Published by: TARGETS, Dutch Monthly Magazine on International Affairs. March 2004
Written by Nico Varkevisser
Research
and edited by Andy Wilcoxson
Two years ago, on February 12, 2002, the prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) began its case against the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. They went before the world public and claimed with complete confidence that their case was a sure thing. They even claimed that they had the goods to convict Milosevic of the most severe crime of all - genocide.
Now after presenting their case for two years, and calling 296 witnesses their case has collapsed like a house of cards. The “friends of the court” known as Amicus Curiae, who have been assigned to ensure that Milosevic receives a “fair trial,” have filed a motion to acquit Milosevic on numerous charges including the charge of genocide, on the grounds that the prosecution has failed to present evidence that would merit such charges.
At the same time the Presiding Judge, Richard May, has submitted his resignation from the tribunal. The stubborn confidence of the media pundits and so-called “legal experts” that Milosevic will get life in prison can not disguise the fact that this trial has ran into big problems.
One does not have to be a lawyer to see that this trial is a show trial. It is a rape of the most basic elements of impartial justice. The chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, and the presiding judge, Richard May have sought to use this so-called “trial” as a forum to lynch Milosevic, and label him as the guilty one in front of public opinion.
But the show disappeared from the eye of the world media very quickly. From the moment that Milosevic made his opening statement the world media realized that they could not simultaneously cover the trial and hide the truth. CNN, which had originally planned to broadcast Milosevic’s opening statement in full, cut their transmission short, using the feeble excuse that the pictures Milosevic was showing of the victims of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign were “too graphic.”
The reason behind the media’s desire to conceal this so-called “trial” under a cone of silence is obvious. For years Western politicians and their lapdog media have reported, without giving the least thought to truth or objectivity, that Milosevic was “the butcher of the Balkans” and that the Serbian people were the “new fascists.”
They are the ones who created, in the public opinion, the climate necessary for NATO’s so-called “humanitarian intervention” which in reality took the form of a bloody 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. From the outset, they accused Milosevic of being the architect behind the wars that destroyed the former Yugoslavia, and in 1999 the ICTY formally indicted him.
Based on their rhetoric you might assume that they had some sort evidence to back up their claims. But when the trial opened, the prosecution hadn’t even finished writing the indictment. For the so-called “judges” this wasn’t a problem. Nor was it a problem that Milosevic’s extradition from Yugoslavia essentially amounted to a kidnapping; it was illegal, it was unconstitutional, and it was carried out in open defiance of the decision reached by the Constitutional Court of Yugoslavia.
What the so-called “judges” and “prosecutors” agreed on very quickly was that NATO was above the law. They decided early on that NATO’s crimes would not be investigated.
Conducting a trial that is supposed to convince public opinion of somebody’s guilt when you don’t have any proof to back up the accusations you’re making is a delicate matter. It demands very tight control. With CNN and George Soros as financiers the tribunal should be able to accomplish a lot, but there is one insecure element for them: Slobodan Milosevic, and what he might say.
Accusing somebody maliciously though the media is no problem when you control the media, but in a trial it is hard to silence them, or at least it is if you want to give the appearance of a fair trial. In an effort to silence Milosevic, the prosecution has sought to have the court impose a lawyer on him. This was the key struggle before this so called trial started.
Milosevic was the target of tremendous manipulations; he was being told from all sides that he should appoint a lawyer. In November of 2001 Milosevic defeated these manipulations and, in a statement to the ICTY, put it in no uncertain terms that he would not appoint a lawyer.
It became clear to the prosecution that they would have to deal with a complication that they did not foresee, or at least one that they did not want.
The fact that Milosevic won this fight was of fundamental importance to the future development of the trial. By refusing to appoint a lawyer, he made it possible to directly influence the trial himself. By defending himself, and conducting his own cross-examinations, Milosevic has defeated their attempts to gag him.
There have been lawyers who have criticized Milosevic’s defense strategy, they have said that he has no chance to succeed, but their arguments are flawed because they assume that the tribunal is a real court of law.
The tribunal is not a court of justice. It is a tool used by powerful countries to further their strategic interests, while providing a “legal justification” for their own criminal actions.
From the outset, Milosevic has approached this as a political trial. He has brushed off the tribunal’s procedural concerns telling them “that’s your problem.” He constantly refers to the prosecution as “the other side” and the presiding judge has had to do with the title “Mr. May.”
In spite of the constant attempts by Mr. May to silence Milosevic by switching off his microphone; Milosevic has been successful on several occasions of embarrassing the judges and the prosecution. The fact that Milosevic has been so successful is what has lead to the lack of media coverage – they can’t afford to let Milosevic be heard.
The tribunal has employed a strategy designed to exhaust and break Milosevic. They have called nearly 300 witnesses, and even after that they don’t have a case. Many jurists, like Professor De Waard in the Netherlands, have criticized this practice. They say that if there was a case to be made it could certainly be made with less than 20 witnesses.
