From: icdsm-italia @...
Subject: [icdsm-italia] Sara Flounders on the Milosevic Case
Date: April 1, 2006 11:53:06 AM GMT+02:00
To: icdsm-italia @yahoogroups.com
http://www.workers.org/2006/world/milosevic-0330/
Milosevic's death: political assassination blamed on victim
By Sara Flounders
Co-Director, International Action Center, NYC
March 16, 2006
In the summer of 2004 I met with former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic in Scheveningen prison when I was approved as a defense
witness. Before I could get in, I had to pass four totally separate
check points, unable to take in anything but papers. Each level of
security was more rigid than the one before.
No one who has met with President Milosevic over the past four years
would believe he would risk killing himself rather than finishing his
trial. And no one who visited Scheveningen in The Hague would believe
the outlandish claims that somehow he was able to smuggle in
un-prescribed medications on a regular basis. They would instead
suspect that the authorities were desperately trying to cover up their
own crimes.
My role as witness was based on my trip to Yugoslavia in the spring of
1999, during the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing. I visited bombed schools,
hospitals, heating plants and market places, recording the harm done
to civilians. In addition, I had written since 1993 on the
behind-the-scenes U.S. role in the strangulation and forced
dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
Even after my name was accepted as a defense witness, it was a
complicated and lengthy procedure to make the visit. Though all was
approved on the day of the visit, it still took four hours to get
through the checkpoints into the special unit inside the prison where
the defendants for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) were kept totally segregated from general population
and closely monitored.
Scheveningen prison is a maximum-security high-tech facility.
Milosevic and other indicted prisoners are housed in a special prison
unit within the larger prison. This section is spread over four floors
with 12 cells each. The unit is specially patrolled by United Nations
guards. Cameras are everywhere. Every movement of the prisoners is
monitored and controlled. When the president was first placed in his
cell, lights were kept on 24 hours a day and every motion was monitored.
WHERE DID RIFAMPICIN COME FROM?
Now the Dutch authorities claim that Milosevic was taking a rare,
difficult-to-acquire antibiotic used to treat leprosy or tuberculosis
that has the unique ability to counteract the medicine he was taking
to control his high blood pressure. How did this medicine, rifampicin,
get into Milosevic's system? He was held in a maximum security prison
in triple lock down in a special contained unit within a larger Dutch
prison once used by the Nazis to detain Dutch resistance fighters.
When rifampicin was found last Jan. 12 in Milosevic's blood, the ICTY
kept the report of the blood tests secret, even from Milosevic and his
doctors, who were complaining that something terribly wrong was
damaging the defendant's health. While the prisoner and his defense
committee and assistant lawyers were demanding health information, the
ICTY officials sat on this report. If ICTY officials responsible for
Milosevic's health really believed he was sneaking toxic medications
into the prison, why hadn't they publicized this report much earlier?
DELAYS HURT MILOSEVIC
Equally outlandish are the claims that Milosevic staged his illness to
delay the trial. The prosecution delayed the trial, first by adding
charges against the president regarding Croatia and Bosnia when they
realized they had no war-crimes case on the original Kosovo charges,
then by bringing hundreds of witnesses to generate 500,000 pages of
prosecution testimony from February 2002 to February 2004.
Each time Milosevic was too sick to continue in court, the prosecution
moved to impose counsel and to take away the prisoner's right to
present his own defense. Milosevic was determined to use the trial as
a platform to defend not only himself but the people of Yugoslavia,
and to indict the U.S., Germany and the NATO powers for their role in
the criminal destruction of his country. He welcomed the trial as the
only platform where he could make the historical record. In his words
to the court he constantly described why, despite his bad health, he
was determined to continue.
When I met Milosevic it was in the special room that was the only
place where the ICTY allowed him to work or have the court papers to
prepare for his defense. Whenever his blood pressure rose and he was
unable to continue the court sessions, he was also barred from any
access to his defense materials.
During each step of the trial Milosevic's cardiovascular problems,
especially his high blood pressure had resulted in several delays in
the trial. At each step the ICTY officials tried to use the issue of
his health in constant efforts to deny him the right to conduct his
own defense. Neither the illness nor the delays helped his defense.
The ICTY charged that Milosevic was secretly medicating himself and
avoiding taking prescribed medicines. Milosevic answered this charge
himself for the court record on Sept. 1, 2004: "You probably don't
know the practice in your own Detention Unit. I take my medication in
the presence of guards. I'm given them. I take them in the presence of
the guard, and the guard writes down in the book the exact time when I
ingested those medicines."
Despite the life-threatening cardiovascular risk raised in every
dispute with the prosecution, tribunal officials refused even to
secure regular check-ups of the president's health condition. They
also denied access for months to specialists who were willing to come
to Scheveningen, delaying his care.
The president's own explanation of his problem was more consistent and
credible than the ICTY's. In a letter addressed to the Russian Embassy
two days before he died, Milosevic writes that he has taken no
antibiotics in more than four years. He asks why the medical report on
the discovery of rifampicin was kept secret from him for almost two
months. He writes that he believes that "active steps are being taken
to destroy my health." He warns that he is sure he is being poisoned
and that his life is in danger.
A POLITICAL TRIBUNAL
The ICTY's handling of President Milosevic's death has been like its
handling of the entire trial: an attempt to blame the victim for the
crime.
The ICTY is not a real international court, with the ability to try
any accused war criminal. It is a political court set up by the UN
Security Council at the insistence of Secretary of State Madeline
Albright in 1993 in violation of the UN Charter. Its scope is limited
to trying the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and the vast majority
of prisoners are Serbs. It is a propaganda apparatus and internment
camp for political prisoners disguised as an unbiased court. It aims
to punish the victims for the crimes committed against them and to
absolve the imperialist powers who invaded, bombed, dismembered and
forced the privatization of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia.
When Milosevic discussed the trial with me, his scope of historical
knowledge, his energy despite his illness, cut through my own jet-lag
and fatigue from the four-hour entrance hurdle and allowed us to
finish the interview with enthusiasm for the next step of the tribunal.
Now the world is asked to believe that Milosevic is responsible for
his own death. It is a scenario so incredibly complex, an elaborate
suicide story that is as improbable as the charges he was facing. The
bought-and-paid-for corporate media is accepting and propagating the
story of his death in the same servile fashion they accepted the very
existence of this illegal court and the justification for the
destruction of Yugoslavia.
Milosevic is now gone. But his summation answering two years of the
prosecution case and his opening defense speech live on. He has left a
ringing indictment of U.S. and European big-power intervention in the
Balkans in a historic document in an "I accuse" format. His speech,
which contains extensive documentation and factual detail, has been
published in Serbian, Greek, French, Russian and English. This
response, "The Defense Speaks—for History and the Future," (IAC 2006)
will stand long after the tawdry war propaganda has collapsed.
---
http://www.swans.com/library/art12/zig090.html
The Milosevic Case
John Catalinotto Interviews Sara Flounders
(Swans - March 27, 2006)
John Catalinotto: Sara, you have been active as a writer and political
organizer since the breakup of Yugoslavia was first threatened in the
early 1990s. What was your reaction when you heard that former
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had died in Scheveningen Prison
in The Hague and that the media was claiming he might have committed
suicide or purposely taken medications that compromised his health?
Sara Flounders: My first reaction was distress that he had died while
in the hands of the same US and NATO forces that had destroyed his
country, Yugoslavia, and which had refused to allow him the medical
care he and his defenders sought, sorrow for his family who had been
prevented from visiting him on a regular basis, and anger that the
same demonization of him that had gone on for the past 16 years spewed
out after his death. As an approved defense witness, I had interviewed
with Milosevic on June 28, 2004. I knew on the one hand how the latest
accusations were as contrived and filled with contradictions as the
whole case against him was, and on the other hand how people
unfamiliar with the facts might be deceived by all the lies.
