 Serbian Population in Kosovo, before NATO bombing After NATO bombing; Serb population in Kosovo, at beginning of NATO occupation |
"The Turks are conquering Germany exactly as the Kosovars conquered Kosovo: through a higher birth rate. I would like it, if it were Eastern European Jews with a 15% higher IQ than the native Germans."
-- Thilo Sarrazin, SPD politician, DeutscheBank board member, in Lettre International Interview
‘Friction theory’ was one of the two primary driving forces for the establishment of Apartheid, as cited by the Minister of Interior, introducing the Group Areas Act to Parliament on 14 June 1950:“Now this, as I say, is designed to eliminate friction between the races in the Union because we believe, and believe strongly, that points of contact – all unnecessary points of contact – between the races must be avoided. If you reduce the number of points of contact to the minimum, you reduce the possibility of friction….. The result of putting people of different races together is to cause racial trouble”.The central justification for this perspective was that segregation was in the interest of all different racial groups, because population pressure contacts between different races, with different cultures, inevitably produced conflict. According to English social geographer, John Western in Outcast Capetown (University of California Press, 1997), the friction theory does have a measure of sense to it, as detailed in the work of Robert Sommer:“[Animal studies] show that both territoriality and dominance behaviour are ways of maintaining social order, and when one system cannot function, the other takes over… Group territories keep individual groups apart and thereby preserve the integrity of the troop, whereas dominance is the basis for intragroup relationships… Group territoriality is expressed in national and local boundaries, a segregation into defined areas that reduces conflict.” (Personal Space, (1969), N.J. Prentice Hall, pp. 12, 14, and 15)-- Footnote in Letter to Sigmar Gabriel, Chairman of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD); African White Refugees Support and Appreciation for Dr. Thilo Sarrazin’s Courageous Intellectual Honesty, excerpted from Radical Honesty SA Amicus to Concourt (PDF)
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Stolen Kosovo [Uloupene Kosovo, Oteto Kosovo]
Atlas Shrugs | Serbia Blog | Wikipedia
A few days ago, Byzantine Art Blog ran the story of a made-for-state-owned Czech-TV film called, "Stolen Kosovo" that became a political hot potato for Czech TV. After the network financed it and Vaclav Dvorak made this fine film, the network decided to quash it as "unbalanced" (the code word for "showing the un-PC side of the story"). Once some Czech politicians shoved through "Kosovo recognition" -- a decision that shamed even the Czech president-- this film would have been on its way to never-to-be-seen oblivion.
But Vaclav Dvorak and the film's production company believed that the world needed to know the truth about Kosovo and the fate of Kosovo's Serbs and other minorities, so they allowed the 60 minute film to be uploaded it to YouTube. And an industrious Czech also subtitled the film in English.
If you ever wondered "what really happened in Kosovo?", "what the NATO Bombing was all about?", or "the truth about US involvement in Kosovo?" , the this film is a must see!
Wiki: Stolen Kosovo
Stolen Kosovo (Czech: Uloupené Kosovo, Serbian: Украдено Косово) is a documentary by Czech director Vaclav Dvorak, about Serbian–Albanian conflict in Kosovo. Kosovo is the subject of a territorial dispute between the Republic of Serbia and the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence on 17 February 2008, while Serbia claims it as part of its own sovereign territory. Kosovo is recognised by 70 of the 192 UN member states.
Plot
The documentary describes the situation in Kosovo, first in a short overview of the history of the area, followed by the 1990s conflicts and bombing of Serbia by NATO forces in 1999 and ending with the situation after the Kosovo War. The documentary focuses on 1990s in the time of Slobodan Milošević's rule as well as on numerous interviews of Serbian civilians and, less, of Albanian soldiers.
