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Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Propaganda System Number One: From Diem and
Arbenz to Milosevic
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER312A.html
Propaganda System Number One:
From Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic
by Edward S. Herman
Propaganda, Politics, Power ISSN 1741-0754 Volume 1: 15-28 ~ 9 December
2003
www.globalresearch.ca 15 December 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER312A.html
The way in which the mainstream media have handled the turning of
Milosevic over to the Hague Tribunal once again reinforces my belief
that the United States is not only number one in military power but
also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system, which is vastly
superior to any past or present state-managed system. The main
characteristic of the U.S. model is that, while offering diversity on
many subjects, on core issues--like "free trade" and the need for a
huge "defense" establishment--and on the occasions when the corporate
and political establishment needs their service--as in legitimating
George W. Bush's presidency in the wake of an electoral coup d'etat, or
supporting the "sanctions of mass destruction" on Iraq--the media can
be relied on to expound and propagandize what would be called a "party
line" if done in China. They do sometimes depart from the official
position as regards tactics, arguing, for example, that the government
is not attacking the enemy with sufficient ferocity (Iraq and
Yugoslavia), or that the cost of the enterprise is perhaps excessive
(the Vietnam war, from 1968), but that the enemy is truly evil and the
national cause meritorious is never debatable. The debates over tactics
helpfully obscure the agreement on ends.
A further important feature of the U.S. system is that this propaganda
service is provided without government censorship or coercion, by self-
censorship alone, with the truth of the propaganda line internalized by
the numerous media participants. This internalization of belief makes
it possible for media personnel to be enthusiastic spokespersons in
pushing the party line, thereby giving it a naturalness that is lacking
in crude systems of government-enforced propaganda.
A third feature of the system is that the party lines are regularly
supported by non-governmental and self-proclaimed "non-partisan"
thinktanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Independent
International Commission on Kosovo, non-governmental organizations like
the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, and assorted
ex-leftists and liberal and left journals that on particular subjects
"see the light." These organizations are commonly funded by interests
(and governments) with an axe to grind, and they serve those interests,
but the media feature them as non-partisan and give special attention
to the ex-leftists and dissidents who now see the light. This helps
firm up the consensus and further marginalizes those still in darkness.
A final feature of the U.S. system is that it works so well that a
sizable fraction of the public doesn't recognize the media's propaganda
role, and accepts the media's own self-image as independent, adversary,
truth-seeking, and helping the public to "assert meaningful control
over the political process" (former Supreme Court Justice Lewis
Powell). This public bamboozlement is aided by the facts that the media
are fairly numerous, are not government controlled, have many true
believers among their editors and journalists (the second
characteristic), are supported by NGOs and elements of the "left" (the
third feature), and regularly proclaim their independence and squabble
furiously with government and among themselves. Even those who doubt
the media's claims of truth-seeking are often carried along, or
confused, by the force and self-assurance of the participants in this
great propaganda machine.
Party Line Consensus
An important operational characteristic of the system, which
facilitates general adherence to the party line without overt coercion,
is the assurance and speed with which the line is established as a
consensus truth, so that deviations and dissent quickly take on the
appearance of foolishness or pathology, as well as suspiciously
unpatriotic behavior. Noam Chomsky and I found that the very asking of
questions about the numerous fabrications, ideological role, and
absence of any beneficial effects for the victims in the anti-Khmer
Rouge propaganda campaign of 1975-1979 was unacceptable, and was
treated almost without exception as "apologetics for Pol Pot."
That "free trade" is beneficial and in the "national interest" whereas
"protectionism" is hurtful and a creature of "special interests" is a
consensus party line of the mainstream media today that profoundly
biases their treatment of trade agreements and protests against
corporate globalization at Seattle, Washington, D.C., Quebec City, and
Genoa (see Herman, "NAFTA, Mexican Meltdown, and the Propaganda
System," chapter 14 in Myth of the Liberal Media; Rachel Coen, "For
Press, Magenta Hair and Nose Rings Defined Protests," EXTRA!
[July-August 2000]; FAIR, "Action Alert: Police Violence in Genoa--Par
for the Course? Media complacency helps normalize assaults on
demonstrators," July 26, 2001).
The consensus around a party line is very quickly established in
dealing with international crises. Once an enemy is demonized-from Ho
Chi Minh in Vietnam and Jacobo Guzman Arbenz in Guatemala in the early
1950s to Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s and up to today-the media
display a form of hysteria that helps mobilize the public in support of
whatever forms of violence the government wishes to carry out. They
become a virtual propaganda arm of the government, joining with it in
the common fight against "another Hitler." Under these conditions
remarkable structures of disinformation can be built,
institutionalized, and remain parts of historic memory even in the face
of ex post confutations, which are kept out of sight.
Let me give a few short illustrations before showing how this
exceptional propaganda service applies to the Milosevic/Tribunal case.
Red Threat as Party Line: Vietnam and Guatemala
In the Cold War years, propaganda service and mobilization of the
public was commonly framed around the Red Threat. This general
demonization of the target produced the requisite hysteria and media
identification with "us" and complete loss of critical capability. When
the U.S.-imported puppet to South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, won a
plebiscite in 1954 with over 99 percent of the votes, an outcome that
would elicit much sarcasm if realized in an enemy state, this was not
news here. And from then onward, U.S. support of a government
admittedly lacking an indigenous constituency, relying on state terror
and U.S. financial and military aid, was treated in the mainstream
media as entirely reasonable and just.
The self-deception and patriotic biases internalized by media personnel
were displayed in their 100 percent inability, from 1954 to today, to
call the U.S. intervention and ultimate direct invasion of Vietnam
either an "invasion" or "aggression." It was also beautifully
illustrated in James Reston's Orwellian statement of 1965 that the
United States, which from beginning to almost the very end believed it
could impose its preferred rulers by virtue of its superior military
power, was in Vietnam to establish the "principle...that no state shall
use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its
political objectives."
Another remarkable case of propaganda service occurred as the United
States destabilized Guatemala's democratic government in the years
1950-1953 and then removed it by means of a U.S.-organized "contra"
invasion in 1954. U.S. hostility began when this government passed a
law in 1947 allowing the organization of unions, and active
destabilization followed and accelerated upon its attempt to engage in
moderate land reforms, partly at the expense of the United Fruit
Company. From 1947 the search was on for "communists" to explain the
reformist policies and to rationalize the hostile intervention. The
U.S. mainstream media became completely hysterical over this Red Threat
from 1950 onward, very worried that Arbenz would not allow elections to
take place in 1951--this same media had not been bothered by the Ubico
dictatorship, 1931-44, and was entirely unconcerned with the absence of
democracy from 1954 onward--and featured a stream of alarming reports
on Red influence in that country and an alleged "reign of terror."
There were endless headlines in the New York Times like "Soviet Agents
Plotting to Ruin Unity, Defenses of America" (June 22, 1950);
"Guatemalan Reds Seek Full Power" (May 21, 1952); "How Communists Won
Control of Guatemala" (March 1, 1953), and even The Nation ran a sleazy
putdown of the democratic government under attack (March 18, 1950).
This was all hysterical nonsense--even Court historian Ronald
Schneider, after reviewing the documents seized from the Reds in
Guatemala, concluded that the Reds had never controlled Guatemala, and
that the Soviet Union "made no significant or even material investment
in the Arbenz regime" and paid little attention to Central America--but
it was effective in making the overthrow of an elected government
acceptable to the U.S. public. And the media's propaganda service was
completed by their long cover-up of the hugely undemocratic aftermath
of the successful termination of the brief democratic experiment (on
the history of this propaganda campaign, Edward Herman, "Returning
Guatemala to the Fold," in Gary Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War Propaganda in
the 1950s [Macmillan, 1999]; more broadly, Piero Gleijeses, Shattered
Hope [Princeton, 1991]). No government-managed propaganda system could
have done a better job of mobilizing the public on the basis of
systematic disinformation; and the achievement here is especially
impressive given the fact that it was all done with the aim and effect
of ending a liberal democracy by violence and installing a terror state.
Bulgarian Connection
Another illustration of outstanding, even remarkable, propaganda
service, and one pertinent to the ongoing Milosevic-Tribunal drama
because it involved a judicial proceeding, was the "Bulgarian
Connection." The Reagan administration had been anxious to demonize the
Soviet Union in the early and mid-1980s, and the assassination attempt
against Pope John Paul II in May 1981, provided an opportunity to pin
the attempt on the KGB and their Bulgarian client. The Turkish fascist,
Mehmet Ali Agca, who had shot the Pope, had spent time in Bulgaria
(along with ten other countries). After 17 months in prison in Italy,
and after numerous visits by secret service, judicial, and papal
personnel, who had admittedly offered him inducements to "confess," he
claimed that he was on the Bulgarian-KGB payroll, had cased the joint
with Bulgarian officials in Rome, and had visited one of them in his
apartment. Although the case was laughably implausible, the U.S.
mainstream media bought it with enthusiasm, and failed to acknowledge
their gullibility and propaganda role even after CIA professionals told
congress during the CIA confirmation hearings on Robert Gates in 1991
that they knew the Connection was false because, among other reasons,
they had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services.
A very important feature of the media's treatment of the Bulgarian
Connection, very similar to that which they apply now to the Hague
Tribunal in its pursuit of Milosevic, was their pretense that the
Italian judiciary, police and political system were only seekers after
truth and justice, even a bit fearful of finding the Bulgarians guilty.
The New York Times even editorialized that the Reaganites were aghast
at the implications of a Soviet involvement in the assassination
attempt ("recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgaria's
agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from Moscow," Oct. 30,
1984), a propaganda lie confuted by the CIA professionals in 1991, who
explained that their own doubts were overruled by the Reaganite leaders
of the CIA who insisted on pushing the Connection as true. The
Bulgarian Connection can be well explained by the exceptional
corruption of the Italian system and the service of this manufactured
connection to the Cold Warriors serving the Italian state (and their
U.S. parent). This explanation was expressed often in the Italian media
during the 1980s, but not in the U.S. mainstream media where, with only
insignificant exceptions, the propaganda line functioned without a
hitch. (See Herman and Brodhead, Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian
Connection, chap. 7.)
Hague Tribunal: Serving Us, So No Awkward Questions, Please!
In the case of the Hague Tribunal also, the mainstream media portray it
as a presumably unbiased judicial body seeking justice with an even
hand, despite the massive evidence that it is a political and
propaganda arm of the United States and other NATO powers. Its ultimate
propaganda service was performed in May, 1999, when the prosecutor of
the International Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY),
Louise Arbour, announced the indictment of Yugoslav president Milosevic
and four associates for war crimes. This was done, hastily, at a time
when NATO was increasingly targeting the civilian infrastructure of
Yugoslavia in order to hasten that country's surrender. NATO needed
this public relations support as a cover for its own war crimes-- the
Sixth Convention of Nuremberg prohibits and makes a war crime the
targeting of civilian facilities not based on "military necessity"--and
the ICTY provided it, with the indictment quickly greeted by Albright
and James Rubin as justifying NATO's bombing policy.
To my knowledge the U.S. mainstream media have never once suggested
that this indictment servicing the NATO war discredited the Tribunal as
an independent judicial body. The New York Times's Steven Erlanger even
explained to Terry Gross that this indictment displayed Arbour's
independence, as she was allegedly fearful that Milosevic would escape
punishment in a political deal if she didn't move quickly! (Fresh Air,
National Public Radio, July 12, 2001). Erlanger was not alone in
offering this imbecile analysis, which not only failed to recognize the
indictment's service to NATO's immediate policy needs, but also ignored
other evidence of Arbour's and the Tribunal's deference to U.S. and
NATO desires.
The media also failed to raise any questions about Arbour's statement
of May 24, 1999, that although people are "entitled to the presumption
of innocence until they are convicted," she was issuing the indictment
because "the evidence...raises serious questions about their
suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace
agreement"--that is, she found them guilty before they were convicted
and thought that on this basis she should interfere with any possible
political settlement.
On the other hand, Arbour and her successor Carla Del Ponte have never
found allies of the NATO powers or the NATO powers themselves worthy of
indictment, even when they did exactly the same things for which the
NATO targets were indictable. Thus, Serb leader Milan Martic was
indicted for launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack on military targets
in Zagreb in May 1995, with the very use of cluster bombs cited by the
Tribunal as showing the aim of "terrorizing the civilians of Zagreb."
But NATO's cluster-bomb raids on Nis on May 7, 1999, far from any
military target, and the 48-hour Croat army shelling of civilian
targets in the city of Knim during the August 1995 Croat Operation
Storm, produced no indictments. Operation Storm, supported by U.S.
officials and helped by U.S.-related professional advisers, resulted in
large-
scale expulsions and the killing of many Serb civilians, but neither
Croat leader Tudjman nor the supportive U.S. officials were indicted,
and Croat military officials also escaped indictment till Del Ponte
recently claimed several in an effort to show her "balance" in the
context of the bringing of Milosevic to The Hague. This double
standard, which makes a mockery of justice, has been of absolutely no
interest to the U.S. mainstream media; and in his long session with
Terry Gross on July 12, when asked "What Americans might be brought to
stand trial before an international court?," Steven Erlanger failed to
come up with a single name for any actions in the Balkans (and Gross
did not follow up on his non-response).
Under pressure to address NATO's wartime activities, which had resulted
in the deaths of many Serb civilians--estimates run from 500 to
3,000--Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte issued a report in June
2000, that declared NATO not guilty. But the document supporting this
conclusion was not based on any investigation by the Tribunal, and it
openly acknowledged a heavy dependence on NATO sources, asserting "that
the NATO and NATO countries press statements are generally reliable and
that explanations have been honestly given." Canadian legal scholar and
expert on the Tribunal, Michael Mandel, asks: "Can you imagine how many
indictments would have been issued against the Serb leadership if the
Prosecutor had stopped at the FRY press releases?" But this remarkable
Del Ponte report was of no interest to the mainstream media.
Also of no interest to the media is the fact that the Tribunal has been
described by John Laughland in the Times (London) as "a rogue court
with rigged rules" (June 17, 1999). As normal practice it violates
virtually every standard of due process: it fails to separate
prosecution and judge; it does not accord the right to bail or a speedy
trial; it has no clear definition of burden of proof required for a
conviction; it has no independent appeal body; it allows a defendant to
be tried twice for the same crime; suspects can be held for 90 days
without trial; confessions are presumed to be free and voluntary unless
the contrary is established by the prisoner; and witnesses can testify
anonymously, with hearsay evidence admissible. These points are almost
never mentioned in the U.S. mainstream media or considered relevant to
the legitimacy of the Tribunal or the likelihood that Milosevic will
get a fair trial.
The Tribunal's biased performance follows from the fact that it was
organized by the United States and its close allies, is funded by them
and staffed with their approval, and depends on them for information
and other support. The Tribunal's charter requirements that its
expenses shall be provided in the UN general budget (Article 32), and
that the Prosecutor shall act independently and not take instructions
from any government (Article 16), have been systematically ignored.
Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, former president of the Hague Tribunal--before
that a director, and now "Special Counsel to the Chairman on Human
Rights," of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., a notorious human
rights violator working in Irian Jaya with the cooperation of the
Indonesian army--stated in 1999 that Tribunal personnel regard
Madeleine Albright as the "mother of the tribunal." NATO PR man Jamie
Shea pointed out in a May 17, 1999 press conference in Brussels that
Arbour will investigate "because we will allow her to;" that the NATO
countries are the ones "that have provided the finance to set up the
Tribunal;" that they are the ones who do the leg work "and have been
detaining indicted war criminals"; and that when she "looks at the
facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav nationality" and not
folks from NATO.