No one who has met with President Milosevic since he was kidnapped
from Belgrade to The Hague in June of 2001 or who watched him
cross-examine government witnesses during sessions of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) could
believe he would kill himself or even risk killing himself rather than
finish his defense. By choosing to defend himself during what was
already a four-year-long hearing he could use the ICTY as a platform
to make his political case against NATO, and he did this well.
Anyone wanting to learn the recent history of the Balkans could
benefit from reading Milosevic's opening defense speech, given on
August 31-September 1, 2004. With it, he has left a ringing indictment
of US and European big-power intervention in the Balkans in a historic
document that follows a J'Accuse format. His speech, which contains
extensive documentation and factual detail, has been published in
Serbian, Greek, French, Russian, and English. This response, which the
International Action Center published just a few months ago in English
under the title, The Defense Speaks for History and the Future, will
stand long after the tawdry war propaganda has collapsed.
And no one who visited Scheveningen in The Hague would believe the
outlandish claims that somehow Milosevic was able to smuggle in
unprescribed medications on a regular basis. Even after my name was
accepted as a defense witness, it was a complicated and lengthy
procedure to get through to Milosevic. Before I could get in, I had to
pass four totally separate checkpoints and was unable to take in
anything but papers. Each level of security was more rigid than the
one before. Though all was approved on the day of the visit, it still
took four hours to get through the checkpoints into the special unit
inside the prison where ICTY defendants were kept -- totally
segregated from the general population and closely monitored.
JC: How did you come to visit Milosevic in Scheveningen and what were
your impressions of him?
SF: My role as witness was based both on my political knowledge -- I
had co-edited two books on its recent history -- and on my trip to
Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 during the bombing. I went then with
a delegation from the International Action Center that accompanied
former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. In the middle of the 78-day
US/NATO bombing campaign -- it was in mid-May, I visited bombed
schools, hospitals, heating plants, and market places, recording the
destruction done to civilians, what NATO press spokesperson Jamie Shea
in 1999 used to call "collateral damage," although some of those
giving orders later admitted that the civilian infrastructure and the
morale of the Yugoslavs were the main targets of the bombing campaign.
After the cease-fire in June 1999, NATO discovered it had destroyed
only 13 tanks in Kosovo and killed maybe a hundred Yugoslav soldiers,
but had killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians in Serbia,
including hundreds of children, rocket-bombed the television
broadcasting center and the Chinese Embassy, and had polluted the
entire region by bombing the chemical plants at Pancevo near Belgrade.
The day I met Milosevic I had flown over from the U.S., suffered from
lack of sleep and jet lag, and had just gone through four hours of
unpleasant security checks. Milosevic had high blood pressure, but he
was energetic and positive throughout the entire interview, which
lasted more than three hours. He had a clear grasp of what he wanted
from my testimony. He was also in complete command of the history of
the region. Whatever my own desire to rest might have been, his
enthusiasm kept me focused on the work. One got the impression that
his best moments were planning and then carrying out his case.
In the hours we met he expressed no complaints about the physical
conditions under which he was held. He didn't complain about the food,
painfully strict security conditions, lack of being allowed to visit
with any of his family, or any of the other things that the ICTY was
using in an attempt to break his morale. His only complaint was that
the ICTY was able to deny him any access to any preparation material
or files during days and days of imposed rest, anytime his blood
pressure was high or he was sick. These delays further increased the
pressure on him, because each court-imposed "rest" further limited his
preparation time. None of the material was allowed into his cell, so
the hours that he could work were very strictly limited. All of this
was part of the pressure to get him to give up on presenting his own
defense.
He spoke English fluently so we needed no interpreter. Before the ICTY
officials, he spoke only Serbian -- not only was that his right, but
he was aiming his statements at the people back home, who were the
only ones, after the first week, who were able to follow the trial
daily in detail. The reason his trial rebuttals and presentations were
such popular viewing in Serbia every evening after Milosevic had
cross-examined prosecution witnesses or later on the court days when
he presented his witnesses, was that these were familiar figures and
events to people in Serbia. The population constantly saw him as
battling Western propaganda and demonization, not battling for his
personal reputation but always putting the events in the larger
political context, yet taking up the minutest details.
Milosevic had hundreds of files, lists and lists of potential defense
witnesses. Every potential witness had to be approved by the ICTY. He
read an enormous amount and knew at the tip of his tongue each
person's particular view, specific contribution, and general political
orientation. He also had a very detailed and fully developed defense
strategy. There were stacks of books in his office cell and stacks of
files of transcripts with stickers marking specific points to raise or
rebut.
During our interview, Milosevic referred often to his copy of Hidden
Agenda: the U.S.-NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia, in which he had written
many comments in the margins of the text. The book, which the
International Action Center published in 2002, was organized so as to
present a case of war crimes against the NATO leaders and generals. It
followed the outline of a people's tribunal we organized in June 2000
charging [President Bill] Clinton and the other NATO presidents, prime
ministers, chancellors, and generals with war crimes regarding the
aggression against Yugoslavia. Ramsey Clark had prepared our
indictment, and it was all laid out in the form of violations of
international laws.
Most important for Milosevic's work, the book included people's
efforts from around the world to gather the evidence of U.S./NATO's
crimes against Yugoslavia during the bombing and it framed the
political role of these bombings in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the
light of international law and war crimes. These were the exact points
Milosevic wanted to develop in his defense. It was obvious our book
was a useful tool for his own preparation, even if he brought up
additional topics or gave a different emphasis.
JC: You say Milosevic had a different emphasis. What do you mean?
SF: In our people's tribunal, although we presented a case against the
leaders of other NATO countries, the main part of our argument exposed
the role of the United States. Also, we were concentrating mainly on
what is called the Kosovo war, that is, the 1999 military assault on
Yugoslavia with the excuse of defending "human rights" of the ethnic
Albanian people who were a majority of the population in the Kosovo
province of Serbia. Milosevic had to defend his role during the
conflicts involving Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina also, and he paid
close attention to the role of the German government -- which was
significant in subverting Yugoslavia in the early 1990s -- and to the
role played by agents of the Vatican. He also developed the historical
role of both Germany and the Catholic Church hierarchy in the Balkans.
Regarding the US role, he used many of the same points we did, but he
also knew -- from the inside -- of the duplicity of US diplomacy.
JC: If the war in Kosovo wasn't fought over human rights, what was
behind this war?
SF: Yugoslavia was the last standing pro-socialist country in Eastern
Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also the last
remaining country whose government had not capitulated to the Western
European powers and the United States and given them free entry to the
economy. For that reason alone these powers aimed at what would today
be called "regime change" first in Yugoslavia and then, after they
succeeded in dividing the Yugoslav Federation into weak countries they
could easily rule, in the remaining independent regime in Serbia and
Montenegro headed by the Socialist Party of Serbia, Milosevic's party.
In addition, these big powers, especially the U.S. and Germany, had
their own rivalries and their own interests at stake in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia has strategic importance. It lies on the oil pipeline route
from the Caspian Sea region to Western Europe. It has a skilled,
educated workforce. It is in what the rulers in Berlin consider their
"back yard," just as Washington looks at Latin America. German
diplomacy and subversion had made key inroads in the early 1990s by
backing the secessionist regimes in Croatia and Slovenia. Washington
had as its trump card its military might, and the 1999 war put the
U.S. back in the leading role in the region.
