certainly the journalists" criticized in Brock's book. The rise of
blogs and media watchdog groups offers a "corrective" for the public
now, Binder contended.

In his call for the revocation of the Pulitzer Prize Peter Brock said
that "in all fairness, if [the Pulitzer board] is not going to revoke
the prize, they ought to give Janet Cooke's Pulitzer back." Cooke was a
Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer for a fabricated 1980 story
about an eight-year old heroin addict.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=\SpecialReports\archive\200603\SPE20060322a.html
 

Belgrade team on the 2nd meeting in Vienna

 

BelgradeSatisfied with Second Round of Decentralization Talks in Vienna 

 

 

The second round of talks between the Serb and Albanian delegations on decentralization of Kosovo in Vienna has not produced any final agreement, but the Belgrade negotiating team is satisfied with the Vienna talks. "The conclusion of Albert Rohan, who presided over the meeting, is in accordance with our hopes. There are still many things to talk about. We have taken a step forward and there can be no going back. For example, as regards to the need of the Serb municipalities to have ties with Belgrade," assessed the Serbian PM Advisor Slobodan Samardzic. He added that the talks had been satisfactory and that the result could be very favourable for Belgrade. In an interview with Vecernje Novosti Leon Kojen, the member of Belgrade negotiating team and the Political Advisor to the Serbian President said that, except for the issue of establishing new municipalities in Kosovo, the discussion on decentralization, which included broader powers of the Serb municipalities, their horizontal ties and direct ties with Belgrade, has been rounded up.  According to him, in case that an agreement is reached it remains to be seen when it will be implemented: "We urged that it should be implemented right away, and I think we shall have the support of the international community on this, whereas the Albanians will urge that it be implemented as late as possible. They have already mentioned 2008 and 2009, and even that it will be implemented one day after the Kosovo status is defined. We will also insist that the reached decentralization concept is included in the future Kosovo constitution," said Kojen. The member of the Belgrade negotiating team Goran Bogdanovic told Vecernje Novosti that the Serbian side must continue to insist on substantial decentralization of power in Kosovo and ties between Serb municipalities and Belgrade. He voiced satisfaction with the understanding that Albert Rohan had expressed toward the Belgrade delegation. The Deputy of the UN S-G Special Envoy for future status process in Kosovo Albert Rohan told the press following the second round of Vienna talks that financing of Kosovo municipalities must be transparent. According to him, the municipalities can cooperate in areas within their jurisdiction, adding that no one among the participants had challenged the legitimacy of ties between the Serb municipalities with Belgrade in certain areas, like education and healthcare. Rohan has announced that the international negotiators would try to identify solutions that could be acceptable to both sides and send this document to Belgrade and Pristina. He has announced that the next meeting has been scheduled for 3 April. Albanian negotiators opposed direct financial ties between Belgrade and Serbian municipalities. RTS reported from Vienna that Pristina delegation insisted that Belgrade could assist the future municipalities, but only if this assistance would be directed through the Kosovo Government, while ties between Serb municipalities and Belgrade, according to Pristina, could only be of informal kind.

 

The Real Butchers Of Serbia: Clinton, Clark, NATO

 

The Real Butchers Of Serbia: Clinton, Clark, NATO

Slobo death media spin intensifies, speculation rife that Milosevic was going to call Clinton as witness

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | March 15 2006

The media coverage of Slobodan Milosevic's death has branched off into two distinct contexts. One is the desperate scramble to spin evidence and testimony suggesting Slobo was murdered and the other revolves around discussion that Milosevic was knocked off because he was about to call Bill Clinton as a witness at the Hague.

The consequence of 'The Butcher Of Serbia's' death remains the same. The only man in a position to legally implicate the real butchers of Serbia, Clark and Clinton, in war crimes that all but wiped an entire race off the map, is silenced.

Today both Milosevic's son and his wife went public to say that in their opinion Slobo was deliberately poisoned by the cocktail of drugs that negated the effects of his high blood pressure medicine, leading to his heart attack.

"They kept cameras and lights on in Slobodan's cell non-stop, so that he could not sleep. That is an officially recognised form of torture," said Mirjana Markovic. Which makes the UN's claim that the drugs found in Slobo's body were smuggled into his jail cell all the more ridiculous. This is the biggest conspiracy theory of them all. Milosevic was under constant monitoring and surveillance yet we are led to believe he had a 'dealer' who was able to provide the goodies.

The truth is that the prosecution was losing the case against Milosevic and as the trial was wounding down to a close the only evidence regarding ethnic cleansing implicated Wesley Clark, Bill Clinton, NATO and all the other warmongers in chief who oversaw the 78 day bombing of Yugoslavia.

What of the U.S. bombing of Radio Television Serbia, the cluster bombing of the Nis marketplace, the use of depleted uranium munitions and the targeting of petrochemical plants causing toxic and chemical waste to pour into the Danube River, or the deliberate targeting of civilian transport? As Jeremy Scahill adeptly points out,

"What the corporate media overwhelmingly ignores in Milosevic’s death is what they ignored in his life as wellâ€â€his intimate knowledge of U.S. war crimes in Yugoslavia. While Milosevic was undoubtedly a war criminal who deserved to be tried for his crimes, he was also the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the U.S. role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In fact, that is precisely what he was fighting to do at his war crimes trial when he died."

"Milosevic’s death means that those who bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days beginning 7 years ago this month, killing thousands, will be, once and for all protected from any public scrutiny for their crimes. However opportunistic Milosevic may have been, he would have been one of the few people to appear at the Hague that could have and would have laid out these crimes in great detail."

"To be sure, there will never be indictments of these U.S. war criminals at the Hague: Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, Jamie Rubin, William Cohen, Sandy Berger, Richard Holbrooke and Wesley Clark. For many of Serbia’s victims of U.S. war crimes, Milosevic’s trial was a “Hail Mary†pass, as awful of an historical irony as that is, aimed at someone recognizing their forgotten suffering."

And what of the rather troubling little matter of US government support for Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda' not fighting the evil Commies in the 70's and 80's, but helping the death squads of the KLA ethnically cleanse the last remaining Serbs and ethnic minorities from Kosovo, outnumbered nine to one by the ethnic Albanian colonizers, in the late 90's?

From the very opening statement of his trial, Milosevic had made his intentions clear by outlining the true power structure behind Al-Qaeda.