But neither this open admission that the NATO powers controlled the
Tribunal, nor the evidence of serious abuses of the judicial process
that has characterized its work, have been of interest to the
mainstream media. As with the prosecution of the Bulgarian Connection,
the Hague Tribunal is servicing the U.S. government and its aims, and
the media therefore regard any bias or political service as reasonable
and take them as givens. Because of their internalized belief that
their country is good and would only support justice, the media can't
even imagine that any conflict of interest exists. This is deep bias.
Also, no questions come up in this context as to why there are no
tribunals for Suharto, Wiranto (the Indonesian general in charge of the
destruction of East Timor in 1999), or Ariel Sharon. These are our
allies, even if major state terrorists, who received and still receive
our support, so that in a well-managed propaganda system the failure to
mention their exclusion from a system of global enforcement of the new
ethical order opposed to ethnic cleansing and human rights violations
is entirely appropriate.
Disinformation as Consensus History: Milosevic and the Balkans
From the time the U.S. government decided to target Milosevic and the
Serbs as the root of Balkan evil in the early 1990s, the U.S.
propaganda system began its work of demonization of the target,
enhanced atrocities management, and the necessary rewriting of history.
The integration of government needs and media service was essentially
complete, and was beautifully symbolized by the marriage during the
crisis years of State Department PR chief James Rubin and Christiane
Amanpour, CNN's main reporter on the Kosovo war, whose reports could
have come from Rubin himself. More recently, in connection with
Milosevic's transfer to the Hague, Amanpour entertained Richard
Holbrooke on the subject, and the two, speaking as old comrades-in-arms
congratulated one another on a joint success, just as a
policy-enforcing official might express mutual congratulations with a
PR officer (Holbrooke applauded Amanpour's "fantastic coverage of the
war throughout the last decade" [CNN Live At Daybreak, June 29, 2001]).
It should be noted that Holbrooke visited Zagreb two days before
Croatia launched Operation Storm in August 1995, almost certainly
talking over and giving U.S. approval to the imminent military
operation, reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's visit to Jakarta just
before Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in September 1975. As
Operation Storm involved a major program of killings and expulsions,
with killings greatly in excess of the numbers attributed to Milosevic
in the Tribunal indictment of May 22, 1999, an excellent case can be
made that Holbrooke should be being tried for war crimes. We may also
be sure that Christiane Amanpour's "fantastic coverage" of the wars in
Yugoslavia did not deal with Operation Storm or mention Holbrooke's and
the U.S. role in that butchery and massive ethnic cleansing.
As NATO prepared to go to war, which began on March 24, 1999, the media
followed the official lead in focusing heavily on Serb atrocities in
Kosovo, with great and indignant attention to the Racak massacre of
January 15, 1999. The failure of the Rambouillet Conference they blamed
on Serb intransigence, again following the official line. During the
78-day bombing war the media focused even more intensively on
atrocities (Serb, not NATO), and passed along the official estimates of
100,000 Kosovo Albanian murders (U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen),
and other estimates, smaller and larger. They also accepted the claim
that the Serb violence that followed the bombing would have taken place
anyway, by plan, so that the bombing, instead of causing the escalated
violence was justified by its occurrence ex post.
In the post-bombing era a number of developments have occurred that
have challenged the official line. But the mainstream media have not
let them disturb the institutionalized untruths. Let me list some of
these and describe the media's mode of deflection.
1. RACAK MASSACRE. The only pre-bombing act of Serb violence listed in
the Tribunal indictment of Milosevic on May 22, 1999, was an alleged
massacre of Albanians by the Serbs at Racak on January 15, 1999. The
Serbs had carried out this action with invited OSCE representatives
(and AP photographers) on the scene, but on the following day, after
KLA reoccupation of the village, some 40 to 45 bodies were on display
for the U.S.-OSCE official William Walker and the media. The
authenticity of this massacre, which follows a long pattern of
convenient but contrived atrocities to meet a PR need--well described
in George Bogdanich's and Martin Lettmayer's brilliant film "The
Avoidable War"--was immediately challenged by journalists in France and
Germany, but no doubts whatever showed up in the U.S. media. Christophe
Chatelet of Le Monde was in Racak the day of the "massacre," and left
at dusk, as did the OSCE observers and Serb police, without witnessing
any massacre. The AP photographers and on-the-scene OSCE
representatives have never been available for corroboration or denial,
and the forensic report of the Finnish team that examined the bodies at
the behest of the OSCE has never been made public. The issue is still
contested, but a very strong case can be made that the Racak "massacre"
was a staged event (see, Chatelet, in Le Monde, Jan. 19, 1999;
Professor Dusan Dunjic [a Serb medical participant in the autopsies],
"The (Ab)use of Forensic Medicine," ; J. Raino, et al., "Independent
forensic autopsies in an armed conflict: investigation of the victims
from Racak, Kosovo," Forensic Science International 116 [2001], 171-85).
But the strong challenging evidence has been effectively blacked out in
the U.S. mainstream media, and the "massacre" is taken as an
established and unquestioned truth (e.g., Amanpour and Carol Lin, CNN
Live at Daybreak, July 3, 2001; Steven Erlanger in his July 12
interview with Terry Gross). Why didn't the Serb army remove the
incriminating bodies, as the propaganda machine claimed then and now
that they were doing as a matter of policy directed from above? As in
the case of the analyses and evidence in the 1980s that Agca might have
been coached to implicate the Bulgarians and KGB, the U.S. mainstream
media refuse to burden a useful party line with inconvenient questions
and facts.
Also, while giving heavy, uncritical and indignant attention to Racak,
the media have never allowed the far larger and unambiguous massacre of
civilians at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999--three months after
Racak--to reach public consciousness. This was a massacre by the U.S.
ally Indonesia, U.S. officials did not feature it, and the media
therefore served national policy by giving it short shrift.
2. U.S. AND NATO OPPOSITION TO SERB "ETHNIC CLEANSING" AND "GENOCIDE"
AS THE BASIS OF THE NATO BOMBING. The official and media propaganda
line is that the United States and NATO powers were deeply upset by
Serb violence in Kosovo and eventually went to war to stop it. But
there are problems with this view. For one thing, evidence has turned
up showing that Washington, through its own agencies or hired
mercenaries, actually aided and trained the KLA prior to the bombing,
and in this and other ways encouraged them in provocations that
stimulated Serb violence (Peter Beaumont et al., "CIA's bastard army
ran riot in Balkans," The Observer [London], March 11, 2001). The
postwar publication by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Report:
Kosovo Aftermath, noted that "Under the influence of the Kosovo
Verification Mission the level of Serbian repression eased off" in late
1998, but "on the other hand, there was a lack of effective measures to
curb the UCK [KLA]" which had an interest in "worsening the situation."
In short, U.S. policy before the bombing encouraged violence in Kosovo.
The evidence for this has been made public abroad, but it has not yet
surfaced in the U.S. mainstream media.
A second problem is that NATO supplied greatly inflated estimates of
Serb killings and expulsions in Kosovo, quite obviously trying to
prepare the ground for bombing. The claim that Serbian policy
constituted "ethnic cleansing" and even "genocide" has long been
confuted by OSCE, State Department, and human rights groups' findings
of limited and targeted Serb violence, and by disclosure of an internal
German Foreign Office report that even denies the appropriateness of
the use of "ethnic cleansing" to describe Serb behavior ["Important
Internal Documents from Germany's Foreign Office,"]. These contesting
points of evidence, even though coming from establishment sources, are
not only off the screen for the mainstream media, they are ignored and
the old lies are repeated by Christopher Hitchens in The Nation ("Body
Count in Kosovo," June 11, 2001) and Bogdan Denitch in In These Times
("Citizen of a Lost Country," May 14, 2001).
A third problem is: how could this humanitarian motive be driving
Clinton and Blair in Kosovo when they had both actively supported
Turkey's far larger- scale ethnic cleansing of Kurds throughout the
1990s? The mainstream media dealt with this and similar problems by not
letting the issue be raised.
3. NATO REASONABLENESS, SERB INTRANSIGENCE AT RAMBOUILLET. On the
question of negotiations versus the use of force, the official line has
been that the NATO powers made reasonable negotiating offers to the
Serbs, trying to get "Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians to come to a
compromise" (Tim Judah), but that the Serb refusal to negotiate led to
the bombing war. This line was demonstrated to be false when it was
disclosed that NATO had inserted a proviso demanding full occupation by
NATO of all of Yugoslavia, admitted by a State Department official to
have been a deliberate "raising of the bar" to allow bombing (George
Kenney, "Rolling Thunder: The Rerun," The Nation, June 14, 1999). This
disclosure has been comprehensively suppressed in the mainstream media,
allowing the propaganda lie to be repeated today (Judah's repetition of
the lie was on June 29, 2001).
4. SERB GENOCIDE BY PLAN DURING THE NATO BOMBING. Three big lies
expounded during the NATO bombing war were that (1) the Serbs were
killing vast numbers; (2) they were doing this and expelling still
larger numbers in a process of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide;" and
(3) that they had planned mass killing and expulsions anyway, so that
these could not be attributed to the bombing war or the kind of
fighting and atrocities characteristic of a brutal civil war. It is now
clear that while large numbers did flee, this included at least an
equal proportion of Serbs, and that many fled without forcible
expulsion; and it is also clear that while there were brutal killings,
these fell far short of the 10,000-500,000 claimed by NATO. It is also
now on the record that NATO and the KLA were engaged in joint military
actions during the bombing war, and that expulsions were concentrated
in areas of KLA strong support, pointing to a military logic to Serb
actions (Daniel Pearl and Robert Block, "War in Kosovo Was Cruel,
Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn't," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31,
1999). The claim that the Serbs intended to do this anyway has never
been supported by any evidence.
In Guatemala after 1947 the search was on for communists; in Kosovo
during and after the bombing war the search was on for dead bodies
(whereas there was no interest in or search for dead bodies in East
Timor after the Indonesian massacres of 1999, in accord with the same
propaganda service). The bodies found in Kosovo received great
publicity, but the fact that this immense effort yielded only 3-4000
bodies from all causes and on all sides, and the fact that it fell far
short of the NATO-media propaganda claims during the bombing war, has
received minimal attention. However, with Milosevic now transferred to
The Hague, and a fresh demand arising for bodies whose deaths can be
attributed to him, once again the media are coming through with fresh
claims of bodies transferred from Kosovo under the villain's direction.
5. WAR A SUCCESS, REFUGEES RETURNED TO KOSOVO. But the refugees were
produced by the NATO bombing policy itself, and they returned to a
shattered country. Furthermore, after the NATO war there was a REAL
ethnic cleansing--in percentage terms the "largest in the Balkan wars"
according to Transnational Foundation for Peace director Jan
Oberg--with some 330,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews, Turks and others driven out
of Kosovo, while some 3,000 people were killed and disappeared.
However, as this has taken place under NATO auspices, the mainstream
media, insofar as they mention the real ethnic cleansing at all, have
treated it as a semi-approved "vengeance." But they have mainly dealt
with the subject, as they did the post-Arbenz REAL terrorism, by eye
aversion.
6. MILOSEVIC AS THE SOURCE OF BALKAN CONFLICT. In virtually all
mainstream accounts, it was "Milosevic's murderous decade" (Nordland
and Gutman in Newsweek, July 9, 2001), Milosevic who "set Yugoslavia to
unraveling" (Roger Cohen, New York Times, July 1, 2001), "the man who
had terrorized the turbulent Balkans for a decade" (Time, April 9,
2001). The wars were a "catastrophe that Slobodan Milosevic unleashed"
(Tim Judah, The Times [London], June 29, 2001). This is comic book
history, that follows the standard demonization process, and is refuted
by every serious historian dealing with the area (Susan Woodward,
Robert Hayden, David Chandler, Lenard Cohen, Raymond Kent, Steven L.
Burg and Paul S. Shoup).
Serious history takes into account, among other matters: (1) the fact
that long before 1990 Yugoslavia had persistent "deep regional and
ethnic cleavages," with Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo "all areas of high
ethnic fragmentation" (Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick, Political
Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic), whose suppression required a strong
federal state; (2) the effects of the Yugoslav economic crisis, dating
back to 1982, and the IMF/World Bank imposition of deflationary
policies on Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, and their consequences; (3)
the post-Soviet collapse ending of Western support for the Yugoslav
federal state, and German and Austrian collaboration in encouraging the
Croatian and Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia without any democratic
vote and without any settlement on the status of the large Serb
minorities; (4) the West's and Western Badinter Commission's refusal to
allow threatened ethnic minorities to withdraw from the new secession
states; (5) the U.S. and Western encouragement of the Muslims in
Bosnia-Herzegovina to hold out for unity under their control in the
face of Serb and Croatian fears and opposition; (6) the U.S. and NATO
support of Croatia and its massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina.
The media rarely mention these extremely important external,
NATO-inspired causes of ethnic cleansing, or the fact that Milosevic
supported many diplomatic initiatives such as the Owen-Vance and
Owen-Stoltenberg plans, both unsuccessful because of U.S. encouragement
of the Muslims to hold out for more. Heavy German and U.S.
responsibility for the breakup of Yugoslavia; the NATO governments'
help in the arming of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the
KLA; and the U.S. sabotaging of efforts at negotiated settlements in
the early 1990s, are all well documented in Bogdanich's and Lettmayer's
"The Avoidable War." The film was shown on the History Channel on April
16, but has otherwise been ignored in Propaganda System Number One for
good reason: it not only shows dominant NATO responsibility for the
Balkan disaster, it makes the mainstream media's supportive propaganda
role crystal clear.
7. MILOSEVIC'S NATIONALIST SPEECHES OF 1987 AND 1989. It is now rote
"history" that in April 1987 Milosevic "endorsed a Serbian nationalist
agenda" at Polje in Kosovo, and did the same there on June 28, 1989--
supposedly heralding his project of Greater Serbia and the coming wars
to achieve it. People like Roger Cohen and Steven Erlanger who cite
these as "inciting Serb passions" almost surely never bothered to read
them (nor did Joe Knowles, who mentions Milosevic's "infamous" speech
of June 28 in In These Times [Aug.6, 2001]). In both speeches,
Milosevic actually warns against the dangers of nationalism, and while
he promises to protect Serbs, he is clearly speaking of the citizens of
the Republic of Serbia, not ethnic Serbs; and he describes "Yugoslavia"
as "a multinational community...[that] can survive only under the
conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it" (June 28,
1989).
8. MILOSEVIC AS DICTATOR. The June 28, 2001 amended indictment of
Milosevic notes that he was "elected" president of Serbia on May 8,
1989, was elected again "in multi-party elections" held in December
1990, was "reelected" in December 1992, was "elected president of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" on July 15, 1997, and was defeated and
ousted from power in an election in September 2000. But as Milosevic is
on the U.S. hit list, he is referred to repeatedly in the media as a
"dictator," a word they were extremely reluctant to apply to Suharto
during his 32 years as a prized U.S. client. The designation of
dictator created a problem for the media because they also found, and
continue to find, the Serb populace guilty as "willing executioners"
who were properly punished by bombing and who need to acknowledge their
guilt. How a people suffering under a dictatorship and
dictator-controlled media could be guilty of crimes committed elsewhere
is unexplained, but in the U.S. mainstream media the contradiction
remains unchallenged.