For anybody to talk about a fair trial here is unthinkable. No real court would allow a prosecutor to call hundreds of witnesses without presenting any hard evidence. Because the whole point of the trial is to convict, and because they know that they have no proof, their whole strategy is to throw as many accusations as they can at him and hope to God that they can make something stick.
The Dutch lawyer Michail Wladimiroff, who had originally sought to be Milosevic’s lawyer, but only received the “consolation prize” of being Amicus Curiae made this point very clear in the media. He said in an interview with Radio Netherlands that “the prosecution has included so many details in the indictments, so many bullets fired at the same target, that there will always be one bullet to hit him."
Wladimiroff shouldn’t have said that and because of his talkative attitude he was fired. Arrogant remarks that “Milosevic will be convicted anyway” have their limits, and for the sake of public opinion, the trial had to at least appear credible.
When the prosecution called their witnesses and when the public got to see how the tribunal carries out its proceedings it was even more embarrassing for the tribunal.
Some so-called “insider witnesses” like Ratomir Tanic have turned out to be frauds. Tanic claimed to be a top advisor to the president of the Novo Demokracija (ND) party at a time when it formed the Yugoslav government together with Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), and the Yugoslav Left (JUL).
From his alleged perch in the ND party, Tanic claimed to have been privy to high level meetings held between Milosevic and officials of the ND party. As it turned out, Tanic didn’t hold any position in the party. According to ND party records obtained by Milosevic, Tanic was never even a member of the ND party. Not only was Milosevic successful in exposing Tanic as a liar, but he also successfully exposed Tanic’s connections to the British secret service.
Then we have the so-called “crime base witnesses” such as Bilall Avdiu, a Kosovo-Albanian from the village of Racak. He told a harrowing story about how he survived an alleged massacre by pretending to be dead, and he testified in detail about how he personally witnessed the Serbian police using knives to cut the hearts out of people’s chests. This story of the so-called “Racak massacre” was used by NATO as the pretext for the bombing of Yugoslavia.
Avdiu said that the police killed Ragip Bajrami by cutting his heart out of his chest with a knife while he was still alive. He said, “I saw that myself. He had no bullet injuries. I saw the knife and saw how they ripped his heart out.”
Avdiu went on to claim that Bajrami wasn’t the only victim who was mutilated like this. He claimed that “Five or six were mutilated. Once they had been killed, they took a knife to them.”
Even Mr. Nice, the prosecutor, was forced to admit that the forensic evidence had exposed Avdiu, and several other Racak witnesses as liars. He sheepishly told the tribunal: “Several witnesses now have spoken of mutilation of bodies at Racak, hearts being cut out and so on. It may be, and this will be an argument in due course, and may be that that is explicable by damage done to bodies by gunshot and similar weaponry?”
Another “crime base witness” was Mustafa Draga, a Kosovo-Albanian from the village of Lecina. He also claimed to have survived a massacre at the hands of the Serbian police. He claimed that the Serbian police tried to execute him.
He said that the police fired at him with heavy machine guns from a distance of less than 8 meters, but that he didn’t get hurt, and to prove his outlandish claim he brought his shirt with him that he said had the bullet holes in it.
When asked by Milosevic to explain how it was possible that he wasn’t even hurt he credited divine providence, and said “I was saved by God to come here and testify, because only God saved me from the Serbian police.”
In spite of his outlandish story, the shirt was accepted as evidence.
Another category of witnesses are the so-called “expert witnesses” such as Renaud de la Brosse, who was called to testify about propaganda in the Serbian media. This so-called “expert” had the disadvantage that he couldn’t speak the Serbian language, which obviously made it impossible for him to credibly and independently analyze the Serbian media.
He couldn’t answer any of Milosevic’s questions about what happened in the war and if the reporting on those events was propaganda or not, because he didn’t know what the facts were in the first place. But it didn’t matter to him; according to his testimony the reporting of true facts was as much propaganda as the reporting of lies.
Mr. de la Brosse, criticized the Serbian media’s alleged propaganda saying that "when the Serb reservists took Zvornik in Bosnia, the Serb media announced the liberation of the town, not mentioning in a word the several thousands corpses lying in the streets." The source of his information about these “thousands of corpses in the streets” was Florence Hartman’s book, "Milosevic, the Diagonal of the Madman."
Florence Hartmann just happens to be the spokesperson for the ICTY prosecutor’s office. So if one employs the logic of Mr. de la Brosse then one would conclude that anything the ICTY prosecution says is gospel truth, and anybody who says something different is engaged in propaganda.
Milosevic made an absolute fool out of de la Brosse in cross-examination. Desperate to save her witness in re-examination the prosecutor, Ms. Uertz-Retzlaff, asked an astonishing question, and got an even more astonishing answer.
