--- In yugoslaviainfo @yahoogroups.com, Predrag Tosic wrote:
http://www.globalresearch.ca
The Hague Tribunal: The Political Economy of Sham Justice
Carla Del Ponte Addresses Goldman Sachs on Justice and Profits
By Edward S. Herman
November 20, 2005
On October 6, 2005, Carla Del Ponte, prosecutor of the International
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), gave a talk before an
audience at Goldman Sachs in London that throws light on the role of
the ICTY as well as the character and qualities of Ms. Del Ponte and
her efforts. [1]
Speaking before this business audience, Ms. Del Ponte emphasized that
the ICTY and other UN organizations are not profit-making bodies, but
that they, and the ICTY specifically, facilitate profit-making for
others. "Preventing wars or bringing justice doesn't fill the UN or
anybody's bank accounts," she said. The private sector can't carry
out these functions. But Ms. Del Ponte claims that such services not
only save lives, reduce human suffering and destruction, they also
help bring stability: "This is where the long-term profit of the UN's
work resides. We are trying to create stable conditions so that safe
investments can take place." This will make for "a reasonably
prosperous democracyŠa factor of peace and stability in the world."
In trying to sell the ICTY to this business group as a partner or
servant of neoliberalism, Del Ponte runs into the difficulty that the
actual work of her organization has been highly destabilizing, did
not "save lives" or diminish human suffering and destruction, and that
it has left its main areas of intervention--Bosnia/Herzegovina, Serbia
and Montenegro, and Kosovo-- in a state of semi-permanent crisis and
with conditions singularly unattractive to private investment (except
for the drug and sex trades, which thrive in Kosovo). [2] On the other
hand, insofar as the ICTY contributed to the real ends sought by
Clinton, Blair, and other major NATO powers, which included helping
NATO celebrate its 50th anniversary in 1999 and showing that NATO
still had a role to play, as a U.S.-dominated organization; destroying
an independent and socialist-inclined Yugoslavia and bringing its
constituent parts into the NATO orbit of influence; and preparing the
ground for further "humanitarian interventions," [3] the ICTY could be
said to be an agent of the dominant Western powers and therefore of
neoliberalism broadly viewed.
In her opening remarks, Del Ponte says that the ICTY is tasked with
"bringing peace, security and justice," but shortly thereafter "peace"
and "security" fade out and she asserts that "our primary objective is
to bring justice." Justice ranks high, she says, because it
"contributes to the reconciliation between peoples who have been torn
apart by the wars of the nineties." Before I explain why this is a
fallacy, especially with justice perceived in the one-sided and highly
politicized fashion of Del Ponte, the ICTY and NATO, it should be
recognized that there may be a conflict between pursuing "justice" and
"peace." It is no coincidence that just as the work of the ICTY has
been associated with chronic instability in the ex-Yugoslavia, so also
its work ran parallel with both outbursts of ferocious local warfare
and closely linked Western wars of intervention in those areas, and
certainly failed to contribute to "peace." In fact, an excellent case
can be made that the ICTY's focus on "justice" was well suited to
avoiding peace, and that its very design was to facilitate war, a
dismantling of Yugoslavia, and a specific attack on Serbia.
This case is made compellingly by Michael Mandel in his How America
Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes
Against Humanity (Pluto Press, 2004), where he points out that the
formation of the ICTY was immediately preceded by a December 1992
speech by the U.S. State Department's Lawrence Eagleberger, who named
three top Serb leaders who needed to be brought to justice, and stated
explicitly that "the international community must begin now to think
about moving beyond the London [peace] agreement and contemplate more
aggressive actions." [4] Even before this, the United States had
sabotaged the promising Lisbon agreement of February 1992 by
encouraging Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to withdraw and
break the plan that the Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and (previously)
Izetbegovic, had accepted. [5] Following Eagleburger's talk, in
February 1993, as Lord David Owen wrote bitterly, ""We have more or
less got a peace settlement but we have a problem. We can't get the
Muslims on board. And that's largely the fault of the Americans,
because the Muslims won't budge while they think that Washington may
come in on their side," so that in reality "the Clinton people block
it." [6] These crucial facts and informed judgments did not interfere
in the least with the established view that it was Milosevic and the
Bosnian Serbs, seeking a "Greater Serbia," that made peace unattainable.