9. THE DICTATOR AS RESPONSIBLE KILLER. In Manufacturing Consent Chomsky
and I showed how in the case of the murder of Jerzy Popieuszko in
communist Poland the media repeatedly sought to prove that the leaders
of Poland knew about and were responsible for the killing, whereas in
cases where our own leaders or clients are involved, the media are not
interested in high level knowledge and responsibility. It was therefore
a foregone conclusion that the media would jump on every claim that
Milosevic was behind the deaths in the Balkan wars, and as the Tribunal
has to confront the need for such proof to convict the demon, the media
are working this terrain with vigor. Some of the alleged new evidence
is clearly being leaked from the Tribunal itself (e.g., Bob Graham and
Tom Walker, "Milosevic Ordered Hiding of Bodies," Sunday Times
[London], July 8, 2001), a form of propaganda once again revealing that
it is not a judicial body but a political instrument. This evidence,
which cites the very words used by the dictator in Belgrade in March
1999 instructing his subordinates to commit crimes ("all civilians
killed in Kosovo have to be moved to places where they will not be
discovered," in ibid.), has the odor of NATO-bloc disinformation and
should be treated with the utmost scepticism. And we may be sure the
media will never ask why, with this instruction, "45 bodies" were left
on the ground in Racak for the convenience of William Walker and other
NATO propagandists.
Concluding Note
The U.S. propaganda system is at the peak of its powers in the early
years of the 21st century, riding the wave of capitalism's triumph,
U.S. global hegemony, and the confidence and effective service of the
increasingly concentrated and commercialized mainstream media. It is a
model propaganda system, its slippages and imperfections adding to its
power, given its assured service in times of need. And as described
above, in such times its ability to ignore inconvenient facts, swallow
disinformation, and work the public over with propaganda can easily
compete with--even surpass--anything found in totalitarian systems.
---
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© Copyright E HERMAN 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage équitable
seulement.
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27
00043 Ciampino (Roma)
email: icdsm-italia@...
Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006
intestato ad Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA
causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC
Data: Lun 15 Dic 2003 14:26:30 Europe/Rome
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Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Propaganda System Number One: From Diem and
Arbenz to Milosevic
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER312A.html
Propaganda System Number One:
From Diem and Arbenz to Milosevic
by Edward S. Herman
Propaganda, Politics, Power ISSN 1741-0754 Volume 1: 15-28 ~ 9 December
2003
www.globalresearch.ca 15 December 2003
The URL of this article is:
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/HER312A.html
The way in which the mainstream media have handled the turning of
Milosevic over to the Hague Tribunal once again reinforces my belief
that the United States is not only number one in military power but
also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system, which is vastly
superior to any past or present state-managed system. The main
characteristic of the U.S. model is that, while offering diversity on
many subjects, on core issues--like "free trade" and the need for a
huge "defense" establishment--and on the occasions when the corporate
and political establishment needs their service--as in legitimating
George W. Bush's presidency in the wake of an electoral coup d'etat, or
supporting the "sanctions of mass destruction" on Iraq--the media can
be relied on to expound and propagandize what would be called a "party
line" if done in China. They do sometimes depart from the official
position as regards tactics, arguing, for example, that the government
is not attacking the enemy with sufficient ferocity (Iraq and
Yugoslavia), or that the cost of the enterprise is perhaps excessive
(the Vietnam war, from 1968), but that the enemy is truly evil and the
national cause meritorious is never debatable. The debates over tactics
helpfully obscure the agreement on ends.
A further important feature of the U.S. system is that this propaganda
service is provided without government censorship or coercion, by self-
censorship alone, with the truth of the propaganda line internalized by
the numerous media participants. This internalization of belief makes
it possible for media personnel to be enthusiastic spokespersons in
pushing the party line, thereby giving it a naturalness that is lacking
in crude systems of government-enforced propaganda.
A third feature of the system is that the party lines are regularly
supported by non-governmental and self-proclaimed "non-partisan"
thinktanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Independent
International Commission on Kosovo, non-governmental organizations like
the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, and assorted
ex-leftists and liberal and left journals that on particular subjects
"see the light." These organizations are commonly funded by interests
(and governments) with an axe to grind, and they serve those interests,
but the media feature them as non-partisan and give special attention
to the ex-leftists and dissidents who now see the light. This helps
firm up the consensus and further marginalizes those still in darkness.
A final feature of the U.S. system is that it works so well that a
sizable fraction of the public doesn't recognize the media's propaganda
role, and accepts the media's own self-image as independent, adversary,
truth-seeking, and helping the public to "assert meaningful control
over the political process" (former Supreme Court Justice Lewis
Powell). This public bamboozlement is aided by the facts that the media
are fairly numerous, are not government controlled, have many true
believers among their editors and journalists (the second
characteristic), are supported by NGOs and elements of the "left" (the
third feature), and regularly proclaim their independence and squabble
furiously with government and among themselves. Even those who doubt
the media's claims of truth-seeking are often carried along, or
confused, by the force and self-assurance of the participants in this
great propaganda machine.
Party Line Consensus
An important operational characteristic of the system, which
facilitates general adherence to the party line without overt coercion,
is the assurance and speed with which the line is established as a
consensus truth, so that deviations and dissent quickly take on the
appearance of foolishness or pathology, as well as suspiciously
unpatriotic behavior. Noam Chomsky and I found that the very asking of
questions about the numerous fabrications, ideological role, and
absence of any beneficial effects for the victims in the anti-Khmer
Rouge propaganda campaign of 1975-1979 was unacceptable, and was
treated almost without exception as "apologetics for Pol Pot."
That "free trade" is beneficial and in the "national interest" whereas
"protectionism" is hurtful and a creature of "special interests" is a
consensus party line of the mainstream media today that profoundly
biases their treatment of trade agreements and protests against
corporate globalization at Seattle, Washington, D.C., Quebec City, and
Genoa (see Herman, "NAFTA, Mexican Meltdown, and the Propaganda
System," chapter 14 in Myth of the Liberal Media; Rachel Coen, "For
Press, Magenta Hair and Nose Rings Defined Protests," EXTRA!
[July-August 2000]; FAIR, "Action Alert: Police Violence in Genoa--Par
for the Course? Media complacency helps normalize assaults on
demonstrators," July 26, 2001).
The consensus around a party line is very quickly established in
dealing with international crises. Once an enemy is demonized-from Ho
Chi Minh in Vietnam and Jacobo Guzman Arbenz in Guatemala in the early
1950s to Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s and up to today-the media
display a form of hysteria that helps mobilize the public in support of
whatever forms of violence the government wishes to carry out. They
become a virtual propaganda arm of the government, joining with it in
the common fight against "another Hitler." Under these conditions
remarkable structures of disinformation can be built,
institutionalized, and remain parts of historic memory even in the face
of ex post confutations, which are kept out of sight.
Let me give a few short illustrations before showing how this
exceptional propaganda service applies to the Milosevic/Tribunal case.
Red Threat as Party Line: Vietnam and Guatemala
In the Cold War years, propaganda service and mobilization of the
public was commonly framed around the Red Threat. This general
demonization of the target produced the requisite hysteria and media
identification with "us" and complete loss of critical capability. When
the U.S.-imported puppet to South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, won a
plebiscite in 1954 with over 99 percent of the votes, an outcome that
would elicit much sarcasm if realized in an enemy state, this was not
news here. And from then onward, U.S. support of a government
admittedly lacking an indigenous constituency, relying on state terror
and U.S. financial and military aid, was treated in the mainstream
media as entirely reasonable and just.
The self-deception and patriotic biases internalized by media personnel
were displayed in their 100 percent inability, from 1954 to today, to
call the U.S. intervention and ultimate direct invasion of Vietnam
either an "invasion" or "aggression." It was also beautifully
illustrated in James Reston's Orwellian statement of 1965 that the
United States, which from beginning to almost the very end believed it
could impose its preferred rulers by virtue of its superior military
power, was in Vietnam to establish the "principle...that no state shall
use military force or the threat of military force to achieve its
political objectives."
Another remarkable case of propaganda service occurred as the United
States destabilized Guatemala's democratic government in the years
1950-1953 and then removed it by means of a U.S.-organized "contra"
invasion in 1954. U.S. hostility began when this government passed a
law in 1947 allowing the organization of unions, and active
destabilization followed and accelerated upon its attempt to engage in
moderate land reforms, partly at the expense of the United Fruit
Company. From 1947 the search was on for "communists" to explain the
reformist policies and to rationalize the hostile intervention. The
U.S. mainstream media became completely hysterical over this Red Threat
from 1950 onward, very worried that Arbenz would not allow elections to
take place in 1951--this same media had not been bothered by the Ubico
dictatorship, 1931-44, and was entirely unconcerned with the absence of
democracy from 1954 onward--and featured a stream of alarming reports
on Red influence in that country and an alleged "reign of terror."
There were endless headlines in the New York Times like "Soviet Agents
Plotting to Ruin Unity, Defenses of America" (June 22, 1950);
"Guatemalan Reds Seek Full Power" (May 21, 1952); "How Communists Won
Control of Guatemala" (March 1, 1953), and even The Nation ran a sleazy
putdown of the democratic government under attack (March 18, 1950).
This was all hysterical nonsense--even Court historian Ronald
Schneider, after reviewing the documents seized from the Reds in
Guatemala, concluded that the Reds had never controlled Guatemala, and
that the Soviet Union "made no significant or even material investment
in the Arbenz regime" and paid little attention to Central America--but
it was effective in making the overthrow of an elected government
acceptable to the U.S. public. And the media's propaganda service was
completed by their long cover-up of the hugely undemocratic aftermath
of the successful termination of the brief democratic experiment (on
the history of this propaganda campaign, Edward Herman, "Returning
Guatemala to the Fold," in Gary Rawnsley, ed., Cold-War Propaganda in
the 1950s [Macmillan, 1999]; more broadly, Piero Gleijeses, Shattered
Hope [Princeton, 1991]). No government-managed propaganda system could
have done a better job of mobilizing the public on the basis of
systematic disinformation; and the achievement here is especially
impressive given the fact that it was all done with the aim and effect
of ending a liberal democracy by violence and installing a terror state.
Bulgarian Connection
Another illustration of outstanding, even remarkable, propaganda
service, and one pertinent to the ongoing Milosevic-Tribunal drama
because it involved a judicial proceeding, was the "Bulgarian
Connection." The Reagan administration had been anxious to demonize the
Soviet Union in the early and mid-1980s, and the assassination attempt
against Pope John Paul II in May 1981, provided an opportunity to pin
the attempt on the KGB and their Bulgarian client. The Turkish fascist,
Mehmet Ali Agca, who had shot the Pope, had spent time in Bulgaria
(along with ten other countries). After 17 months in prison in Italy,
and after numerous visits by secret service, judicial, and papal
personnel, who had admittedly offered him inducements to "confess," he
claimed that he was on the Bulgarian-KGB payroll, had cased the joint
with Bulgarian officials in Rome, and had visited one of them in his
apartment. Although the case was laughably implausible, the U.S.
mainstream media bought it with enthusiasm, and failed to acknowledge
their gullibility and propaganda role even after CIA professionals told
congress during the CIA confirmation hearings on Robert Gates in 1991
that they knew the Connection was false because, among other reasons,
they had penetrated the Bulgarian secret services.
A very important feature of the media's treatment of the Bulgarian
Connection, very similar to that which they apply now to the Hague
Tribunal in its pursuit of Milosevic, was their pretense that the
Italian judiciary, police and political system were only seekers after
truth and justice, even a bit fearful of finding the Bulgarians guilty.
The New York Times even editorialized that the Reaganites were aghast
at the implications of a Soviet involvement in the assassination
attempt ("recoiled from the devastating implication that Bulgaria's
agents were bound to have acted only on a signal from Moscow," Oct. 30,
1984), a propaganda lie confuted by the CIA professionals in 1991, who
explained that their own doubts were overruled by the Reaganite leaders
of the CIA who insisted on pushing the Connection as true. The
Bulgarian Connection can be well explained by the exceptional
corruption of the Italian system and the service of this manufactured
connection to the Cold Warriors serving the Italian state (and their
U.S. parent). This explanation was expressed often in the Italian media
during the 1980s, but not in the U.S. mainstream media where, with only
insignificant exceptions, the propaganda line functioned without a
hitch. (See Herman and Brodhead, Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian
Connection, chap. 7.)
Hague Tribunal: Serving Us, So No Awkward Questions, Please!
In the case of the Hague Tribunal also, the mainstream media portray it
as a presumably unbiased judicial body seeking justice with an even
hand, despite the massive evidence that it is a political and
propaganda arm of the United States and other NATO powers. Its ultimate
propaganda service was performed in May, 1999, when the prosecutor of
the International Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY),
Louise Arbour, announced the indictment of Yugoslav president Milosevic
and four associates for war crimes. This was done, hastily, at a time
when NATO was increasingly targeting the civilian infrastructure of
Yugoslavia in order to hasten that country's surrender. NATO needed
this public relations support as a cover for its own war crimes-- the
Sixth Convention of Nuremberg prohibits and makes a war crime the
targeting of civilian facilities not based on "military necessity"--and
the ICTY provided it, with the indictment quickly greeted by Albright
and James Rubin as justifying NATO's bombing policy.
To my knowledge the U.S. mainstream media have never once suggested
that this indictment servicing the NATO war discredited the Tribunal as
an independent judicial body. The New York Times's Steven Erlanger even
explained to Terry Gross that this indictment displayed Arbour's
independence, as she was allegedly fearful that Milosevic would escape
punishment in a political deal if she didn't move quickly! (Fresh Air,
National Public Radio, July 12, 2001). Erlanger was not alone in
offering this imbecile analysis, which not only failed to recognize the
indictment's service to NATO's immediate policy needs, but also ignored
other evidence of Arbour's and the Tribunal's deference to U.S. and
NATO desires.
The media also failed to raise any questions about Arbour's statement
of May 24, 1999, that although people are "entitled to the presumption
of innocence until they are convicted," she was issuing the indictment
because "the evidence...raises serious questions about their
suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace
agreement"--that is, she found them guilty before they were convicted
and thought that on this basis she should interfere with any possible
political settlement.
On the other hand, Arbour and her successor Carla Del Ponte have never
found allies of the NATO powers or the NATO powers themselves worthy of
indictment, even when they did exactly the same things for which the
NATO targets were indictable. Thus, Serb leader Milan Martic was
indicted for launching a rocket cluster-bomb attack on military targets
in Zagreb in May 1995, with the very use of cluster bombs cited by the
Tribunal as showing the aim of "terrorizing the civilians of Zagreb."
But NATO's cluster-bomb raids on Nis on May 7, 1999, far from any
military target, and the 48-hour Croat army shelling of civilian
targets in the city of Knim during the August 1995 Croat Operation
Storm, produced no indictments. Operation Storm, supported by U.S.
officials and helped by U.S.-related professional advisers, resulted in
large-
scale expulsions and the killing of many Serb civilians, but neither
Croat leader Tudjman nor the supportive U.S. officials were indicted,
and Croat military officials also escaped indictment till Del Ponte
recently claimed several in an effort to show her "balance" in the
context of the bringing of Milosevic to The Hague. This double
standard, which makes a mockery of justice, has been of absolutely no
interest to the U.S. mainstream media; and in his long session with
Terry Gross on July 12, when asked "What Americans might be brought to
stand trial before an international court?," Steven Erlanger failed to
come up with a single name for any actions in the Balkans (and Gross
did not follow up on his non-response).
