-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 27, 2002
issue of Workers World newspaper
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TURNING THE TABLES ON U.S.:
MILOSEVIC CROSS-EXAMINES WAR CRIMINAL

By Heather Cottin

The prosecution has brought in its heavy hitters for the
show trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
in The Hague.

They trotted out William Walker, the head of a U.S.
"peacekeeping" mission in Kosovo, on June 12, followed by
the head of the German army, Gen. Klaus Neumann, the next
day.

Even with Judge Richard Mays' open displays of hostility,
Milosevic was not intimidated.

The major NATO powers, notably the United States and
Germany, created the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 to criminalize Serb and
Yugoslav leaders and personnel as part of their plan to
dismember and re-colonize Yugoslavia.

Milosevic confronted William Walker first. Walker worked for
the U.S. State Department from 1985-1988 on Central America
policy. He was U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador during the
Sumpul River massacre. So he knows about massacres. He knows
how to cover them up.

Walker was an integral part of the Reagan-Bush war against
the people of El Salvador that took nearly 100,000 lives.

Walker was directly involved in another campaign of terror
while in Central America. He supported the anti-Sandinista
Contra fighters in Nicaragua with proceeds from secret arms
sales to Iran. The CIA-organized counter-revolutionaries
killed over 20,000 people in Nicaragua.

'MASSACRE' ALLEGATION BY U.S. WAR CRIMINAL

It was Walker who first reported the story that the U.S. and
NATO used to justify the 78-day bombing war against
Yugoslavia in 1999. As the Associated Press noted in its
coverage of the testimony, "William Walker, the former U.S.
head of an OSCE Kosovo peacekeeping mission, claimed he saw
'piles of bodies at Racak,' a massacre that focused world
attention on atrocities by Serb forces."

An analysis by Armen Georgian and Arthur Neslen in the April
5, 2001, edition of the New Statesman showed that the
January 1999 "Rakac Massacre" came at a convenient time,
when the Clinton administration was looking for an excuse to
begin the war against socialist Yugoslavia.

It was, according to the New Statesman article, reminiscent
of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, "the CIA-manipulated story
... that escalated the Vietnam War." The report is notable,
since the New Statesman is not friendly to Milosevic or the
Yugoslav socialists.

Georgian and Neslen pointed out that on Aug. 12, 1998, the
U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee had commented:
"Planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now
largely in place. The only missing element seems to be an
event--with suitably vivid media coverage--that could make
the intervention politically saleable."

The Sunday Times of London reported in 2001 that Walker was
"inextricably linked with the CIA." In the Times story,
diplomatic and intelligence sources alleged that the team
led by Walker which discovered the "Rakac Massacre" was a
CIA front that also gave logistical and technical support to
the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Milosevic knew all this. Cross-examining Walker, he charged
that the CIA had recruited the OSCE team.

"In Kosovo, you supported a different kind of Contras,"
Milosevic charged, "the Contra Kosovo Liberation Army." He
also suggested Walker was involved in the murder of Jesuit
priests and nuns in El Salvador.

Clearly flustered on the witness stand, Walker said he had
only supplied humanitarian aid to El Salvador from the air
base used by U.S. authorities to provide illicit arms to the
Contras.

His credibility was clearly damaged.

GERMAN GENERAL'S INCREDIBLE STORY

The next day, General Neumann gave his testimony to the
ICTY. His story was even more incredible.

Neumann claimed, on the stand, that Milosevic told him in
1999 "that Yugoslavia's problems would be solved if ethnic
Albanians were murdered."

Neumann was the commanding officer of KSK, the elite
commando unit of the Bundeswehr, or German army. His unit
trained the KLA in Albania and at NATO bases in Turkey in
1998.

Milosevic's defense of himself and of Yugoslavia during the
trial has proven that he knew intimately what NATO forces
were doing to destabilize and destroy Yugoslavia.

Milosevic knew Germany's role in dismembering the socialist
federation. He knew that Klaus Neumann, the most powerful
military leader in Germany, was the archenemy of the Serbian
people and a united Yugoslavia. Neumann was part of the
effort to supply and train the Kosovo Liberation Army,
NATO's cat's paw in Yugoslavia.

Milosevic could never confide in Neumann. He knew Neumann
was an implacable enemy of peace in Yugoslavia.

The ongoing trial in The Hague is a clear case of "victor's
justice." As political activist and author Greg Elich wrote:
"Open perjury appears not to be a problem for Judge May. The
prosecution hasn't even come close to presenting a case, and
not a shred of evidence that Milosevic was responsible for
crimes." (www.stopnato.org)

- END -

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