The role of the ICTY in this peace-sabotage business was to indict
Serb leaders in order to demonize them and make them ineligible for
any peace negotiating process-in Mandel's words, the ICTY function was
to help the Americans "justify their intention to go to warŠby
branding their proposed enemies as Nazis." [7] As presiding judge
Antonio Cassese said at the time regarding Bosnian Serb leader Radovan
Karadzic, "Let us see who will sit down at the negotiating table now
with a man accused of genocide." [8] Later, in the 1998-1999 run-up to
the NATO bombing war on Yugoslavia, the ICTY turned unremitting
attention to denouncing Serbs, and as Mandel points out, its work in
this period "had nothing to do with trying and punishing criminals,
and everything to do with lending crucial credibility to NATO's
cause." [9] During the 78-day NATO bombing war, which began on March
24, 1999, the ICTY served as an aggressive public relations arm of
NATO, most dramatically in indicting Milosevic in May 1999 just as
NATO was drawing criticism for extending its bombing targets to
Serbian civilian facilities. In short, the ICTY, serving as an arm of
NATO, helped prevent peace settlements in the Bosnian conflict in
the deadly years 1992-1994, and helped justify and sustain NATO's 1999
assault on Yugoslavia.
This ICTY service was based on structural facts: the institution was
created by the NATO powers, with the United States in the lead; it was
funded heavily by these powers and closely allied NGOs (Soros's Open
Society Institute); it was staffed with NATO country personnel, often
seconded to the ICTY, and its high officials were vetted by NATO-power
leaders; and it depended on NATO for information and police service.
But this meant that NATO itself would be exempt from "justice," and
that it would be difficult to bring to justice NATO clients, even if
they committed crimes similar to or even worse than those committed by
Serbs. Mandel points out that when he presented the ICTY prosecutor
with a three volume dossier and complaint on NATO war crimes in May
1999, it took a year for the prosecutor to decide to reject this
application, without ever having made a formal investigation, whereas
in the case of the alleged Racak massacre, attributable to the Serbs,
the prosecutor declared this a war crime and rushed into action on the
very same day, based solely on information supplied her by the U.S.
representative in the scene, William Walker. [10] Of the leaders in
the Balkan wars, Clinton, Blair, Izetbegovic and Tudjman have never
been indicted by the ICTY, only Milosevic, although on the logic
applied in the Milosevic prosecution, an equal or better case could be
made for each of the exempted leaders. [11]
This highly politicized justice brought by the ICTY not only served
war rather than peace, it cannot be regarded as justice at all.
Justice that is not even-handed is deeply compromised. And if it is
clearly serving a political end and meeting an external political
agenda it is almost certain to be biased and fail to bring justice
even in dealing with politically eligible targets. If it is
politically corrupt it will do its work corruptly and bend its
supposed judicial process to meeting those same political aims. This
has been evident throughout the ICTY's operations-in the case of the
numerous indictments that met a NATO political or PR need of the
moment (e.g., the indictment of the Serb paramilitary leader Arkan in
March 1999, just as the NATO bombing commenced; Milosevic in May 1999,
just as NATO's bombing of civilian sites was creating a PR problem),
its steady resort to publicity that compromised supposed judicial
proceedings, and with endless illustrations of judicial malpractice in
the ICTY proceedings themselves.
According to Michael Scharf, an ICTY supporter, over 90 percent of the
evidence brought forward in the Milosevic trial was hearsay, [12] all
freely admitted into the record by the judge, although almost none of
it had any connection with proving orders or the sanction of war
crimes by the man on trial (and all of which could be readily
duplicated for Bosnian Muslim and Croat treatment of Serbs or U.S.
bombing attacks on the Serbian civilian infrastructure). It did,
however, set a tone in creating a moral environment of target
demonization that served NATO political aims, even if it compromised
the possibility of a fair trial.
From a steady stream of cases, the absence of judicial equity may be
illustrated by the fact that with William Walker on the stand for the
prosecution, Judge Richard May never interrupted him once as he ranged
far and wide, even covering his view of Milosevic's "general
attitude"; and although the "Racak massacre" claim was the basis of 45
charges of murder against Milosevic, and Walker was a key driver of
that claim, May gave the defendant a fixed time limit for questions
and interrupted his questioning over 60 times in the process of
preventing a serious cross-examination. Athough allowing a stream of
hearsay from prosecution witnesses, Judge May refused to permit
Milosevic to enter into the record articles from Le Monde and Figaro
that raised serious doubts about the Walker version of events at
Racak. [13]
With General Wesley Clark testifying for the prosecution, the judge
allowed the U.S. government to force a closed session and to redact
the testimony before release, he permitted Clark to talk about
anything he pleased, including ten minutes of self-adulation (without
judicial interruption), and he was permitted to phone Bill Clinton to
request a letter of support, contrary to the stated rule that no
outside communication was permitted in the midst of testimony; whereas
Milosevic was not permitted to ask questions challenging Clark's
credibility or anything not directly responsive to Clark's verbal
claims. [14] More recently, during the defense's presentation of its
case, the ICTY judge allowed the prosecution to present a video of an
alleged killing of six Bosnian Muslims back in 1995, although it had
no bearing on the ongoing questioning of the defense witness and was
presented without prior notice to the defense, which was not permitted
to question the video presentation. However, introduction of this
video did serve to dramatize claims about the Srebrenica massacre at a
time when that event was being given tenth anniversary memorial
publicity by the Western establishment.