Broadcasting
Although the Czech Television (Czech public TV) had been one of the sponsors of the documentary, it delayed broadcasting it several times, claiming the documentary was "unbalanced" and marked with "pro-Serbian bias", and so "the tone of the documentary could cause negative emotions"[1] Václav Dvořák, the director, responded that the same could be said for "Holocaust documentaries, where the Nazi Germany 'side' and 'views' were also appropriately ignored".[1]
The documentary producer, Aleš Bednář, additionally stated that it wasn't ruled out that some viewers could feel it was "unbalanced", but only because they had been "lopsidedly informed about Balkan conflicts through years, above all by television, but by other media as well."[2]
Its first broadcasting, scheduled for 17 March 2008, on the 4th anniversary of the ethnic clashes in Kosovo in 2004, was postponed until April, and was eventually broadcasted with a follow-up show analyzing the Kosovo conflict from the point of view of the Kosovo Albanians. The creators of the documentary published it on YouTube, where it is still available (as of July 2009). The film isn't listed on IMDb.[3][4][5]
On 17 February 2009, the 1st anniversary since the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo, Radio Television of Serbia aired Stolen Kosovo at 21:00 CET on its RTS1 channel. Before the documentary was aired, an interview with the creator was shown.
» » » » [Serb Blog :: Atlas Shrugs :: What do You Believe :: Wiki: Stolen Kosovo]
Racak: Why NATO spent 78-days bombing Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999!?
MatrixECS Youtube Channel
NATO's Illegal War Against Serbia/ The Lies Of The Racak Massacre In Kosovo |
There was the ethnic cleansing. The atrocities. The refugees chased out of Kosovo by the Serb army. The mass graves. The heaps of bodies tossed into vats of sulphuric acid at the Trepca mines.
NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said there were 100,000 Kosovo Albanian Muslims unaccounted for.
Problem is, none of it happened.
NATO's original estimate of 100,000 ethnic Albanians slaughtered, later revised downward to 10,000, turns out to be considerably exaggerated.
Dr. Peter Markesteyn, a Winnipeg forensic pathologist, was among the first war crimes investigators to arrive in Kosovo after NATO ended its bombing campaign.
"We were told there were 100,000 bodies everywhere," said Dr. Markesteyn. "We performed 1,800 autopsies -- that's it."
Fewer than 2,000 corpses. None found in the Trepca mines. No remains in the vats of sulphuric acid. Most found in isolated graves -- not in the mass graves NATO warned about. And no clue as to whether the bodies were those of KLA terrorists, civilians, even whether they were Serbs or ethnic Albanians.
No wonder then that of all the incidents on which Slobodan Milosevic has been indicted for war crimes, the total body count is not 100,000, not 10,000, not even 1,800 -- but 391!
Truth and Lies of Racak, by RTS Information Program, March 2009 [01/07] [02/07] [03/07] [04/07] [05/07] [06/07] [07/07] "Racak massacre hoax was the trigger event prior to NATO bombing of Serbia and invasion of Kosovo. The media started preparing the public doctoring the favorable opinion on the war. As in 1992 and 1995, the demonization of Serbs worked." -- Hot4Truth |
It was Walker, at the time head of the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) who, on the morning of January 16, 1999, led the press to the Kosovo village of Racak, a KLA stronghold. There some 20 bodies were found in a shallow trench, and 20 more were found scattered throughout the village. The KLA terrorists, and Walker, alleged that masked Serb policemen had entered the village the previous day, and killed men, women and children at close range, after torturing and mutilating them. Chillingly, the Serb police were said to have whistled merrily as they went about their work of slaughtering the villagers.
Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as eager to scratch her ever itchy trigger finger as her boss was to scratch his illimitable sexual itches, demanded that Yugoslavia be bombed immediately. Albright, like a kid agonizingly counting down the hours to Christmas, would have to wait until after Milosevic's rejection of NATO's ultimata at Rambouillet to get her wish.
But not everyone was so sure that Walker's story was to be believed. The French newspaper La Monde had some trouble swallowing the story. It reported on Jan. 21, 1999, a few days after the incident, that an Associated Press TV crew had filmed a gun battle at Racak between Serb police and KLA terrorists. Indeed, the crew was present because the Serbs had tipped them off that they were going to enter the village to arrest a man accused of shooting a police officer. Also present were two teams of KVM monitors.