It is instructive that at the end of the 1999 war the big powers held
a conference in Bosnia to carve up Kosovo just as they had met in 1878
in Berlin to carve up the Balkans or in 1885 in Berlin again to carve
up Africa. Without the Soviet Union as a counterweight, these powers
more openly exposed their role as colonial rulers. The United States
set up the large permanent military base, Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo,
its largest foreign military base since the Vietnam War, poised to
threaten all of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Germany, France,
Britain, and Italy each took control of pieces of Kosovo, which
includes the valuable mines and refineries in Trepca, their worth
valued at $5 billion. Italy, as the least powerful of these colonial
powers, got control of the part of Kosovo that had the most Depleted
Uranium weapons fired and left as a dangerous waste product of the war.
By 2003, with a client regime in power in Serbia, USX, formerly known
as the U.S. Steel Corporation, had bought the technologically advanced
Sartid steel plant for a mere $23 million, although the Yugoslav
government had invested $1 billion into it from 1990 to 2000. This
plant manufactures specialized steel with buyers on the world market.
And it has workers with more than 30 years experience who are paid
only $159 per month. Sartid was only one of 882 major purchases at low
prices of Yugoslav industries bought up by US and West European
capital. They paid $1.4 billion in total to the Serbian government,
about half of it from US capital.
Like the other wars of the 20th century, the war against Yugoslavia
was fought over conquest of raw materials, markets, and areas to
invest capital.
JC: What was Milosevic's attitude toward the ICTY?
SF: The president constantly raised the illegitimacy of the ICTY, who
set up the tribunal and whose interests it served. He refused to show
respect for the ICTY, and never addressed the ICTY judges by their
titles. He would only say Mr. Robinson, Mr. May. He insisted on
representing himself in the proceedings so as not to be at the mercy
of anyone who may have a separate agenda, and especially to anyone
beholden to the ICTY.
Milosevic did not plead with his own innocence. He didn't push the
responsibility for decisions onto others, as so many US politicians do
when they say that they were not informed about a situation, had bad
advice, were kept in the dark, etc. He focused his strategy entirely
on proving the role and the guilt of the United States, Germany, and
NATO in the dismemberment of the Yugoslav Federation.
During the ICTY proceedings, Milosevic constantly cut through layers
of phony legalisms and procedural motions and put the issue, the fact
or the witness in clear terms. To him, the terms were who had resisted
US/NATO aggression and who had worked for and served US/NATO
aggression. I saw a Dutch television film about the Milosevic case
with some coverage of highlights of testimony. Milosevic showed in his
detailed cross-examination of prosecution witnesses that he often knew
more about the witnesses and their history in Yugoslavia than the
prosecutor who had brought them to The Hague. He often had information
that would discredit their testimony.
When we met he discussed how determined he was to subpoena as
witnesses both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. He reasoned that if these
leaders of NATO countries refused to testify as hostile witnesses, it
would only further expose just how rigged the entire trial was. Last
month Milosevic asked to have both Clinton and Blair as witnesses and
both refused.
JC: Could you explain what the origins of the ICTY were?
SF: The ICTY is not a real international court, in the sense that the
International Criminal Court (ICC) is. The United States government
refuses to recognize the authority of the ICC since this court has the
ability to try anyone in any country signed up to it for war crimes.
But the ICTY, the one that tried Milosevic, is a political court set
up by the UN Security Council at the insistence of Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright in 1993. As Ramsey Clark has made clear in his
writing many times, there is nothing in the UN Charter that allows the
United Nations Security Council to set up such a court. The ICTY's
scope is limited to trying the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. The
vast majority of the prisoners are Serbs. It is a propaganda apparatus
and internment camp for political prisoners, disguised as an unbiased
court.
The ICTY's goal is to punish the victims for the crimes committed
against them and to absolve the big powers -- who were all the former
colonialist rulers of the world, including the Balkans -- who invaded,
bombed, dismembered, and forced the privatization of the Socialist
Federation of Yugoslavia. When attorneys from Canada and Britain tried
to bring charges against US and NATO figures for war crimes, such as
the bombing of civilian targets, the ICTY decided that it could not
hear these charges.
For six years after the ICTY was established it brought no charges
against Milosevic for anything having to do with the battles in
Croatia or the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was only during the
heat of the bombing attack on Yugoslavia, when NATO was desperately
trying to get the Yugoslavs to stop resisting this bombing, that is,
toward the end of May 1999, that the ICTY charged Milosevic with war
crimes regarding Kosovo. German and US politicians had claimed there
were massacres of as many as 100,000 people in Kosovo. This was given
as the reason for intervening. On November 10, 1999, Carla Del Ponte,
chief prosecutor for the ICTY, reported that UN war crimes
investigators and forensic experts from 17 countries who had spent the
entire summer digging in over 195 locations in Kosovo where the media
had reported on the existence of mass graves and had found absolutely
no evidence of any mass graves in Kosovo. Nevertheless, the indictment
of Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo remained.
After Milosevic was kidnapped and brought to The Hague, the ICTY
realized that they could never make a charge for something like
"genocide" stick regarding Kosovo. The only "massacres" that took
place there were the mass killings from NATO bombing raids. So the
additional charges regarding Bosnia and Croatia were added to the
indictment against Milosevic. In Croatia, the biggest massacre took
place during "Operation Storm" in the summer of 1995. This was an
attack by the neo-fascist Croatian regime and its army, planned with
the assistance of allegedly retired US generals, aimed at the
Serb-origin population of the Krajina region of Croatia. Serbs whose
families had lived in the region for centuries were driven out and
became refugees in Serbia. This left Bosnia, where there was a bloody
three-sided civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1995.
The ICTY ignored the fact that the international community -- that is,
the diplomats of the big powers -- had praised Milosevic for helping
bring about the Dayton Accord in 1995 that ended the civil war.
Instead, they tried but failed to show that he had operational command
of the Bosnian Serb forces. The ICTY prosecutors thought that by
bringing hundreds of witnesses to generate 500,000 pages of
prosecution testimony from February 2002 to February 2004 they could
make a case against Milosevic that would look strong. But his
determination to keep fighting defeated them.
As Milosevic said in his defense speech, he was honored to be
defending himself because "truth and justice are on my side."
At this point the ICTY is an entire multi-million dollar industry at
The Hague and in the Balkans. The two-year budget for the Tribunal for
2004 and 2005 was $271 million. The court expenses have been $500
million in the last five years alone. Private corporations and
foundations pay a substantial part of the budget. There are more than
1,200 employees of the court from 84 countries.
There are special, separate prison guards, monitors, greeters,
translators, clerks, administrators, teams of rotating judges
available for different cases, each with staff, a large prosecutors
department with teams of lawyers, investigators, researchers. Hundreds
of other individuals have part-time employment and consulting jobs in
the Balkans. In a region where unemployment is enormous, the ICTY
payroll is a huge source of funds.
There are no set rules for the ICTY. The judges can make quite
arbitrary decisions ruling about what testimony is legal or not. For
example, when General Wesley Clark, who directed NATO's 1999 war
against Yugoslavia, testified for the prosecution he was allowed to
testify in secret and not in a public session. In addition, the US
government was granted the right to review Wesley Clark's testimony
before the transcripts were released. Further, the judge ruled that
Milosevic on cross-examination could not ask General Wesley Clark
"anything at all about the war waged by NATO against Yugoslavia."
The general had written a book about his experiences in the war in
which he made it clear that the military command had purposely bombed
civilian targets in an attempt to wear down the resistance of the
Yugoslavs and try to turn the population against the government. This
came out because there was a struggle within the Pentagon command
regarding how to divide the bombing effort. Some argued for striking
military targets in Kosovo -- allegedly the reason for entering the
war, that is, as a "humanitarian" effort to protect ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo -- and to strike Serbia. Others argued for focusing all the
effort at striking the civilian infrastructure in Serbia. One can see
why the U.S. didn't want this type of testimony to come out in the
sessions.
JC: Some of Milosevic's supporters say that he was killed by the ICTY.
What evidence do they have of this?