Del Ponte states authoritatively in her Goldman Sachs talk that 8,000
Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered at Srebrenica in the "only genocide"
in Europe since World War II. The 8,000 figure was given by the Red
Cross back in July 1995 based on crude and unverified estimates of
3,000 captured by the Bosnian Serbs plus 5,000 initially claimed to be
"missing." It was very soon recognized by the Red Cross and other
observers that several thousand of the "missing" had escaped to
Bosnian Muslim lines and to Yugoslavia itself, and that several
thousand more were almost surely killed in fighting. But that 8,000
number withstood not only this needed correction, but also the fact
that fewer than 3,000 bodies were found in the Srebrenica area, [15]
with an unknown but probably large fraction killed in the savage July
1995 fighting or earlier. Belated claims of reburials lack
plausibility, and run into the problem that although Madeleine
Albright warned the Serbs that "We will be watching you," no satellite
photos have ever been displayed publicly showing digging, burying, or
trucks moving bodies. In short, the stable figure of 8,000 rests on a
propaganda need that has sustained a politically convenient
myth-inflation, supported by the combination of NATO officials, the
mainstream media, and the ICTY. [16]
Del Ponte's claim in her Goldman Sachs speech that this was a case of
"genocide" follows a pattern of ICTY findings and conclusion that
don't withstand the slightest scrutiny and even suffer from internal
contradiction. ICTY judges repeatedly stated as an established fact
that 7-8,000 Muslim men had been executed, while simultaneously
acknowledging that the evidence only "suggested" that "a majority" of
the 7-8,000 missing had not been killed in combat, [17] which yields a
number substantially lower than 7-8,000, plus uncertainty. Can you
have "genocide" in one small town? The judges suggested that pushing
the Bosnian Muslim inhabitants out of the Srebrenica area while
killing many males was itself genocide, and they essentially equated
genocide with ethnic cleansing.
The Tribunal dealt with the awkward problem of the genocide-intent
Serbs busing Bosnian Muslim women and children to safety by arguing
that they did this for public relations reasons, but as Michael Mandel
points out, failing to do some criminal act despite your desire--in
this case entirely unproven and resting on an ideological/political
premise of ICTY personnel--is called "not committing the crime." [18]
The Tribunal never asked why the genocidal Serbs failed to surround
the town before its capture to prevent thousands of males from
escaping to safety, or why the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were willing to
leave their women and children as well as many wounded comrades to the
mercies of the Serbs; and they failed to confront the fact that
10,000 mainly Muslim residents of Zvornik sought refugee from the
civil war in Serbia itself, as prosecution witness Borisav Jovic
testified.
It is notable that the ICTY has never called Operation Storm, the
August 1995 Croatian ethnic cleansing of some 250,000 Krajina Serbs,
"genocide," although in that case many women and children were killed
and the ethnic cleansing applied to a larger area and larger victim
population than in Srebrenica. It was also preceded by an earlier
series of Croatian army attacks, first on the Serbian villages of
Medak, Citluk and Divoselo in the UN- protected Krajina region back in
1993, in which a hundred or more unarmed civilians were slaughtered,
and then in the brutal ethnic cleansing trial run for Operation Storm
with "Operation Flash" carried out in Western Slavonia in May 1995
with many hundreds killed. There was no ICTY response to any of these
major death-dealing operations, even though a UN dossier was
submitted to the ICTY that described the 1993 crimes. [19]
The ICTY's extreme bias and politically-based double standard in
treating Srebrenica and Krajina is dramatically evident in Del Ponte's
discussion of the two cases before the Goldman Sachs audience. In the
Srebrenica case, she transmits without question a corrupted
interpretation of the word genocide and an inflated and unproven
number of victims, and mentions no context, such as the fact that
Srebrenica had been the base of Bosnian Muslim commander Naser Oric
who had sallied forth from 1992 into 1995 in Serb massacre and
destruction forays that left well over a thousand dead Serb civilians.