She asked de la Brosse, “if you would have known the things that you do not know now, would it be in the advantage or the disadvantage of the accused”, and de la Brosse answered, “I think that would be disadvantageous to him.”
To make matters even worse for the prosecution their very next witness was a secret witness codenamed B-1775. B-1775 was the undertaker in Zvornik. It was his job to collect corpses and take them to the morgue. Asked by Milosevic how many dead people – Serbs and Muslims – he found, he said that only 50.
When Milosevic pointed out the contradiction between the claims made by de la Brose and Hartmann of thousands of dead bodies on the one hand, and the claim made by B-1775 of 50 on the other; the presiding judge dismissed his observation as a waste of time saying simply, “We are dealing with this witness and his evidence.”
The tribunal left no doubt that it was a pawn of NATO when it called the former NATO commander Wesley Clark to testify. Clark was not only allowed to testify behind closed doors, as happens frequently with other witnesses, but the U.S. Government was given the right to redact the trial transcripts if it so desired – a real demonstration of impartial justice indeed.
Torture
No matter how much the tribunal attempts to present its witnesses as “credible and reliable” it can not disguise the criminal way in which it has acted, together with the quisling regime that seized power through a coup in Belgrade on October 5, 2000.
When the prosecution called the former Serbian state security chief, Radomir Markovic, to testify it was revealed that the Serbian authorities had tried to bribe Markovic so that he would falsely testify against Milosevic.
Here is the transcript of that astonishing testimony:
MILOSEVIC: Is it true that they [the Serbian regime] offered on that occasion to you certain protective measures? They told you, you would be in prison for six months and would be tried if you don't agree to charge me falsely, to level false allegations against me? Is that true or not?
MARKOVIC: They spoke to me about the difficult position I was in. They warned me against the possible consequences and offered me an option in the form of accusing Milosevic, as the person who issued orders for those criminal offences, which would relieve me of liability before a criminal court.
MILOSEVIC: Is it true that they offered you a new identity, money, and sustenance for you and your family only so that you would falsely accuse me? Is that correct?
MARKOVIC: Yes, that's correct.
MILOSEVIC: Do you know that in 1998 -- sorry. 1988, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted by consensus a declaration against torture, and that such treatment that you were subjected to is explicitly forbidden by this declaration, as well as forcing --
PROSECUTOR NICE: Your Honour –
MILOSEVIC: -- statements from detainees, extortion and such things?
JUDGE MAY: This doesn't appear to have any relevance to the evidence the witness has given here, none at all. He's been agreeing with you, he's been agreeing to the matters you've put to him, and we're not certainly going to litigate here what happened in Yugoslavia when he was arrested. What we're concerned with, as you know, is events in Kosovo.
[End transcript]
In a real court of law the judge would probably be concerned over the fact that a witness had been threatened, and offered bribes in order to falsely testify against an accused, but not at the Hague tribunal.
As if the proceedings of the court weren’t enough to make one dismiss it immediately, then the way Milosevic is being treated by these so-called “defenders of human rights and justice” should make things clear. From the moment he arrived in The Hague, they have done everything they can think of to break him and make his defense impossible.
By keeping the lights on in his cell 24-hours a day they severely damaged his sleep cycle. Even though they knew that Milosevic was a heart patient they gave him no other treatment than aspirin for the first year.
The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported in the fall of 2002 that when they finally provided further treatment for him that the medicine they gave him made him dizzy, caused sleeplessness, and made it difficult for him to concentrate. Only in spring of 2003 would they agree to change his treatment.
They have also denied him the right to receive visitors. In the first months after his kidnapping, the Dutch Embassy in Belgrade made it as difficult as possible for his family members and his lawyers to receive visas. The tribunal’s power extended so far that the visa policy of the Dutch Foreign Ministry was subordinated to the tribunal.
The ICTY prosecution gets all of the space in the media to attack Milosevic. In fact the tribunal provides them with a conference room so that they can hold press conferences. Milosevic on the other hand, is strictly forbidden from speaking to the media. They are so scared of what he might say to the media that they have even gone to the extreme of banning the people who visit him from speaking to the media.
The quisling regime in Belgrade has also played its part to break Milosevic, by denying him the possibility of ever seeing his wife again. They launched a political witch-hunt against her, and through their false accusations they placed her on the Interpol list, which means that she would be arrested if she ever attempted to visit her husband.
Members of Milosevic’s party, the SPS, were banned from seeing him because they allegedly spoke to the media. Milosevic was then placed under a total communications ban, except for his lawyers, because he was a candidate for the parliamentary elections in Serbia.
Milosevic has to fight against the machinery of the tribunal, its staff in the thousands and its budget of millions of dollars, with nothing more than a public telephone.