Under pressure to address NATO's wartime activities, which had resulted
in the deaths of many Serb civilians--estimates run from 500 to
3,000--Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte issued a report in June
2000, that declared NATO not guilty. But the document supporting this
conclusion was not based on any investigation by the Tribunal, and it
openly acknowledged a heavy dependence on NATO sources, asserting "that
the NATO and NATO countries press statements are generally reliable and
that explanations have been honestly given." Canadian legal scholar and
expert on the Tribunal, Michael Mandel, asks: "Can you imagine how many
indictments would have been issued against the Serb leadership if the
Prosecutor had stopped at the FRY press releases?" But this remarkable
Del Ponte report was of no interest to the mainstream media.
Also of no interest to the media is the fact that the Tribunal has been
described by John Laughland in the Times (London) as "a rogue court
with rigged rules" (June 17, 1999). As normal practice it violates
virtually every standard of due process: it fails to separate
prosecution and judge; it does not accord the right to bail or a speedy
trial; it has no clear definition of burden of proof required for a
conviction; it has no independent appeal body; it allows a defendant to
be tried twice for the same crime; suspects can be held for 90 days
without trial; confessions are presumed to be free and voluntary unless
the contrary is established by the prisoner; and witnesses can testify
anonymously, with hearsay evidence admissible. These points are almost
never mentioned in the U.S. mainstream media or considered relevant to
the legitimacy of the Tribunal or the likelihood that Milosevic will
get a fair trial.
The Tribunal's biased performance follows from the fact that it was
organized by the United States and its close allies, is funded by them
and staffed with their approval, and depends on them for information
and other support. The Tribunal's charter requirements that its
expenses shall be provided in the UN general budget (Article 32), and
that the Prosecutor shall act independently and not take instructions
from any government (Article 16), have been systematically ignored.
Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, former president of the Hague Tribunal--before
that a director, and now "Special Counsel to the Chairman on Human
Rights," of Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., a notorious human
rights violator working in Irian Jaya with the cooperation of the
Indonesian army--stated in 1999 that Tribunal personnel regard
Madeleine Albright as the "mother of the tribunal." NATO PR man Jamie
Shea pointed out in a May 17, 1999 press conference in Brussels that
Arbour will investigate "because we will allow her to;" that the NATO
countries are the ones "that have provided the finance to set up the
Tribunal;" that they are the ones who do the leg work "and have been
detaining indicted war criminals"; and that when she "looks at the
facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav nationality" and not
folks from NATO.
But neither this open admission that the NATO powers controlled the
Tribunal, nor the evidence of serious abuses of the judicial process
that has characterized its work, have been of interest to the
mainstream media. As with the prosecution of the Bulgarian Connection,
the Hague Tribunal is servicing the U.S. government and its aims, and
the media therefore regard any bias or political service as reasonable
and take them as givens. Because of their internalized belief that
their country is good and would only support justice, the media can't
even imagine that any conflict of interest exists. This is deep bias.
Also, no questions come up in this context as to why there are no
tribunals for Suharto, Wiranto (the Indonesian general in charge of the
destruction of East Timor in 1999), or Ariel Sharon. These are our
allies, even if major state terrorists, who received and still receive
our support, so that in a well-managed propaganda system the failure to
mention their exclusion from a system of global enforcement of the new
ethical order opposed to ethnic cleansing and human rights violations
is entirely appropriate.
Disinformation as Consensus History: Milosevic and the Balkans
From the time the U.S. government decided to target Milosevic and the
Serbs as the root of Balkan evil in the early 1990s, the U.S.
propaganda system began its work of demonization of the target,
enhanced atrocities management, and the necessary rewriting of history.
The integration of government needs and media service was essentially
complete, and was beautifully symbolized by the marriage during the
crisis years of State Department PR chief James Rubin and Christiane
Amanpour, CNN's main reporter on the Kosovo war, whose reports could
have come from Rubin himself. More recently, in connection with
Milosevic's transfer to the Hague, Amanpour entertained Richard
Holbrooke on the subject, and the two, speaking as old comrades-in-arms
congratulated one another on a joint success, just as a
policy-enforcing official might express mutual congratulations with a
PR officer (Holbrooke applauded Amanpour's "fantastic coverage of the
war throughout the last decade" [CNN Live At Daybreak, June 29, 2001]).
It should be noted that Holbrooke visited Zagreb two days before
Croatia launched Operation Storm in August 1995, almost certainly
talking over and giving U.S. approval to the imminent military
operation, reminiscent of Henry Kissinger's visit to Jakarta just
before Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in September 1975. As
Operation Storm involved a major program of killings and expulsions,
with killings greatly in excess of the numbers attributed to Milosevic
in the Tribunal indictment of May 22, 1999, an excellent case can be
made that Holbrooke should be being tried for war crimes. We may also
be sure that Christiane Amanpour's "fantastic coverage" of the wars in
Yugoslavia did not deal with Operation Storm or mention Holbrooke's and
the U.S. role in that butchery and massive ethnic cleansing.
As NATO prepared to go to war, which began on March 24, 1999, the media
followed the official lead in focusing heavily on Serb atrocities in
Kosovo, with great and indignant attention to the Racak massacre of
January 15, 1999. The failure of the Rambouillet Conference they blamed
on Serb intransigence, again following the official line. During the
78-day bombing war the media focused even more intensively on
atrocities (Serb, not NATO), and passed along the official estimates of
100,000 Kosovo Albanian murders (U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen),
and other estimates, smaller and larger. They also accepted the claim
that the Serb violence that followed the bombing would have taken place
anyway, by plan, so that the bombing, instead of causing the escalated
violence was justified by its occurrence ex post.
In the post-bombing era a number of developments have occurred that
have challenged the official line. But the mainstream media have not
let them disturb the institutionalized untruths. Let me list some of
these and describe the media's mode of deflection.
1. RACAK MASSACRE. The only pre-bombing act of Serb violence listed in
the Tribunal indictment of Milosevic on May 22, 1999, was an alleged
massacre of Albanians by the Serbs at Racak on January 15, 1999. The
Serbs had carried out this action with invited OSCE representatives
(and AP photographers) on the scene, but on the following day, after
KLA reoccupation of the village, some 40 to 45 bodies were on display
for the U.S.-OSCE official William Walker and the media. The
authenticity of this massacre, which follows a long pattern of
convenient but contrived atrocities to meet a PR need--well described
in George Bogdanich's and Martin Lettmayer's brilliant film "The
Avoidable War"--was immediately challenged by journalists in France and
Germany, but no doubts whatever showed up in the U.S. media. Christophe
Chatelet of Le Monde was in Racak the day of the "massacre," and left
at dusk, as did the OSCE observers and Serb police, without witnessing
any massacre. The AP photographers and on-the-scene OSCE
representatives have never been available for corroboration or denial,
and the forensic report of the Finnish team that examined the bodies at
the behest of the OSCE has never been made public. The issue is still
contested, but a very strong case can be made that the Racak "massacre"
was a staged event (see, Chatelet, in Le Monde, Jan. 19, 1999;
Professor Dusan Dunjic [a Serb medical participant in the autopsies],
"The (Ab)use of Forensic Medicine," ; J. Raino, et al., "Independent
forensic autopsies in an armed conflict: investigation of the victims
from Racak, Kosovo," Forensic Science International 116 [2001], 171-85).
But the strong challenging evidence has been effectively blacked out in
the U.S. mainstream media, and the "massacre" is taken as an
established and unquestioned truth (e.g., Amanpour and Carol Lin, CNN
Live at Daybreak, July 3, 2001; Steven Erlanger in his July 12
interview with Terry Gross). Why didn't the Serb army remove the
incriminating bodies, as the propaganda machine claimed then and now
that they were doing as a matter of policy directed from above? As in
the case of the analyses and evidence in the 1980s that Agca might have
been coached to implicate the Bulgarians and KGB, the U.S. mainstream
media refuse to burden a useful party line with inconvenient questions
and facts.
Also, while giving heavy, uncritical and indignant attention to Racak,
the media have never allowed the far larger and unambiguous massacre of
civilians at Liquica in East Timor on April 6, 1999--three months after
Racak--to reach public consciousness. This was a massacre by the U.S.
ally Indonesia, U.S. officials did not feature it, and the media
therefore served national policy by giving it short shrift.
2. U.S. AND NATO OPPOSITION TO SERB "ETHNIC CLEANSING" AND "GENOCIDE"
AS THE BASIS OF THE NATO BOMBING. The official and media propaganda
line is that the United States and NATO powers were deeply upset by
Serb violence in Kosovo and eventually went to war to stop it. But
there are problems with this view. For one thing, evidence has turned
up showing that Washington, through its own agencies or hired
mercenaries, actually aided and trained the KLA prior to the bombing,
and in this and other ways encouraged them in provocations that
stimulated Serb violence (Peter Beaumont et al., "CIA's bastard army
ran riot in Balkans," The Observer [London], March 11, 2001). The
postwar publication by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, General Report:
Kosovo Aftermath, noted that "Under the influence of the Kosovo
Verification Mission the level of Serbian repression eased off" in late
1998, but "on the other hand, there was a lack of effective measures to
curb the UCK [KLA]" which had an interest in "worsening the situation."
In short, U.S. policy before the bombing encouraged violence in Kosovo.
The evidence for this has been made public abroad, but it has not yet
surfaced in the U.S. mainstream media.
A second problem is that NATO supplied greatly inflated estimates of
Serb killings and expulsions in Kosovo, quite obviously trying to
prepare the ground for bombing. The claim that Serbian policy
constituted "ethnic cleansing" and even "genocide" has long been
confuted by OSCE, State Department, and human rights groups' findings
of limited and targeted Serb violence, and by disclosure of an internal
German Foreign Office report that even denies the appropriateness of
the use of "ethnic cleansing" to describe Serb behavior ["Important
Internal Documents from Germany's Foreign Office,"]. These contesting
points of evidence, even though coming from establishment sources, are
not only off the screen for the mainstream media, they are ignored and
the old lies are repeated by Christopher Hitchens in The Nation ("Body
Count in Kosovo," June 11, 2001) and Bogdan Denitch in In These Times
("Citizen of a Lost Country," May 14, 2001).
A third problem is: how could this humanitarian motive be driving
Clinton and Blair in Kosovo when they had both actively supported
Turkey's far larger- scale ethnic cleansing of Kurds throughout the
1990s? The mainstream media dealt with this and similar problems by not
letting the issue be raised.
3. NATO REASONABLENESS, SERB INTRANSIGENCE AT RAMBOUILLET. On the
question of negotiations versus the use of force, the official line has
been that the NATO powers made reasonable negotiating offers to the
Serbs, trying to get "Serbia and the Kosovo Albanians to come to a
compromise" (Tim Judah), but that the Serb refusal to negotiate led to
the bombing war. This line was demonstrated to be false when it was
disclosed that NATO had inserted a proviso demanding full occupation by
NATO of all of Yugoslavia, admitted by a State Department official to
have been a deliberate "raising of the bar" to allow bombing (George
Kenney, "Rolling Thunder: The Rerun," The Nation, June 14, 1999). This
disclosure has been comprehensively suppressed in the mainstream media,
allowing the propaganda lie to be repeated today (Judah's repetition of
the lie was on June 29, 2001).
4. SERB GENOCIDE BY PLAN DURING THE NATO BOMBING. Three big lies
expounded during the NATO bombing war were that (1) the Serbs were
killing vast numbers; (2) they were doing this and expelling still
larger numbers in a process of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide;" and
(3) that they had planned mass killing and expulsions anyway, so that
these could not be attributed to the bombing war or the kind of
fighting and atrocities characteristic of a brutal civil war. It is now
clear that while large numbers did flee, this included at least an
equal proportion of Serbs, and that many fled without forcible
expulsion; and it is also clear that while there were brutal killings,
these fell far short of the 10,000-500,000 claimed by NATO. It is also
now on the record that NATO and the KLA were engaged in joint military
actions during the bombing war, and that expulsions were concentrated
in areas of KLA strong support, pointing to a military logic to Serb
actions (Daniel Pearl and Robert Block, "War in Kosovo Was Cruel,
Bitter, Savage; Genocide It Wasn't," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31,
1999). The claim that the Serbs intended to do this anyway has never
been supported by any evidence.
In Guatemala after 1947 the search was on for communists; in Kosovo
during and after the bombing war the search was on for dead bodies
(whereas there was no interest in or search for dead bodies in East
Timor after the Indonesian massacres of 1999, in accord with the same
propaganda service). The bodies found in Kosovo received great
publicity, but the fact that this immense effort yielded only 3-4000
bodies from all causes and on all sides, and the fact that it fell far
short of the NATO-media propaganda claims during the bombing war, has
received minimal attention. However, with Milosevic now transferred to
The Hague, and a fresh demand arising for bodies whose deaths can be
attributed to him, once again the media are coming through with fresh
claims of bodies transferred from Kosovo under the villain's direction.
5. WAR A SUCCESS, REFUGEES RETURNED TO KOSOVO. But the refugees were
produced by the NATO bombing policy itself, and they returned to a
shattered country. Furthermore, after the NATO war there was a REAL
ethnic cleansing--in percentage terms the "largest in the Balkan wars"
according to Transnational Foundation for Peace director Jan
Oberg--with some 330,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews, Turks and others driven out
of Kosovo, while some 3,000 people were killed and disappeared.
However, as this has taken place under NATO auspices, the mainstream
media, insofar as they mention the real ethnic cleansing at all, have
treated it as a semi-approved "vengeance." But they have mainly dealt
with the subject, as they did the post-Arbenz REAL terrorism, by eye
aversion.
6. MILOSEVIC AS THE SOURCE OF BALKAN CONFLICT. In virtually all
mainstream accounts, it was "Milosevic's murderous decade" (Nordland
and Gutman in Newsweek, July 9, 2001), Milosevic who "set Yugoslavia to
unraveling" (Roger Cohen, New York Times, July 1, 2001), "the man who
had terrorized the turbulent Balkans for a decade" (Time, April 9,
2001). The wars were a "catastrophe that Slobodan Milosevic unleashed"
(Tim Judah, The Times [London], June 29, 2001). This is comic book
history, that follows the standard demonization process, and is refuted
by every serious historian dealing with the area (Susan Woodward,
Robert Hayden, David Chandler, Lenard Cohen, Raymond Kent, Steven L.
Burg and Paul S. Shoup).
Serious history takes into account, among other matters: (1) the fact
that long before 1990 Yugoslavia had persistent "deep regional and
ethnic cleavages," with Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo "all areas of high
ethnic fragmentation" (Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick, Political
Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic), whose suppression required a strong
federal state; (2) the effects of the Yugoslav economic crisis, dating
back to 1982, and the IMF/World Bank imposition of deflationary
policies on Yugoslavia in the late 1980s, and their consequences; (3)
the post-Soviet collapse ending of Western support for the Yugoslav
federal state, and German and Austrian collaboration in encouraging the
Croatian and Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia without any democratic
vote and without any settlement on the status of the large Serb
minorities; (4) the West's and Western Badinter Commission's refusal to
allow threatened ethnic minorities to withdraw from the new secession
states; (5) the U.S. and Western encouragement of the Muslims in
Bosnia-Herzegovina to hold out for unity under their control in the
face of Serb and Croatian fears and opposition; (6) the U.S. and NATO
support of Croatia and its massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Krajina.