It seems unlikely that if you're about to carry out a massacre that you would invite the press -- and international observers -- to watch.
The film showed that as soon as the Serbs entered Racak they came under heavy fire from KLA terrorists positioned in the surrounding hills. The idea that the police could dig a trench and then kill villagers at close range while under attack troubled La Monde. So too did the fact that, entering the village after the fire fight to assess the damage and interview the villagers, the KVM observers saw no sign of a massacre. What's more, the villagers said nothing about a massacre either.
Yet, when Walker returned the next day with the press -- at the KLA's invitation -- there was the trench with the bodies.
Could the police have returned later on and carried out the massacre under cover of darkness?
[Russia Today] Exposed: How Kosovo Serbs were butchered for organs Former chief prosecutor at the International Court of Justice in the Hague releases details of suspected atrocities committed by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999. Carla Del Ponte's book 'The Hunt: Me and War crimes' claims that before killing Serbs and members of other ethnic communities, Kosovo Albanians removed their organs to sell for transplants. |
That seems unlikely. Racak is a KLA stronghold. Serb police had already discovered that if they were going to enter the village they would have to deal with the guerillas. How could they torture, mutilate and cold-bloodedly kill villagers at close range while harassed by KLA gunfire?
And why, wondered La Monde, were there few signs of spent cartridges and blood at the trench?
And now there's a report that the Finnish forensic pathologists who investigated the incident on behalf of the European Union, say there was no evidence of a massacre. In an article to be published in Forensic Science International at the end of February, the Finnish team writes that none of the bodies were mutilated, there was no evidence of torture, and only one was shot at close range.
The pathologists say Walker was quick to come to the conclusion that there was a massacre, even though the evidence was weak.
And they point out that there is no evidence that the deceased were from Racak.
The KLA terrorists, the Serbs charge, faked the massacre by laying out their fallen comrades in the trench they, themselves, prepared, and the United States used the staged massacre as a pretext for the bombing.
» » » » [Youtube: MatrixECS :: Hot4Truth]
Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice
by John Laughland (London/Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).
Review by Prof. Edward S. Herman | Global Research, May 6, 2007 | Z Magazine April 2007
John Laughland's superb new book, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice, is the fourth important critical study of the issues pertaining to the Balkans wars that I have reviewed in Z Magazine.
The earlier three were Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade (2002), Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder (2004), and Peter Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting (2005). It is an interesting and distressing fact that none of the three earlier books has been reviewed in any major U.S. paper or journal, nor, with the exception of Z Magazine (and Swans and Monthly Review, which later ran a fuller version of the Johnstone review), in any liberal or left journal in this country (including The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, or Mother Jones). This is testimony to the power of the established narrative on the recent history of the Balkans, according to which Clinton, Blair and NATO fought the good fight, though coming in late and reluctantly, to halt Serb ethnic cleansing and genocide managed by Milosevic, with the bad man properly brought before a legitimate court to be tried in the interest of justice.
 Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption, By John Laughland, Ramsey Clark [*Amazon*] |
This narrative was quickly institutionalized, with the help of an intense propaganda campaign carried out by the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim governments (assisted by U.S. PR firms), the U.S. and other NATO governments, the NATO-organized and NATO-servicing International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia's (ICTY, or Tribunal), and the Western media, which quickly became co-belligerents in this struggle. This informal collective focused on numerous stories and pictures of suffering victims, on one side only and devoid of context. In commenting on the parade of witness victims, Laughland notes that "Indictments [by the ICTY] are drawn up with little or no reference to the fact that the acts in question were committed in battle: one often has the surreal sensation one would have reading a description of one man beating another man unconscious which omitted to mention that the violence was being inflicted in the course of a boxing match." But this stream of witnesses, that the defense could duplicate in its turn if given the opportunity--and Milosevic did with a video presentation of badly abused Serbs for several hours toward the beginning of his trial--is effective in demonization and helped mass-produce true believers who viewed any contesting argument or evidence as "apologetics for Milosevic."
