Must remember that the ethnic albanians in today's Kosovo invaded the region in extremely recent times, and their numerical presence there inflated after the 90s war when more islamoterrorist Albanians came to settle and swell their presence. NATO would have the world think that the region now belongs to these incomers and have therefore worked hard (employing lies, violence, threats and more lies) to give it to them. Perhaps the islamoterrorist albanians may show NATO the love they are famous for in return.
Following is a Koenraad Elst article over two parts. It's a summary of all of Yugoslavia's current situation, with lots of information - quite a bit previously unknown to me, though others here may already know.
<b>Thoroughly recommended read - <i>every single paragraph.</i></b> Some unexpected scary similarities with India's situation.
(The second quoteblock below contains mad highlighting/colouring again - but really, it's <i>all</i> worth reading.)
http://users.pandora.be/lieven.kenis/Nucle...ef/main0603.htm
and http://users.pandora.be/lieven.kenis/Nucle...ef/main0903.htm
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Milosevic Show Trial</b>
The University of Louvain has sometimes been criticised for the people it selects for the award of an honorary degree. This was the case when it chose Prince Philip of Belgium. And yet, with less criticised personalities, the University can make much more serious mistakes. Last year, one of the laureates besides Prince Philip, was Carla Del Ponte, public prosecutor in a show trial against alleged Yugoslavian war criminals - firstly against the ex-president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic. This socialist politician is by no means our best friend, but that does not justify the travesty of justice performed by Del Ponte and company in The Hague.
The tribunal was the first international example created to prosecute war crimes, after the tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo in 1946. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up by resolution 827 of the UN Security Council in May 1993. All UN members have to co-operate with it. This tribunal is qualified to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards, including: serious violation of the Geneva Convention of 1949, infringement of the laws of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The tribunal cannot judge suspects in their absence and cannot pronounce the death penalty - lifelong detention being the maximum sentence. The tribunal aims to prosecute the people ultimately accountable, rather than the small fry who executed the dirty work. One sentence that could have far reaching consequences concerns the formal assessment of rape as a war crime. Rather Kafkaian are the provisions that accusations can be made openly or under seal, that the suspects can be arrested on the basis of secret accusations and that the identity of witnesses can be kept a secret.
Chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss lawyer, already the third to hold the post after Louise Arbor (Canada) and Richard Goldstone (South Africa), collects evidence with her team to enable her to formulate accusations and start prosecutions. The tribunal works according to the following principle: âNobody is above the law or out of reach of international justice. The international community demonstrates its determination that victims will not be forgotten and that their story shall be toldâ. The tribunal sends important research teams in the field, but for making arrests it has to rely upon the co-operation of the police in the states of former Yugoslavia or of the international âpeace forcesâ, S-For and K-For respectively, in Bosnia and Kosovo. The tribunal has more than a thousand employees and a yearly budget of around 100 million dollars.
<b>False pretences</b>
The mock tribunal in The Hague is clearly an example of justice by the victors. Against the wishes of the Serbs, the tribunal refuses to summon Bill Clinton, former US President, Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of State, and other NATO executives. This, despite the fact that the NATO interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and in Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, undoubtedly constituted violations of international law and made thousands of civilian victims. Additionally it must be said that bombings are not justified by the fact that the victims are soldiers, when basically it is nothing more than pure aggression. It may be recalled that the intervention in 1999 was given legal justification from the fact that what remained of Yugoslavia, refused to accept the Rambouillet agreements. Certainly a sovereign state has the right to accept or reject a treaty, in this case all the more so as these agreements included the unlimited right for NATO to station troops on Yugoslavian soil, a clause which no sovereign state would consider acceptable. This was purely the arrogance of power, comparable to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914 and Hitlerâs ultimatum to Poland in 1939.
Furthermore, the immediate causes for the intervention were false. The US holds a long record of false justifications for initiating a war: the alleged Spanish assault of the warship Maine, which was the reason for invading Cuba and the Philippines in 1898; the provocation of the shelling of the Lusitania (a passenger ship used for weapons transport) by Germany in 1915; the so-called Tonkin Golf incident in 1964; the story of premature babies being killed with bayonets in Kuwait in 1990, which determined a majority of US members of Congress to vote in favour of an attack upon Iraq; the untraceable weapons of mass destruction which were meant to justify the recent conquest of Iraq. On this last point, I accept in principle that perhaps, in the future, somewhere, somehow, a pocket nuclear bomb could be discovered. But as far as the NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo are concerned, there is no longer a shred of doubt that they were initiated on false pretences.
The Bosnian government and its cool Islamic leader Ali Izetbegovic had correctly assessed the international forces and in particular the importance of public relations working upon the sentiments of American leaders. He hired, amongst others, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy (who, with his carefully studied haircut and his largely open shirt looked more like a pimp) and a New York advertising firm. They, just like him, thoroughly understood how stories about âcrueltiesâ can do wonders in influencing opinion. Observe how the situation was turned around regarding Kuwait after the invented stories about Iraqis and the premature babies. The Serbs, boozers as they were, trusted in their brutal force and neglected public relations. Sometimes they even offered themselves to their enemies as excellent propaganda material.
On the military front the Islamic, Bosnian public relations coup was decisive, because as a result NATO decided to take action. Indeed there was a lot of shooting around Sarajevo, but the Serbs certainly did not behave as senseless barbarians. For example, they agreed to evacuate the strategic Mount Igman and make it a demilitarised zone, with the result that the Moslems took the mountain and started shooting from there. For all their brutality, the Serbs gave in from time to time; the Moslems never did. In any case, the Serbs were branded as barbarian bombers of civil targets within besieged Sarajevo. Crucial incidents, neatly filmed by cameras, which were there as if by chance, included: the shooting of a queue waiting outside a bakery in Vase Miskina Street (16 deaths, May 1992) and the shootings in the Markale market place (68 deaths, February 1994 and 38 deaths, August 1995). Respectively these incidents led to an embargo against the remains of Yugoslavia; to the official announcement of NATO interference in Bosnia and to the bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, in co-ordination with an offensive by Croatian ground troops.
However, ballistic analysis and other information soon indicated that the murderous attacks had not been the work of Serbian besiegers but of the Bosnian government itself. Perhaps these sorts of dirty tricks can be excused in wartime. What is sure is that these cases of successful deception were revealed by Western journalists and confirmed by Western officers on the spot, so that they were well known for what they were by the US and NATO authorities. Perhaps they were even planned with the help of the CIA. The governments of NATO countries cheated their parliaments and population, and started the war on false information about alleged Serbian cruelties. In Nuremberg this would have been described as âcrimes against peaceâ and at that time Clinton would probably have been condemned to spend some years in Spandau prison.
<b>Srebrenica</b>
Another brilliant propaganda coup was the capture of Srebrenica. It is taken for granted that the Serbian troops of Ratko Mladic, after they had taken Srebrenica on 11th July 1995, raised hell amongst the Moslem population. This gave sufficient ground to the propaganda machinery of the other side to significantly embroider the basic truth. Eight thousand deaths were mentioned, but all subsequent exhumations did not come near that figure, by a long way. The figure â8,000â reported by the New York Times and all other media afterwards as the death toll, was in fact the addition of two figures mentioned in the preliminary report by the Red Cross dated 13th September 1995: 3,000 âwho according to eye-witnesses had been arrested by the Serbian troopsâ, and 5,000 âwho escaped Srebrenica and arrived, most of them, in Central Bosniaâ. The Times of London had already reported on 2nd August 1995 that 3 to 4,000 of the âmissingâ male Moslems had safely fled out of Srebrenica.
Among them were 2,000 Moslems who had arrived in the Tuzla region, having come from Srebrenica, and who were described by the Times as âBosnian governmental troopsâ. Instead of ârefugeesâ coming from a town attacked by Serbs, it appeared that they were just soldiers who had obeyed an order for strategic retreat, with the result that the Serbs could easily take Srebrenica. When the Serbs subsequently took Zepa, hundreds of defenders of this enclave appeared to be members of the âmissingâ Srebrenica Moslems. The fleeing Moslem soldiers abandoned their wounded comrades, and the Serbs evacuated them to Sarajevo. Witnesses attested that at no time were they ill-treated by the Serbs. It has to be remarked that the Moslem fighters had no problem in leaving behind wounded soldiers and, in Srebrenica, also women and children. It must have been that they did not believe in stories about bloodthirsty Serbs. Generally the media did not mention that the Moslems in Srebrenica were not at all the helpless and hunted population that, as a minority, needed UN protection. Just as in the âsafe zoneâ of Goradze they were active warriors who used Srebrenica as a base from which they organized regular attacks against neighbouring Serbian positions. The Bosnian-Serbian President Radovan Karadzic counted 1260 Serbian deaths in the region during the previous months as a result of Moslem attacks organized from Srebrenica.
Even the 3,000 who were arrested were probably not all executed. On 17th January 1996, The Guardian reported the arrival in Dublin of 24 Bosnian Moslem prisoners of war, who had been transported from Srebrenica to the prisoners camp of Sljivovica in Serbia, where they had been held for some months. Nicholas Burns of the State Department declared that 800 prisoners coming from Srebrenica were kept in prison camps in Serbia and that 214 of them were granted asylum in the US. Certainly, blood would have been shed during the taking of Srebrenica, but just as with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the 8,000 dead from Srebrenica have not been found. Not even with the 460 corpses exhumed near Srebrenica in 1996 is there enough evidence to be sure that they have been victims of âtheâ mass murder. Of course Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has tried to explain the lack of evidence by telling tall stories about the Serbs making corpses disappear by chemical treatments. It is amazing how these Serbs, suffocated by a longstanding embargo, would have been able to use technological devices to mislead the omnipresent American inspectors, not to mention the satellites.