The media rarely mention these extremely important external,
NATO-inspired causes of ethnic cleansing, or the fact that Milosevic
supported many diplomatic initiatives such as the Owen-Vance and
Owen-Stoltenberg plans, both unsuccessful because of U.S. encouragement
of the Muslims to hold out for more. Heavy German and U.S.
responsibility for the breakup of Yugoslavia; the NATO governments'
help in the arming of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the
KLA; and the U.S. sabotaging of efforts at negotiated settlements in
the early 1990s, are all well documented in Bogdanich's and Lettmayer's
"The Avoidable War." The film was shown on the History Channel on April
16, but has otherwise been ignored in Propaganda System Number One for
good reason: it not only shows dominant NATO responsibility for the
Balkan disaster, it makes the mainstream media's supportive propaganda
role crystal clear.
7. MILOSEVIC'S NATIONALIST SPEECHES OF 1987 AND 1989. It is now rote
"history" that in April 1987 Milosevic "endorsed a Serbian nationalist
agenda" at Polje in Kosovo, and did the same there on June 28, 1989--
supposedly heralding his project of Greater Serbia and the coming wars
to achieve it. People like Roger Cohen and Steven Erlanger who cite
these as "inciting Serb passions" almost surely never bothered to read
them (nor did Joe Knowles, who mentions Milosevic's "infamous" speech
of June 28 in In These Times [Aug.6, 2001]). In both speeches,
Milosevic actually warns against the dangers of nationalism, and while
he promises to protect Serbs, he is clearly speaking of the citizens of
the Republic of Serbia, not ethnic Serbs; and he describes "Yugoslavia"
as "a multinational community...[that] can survive only under the
conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it" (June 28,
1989).
8. MILOSEVIC AS DICTATOR. The June 28, 2001 amended indictment of
Milosevic notes that he was "elected" president of Serbia on May 8,
1989, was elected again "in multi-party elections" held in December
1990, was "reelected" in December 1992, was "elected president of the
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" on July 15, 1997, and was defeated and
ousted from power in an election in September 2000. But as Milosevic is
on the U.S. hit list, he is referred to repeatedly in the media as a
"dictator," a word they were extremely reluctant to apply to Suharto
during his 32 years as a prized U.S. client. The designation of
dictator created a problem for the media because they also found, and
continue to find, the Serb populace guilty as "willing executioners"
who were properly punished by bombing and who need to acknowledge their
guilt. How a people suffering under a dictatorship and
dictator-controlled media could be guilty of crimes committed elsewhere
is unexplained, but in the U.S. mainstream media the contradiction
remains unchallenged.
9. THE DICTATOR AS RESPONSIBLE KILLER. In Manufacturing Consent Chomsky
and I showed how in the case of the murder of Jerzy Popieuszko in
communist Poland the media repeatedly sought to prove that the leaders
of Poland knew about and were responsible for the killing, whereas in
cases where our own leaders or clients are involved, the media are not
interested in high level knowledge and responsibility. It was therefore
a foregone conclusion that the media would jump on every claim that
Milosevic was behind the deaths in the Balkan wars, and as the Tribunal
has to confront the need for such proof to convict the demon, the media
are working this terrain with vigor. Some of the alleged new evidence
is clearly being leaked from the Tribunal itself (e.g., Bob Graham and
Tom Walker, "Milosevic Ordered Hiding of Bodies," Sunday Times
[London], July 8, 2001), a form of propaganda once again revealing that
it is not a judicial body but a political instrument. This evidence,
which cites the very words used by the dictator in Belgrade in March
1999 instructing his subordinates to commit crimes ("all civilians
killed in Kosovo have to be moved to places where they will not be
discovered," in ibid.), has the odor of NATO-bloc disinformation and
should be treated with the utmost scepticism. And we may be sure the
media will never ask why, with this instruction, "45 bodies" were left
on the ground in Racak for the convenience of William Walker and other
NATO propagandists.
Concluding Note
The U.S. propaganda system is at the peak of its powers in the early
years of the 21st century, riding the wave of capitalism's triumph,
U.S. global hegemony, and the confidence and effective service of the
increasingly concentrated and commercialized mainstream media. It is a
model propaganda system, its slippages and imperfections adding to its
power, given its assured service in times of need. And as described
above, in such times its ability to ignore inconvenient facts, swallow
disinformation, and work the public over with propaganda can easily
compete with--even surpass--anything found in totalitarian systems.
---
The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) at www.globalresearch.ca
grants permission to cross-post original CRG articles in their
entirety, or any portions thereof, on community internet sites, as long
as the text and title of the article are not modified. The source must
be acknowledged as follows: Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
at www.globalresearch.ca . The active URL hyperlink address of the
original CRG article and the author's copyright note must be clearly
displayed. (For articles from other news sources, check with the
original copyright holder, where applicable.) For publication of CRG
articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites,
contact: editor@... .
© Copyright E HERMAN 2003 For fair use only/ pour usage équitable
seulement.
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27
00043 Ciampino (Roma)
email: icdsm-italia@...
Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006
intestato ad Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA
causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC
Da: ICDSM Italia
Data: Lun 15 Dic 2003 14:21:46 Europe/Rome
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Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Political Trial, Political Testimony, Political
Pressure
The Deposition Will not be Televised:
Wesley Clark's Testimony in the Milosevic Trial
The right to a fair and public trial, the cornerstone of criminal
justice, has been under attack since September 11th, 2001. The protean
war on terrorism has led to a growing culture of judicial opacity and
has had the effect of increasing the public's tolerance of closed
proceedings, in the name of State security and national interests.
Yet not only in the US-- or at Guantanamo Bay-- have the courthouse
doors been slamming shut, and the workings of justice shielded from
public view. At the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY), the public and the media are often invited to step
out of the public gallery for confidential portions of proceedings. The
defendant's right to a public trial[1]-- and the public's right to
measure whether justice is truly carried out independently and
impartially-- is infringed upon by security considerations with
alarming frequency, particularly in the case of Slobodan Milosevic. To
exclude the public from even a fraction of such a historically
important trial, before a Tribunal created by the Security Council of
the United Nations[2]-- ostensibly to establish truth[3],
reconciliation[4] and peace[5]-- would seem to defeat the purpose. How
can a UN body disregard UN human rights instruments and General
Assembly resolutions which elevate the right to a public trial to the
gold standard in the protection of human rights? The fact that the ICTY
was created for political considerations provides some insight into the
question. Madeleine Albright was described as "the mother of the
Tribunal" by its past President[6], and Madam Secretary also lent her
name to the so-called "humanitarian" war in Kosovo[7].
Political Trial, Political Testimony, Political Pressure
Any doubt as to the political nature of the ICTY has been put to rest
following the imposition by the US government of bafflingly stringent
conditions for the upcoming testimony, on December 15th and 16th, of US
presidential candidate Wesley Clark for the Prosecution in the
Milosevic case[8]. The American government has succeeded in requiring
that General Clark's testimony be held in the absence of the public or
press, and has obtained the right to delay the transmission of the
testimony for 48 hours, in what the ICTY had called a "temporary closed
session." The delayed transmission is designed to permit the US
government to "review the transcript and make representations as to
whether evidence given in open session (sic) should be redacted in
order to protect the national interests of the US". This process will
engender a further delay, as the Chamber considers US requests for
censorship of the public record, in keeping with the legally nebulous
concept of US "national interests".
But what could General Clark have to tell the Security Council
Tribunal that he hasn't said in an interview, written in an op-ed, or
detailed in one of his two self-congratulatory tomes on the art of war?
More importantly, what could he possibly say against the interests of
President Slobodan Milosevic that would require the imposition by the
US of stringent conditions to protect its "legitimate national
interests"?
Could it be that Wesley Clark is a vulnerable witness? In the context
of the ongoing-- and apparently endless-- "war on terrorism", might the
US government wish to prevent questions being asked about General
Clark's role[9]-- and that of his government[10]-- in providing
military, financial and political support to the KLA[11], whose
well-documented links to Al-Qaeda[12] now threaten to throw intolerable
light on the effects of US foreign policy in the Balkans?
The ICTY has already agreed that seven paragraphs of Clark's full
statement will be placed under seal, inaccessible to the public. The US
government, which has obtained the right to have two representatives
present in the courtroom for General Clark's testimony--in contrast to
the public, who are entitled to no representative whatsoever-- may
request that further evidence be given in private session.
Public Trial?
In other words, while Wesley Clark--a public figure, US presidential
candidate and former Supreme Commander of NATO during its bombing of
Yugoslavia-- testifies at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic--the trial of
the century-- the public and media will be shut out. For 48 hours, the
public will wait for the US government to decide what it believes the
media can be trusted to report, and what must be cut from the public
record, in the name of "national interests". During the invasion of
Iraq, embedded journalists obtained information in a timelier manner.
And upon what basis will the Chamber decide whether or not to grant US
requests to cut evidence from the public record? Isn't the concept of
"national interest" a somewhat subjective, political notion, making the
adjudication of its content and applicability next to impossible? A
foreign government-- the sole superpower-- imposes conditions on the
testimony of a retired general and presidential candidate against the
former president of the nation bombed under the orders of the witness.
The conditions of the testimony violate internationally recognized
rights to public trials. The conditions violate the rights of the
accused, the media, and the public. That a court of law -- much less an
international tribunal purportedly designed to uphold human rights and
bring an end to the culture of impunity-- would accept such outrageous
conditions is unthinkable, unless this is a political, rather than
judicial process.
The public nature of the judicial process is vital to any democracy:
public access to open justice ensures fair trials. Only if justice is
accessible can the people form an opinion as to whether trials conform
to national and international standards[13]. Public access to criminal
proceedings protects defendants from malicious, abusive, or political
prosecutions, carried out in secret, far from public scrutiny. In the
context of the Milosevic trial, these considerations apply with greater
urgency still, given the political nature of the Tribunal, the
proceedings, as well as the financial and institutional support
received by the ICTY from certain governments and individuals[14],
whose preoccupations and interests are at odds with the requirements of
justice as envisaged by international and domestic standards.
"National interests" trump cross-examination
Slobodan Milosevic's right to cross-examine Wesley Clark has also been
severely curtailed-- contrary to the rights set out by the ICTY's Rules
of Procedure and recognized in all adversarial systems of law. He will
not be entitled to question General Clark on matters of credibility, an
outrageous restriction in light of the fact that Clark, a US
presidential candidate, has recently acknowledged that the 78-day
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia by NATO-- a campaign for which he
was directly responsible-- was carried out in "technical" violation of
international law[15].
Questions of credibility inevitably arise with respect to a witness
testifying about Mr. Milosevic's intent and good faith as a negotiator.
In such a case, the defence would be entitled to question the sincerity
of the witness, one who ordered the bombing of the RTS television
studios in Belgrade[16], just as a link-up was being established for an
interview with Larry King on CNN[17]. One could ask about the bombing
of a passenger train, and in particular, about the less than forthright
justification provided by the witness, publicly, for that incident of
"collateral damage"[18]. In particular, Clark could be asked why he
stated to the press that the train’s speed was such that the missiles’
trajectories could not be altered, using altered videotape
footage—shown at three times the normal speed—to support his
justification for these civilian deaths. General Clark's incredible
explanations for the bombing of the Chinese embassy— one of which
was : « I had another call that said, "Whoops. It looks like the
embassy was moved »[19] would also constitute appropriate lines of
cross-examination.
It is presently unknown to the public if Clark will even be questioned
with respect to the bombing campaign. If his statement does not cover
NATO's attack on Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic will not be entitled to
raise it at all, as the conditions obtained by the US government limit
questions asked to the content of Clark's statement[20]. The ICTY has
allowed Mr Milosevic to "seek to have the scope of examination expanded
by prior agreement of the US government"[21]. This delegation of
judicial authority by the Trial Chamber to the US government would be
comical if it were not such a striking manifestation of this
institution's incapacity to act judicially. Why can't President
Milosevic apply to the judges to request a wider scope of
cross-examination? When did the US government replace the judges on the
bench? No legal explanation or authority is provided by the ICTY's
decision to justify such an incredible measure. It is simply an
admission that this institution cannot adjudicate the facts or apply
the law with the independence and impartiality required by
international legal authority as well as its own statute, which
provides that "The Trial Chambers shall ensure that a trial is fair and
expeditious and that proceedings are conducted in accordance with the
rules of procedure and evidence, with full respect for the rights of
the accused and due regard for the protection of victims and
witnesses"[22].
The Rules of the ICTY also set out that "all proceedings before a Trial
Chamber, other than deliberations of the Chamber, shall be held in
public, unless otherwise provided."[23] Exceptions to this rule do not
include the imposition, by a foreign government, of closed sessions and
censorship of the public record, based on "national interests"[24],
even when that foreign governement is an indispensable financial
contributor to the Tribunal.[25]
"National interests"
What are "national interests", anyway? One could be forgiven for
concluding that they could mean anything. The law is silent as to the
definition of this notion. The concept of "national security" however,
has been studied and defined as a legal concept. In particular, the
question of whether and when the public can be deprived of access to
information in the name of national security was the object of an
important international legal conference held in Johannesburg in 1995,
at which the "Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of
Expression and Access to Information", were adopted. The meeting was
convened by Article 19, the International Centre Against Censorship,
and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies of the University of
Witwatersrand, South Africa[26].
A restriction to open justice, on the ground of "national
security"--and not "national interest"-- a concept which would appear
to protect less urgent concerns--is not, according to Principle 2 of
the Johannesburg Principles "legitimate unless its genuine purpose and
demonstrable effect is to protect a country's existence or its
territorial integrity against the use or threat of force, or its
capacity to respond to the threat or use of force, whether from an
external source, such as a military threat, or an internal source, such
as incitement to overthrow the government."
Did the US government argue that the very existence or territorial
integrity of the United States of America would be emperiled by Wesley
Clark's public testimony? It is unkown whether they did or not, because
the application made by the US government to require these
conditions--without which conditions they would not permit Wesley Clark
to testify at all-- was confidential. The hearing was confidential. And
the confidential decision setting out these conditions--released to the
public over two weeks after being handed down--fails to offer any
indication of which "national interests" were invoked by the United
States government to justify such sweeping measures of secrecy.
The Johannesburg Principles also set out what would not constitute a
legitimate restriction to a public trial on the basis of national
security:
"In particular, a restriction sought to be justified on the ground of
national security is not legitimate if its genuine purpose or
demonstrable effect is to protect interests unrelated to national
security, including, for example, to protect a government from
embarrassment or exposure of wrongdoing, or to conceal information
about the functioning of its public institutions, or to entrench a
particular ideology, or to suppress industrial unrest."[27]
Clearly, the fact that the ICTY would accept the imposition by the US
of conditions which egregiously violate one of the most fundamental
principles of international law--public trials-- without a public case
ever having being made to justify such an unprecedented restriction,
should thoroughly dispell any myths about the fairness of these
proceedings.
Consider, in addition, that Wesley Clark is very much a public figure,
he is running for President of the United States, and accordingly, his
testimony should be subject to public scrutiny. And note that General
Clark, retired, testifies against Slobodan Milosevic in interviews
almost every day-- and frequently engages in derisive imitations of him
which mock his Slavic-accented English[28]. Could it be that the ICTY
is protecting the US "national interest" in the public and media by not
hearing Slobodan Milosevic effectively cross-examine Wesley Clark?
The US governement has succeeded in insulating Clark's testimony from
public scrutiny in the name of "national interests". But why stop at
General Clark? And why would other NATO countries fail to seize this
opportunity to testify as accusers without having to bear the
consequences of a transparent process? This precedent will no doubt be
invoked to protect other American officials[29] from the strains of
public trials, and in turn, serve to further secure US impunity under
international law. US impunity is already well-established, considering
the American governement's refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court for fear of "political prosecutions"[30].