SF: I know there will be many people, especially inside the United
States, who will claim that such a murder is impossible, that the ICTY
would never do this, that there is no evidence. Since we have no
secret evidence, probably the best way to discuss this question is to
simply state some facts that are easy to check.
First of all, this would not be the first time NATO was involved in an
effort to assassinate President Milosevic. On April 22, 1999, NATO
forces fired a missile directly in the bedroom window of his private
residence. He wasn't in the house at that time and escaped death. It
was only after this failed attempt at assassination that on May 27
NATO got the ICTY to announce the indictment of Milosevic for war
crimes in Kosovo. The US and NATO rulers believed five years ago that
a show trial of Milosevic would help subdue Serbia and turn it into a
more willing colony. Now, with the ICTY's case against him in
shambles, they were again better off if Milosevic could be made to
disappear.
Second, everyone is aware the CIA has been involved in assassinations
and attempted assassinations of heads of state. There are even jokes
about all the failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Patrice Lumumba
was assassinated in the Congo.
But even if you put all the above aside, and you don't believe that
the ICTY poisoned Milosevic outright, it is responsible for his death
because the ICTY systematically denied Milosevic proper medical
treatment. Despite the life-threatening cardiovascular risk raised in
every dispute with the prosecution, tribunal officials refused even to
secure regular checkups of the president's health condition. They also
denied access for months to specialists who were willing to come to
Scheveningen, thus delaying his care.
There were several mass international campaigns to demand that the
court allow Milosevic to see doctors of his choosing and specialists
who could examine his dangerous heart condition. Tests for his heart
condition were demanded again and again. Thousands of people in Serbia
and around the world signed petitions demanding that specialists be
allowed to visit him. It was only in the fall of 2005 that a team of
three medical specialists from France, Russia, and Serbia was allowed
to examine Milosevic. On November 12, 2005, I attended an emergency
conference in Belgrade that focused on Milosevic's health problems.
The team had released a grave warning that there was serious danger to
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's life if the
US-orchestrated show trial at The Hague continued without regard to
his deteriorating health. The team urged an immediate six-week break
in the proceedings to allow time for medical treatment. The ICTY
ignored this request.
On March 18, 2006, the New York Times reported that Russian heart
specialist Dr. Leo Bokeria, who flew to The Hague to review the
autopsy reports on Milosevic, said that "two stents" for blocked
arteries could have saved his life and given him many long years. In
other words, this was not just neglectful treatment by the ICTY, but a
systematic and intentional denial of adequate medical care.
In a letter addressed to the Russian Embassy two days before he died,
Milosevic wrote that he had taken no antibiotics in more than four
years. He asked why the medical report on the discovery of rifampicin
was kept secret from him for almost two months. He wrote that he
believed that "active steps are being taken to destroy my health." He
warned that he was sure he was being poisoned and that his life was in
danger. The president had good reason to suspect foul play. Last
January 12, tests performed by the ICTY doctors found the antibiotic
rifampicin in Milosevic's blood. The ICTY kept the report of the blood
tests secret, even from Milosevic and his doctors, who were
complaining at the time that something terribly wrong was damaging the
defendant's health. While the prisoner and his defense committee and
assistant lawyers were demanding health information, the ICTY
officials sat on this report.
Then the Dutch authorities claimed that Milosevic was taking a rare,
difficult-to-acquire antibiotic used to treat leprosy or tuberculosis
that has the unique ability to counteract the medicine he was taking
to control his high blood pressure. If the authorities believed this,
why hadn't they publicized this report earlier? How did this medicine,
rifampicin, get into Milosevic's system? He was held in a maximum
security prison in triple lockdown in a special contained unit within
a larger Dutch prison once used by the Nazis to detain Dutch
resistance fighters.
Claims that Milosevic staged his illness -- and risked killing himself
-- to delay the trial are equally outlandish. Each time Milosevic was
too sick to continue in court, the prosecution moved to impose counsel
and to take away the prisoner's right to present his own defense. When
I met Milosevic it was in the special room that was the only place
where the ICTY allowed him to work or have the court papers to prepare
his defense. Whenever his blood pressure rose and he was unable to
continue the court sessions, he was also barred from any access to his
defense materials.
Milosevic was determined to use the trial as a platform to defend not
only himself but the people of Yugoslavia, and to indict the U.S.,
Germany, and the NATO powers for their role in the criminal
destruction of his country. He welcomed the trial as the only platform
where he could make the historical record. In his words to the court
he constantly described why, despite his bad health, he was determined
to continue.
The only thing the court did about Milosevic's acknowledged heart
condition was to use it as an excuse to deny him access to his defense
papers for days at a time, whenever his blood pressure went up too
high. During each step of the trial Milosevic's cardiovascular
problems, especially his high blood pressure, had resulted in several
delays in the trial. At each step the ICTY officials tried to use the
issue of his health as they made constant efforts to deny him the
right to conduct his own defense. Neither the illness nor the delays
helped his defense.
The ICTY had earlier charged that Milosevic was secretly medicating
himself and avoiding taking prescribed medicines. Milosevic answered
this charge himself for the court record on September 1, 2004: "You
probably don't know the practice in your own Detention Unit. I take my
medication in the presence of guards. I'm given them. I take them in
the presence of the guard, and the guard writes down in the book the
exact time when I ingested those medicines."
JC: At one point you and other witnesses told the ICTY you would not
appear in the sessions if summoned. What was that about?
SF: Milosevic had to win and win again his basic right to defend
himself. At every step the court sought to deny him this right and to
impose counsel. The ICTY really feared that Milosevic was successfully
taking advantage of his position as defendant and counsel to make a
strong political case. Even after two years of his well-demonstrated
ability to cross-examine all the prosecutions witnesses, the court
again moved to silence Milosevic and impose counsel in order to speed
up the trial. Once he laid out this well reasoned, researched, and
detailed presentation of his entire defense on August 31 and September
1, 2004, the ICTY again moved to impose counsel on him and deny him
the right to defend himself.
I, along with hundreds of other witnesses who had agreed to testify
for the defense, sent letters notifying the court that we were
outraged by the ICTY decision to impose counsel on Milosevic against
his will and to deprive him of his lawful and fundamental right to
self defense. Under these court-imposed conditions we each wrote to
the court that we could not participate as witnesses in the proceedings.
Faced with a mass insurrection of all of the witnesses that Milosevic
had called and the ICTY had already approved, and the inability of the
imposed counsel, Steven Kaye, to provide any witnesses, the ICTY was
forced to back down in its attempt to deny Milosevic his right to
present his own defense. The media kept repeating after he died that
Milosevic faced 66 counts of war crimes charges. Whether it was 66 or
66 million, none of them had been proven. His death saved the ICTY
from either convicting him without sufficient evidence or admitting
that he could not be found guilty of these charges. In the course of
the four years of proceedings, Milosevic had shown that the real
"butchers of the Balkans" were found not in Belgrade but in Berlin,
Brussels, and Washington.
==========================
IN DIFESA DELLA JUGOSLAVIA
Il j'accuse di Slobodan Milosevic
di fronte al "Tribunale ad hoc" dell'Aia"
(Ed. Zambon 2005, 10 euro)
Tutte le informazioni sul libro, appena uscito, alle pagine:
http://www.pasti.org/autodif.html
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/icdsm-italia/message/204
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
c/o GAMADI, Via L. Da Vinci 27 -- 00043 Ciampino (Roma)
tel/fax +39-06-7915200 -- email: icdsm-italia @ libero.it
http://www.pasti.org/linkmilo.html
*** Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006, intestato ad
Adolfo Amoroso, ROMA, causale: DIFESA MILOSEVIC ***
LE TRASCRIZIONI "UFFICIALI" DEL "PROCESSO" SI TROVANO AI SITI:
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/transe54.htm (IN ENGLISH)
http://www.un.org/icty/transf54/transf54.htm (EN FRANCAIS)
Subject: [icdsm-italia] Sara Flounders on the Milosevic Case
Date: April 1, 2006 11:53:06 AM GMT+02:00
To: icdsm-italia @yahoogroups.com
http://www.workers.org/2006/world/milosevic-0330/
Milosevic's death: political assassination blamed on victim
By Sara Flounders
Co-Director, International Action Center, NYC
March 16, 2006
In the summer of 2004 I met with former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic in Scheveningen prison when I was approved as a defense
witness. Before I could get in, I had to pass four totally separate
check points, unable to take in anything but papers. Each level of
security was more rigid than the one before.