However, the image of âgenocideâ inflicted upon a helpless Moslem community became an indestructible feature of international perception and had consequences, especially in the diplomatic field. Because the Bosnian-Serb leaders Mladic and Karadzic had been branded as genocidal criminals, they were not acceptable as spokesmen for their people at the Dayton peace negotiations. As a replacement the Bosnian Serbs were represented by Slobodan Milosevic, head of a state that was, according to all non-Serb participants, an alien state, distinct from the newly founded Bosnia. The situation was really absurd: according to the Americans, the Bosnian Serbs had nothing to do anymore with what remained of Yugoslavia, but nevertheless their interests were represented in Dayton by the Head of State of this foreign country. At that time Milosevic was still âour villain in ex-Yugoslaviaâ (in line with the principle used by the US in Latin America for its dictators: âOK, he is a villain, but he is OUR villainâ). Milosevic was very malleable, being hard pressed himself. He had other interests to look after than those of his fellow Serbs who now belonged to the new state of Bosnia.
Here we open a parenthesis on masochistic tendencies, which appear when someone is in a situation of complete powerlessness. The Bosnian-Serb President Biljana Plavsic is an example of this. Once she was the dignified defender of the Serbian interests against the nasty efforts of Albright to obtain more concessions than already agreed upon, always demanded in the name of the âspirit of Dayton (âWe do not believe in ghostsâ, replied Plavsic). On an impulse of psychological despair, she gave herself up to the tribunal in The Hague. She offered a pathetic self-accusation and was promised a mild treatment in return for incriminating testimonials against other leading figures.
This sort of masochism has been caused also by the Srebrenica crisis, even in places far from the Yugoslavian borders, more specifically in The Netherlands, whose troops were supposed to guarantee the safety of the Moslems within the enclave. During the Spring of 2002 the Dutch government âKOK IIâ was compelled to hand in its resignation in the aftermath of the Srebrenica affair. In November 1995, the public prosecutor Goldstone begged the US government to obtain the promised evidence of the mass murders and said that the evidence he had already received was âdisappointingâ. The Dutch government refused to deduce from this that, logically, the crime and henceforth the Dutch involvement was most probably not as important as might have been feared. While the disappearance of the bodies should have been encouraging the Dutch in that direction, Defence minister Joris Voorhoeve, on the authority of âintelligence servicesâ, declared that the Serbs had disposed of the evidence of mass murders. In any case, at that time other NATO troops had taken over from the Dutch and could have found out if indeed the evidence had been tampered with.
<b>Disintegration</b>
When analysing the debates held in The Hague, one can observe that the judgement on guilt or innocence regarding the Yugoslavian wars, depends entirely on a correct understanding of the basic political facts. NATO stated that a Serbian âoccupation armyâ remained illegally in the territory of the âsovereign state Bosniaâ. It is, of course, common knowledge that the situation was different. The province of Bosnia declared its independence with the support of the West, after a referendum that was boycotted by the Serbs. This made the result of the referendum illegal: fundamental changes to the Constitution (including of course a declaration of independence) needed a majority within each ethnic group. Yugoslavia, a member of the UN, was confronted with the same situation as Spain with Baskia, as Indonesia with Aceh, as India with Kashmir, etc. The world community accepts the right of these states to repress armed separatist movements. Yugoslavia, weak as it was, withdrew its army from Bosnia under pressure (discreetly leaving its weapons in the hands of anti-separatist Serbian militia) and accepted the partition. Probably, a refusal on principle to yield to international pressure would have obtained a better result than this useless effort to accepting a fundamental change, imposed by a disloyal âinternational communityâ.
Be that as it may be, the attitude of the governments of Yugoslavia and of the Republic of Serbia in the years 1990-1992 cannot by all means be considered as a factor of war, as the ICTY is affirming in its indictment against Milosevic. First it must be stressed that at that time the Serbs, and certainly Milosevic, did not have the principal power, contrary to the declaration of the ICTY that he âde facto controlled the federal governmentâ. At the time that he tried to control the emerging separatism, key positions within the collective leadership of the then unified Yugoslavia were held, until the end of 1991, by loyal Croats, such as Prime Minister Anté Marcovic and Foreign minister Budimir Loncar. Inevitably the ethnic Serbs were in a weaker position once the non-Serbian ethnic groups split into federalist and separatist factions, as the Serbs had no separatist option of their own. What remained of Yugoslavia became more and more synonymous with the Serbian regions only, and from then onwards the hostile media hatefully called it âGreater Serbiaâ.
The indictment consistently speaks in abstract and impersonal terms of events that have harmed the Yugoslav Federation, the Serbian State or the Serbian people. It declares that in 1991 the Federation âdisintegratedâ (not mentioning the responsibility of separatists and of their supporters in Bonn and Washington) and further says that the declaration of independence issued by Slovenia on 25th June 1991 âled to war breaking outâ. The said declaration was, under the Yugoslav Constitution, illegal and the Yugoslav army was deployed in order to regain the border crossings which had been taken over by Slovenian militia. This militia prevailed over the Yugoslav army, and so the war started.
After the successful separation of Slovenia and Croatia, recognized by Belgrade in January 1992, everybody foresaw the more dramatic crisis, which would hit the much more ethnically mixed Bosnia. The Yugoslavian leadership was prepared to agree to the lesser evil, namely the division of Bosnia into ethnic districts, as was worked out at the Lisbon conference on 19th March 1992. Representatives of the Croats, Moslems and Serbs in Bosnia approved the plan. The man who opposed this last-ditch peace plan carries an enormous responsibility and should deservedly be brought before the Court in The Hague. His name is, however, not Slobodan Milosevic, but Warren Zimmerman, the then US ambassador in Yugoslavia, who assured the Moslem leader Alija Izetbegovic that he would be granted American support in favour of an undivided Moslem-dominated Bosnia if he withdrew from the Lisbon agreement. Later, in his book âOrigins of a Catastropheâ, Zimmerman conceded that the Lisbon plan âwas not so badâ and that âhe probably had been wrongâ.
But the events continued. On 14th April, Izetbegovic ordered his âgreen beretsâ militia to attack the Yugoslav army. Two weeks later the âinternational communityâ demanded the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army from Bosnia. In the course of its withdrawal the army lost more than two hundred soldiers in ambushes. One of these ambushes occurred right before the eyes of Izetbegovic and the UN commander Louis McKenzie. Later on, negotiator Lord Carrington declared (Intervju, Belgrade, 20th October 1995) that Izetbegovic âin a way had been put under pressure to declare independenceâ.
A war does not start spontaneously. A legal framework exists and conflicting interests look for a solution in or outside that framework. If it were to remain faithful to its principle of punishing the people bearing the top responsibility rather than the guys in the field, the ICTY should have indicted the people who were politically responsible for the disintegration of Yugoslavia. These were not only Yugoslavian politicians like Izetbegovic, but Western leaders and diplomats. After tens of thousands of deaths, a schemer like Zimmerman candidly admitted that he had been wrong. Did that give him the right to be absolved without punishment?
(to be continued)
Koenraad Elst<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Milosevic show trial
Part 2</b>
In the first part of our consideration of the Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague, we observed its blatant partiality. We also mentioned the fact that NATOâs intervention in Bosnia was justified by false allegations regarding cruelties perpetrated by the Serbs. The political basis for the case has been presented incorrectly and in a particularly biased way by the media as well as in the declarations by NATO and in the indictment by the tribunal.
All basic political concepts have systematically been twisted. âDemocratâ is now the name used for âanti-nationalistâ, although successive elections in Bosnia have time and again proved that the democratically expressed popular vote prefers the nationalists. âNationalist politicians are, contrary to what is proclaimed by some theorists of the Holy Grail of civil society, not an obstacle to democracy in Bosnia; they are indeed the very expression of it (â¦). In 1997, 91% of Bosnian Serbs and 84% of Bosnian Croats voted against the idea of a so called Bosnian state, while 98% of the Bosnian Moslems were in favourâ. (Mark Mazower, When A Modern War is Won, Times Literary Supplement, 14-02-2003).
(Language misuse)
The opinion makers of the liberal left will immediately say: âThere you are, Moslems are not narrow-minded! Their choice is for a multicultural state! They are much less blinkered than catholic or orthodox people! They are oh so non-nationalistic!â
In fact, these percentages reflect the same motivation by all three populations. All are nationalist, as Mazower states, because all three of them pursue their own ethnic interests by choice. The dominant group, knowing its demographic superiority, will be able slowly to pester the minorities until they leave, and has an interest in keeping Bosnia as vast as possible. To the frightened minorities, on the other hand, a split offers the best guarantee of a future for them within Bosnia, if only within part of it. If we look at it from that perspective, the Croats are the least nationalistic or narrow-minded: 16% of them do not think primarily of the interests of their own group, whereas only 2% of the Moslems do the same.
<b>Propaganda about cruelty</b>
For Kosovo the consequences of manipulating political concepts, considering the difficulties in hand, are even more striking. The media always spoke of âSerbia and Kosovoâ and of the âSerbian invasion or occupation of Kosovoâ, while Kosovo is (was) part of Serbia. They spoke of âKosovarsâ when they meant âKosovar Albaniansâ. Politicians and journalists competed with estimates of death figures, ten thousand, fifty thousand, etc. Was it not indeed urgent, so was the message, to stop by any possible means these monstrous Serbs who would not relent?
(Again, controlled, calculated use of language.)
<b>Cees van Zweeden accurately said (War against Serbia sold with lies, Gazet van Antwerpen, 23-06-2003): âTony Blair branded the policy of Milosevic in Kosovo as âracial genocideâ. He said: âThousands of Albanians have been murdered, hundreds of thousands are missing.â An American document produced by the government even gave the figure of 400,000 victims. The reality was somewhat different. Four years after the war, less than three thousand deaths have been counted, including Serbian as well as Albanian victims. The United Nations estimated the number of missing persons at around 3,500. Many of them have quietly emigrated to neighbouring countries or to the West.â
What is more: âDuring the war the British disclosed the existence of a camp in Djakovica, where Serbs systematically raped Albanian women. After the war it appeared that this camp had only existed in Blairâs imagination.â (idem) This was no longer of any importance. Indeed, the stories had served their purpose, which was to justify the NATO bombings on what remained of Yugoslavia.</b>
Public prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who accuses Milosevic of genocide, had no problem with the modest figures of victims. As George Szamuely reported (Numbers Games, American Conservative, 24-02-2003): <b>âAfter months and months of continuous digging, Carla del Ponte announced that NATO had unearthed 2,108 bodies. This was very much beneath the official estimate. Ms Del Ponte could not even tell whose bodies they were, to what ethnic group they belonged or how and when they died.</b> âGenocide is not a numbers gameâ, the tribunal replied dismissivelyâ.