Such a concern, when viewed in light of the massive US contribution to
both ad hoc Security Council tribunals, the ICTY and ICTR-- from which
one may presume that the US has culled evidence of unfounded,
politically-motivated prosecutions[31]--elevates disingenuity to
dizzying heights.
Conflict of interest?
The right to a fair and public trial is the right to a fair and public
trial before an independent and impartial tribunal. Every international
legal instrument recognizes this basic principle[32].
Wesley Clark will presumably be testifying about his role as NATO
Supreme Commander. The US is a NATO country--arguably the NATO country.
As Wesley Clark put it: "we're the leaders of NATO, we set up NATO,
it's our organization."[33] The ICTY is in a difficult position to act
as an independent judicial body, because NATO has stated that "it is
one" with the Tribunal. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, on May 16th
1999, told the press that when "Justice Arbour starts her
investigation, she will because we allow her to. (…) NATO countries are
those who have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are
amongst the majority financiers (…)so let me assure that we and the
Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals brought to
justice and I am certain that when Justice Arbour goes to Kosovo and
looks at the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav
nationality(…)"[34]
It is difficult to imagine a more damning admisssion. By stating that
its constituent countries are the Tribunal's major financiers, NATO is
in essence claiming to pay the salaries of the judges and prosecutor of
the ICTY. And that statement is somewhat inconsistent with the
requirements of institutional independence and impartiality for a
criminal trial. And when NATO's former Supreme Commander,-- a board
member of George Soros' International Crisis Group, alongside Canadian
Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour[35] -- is given an opportunity to
testify in the absence of the press because this is a condition imposed
by the United States -- any appearance of justice, beyond the cosmetic
trappings of judges' robes, and the ritual incantions "all rise" and
"be seated" (although who will be there to rise and be seated?) vanish
in a puff of smoke.
Tiphaine Dickson
© 2003
(Tiphaine Dickson criminal lawyer based Montréal. She acted as lead
defence counsel in one of the first ad hoc genocide prosecutions before
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.)
[1]Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights states:
"In the determination of any criminal charge against him, or of his
rights and obligations in a suit at law, everyone shall be entitled to
a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial
tribunal established by law..."
Paragraph 106 of the Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to
Paragraph 2 of Security Council Resolution 808 (1993),(S/25704),
recognized the application of international legal safeguards to the
ICTY:
"It is axiomatic that the International Tribunal must fully respect
internationally recognized standards regarding the rights of the
accused at all stages of its proceedings. In the view of the
Secretary-General, such internationally recognized standards are, in
particular, contained in article 14 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights."
[2]United Nations Security Council Resolution 827 (1993).
[3]"Speaking during the debate on the resolution that committed the
U.N. Security Council to the creation of the ICTY, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright asserted that "[t]his will be no victor's tribunal.
The only victor that will prevail in this endeavour is the truth.",
Remarks of ICTY President Theodor Meron, October 7th, 2003, before the
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, (CSCE), Washington,
http://www.csce.gov/witness.cfm?briefing_id=269&testimony_id=437
[4]"The role of the Tribunal cannot be over emphasized. Far from being
a vehicle for revenge, it is a tool for promoting reconciliation and
restoring true peace." First Annual Report of the ICTY, (A/49/342 -
S/1994/1007) submitted by former ICTY President Judge Gabrielle Kirk
McDonald.
[5]"the Security Council stated in Resolution 808 (1993) that it was
convinced that in the particular circumstances of the former
Yugoslavia, the establishment of an international tribunal would bring
about the achievement of the aim of putting an end to such crimes and
of taking effective measures to bring to justice the persons
responsible for them, and would contribute to the restoration and
maintenance of peace." Paragraph 26 of the Report of the
Secretary-General Pursuant to Paragraph 2 of Security Council
Resolution 808 (1993), Presented 3 May 1993 (S/25704). Security Council
Resolution 827 adopted this reasoning as a justification to establish
the ICTY.
[6]Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, first President of the ICTY, made
this statement at an awards ceremony held at the U.S. Supreme Court
on April 5th, 1999: "[W]e benefited from the strong support of
concerned governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary
Albright. As the permanent representative to the United Nations, she
had worked with unceasing resolve to establish the Tribunal. Indeed, we
often refer to her as the ‘Mother of the Tribunal.’" Quoted in
Prosecute NATO, George Szamuely, New York Press,
http://www.balkanpeace.org/library/fa_2000/jan/fa250100.html.
[7]See Online Newshour, June 10th 1999:
JIM LEHRER: Does it bother you when people called it Madeleine's war?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I had... it had never occurred to me that
anybody would call a war after me, but it doesn't bother me at all that
people know that I believed, as did President Clinton, that this was a
situation that could not go on.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/jan-june99/albright_6-10.html
[8]"Decision on Prosecution's Application for a Witness Pursuant to
Rule 70 (B)", Prosecutor v. Milosevic, IT-02-54-T, 30 October 2003,
Confidential, released November 16th, 2003.
[9]As military aide to Richard Holbrooke during the 1995 Dayton Peace
Accords, as Director for Strategic Plans and Policy within the Joint
Chiefs of Staff from 1994 to 1997, and as Supreme Allied Commander of
NATO from 1997 to 2000.
[10]Brendan O'Neill, "How We Trained Al-Qa'eda", The Spectator,
November 22nd, 2003,
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?2003-09-13&id=3499#articletop.
[11]Id., Craig Pyesjosh Meyer and William C. Rempe, "Terrorists Use
Bosnia as Base and Sanctuary", Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001;
Michel Chossudovsky, "Regime Rotation in America: Wesley Clark, Osama
bin Laden and the 2004 Presidential Elections", Center for Research on
Globalization, October 22nd, 2003,
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO310B.html.
[12] Cliff Kincaid, "Wesley Clark's Ties To Muslim Terrorists",
Accuracy in Media, September 17, 2003; Brendan O'Neill, "How We Trained
Al-Qa'eda", The Spectator, November 22nd, 2003,
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?2003-09-13&id=3499#articletop;
Craig Pyesjosh Meyer and William C. Rempe, "Terrorists Use Bosnia as
Base and Sanctuary", Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001; Michel
Chossudovsky, "Regime Rotation in America: Wesley Clark, Osama bin
Laden and the 2004 Presidential Elections", Center for Research on
Globalization, October 22nd, 2003,
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO310B.html; Nikolaos Stavrou,
"Balkan Branches of the Terror Network?", Washington Times, October 21,
2001; George Szamuely, "Home-Grown Terrorism", New York Press, December
28, 1999.
[13]Amnesty International, Fair Trials Manual,
http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/fairtrial/indxftm_b.htm#14
[14]Although the ICTY's Statute provides that the Tribunal is to be
financed by the regular budget of the UN, which constitutes a safeguard
against the violation of judicial independence, the Tribunal has
received donations from governments, including the US, as well as
private foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation. See paragraph
16 of the First Annual Report by the President of the ICTY,
http://www.un.org/icty/rappannu-e/1994/index.htm. The ICTY has also
received donations from George Soros as well as corporations. Of
interest is the "private" financing of exhumations, for the Office of
the Prosecutor: " Funding for mass grave exhumations in the former
Yugoslavia is not part of the Tribunal's regular budget but comes
primarily from PHR (Physicians for Human Rights-ed.). That organisation
acts as a conduit for funding from IGOs and NGOs to the Tribunals for
the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. To date, a number of foundations,
including the US-based John Merck, Rockefeller and Soros (Open Society
Institute) Foundations, and the Dutch organisation Novib, have made
donations of cash, equipment and personnel." See
http://www.un.org/icty/BL/08art1e.htm.
[15]"Meet the Press", November 16th, 2003,
http://www.msnbc.com/news/994273.asp; Peter J. Boyer, "General Clark's
Battles", The New Yorker, November 17th, 2003.
[16]Reporters sans frontières, November 2000 Report, "Serbian
Broadcasting: Chronicle of Martyrdom Foretold",
http://www.rsf.org/rsf/uk/html/europe/rapport/serbie_rts.html. Both
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have concluded that the
bombing of RTS-- which killed 16 people-- was carried out in violation
of international law, id.
[17]Robert Fisk, "Taken In By the NATO Line," The Independent, July 2,
1999.
[18]"NATO used speeded-up film to excuse civilian deaths in Kosovo:
newspaper", AFP, January 6, 2001: " (…) US General Wesley Clark,
shortly afterwards showed two videotapes of the train appearing to be
traveling fast on the bridge, and said it had then been impossible to
alter the missiles' trajectories. The Frankfurt newspaper said the two
videotapes were both shown at three times normal speed. A spokesman for
NATO'S military command in Mons, Belgium, acknowledged in a telephone
interview with AFP that those images had been altered by "a technical
problem." The footage, recorded by a camera installed in the warhead of
one of the missiles that destroyed the bridge and train were altered
during the process of being copied for screening, said the spokesman.
He said NATO was aware of the problem since last October but did not
consider it "useful" to disclose it."
[19]"About five in the morning, I had another call that said, "Whoops.
It looks like the embassy was moved." Interview, General Wesley Clark,
Frontline, PBS,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/interviews/
clark.html
[20]ICTY Decision, supra.
[21]Id.
[22]ICTY Statute, Article 20, paragraph 1.
[23]Id., paragraph 4.
[24]Rules 70 and 79 of the ICTY Rules of Procedure and Evidence
exhaustively set out permissible exceptions to the requirement of
public hearings.
[25]The President of the ICTY, Judge Theodor Meron, stated the
following, last October 7th, before the Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Washington: "As you know, the United
States took a leading role in the creation of the ICTY and remains a
staunch supporter. The U.S.'s financial contribution accounts for
approximately a quarter of the Tribunal's annual budget of
approximately $ 120 million."
http://www.csce.gov/witness.cfm?briefing_id=269&testimony_id=437
[26]http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/excep/johannesburg.html
[27]Johannesburg Principles, Principle 2 (B).
[28]N.R. Kleinfield, "General Clark on the Hustings: Complexity and
Contradiction", New York Times, November 23rd, 2003,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/politics/campaigns/23CLAR.html; Seth
Rogovoy, "A General for President?", September 13th, 2003, The Atlantic
Monthly, Tom Junod, "The General", August 2003, Esquire.
[29] Christopher Marquis, "US Seeks Safeguards on Diplomats Testifying
at Milosevic Trial", New York Times, June 13th, 2002 Global Policy
Forum- International
Justice,http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/tribunals/2002/
0613mil.htm
[30] US Department of State, International Information Programs, "U.S.
Restates Objections to International Criminal Court U.S. statement to
General Assembly Sixth Committee", October 14th, 2002:
"In a speech to the General Assembly's sixth committee, which deals
with legal matters, Nicholas Rostow explained the U.S. position on the
court. "The United States is concerned about the danger of politically
motivated prosecutions," Rostow said. "Examples of investigations or
prosecutions based on political agenda, not evidence and neutral
prosecutorial judgement abound. The structure of the ICC makes such
unacceptable proceedings possible."
http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/usandun/02101615.htm
[31]Id.
[32]Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 10; International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 14; European Convention
on Human Rights, Article 6; African Charter of Rights, Articles 7 (d)
and 26; American Convention, Article 8(1); Basic Principles on the
Independence of the Judiciary. According to the UN Human Rights
Committee, the right to be tried before an independent tribunal "is an
absolute right that may suffer no exception": González del Río v. Peru,
(263/1987), 28 October 1992, Report of the HRC, vol. II, (A/48/40),
1993, paragraph 20.
[33]June 20, 2001, Uncommon Knowledge, Transcript 606: Waging Modern
War, www.uncoommonknowledge.org/01-02/606.html
[34]Press Conference, 16 May 1999.
www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990516b.htm
[35]http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/home/index.cfm?id=1139&l=1
---
The Hague, 15 September 2003
8:00 a.m. Demonstrations in front of the Tribunal
9:00 a.m. ICDSM Press Conference at Bel Air Hotel
ICDSM lawyer Tiphaine Dickson will give a statement
and answer questions of the press
---
SLOBODA urgently needs your donation.
Please find the detailed instructions at:
http://www.sloboda.org.yu/pomoc.htm
To join or help this struggle, visit:
http://www.sloboda.org.yu/ (Sloboda/Freedom association)
http://www.icdsm.org/ (the international committee to defend Slobodan
Milosevic)
http://www.free-slobo.de/ (German section of ICDSM)
http://www.icdsm-us.org/ (US section of ICDSM)
http://www.icdsmireland.org/ (ICDSM Ireland)
http://www.wpc-in.org/ (world peace council)
http://www.geocities.com/b_antinato/ (Balkan antiNATO center)
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27
00043 Ciampino (Roma)
email: icdsm-italia@...
Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006
intestato ad Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA
causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC
Data: Lun 15 Dic 2003 14:21:46 Europe/Rome
A: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Political Trial, Political Testimony, Political
Pressure
The Deposition Will not be Televised:
Wesley Clark's Testimony in the Milosevic Trial
The right to a fair and public trial, the cornerstone of criminal
justice, has been under attack since September 11th, 2001. The protean
war on terrorism has led to a growing culture of judicial opacity and
has had the effect of increasing the public's tolerance of closed
proceedings, in the name of State security and national interests.
Yet not only in the US-- or at Guantanamo Bay-- have the courthouse
doors been slamming shut, and the workings of justice shielded from
public view. At the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY), the public and the media are often invited to step
out of the public gallery for confidential portions of proceedings. The
defendant's right to a public trial[1]-- and the public's right to
measure whether justice is truly carried out independently and
impartially-- is infringed upon by security considerations with
alarming frequency, particularly in the case of Slobodan Milosevic. To
exclude the public from even a fraction of such a historically
important trial, before a Tribunal created by the Security Council of
the United Nations[2]-- ostensibly to establish truth[3],
reconciliation[4] and peace[5]-- would seem to defeat the purpose. How
can a UN body disregard UN human rights instruments and General
Assembly resolutions which elevate the right to a public trial to the
gold standard in the protection of human rights? The fact that the ICTY
was created for political considerations provides some insight into the
question. Madeleine Albright was described as "the mother of the
Tribunal" by its past President[6], and Madam Secretary also lent her
name to the so-called "humanitarian" war in Kosovo[7].
Political Trial, Political Testimony, Political Pressure
Any doubt as to the political nature of the ICTY has been put to rest
following the imposition by the US government of bafflingly stringent
conditions for the upcoming testimony, on December 15th and 16th, of US
presidential candidate Wesley Clark for the Prosecution in the
Milosevic case[8]. The American government has succeeded in requiring
that General Clark's testimony be held in the absence of the public or
press, and has obtained the right to delay the transmission of the
testimony for 48 hours, in what the ICTY had called a "temporary closed
session." The delayed transmission is designed to permit the US
government to "review the transcript and make representations as to
whether evidence given in open session (sic) should be redacted in
order to protect the national interests of the US". This process will
engender a further delay, as the Chamber considers US requests for
censorship of the public record, in keeping with the legally nebulous
concept of US "national interests".
But what could General Clark have to tell the Security Council
Tribunal that he hasn't said in an interview, written in an op-ed, or
detailed in one of his two self-congratulatory tomes on the art of war?
More importantly, what could he possibly say against the interests of
President Slobodan Milosevic that would require the imposition by the
US of stringent conditions to protect its "legitimate national
interests"?
Could it be that Wesley Clark is a vulnerable witness? In the context
of the ongoing-- and apparently endless-- "war on terrorism", might the
US government wish to prevent questions being asked about General
Clark's role[9]-- and that of his government[10]-- in providing
military, financial and political support to the KLA[11], whose
well-documented links to Al-Qaeda[12] now threaten to throw intolerable
light on the effects of US foreign policy in the Balkans?