No one who has met with President Milosevic over the past four years
would believe he would risk killing himself rather than finishing his
trial. And no one who visited Scheveningen in The Hague would believe
the outlandish claims that somehow he was able to smuggle in
un-prescribed medications on a regular basis. They would instead
suspect that the authorities were desperately trying to cover up their
own crimes.
My role as witness was based on my trip to Yugoslavia in the spring of
1999, during the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing. I visited bombed schools,
hospitals, heating plants and market places, recording the harm done
to civilians. In addition, I had written since 1993 on the
behind-the-scenes U.S. role in the strangulation and forced
dismemberment of Yugoslavia.
Even after my name was accepted as a defense witness, it was a
complicated and lengthy procedure to make the visit. Though all was
approved on the day of the visit, it still took four hours to get
through the checkpoints into the special unit inside the prison where
the defendants for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) were kept totally segregated from general population
and closely monitored.
Scheveningen prison is a maximum-security high-tech facility.
Milosevic and other indicted prisoners are housed in a special prison
unit within the larger prison. This section is spread over four floors
with 12 cells each. The unit is specially patrolled by United Nations
guards. Cameras are everywhere. Every movement of the prisoners is
monitored and controlled. When the president was first placed in his
cell, lights were kept on 24 hours a day and every motion was monitored.
WHERE DID RIFAMPICIN COME FROM?
Now the Dutch authorities claim that Milosevic was taking a rare,
difficult-to-acquire antibiotic used to treat leprosy or tuberculosis
that has the unique ability to counteract the medicine he was taking
to control his high blood pressure. How did this medicine, rifampicin,
get into Milosevic's system? He was held in a maximum security prison
in triple lock down in a special contained unit within a larger Dutch
prison once used by the Nazis to detain Dutch resistance fighters.
When rifampicin was found last Jan. 12 in Milosevic's blood, the ICTY
kept the report of the blood tests secret, even from Milosevic and his
doctors, who were complaining that something terribly wrong was
damaging the defendant's health. While the prisoner and his defense
committee and assistant lawyers were demanding health information, the
ICTY officials sat on this report. If ICTY officials responsible for
Milosevic's health really believed he was sneaking toxic medications
into the prison, why hadn't they publicized this report much earlier?
DELAYS HURT MILOSEVIC
Equally outlandish are the claims that Milosevic staged his illness to
delay the trial. The prosecution delayed the trial, first by adding
charges against the president regarding Croatia and Bosnia when they
realized they had no war-crimes case on the original Kosovo charges,
then by bringing hundreds of witnesses to generate 500,000 pages of
prosecution testimony from February 2002 to February 2004.
Each time Milosevic was too sick to continue in court, the prosecution
moved to impose counsel and to take away the prisoner's right to
present his own defense. Milosevic was determined to use the trial as
a platform to defend not only himself but the people of Yugoslavia,
and to indict the U.S., Germany and the NATO powers for their role in
the criminal destruction of his country. He welcomed the trial as the
only platform where he could make the historical record. In his words
to the court he constantly described why, despite his bad health, he
was determined to continue.
When I met Milosevic it was in the special room that was the only
place where the ICTY allowed him to work or have the court papers to
prepare for his defense. Whenever his blood pressure rose and he was
unable to continue the court sessions, he was also barred from any
access to his defense materials.
During each step of the trial Milosevic's cardiovascular problems,
especially his high blood pressure had resulted in several delays in
the trial. At each step the ICTY officials tried to use the issue of
his health in constant efforts to deny him the right to conduct his
own defense. Neither the illness nor the delays helped his defense.
The ICTY charged that Milosevic was secretly medicating himself and
avoiding taking prescribed medicines. Milosevic answered this charge
himself for the court record on Sept. 1, 2004: "You probably don't
know the practice in your own Detention Unit. I take my medication in
the presence of guards. I'm given them. I take them in the presence of
the guard, and the guard writes down in the book the exact time when I
ingested those medicines."
Despite the life-threatening cardiovascular risk raised in every
dispute with the prosecution, tribunal officials refused even to
secure regular check-ups of the president's health condition. They
also denied access for months to specialists who were willing to come
to Scheveningen, delaying his care.
The president's own explanation of his problem was more consistent and
credible than the ICTY's. In a letter addressed to the Russian Embassy
two days before he died, Milosevic writes that he has taken no
antibiotics in more than four years. He asks why the medical report on
the discovery of rifampicin was kept secret from him for almost two
months. He writes that he believes that "active steps are being taken
to destroy my health." He warns that he is sure he is being poisoned
and that his life is in danger.
A POLITICAL TRIBUNAL
The ICTY's handling of President Milosevic's death has been like its
handling of the entire trial: an attempt to blame the victim for the
crime.
The ICTY is not a real international court, with the ability to try
any accused war criminal. It is a political court set up by the UN
Security Council at the insistence of Secretary of State Madeline
Albright in 1993 in violation of the UN Charter. Its scope is limited
to trying the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and the vast majority
of prisoners are Serbs. It is a propaganda apparatus and internment
camp for political prisoners disguised as an unbiased court. It aims
to punish the victims for the crimes committed against them and to
absolve the imperialist powers who invaded, bombed, dismembered and
forced the privatization of the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia.
When Milosevic discussed the trial with me, his scope of historical
knowledge, his energy despite his illness, cut through my own jet-lag
and fatigue from the four-hour entrance hurdle and allowed us to
finish the interview with enthusiasm for the next step of the tribunal.
Now the world is asked to believe that Milosevic is responsible for
his own death. It is a scenario so incredibly complex, an elaborate
suicide story that is as improbable as the charges he was facing. The
bought-and-paid-for corporate media is accepting and propagating the
story of his death in the same servile fashion they accepted the very
existence of this illegal court and the justification for the
destruction of Yugoslavia.
Milosevic is now gone. But his summation answering two years of the
prosecution case and his opening defense speech live on. He has left a
ringing indictment of U.S. and European big-power intervention in the
Balkans in a historic document in an "I accuse" format. His speech,
which contains extensive documentation and factual detail, has been
published in Serbian, Greek, French, Russian and English. This
response, "The Defense Speaks—for History and the Future," (IAC 2006)
will stand long after the tawdry war propaganda has collapsed.
---
http://www.swans.com/library/art12/zig090.html
The Milosevic Case
John Catalinotto Interviews Sara Flounders
(Swans - March 27, 2006)
John Catalinotto: Sara, you have been active as a writer and political
organizer since the breakup of Yugoslavia was first threatened in the
early 1990s. What was your reaction when you heard that former
Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had died in Scheveningen Prison
in The Hague and that the media was claiming he might have committed
suicide or purposely taken medications that compromised his health?
Sara Flounders: My first reaction was distress that he had died while
in the hands of the same US and NATO forces that had destroyed his
country, Yugoslavia, and which had refused to allow him the medical
care he and his defenders sought, sorrow for his family who had been
prevented from visiting him on a regular basis, and anger that the
same demonization of him that had gone on for the past 16 years spewed
out after his death. As an approved defense witness, I had interviewed
with Milosevic on June 28, 2004. I knew on the one hand how the latest
accusations were as contrived and filled with contradictions as the
whole case against him was, and on the other hand how people
unfamiliar with the facts might be deceived by all the lies.