“In 1998 when [Clinton envoy Richard] Holbrooke visited us in Belgrade, we told him the information we had at our disposal, that in Northern Albania the KLA is being aided by Osama bin Laden, that he was arming, training, and preparing the members of this terrorist organisation in Albania. However, they decided to cooperate with the KLA and indirectly, therefore, with bin Laden, although before that he had bombed the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania [and] had already declared war.†Milosevic concluded that “one day all this will have to come to light, these links.â€Â

The media fallout from Milosevic's death has predictably split down myopic partisan lines.

The establishment left press, who only cry bloody murder about a war if a Bush is in office, were quick off the mark to denounce questions about the nature of 'The Butcher's' death and rally round to defend their darling war criminals Clinton and Clark.

One example is Media Matters, who called Rush Limbaugh's sanity into question, after Limbaugh suggested that Milosevic may have been the final victim of the Clinton Death List, whose previous members include Ron Brown and Vince Foster. Like others, Limbaugh speculated that Slobo was about to call Clinton as his last witness, implicating Clark and the rest of the NATO collaborators in the process

Although Limbaugh has about as much objectivity as a 9/11 Commission panel member, he is right to make this connection. The Brown and Foster evidence lead right back to Clinton and for Media Matters to couch this in the context of another madcap Rush rant betrays the hypocrisy of the left.

It was Bill Clinton who turned Serbia into a DU ridden hellhole and it was Bill Clinton who initiated sanctions in Iraq that killed 500,000 children, a "price worth paying," according to his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

But to the left Clinton can do no wrong, so for them the blame must be pinned on Slobo. And when a Democrat gets in after 2008 and launches an unjustified and unconstitutional war against a defenseless sovereign nation, the majority of them will drop their Bush banners, line up in an orderly queue, and assume the position to lick government boots.

As Paul Craig Roberts highlights, Serbia was a practice run for the ethnic cleansing we now see unfolding in Iraq. It doesn't matter what letter the Commander In Butchery has before his name, governments and terrorist henchmen are bought and paid for while American soldiers are used as cannon fodder for the New World Order's next imperial conquest. Any individual that has intimate knowledge and evidence of that fact, like Slobodan Milosevic, is a target for elimination.

http://www.infowars.com/articles/world/milosevic_real_butchers_of_serbia_clinton_clark.htm

Kosovo May Explode - Here

  Kosovo May Explode -- Here

By Julia Gorin

CNSNews.com Commentary

March 16, 2006

The War on Terror suffered a major blow three years before it was ever announced. It happened when the people of this democracy were misled into attacking the sovereign, emerging post-Communist democracy of Yugoslavia, over rumors of genocide and ethnic cleansing that proved false. In so doing, we delivered the Balkans to al Qaeda.

Today we are being asked to seal that historical blunder, the repercussions of which are still escalating seven years later. The people we "rescued" have turned their weapons against United Nations and NATO forces.

While NATO spends most of its time rooting out terror cells in Kosovo and Bosnia, which served as the planning bases for the London and Madrid bombings, the 2006 deadline to complete our eagerly forgotten debacle and determine the province's final status is fast approaching.

To persuade the international community that only one final status will be acceptable, our Albanian "rescuees" have been stepping up the violence. This is a message to the West that it has only one possible exit strategy: grant unconditional independence -- without border compromises with Serbia and without protection guarantees for what's left of the non-Albanian minorities.

If we allow this to happen, the peacekeepers will have to leave, and with them so will our eyes and ears in this terror haven and thruway. Still, congressional, U.S. State Department and U.N. sentiment seem to be tilting toward self-determination and the logic that if you've dug yourself into a hole, keep digging.

Here is the size of that hole so far: In November, 2001, what should have been an explosive article appeared in the European edition of the Wall St. Journal. Headlined "Al Qaeda's Balkan Links," it read: "For the past 10 years ... Ayman al-Zawahiri (bin Laden's second in command) has operated terrorist training camps [and] weapons of mass destruction factories throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia ... Though the Clinton administration had been briefed extensively by the State Department in 1993 on the growing Islamist threat in former Yugoslavia, little was done to follow through ..."

A December 2003 article in Britain's Sunday Mirror also registered barely a blip: "Posing as members of the Real IRA, we ... made our deal in Kosovo, a breeding ground for fanatics with al-Qaeda links. Our contact was the deputy commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army Niam Behljulji ... [who allegedly supplied] terrorists across Europe and has been accused of massacring Serbian women and children during the war. He even posed grinning for a photograph, holding the severed head of one of his victims."

Even the high-minded among us may soon become nostalgic for the days when ethnic profiling was even possible. Because while the world wept for Bosnia, bin Laden and Iran were recruiting thousands of blonde, blue-eyed Bosnian Muslims for suicide missions -- "White al Qaeda," according to Yossef Bodansky, security expert and author of "Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America."

But to perpetuate the version of events we were sold from the beginning, all these connections have gone purposefully unmade by our nation's "journalists," who were gung-ho supporters of our 1999 offensive against a historical ally.

How many Americans know that the terrorists who carried out a spate of suicide attacks in Iraq in August 2004 were trained in Bosnia, or that al Qaeda's top Balkans operative -- al-Zawahiri's brother Mohammed -- had a high position with our terrorist KLA "allies"?

And who wants to bring up what former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bissett has, that in Bosnia we fought alongside at least two of the 9/11 hijackers. We won't learn the details of how Bosnia has become the European "one-stop shop" for all the terrorism needs -- weapons, money, shelter, documents -- of Chechen and Afghan fighters passing through Europe before heading to Iraq.

We will lack information about an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, where U.S. forces recovered one Albanian Kosovar's application, reading: "I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience against Serb and American forces. ... I recommend operations against parks like Disney."

Despite the media's blackout on the subject of Balkans terror, more and more Americans have been scratching their heads, wondering why we forcibly precluded what the Serbs were doing in their own backyard, and continue to mischaracterize it, even as we've gone halfway around the globe to do the same thing.

For the past four years The Hague's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has been finding what multiple international forensics teams have found, that claims of Serb "atrocities" were exaggerated and often invented. It turns out we confused an attempt to create an Islamic "Greater Albania" with one to create a "Greater Serbia." But Milosevic's sudden death this week spares us from the worldwide riots that would have ensued had the tribunal mustered the courage to issue a verdict based on the evidence.

"If you break it, you fix it." We've heard much of that refrain throughout our Iraq debates, including from the self-same architects of the Kosovo offensive, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Wesley Clark.

Their prescription for fixing what they broke? Bury it. Clark warned that "a violent collision may occur by year-end" if we don't do what the Albanians want, and this four-star general advocated doing just that. After all, "unrest" in the region shines an unwelcome spotlight on his "successful war." Clark even suggested pummeling the Serbs again if Belgrade got in the way; it's easier than fighting his terrorist Albanian campaign donors.