The tribunal has served nearly a million pages of documents on Milosevic, not to mention thousands of audio and video tapes, and they have served it in such a chaotic way that even the Amicus Curiae have had to hire people just to put the papers in order.
Unfortunately, Milosevic doesn’t have the luxury of hiring a staff to put order to all of this material. His cell is absolutely packed with papers, and in many instances he isn’t provided with the materials he needs until the last minute.
The most recent example, although definitely not the only example, of this practice could be seen when the French General, Philippe Morillon came to testify. Morillon, occupied a position of key importance serving as the UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the prosecution knew for quite some time that they would be calling him as a witness, but they did not provide Milosevic with his witness statement until the last possible moment, which made it impossible for Milosevic to prepare his cross-examination.
On the day that Morillon testified the prosecutor, Mr. Groome, explained to an unconcerned panel of judges that Morillon’s witness statement was only “given to the accused just prior to the testimony today.”
Morillon only testified for one day. Milosevic had to, without any possibility of preparing ahead of time, cross-examine this extremely important witness on the content of his examination-in-chief and the content of his witness statement, and he had to do it within a two hour time limit imposed by the judges. Luckily for Milosevic, he has a razor sharp wit and so he was able to make a very effective cross-examination of Morillon, in spite of the tribunal’s malicious attempts to sabotage his defense.
Another frequently employed trick by the prosecution is the changing of the order of witnesses at the very last moment. Their objective is to catch Milosevic unprepared, but their schemes always fail because Milosevic is smarter than the whole lot of them put together.
Another favorite trick they use to sabotage his defense is to hold him at the courthouse, sometimes for many hours after the court has adjourned. They keep him on a wooden bench without food or water, and tell him that he can’t be taken back to the prison because they have no transportation. By getting him to the prison late they can deny his legal associates any chance of meeting with him, because of the excuse that visiting hours have ended.
Nobody in his right mind can say that Milosevic is getting a fair trial. The prosecution prepared its case for years, but Milosevic has only been allowed three months to prepare his defense, and on June 8th he has to call his first witness.
These are only a few of the methods that this illegal institution employs to break this innocent man. It is shocking that the media remains silent, and it is shameful that not a single member of parliament in The Hague has stood up to protest this flagrant rape of justice that is happening in the Netherlands.
In spite of the inhumane treatment that he receives, Slobodan Milosevic remains unbroken. It is true that he has heart problems, and undoubtedly his unlawful imprisonment has taken its toll on him, but his spirit and his mind are unbroken.
The writer of this article has had the privilege of visiting Milosevic three times last year and has spoken with him many times by phone. It is clear that he is not a beaten man. He will fight until the bitter end. For him this is not a personal fight – he is fighting for the very survival of his country and its people.
This is the core of the case. This trial has nothing to do with bringing justice to the victims of the tragedies that happened in the former Yugoslavia. This trial’s purpose is to hide the criminal Western policy of destroying a multi ethnic state that emerged after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, by using the most reactionary forces: fascists in Croatia and Muslim terrorists in Bosnia and Kosovo.
This trial’s purpose is not to bring justice, or provide a basis for future cooperation among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. On the contrary, this trial has the purpose of creating the legal framework necessary for future colonization and plundering by the West. A conviction of Milosevic will serve to label the Serbian people as the guilty party for the wars. Serbia will be forced to pay war reparations to its so-called “victims,” Croatia and Bosnia have already filed claims in the billions of dollars.
And more, if the former head of State were to be convicted by the Hague tribunal, the country could be held "legally responsible" not only for the costs of NATO's "humanitarian bombs", but for all the military and "peacekeeping" expenses incurred since 1992.
Serbia, strapped for cash, and robbed of its public property, will be forced to borrow money from Western banks to pay Bosnia and Croatia, who in turn will use the money to pay their debts to these same Western banks. The circle will be closed and the Balkans will be plundered, and the people robbed of everything they have in lengths of years. This is the “justice” that NATO and its puppet court seek to achieve.
It will also serve as an instrument for permanent interference in Serbia’s internal affairs, to keep it under tight control and to push for the independence of Kosovo, and if necessary a further break-up of Serbia into several protectorates. The recent Albanian terrorist attacks, not only show how NATO has completely violated the agreements that ended the bombing in June 1999, but it also shows that the NATO-powers are now pushing for a final solution, for something Hitler-Germany used the word “Endlösung”: the complete ethnic cleansing of Kosovo and the further destruction of Serbia.
Slobodan Milosevic made it clear that he doesn’t want to run away from this trial, all he wants is to be allowed to prepare his defense under fair conditions. He asks to be free to prepare his defense for his people. He told the court “I am not going to run away from this place of force and injustice, where my people and where my country are being slandered, because these are the gravest possible accusations.” Slobodan Milosevic has pledged to stay and fight this injustice. “I will not run away from the tribunal, I will destroy it.”
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