No one who has met with President Milosevic since he was kidnapped
from Belgrade to The Hague in June of 2001 or who watched him
cross-examine government witnesses during sessions of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) could
believe he would kill himself or even risk killing himself rather than
finish his defense. By choosing to defend himself during what was
already a four-year-long hearing he could use the ICTY as a platform
to make his political case against NATO, and he did this well.
Anyone wanting to learn the recent history of the Balkans could
benefit from reading Milosevic's opening defense speech, given on
August 31-September 1, 2004. With it, he has left a ringing indictment
of US and European big-power intervention in the Balkans in a historic
document that follows a J'Accuse format. His speech, which contains
extensive documentation and factual detail, has been published in
Serbian, Greek, French, Russian, and English. This response, which the
International Action Center published just a few months ago in English
under the title, The Defense Speaks for History and the Future, will
stand long after the tawdry war propaganda has collapsed.
And no one who visited Scheveningen in The Hague would believe the
outlandish claims that somehow Milosevic was able to smuggle in
unprescribed medications on a regular basis. Even after my name was
accepted as a defense witness, it was a complicated and lengthy
procedure to get through to Milosevic. Before I could get in, I had to
pass four totally separate checkpoints and was unable to take in
anything but papers. Each level of security was more rigid than the
one before. Though all was approved on the day of the visit, it still
took four hours to get through the checkpoints into the special unit
inside the prison where ICTY defendants were kept -- totally
segregated from the general population and closely monitored.
JC: How did you come to visit Milosevic in Scheveningen and what were
your impressions of him?
SF: My role as witness was based both on my political knowledge -- I
had co-edited two books on its recent history -- and on my trip to
Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 during the bombing. I went then with
a delegation from the International Action Center that accompanied
former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. In the middle of the 78-day
US/NATO bombing campaign -- it was in mid-May, I visited bombed
schools, hospitals, heating plants, and market places, recording the
destruction done to civilians, what NATO press spokesperson Jamie Shea
in 1999 used to call "collateral damage," although some of those
giving orders later admitted that the civilian infrastructure and the
morale of the Yugoslavs were the main targets of the bombing campaign.
After the cease-fire in June 1999, NATO discovered it had destroyed
only 13 tanks in Kosovo and killed maybe a hundred Yugoslav soldiers,
but had killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians in Serbia,
including hundreds of children, rocket-bombed the television
broadcasting center and the Chinese Embassy, and had polluted the
entire region by bombing the chemical plants at Pancevo near Belgrade.
The day I met Milosevic I had flown over from the U.S., suffered from
lack of sleep and jet lag, and had just gone through four hours of
unpleasant security checks. Milosevic had high blood pressure, but he
was energetic and positive throughout the entire interview, which
lasted more than three hours. He had a clear grasp of what he wanted
from my testimony. He was also in complete command of the history of
the region. Whatever my own desire to rest might have been, his
enthusiasm kept me focused on the work. One got the impression that
his best moments were planning and then carrying out his case.
In the hours we met he expressed no complaints about the physical
conditions under which he was held. He didn't complain about the food,
painfully strict security conditions, lack of being allowed to visit
with any of his family, or any of the other things that the ICTY was
using in an attempt to break his morale. His only complaint was that
the ICTY was able to deny him any access to any preparation material
or files during days and days of imposed rest, anytime his blood
pressure was high or he was sick. These delays further increased the
pressure on him, because each court-imposed "rest" further limited his
preparation time. None of the material was allowed into his cell, so
the hours that he could work were very strictly limited. All of this
was part of the pressure to get him to give up on presenting his own
defense.
He spoke English fluently so we needed no interpreter. Before the ICTY
officials, he spoke only Serbian -- not only was that his right, but
he was aiming his statements at the people back home, who were the
only ones, after the first week, who were able to follow the trial
daily in detail. The reason his trial rebuttals and presentations were
such popular viewing in Serbia every evening after Milosevic had
cross-examined prosecution witnesses or later on the court days when
he presented his witnesses, was that these were familiar figures and
events to people in Serbia. The population constantly saw him as
battling Western propaganda and demonization, not battling for his
personal reputation but always putting the events in the larger
political context, yet taking up the minutest details.
Milosevic had hundreds of files, lists and lists of potential defense
witnesses. Every potential witness had to be approved by the ICTY. He
read an enormous amount and knew at the tip of his tongue each
person's particular view, specific contribution, and general political
orientation. He also had a very detailed and fully developed defense
strategy. There were stacks of books in his office cell and stacks of
files of transcripts with stickers marking specific points to raise or
rebut.
During our interview, Milosevic referred often to his copy of Hidden
Agenda: the U.S.-NATO Takeover of Yugoslavia, in which he had written
many comments in the margins of the text. The book, which the
International Action Center published in 2002, was organized so as to
present a case of war crimes against the NATO leaders and generals. It
followed the outline of a people's tribunal we organized in June 2000
charging [President Bill] Clinton and the other NATO presidents, prime
ministers, chancellors, and generals with war crimes regarding the
aggression against Yugoslavia. Ramsey Clark had prepared our
indictment, and it was all laid out in the form of violations of
international laws.
Most important for Milosevic's work, the book included people's
efforts from around the world to gather the evidence of U.S./NATO's
crimes against Yugoslavia during the bombing and it framed the
political role of these bombings in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the
light of international law and war crimes. These were the exact points
Milosevic wanted to develop in his defense. It was obvious our book
was a useful tool for his own preparation, even if he brought up
additional topics or gave a different emphasis.
JC: You say Milosevic had a different emphasis. What do you mean?
SF: In our people's tribunal, although we presented a case against the
leaders of other NATO countries, the main part of our argument exposed
the role of the United States. Also, we were concentrating mainly on
what is called the Kosovo war, that is, the 1999 military assault on
Yugoslavia with the excuse of defending "human rights" of the ethnic
Albanian people who were a majority of the population in the Kosovo
province of Serbia. Milosevic had to defend his role during the
conflicts involving Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina also, and he paid
close attention to the role of the German government -- which was
significant in subverting Yugoslavia in the early 1990s -- and to the
role played by agents of the Vatican. He also developed the historical
role of both Germany and the Catholic Church hierarchy in the Balkans.
Regarding the US role, he used many of the same points we did, but he
also knew -- from the inside -- of the duplicity of US diplomacy.
JC: If the war in Kosovo wasn't fought over human rights, what was
behind this war?
SF: Yugoslavia was the last standing pro-socialist country in Eastern
Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was also the last
remaining country whose government had not capitulated to the Western
European powers and the United States and given them free entry to the
economy. For that reason alone these powers aimed at what would today
be called "regime change" first in Yugoslavia and then, after they
succeeded in dividing the Yugoslav Federation into weak countries they
could easily rule, in the remaining independent regime in Serbia and
Montenegro headed by the Socialist Party of Serbia, Milosevic's party.
In addition, these big powers, especially the U.S. and Germany, had
their own rivalries and their own interests at stake in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia has strategic importance. It lies on the oil pipeline route
from the Caspian Sea region to Western Europe. It has a skilled,
educated workforce. It is in what the rulers in Berlin consider their
"back yard," just as Washington looks at Latin America. German
diplomacy and subversion had made key inroads in the early 1990s by
backing the secessionist regimes in Croatia and Slovenia. Washington
had as its trump card its military might, and the 1999 war put the
U.S. back in the leading role in the region.