This consolidation of a party line has been reinforced by a virtual lobby of institutions and dedicated individuals ready to pounce on both the deviants who challenge the new orthodoxy as well as the media institutions that on rare occasion allow a questioning of the "truth." The refusal to review these dissenting books and to deal with the issues they raise is also testimony to the cowardice and self-imposed ignorance of the media, and especially the liberal-left media, unwilling to challenge a narrative that is false at every level, as is spelled out convincingly in the three books reviewed earlier and once again in Travesty.
Laughland's Travesty focuses on "The Corruption of International Justice" displayed in the ICTY's performance in the seizure and trial of Milosevic, but in the process the book covers most of the issues central to evaluating the Balkan wars and the role of the various participants. The institutionalized lies are dismantled one after the next. On the matter of "international justice," Laughland stresses the fact that the ICTY is a political court with explicit political objectives that run counter to the requirements of any lawful justice.
This political court was organized mainly by the United States and Britain, countries that now freely attack others, but seek the fiction that will give their aggressions a de jure as well as quasi-moral cover. For this reason the rules of the ICTY stood Nuremberg on its head. The Nuremberg Tribunal tried the Nazi leaders for their planning and carrying out the "supreme international crime" of aggression. But the ICTY Statute doesn't even mention crimes against peace (although with Kafkaesque hypocrisy it claims to be aiming at protecting the peace). Thus, Laughland notes, "instead of applying existing international law, the ICTY has effectively overturned it." The dominant powers now wanting to be able to intervene anywhere, the new principles to be applied were a throwback to the Nazis in disrespect for international borders. Laughland says that "the commitment to non-interference in the internal affairs of states, reaffirmed as part of the Nuremberg Principles in the United Nations Charter, is an attempt to institutionalize an anti-fascist theory of international relations. It is this theory which the allies destroyed in attacking Yugoslavia in 1999." And it is this anti-fascist theory that the ICTY and humanitarian interventionists have abandoned, opening the door to a more aggressive imperialism.
 How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against, By Michael Mandel [*Amazon*] |
The ICTY was established not by passage of any law or signing of an international agreement (as in the case of the International Court of Justice) but by the decision of a few governments dominating the Security Council, and Laughland shows that this was beyond the authority of the Security Council (also shown in another outstanding but politically incorrect and neglected work, Hans Kochler's Global Justice or Global Revenge? [Springer-Verlag Wien, 2003]). It was also established with the open objective of using it to pursue one party in a conflict, presumed guilty in advance of any trial. The political objectives were allegedly to bring peace by punishing villains and thus serving as a deterrent, but also to serve the victims by what Laughland calls "the therapeutic power of obtaining convictions." But how can you deter without a bias against acquittal? Laughland also notes that "The heavy emphasis on the rights of victims implies that 'justice' is equivalent to a guilty verdict, and it comes perilously close to justifying precisely the vengeance which supporters of criminal law say they reject." "Meanwhile, the notion that such trials have a politically educational function is itself reminiscent of the 'agitation trials' conducted for the edification of the proletariat in early Soviet Russia."
Laughland features the many-leveled lawlessness of the ICTY. It was not created by law and there is no higher body that reviews its decisions and to whom appeals can be made. The judges, often political appointees and without judicial experience, judge themselves. Laughland points out that the judges have changed their rules scores of times, but none of these changes have ever been challenged by any higher authority. And their rules are made "flexible," to give efficient results; the judges proudly noting that the ICTY "disregards legal formalities" and that it does not need "to shackle itself to restrictive rules which have developed out of the ancient trial-by-jury system." The rule changes have steadily reduced defendants' rights, but from the beginning those rights were shriveled: Laughland quotes a U.S. lawyer who helped draft the rules of evidence of the ICTY, who acknowledges that they were "to minimize the possibility of a charge being dismissed for lack of evidence."