(It's all so very Romilla Thapar-esque of Ms Del Ponte. Give her a Klown.. I mean <i>Kluge</i> Chair too for services rendered in defense of communazism.)
<b>Apart from this cheap rabble-rousing, the NATO governments also concealed the real reason for the NATO attack against Yugoslavia. The official reason was that Milosevic had refused to sign the Rambouillet-agreement, although he had previously showed his readiness to accept the demands of the West: autonomy for Kosovo, with peace forces stationed there. But âConfronted with the perspective that the Serbs would accept the peace plan, a new condition was added at the eleventh hour. As the complete text of the peace plan was kept a secret, it was not clear why the Serbs had refused to sign.â
âIt was only on 18th April 1999, when the war was already in full operation, that Le Monde Diplomatique revealed the complete text. Appendix B of Chapter 7 of the document demanded âunlimited accessâ for NATO troops to the whole of Yugoslavia. In other words, Milosevic had to agree that his country would become occupied territory. The Americans and the British had added this condition for the explicit purpose of making the acceptance of the document impossible.â (idem) Many of us have a really very short memory. Only a few years later they again believed the American-British stories supposed to justify the invasion of Iraq.</b>
(Shades of the Indo-US nuclear con-deal between the US and its puppet government in India which is similarly famous for taking place behind-closed-doors.)
<b>Unhistoric</b>
On 22nd May 1999, two months after the NATO attack against Yugoslavia had begun, prosecutor Louise Arbour entered an indictment at the ICTY against the Yugoslavs Slobodan Milosevic, Milan Milutinovic, Nikola Sainovic, Dragoljub Ojdanic and Vlajko Stojiljkovic. They were accused of crimes against humanity and violation of the laws of war. Paragraph 24 of the indictment named Milosevic and Milutinovic as the elected presidents of the Yugoslav federation and Serbia respectively. Milosevic had been elected President of Serbia in 1990 and 1992, each time with a large majority and in 1997 he had been elected President of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless the media always spoke of the âdictatorâ Milosevic, which was the new name for a head of state, pursuing national interests against the New World Order.
(Reminiscent of Indian psecular communist media who can't accept democratically accepted leaders either, but always have cheers for genocidal maniacs )
The first indictment against Milosevic concerned the most recent case, namely Kosovo. Paragraph 4 of the indictment was presented as if Kosovo was essentially Albanian territory, oppressed by Serb nationalists. It said: âIn 1981, the last census was carried out. On a total population of around 1,585,000, Kosovo counted 77% Albanians, 13% Serbs. (â¦) The actual population of Kosovo is estimated at between 1,800,000 and 2,100,000, of whom 85-90% are Kosovo-Albanians and 5-10% Serbs.â This was given as an argument for the fact that the Albanians, being the great majority, were entitled to claim power over Kosovo.
The total absence of historical perspective is striking in this instance. One has not arrived spontaneously with these proportions. Refusal to take into account the historical dimension suited the left-liberal vision of a one-dimensional human being, confining him to a present that can be manipulated. If the percentage of Serbs has been cut in half between 1981 and 1999 the explanation is that the Albanians have driven them out of the region.
History shows that in 1455, 1.900 families lived in the central region of Drenica, of whom 1.873 were Serbian and 10 Albanian. Prizren, a town in Kosovo, was once the capital of Serbia. The censuses held in 1921 and 1931 still showed no Albanian majority in that region. The Albanian character of Kosovo, as stressed by the indictment, is the result of a policy over different periods of forced Islamizing (under Turkish occupation) and forced Albanisation. During the Italian occupation, many Albanians were imported and Serbs chased away.
Under Tito, the return of the hounded Serbs was made impossible and the Albanians received political privileges de facto, allowing the provincial rulers to continue making life difficult for the remaining Serbs and persuading them to emigrate. The gradual expulsion of Serbs started in the late sixties. An estimated 200.000 Serbs were expelled between 1965 and 1981. After that, the pressure on them increased further. The New York Times reported at the time (12-07-1982: Exodus of Serbs stirs province in Yugoslavia): â âThe [Albanian] nationalists have a two-point programâ, said Becir Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, âfirst to establish an ethnically pure Albanian republic and secondly to reunite it with Albania and found the Greater Albania.â The large Albanian majority is therefore not a result of demographic differences, but mainly of ethnic cleansing.â
(Note how liars, such as communists, are always harping everywhere that people should 'forget history' and 'focus on the present' - a present unnaturally cut off from historical context - so that they can twist the situation to their purposes and keep victim populations victimised forever. Nice try, but the rest of the world does not want to be afflicted with such a convenient case of selective amnesia, thanks.)
<b>Albanian separatism</b>
Paragraph 6 of the indictment points the finger at Milosevic: âIn April 1987 Slobodan Milosevic, re-elected in 1986 as chairman of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Serbia, travelled to Kosovo. He met there with Serbian leaders and addressed a large gathering of Serbs, giving his support to a Serb-nationalist agenda. By doing this, he broke with the policy of party and government who had both forbidden all expressions of nationalism in Yugoslavia, since it was founded by Josip Broz Tito after WWII.â
Carla del Ponte does not give credence to the idea that the harassment of non-Albanians by Albanians could be a shameful expression of nationalism. Neither does she see anything wrong in the fact that the state tolerated all sorts of pro-Albanian and anti-Serbian discrimination. In fact this shows that she is in fact a Soviet agent and that the New World Order is a continuation of the Bolshevik agenda, through other means. Look at it, she says with sanctimonious indignation, this bad Milosevic has deviated from the good old communist party line dictated by the good old anti-nationalist Tito!
(Communiterrorists are the same everywhere: compulsive liars who are always willing to descend to the nethermost gutters to achieve their communist tyrannopia.)
In 1990, 114 of the 123 Albanian members of the parliament of Kosovo adopted an unofficial resolution that proclaimed Kosovo as an independent Yugoslav republic apart from Serbia. Later that year the same politicians proclaimed a âConstitution for the republic of Kosovoâ. In September 1991 they organized an unofficial referendum whereby a large majority of Albanians in Kosovo voted for independence. On 24th May 1992 they held unofficial elections for a parliament and a president of the âRepublic of Kosovoâ. Meanwhile the official institutions were boycotted, including the school system. <b>A few years later the established parallel schools delivered most of the fighters of the Ushtria lirimtare e Kosovs (UCK), also known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).</b>
The UCK came to the forefront in December 1994 when it killed a police inspector and claimed responsibility. At the same time it claimed responsibility for earlier murders perpetrated on âoccupants and traitorsâ. From 1996 onwards, open armed attacks against the Yugoslav police followed. In 1982 this UCK had had a predecessor in the National Movement for the Republic of Kosovo (NPRK). This was founded by a group of Albanian emigrants in Germany and by four local groups: the Movement for the <b>Albanian Socialist Republic in Yugoslavia (PASRJ), the Marxist-Leninist Organization of Kosovo (OMLK), the Communist-Leninist Party of Yugoslav Albanians (PKMLSHJ) and the Red Popular Front (FKB)</b>. This proves that the Albanian separatism (anti-Serbian, although not yet anti-Yugoslavian) dated from before Milosevic and his âSerbian nationalismâ. NPRK-militias were active from 1990 onwards. In the discussion of âwho started the gameâ it can at least be established that it was not the Serbs.
(Note, communist parties=islamist parties.)
From 1996 onwards, Albanian separatist fighters and Yugoslav police (I do not call them âSerbianâ, because this was a multiethnic body, including Romanies and even Albanians) clashed regularly. There were of course victims on both sides, being part of the perhaps 3,000 victims of the Kosovo crisis in what remained of Yugoslavia. The others were victims of UCK-terror, Serbs as well as Albanians, branded as âtraitorsâ and âcollaboratorsâ. Certainly, Kosovo Albanians were killed, but not all of them by Yugoslav forces who had deployed far fewer resources than the Macedonian army had against its Albanian militia.
<b>Islamic terror networks sustained the UCK. Among them, at that time, the not so well known Osama bin Laden.</b> For that reason Israeli experts advised against an anti-Serbian and pro-UCK intervention. Washington did not listen and established something resembling diplomatic relations with the UCK, swiftly followed by Berlin. The German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel advised all European countries that they should follow the American example and contact the UCK.
<b>These contacts resulted in the Americans taking sides with the terrorists. Early in 1999, NATO decided to expel the Serbian troops from Kosovo and to offer air support to the UCK. This was the famous âhumanitarian interventionâ justified by the brand new âright to interveneâ. Over 78 days the bombings would kill at least 6,000 people. Because of its âhumanitarian characterâ the operation was code-named Merciful Angel. For that matter, the American Congress had not ratified the attack upon the rest - Yugoslavia - under the War Powers Act, so it was also illegal according to American law.</b>
Since NATO stationed occupation forces in Kosovo, more than half of the remaining Serbs and the vast majority of Romanies have fled. With the exception of the northern province, the region is now almost completely Albanian. While I was finishing this article, a friend just back from there told me that Albanian fighters had killed six Serbian children. Propaganda for making us weep or a nice example of the alliance between NATO and Jihad?
