SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC: Death and the rain

 

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2006/marzo/vier24/13milosevic.html

 

GRANMA INTERNATIONAL/Cuba

 

Havana. March 24, 2006

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC
Death and the rain

BY ELSA CLARO—Granma International staff writer—

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

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

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

ARIADNE’S THREAD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROVISONAL EPILOGUE

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

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

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

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

CDSM: Letter of Complaint to the BBC

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



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


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

22nd March 2006

Dear Sir/Madam,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours faithfully,


Neil Clark, Name & Address supplied

Countersigned:

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

A MYSTERY AT THE HAGUE by Srdja Trifkovic

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

ChroniclesExtra! Friday, March 24, 2006

A MYSTERIOUS DEATH AT THE HAGUE
By Srdja Trifkovic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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