Laughland notes that the ICTY is a "prosecutorial organization" whose "whole philosophy and structure is accusatory." This is why its judges gradually accepted a stream of rulings damaging to the defense and to the possibility of a fair trial-including the acceptance of hearsay evidence, secret witnesses, and closed sessions (the latter two categories applicable in the case of 40 percent of the witnesses in the Milosevic trial). ICTY rules even allow an appeal and retrial of an acquitted defendant-"in other words, the ICTY can imprison a person whom it has just found innocent."
Laughland's devastating analysis of the Milosevic indictment and trial is a study in abuse of power in a politically-motivated show trial, incompetence, and faux-judiciary malpractice. The first indictment, issued in the midst of the NATO bombing war, on May 27, 1999, was put up in close coordination between the ICTY and U.S. and British officials, and its immediate political role was crystal clear-to eliminate the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the war and to deflect attention from NATO's turn to bombing civilian infrastructure (a legal war crime, adding to the "supreme international crime," both here protected by this body supposedly connected to "law" and protecting the peace!). The later kidnapping and transfer of Milosevic to the Hague was a violation of Yugoslav law and rulings of its courts. The ICTY's NATO service and contempt for the rule of law was manifest.
The original indictment of Milosevic dealt only with his responsibility for alleged war crimes in Kosovo. But as Laughland points out, the wild claims of mass killing and genocide in Kosovo were not sustainable by evidence, and NATO bombing may have killed as many Kosovo civilians as the Yugoslav army. This accentuated the problem that if the Milosevic indictment was limited to Kosovo it would be hard to justify trying him for Kosovo crimes but not NATO leaders, a point even acknowledged by the ICTY prosecutor. So two years after the first indictment, but after Milosevic's kidnapping and transfer to The Hague, the indictment was extended to cover Bosnia and Croatia. A bit awkward, given that back in 1995 when Mladic and Karadzic were indicted for crimes in Bosnia, Milosevic was exempted. There was also the problem that the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs were not under Serb and Milosevic authority after the declared independence of Bosnia and Croatia, and Milosevic fought with them continuously in an effort to get them to accept various peace plans 1992-1995 (documented in Sir David Owen's Balkan Odyssey, another important book neglected perhaps because of its contra-party line evidence).
 Global Justice or Global Revenge? International Criminal Justice at the Crossroads, By Hans Köchler [*Amazon*] |
So the prosecution sought to make the case for "genocide" by belatedly making Milosevic the boss in a "joint criminal enterprise" (JCE) to get rid of Croats and Muslims in a "Greater Serbia." The initial indictments that confined his alleged crimes to Kosovo never mentioned any participation in a JCE or drive for a "Greater Serbia." So the prosecution had to start over in collecting evidence for the crimes, JCE, and Greater Serbia aims in Bosnia and Croatia and tying them to Milosevic. Guilt decision first, then go for the evidence, was the rule for this political court. The trial moved ahead while the "evidence" was still being assembled. Most of it was the testimony of scores of alleged witnesses to alleged crimes, a large majority with hearsay evidence, and almost none of it bearing on Milosevic's decision-making or differentiating it from what could have been brought against Izetbegovic, Tudjman or Bill Clinton. Laughland shows very persuasively that the inordinate length of the trial was in no way related to Milosevic's performance-a lie beloved by Marlise Simons and the mainstream media in general-it was based on the fact that this was a political trial that inherently demanded massive evidence, and the prosecution, unprepared and struggling to make a concocted charge plausible, poured it on, trying to make up for lack of any documentation of their charges of a Milosevic-based plan and orders with sheer volume of irrelevant witnesses to civil warfare and Kosovo-war crimes and pain.
A key element in the prosecution case was the belated charge that Milosevic was involved in a "joint criminal enterprise" with Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to get rid of non-Serbs by violence, looking toward that Greater Serbia. The concept of a JCE is not to be found in prior law or even in the ICTY Statute. It was improvised to allow the finding of guilt anywhere and anytime. You are part of a JCE if you are doing something bad along with somebody else, or are attacking the same parties with somebody who does something bad. With that common end you don't even have to know about what that somebody else is doing to be part of a JCE. Laughland has a devastating analysis of this wonderfully expansive and opportunistic doctrine, and his chapter dealing with it is entitled "Just convict everyone," based on a quote from a lawyer-supporter of the ICTY who finds the JCE a bit much. Milosevic probably would have been convicted based on this catch-all, or catch anyone, doctrine. Of course it fits much better the joint and purposeful Clinton, Blair, NATO attack on Yugoslavia, or the Croats U.S.-supported ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatian Krajina in August 1995, but there is nobody to enforce the JCE against them, whereas we have the ICTY to take care of U.S. and NATO targets!