<b>âEvidenceâ at The Hague</b>
It is typical that the whole procedure at The Hague only makes minuscule use of material evidence. It has an overwhelming faith in eyewitness reports. This is of course the least reliable form of evidence. It can be manipulated, through rewards or threats. It is well known that even confessions are often the product of all sorts of calculations, of irrational feelings, of horse trading with the interrogators, of attempts to protect others or to escape the vengeance from the real culprits. History shows innumerable examples of convictions made on the basis of testimonies and confessions that were afterwards devastatingly refuted by new material evidence. And yet, in a trial presumptuously presented as having an historic exemplary function, one trusts almost entirely upon declarations of the people involved, instead of real evidence.
George Pumphrey (www.emperors-clothes.com) tells us the story of a crown witness on Srebrenica, Drazen Erdemovic. In March 1996 he contacted an ABC News team in Serbia, asking to be brought to The Hague. He had an ethnically mixed background and had first fought with the Croatian militia but had later joined the Bosnian-Serb troops of Ratko Mladic. After a row with his commander, he decided to take his revenge by telling his story. He declared he had participated in the shooting and burying of 1.200 Moslems near Srebrenica. According to Pumphrey the tribunal had not even bothered to verify if the bullets present in the mass grave indicated by Erdemovic, matched the details he had given them. Indeed the grave contained only some 150 bodies, not 1.200.
After his testimony, which the tribunal could of course use against his superiors, Erdemovic was himself accused for participating in the crimes he had described. If he wanted a lenient sentence, he had to comply with what was demanded of him: produce sketchy stories charging Serbian leaders. He needed to be condemned as well, bearing in mind the possible later condemnation of his ultimate commander, the fugitive general Mladic, but he was given credit for all his accusations against his chiefs. He was jailed for five years, a mild sentence according to the judges, and a result of his âhonestyâ attested by his âconfessionâ and his âcontinuous admission of guiltâ. On the other hand those who maintained their innocence would be considered as dishonest.
<b>The bias of the tribunal has some sort of hierarchy. The Western leaders who ordered bombings that caused thousands of victims, may not even be mentioned and no NATO politician or soldier has been indicted. No doubt about it: this is justice on the terms of the victor. When Milosevic says so in The Hague, the tribunal simply switches off his microphone. The stronger party thereby makes no attempts to conceal that double standards prevail, nor that coercion is used to bring the losers to the desired confessions.</b>
(Justice of the 'civilised' west.)
The local âcriminalsâ are treated differently. Serbs are indicted and sentenced up to the highest level. Croats are taken on up to a reasonable level (the Americans started to put on pressure for the indictment of President Franjo Tudjman, but this was halted by his death). With the Moslems, only small fry were symbolically sacrificed. Amongst them there were some instructive cases.
Take the Moslem commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric. He was arrested in April 2003. His story informs us that the Muslims in Srebrenica were not after all pitiful victims. âAccording to the indictment, Oric and his troops tortured and ill-treated Serbian prisoners at the police station of Srebrenica, between June 1992 and March 1993. Several of them were beaten to death. Moreover, fifteen villages with mainly Serbian inhabitants were pillaged, under the command of Oricâ (De Standaard, 12-04-2003). It looks as if the exclusive demonizing of the Serbs can be somewhat slowed down now, its purpose having been achieved.
In this case the procedures of the tribunal are also interesting. âA spokesperson for the Yugoslavia tribunal, Florence Hartmann, declared that the accusation against Oric had been kept secret in order to facilitate his arrest.â Dirty tricks were the order of the day here. A Serbian suspect, Milan Kovacevic, was arrested by British soldiers in the uniform of the Red Cross, blatantly in opposition to the internationally recognized statute of this neutral aid organization. Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic extradited Milosevic himself and did this under economical pressure from the US (no extradition of Milosevic, meant no US economic help). This happened illegally, against a legal sentence and against the democratically supported refusal by President Vojislav Kostunica. By the way, the promised American help has still not arrived.
<b>The Djindjic case</b>
Zoran Djindjic is a typical example of the policy promoted by the New World Order within the former East block. The New York Times has praised this âexâ-communist and former student of the extreme-left philosopher, Jörgen Habermas, as a âpragmatistâ. He enjoyed financial support in the US for his election campaign, which brought him into the government. On 1st April 2001, he tried to force Milosevicâ arrest (later it was done by the book) through a shoot-out between the soldiers protecting Milosevicâs residence and masked policemen who had been ordered to arrest him. Several of them were wounded and only an intervention by President Kostunica prevented a massacre.
Nevertheless, Djindjic is presented in our media as a white knight. De Standaard (22-08-203) describes him as a âreformistâ, the usual laudatory term for the politicians of Eastern Europe preferred by the left-liberal establishment of the West. They have to be anti-communist and anti-nationalist (qualities which made Milosevic the chosen partner of the US in 1995, as he was willing to let 100,000 Serbs be chased out of Croatia). And moreover âDjindjic was said to have plans of taking on the Mafiaâ. For that reason, it appears, he was murdered in March 2003.
Really? According to John Laughland (âWhy bombs donât make democraciesâ, American Conservative, 2-06-2003) Djindjic was up to his neck in Mafia business. Around 1990 he started by smuggling cigarettes and trading in false trade name clothing. For that information Laughland quotes a Serbian newspaper that was closed down when Djindjic became Prime Minister. He subsequently became one of the richest men in the country. For that reason the Americans thought him a suitable contact: âA man only interested in personal profit and not giving a damn about his country.â Laughland points out that the US had also fostered the political ambitions of the Mafia in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia.
As far as the murder is concerned, it is very unlikely that the Mafia would fear Djindjic. If so, the usual tactic would have been to kill one of his lieutenants, to put pressure upon the top man (indeed, eliminating the chief, creates more difficulty for doing business). If one follows the lead âwho profitsâ by the murder, then ideally one should investigate Djindjicâs supporters and collaborators. Not that there were no Mafiosi in his entourage, but the motive would in this case have been more ambitious than just protecting sordid Mafia business.
After the murder, a state of emergency was proclaimed. Laughland points out: âMaking use of special powers, which the West had condemned as dictatorial when Milosevic decided them in 1992 (he in fact never used them), they arrested 8,000 people for interrogation. Of them 2,000 were kept in prison, without any contact with their families or lawyers and without any formal accusation. (â¦) Politicians of Milosevicâ Socialist Party and of former President Kostunicaâs Democratic Party were prominently present amongst the arrested, as were journalists âwho had inspired the murder by criticizing Djindjicâ. (â¦) This use of the state apparatus for the elimination of the opposition was warmly welcomed by Western governments.â
The Serbian-American columnist Srdja Trifkovic (âSerbia after Djindjic: the plot thickensâ, Chronicles, 22-03-2003) names amongst others the people under threat who explain Western enthusiasm by: âThe atmosphere of fear and of physical and legal uncertainty is now worse than during the darkest days under Milosevic. (â¦) There are no longer strikes, while the trade-union bosses, in view of the emergency laws, do not dare to organize meetings and to criticize the government. Two popular newspapers have been closed down and most editors in chief work in a suffocating climate of self-censorship.â Trifkovic also mentions plans ascribed to Djindjicâs successor, Zoran Zivkovic, of outlawing the two nationalist parties as âsources of inspiration for the murderâ. At the same time the tribunals will be âcleansedâ and filled with the faithful of the new regime.
Laughland places this in a larger context: âThere has been much talk about the sudden conversion of so-called communists to the virtues of capitalism. But the simultaneous and opposite trend has scarcely been remarked upon: the acceptance by Western politicians of the key principles of the discredited communist belief. The most important of these is the myth of revolution. From Bucharest to Belgrade and as far as Baghdad, completely artificial events are presented as spontaneous actions from âthe peopleâ (â¦) In compliance with this new revolutionary doctrine, the West encourages chaos and crime, to get rid of the old order and to make that the population, plunged into daily material worries, offer no political resistance.â
Laughland gives a few other parallels between the rest -Yugoslavia and Iraq: they have both been suffering under longstanding sanctions, they are both exposed to the stranglehold of the Mafia; Djindjic is matched in Iraq by the servant of the US, Ahmed Chalabi, condemned to 20 years in jail for bank fraud. Iraq has still no electricity after five months; Kosovo has none after four years. There seems to be some logic behind the enigmatic destructive policy of the West. The logic that creates a system wherein Zoran Djindjic, a Mafioso and organizer of a new dictatorship, could become Washingtonâs man and the supplier of top suspects to the Yugoslavia tribunal.
<b>A travesty</b>
Gary J. Bass, lecturer of international policy at Princeton and a staunch supporter of the ICTY, calls it a success that âthe prosecutors have succeeded in removing Milosevic permanently from the Balkan politicsâ (Milosevic in The Hague, Foreign Affairs, May 2003). But surely it is not the mission of a tribunal to influence the future of a politician, certainly not under the painfully developed system of separation of powers. Bassâ declaration is in fact just a brutal confirmation of Milosevicâs own thesis that this is a political process, not a proper judicial procedure but a continuation of American politics behind a legal facade.
As for Carla del Ponte she is not ashamed over her mockery of normal legal procedures. âThe prosecutors at the Yugoslavia tribunal have placed all their hopes in deals with other suspects, so that they can prove that Milosevic is guilty of a genocide in Bosnia. (â¦) Only if accused politicians and officers are prepared to testify against Milosevic in exchange for milder sentences, thinks Del Ponte, will she be able to prove that Milosevic was involved in the massacre in Srebrenica and in the siege of Sarajevo.â (De Standaard, 17-07-2003). This means that prisoners already held for some time in The Hague, whose positions are well known, and of whom it is common knowledge that they have no declarations to offer against Milosevic, will be forced, by using the stick and the carrot, to switch their honest recollection of what happened for a version which pleases the prosecutors.