As U.N. human rights observer Jiri Dienstbier notes, "If NATO and the U.N. can't defeat terrorism in an area the size of one-eighth of the Czech Republic, how do they expect to confront global terrorism?"

Balkans author Vojin Joksimovich seconds the question: "Although the intelligence community is fully aware of the threat, political leaders are denying it and the media are silent. Given this cover-up, it's fair to ask whether we are able to prevent yet another major terrorist act."

Indeed, can you fight terror with one hand while abetting it with the other?

It's long past time to set the record straight on what we "achieved" in the Balkans, and change course. If a commission was set up to determine whether a presidential administration did all it could to prevent kamikaze attacks on 9/11, good God, what of an administration that committed the might of the U.S. Air Force to bomb Europe for a legacy beyond sexual harassment, and lied about genocide to achieve it?

Testifying at the Milosevic trial in September 2004, former Senate Republican Policy Committee analyst James Jatras quoted the 9/11 Commission's finding that it was in 1990s Bosnia that the "groundwork for a true terrorist network was being laid." That network is known as al Qaeda.

The Balkans were the early, key prize that Iran and Osama bin Laden sought as a terror corridor into the West. We delivered it to them. Why?

As the world closes in on the Serbs again this year, handing bin Laden an unequivocal victory by severing Kosovo -- Serbia's version of Jerusalem -- and officially establishing a terror state in Europe, we can know from Madrid and London that we'll pay for it with our own blood.

Indeed, we already have.

(Julia Gorin blogs at JuliaGorin.com and is a contributing editor to JewishWorldReview.com, where she has been chronicling the enduring fallout from the Balkan wars.)

       
<http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPrint.asp?Page=\Commentary\archive\200603\COM20060316a.html>       

       

'Thank you for coming'

http://www.bhhrg.org/mediaDetails.asp?ArticleID=996

 

The Spectator

A chat with Milosevic
by John Laughland 
18 March 2006,

I was one of the last Western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic. It was early last year. A fierce wind was whipping the cold rain straight off the sea and through the ugly streets of Scheveningen as I unbundled from my pockets the various secret cameras and recording devices which I had in vain hidden there, and made my way through the security checks at the United Nations Detention Unit. A series of doors clanged open and shut and there was a friendly hubbub and a fug of cigarette smoke as stubbly men lounged, chatting in their long flat vowels as if it were an ordinary weekday morning in a Belgrade café. Holland dissolved behind me and I had arrived back in Yugoslavia.

The Hague tribunal is like Dover in Act V of King Lear — nearly all the main surviving protagonists of the Balkans wars are assembled in this improbable place. In a rare moment of postwar Yugoslav unity, the inmates once joined forces to protest about the tasteless food produced by the Dutch caterers, and so cevapcici are now delivered instead from a Croat restaurant in town. The colour inside is dark grey, a cross between a prison and an office. At the end of the corridor, I was shown into a room with a big window and a table covered in papers, books, dirty ashtrays, used plastic cups and open packets of Marlboro. Behind it sat Slobodan Milosevic, the butcher of the Balkans, wearing a zip-up grey cardigan and an open-necked shirt. He rose to greet me and smiled. ‘It is very nice to see you,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘Thank you for coming. Will you have some coffee?’

His demeanour was upbeat and his manner open and friendly. He spoke slowly and in a deep voice, occasionally with humour and contempt for his accusers. ‘The indictment against me is based on lies and contradiction,’ he said in his fluent if accented English. ‘It is a political trial, a show trial, designed to cover up the crimes committed against my country. I am accused when others are guilty. But we will fight. They cannot win. Freedom is a universal value. They have no evidence against me. That Geoffrey Nice [the prosecuting counsel] is stupid, very stupid. He is a king’s jester.’

This was the culmination of a long odyssey for me. Having once been a supporter of the standard party line on foreign policy, my conversion occurred on the night of my own father’s death, as I watched the hideous television images of bombers taking off from British bases and US aircraft carriers to attack Yugoslavia. I began to question the arguments used to justify the Kosovo war. I visited Belgrade during the bombing and went to sleep to the sound of air-raid sirens and explosions; I travelled to Kosovo numerous times and observed how the West had helped Mafia gangsters and drug-runners to become kings of the castle in this fetid and teeming province. Having spent much time behind the Iron Curtain as an active Cold Warrior, my own logic had now led me to become a dissident in the new world order, hence my visit to The Hague as a potential witness and my hour-long chat over a fag and a coffee with Slobo.

According to his closest assistant, Milosevic remained bullish to the end. In the final weeks, he complained about painful pressure behind his eyes, presumably the result of his deteriorating heart condition, but otherwise he was happy with the way the trial was proceeding. He was certainly bullish when I met him. He had marshalled an impressive array of defence witnesses who helped him rubbish the prosecution’s case — not that you would know it from most of the media, which rapidly lost interest once the initial attraction of the atrocity stories had worn off. In his conversation with me, he repeated the central planks of his defence. ‘There was never any plan to expel the Albanians from Kosovo,’ he said, ‘and no order to that effect was ever given. There was never any genocide in Kosovo. They have exhumed 2,000 bodies in total, of all different nationalities, and the causes of their deaths include Nato’s own bombs.’

On Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic was no less indignant. ‘The indictment is full of contradictions,’ he said. He picked up a sheaf of papers and pointed to bits he had underlined. ‘Look here. In paragraph 85 of the indictment, it says that from 8 October 1991 the conflict in Croatia was international in nature, not internal, yet in paragraph 110 it says that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia existed as a sovereign state until 27 April 1992. These two statements cannot both be true. The indictment itself does not make sense.’ His apparently technical point is important because, broadly speaking, jurisdiction for the laws of war kicks in only when a conflict is international. ‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘the indictment also says that fighting broke out when the secessionist states declared independence from Yugoslavia. But am I supposed to have pursued a joint criminal enterprise by sponsoring armed secession from the state I wanted to see preserved? It is ridiculous.’