Laughland has a fine chapter on Greater Serbia, which shows that Milosevic didn't start the breakup wars (even quoting prosecutor Nice admitting this), that he was no extreme nationalist and that accusations about his speeches of 1987 and 1989 are false, that his support of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia was fitful and largely defensive, and that he was not working toward a Greater Serbia but at most trying to enable Serbs in a disintegrating Yugoslavia to stay together. During Milosevic's trial defense, Serb Nationalist Party leader Vojislav Seselj claimed that only his party sought a "Greater Serbia," as the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were really Serbs with a different religion and his party fought to bring them all within Serbia-Milosevic only wanted the Serbs stranded in the breakaway states to be able to join Serbia. At that point the prosecutor Geoffrey Nice acknowledged that Milosevic was not aiming for a Greater Serbia, but, in Nice's words, only had the "pragmatic" goal of "ensuring that all the Serbs who had lived in the former Yugoslavia should be allowed.to live in the same unit." This caused some consternation among the trial judges, as Milosevic's aggressive drive for a Greater Serbia was at the heart of the ICTY case. You never heard about this? Understandably, as the New York Times and mainstream media never reported it, just as they never tried to reconcile Milosevic's support of serial peace moves with his alleged role as the aggressor seeking that Greater Serbia.
There is much more of value in Travesty and I can't do it justice even on the issues discussed here. This is a wonderful book that should be on the reading list of everyone looking for enlightenment on the confused and confusing issues involving the Balkan wars and "humanitarian intervention." It helps shred the notion that the NATO attacks were based on a morality that justified over-riding sovereignty and international law, and it shows decisively that the ICTY is a completely politicized rogue court that is a "corruption of international justice."
As Laughland emphasizes (and Johnstone and Mandel do as well), the NATO war and the work of the ICTY in running interference for that war, were very helpful in setting the stage for George Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly also, Iran. It was treated then, and remains treated today, as a "good war," a "humanitarian intervention." So those who swallowed the standard narrative, built on lies, at best failed to see the continuity between Clinton and Bush, and the service of the former and the publicists of the "good war" in removing the protection of the "anti-fascist theory of international relations" that protected small countries from Great Power aggression and unleashing the rule of the jungle.
Edward S. Herman is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Articles by Edward S. Herman
» » » » [Global Research]
Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice
by John Laughland
Introduction to Travesty | LewRockwell.com | February 7, 2007
Introduction
When the indictment against Slobodan Milošević, President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was announced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Thursday, 27th May 1999, it created an instant sensation around the world. The indictment was published two months after NATO, the world’s most powerful military alliance, had started raining down bombs on the small state of Yugoslavia on 24th March 1999. The bombing campaign was to last until early June. The world’s television screens had been filled with highly emotive pictures of refugees fleeing into Macedonia and Albania, and the Western media had been saturated with NATO’s war propaganda about atrocities being committed against the civilian ethnic Albanian population of the Southern Serbian province of Kosovo. The first indictment in history by an international tribunal of a sitting head of state for war crimes and crimes against humanity greatly bolstered NATO’s cause.