The ICTY has already agreed that seven paragraphs of Clark's full
statement will be placed under seal, inaccessible to the public. The US
government, which has obtained the right to have two representatives
present in the courtroom for General Clark's testimony--in contrast to
the public, who are entitled to no representative whatsoever-- may
request that further evidence be given in private session.
Public Trial?
In other words, while Wesley Clark--a public figure, US presidential
candidate and former Supreme Commander of NATO during its bombing of
Yugoslavia-- testifies at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic--the trial of
the century-- the public and media will be shut out. For 48 hours, the
public will wait for the US government to decide what it believes the
media can be trusted to report, and what must be cut from the public
record, in the name of "national interests". During the invasion of
Iraq, embedded journalists obtained information in a timelier manner.
And upon what basis will the Chamber decide whether or not to grant US
requests to cut evidence from the public record? Isn't the concept of
"national interest" a somewhat subjective, political notion, making the
adjudication of its content and applicability next to impossible? A
foreign government-- the sole superpower-- imposes conditions on the
testimony of a retired general and presidential candidate against the
former president of the nation bombed under the orders of the witness.
The conditions of the testimony violate internationally recognized
rights to public trials. The conditions violate the rights of the
accused, the media, and the public. That a court of law -- much less an
international tribunal purportedly designed to uphold human rights and
bring an end to the culture of impunity-- would accept such outrageous
conditions is unthinkable, unless this is a political, rather than
judicial process.
The public nature of the judicial process is vital to any democracy:
public access to open justice ensures fair trials. Only if justice is
accessible can the people form an opinion as to whether trials conform
to national and international standards[13]. Public access to criminal
proceedings protects defendants from malicious, abusive, or political
prosecutions, carried out in secret, far from public scrutiny. In the
context of the Milosevic trial, these considerations apply with greater
urgency still, given the political nature of the Tribunal, the
proceedings, as well as the financial and institutional support
received by the ICTY from certain governments and individuals[14],
whose preoccupations and interests are at odds with the requirements of
justice as envisaged by international and domestic standards.
"National interests" trump cross-examination
Slobodan Milosevic's right to cross-examine Wesley Clark has also been
severely curtailed-- contrary to the rights set out by the ICTY's Rules
of Procedure and recognized in all adversarial systems of law. He will
not be entitled to question General Clark on matters of credibility, an
outrageous restriction in light of the fact that Clark, a US
presidential candidate, has recently acknowledged that the 78-day
bombing campaign against Yugoslavia by NATO-- a campaign for which he
was directly responsible-- was carried out in "technical" violation of
international law[15].
Questions of credibility inevitably arise with respect to a witness
testifying about Mr. Milosevic's intent and good faith as a negotiator.
In such a case, the defence would be entitled to question the sincerity
of the witness, one who ordered the bombing of the RTS television
studios in Belgrade[16], just as a link-up was being established for an
interview with Larry King on CNN[17]. One could ask about the bombing
of a passenger train, and in particular, about the less than forthright
justification provided by the witness, publicly, for that incident of
"collateral damage"[18]. In particular, Clark could be asked why he
stated to the press that the train’s speed was such that the missiles’
trajectories could not be altered, using altered videotape
footage—shown at three times the normal speed—to support his
justification for these civilian deaths. General Clark's incredible
explanations for the bombing of the Chinese embassy— one of which
was : « I had another call that said, "Whoops. It looks like the
embassy was moved »[19] would also constitute appropriate lines of
cross-examination.
It is presently unknown to the public if Clark will even be questioned
with respect to the bombing campaign. If his statement does not cover
NATO's attack on Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic will not be entitled to
raise it at all, as the conditions obtained by the US government limit
questions asked to the content of Clark's statement[20]. The ICTY has
allowed Mr Milosevic to "seek to have the scope of examination expanded
by prior agreement of the US government"[21]. This delegation of
judicial authority by the Trial Chamber to the US government would be
comical if it were not such a striking manifestation of this
institution's incapacity to act judicially. Why can't President
Milosevic apply to the judges to request a wider scope of
cross-examination? When did the US government replace the judges on the
bench? No legal explanation or authority is provided by the ICTY's
decision to justify such an incredible measure. It is simply an
admission that this institution cannot adjudicate the facts or apply
the law with the independence and impartiality required by
international legal authority as well as its own statute, which
provides that "The Trial Chambers shall ensure that a trial is fair and
expeditious and that proceedings are conducted in accordance with the
rules of procedure and evidence, with full respect for the rights of
the accused and due regard for the protection of victims and
witnesses"[22].
The Rules of the ICTY also set out that "all proceedings before a Trial
Chamber, other than deliberations of the Chamber, shall be held in
public, unless otherwise provided."[23] Exceptions to this rule do not
include the imposition, by a foreign government, of closed sessions and
censorship of the public record, based on "national interests"[24],
even when that foreign governement is an indispensable financial
contributor to the Tribunal.[25]
"National interests"
What are "national interests", anyway? One could be forgiven for
concluding that they could mean anything. The law is silent as to the
definition of this notion. The concept of "national security" however,
has been studied and defined as a legal concept. In particular, the
question of whether and when the public can be deprived of access to
information in the name of national security was the object of an
important international legal conference held in Johannesburg in 1995,
at which the "Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of
Expression and Access to Information", were adopted. The meeting was
convened by Article 19, the International Centre Against Censorship,
and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies of the University of
Witwatersrand, South Africa[26].
A restriction to open justice, on the ground of "national
security"--and not "national interest"-- a concept which would appear
to protect less urgent concerns--is not, according to Principle 2 of
the Johannesburg Principles "legitimate unless its genuine purpose and
demonstrable effect is to protect a country's existence or its
territorial integrity against the use or threat of force, or its
capacity to respond to the threat or use of force, whether from an
external source, such as a military threat, or an internal source, such
as incitement to overthrow the government."
Did the US government argue that the very existence or territorial
integrity of the United States of America would be emperiled by Wesley
Clark's public testimony? It is unkown whether they did or not, because
the application made by the US government to require these
conditions--without which conditions they would not permit Wesley Clark
to testify at all-- was confidential. The hearing was confidential. And
the confidential decision setting out these conditions--released to the
public over two weeks after being handed down--fails to offer any
indication of which "national interests" were invoked by the United
States government to justify such sweeping measures of secrecy.
The Johannesburg Principles also set out what would not constitute a
legitimate restriction to a public trial on the basis of national
security:
"In particular, a restriction sought to be justified on the ground of
national security is not legitimate if its genuine purpose or
demonstrable effect is to protect interests unrelated to national
security, including, for example, to protect a government from
embarrassment or exposure of wrongdoing, or to conceal information
about the functioning of its public institutions, or to entrench a
particular ideology, or to suppress industrial unrest."[27]
Clearly, the fact that the ICTY would accept the imposition by the US
of conditions which egregiously violate one of the most fundamental
principles of international law--public trials-- without a public case
ever having being made to justify such an unprecedented restriction,
should thoroughly dispell any myths about the fairness of these
proceedings.
Consider, in addition, that Wesley Clark is very much a public figure,
he is running for President of the United States, and accordingly, his
testimony should be subject to public scrutiny. And note that General
Clark, retired, testifies against Slobodan Milosevic in interviews
almost every day-- and frequently engages in derisive imitations of him
which mock his Slavic-accented English[28]. Could it be that the ICTY
is protecting the US "national interest" in the public and media by not
hearing Slobodan Milosevic effectively cross-examine Wesley Clark?
The US governement has succeeded in insulating Clark's testimony from
public scrutiny in the name of "national interests". But why stop at
General Clark? And why would other NATO countries fail to seize this
opportunity to testify as accusers without having to bear the
consequences of a transparent process? This precedent will no doubt be
invoked to protect other American officials[29] from the strains of
public trials, and in turn, serve to further secure US impunity under
international law. US impunity is already well-established, considering
the American governement's refusal to submit to the jurisdiction of the
International Criminal Court for fear of "political prosecutions"[30].
Such a concern, when viewed in light of the massive US contribution to
both ad hoc Security Council tribunals, the ICTY and ICTR-- from which
one may presume that the US has culled evidence of unfounded,
politically-motivated prosecutions[31]--elevates disingenuity to
dizzying heights.
Conflict of interest?
The right to a fair and public trial is the right to a fair and public
trial before an independent and impartial tribunal. Every international
legal instrument recognizes this basic principle[32].
Wesley Clark will presumably be testifying about his role as NATO
Supreme Commander. The US is a NATO country--arguably the NATO country.
As Wesley Clark put it: "we're the leaders of NATO, we set up NATO,
it's our organization."[33] The ICTY is in a difficult position to act
as an independent judicial body, because NATO has stated that "it is
one" with the Tribunal. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, on May 16th
1999, told the press that when "Justice Arbour starts her
investigation, she will because we allow her to. (…) NATO countries are
those who have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are
amongst the majority financiers (…)so let me assure that we and the
Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals brought to
justice and I am certain that when Justice Arbour goes to Kosovo and
looks at the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav
nationality(…)"[34]
It is difficult to imagine a more damning admisssion. By stating that
its constituent countries are the Tribunal's major financiers, NATO is
in essence claiming to pay the salaries of the judges and prosecutor of
the ICTY. And that statement is somewhat inconsistent with the
requirements of institutional independence and impartiality for a
criminal trial. And when NATO's former Supreme Commander,-- a board
member of George Soros' International Crisis Group, alongside Canadian
Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour[35] -- is given an opportunity to
testify in the absence of the press because this is a condition imposed
by the United States -- any appearance of justice, beyond the cosmetic
trappings of judges' robes, and the ritual incantions "all rise" and
"be seated" (although who will be there to rise and be seated?) vanish
in a puff of smoke.
Tiphaine Dickson
© 2003
(Tiphaine Dickson criminal lawyer based Montréal. She acted as lead
defence counsel in one of the first ad hoc genocide prosecutions before
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania.)
[1]Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights states:
"In the determination of any criminal charge against him, or of his
rights and obligations in a suit at law, everyone shall be entitled to
a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial
tribunal established by law..."
Paragraph 106 of the Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to
Paragraph 2 of Security Council Resolution 808 (1993),(S/25704),
recognized the application of international legal safeguards to the
ICTY:
"It is axiomatic that the International Tribunal must fully respect
internationally recognized standards regarding the rights of the
accused at all stages of its proceedings. In the view of the
Secretary-General, such internationally recognized standards are, in
particular, contained in article 14 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights."
[2]United Nations Security Council Resolution 827 (1993).
[3]"Speaking during the debate on the resolution that committed the
U.N. Security Council to the creation of the ICTY, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright asserted that "[t]his will be no victor's tribunal.
The only victor that will prevail in this endeavour is the truth.",
Remarks of ICTY President Theodor Meron, October 7th, 2003, before the
Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, (CSCE), Washington,
http://www.csce.gov/witness.cfm?briefing_id=269&testimony_id=437
[4]"The role of the Tribunal cannot be over emphasized. Far from being
a vehicle for revenge, it is a tool for promoting reconciliation and
restoring true peace." First Annual Report of the ICTY, (A/49/342 -
S/1994/1007) submitted by former ICTY President Judge Gabrielle Kirk
McDonald.
[5]"the Security Council stated in Resolution 808 (1993) that it was
convinced that in the particular circumstances of the former
Yugoslavia, the establishment of an international tribunal would bring
about the achievement of the aim of putting an end to such crimes and
of taking effective measures to bring to justice the persons
responsible for them, and would contribute to the restoration and
maintenance of peace." Paragraph 26 of the Report of the
Secretary-General Pursuant to Paragraph 2 of Security Council
Resolution 808 (1993), Presented 3 May 1993 (S/25704). Security Council
Resolution 827 adopted this reasoning as a justification to establish
the ICTY.
[6]Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, first President of the ICTY, made
this statement at an awards ceremony held at the U.S. Supreme Court
on April 5th, 1999: "[W]e benefited from the strong support of
concerned governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary
Albright. As the permanent representative to the United Nations, she
had worked with unceasing resolve to establish the Tribunal. Indeed, we
often refer to her as the ‘Mother of the Tribunal.’" Quoted in
Prosecute NATO, George Szamuely, New York Press,
http://www.balkanpeace.org/library/fa_2000/jan/fa250100.html.
[7]See Online Newshour, June 10th 1999:
JIM LEHRER: Does it bother you when people called it Madeleine's war?
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well, I had... it had never occurred to me that
anybody would call a war after me, but it doesn't bother me at all that
people know that I believed, as did President Clinton, that this was a
situation that could not go on.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/europe/jan-june99/albright_6-10.html
[8]"Decision on Prosecution's Application for a Witness Pursuant to
Rule 70 (B)", Prosecutor v. Milosevic, IT-02-54-T, 30 October 2003,
Confidential, released November 16th, 2003.
[9]As military aide to Richard Holbrooke during the 1995 Dayton Peace
Accords, as Director for Strategic Plans and Policy within the Joint
Chiefs of Staff from 1994 to 1997, and as Supreme Allied Commander of
NATO from 1997 to 2000.
[10]Brendan O'Neill, "How We Trained Al-Qa'eda", The Spectator,
November 22nd, 2003,
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?2003-09-13&id=3499#articletop.
[11]Id., Craig Pyesjosh Meyer and William C. Rempe, "Terrorists Use
Bosnia as Base and Sanctuary", Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001;
Michel Chossudovsky, "Regime Rotation in America: Wesley Clark, Osama
bin Laden and the 2004 Presidential Elections", Center for Research on
Globalization, October 22nd, 2003,
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO310B.html.
[12] Cliff Kincaid, "Wesley Clark's Ties To Muslim Terrorists",
Accuracy in Media, September 17, 2003; Brendan O'Neill, "How We Trained
Al-Qa'eda", The Spectator, November 22nd, 2003,
http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?2003-09-13&id=3499#articletop;
Craig Pyesjosh Meyer and William C. Rempe, "Terrorists Use Bosnia as
Base and Sanctuary", Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2001; Michel
Chossudovsky, "Regime Rotation in America: Wesley Clark, Osama bin
Laden and the 2004 Presidential Elections", Center for Research on
Globalization, October 22nd, 2003,
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO310B.html; Nikolaos Stavrou,
"Balkan Branches of the Terror Network?", Washington Times, October 21,
2001; George Szamuely, "Home-Grown Terrorism", New York Press, December
28, 1999.
[13]Amnesty International, Fair Trials Manual,
http://www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/fairtrial/indxftm_b.htm#14
[14]Although the ICTY's Statute provides that the Tribunal is to be
financed by the regular budget of the UN, which constitutes a safeguard
against the violation of judicial independence, the Tribunal has
received donations from governments, including the US, as well as
private foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation. See paragraph
16 of the First Annual Report by the President of the ICTY,
http://www.un.org/icty/rappannu-e/1994/index.htm. The ICTY has also
received donations from George Soros as well as corporations. Of
interest is the "private" financing of exhumations, for the Office of
the Prosecutor: " Funding for mass grave exhumations in the former
Yugoslavia is not part of the Tribunal's regular budget but comes
primarily from PHR (Physicians for Human Rights-ed.). That organisation
acts as a conduit for funding from IGOs and NGOs to the Tribunals for
the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. To date, a number of foundations,
including the US-based John Merck, Rockefeller and Soros (Open Society
Institute) Foundations, and the Dutch organisation Novib, have made
donations of cash, equipment and personnel." See
http://www.un.org/icty/BL/08art1e.htm.