However self-serving these statements may appear to a sceptical reader, it remains the case that Slobodan Milosevic was not in charge of Yugoslavia when it was falling apart. The initial order for the Yugoslav National Army to fight the secessionists was given by the federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, an ethnic Croat, but the federal authority was weak and the army largely a law unto itself. It is also a fact that the Serbs in Serbia (where Milosevic was president) and the Serbs in Bosnia were living in different states; Milosevic broke with the Bosnian Serb leadership in 1993, having never controlled them in the first place, while what political influence he may have had does not stack up, in law, to criminal responsibility for their acts. Certainly, few Bosnian Serbs regard Milosevic as their master; when I visited a Bosnian Serb village near Sarajevo in 2001, in whose graveyard lay the bodies of hundreds of villagers killed by Muslims, the people looking after the church proudly showed me photographs of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic nestling among the icons, men who are accused of the worst atrocities in Bosnia’s civil war. But they dismissed Milosevic with contempt as a man who had betrayed them by helping to bring the fighting to an end at Dayton in 1995.

To be sure, Milosevic bore some political responsibility for the Yugoslav wars, but so did the other Yugoslav leaders and so does the West, which was intimately involved with the very minutiae of the conflict from the outset and which in many ways encouraged it. Our interference was especially damaging over Bosnia: with the backing of our troop presence there since 1992, we pressed on the accelerator and the brake simultaneously by incoherently insisting both that the multi-ethnic Yugoslav state must be dismantled and also that the multi-ethnic Bosnian state must be preserved. Our foreign policy therefore spun around in circles and we prolonged the killing for years.

Demonisation and denunciation are infectious viruses which can engulf large numbers of people very quickly. They are parasites on one of the core human vices, pride, because they give the denunciator an intoxicating sense of superiority over the object of his attack. Political trials, as Stalin discovered, tap into this. Milosevic is the seventh defendant to die in The Hague’s tender care, following a trial in which almost every established precept of jurisprudence and international law has been violated by the judges there. If the legacy of his death is the de facto legitimisation of the gross abuses committed in the name of international justice by this kangaroo court, then all our liberties are at risk.

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=7485&issue=2006-03-18

Milosevic Legal Adviser:UN Report Into Death "Scandalous"

 

17 Mar 2006 16:38 GMT    Milosevic Legal Adviser:UN Report Into Death "Scandalous"
Copyright © 2006, Dow Jones Newswires
BELGRADE (AP)--Branko Rakic, legal adviser for Slobodan Milosevic during his war crimes trial, Friday called a U.N. report into the former Serbian leader's death "scandalous". Milosevic died last weekend at a detention center near the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, which was trying him on 66 counts of war crimes, including genocide. Questions and accusations have swirled this week about Milosevic's death. His widow and her son say the former leader was poisoned. "No evidence of poisoning has been found," Tribunal President Judge Fausto Pocar said in The Hague, reading the preliminary results of a Dutch toxicological report. A number of prescribed medications were found in his body, "but not in toxic concentrations," he said. "Today, such a huge array of falsehoods has been presented, indicating that someone's conscience obviously isn't clear," Rakic said in Belgrade. "Those who were in a position of monopoly over Milosevic's health, denied him proper and adequate treatment," Rakic said. "If Milosevic had been in a hospital, he would have been alive today." Flown home Wednesday, Milosevic is to be buried Saturday at a family estate in his home town of Pozarevac, about 50 kilometers southeast of Belgrade. (END) Dow Jones Newswires 03-17-06 1138ET Copyright (c) 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

http://framehosting.dowjonesnews.com/sample/samplestory.asp?StoryID=2006031716380014&Take=1

If this man is a war criminal where is all the evidence?

If this man is a war criminal where is all the evidence?

by John Laughland 

24 August 2002, Mail on Sunday


In the great film with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Laughton, the “Witness for the Prosecution†appears in court and gives exactly the opposite testimony from what was expected.  You would not know it from our media - which passed over the event in silence - but the same thing happened at The Hague recently, in the most important war crimes trial since Nuremberg, that of the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.  One of the prosecution’s star witnesses said precisely the opposite of what he was supposed to say, dealing what seemed like a fatal blow to a prosecution case which was already reeling from several previous blunders.



The star witness in question was Rade Markovic, the former head of the Yugoslav secret services.  Before he appeared in the witness box, the media universally hailed him as the insider who would finally give the clinching testimony that Milosevic had personally ordered the persecution of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.  This is the single issue which NATO uses to justify its otherwise illegal attacks on Yugoslavia: without it, the moral justification for NATO's war in 1999 completely disappears.



The urge to hear Markovic's testimony was all the greater because the prosecution's last "star witness" had been a severe embarrassment. Ratomir Tanic had presented himself as another "insider", and had claimed that he had actually been present when Milosevic gave the genocidal order.  Under cross-examination, however, Tanic was shown to be an agent of the secret services of various Western countries, and to be so unfamiliar with the corridors of power that he could not even say what floor in the presidential palace Milosevic's office had been on.



The embarrassment over Tanic was equalled only by that caused when an    Albanian witness produced a list of names, which he alleged was of Albanians whom the Serb police were to execute.  On closer examination, the list turned out to be a fake:  the spelling mistakes were so numerous that only an Albanian could have written them.



Enter, therefore, Radomir Markovic, the secret police chief who knew more about what was going on in Yugoslavia than anyone else.  But, in painstakingly detailed testimony lasting nearly three hours, he told the court that Milosevic had never ordered the expulsion of the Albanian population of Kosovo; that the former president had repeatedly issued instructions to the police and the army to respect the laws of war, and    to protect the civilian population, even if it meant compromising the battle against Albanian terrorists;  and that the mass exodus of Albanians during the Nato bombing was caused not by Serb forces but instead by the Kosovo Liberation Army itself, which needed a constant flow of refugees to maintain the support of Western public opinion for the Nato campaign.


"Did you ever get any kind of report," Milosevic asked him,"or have you ever heard of an order, to expel Albanians from Kosovo?" "No, I never heard of such an order.  Nobody ever ordered for Albanians from Kosovo to be expelled," Markovic replied.  "Did you receive any information about any plan, suggestion or de facto influence that Albanians were to be expelled?" asked Milosevic.  Reply:  "No, I never heard of such a suggestion to expel Albanians from Kosovo."  "At the meetings you attended, is it true that completely the opposite is said, namely that we always insisted that civilians be protected, and that they not be hurt in the process of anti-terrorist operations?"  "Certainly," said the witness. "The task was not only to protect Serbs but also Albanian civilians."  "Is it not true that we tried to persuade the flow of refugees to stay at home, and that the army and police would protect them?" the former president asked. "Yes, that was the instruction and those were the assignments."  "Do you know that the Kosovo Liberation Army told people to leave, and to stage an exodus?" "Yes," said Markovic.  "I am aware of that."