Milošević was in fact only one of five Yugoslav leaders to be indicted. Since he was the President, and since he seemed to be the central figure in the Balkan wars which had started to rage in 1991, his indictment and subsequent trial attracted the most attention. However, the fact that the indictment named many of the leading political and military officials in Yugoslavia emphasised its unique constitutional importance. Just as the declared purpose of NATO’s bombing campaign was to overturn the existing international system – to abolish national sovereignty as the cornerstone of international law, and henceforth to allow military attacks on states which were said to be abusing universal human rights – so the criminal condemnation of the entire war policy of the Yugoslav state by the ICTY Prosecutor, and the approval of that indictment by the ICTY judges, were clear signals that international law would no longer be based on the principle of state sovereignty. NATO’s war and the indictment of Slobodan Milošević were therefore ideologically linked at the deepest possible level. In fact, they were two sides of the same coin – a state of affairs conveniently emphasised by the fact that, during the bombing, the ICTY web site helpfully carried a link to NATO on its home page.
Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption, By John Laughland, Ramsey Clark [*Amazon*] |
The unprecedented indictment was eventually to lead to a trial which was itself unique by almost every measure. The Milošević trial was the longest criminal trial in history, having lasted for four years from February 2002 until Milošević’s death in his cell on the morning of Saturday, 11th March 2006. Its duration contrasts with the Nuremberg trial of twenty leading Nazis, which lasted just ten months from 20th November 1945 to 30th September 1946. By the end of the trial, the transcripts ran to just under 50,000 pages and nearly 300 witnesses had testified. The Filings, exhibits, documentation, DVDs and videos presented at the trial ran to a total of more than 1.2 million pages.1 If a person sat down and tried to read all this material, reading at a rate of one page a minute, eight hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take him over seven years to accomplish his task. In other words, it is an impossible task: the total amount of material submitted in the Milošević trial has never been read by any single individual and the trial was therefore Kafkaesque in the true sense of the term. The cost of the trial was concomitantly enormous. The budget of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia runs at nearly US$300 million a year. There are no official figures for the cost of specific trials but one estimate is that 20% of the ICTY’s costs went on the Milošević trial, or some $20–$30 million a year for six years.
The trial was attended by some of the world’s most powerful people and many of the major players in the Yugoslav wars. The Presidents of Croatia and Slovenia, the former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Milošević’s predecessor), former Prime Ministers of Yugoslavia and of the Soviet Union, the Chief of Staff of the Russian army, the former Supreme Commander of NATO, the High Representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the EU’s special envoy during the Balkan wars all came to testify: most of their appearances in The Hague were ignored by the world’s media. Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, and Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor, were also called to attend for cross-examination by Milošević, but they refused to do so and the ICTY judges refused to issue subpoenas to force them to testify. The Presiding judge, Sir Richard May (who had stood as Labour Party candidate against Margaret Thatcher in the constituency of Finchley at the General Election of 1979 which brought Thatcher’s Conservative government to power) died two years into the proceedings; instead of being allowed to collapse, the trial continued.
Milošević himself died in custody, the seventh defendant at the ICTY to have died either in The Hague or shortly after release. He had been in poor health throughout and yet, instead of releasing him on compassionate grounds as the British authorities had done to General Pinochet (after having detained him for months on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by a Spanish magistrate), the ICTY judges used his illness as an excuse for taking the unprecedented decision to impose a defence lawyer on their most famous defendant. This means that, in international law, a sick man can now be convicted on the basis of a trial at which he has been ‘represented’ by a lawyer whom he has in fact not appointed and whom he does not instruct. He can even be tried in absentia, as Milošević himself was. As the ICTY itself admitted, there is no precedent anywhere in national or international law for such measures. Staff at the ICTY added insult to injury when they alleged, after his death, that Milošević had deliberately damaged his own health by taking medicine which had not been prescribed.
In spite of the fact that the trial cast light on some of the most interesting and widely-discussed events of the end of the 20th century, the proceedings were effectively ignored by the world’s media. Indeed, many members of the public had forgotten that Milošević was even still on trial when he died in March 2006. The only partial exceptions to this media silence came when the Prosecution announced that some ‘star witness’ was due to appear, or that some ‘smoking gun’ piece of evidence was due to emerge. In fact, neither of these ever did. On the contrary, many of the Prosecution witnesses backfired. Whereas supporters of international criminal justice had written excitedly at the beginning of the trial that it was to be ‘the world’s most closely watched criminal proceeding since the trial of O. J. Simpson,’2 in fact the media quickly lost interest after the initial thrill of more atrocity propaganda had worn off, and when the trial revealed that the facts involved were far more nuanced. During the trial, most of the world’s mainstream media behaved as indulgently towards The Hague Tribunal as had human rights activists from the Ligue des droits de l’homme who observed the Moscow show trials in the 1930s and reported back that they were models of due process.