[15]"Meet the Press", November 16th, 2003,
http://www.msnbc.com/news/994273.asp; Peter J. Boyer, "General Clark's
Battles", The New Yorker, November 17th, 2003.
[16]Reporters sans frontières, November 2000 Report, "Serbian
Broadcasting: Chronicle of Martyrdom Foretold",
http://www.rsf.org/rsf/uk/html/europe/rapport/serbie_rts.html. Both
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have concluded that the
bombing of RTS-- which killed 16 people-- was carried out in violation
of international law, id.
[17]Robert Fisk, "Taken In By the NATO Line," The Independent, July 2,
1999.
[18]"NATO used speeded-up film to excuse civilian deaths in Kosovo:
newspaper", AFP, January 6, 2001: " (…) US General Wesley Clark,
shortly afterwards showed two videotapes of the train appearing to be
traveling fast on the bridge, and said it had then been impossible to
alter the missiles' trajectories. The Frankfurt newspaper said the two
videotapes were both shown at three times normal speed. A spokesman for
NATO'S military command in Mons, Belgium, acknowledged in a telephone
interview with AFP that those images had been altered by "a technical
problem." The footage, recorded by a camera installed in the warhead of
one of the missiles that destroyed the bridge and train were altered
during the process of being copied for screening, said the spokesman.
He said NATO was aware of the problem since last October but did not
consider it "useful" to disclose it."
[19]"About five in the morning, I had another call that said, "Whoops.
It looks like the embassy was moved." Interview, General Wesley Clark,
Frontline, PBS,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/interviews/
clark.html
[20]ICTY Decision, supra.
[21]Id.
[22]ICTY Statute, Article 20, paragraph 1.
[23]Id., paragraph 4.
[24]Rules 70 and 79 of the ICTY Rules of Procedure and Evidence
exhaustively set out permissible exceptions to the requirement of
public hearings.
[25]The President of the ICTY, Judge Theodor Meron, stated the
following, last October 7th, before the Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Washington: "As you know, the United
States took a leading role in the creation of the ICTY and remains a
staunch supporter. The U.S.'s financial contribution accounts for
approximately a quarter of the Tribunal's annual budget of
approximately $ 120 million."
http://www.csce.gov/witness.cfm?briefing_id=269&testimony_id=437
[26]http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/excep/johannesburg.html
[27]Johannesburg Principles, Principle 2 (B).
[28]N.R. Kleinfield, "General Clark on the Hustings: Complexity and
Contradiction", New York Times, November 23rd, 2003,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/23/politics/campaigns/23CLAR.html; Seth
Rogovoy, "A General for President?", September 13th, 2003, The Atlantic
Monthly, Tom Junod, "The General", August 2003, Esquire.
[29] Christopher Marquis, "US Seeks Safeguards on Diplomats Testifying
at Milosevic Trial", New York Times, June 13th, 2002 Global Policy
Forum- International
Justice,http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/tribunals/2002/
0613mil.htm
[30] US Department of State, International Information Programs, "U.S.
Restates Objections to International Criminal Court U.S. statement to
General Assembly Sixth Committee", October 14th, 2002:
"In a speech to the General Assembly's sixth committee, which deals
with legal matters, Nicholas Rostow explained the U.S. position on the
court. "The United States is concerned about the danger of politically
motivated prosecutions," Rostow said. "Examples of investigations or
prosecutions based on political agenda, not evidence and neutral
prosecutorial judgement abound. The structure of the ICC makes such
unacceptable proceedings possible."
http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/usandun/02101615.htm
[31]Id.
[32]Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 10; International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 14; European Convention
on Human Rights, Article 6; African Charter of Rights, Articles 7 (d)
and 26; American Convention, Article 8(1); Basic Principles on the
Independence of the Judiciary. According to the UN Human Rights
Committee, the right to be tried before an independent tribunal "is an
absolute right that may suffer no exception": González del Río v. Peru,
(263/1987), 28 October 1992, Report of the HRC, vol. II, (A/48/40),
1993, paragraph 20.
[33]June 20, 2001, Uncommon Knowledge, Transcript 606: Waging Modern
War, www.uncoommonknowledge.org/01-02/606.html
[34]Press Conference, 16 May 1999.
www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990516b.htm
[35]http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/home/index.cfm?id=1139&l=1
---
The Hague, 15 September 2003
8:00 a.m. Demonstrations in front of the Tribunal
9:00 a.m. ICDSM Press Conference at Bel Air Hotel
ICDSM lawyer Tiphaine Dickson will give a statement
and answer questions of the press
---
SLOBODA urgently needs your donation.
Please find the detailed instructions at:
http://www.sloboda.org.yu/pomoc.htm
To join or help this struggle, visit:
http://www.sloboda.org.yu/ (Sloboda/Freedom association)
http://www.icdsm.org/ (the international committee to defend Slobodan
Milosevic)
http://www.free-slobo.de/ (German section of ICDSM)
http://www.icdsm-us.org/ (US section of ICDSM)
http://www.icdsmireland.org/ (ICDSM Ireland)
http://www.wpc-in.org/ (world peace council)
http://www.geocities.com/b_antinato/ (Balkan antiNATO center)
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27
00043 Ciampino (Roma)
email: icdsm-italia@...
Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006
intestato ad Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA
causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC
Da: ICDSM Italia
Data: Lun 15 Dic 2003 14:18:53 Europe/Rome
A: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Un vero criminale di guerra all'Aia - come
testimone anziche' come accusato !!!
WESLEY CLARK: ex comandante della NATO, responsabile di centinaia morti
civili nella primavera 1999.
Un vero criminale di guerra e' oggi all'Aia - ma come testimone, per
una seduta SEGRETA del "Tribunale", anziche' come accusato. Vergogna!
Contemporaneamente, l'ex segretario della NATO Solana, corresponsabile
di quel crimine, si reca in visita di cortesia dalle sue vittime...
La seguente documentazione ci e' stata inviata da Vladimir Krsljanin
della associazione SLOBODA (Belgrado)
=========
The Hague, 15 September 2003
8:00 a.m. Demonstrations in front of the Tribunal
9:00 a.m. ICDSM Press Conference at Bel Air Hotel
ICDSM lawyer Tiphaine Dickson will give a statement
and answer questions of the press
=========
EU Official Announcement
Brussels, 12 December 2003
S0254/03
Javier SOLANA,
EU High Representative for the CFSP, will visit Skopje and Belgrade15
December 2003
Javier SOLANA, EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and
Security Policy, will visit Skopje and Belgrade on Monday, 15 December
2003.
In Skopje, Mr Solana will participate in the ceremony marking the
termination of the EU Military Operation CONCORDIA and the launch of
the EU Police Mission PROXIMA. The EU High Representative will also
meet with the President of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,
MrBoris Trajkovski,and the Prime Minister, Mr Branko Crvenkovski.
Later on the same day, in Belgrade, Mr Solana will meet with the
President of Serbia and Montenegro, Mr Svetozar Marovic, the Serbian
Prime Minister, Mr Zoran Zivkovic, and Serbia and Montenegro's Minister
of Foreign Affairs, Mr Goran Svilanovic and Minister of Defence, Mr
Boris Tadic. The EU High Representative will also meet with other
members of the government of Serbia, as well as with leaders of the
political parties, ahead of the Parliamentary elections of 28 December.
---
Former NATO commander in Hague for testimony | 19:29 | B92 Reuters
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27
00043 Ciampino (Roma)
email: icdsm-italia@...
Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006
intestato ad Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA
causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC
L'utilizzo, da parte tua, di Yahoo! Gruppi è soggetto alle
http://it.docs.yahoo.com/info/utos.html
Data: Lun 15 Dic 2003 14:18:53 Europe/Rome
A: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Un vero criminale di guerra all'Aia - come
testimone anziche' come accusato !!!
WESLEY CLARK: ex comandante della NATO, responsabile di centinaia morti
civili nella primavera 1999.
Un vero criminale di guerra e' oggi all'Aia - ma come testimone, per
una seduta SEGRETA del "Tribunale", anziche' come accusato. Vergogna!
Contemporaneamente, l'ex segretario della NATO Solana, corresponsabile
di quel crimine, si reca in visita di cortesia dalle sue vittime...
La seguente documentazione ci e' stata inviata da Vladimir Krsljanin
della associazione SLOBODA (Belgrado)
=========
The Hague, 15 September 2003
8:00 a.m. Demonstrations in front of the Tribunal
9:00 a.m. ICDSM Press Conference at Bel Air Hotel
ICDSM lawyer Tiphaine Dickson will give a statement
and answer questions of the press
=========
EU Official Announcement
Brussels, 12 December 2003
S0254/03
Javier SOLANA,
EU High Representative for the CFSP, will visit Skopje and Belgrade15
December 2003
Javier SOLANA, EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and
Security Policy, will visit Skopje and Belgrade on Monday, 15 December
2003.
In Skopje, Mr Solana will participate in the ceremony marking the
termination of the EU Military Operation CONCORDIA and the launch of
the EU Police Mission PROXIMA. The EU High Representative will also
meet with the President of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,
MrBoris Trajkovski,and the Prime Minister, Mr Branko Crvenkovski.
Later on the same day, in Belgrade, Mr Solana will meet with the
President of Serbia and Montenegro, Mr Svetozar Marovic, the Serbian
Prime Minister, Mr Zoran Zivkovic, and Serbia and Montenegro's Minister
of Foreign Affairs, Mr Goran Svilanovic and Minister of Defence, Mr
Boris Tadic. The EU High Representative will also meet with other
members of the government of Serbia, as well as with leaders of the
political parties, ahead of the Parliamentary elections of 28 December.
---
Former NATO commander in Hague for testimony | 19:29 | B92 Reuters
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27
00043 Ciampino (Roma)
email: icdsm-italia@...
Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006
intestato ad Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA
causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC
L'utilizzo, da parte tua, di Yahoo! Gruppi è soggetto alle
http://it.docs.yahoo.com/info/utos.html
TIPICO ESEMPIO DI "FAIR TRIAL" PER GRANDI DITTATORI
ROMANIA: SPARITI DA ARCHIVI DOCUMENTI PROCESSO CEAUSESCU
(ANSA) - BUCAREST, 12 DIC - I documenti del processo all'ex dittatore
comunista Nicolae Ceausescu e di sua moglie Elena, fucilati durante la
rivoluzione del dicembre 1989, sono spariti dagli archivi del Tribunale
militare di Bucarest.
Lo hanno annunciato a Bucarest ufficiali del Tribunale militare della
capitale romena, i quali hanno informato che negli archivi sono
scomparse le due copie della sentenza definitiva e del verbale con il
quale si certificava che la sentenza era stata eseguita.
Il processo Ceausescu e' uno dei piu' controversi atti di giustizia
nella storia della Romania moderna. Negli ultimi anni, molti giudici
hanno rilevato numerose illegalita' commesse durante il processo. Fra
queste, il fatto che l'allora leader del Fronte della salvezza
nazionale (Fsn) e attuale presidente della Repubblica, Ion Iliescu, non
aveva il diritto di dare l'ordine della creazione del Tribunale
militare straordinario, davanti al quale si svolse poi il processo
contro la coppia Ceausescu. L'Fsn era la prima forza politica
democratica costituita sin dai primi giorni della rivoluzione
anti-comunista.
Il processo Ceausescu si svolse nella base dell'esercito di Targoviste
il 25 dicembre 1989. Il procuratore militare Dan Voinea aveva chiesto
al Tribunale militare straordinario di condannare l'ex dittatore e sua
moglie per genocidio. Tra le imputazioni figuravano accuse di aver
minato i poteri dello stato romeno con azioni armate contro i
manifestanti anticomunisti, di aver minato l'economia nazionale e di
aver cercato di lasciare il paese per entrare in possesso di un milione
di dollari depositato negli anni in varie banche estere.
Tutte le accuse erano scritte nella requisitoria finale, ma anche
questo documento e' sparito dagli archivi del Tribunale militare di
Bucarest. La condanna a morte fu pronunciata alla fine di un rapido
processo. I coniugi avrebbero potuto presentare ricorso contro la
sentenza tramite l'avvocato loro assegnato, Nichi Teodorescu, ma l'ex
dittatore - che non riconosceva la legalita' del Tribunale militare
straordinario e dell'intero processo - rifiuto' questa possibilita' e
la sentenza divenne percio' definitiva.
La condanna a morte fu eseguita subito e i due furono fucilati. Il
Tribunale militare di Bucarest ha rifiutato di dare alla stampa
particolari sulla scomparsa dei documenti, ma ha assicurato che i
documenti stessi saranno rifatti in base alle testimonianze dei giudici
presenti al processo. Il procuratore militare Vionea, pero' - che
rappresentava l'accusa nel processo Ceausescu - si suicido' nei primi
mesi del 1990. (ANSA). COR-RED
12/12/2003 15:45
ROMANIA: SPARITI DA ARCHIVI DOCUMENTI PROCESSO CEAUSESCU
(ANSA) - BUCAREST, 12 DIC - I documenti del processo all'ex dittatore
comunista Nicolae Ceausescu e di sua moglie Elena, fucilati durante la
rivoluzione del dicembre 1989, sono spariti dagli archivi del Tribunale
militare di Bucarest.
Lo hanno annunciato a Bucarest ufficiali del Tribunale militare della
capitale romena, i quali hanno informato che negli archivi sono
scomparse le due copie della sentenza definitiva e del verbale con il
quale si certificava che la sentenza era stata eseguita.
Il processo Ceausescu e' uno dei piu' controversi atti di giustizia
nella storia della Romania moderna. Negli ultimi anni, molti giudici
hanno rilevato numerose illegalita' commesse durante il processo. Fra
queste, il fatto che l'allora leader del Fronte della salvezza
nazionale (Fsn) e attuale presidente della Repubblica, Ion Iliescu, non
aveva il diritto di dare l'ordine della creazione del Tribunale
militare straordinario, davanti al quale si svolse poi il processo
contro la coppia Ceausescu. L'Fsn era la prima forza politica
democratica costituita sin dai primi giorni della rivoluzione
anti-comunista.
Il processo Ceausescu si svolse nella base dell'esercito di Targoviste
il 25 dicembre 1989. Il procuratore militare Dan Voinea aveva chiesto
al Tribunale militare straordinario di condannare l'ex dittatore e sua
moglie per genocidio. Tra le imputazioni figuravano accuse di aver
minato i poteri dello stato romeno con azioni armate contro i
manifestanti anticomunisti, di aver minato l'economia nazionale e di
aver cercato di lasciare il paese per entrare in possesso di un milione
di dollari depositato negli anni in varie banche estere.
Tutte le accuse erano scritte nella requisitoria finale, ma anche
questo documento e' sparito dagli archivi del Tribunale militare di
Bucarest. La condanna a morte fu pronunciata alla fine di un rapido
processo. I coniugi avrebbero potuto presentare ricorso contro la
sentenza tramite l'avvocato loro assegnato, Nichi Teodorescu, ma l'ex
dittatore - che non riconosceva la legalita' del Tribunale militare
straordinario e dell'intero processo - rifiuto' questa possibilita' e
la sentenza divenne percio' definitiva.
La condanna a morte fu eseguita subito e i due furono fucilati. Il
Tribunale militare di Bucarest ha rifiutato di dare alla stampa
particolari sulla scomparsa dei documenti, ma ha assicurato che i
documenti stessi saranno rifatti in base alle testimonianze dei giudici
presenti al processo. Il procuratore militare Vionea, pero' - che
rappresentava l'accusa nel processo Ceausescu - si suicido' nei primi
mesi del 1990. (ANSA). COR-RED
12/12/2003 15:45