   

      The media greeted this stunning evidence with complete silence.  Indeed, it even failed to report the most extraordinary assertion of all made by Markovic, namely that he had effectively been tortured by the new pro-Western authorities in Belgrade, in order to make him testify against Milosevic.  Markovic claimed that the new Minister of the    Interior in the Western-backed government in Belgrade had taken him out to dinner and offered him release from prison - where he has been incarcerated for over a year now - and a new identity in a country of his choice, if only he would agree to testify against his former boss at The Hague. As Slobodan Milosevic tried to point out in his cross-examination - until he was interrupted by the judge, that is - it clearly falls under the terms of the United Nations' definition of "torture" to imprison someone in order to force them to co-operate.  Markovic also alleged that the Tribunal's own prosecutors had falsified and embellished the written statement he had given them.


        These were amazing allegations.  With them, the whole prosecution case seemed to crumble.  But even more stunning was the reaction of the British presiding judge, Sir Richard May.  A judge is supposed to be a neutral arbiter between the prosecution and the defence:  May, by contrast, has distinguished himself throughout the trial by his    belligerence towards Milosevic, who is conducting his own defence, and in particular for his habit of interrupting Milosevic, even sometimes switching off his microphone, whenever the former Yugoslav leader's cross-examination shows up inconsistencies in a witness' evidence.


        As May listened to Markovic, he tried desperately to stop him making these allegations against the Prosecutors and their allies in Belgrade.  When Markovic began to describe his ordeal at the hands of the new Yugoslav government, May silenced him, saying to Milosevic, “This does not appear to have relevance to the evidence which the
witness has given here.  We are not going to litigate here with what happened to him (i.e. Markovic) in Yugoslavia when he was arrested."  And when Milosevic insisted that the Tribunal's own investigators had falsified Markovic's written evidence, May interrupted him tartly by saying,  "That is not a comment which it is proper for you to make."  In Judge May's book, therefore, it is irrelevant if the prosecution is lying, or if it is an accomplice to torture.


      Judge Richard May is no stranger to political activity,  like the prosecutor, Geoffrey Nice, he is a committed Socialist:  he stood as a Labour Party candidate for Finchley in the general election in 1979, where his Conservative opponent was none other than Margaret Thatcher. As a judge on the Midlands Circuit in the 1980s, he would dine out on this story, for which he enjoyed the admiration of his left-wing colleagues.  But even this happy admission of political bias could not have prepared anyone for the way he would react to Markovic's shocking claims.



It gets worse.  The Tribunal's priorities now seem so distorted that they see Milosevic's "political crime" of resisting NATO as worse than the crimes of physically torturing people to death.  On 31st July, the Tribunal ordered the release from custody of a man called Milojica Kos.  Kos had served four years of a six-year sentence for murder, torture and persecution as a guard at the notorious Omarska camp in Bosnia, which was compared at the time to a Nazi concentration camp.  But the president of the Tribunal, Claude Jorda, said that Kos would be released early because of "his wish to reintegrate himself into society, his determination not to re-offend, his irreproachable conduct in detention, his attachment to his family, and the possibility of exercising a profession again." No such tolerance will be shown to Milosevic.


      These events have provided spectacular proof of what critics have always said - that the International Criminal Tribunal is a political kangaroo court in the hands of the West.  But political manipulation can work both ways.  Tony Blair has been a vigorous supporter of a clone of the Yugoslav tribunal, the new International Criminal Court.  But why shouldn't the new court be as politicised as the present one?  Plenty of anti-Western countries, like Iran, Sudan and Zimbabwe, have signed the new ICC treaty.  If they decided to prosecute Tony Blair for attacking Iraq, say, there is little to stop them  - especially since the ICC defines "aggression" as a war crime.  On his next trip abroad, therefore, Mr. Blair might be wise to pack his toothbrush.

http://www.bhhrg.org/default.asp

Milosevic Dead. Now We'll Never Have to Know the Truth

Milosevic Dead. Now We'll Never Have to Know the Truth

By Julia Gorin
 

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |


The people of the world can breathe a collective sigh of relief; now for sure they'll never be asked to understand what actually happened in the Balkans.


No doubt this is only the second or third time you're hearing anything about the all-important "Second Nuremberg" trial in the four years it has been proceeding. That's because it wasn't going too well - for the prosecution, which Milosevic embarrassed on a daily basis. The UN's kangaroo court even had journalists snickering at the prosecution's flimsy evidence and performance. Journalists--those people who built their careers in the 1990s as co-belligerents against the Serbs in the avoidable but media-ensured Balkan wars.


Though Milosevic's conviction was a foregone conclusion (we wouldn't want any more rampaging Muslims than there need to be), he was creaming the Court (the Court and the prosecution are essentially one), such that six months ago prosecutor Geoffrey Nice admitted (transcript) he was no longer sure what, exactly, the case against the former strongman was. Everyone wondered why a trial would be taking four years for someone who was the undisputed "Butcher of Belgrade." The answer is that there's been an unintended benefit to the otherwise bad idea of an international court: the historical record was being set straight.


But look for a renewed wave of propaganda about the alleged "crimes" of Milosevic from the media anyway, now that they are confident the truth will stay buried longer. (No, I'm not a fan of Milosevic, as I am an anti-socialist.) You won't find the kinds of glowing obituaries that the domestic and international press gave our friend, the late Bosnian President and fundamentalist Muslim Alija Izetbegovic, who turned down the 1992 Lisbon plan that would have avoided the Bosnian war.


But to sum up, here is all that Americans need to know about that confounding, dreaded subject that we so aggressively ignore, the Balkans:


The Serbs have admitted to not being innocents in those civil wars. Problem is, they were less guilty than their enemies - the Croats (a people Germanized since the 1500s and nostalgic for the 1930s), the Bosnian Muslims, and the Albanian Kosovo Muslims. Funny that none of these others have admitted to anything at all, despite their much more dastardly roles in sparking the Balkan wars--most relevantly that last group. As Canadian former UN Commander Major General Lewis MacKenzie wrote in a National Post article titled "We Bombed the Wrong Side?":


"The Kosovo-Albanians have played us like a Stradivarius. We have subsidized.their violent campaign for an ethnically pure and independent Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early '90s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary. When they achieve independence with the help of our tax dollars combined with those of bin Laden and al-Qaeda, just consider the message of encouragement this sends to other terrorist-supported independence movements around the world."


Increasingly active separatist movements from the Caucuses to Southeast Asia in the seven years since we lent our Air Force to terrorists have been testament to that.