George Pumphrey sums up all this mockery and sighs: âIf this is to become the norm in international legal proceedings, no national legal system, however excellent it may be, will be able to resist such a totalitarian legal system. If this sort of procedure becomes legally enforced on the international level, this will also determine the national legal standards. From a legal point of view mankind will return to the norms used at the time of the Inquisition.â
Â
Koenraad Elst<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Following is a Koenraad Elst article over two parts. It's a summary of all of Yugoslavia's current situation, with lots of information - quite a bit previously unknown to me, though others here may already know.
<b>Thoroughly recommended read - <i>every single paragraph.</i></b> Some unexpected scary similarities with India's situation.
(The second quoteblock below contains mad highlighting/colouring again - but really, it's <i>all</i> worth reading.)
http://users.pandora.be/lieven.kenis/Nucle...ef/main0603.htm
and http://users.pandora.be/lieven.kenis/Nucle...ef/main0903.htm
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Milosevic Show Trial</b>
The University of Louvain has sometimes been criticised for the people it selects for the award of an honorary degree. This was the case when it chose Prince Philip of Belgium. And yet, with less criticised personalities, the University can make much more serious mistakes. Last year, one of the laureates besides Prince Philip, was Carla Del Ponte, public prosecutor in a show trial against alleged Yugoslavian war criminals - firstly against the ex-president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic. This socialist politician is by no means our best friend, but that does not justify the travesty of justice performed by Del Ponte and company in The Hague.
The tribunal was the first international example created to prosecute war crimes, after the tribunals of Nuremberg and Tokyo in 1946. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up by resolution 827 of the UN Security Council in May 1993. All UN members have to co-operate with it. This tribunal is qualified to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards, including: serious violation of the Geneva Convention of 1949, infringement of the laws of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity. The tribunal cannot judge suspects in their absence and cannot pronounce the death penalty - lifelong detention being the maximum sentence. The tribunal aims to prosecute the people ultimately accountable, rather than the small fry who executed the dirty work. One sentence that could have far reaching consequences concerns the formal assessment of rape as a war crime. Rather Kafkaian are the provisions that accusations can be made openly or under seal, that the suspects can be arrested on the basis of secret accusations and that the identity of witnesses can be kept a secret.
Chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss lawyer, already the third to hold the post after Louise Arbor (Canada) and Richard Goldstone (South Africa), collects evidence with her team to enable her to formulate accusations and start prosecutions. The tribunal works according to the following principle: âNobody is above the law or out of reach of international justice. The international community demonstrates its determination that victims will not be forgotten and that their story shall be toldâ. The tribunal sends important research teams in the field, but for making arrests it has to rely upon the co-operation of the police in the states of former Yugoslavia or of the international âpeace forcesâ, S-For and K-For respectively, in Bosnia and Kosovo. The tribunal has more than a thousand employees and a yearly budget of around 100 million dollars.
<b>False pretences</b>
The mock tribunal in The Hague is clearly an example of justice by the victors. Against the wishes of the Serbs, the tribunal refuses to summon Bill Clinton, former US President, Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of State, and other NATO executives. This, despite the fact that the NATO interventions in Bosnia in 1995 and in Serbia and Kosovo in 1999, undoubtedly constituted violations of international law and made thousands of civilian victims. Additionally it must be said that bombings are not justified by the fact that the victims are soldiers, when basically it is nothing more than pure aggression. It may be recalled that the intervention in 1999 was given legal justification from the fact that what remained of Yugoslavia, refused to accept the Rambouillet agreements. Certainly a sovereign state has the right to accept or reject a treaty, in this case all the more so as these agreements included the unlimited right for NATO to station troops on Yugoslavian soil, a clause which no sovereign state would consider acceptable. This was purely the arrogance of power, comparable to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914 and Hitlerâs ultimatum to Poland in 1939.
Furthermore, the immediate causes for the intervention were false. The US holds a long record of false justifications for initiating a war: the alleged Spanish assault of the warship Maine, which was the reason for invading Cuba and the Philippines in 1898; the provocation of the shelling of the Lusitania (a passenger ship used for weapons transport) by Germany in 1915; the so-called Tonkin Golf incident in 1964; the story of premature babies being killed with bayonets in Kuwait in 1990, which determined a majority of US members of Congress to vote in favour of an attack upon Iraq; the untraceable weapons of mass destruction which were meant to justify the recent conquest of Iraq. On this last point, I accept in principle that perhaps, in the future, somewhere, somehow, a pocket nuclear bomb could be discovered. But as far as the NATO interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo are concerned, there is no longer a shred of doubt that they were initiated on false pretences.
The Bosnian government and its cool Islamic leader Ali Izetbegovic had correctly assessed the international forces and in particular the importance of public relations working upon the sentiments of American leaders. He hired, amongst others, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy (who, with his carefully studied haircut and his largely open shirt looked more like a pimp) and a New York advertising firm. They, just like him, thoroughly understood how stories about âcrueltiesâ can do wonders in influencing opinion. Observe how the situation was turned around regarding Kuwait after the invented stories about Iraqis and the premature babies. The Serbs, boozers as they were, trusted in their brutal force and neglected public relations. Sometimes they even offered themselves to their enemies as excellent propaganda material.
On the military front the Islamic, Bosnian public relations coup was decisive, because as a result NATO decided to take action. Indeed there was a lot of shooting around Sarajevo, but the Serbs certainly did not behave as senseless barbarians. For example, they agreed to evacuate the strategic Mount Igman and make it a demilitarised zone, with the result that the Moslems took the mountain and started shooting from there. For all their brutality, the Serbs gave in from time to time; the Moslems never did. In any case, the Serbs were branded as barbarian bombers of civil targets within besieged Sarajevo. Crucial incidents, neatly filmed by cameras, which were there as if by chance, included: the shooting of a queue waiting outside a bakery in Vase Miskina Street (16 deaths, May 1992) and the shootings in the Markale market place (68 deaths, February 1994 and 38 deaths, August 1995). Respectively these incidents led to an embargo against the remains of Yugoslavia; to the official announcement of NATO interference in Bosnia and to the bombing of the Bosnian Serbs, in co-ordination with an offensive by Croatian ground troops.
However, ballistic analysis and other information soon indicated that the murderous attacks had not been the work of Serbian besiegers but of the Bosnian government itself. Perhaps these sorts of dirty tricks can be excused in wartime. What is sure is that these cases of successful deception were revealed by Western journalists and confirmed by Western officers on the spot, so that they were well known for what they were by the US and NATO authorities. Perhaps they were even planned with the help of the CIA. The governments of NATO countries cheated their parliaments and population, and started the war on false information about alleged Serbian cruelties. In Nuremberg this would have been described as âcrimes against peaceâ and at that time Clinton would probably have been condemned to spend some years in Spandau prison.
<b>Srebrenica</b>
Another brilliant propaganda coup was the capture of Srebrenica. It is taken for granted that the Serbian troops of Ratko Mladic, after they had taken Srebrenica on 11th July 1995, raised hell amongst the Moslem population. This gave sufficient ground to the propaganda machinery of the other side to significantly embroider the basic truth. Eight thousand deaths were mentioned, but all subsequent exhumations did not come near that figure, by a long way. The figure â8,000â reported by the New York Times and all other media afterwards as the death toll, was in fact the addition of two figures mentioned in the preliminary report by the Red Cross dated 13th September 1995: 3,000 âwho according to eye-witnesses had been arrested by the Serbian troopsâ, and 5,000 âwho escaped Srebrenica and arrived, most of them, in Central Bosniaâ. The Times of London had already reported on 2nd August 1995 that 3 to 4,000 of the âmissingâ male Moslems had safely fled out of Srebrenica.
Among them were 2,000 Moslems who had arrived in the Tuzla region, having come from Srebrenica, and who were described by the Times as âBosnian governmental troopsâ. Instead of ârefugeesâ coming from a town attacked by Serbs, it appeared that they were just soldiers who had obeyed an order for strategic retreat, with the result that the Serbs could easily take Srebrenica. When the Serbs subsequently took Zepa, hundreds of defenders of this enclave appeared to be members of the âmissingâ Srebrenica Moslems. The fleeing Moslem soldiers abandoned their wounded comrades, and the Serbs evacuated them to Sarajevo. Witnesses attested that at no time were they ill-treated by the Serbs. It has to be remarked that the Moslem fighters had no problem in leaving behind wounded soldiers and, in Srebrenica, also women and children. It must have been that they did not believe in stories about bloodthirsty Serbs. Generally the media did not mention that the Moslems in Srebrenica were not at all the helpless and hunted population that, as a minority, needed UN protection. Just as in the âsafe zoneâ of Goradze they were active warriors who used Srebrenica as a base from which they organized regular attacks against neighbouring Serbian positions. The Bosnian-Serbian President Radovan Karadzic counted 1260 Serbian deaths in the region during the previous months as a result of Moslem attacks organized from Srebrenica.
Even the 3,000 who were arrested were probably not all executed. On 17th January 1996, The Guardian reported the arrival in Dublin of 24 Bosnian Moslem prisoners of war, who had been transported from Srebrenica to the prisoners camp of Sljivovica in Serbia, where they had been held for some months. Nicholas Burns of the State Department declared that 800 prisoners coming from Srebrenica were kept in prison camps in Serbia and that 214 of them were granted asylum in the US. Certainly, blood would have been shed during the taking of Srebrenica, but just as with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the 8,000 dead from Srebrenica have not been found. Not even with the 460 corpses exhumed near Srebrenica in 1996 is there enough evidence to be sure that they have been victims of âtheâ mass murder. Of course Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has tried to explain the lack of evidence by telling tall stories about the Serbs making corpses disappear by chemical treatments. It is amazing how these Serbs, suffocated by a longstanding embargo, would have been able to use technological devices to mislead the omnipresent American inspectors, not to mention the satellites.