It is instructive that at the end of the 1999 war the big powers held
a conference in Bosnia to carve up Kosovo just as they had met in 1878
in Berlin to carve up the Balkans or in 1885 in Berlin again to carve
up Africa. Without the Soviet Union as a counterweight, these powers
more openly exposed their role as colonial rulers. The United States
set up the large permanent military base, Camp Bondsteel, in Kosovo,
its largest foreign military base since the Vietnam War, poised to
threaten all of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Germany, France,
Britain, and Italy each took control of pieces of Kosovo, which
includes the valuable mines and refineries in Trepca, their worth
valued at $5 billion. Italy, as the least powerful of these colonial
powers, got control of the part of Kosovo that had the most Depleted
Uranium weapons fired and left as a dangerous waste product of the war.
By 2003, with a client regime in power in Serbia, USX, formerly known
as the U.S. Steel Corporation, had bought the technologically advanced
Sartid steel plant for a mere $23 million, although the Yugoslav
government had invested $1 billion into it from 1990 to 2000. This
plant manufactures specialized steel with buyers on the world market.
And it has workers with more than 30 years experience who are paid
only $159 per month. Sartid was only one of 882 major purchases at low
prices of Yugoslav industries bought up by US and West European
capital. They paid $1.4 billion in total to the Serbian government,
about half of it from US capital.
Like the other wars of the 20th century, the war against Yugoslavia
was fought over conquest of raw materials, markets, and areas to
invest capital.
JC: What was Milosevic's attitude toward the ICTY?
SF: The president constantly raised the illegitimacy of the ICTY, who
set up the tribunal and whose interests it served. He refused to show
respect for the ICTY, and never addressed the ICTY judges by their
titles. He would only say Mr. Robinson, Mr. May. He insisted on
representing himself in the proceedings so as not to be at the mercy
of anyone who may have a separate agenda, and especially to anyone
beholden to the ICTY.
Milosevic did not plead with his own innocence. He didn't push the
responsibility for decisions onto others, as so many US politicians do
when they say that they were not informed about a situation, had bad
advice, were kept in the dark, etc. He focused his strategy entirely
on proving the role and the guilt of the United States, Germany, and
NATO in the dismemberment of the Yugoslav Federation.
During the ICTY proceedings, Milosevic constantly cut through layers
of phony legalisms and procedural motions and put the issue, the fact
or the witness in clear terms. To him, the terms were who had resisted
US/NATO aggression and who had worked for and served US/NATO
aggression. I saw a Dutch television film about the Milosevic case
with some coverage of highlights of testimony. Milosevic showed in his
detailed cross-examination of prosecution witnesses that he often knew
more about the witnesses and their history in Yugoslavia than the
prosecutor who had brought them to The Hague. He often had information
that would discredit their testimony.
When we met he discussed how determined he was to subpoena as
witnesses both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. He reasoned that if these
leaders of NATO countries refused to testify as hostile witnesses, it
would only further expose just how rigged the entire trial was. Last
month Milosevic asked to have both Clinton and Blair as witnesses and
both refused.
JC: Could you explain what the origins of the ICTY were?
SF: The ICTY is not a real international court, in the sense that the
International Criminal Court (ICC) is. The United States government
refuses to recognize the authority of the ICC since this court has the
ability to try anyone in any country signed up to it for war crimes.
But the ICTY, the one that tried Milosevic, is a political court set
up by the UN Security Council at the insistence of Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright in 1993. As Ramsey Clark has made clear in his
writing many times, there is nothing in the UN Charter that allows the
United Nations Security Council to set up such a court. The ICTY's
scope is limited to trying the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. The
vast majority of the prisoners are Serbs. It is a propaganda apparatus
and internment camp for political prisoners, disguised as an unbiased
court.
The ICTY's goal is to punish the victims for the crimes committed
against them and to absolve the big powers -- who were all the former
colonialist rulers of the world, including the Balkans -- who invaded,
bombed, dismembered, and forced the privatization of the Socialist
Federation of Yugoslavia. When attorneys from Canada and Britain tried
to bring charges against US and NATO figures for war crimes, such as
the bombing of civilian targets, the ICTY decided that it could not
hear these charges.
For six years after the ICTY was established it brought no charges
against Milosevic for anything having to do with the battles in
Croatia or the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was only during the
heat of the bombing attack on Yugoslavia, when NATO was desperately
trying to get the Yugoslavs to stop resisting this bombing, that is,
toward the end of May 1999, that the ICTY charged Milosevic with war
crimes regarding Kosovo. German and US politicians had claimed there
were massacres of as many as 100,000 people in Kosovo. This was given
as the reason for intervening. On November 10, 1999, Carla Del Ponte,
chief prosecutor for the ICTY, reported that UN war crimes
investigators and forensic experts from 17 countries who had spent the
entire summer digging in over 195 locations in Kosovo where the media
had reported on the existence of mass graves and had found absolutely
no evidence of any mass graves in Kosovo. Nevertheless, the indictment
of Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo remained.
After Milosevic was kidnapped and brought to The Hague, the ICTY
realized that they could never make a charge for something like
"genocide" stick regarding Kosovo. The only "massacres" that took
place there were the mass killings from NATO bombing raids. So the
additional charges regarding Bosnia and Croatia were added to the
indictment against Milosevic. In Croatia, the biggest massacre took
place during "Operation Storm" in the summer of 1995. This was an
attack by the neo-fascist Croatian regime and its army, planned with
the assistance of allegedly retired US generals, aimed at the
Serb-origin population of the Krajina region of Croatia. Serbs whose
families had lived in the region for centuries were driven out and
became refugees in Serbia. This left Bosnia, where there was a bloody
three-sided civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1995.
The ICTY ignored the fact that the international community -- that is,
the diplomats of the big powers -- had praised Milosevic for helping
bring about the Dayton Accord in 1995 that ended the civil war.
Instead, they tried but failed to show that he had operational command
of the Bosnian Serb forces. The ICTY prosecutors thought that by
bringing hundreds of witnesses to generate 500,000 pages of
prosecution testimony from February 2002 to February 2004 they could
make a case against Milosevic that would look strong. But his
determination to keep fighting defeated them.
As Milosevic said in his defense speech, he was honored to be
defending himself because "truth and justice are on my side."
At this point the ICTY is an entire multi-million dollar industry at
The Hague and in the Balkans. The two-year budget for the Tribunal for
2004 and 2005 was $271 million. The court expenses have been $500
million in the last five years alone. Private corporations and
foundations pay a substantial part of the budget. There are more than
1,200 employees of the court from 84 countries.
There are special, separate prison guards, monitors, greeters,
translators, clerks, administrators, teams of rotating judges
available for different cases, each with staff, a large prosecutors
department with teams of lawyers, investigators, researchers. Hundreds
of other individuals have part-time employment and consulting jobs in
the Balkans. In a region where unemployment is enormous, the ICTY
payroll is a huge source of funds.
There are no set rules for the ICTY. The judges can make quite
arbitrary decisions ruling about what testimony is legal or not. For
example, when General Wesley Clark, who directed NATO's 1999 war
against Yugoslavia, testified for the prosecution he was allowed to
testify in secret and not in a public session. In addition, the US
government was granted the right to review Wesley Clark's testimony
before the transcripts were released. Further, the judge ruled that
Milosevic on cross-examination could not ask General Wesley Clark
"anything at all about the war waged by NATO against Yugoslavia."
The general had written a book about his experiences in the war in
which he made it clear that the military command had purposely bombed
civilian targets in an attempt to wear down the resistance of the
Yugoslavs and try to turn the population against the government. This
came out because there was a struggle within the Pentagon command
regarding how to divide the bombing effort. Some argued for striking
military targets in Kosovo -- allegedly the reason for entering the
war, that is, as a "humanitarian" effort to protect ethnic Albanians
in Kosovo -- and to strike Serbia. Others argued for focusing all the
effort at striking the civilian infrastructure in Serbia. One can see
why the U.S. didn't want this type of testimony to come out in the
sessions.