When Bill Clinton misled us into an obscure region called Kosovo to stop a genocide that wasn't happening, he told us it would stabilize the region, keep the conflict from spreading. This is precisely what Milosevic was doing. Like clockwork, within months of our intervention, the Albanians moved on to terrorize Macedonia, and now they are fighting for parts of Southern Serbia, Montenegro and Greece--to form the Greater Albania that had been their nationalistic and Islamic vision all along. Meanwhile, as UN human rights observer Jiri Dienstbier has said, "Kosovo is an infinitely more dangerous place than it was before" the U.S.-led NATO intervention. What we managed to do, if you can imagine, was destabilize the notoriously unstable Balkans.


Indeed, we mistook for Nazis people who were fighting the Nazis' real heirs. Once we approve independence for Kosovo this year and Albanian borders revert to what they were under Hitler, it'll be worth recalling that an Albanian SS Skanderbeg Division and a Bosnian-Muslim SS Handzar Division fought alongside Hitler, and that Croatia killed 750,000 Serbs and Jews in concentration camps - in ways that humbled the Nazis. By looking for holocausts under every bed, we picked a staged one, and set the stage for a real one; the Serbs were only the Balkans' first victims. New York, Madrid, London and Netanya followed soon after.


For some reason, fate intends the Serbs to be maligned to the end. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman died before the Hague could hand down an indictment for his war crimes - which would have exposed the damning Croatian role in the Balkan wars; Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic was being quietly investigated and died before the indictment came down (which would have been damning to the Bosnian Muslims)--and now Milosevic has died before he could get through his list of defense witnesses, many of whom threatened to further expose the hoax that started a war.


In case you've been obliging both the mainstream and alternative media by not following the Milosevic trial as the accused debunked one charge after another, catching "witness" after "witness" in a lie, here's what you missed--with particular emphasis on the Albanian Islamo-fascist narco-terrorists on whose behalf we declared war on a multi-ethnic European nation:

Milosevic � his gradual, prolonged and protracted murder

Pravda

Front page / Opinion / Columnists

Milosevic – his gradual, prolonged and protracted murder



16.03.2006

Source: URL: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/77338-Milosevic-0

Callous irresponsibility of the International Penal Court amounts to
wanton murder and a gradual and purposeful process of torture, which
eventually cost Slobodan Milosevic his life.

The International Penal Court at The Hague is in serious trouble,
having breached international law on the human rights of prisoners and
the legally afforded processes for sick persons in its control.
However, in today's world, where rules and conventions and agreements
and laws and charters can be broken capriciously, where any common
rules of decency from yesteryear are swept away by a clique of elitist
barons who pull the world's economic strings, what to expect?

What to expect from a "Court" whose chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte,
stated publicly that Slobodan Milosevic was guilty before the case had
even started? What to expect from a "Court" which held Slobodan
Milosevic in a state of illegal imprisonment after he had been
kidnapped against the laws of Serbia and Yugoslavia ?

What to expect from a "Court" which denied Slobodan Milosevic the
right to conditions and treatment which would have saved his life?
Denying him this right is tantamount to protracted torture and
eventually, murder.

The law

At the First UN Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of
Offenders, Annex 1A, Rule 22(2) it is stated that "Sick prisoners who
require specialist treatment shall be transferred to specialised
institutions or to civil hospitals".

The case

Nico Varkevisser, the Vice President of the International Committee to
Defend Slobodan Milosevic, applied to the IPC for "the specialised
medical care he requires (and)…an additional adjournment for the
complete recovery of the defendant". This was on 5th November, 2002.

The reason was because Slobodan Milosevic was physically at risk,
suffering from chronic malignant hypertension and angina pectoris, as
pronounced by a council of medical experts, conditions made worse by
stress. The condition is so serious that untreated, 75% of patients
die within one year.

Yet what conditions did the IPC apportion to him?

He was forced to opt between taking a breath of fresh air or eating a
sandwich in the basement for nourishment;

The chief prosecutor had years to prepare her case, giving her an
unfair advantage since Mr. Milosevic had far less time to prepare and
present his defence even though the Statute of the Tribunal provides
for adequate time and facilities for the preparation of the defence.
Mr. Milosevic was not apportioned these (she callously stuck over
100.000 pages of documents and 600 video cassettes before Milosevic
for him to defend himself);

Slobodan Milosevic was pursuing his fundamental right under the
International Covenant for Civil and Political Rights to defend
himself, yet the IPC did not give him equal conditions under fair
legal practice to do so;

The IPC Unit did not provide an adequate custodial setting for
Slobodan Milosevic to conduct his defence fairly and worse than this,
provided a stimulus for an increase in dangerous levels of stress,
since the conditions were not consistent with what would be reasonably
expected for an adequate defence at such a massive trial, at which he
was fighting alone against massive resources which he did not have and
which he was denied;

The IPC was aware of this since both Mr. Milosevic's personal
physician, Zdravko Mijailovic, MD, PhD and other medical experts had
warned the authorities as to the precarious and dangerous state of
health suffered by the defendant;

Mr. Milosevic was not allowed to travel to Russia for specialised
medical treatment which would have saved his life.

Mr. Milosevic's last message

Mr. Milosevic's last written message was delivered to the Russian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 8th March. It was a request for help.
In the letter he claims:

"I think that the 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 there were
active, wilful steps taken, to destroy my health…"

"On 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 this five years that I'm in their prison".

Why did it take two months to report this? Why was it kept a secret?
Who treated Mr. Milosevic with this drug (which we now discover was to
counter the effects of his treatment)?

In his last letter, Mr. Milosevic spoke of "those who have an interest
to silence me".

Whether or not they managed to silence Mr. Milosevic depends on the
members of the international community, those who defend the state of
law, those who believe in justice and fairness and those who stand for
a world ruled by right and reason, not bullying, belligerence and the
bullet.

The death of Slobodan Milosevic was part of the cabal which has seen
criminal actions of state terrorism become the norm, along with a
callous disregard for common decency and human rights, based upon a
unilateralist Anglo-Saxon Alliance of self-righteousness and sheer
arrogance.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smo031506.htm

DEBUNKING THE CONSPIRACY THEORY: MILOSEVIC COULD NOT HAVE ESCAPED BY
GOING TO THE MEDICAL CENTER IN MOSCOW
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - March 15, 2006

Written by: Andy Wilcoxson

On the occasion of Slobodan Milosevic's death, the Hague Tribunal and
the Western media have concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory in an
apparent effort to absolve the tribunal of responsibility.

According to this conspiracy theory, Milosevic secretly took a drug
called Rifampicin to block the effectiveness of his high blood
pressure medicine, which in turn created a fake medical condition that
he used to justify his request to go to Moscow under the pretext of
obtaining medical treatment, however obtaining medical treatment
wasn't Milosevic's real objective that was just a ruse so that he
could make his escape.