However, the image of âgenocideâ inflicted upon a helpless Moslem community became an indestructible feature of international perception and had consequences, especially in the diplomatic field. Because the Bosnian-Serb leaders Mladic and Karadzic had been branded as genocidal criminals, they were not acceptable as spokesmen for their people at the Dayton peace negotiations. As a replacement the Bosnian Serbs were represented by Slobodan Milosevic, head of a state that was, according to all non-Serb participants, an alien state, distinct from the newly founded Bosnia. The situation was really absurd: according to the Americans, the Bosnian Serbs had nothing to do anymore with what remained of Yugoslavia, but nevertheless their interests were represented in Dayton by the Head of State of this foreign country. At that time Milosevic was still âour villain in ex-Yugoslaviaâ (in line with the principle used by the US in Latin America for its dictators: âOK, he is a villain, but he is OUR villainâ). Milosevic was very malleable, being hard pressed himself. He had other interests to look after than those of his fellow Serbs who now belonged to the new state of Bosnia.
Here we open a parenthesis on masochistic tendencies, which appear when someone is in a situation of complete powerlessness. The Bosnian-Serb President Biljana Plavsic is an example of this. Once she was the dignified defender of the Serbian interests against the nasty efforts of Albright to obtain more concessions than already agreed upon, always demanded in the name of the âspirit of Dayton (âWe do not believe in ghostsâ, replied Plavsic). On an impulse of psychological despair, she gave herself up to the tribunal in The Hague. She offered a pathetic self-accusation and was promised a mild treatment in return for incriminating testimonials against other leading figures.
This sort of masochism has been caused also by the Srebrenica crisis, even in places far from the Yugoslavian borders, more specifically in The Netherlands, whose troops were supposed to guarantee the safety of the Moslems within the enclave. During the Spring of 2002 the Dutch government âKOK IIâ was compelled to hand in its resignation in the aftermath of the Srebrenica affair. In November 1995, the public prosecutor Goldstone begged the US government to obtain the promised evidence of the mass murders and said that the evidence he had already received was âdisappointingâ. The Dutch government refused to deduce from this that, logically, the crime and henceforth the Dutch involvement was most probably not as important as might have been feared. While the disappearance of the bodies should have been encouraging the Dutch in that direction, Defence minister Joris Voorhoeve, on the authority of âintelligence servicesâ, declared that the Serbs had disposed of the evidence of mass murders. In any case, at that time other NATO troops had taken over from the Dutch and could have found out if indeed the evidence had been tampered with.
<b>Disintegration</b>
When analysing the debates held in The Hague, one can observe that the judgement on guilt or innocence regarding the Yugoslavian wars, depends entirely on a correct understanding of the basic political facts. NATO stated that a Serbian âoccupation armyâ remained illegally in the territory of the âsovereign state Bosniaâ. It is, of course, common knowledge that the situation was different. The province of Bosnia declared its independence with the support of the West, after a referendum that was boycotted by the Serbs. This made the result of the referendum illegal: fundamental changes to the Constitution (including of course a declaration of independence) needed a majority within each ethnic group. Yugoslavia, a member of the UN, was confronted with the same situation as Spain with Baskia, as Indonesia with Aceh, as India with Kashmir, etc. The world community accepts the right of these states to repress armed separatist movements. Yugoslavia, weak as it was, withdrew its army from Bosnia under pressure (discreetly leaving its weapons in the hands of anti-separatist Serbian militia) and accepted the partition. Probably, a refusal on principle to yield to international pressure would have obtained a better result than this useless effort to accepting a fundamental change, imposed by a disloyal âinternational communityâ.
Be that as it may be, the attitude of the governments of Yugoslavia and of the Republic of Serbia in the years 1990-1992 cannot by all means be considered as a factor of war, as the ICTY is affirming in its indictment against Milosevic. First it must be stressed that at that time the Serbs, and certainly Milosevic, did not have the principal power, contrary to the declaration of the ICTY that he âde facto controlled the federal governmentâ. At the time that he tried to control the emerging separatism, key positions within the collective leadership of the then unified Yugoslavia were held, until the end of 1991, by loyal Croats, such as Prime Minister Anté Marcovic and Foreign minister Budimir Loncar. Inevitably the ethnic Serbs were in a weaker position once the non-Serbian ethnic groups split into federalist and separatist factions, as the Serbs had no separatist option of their own. What remained of Yugoslavia became more and more synonymous with the Serbian regions only, and from then onwards the hostile media hatefully called it âGreater Serbiaâ.
The indictment consistently speaks in abstract and impersonal terms of events that have harmed the Yugoslav Federation, the Serbian State or the Serbian people. It declares that in 1991 the Federation âdisintegratedâ (not mentioning the responsibility of separatists and of their supporters in Bonn and Washington) and further says that the declaration of independence issued by Slovenia on 25th June 1991 âled to war breaking outâ. The said declaration was, under the Yugoslav Constitution, illegal and the Yugoslav army was deployed in order to regain the border crossings which had been taken over by Slovenian militia. This militia prevailed over the Yugoslav army, and so the war started.
After the successful separation of Slovenia and Croatia, recognized by Belgrade in January 1992, everybody foresaw the more dramatic crisis, which would hit the much more ethnically mixed Bosnia. The Yugoslavian leadership was prepared to agree to the lesser evil, namely the division of Bosnia into ethnic districts, as was worked out at the Lisbon conference on 19th March 1992. Representatives of the Croats, Moslems and Serbs in Bosnia approved the plan. The man who opposed this last-ditch peace plan carries an enormous responsibility and should deservedly be brought before the Court in The Hague. His name is, however, not Slobodan Milosevic, but Warren Zimmerman, the then US ambassador in Yugoslavia, who assured the Moslem leader Alija Izetbegovic that he would be granted American support in favour of an undivided Moslem-dominated Bosnia if he withdrew from the Lisbon agreement. Later, in his book âOrigins of a Catastropheâ, Zimmerman conceded that the Lisbon plan âwas not so badâ and that âhe probably had been wrongâ.
But the events continued. On 14th April, Izetbegovic ordered his âgreen beretsâ militia to attack the Yugoslav army. Two weeks later the âinternational communityâ demanded the withdrawal of the Yugoslav army from Bosnia. In the course of its withdrawal the army lost more than two hundred soldiers in ambushes. One of these ambushes occurred right before the eyes of Izetbegovic and the UN commander Louis McKenzie. Later on, negotiator Lord Carrington declared (Intervju, Belgrade, 20th October 1995) that Izetbegovic âin a way had been put under pressure to declare independenceâ.
A war does not start spontaneously. A legal framework exists and conflicting interests look for a solution in or outside that framework. If it were to remain faithful to its principle of punishing the people bearing the top responsibility rather than the guys in the field, the ICTY should have indicted the people who were politically responsible for the disintegration of Yugoslavia. These were not only Yugoslavian politicians like Izetbegovic, but Western leaders and diplomats. After tens of thousands of deaths, a schemer like Zimmerman candidly admitted that he had been wrong. Did that give him the right to be absolved without punishment?
(to be continued)
Koenraad Elst<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Milosevic show trial
Part 2</b>
In the first part of our consideration of the Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague, we observed its blatant partiality. We also mentioned the fact that NATOâs intervention in Bosnia was justified by false allegations regarding cruelties perpetrated by the Serbs. The political basis for the case has been presented incorrectly and in a particularly biased way by the media as well as in the declarations by NATO and in the indictment by the tribunal.
All basic political concepts have systematically been twisted. âDemocratâ is now the name used for âanti-nationalistâ, although successive elections in Bosnia have time and again proved that the democratically expressed popular vote prefers the nationalists. âNationalist politicians are, contrary to what is proclaimed by some theorists of the Holy Grail of civil society, not an obstacle to democracy in Bosnia; they are indeed the very expression of it (â¦). In 1997, 91% of Bosnian Serbs and 84% of Bosnian Croats voted against the idea of a so called Bosnian state, while 98% of the Bosnian Moslems were in favourâ. (Mark Mazower, When A Modern War is Won, Times Literary Supplement, 14-02-2003).
(Language misuse)
The opinion makers of the liberal left will immediately say: âThere you are, Moslems are not narrow-minded! Their choice is for a multicultural state! They are much less blinkered than catholic or orthodox people! They are oh so non-nationalistic!â
In fact, these percentages reflect the same motivation by all three populations. All are nationalist, as Mazower states, because all three of them pursue their own ethnic interests by choice. The dominant group, knowing its demographic superiority, will be able slowly to pester the minorities until they leave, and has an interest in keeping Bosnia as vast as possible. To the frightened minorities, on the other hand, a split offers the best guarantee of a future for them within Bosnia, if only within part of it. If we look at it from that perspective, the Croats are the least nationalistic or narrow-minded: 16% of them do not think primarily of the interests of their own group, whereas only 2% of the Moslems do the same.
<b>Propaganda about cruelty</b>
For Kosovo the consequences of manipulating political concepts, considering the difficulties in hand, are even more striking. The media always spoke of âSerbia and Kosovoâ and of the âSerbian invasion or occupation of Kosovoâ, while Kosovo is (was) part of Serbia. They spoke of âKosovarsâ when they meant âKosovar Albaniansâ. Politicians and journalists competed with estimates of death figures, ten thousand, fifty thousand, etc. Was it not indeed urgent, so was the message, to stop by any possible means these monstrous Serbs who would not relent?
(Again, controlled, calculated use of language.)
<b>Cees van Zweeden accurately said (War against Serbia sold with lies, Gazet van Antwerpen, 23-06-2003): âTony Blair branded the policy of Milosevic in Kosovo as âracial genocideâ. He said: âThousands of Albanians have been murdered, hundreds of thousands are missing.â An American document produced by the government even gave the figure of 400,000 victims. The reality was somewhat different. Four years after the war, less than three thousand deaths have been counted, including Serbian as well as Albanian victims. The United Nations estimated the number of missing persons at around 3,500. Many of them have quietly emigrated to neighbouring countries or to the West.â
What is more: âDuring the war the British disclosed the existence of a camp in Djakovica, where Serbs systematically raped Albanian women. After the war it appeared that this camp had only existed in Blairâs imagination.â (idem) This was no longer of any importance. Indeed, the stories had served their purpose, which was to justify the NATO bombings on what remained of Yugoslavia.</b>
Public prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who accuses Milosevic of genocide, had no problem with the modest figures of victims. As George Szamuely reported (Numbers Games, American Conservative, 24-02-2003): <b>âAfter months and months of continuous digging, Carla del Ponte announced that NATO had unearthed 2,108 bodies. This was very much beneath the official estimate. Ms Del Ponte could not even tell whose bodies they were, to what ethnic group they belonged or how and when they died.</b> âGenocide is not a numbers gameâ, the tribunal replied dismissivelyâ.