JC: Some of Milosevic's supporters say that he was killed by the ICTY.
What evidence do they have of this?
SF: I know there will be many people, especially inside the United
States, who will claim that such a murder is impossible, that the ICTY
would never do this, that there is no evidence. Since we have no
secret evidence, probably the best way to discuss this question is to
simply state some facts that are easy to check.
First of all, this would not be the first time NATO was involved in an
effort to assassinate President Milosevic. On April 22, 1999, NATO
forces fired a missile directly in the bedroom window of his private
residence. He wasn't in the house at that time and escaped death. It
was only after this failed attempt at assassination that on May 27
NATO got the ICTY to announce the indictment of Milosevic for war
crimes in Kosovo. The US and NATO rulers believed five years ago that
a show trial of Milosevic would help subdue Serbia and turn it into a
more willing colony. Now, with the ICTY's case against him in
shambles, they were again better off if Milosevic could be made to
disappear.
Second, everyone is aware the CIA has been involved in assassinations
and attempted assassinations of heads of state. There are even jokes
about all the failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro. Patrice Lumumba
was assassinated in the Congo.
But even if you put all the above aside, and you don't believe that
the ICTY poisoned Milosevic outright, it is responsible for his death
because the ICTY systematically denied Milosevic proper medical
treatment. Despite the life-threatening cardiovascular risk raised in
every dispute with the prosecution, tribunal officials refused even to
secure regular checkups of the president's health condition. They also
denied access for months to specialists who were willing to come to
Scheveningen, thus delaying his care.
There were several mass international campaigns to demand that the
court allow Milosevic to see doctors of his choosing and specialists
who could examine his dangerous heart condition. Tests for his heart
condition were demanded again and again. Thousands of people in Serbia
and around the world signed petitions demanding that specialists be
allowed to visit him. It was only in the fall of 2005 that a team of
three medical specialists from France, Russia, and Serbia was allowed
to examine Milosevic. On November 12, 2005, I attended an emergency
conference in Belgrade that focused on Milosevic's health problems.
The team had released a grave warning that there was serious danger to
former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's life if the
US-orchestrated show trial at The Hague continued without regard to
his deteriorating health. The team urged an immediate six-week break
in the proceedings to allow time for medical treatment. The ICTY
ignored this request.
On March 18, 2006, the New York Times reported that Russian heart
specialist Dr. Leo Bokeria, who flew to The Hague to review the
autopsy reports on Milosevic, said that "two stents" for blocked
arteries could have saved his life and given him many long years. In
other words, this was not just neglectful treatment by the ICTY, but a
systematic and intentional denial of adequate medical care.
In a letter addressed to the Russian Embassy two days before he died,
Milosevic wrote that he had taken no antibiotics in more than four
years. He asked why the medical report on the discovery of rifampicin
was kept secret from him for almost two months. He wrote that he
believed that "active steps are being taken to destroy my health." He
warned that he was sure he was being poisoned and that his life was in
danger. The president had good reason to suspect foul play. Last
January 12, tests performed by the ICTY doctors found the antibiotic
rifampicin in Milosevic's blood. The ICTY kept the report of the blood
tests secret, even from Milosevic and his doctors, who were
complaining at the time that something terribly wrong was damaging the
defendant's health. While the prisoner and his defense committee and
assistant lawyers were demanding health information, the ICTY
officials sat on this report.
Then the Dutch authorities claimed that Milosevic was taking a rare,
difficult-to-acquire antibiotic used to treat leprosy or tuberculosis
that has the unique ability to counteract the medicine he was taking
to control his high blood pressure. If the authorities believed this,
why hadn't they publicized this report earlier? How did this medicine,
rifampicin, get into Milosevic's system? He was held in a maximum
security prison in triple lockdown in a special contained unit within
a larger Dutch prison once used by the Nazis to detain Dutch
resistance fighters.
Claims that Milosevic staged his illness -- and risked killing himself
-- to delay the trial are equally outlandish. Each time Milosevic was
too sick to continue in court, the prosecution moved to impose counsel
and to take away the prisoner's right to present his own defense. When
I met Milosevic it was in the special room that was the only place
where the ICTY allowed him to work or have the court papers to prepare
his defense. Whenever his blood pressure rose and he was unable to
continue the court sessions, he was also barred from any access to his
defense materials.
Milosevic was determined to use the trial as a platform to defend not
only himself but the people of Yugoslavia, and to indict the U.S.,
Germany, and the NATO powers for their role in the criminal
destruction of his country. He welcomed the trial as the only platform
where he could make the historical record. In his words to the court
he constantly described why, despite his bad health, he was determined
to continue.
The only thing the court did about Milosevic's acknowledged heart
condition was to use it as an excuse to deny him access to his defense
papers for days at a time, whenever his blood pressure went up too
high. During each step of the trial Milosevic's cardiovascular
problems, especially his high blood pressure, had resulted in several
delays in the trial. At each step the ICTY officials tried to use the
issue of his health as they made constant efforts to deny him the
right to conduct his own defense. Neither the illness nor the delays
helped his defense.
The ICTY had earlier charged that Milosevic was secretly medicating
himself and avoiding taking prescribed medicines. Milosevic answered
this charge himself for the court record on September 1, 2004: "You
probably don't know the practice in your own Detention Unit. I take my
medication in the presence of guards. I'm given them. I take them in
the presence of the guard, and the guard writes down in the book the
exact time when I ingested those medicines."
JC: At one point you and other witnesses told the ICTY you would not
appear in the sessions if summoned. What was that about?
SF: Milosevic had to win and win again his basic right to defend
himself. At every step the court sought to deny him this right and to
impose counsel. The ICTY really feared that Milosevic was successfully
taking advantage of his position as defendant and counsel to make a
strong political case. Even after two years of his well-demonstrated
ability to cross-examine all the prosecutions witnesses, the court
again moved to silence Milosevic and impose counsel in order to speed
up the trial. Once he laid out this well reasoned, researched, and
detailed presentation of his entire defense on August 31 and September
1, 2004, the ICTY again moved to impose counsel on him and deny him
the right to defend himself.
I, along with hundreds of other witnesses who had agreed to testify
for the defense, sent letters notifying the court that we were
outraged by the ICTY decision to impose counsel on Milosevic against
his will and to deprive him of his lawful and fundamental right to
self defense. Under these court-imposed conditions we each wrote to
the court that we could not participate as witnesses in the proceedings.
Faced with a mass insurrection of all of the witnesses that Milosevic
had called and the ICTY had already approved, and the inability of the
imposed counsel, Steven Kaye, to provide any witnesses, the ICTY was
forced to back down in its attempt to deny Milosevic his right to
present his own defense. The media kept repeating after he died that
Milosevic faced 66 counts of war crimes charges. Whether it was 66 or
66 million, none of them had been proven. His death saved the ICTY
from either convicting him without sufficient evidence or admitting
that he could not be found guilty of these charges. In the course of
the four years of proceedings, Milosevic had shown that the real
"butchers of the Balkans" were found not in Belgrade but in Berlin,
Brussels, and Washington.
==========================
IN DIFESA DELLA JUGOSLAVIA
Il j'accuse di Slobodan Milosevic
di fronte al "Tribunale ad hoc" dell'Aia"
(Ed. Zambon 2005, 10 euro)
Tutte le informazioni sul libro, appena uscito, alle pagine:
http://www.pasti.org/autodif.html
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==========================
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*** Conto Corrente Postale numero 86557006, intestato ad
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LE TRASCRIZIONI "UFFICIALI" DEL "PROCESSO" SI TROVANO AI SITI:
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/transe54.htm (IN ENGLISH)
http://www.un.org/icty/transf54/transf54.htm (EN FRANCAIS)