Dr. Donald Uges, a professor of clinical and forensic toxicology at
the University of Groningen, was the first to advance this theory in
the media. He told the New York Times "It's like a James Bond story",
and on that score he's absolutely correct it's exactly like a James
Bond story – it's fiction.

Dr. Uges told the New York Times: "There was one escape for Milosevic
out of prison, and that was to Moscow where his wife and son, and
friends were. He wanted to go to Moscow on a one-way trip."

Moscow was never an avenue of escape for Milosevic. On January 18th
the Russian Government gave the Hague Tribunal assurances that it
would guarantee "Milosevic's personal security during his time in
Russia and his return to The Hague within the timeframe specified by
the Tribunal." Milosevic would have been under armed-guard the whole
time he was in Russia. There was absolutely no chance that he could
escape by getting medical treatment Moscow.

Dr. Uges was all over the media, acting more like a politician than a
doctor, he told the Irish Times that Milosevic "took Rifampicin
himself, not for suicide, only for his trip to Moscow." Of course Dr.
Uges is a toxicologist, and not a mind reader. He can't possibly know
what was going on in Milosevic's thoughts, but he didn't let that get
in his way.

Rifampicin is odorless and tasteless, and as such could have been
mixed into Milosevic's food without his knowledge. He was administered
all of his medicine by guards at the prison dispensary. He took the
medicine that they gave him. The drug could have easily been added
into one of his medicine capsules.

Clearly, Dr. Uges can't know whether Milosevic took the drug knowingly
or not, but we can find a clue in the letter that Milosevic wrote to
the Russian Foreign Ministry on March 8th:

"I think that the 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 there were
active, willful steps taken, to destroy my health, throughout the
proceedings of the trial, which could not be hidden from Russian
specialists."

"In order to verify my allegations, I'm presenting you a simple
example, which you can find in the attachment. This document, which I
received on March 7, shows that on 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 this 5 years that
I'm 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 to me), can't
have any other explanation than we are facing manipulation. In any
case, those who foist on me a drug against leprosy surely can't treat
my illness; likewise those from which I defended my country in times
of war and who have an interest to silence me."

In his interview with the New York Times Dr. Urges confirmed that
March 7th was indeed the day that Milosevic learned the drug had been
found in his blood.

Clearly, the detection of the drug is what motivated Milosevic to
write the letter. As the text of the letter makes plain Milosevic was
not knowingly taking the drug.

The letter raises some serious questions: Why did it take the
tribunal's medical staff two months to tell him that the drug had been
found in his blood? If they knew in January, then why wasn't an
investigation launched immediately to determine how the drug was
getting into his system? Why was this information concealed from him
for two months?

The conspiracy theory being advanced in the media by Dr. Uges and
certain "unnamed sources" at the Hague Tribunal just doesn't hold
water. The conspiracy would have to involve: Milosevic, the Russian
Government, the doctors at the Bakulev Medical Center in Moscow, the
person who was procuring the drug and sneaking it in to him, the
doctor who was advising him on how to take it, etc…. It's all just too
far-fetched to be true.

The fact that the tribunal is floating such a stupid story tells you
right off the bat that they're guilty as sin for Milosevic's death.

Milosevic had no motive to sabotage his own health. A trip to Moscow
for medical treatment would not have allowed him to escape. The
Russian Government guaranteed all the way back in January that it
would return him within the timetable set by the tribunal.

If Milosevic had been sabotaging his health he would have been running
the risk of handing his defense over to Mr. Kay. Anybody who followed
the trial proceedings knows that he would have never done that.

The trial was not going well for the prosecution. They had not
presented a stitch of evidence to show that he ordered or condoned the
commission of a single crime. The prosecution spent a great deal of
time trying to prove that crimes were committed, but they never made a
link between any of the alleged crimes and Milosevic.

At the end of the trial the judges were going to have to write a
judgment based on the evidence presented in court. Writing a credible
judgment convicting Milosevic on the evidence would have been
impossible, because the prosecution never managed to link him to a
crime.

The Milosevic trial was an embarrassment for a lot of very powerful
people, which is why the media very rarely covered the proceedings. He
was using the trial as a platform to expose the crimes committed in
Yugoslavia by various Western governments and political officials.

Milosevic had an extremely long list of enemies. A person would have
to be an fool to think that nobody wanted to kill him. It is a
well-known fact that MI6 was plotting his assassination in 1992.

It isn't hard to believe that one of his many enemies wanted to shut
him up so badly that they poisoned him. Maybe they didn't want to kill
him outright; maybe they just wanted him to be sick enough that Mr.
Kay could take over his defense.

At any rate, it's a lot easier to believe that a foreign intelligence
agency, or a corrupt tribunal official, was able to infiltrate one guy
into the prison who mixed the drug into Milosevic's food or into some
of his other medicines.

Whatever their intentions might have been, Milosevic is dead, and
those responsible must be held legally accountable. Clearly, Mr.
Robinson, Mr. Kwon, and Mr. Bonomy bear the most responsibility
because it was their decision that denied him the medical care he
urgently needed in Moscow.

The doctors who knew that the Rifampicin was in his blood, but didn't
tell him for two months must also be held accountable, and the prison
officials who allowed the drug to be smuggled into the prison must
also be held responsible. If nothing else they were negligent in their
duty to keep non-prescribed drugs out of the prison.

                                   Serbian News Network - SNN

                                        news@antic.org

                                    http://www.antic.org/

He lived and died for us and for a better world

"If we cannot convict you on our lies, we will at least make sure you don't
get out alive"

http://blog.lewrockwell.com/lewrw/archives/010149.html


'''''''''''''''''''

To the Family of President Slobodan Milosevic:

When I heard the news that Slobodan Milosevic had died I did not want to
believe it. I did not want to believe that evil had triumphed over good, or
that the evil that had been done to this brave and beautiful man could have
finally killed him.  When I heard it again on the news, my heart sank and I
was deeply sad. His spirit and brilliant mind were indomitable, but his body
was destroyed by the conditions of his arrest and the willful decision by
the Hague Tribunal to let him die in prison rather than receive the medical
treatment they knew he needed. And why proceed with a trial in which he had
already proven his innocence? So in the end this is how the Hague Tribunal
has made its mark on history - with the negligent homicide of Slobodan
Milosevic.