(It's all so very Romilla Thapar-esque of Ms Del Ponte. Give her a Klown.. I mean <i>Kluge</i> Chair too for services rendered in defense of communazism.)
<b>Apart from this cheap rabble-rousing, the NATO governments also concealed the real reason for the NATO attack against Yugoslavia. The official reason was that Milosevic had refused to sign the Rambouillet-agreement, although he had previously showed his readiness to accept the demands of the West: autonomy for Kosovo, with peace forces stationed there. But âConfronted with the perspective that the Serbs would accept the peace plan, a new condition was added at the eleventh hour. As the complete text of the peace plan was kept a secret, it was not clear why the Serbs had refused to sign.â
âIt was only on 18th April 1999, when the war was already in full operation, that Le Monde Diplomatique revealed the complete text. Appendix B of Chapter 7 of the document demanded âunlimited accessâ for NATO troops to the whole of Yugoslavia. In other words, Milosevic had to agree that his country would become occupied territory. The Americans and the British had added this condition for the explicit purpose of making the acceptance of the document impossible.â (idem) Many of us have a really very short memory. Only a few years later they again believed the American-British stories supposed to justify the invasion of Iraq.</b>
(Shades of the Indo-US nuclear con-deal between the US and its puppet government in India which is similarly famous for taking place behind-closed-doors.)
<b>Unhistoric</b>
On 22nd May 1999, two months after the NATO attack against Yugoslavia had begun, prosecutor Louise Arbour entered an indictment at the ICTY against the Yugoslavs Slobodan Milosevic, Milan Milutinovic, Nikola Sainovic, Dragoljub Ojdanic and Vlajko Stojiljkovic. They were accused of crimes against humanity and violation of the laws of war. Paragraph 24 of the indictment named Milosevic and Milutinovic as the elected presidents of the Yugoslav federation and Serbia respectively. Milosevic had been elected President of Serbia in 1990 and 1992, each time with a large majority and in 1997 he had been elected President of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless the media always spoke of the âdictatorâ Milosevic, which was the new name for a head of state, pursuing national interests against the New World Order.
(Reminiscent of Indian psecular communist media who can't accept democratically accepted leaders either, but always have cheers for genocidal maniacs )
The first indictment against Milosevic concerned the most recent case, namely Kosovo. Paragraph 4 of the indictment was presented as if Kosovo was essentially Albanian territory, oppressed by Serb nationalists. It said: âIn 1981, the last census was carried out. On a total population of around 1,585,000, Kosovo counted 77% Albanians, 13% Serbs. (â¦) The actual population of Kosovo is estimated at between 1,800,000 and 2,100,000, of whom 85-90% are Kosovo-Albanians and 5-10% Serbs.â This was given as an argument for the fact that the Albanians, being the great majority, were entitled to claim power over Kosovo.
The total absence of historical perspective is striking in this instance. One has not arrived spontaneously with these proportions. Refusal to take into account the historical dimension suited the left-liberal vision of a one-dimensional human being, confining him to a present that can be manipulated. If the percentage of Serbs has been cut in half between 1981 and 1999 the explanation is that the Albanians have driven them out of the region.
History shows that in 1455, 1.900 families lived in the central region of Drenica, of whom 1.873 were Serbian and 10 Albanian. Prizren, a town in Kosovo, was once the capital of Serbia. The censuses held in 1921 and 1931 still showed no Albanian majority in that region. The Albanian character of Kosovo, as stressed by the indictment, is the result of a policy over different periods of forced Islamizing (under Turkish occupation) and forced Albanisation. During the Italian occupation, many Albanians were imported and Serbs chased away.
Under Tito, the return of the hounded Serbs was made impossible and the Albanians received political privileges de facto, allowing the provincial rulers to continue making life difficult for the remaining Serbs and persuading them to emigrate. The gradual expulsion of Serbs started in the late sixties. An estimated 200.000 Serbs were expelled between 1965 and 1981. After that, the pressure on them increased further. The New York Times reported at the time (12-07-1982: Exodus of Serbs stirs province in Yugoslavia): â âThe [Albanian] nationalists have a two-point programâ, said Becir Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, âfirst to establish an ethnically pure Albanian republic and secondly to reunite it with Albania and found the Greater Albania.â The large Albanian majority is therefore not a result of demographic differences, but mainly of ethnic cleansing.â
(Note how liars, such as communists, are always harping everywhere that people should 'forget history' and 'focus on the present' - a present unnaturally cut off from historical context - so that they can twist the situation to their purposes and keep victim populations victimised forever. Nice try, but the rest of the world does not want to be afflicted with such a convenient case of selective amnesia, thanks.)
<b>Albanian separatism</b>
Paragraph 6 of the indictment points the finger at Milosevic: âIn April 1987 Slobodan Milosevic, re-elected in 1986 as chairman of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist party of Serbia, travelled to Kosovo. He met there with Serbian leaders and addressed a large gathering of Serbs, giving his support to a Serb-nationalist agenda. By doing this, he broke with the policy of party and government who had both forbidden all expressions of nationalism in Yugoslavia, since it was founded by Josip Broz Tito after WWII.â
Carla del Ponte does not give credence to the idea that the harassment of non-Albanians by Albanians could be a shameful expression of nationalism. Neither does she see anything wrong in the fact that the state tolerated all sorts of pro-Albanian and anti-Serbian discrimination. In fact this shows that she is in fact a Soviet agent and that the New World Order is a continuation of the Bolshevik agenda, through other means. Look at it, she says with sanctimonious indignation, this bad Milosevic has deviated from the good old communist party line dictated by the good old anti-nationalist Tito!
(Communiterrorists are the same everywhere: compulsive liars who are always willing to descend to the nethermost gutters to achieve their communist tyrannopia.)
In 1990, 114 of the 123 Albanian members of the parliament of Kosovo adopted an unofficial resolution that proclaimed Kosovo as an independent Yugoslav republic apart from Serbia. Later that year the same politicians proclaimed a âConstitution for the republic of Kosovoâ. In September 1991 they organized an unofficial referendum whereby a large majority of Albanians in Kosovo voted for independence. On 24th May 1992 they held unofficial elections for a parliament and a president of the âRepublic of Kosovoâ. Meanwhile the official institutions were boycotted, including the school system. <b>A few years later the established parallel schools delivered most of the fighters of the Ushtria lirimtare e Kosovs (UCK), also known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).</b>
The UCK came to the forefront in December 1994 when it killed a police inspector and claimed responsibility. At the same time it claimed responsibility for earlier murders perpetrated on âoccupants and traitorsâ. From 1996 onwards, open armed attacks against the Yugoslav police followed. In 1982 this UCK had had a predecessor in the National Movement for the Republic of Kosovo (NPRK). This was founded by a group of Albanian emigrants in Germany and by four local groups: the Movement for the <b>Albanian Socialist Republic in Yugoslavia (PASRJ), the Marxist-Leninist Organization of Kosovo (OMLK), the Communist-Leninist Party of Yugoslav Albanians (PKMLSHJ) and the Red Popular Front (FKB)</b>. This proves that the Albanian separatism (anti-Serbian, although not yet anti-Yugoslavian) dated from before Milosevic and his âSerbian nationalismâ. NPRK-militias were active from 1990 onwards. In the discussion of âwho started the gameâ it can at least be established that it was not the Serbs.
(Note, communist parties=islamist parties.)
From 1996 onwards, Albanian separatist fighters and Yugoslav police (I do not call them âSerbianâ, because this was a multiethnic body, including Romanies and even Albanians) clashed regularly. There were of course victims on both sides, being part of the perhaps 3,000 victims of the Kosovo crisis in what remained of Yugoslavia. The others were victims of UCK-terror, Serbs as well as Albanians, branded as âtraitorsâ and âcollaboratorsâ. Certainly, Kosovo Albanians were killed, but not all of them by Yugoslav forces who had deployed far fewer resources than the Macedonian army had against its Albanian militia.
<b>Islamic terror networks sustained the UCK. Among them, at that time, the not so well known Osama bin Laden.</b> For that reason Israeli experts advised against an anti-Serbian and pro-UCK intervention. Washington did not listen and established something resembling diplomatic relations with the UCK, swiftly followed by Berlin. The German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel advised all European countries that they should follow the American example and contact the UCK.
<b>These contacts resulted in the Americans taking sides with the terrorists. Early in 1999, NATO decided to expel the Serbian troops from Kosovo and to offer air support to the UCK. This was the famous âhumanitarian interventionâ justified by the brand new âright to interveneâ. Over 78 days the bombings would kill at least 6,000 people. Because of its âhumanitarian characterâ the operation was code-named Merciful Angel. For that matter, the American Congress had not ratified the attack upon the rest - Yugoslavia - under the War Powers Act, so it was also illegal according to American law.</b>
Since NATO stationed occupation forces in Kosovo, more than half of the remaining Serbs and the vast majority of Romanies have fled. With the exception of the northern province, the region is now almost completely Albanian. While I was finishing this article, a friend just back from there told me that Albanian fighters had killed six Serbian children. Propaganda for making us weep or a nice example of the alliance between NATO and Jihad?