 The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West (Praeger Security International); by Christopher Deliso [*Amazon*] |
Today’s journalistes engagés, so quick to issue moral condemnations when they are of people whom everyone loves to hate, seem never to question the procedures and philosophy of the ICTY or of ‘international justice’ in general. In fact, the rules and procedures of the ICTY are heavily stacked against the Defence and in favour of the Prosecution. The Tribunal is not subject to any meaningful control and, the author of its own rules of evidence, it often bends the law and established procedure to obtain convictions. The underlying assumption often seems to be that ‘justice’ means a guilty verdict at all costs. In the brave new world of so-called international law, indeed, it has become a banality for Western leaders to demonise the leaders of enemy states, often in order to obscure the atrocities committed by the West itself on their territory. This has led many people in the West to think that they know that Milošević was guilty as charged, or that he was an evil man, even when they are ignorant about the most basic facts concerning the former Yugoslavia, its wars and the NATO attacks of 1999.
This book argues that the trial was inherently political, and that the political nature of the indictment made a fair trial impossible. The very fact that the trial lasted for four years is itself indication of an unfair trial: compare it to the guidelines laid down by the Lord Chief Justice for England and Wales in March 2005, which say that even the most complex criminal trials should last between three and six months, but no longer.3 There is unfortunately nothing new about the judicial process being abused to further political goals. All revolutionary forces in modern history have sought to legitimise their regimes with a symbolic murder in the form of a trial and execution of the leader of the old regime. The mere appearance in court of a former king is enough to show that a new regime is in power. Such trials are anvils on which a new political order is supposed to be forged – and they are seldom models of due process. This is why the Milošević trial’s pedigree lies in the great revolutionary trials of the past, organised as it was to emphasise the dawn of a New World Order in international law. NATO and the Western states needed the Milošević trial to prove that they had torn up the existing rules of the international system and replaced it with a new globalist regime, in which the rights and duties of states had given way to a universal regime of ‘human rights.’
History shows that such show trials in fact corrupt the criminal justice system. The destruction of lawfulness, especially if carried out in the name of morality, is a matter of the greatest concern to all of those who are interested in that precious jewel of Western civilisation, the rule of law. For, as Charles Stuart said as he was led to the gallows, ‘If power without law may make laws, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life or any thing that he calls his own.’ The subsequent dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell proved him right. In our own day, the ‘war on terror’ has shown how an aggressive stance in foreign policy leads quickly to an attack on civil liberties at home. If a culture of condemnation is allowed to pass for ‘justice,’ then it will not be long before innocent people are judicially lynched in domestic courts as well. This is why a lawyer representing a defendant at The Hague tribunal, who struggled against its destruction of established legal principles, wrote in 1999, ‘We are fighting here the battles which were fought to establish the principles enunciated in Magna Carta and the American Constitution. Yet the stakes are much higher this time. For if we fail we will lose the whole world, since there will be nowhere else to hide.’4
Notes
[1] Figures given by assigned counsel, Steven Kay, Trial Chamber, 29th November 2005, Milošević trial transcript p. 46701.
[2] Michael P. Scharf and William A. Schabas, Slobodan Milošević On Trial: A Companion, Continuum, New York and London, 2002, p. 3.
[3] ‘Control and Management of Heavy Fraud and Other Complex Criminal Cases, A Protocol issued by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales,’ 22nd March 2005.
[4] Private correspondence with the author.
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2 comments:
you are idiots. bitter idiots. bitter idiots with a lot of time on your hands. bitter idiots with a lot of time and no job?
Ada,
Ever heard the term projection? Can you verify that any statement made in the article is not based on facts? If so, please do so.
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