Slobodan Milosevic was not easy to destroy; Slobodan Milosevic was killed
three times. The first time was when they destroyed the country he loved and
lived for - Yugoslavia. The second time was with character assassination,
the preferred weapon of nameless cowards, criminals and liars. The trial
itself did not kill him. He vindicated himself, his country and his people.
He lived and died for us. What more can you say about a man? But ultimately
with no better option before it, the ICTY decided to choke the life out of
him by depriving him of the essential medical care he needed to survive.

My father was also killed by negligence and so I know the bitterness one
feels after such an event. But you can take solace in the fact that Slobo
died a martyr's death. He fought to defend his country, his nation, and a
progressive socialist vision of humanity against the onslaught of a
militarist and imperialist alliance of puppets and puppeteers. He was killed
not because he was a nationalist, but precisely because he believed in
multinationalist unity and justice and a just economic order inimical to the
interests of multinational corporations and their financial and political
institutions. He is the most famous and most courageous Serb of our time.
And in light of the evidence presented at his trial, history will have to
acquit him of all of the monstrous allegations made against him which the
ICTY would not do even though they knew he was not guilty as charged.

Finally, as you know, I had the privilege of meeting President Milosevic
several times. He had great intelligence, warmth, sense of humor and wit,
wisdom, kindness and charm that I will never forget as long as I live. He
was so strong and energetic despite his illness. The prison nurses came
frequently during my visits and reported the news - 240 over 80 or worse.
How did he survive it so long? He was amazing in every way. And then there
was his smile and his penetrating stare which gave you detailed messages
with a single look.

As I said before, he lived and died for us and for a better world. I know
you are proud of him. I feel the same way. And one day I hope the whole
world will feel this way too. If there is a better future, it will.

Barry Lituchy, New York City, 11 March 2006

''''''''''''''

Slobo back to Belgrade
http://today.reuters.com/tv/videoStory.aspx?isSummitStory=false&storyId=2be1
029ead5363bb7c05ed6a9c8442804ae9a0d6


Belgrade getting ready to bid final farewell to Slobodan Milosevic
http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=4630027&PageNum=0

Scabegoat RIP (J Bisset)

 

National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada)
March 15, 2006 Wednesday
                           All but Toronto Edition

ISSUES & IDEAS

HEADLINE: Scapegoat, R.I.P.

BY: James Bissett, National Post


Slobodan Milosevic's obituaries are damning. In death, as in the last years
of his life, the former Serbian president is being blamed for all of the death
and destruction that accompanied the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation in the
early 1990s. He has been described as the "Butcher of the Balkans." He is
accused of masterminding four wars, of committing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
These charges have been repeated so many times that they have become part of
received wisdom. Yet the facts tell a different story.

Two weeks ago I travelled to The Hague to appear as a witness in defence of
Milosevic at his war-crimes trial. We met in his cell for two days, going over
my testimony.

On the first day, he seemed relaxed and in good health. On the second day,
following several hours of discussions, he suddenly became flushed and appeared
to be ill. I asked if he was alright, and he said he was OK, but then explained
that he suffered from a terrible ringing in his ears. The prison doctors had
told him it was "psychological," but finally agreed to a MRI, which revealed
that an abnormal artery was affecting his hearing. He told me he did not believe
he was getting adequate medical attention in the prison, and wanted to get
specialist treatment in Moscow, but tribunal officials had refused.

He regarded the presiding body -- the UN's International Criminal Tribunal
for the Former Yugoslavia -- as a political court set up to make him the
scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong in Yugoslavia. He was aware that
there was, in effect, a Western news blackout of anything revealed during the
trial that was favourable to his case. And he was also resigned to the reality
that he would be found guilty.

I have been asked often why I was willing to appear as a witness for a man
branded by the media as another Hitler. The answer is simple. His prosecution
was the most important war-crimes trial since the Nuremberg Trials of leading
Nazis following the Second World War. It was important that the presumption of
innocence be maintained, and it was equally important that those with relevant
information appear at the court so that their evidence could be heard. I was in
Belgrade as Canada's ambassador during the critical early stages of the Yugoslav
breakup drama, and I was not prepared to remain silent about what I observed.

Even in the early days, it was apparent that most of the media reporting
about the cause and course of the Yugoslav fighting was biased. In effect, the
Serbs had been branded as the bad guys, and any news developments were
interpreted on that basis.

But it was not the Serbians and "Slobo" who started the wars in Yugoslavia.
The fighting started because Slovenia, then a Yugoslav republic, declared
unilateral independence and used force to seize customs posts along the Austrian
border.

The federal prime minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Markovic, who happened to be a
Croatian, ordered the army into Slovenia to restore order. The army was met by
armed resistance and retired to barracks in Croatia to avoid further bloodshed.
The Croatian security and paramilitary forces then surrounded the federal
barracks and fighting broke out in Croatia. At this time, Milosevic, as
president of Serbia, had no control over the federal army. (Incidentally, the
federal minister of defence at the time was also a Croatian, as was the foreign
minister.)

Later, when the army lost all of its non-Serbian soldiers, it did become a
Serb-dominated force. But when the federal government collapsed, it was none
other than Milosevic who ordered all Serbian soldiers out of Bosnia. (At the
time I was asked to call upon him to congratulate him for this decision.) From
the outset of the violence sweeping across Yugoslavia, Milosevic was a key
player in all of the peace plans that were proposed. Had it not been for him,
the 1995 Dayton peace agreement could not have taken place. He was heralded then
by U.S. secretary of state Madeline Albright as a man of peace.

Although the war crimes Tribunal was set up in 1993, it was not until the
bombing of Kosovo five years later that a hurried indictment was issued against
Milosevic on charges of genocide. Yet the forensic teams that searched for
evidence of this genocide in Kosovo have so far discovered fewer than 3,000
bodies -- bad enough, but not genocide.

Milosevic was a communist party boss. He was an apparatchik and an
opportunist interested in holding on to his power, prestige and privileges. He
was not an ardent Serbian nationalist and I believe had little interest in a
"greater Serbia." As the president of Serbia, he was forced to display sympathy
to his fellow Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia, but he did not have authority over
them. He was prepared to help them battle brutally for land and power, but he
was also prepared to sell them out if it was to his own advantage.

There are many Serbians who despise him for that. It is unfortunate that he
died before being given the chance to set down his side of the story. Now we
only have his opponent's version of events.

GRAPHIC: Black & White
Photo: Eric Miller, Reuters; From left, president Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia,
president Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and president Franjo Tudjman
of Croatia sign the Dayton peace accord on Nov. 21, 1995.

                         Copyright 2006 National Post
                             All Rights Reserved