<b>âEvidenceâ at The Hague</b>
It is typical that the whole procedure at The Hague only makes minuscule use of material evidence. It has an overwhelming faith in eyewitness reports. This is of course the least reliable form of evidence. It can be manipulated, through rewards or threats. It is well known that even confessions are often the product of all sorts of calculations, of irrational feelings, of horse trading with the interrogators, of attempts to protect others or to escape the vengeance from the real culprits. History shows innumerable examples of convictions made on the basis of testimonies and confessions that were afterwards devastatingly refuted by new material evidence. And yet, in a trial presumptuously presented as having an historic exemplary function, one trusts almost entirely upon declarations of the people involved, instead of real evidence.
George Pumphrey (www.emperors-clothes.com) tells us the story of a crown witness on Srebrenica, Drazen Erdemovic. In March 1996 he contacted an ABC News team in Serbia, asking to be brought to The Hague. He had an ethnically mixed background and had first fought with the Croatian militia but had later joined the Bosnian-Serb troops of Ratko Mladic. After a row with his commander, he decided to take his revenge by telling his story. He declared he had participated in the shooting and burying of 1.200 Moslems near Srebrenica. According to Pumphrey the tribunal had not even bothered to verify if the bullets present in the mass grave indicated by Erdemovic, matched the details he had given them. Indeed the grave contained only some 150 bodies, not 1.200.
After his testimony, which the tribunal could of course use against his superiors, Erdemovic was himself accused for participating in the crimes he had described. If he wanted a lenient sentence, he had to comply with what was demanded of him: produce sketchy stories charging Serbian leaders. He needed to be condemned as well, bearing in mind the possible later condemnation of his ultimate commander, the fugitive general Mladic, but he was given credit for all his accusations against his chiefs. He was jailed for five years, a mild sentence according to the judges, and a result of his âhonestyâ attested by his âconfessionâ and his âcontinuous admission of guiltâ. On the other hand those who maintained their innocence would be considered as dishonest.
<b>The bias of the tribunal has some sort of hierarchy. The Western leaders who ordered bombings that caused thousands of victims, may not even be mentioned and no NATO politician or soldier has been indicted. No doubt about it: this is justice on the terms of the victor. When Milosevic says so in The Hague, the tribunal simply switches off his microphone. The stronger party thereby makes no attempts to conceal that double standards prevail, nor that coercion is used to bring the losers to the desired confessions.</b>
(Justice of the 'civilised' west.)
The local âcriminalsâ are treated differently. Serbs are indicted and sentenced up to the highest level. Croats are taken on up to a reasonable level (the Americans started to put on pressure for the indictment of President Franjo Tudjman, but this was halted by his death). With the Moslems, only small fry were symbolically sacrificed. Amongst them there were some instructive cases.
Take the Moslem commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric. He was arrested in April 2003. His story informs us that the Muslims in Srebrenica were not after all pitiful victims. âAccording to the indictment, Oric and his troops tortured and ill-treated Serbian prisoners at the police station of Srebrenica, between June 1992 and March 1993. Several of them were beaten to death. Moreover, fifteen villages with mainly Serbian inhabitants were pillaged, under the command of Oricâ (De Standaard, 12-04-2003). It looks as if the exclusive demonizing of the Serbs can be somewhat slowed down now, its purpose having been achieved.
In this case the procedures of the tribunal are also interesting. âA spokesperson for the Yugoslavia tribunal, Florence Hartmann, declared that the accusation against Oric had been kept secret in order to facilitate his arrest.â Dirty tricks were the order of the day here. A Serbian suspect, Milan Kovacevic, was arrested by British soldiers in the uniform of the Red Cross, blatantly in opposition to the internationally recognized statute of this neutral aid organization. Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic extradited Milosevic himself and did this under economical pressure from the US (no extradition of Milosevic, meant no US economic help). This happened illegally, against a legal sentence and against the democratically supported refusal by President Vojislav Kostunica. By the way, the promised American help has still not arrived.
<b>The Djindjic case</b>
Zoran Djindjic is a typical example of the policy promoted by the New World Order within the former East block. The New York Times has praised this âexâ-communist and former student of the extreme-left philosopher, Jörgen Habermas, as a âpragmatistâ. He enjoyed financial support in the US for his election campaign, which brought him into the government. On 1st April 2001, he tried to force Milosevicâ arrest (later it was done by the book) through a shoot-out between the soldiers protecting Milosevicâs residence and masked policemen who had been ordered to arrest him. Several of them were wounded and only an intervention by President Kostunica prevented a massacre.
Nevertheless, Djindjic is presented in our media as a white knight. De Standaard (22-08-203) describes him as a âreformistâ, the usual laudatory term for the politicians of Eastern Europe preferred by the left-liberal establishment of the West. They have to be anti-communist and anti-nationalist (qualities which made Milosevic the chosen partner of the US in 1995, as he was willing to let 100,000 Serbs be chased out of Croatia). And moreover âDjindjic was said to have plans of taking on the Mafiaâ. For that reason, it appears, he was murdered in March 2003.
Really? According to John Laughland (âWhy bombs donât make democraciesâ, American Conservative, 2-06-2003) Djindjic was up to his neck in Mafia business. Around 1990 he started by smuggling cigarettes and trading in false trade name clothing. For that information Laughland quotes a Serbian newspaper that was closed down when Djindjic became Prime Minister. He subsequently became one of the richest men in the country. For that reason the Americans thought him a suitable contact: âA man only interested in personal profit and not giving a damn about his country.â Laughland points out that the US had also fostered the political ambitions of the Mafia in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia.
As far as the murder is concerned, it is very unlikely that the Mafia would fear Djindjic. If so, the usual tactic would have been to kill one of his lieutenants, to put pressure upon the top man (indeed, eliminating the chief, creates more difficulty for doing business). If one follows the lead âwho profitsâ by the murder, then ideally one should investigate Djindjicâs supporters and collaborators. Not that there were no Mafiosi in his entourage, but the motive would in this case have been more ambitious than just protecting sordid Mafia business.
After the murder, a state of emergency was proclaimed. Laughland points out: âMaking use of special powers, which the West had condemned as dictatorial when Milosevic decided them in 1992 (he in fact never used them), they arrested 8,000 people for interrogation. Of them 2,000 were kept in prison, without any contact with their families or lawyers and without any formal accusation. (â¦) Politicians of Milosevicâ Socialist Party and of former President Kostunicaâs Democratic Party were prominently present amongst the arrested, as were journalists âwho had inspired the murder by criticizing Djindjicâ. (â¦) This use of the state apparatus for the elimination of the opposition was warmly welcomed by Western governments.â
The Serbian-American columnist Srdja Trifkovic (âSerbia after Djindjic: the plot thickensâ, Chronicles, 22-03-2003) names amongst others the people under threat who explain Western enthusiasm by: âThe atmosphere of fear and of physical and legal uncertainty is now worse than during the darkest days under Milosevic. (â¦) There are no longer strikes, while the trade-union bosses, in view of the emergency laws, do not dare to organize meetings and to criticize the government. Two popular newspapers have been closed down and most editors in chief work in a suffocating climate of self-censorship.â Trifkovic also mentions plans ascribed to Djindjicâs successor, Zoran Zivkovic, of outlawing the two nationalist parties as âsources of inspiration for the murderâ. At the same time the tribunals will be âcleansedâ and filled with the faithful of the new regime.
Laughland places this in a larger context: âThere has been much talk about the sudden conversion of so-called communists to the virtues of capitalism. But the simultaneous and opposite trend has scarcely been remarked upon: the acceptance by Western politicians of the key principles of the discredited communist belief. The most important of these is the myth of revolution. From Bucharest to Belgrade and as far as Baghdad, completely artificial events are presented as spontaneous actions from âthe peopleâ (â¦) In compliance with this new revolutionary doctrine, the West encourages chaos and crime, to get rid of the old order and to make that the population, plunged into daily material worries, offer no political resistance.â
Laughland gives a few other parallels between the rest -Yugoslavia and Iraq: they have both been suffering under longstanding sanctions, they are both exposed to the stranglehold of the Mafia; Djindjic is matched in Iraq by the servant of the US, Ahmed Chalabi, condemned to 20 years in jail for bank fraud. Iraq has still no electricity after five months; Kosovo has none after four years. There seems to be some logic behind the enigmatic destructive policy of the West. The logic that creates a system wherein Zoran Djindjic, a Mafioso and organizer of a new dictatorship, could become Washingtonâs man and the supplier of top suspects to the Yugoslavia tribunal.
<b>A travesty</b>
Gary J. Bass, lecturer of international policy at Princeton and a staunch supporter of the ICTY, calls it a success that âthe prosecutors have succeeded in removing Milosevic permanently from the Balkan politicsâ (Milosevic in The Hague, Foreign Affairs, May 2003). But surely it is not the mission of a tribunal to influence the future of a politician, certainly not under the painfully developed system of separation of powers. Bassâ declaration is in fact just a brutal confirmation of Milosevicâs own thesis that this is a political process, not a proper judicial procedure but a continuation of American politics behind a legal facade.
As for Carla del Ponte she is not ashamed over her mockery of normal legal procedures. âThe prosecutors at the Yugoslavia tribunal have placed all their hopes in deals with other suspects, so that they can prove that Milosevic is guilty of a genocide in Bosnia. (â¦) Only if accused politicians and officers are prepared to testify against Milosevic in exchange for milder sentences, thinks Del Ponte, will she be able to prove that Milosevic was involved in the massacre in Srebrenica and in the siege of Sarajevo.â (De Standaard, 17-07-2003). This means that prisoners already held for some time in The Hague, whose positions are well known, and of whom it is common knowledge that they have no declarations to offer against Milosevic, will be forced, by using the stick and the carrot, to switch their honest recollection of what happened for a version which pleases the prosecutors.
George Pumphrey sums up all this mockery and sighs: âIf this is to become the norm in international legal proceedings, no national legal system, however excellent it may be, will be able to resist such a totalitarian legal system. If this sort of procedure becomes legally enforced on the international level, this will also determine the national legal standards. From a legal point of view mankind will return to the norms used at the time of the Inquisition.â
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Koenraad Elst<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->