Her treatment of Operation Storm and the Krajina massacre makes an
enlightening contrast and is worth quoting at length:
"Another typical case is Ante Gotovina. This Croatian general was
indicted in 2001 for crimes committed against Serbs in 1995 [Operation
Storm]. Over 100 were killed and a hundred thousand forced to leave
their homes while their houses were looted or destroyed. These crimes
were committed in the course of a military operation, undoubtedly
legitimate as such, aimed at re-taking the part of Croatian territory
which was occupied by Serb forces. The operation was a success, and
Croatians remember it as one of their finest hours. Gotovina was one
of the commanders and, quite naturally, he is revered as a hero. The
mere mention of the war crimes committed in the course of the
operation was taboo for years. . The logic was: only enemy forces
committed war crimes, defenders were innocent by definition. It is
only recently that the government has acknowledged that, yes, crimes
were committed, and those responsible for these crimes, including
Gotovina, must be tried in The Hague."
This is straightforward apologetics for ethnic cleansing, with a
number of omissions and serious misrepresentations of fact. She never
mentions that Krajina had been a UN protected area, like Srebrenica,
brazenly violated by the Croatians in 1993; nor does she mention the
May 1995 Operation Flash assault in which the Croats killed many
hundreds of Serb civilians. She doesn't mention the fact that the UN
continued to urge a negotiated settlement of the Krajina dispute,
ignored by the Croats in the massive attack of August 1995. She says
that these crimes "were committed in the course of a military
operation," but so were the Srebrenica crimes, and in fact Srebrenica
was defended (and abandoned) by a military force relatively stronger
than the Krajina Serbs had maintained. Her statement that the Krajina
operation was "legitimate" because it was "aimed at re-taking the part
of Croatian territory which was occupied by Serb forces" gives this
operation an apologetic context that involves serious lying-this was a
carefully planned campaign, not mainly to remove "Serb
forces"-relatively weak in Krajina and arguably there to defend a
civilian population against Croatian army massacres such as occurred
earlier at Medak and in Operation Flash-but to remove the Serb
civilian population that had lived in that area for centuries. This
was deliberate ethnic cleansing, but Del Ponte cannot admit the fact
in this case. Can you imagine Del Ponte saying that the Serb attack on
Srebrenica was to "remove Bosnian Muslim forces," or that the Serb
operations in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 were to "remove KLA forces"?
Serb actions are invariably ethnic cleansing, Croatian actions of
comparable or greater anti-civilian scope are merely "military
operations," never ethnic cleansing, in accord with a clear political
agenda.
Further misrepresentations are her statement that "over 100 were
killed," and that "a hundred thousand" were "forced to leave their
homes." Just as she swallowed the inflated 8,000 for Srebrenica, so
here Del Ponte grossly underestimates the toll of the politically
inconvenient victims. The Serb human rights organization Veritas
estimated that 1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm; [20]
and their list of victims included 368 women and children--the Croats
didn't bus women and children to safety as did the genocidal Serbs at
Srebrenica. Operation Storm may well have involved the killing of
more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the
Srebrenica massacre: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters,
not civilians (only one of 1,883 bodies in the graves around
Srebrenica was identified as female). [21]
As to numbers expelled, even conventional studies give a figure of
200,000 or more for those driven out of Krajina. [22] Del Ponte
strives to minimize these numbers because 250,000 civilians ethnically
cleansed is hard to explain away as merely part of a "military
operation" to deal with "Serb forces." In contrast with her usual
dramatizing of Serbian violence, Del Ponte uses gentle language in
describing Croatian actions: the 100,000 were "forced to leave their
homes," not "deported," "driven out," or "ethnically cleansed" as she
and her allies would describe comparable Serb actions. She provides no
details on the impressively ruthless Croatian actions, such as: "UN
troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead
Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full
of rounds from the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies
under the tracks of a tank." [23]
So for De Ponte this massive ethnic cleansing of civilians was
reasonably seen by Croats as "one of their finest hours," because it
was a military success, though some incidental "war crimes" were
committed; whereas she would never suggest that the Bosnian Serb
capture of the better defended Srebrenica was a creditable military
success of which Serbs might properly be proud-any such success was
unmentionable in the face of war crimes, and she berates the Serbs
because one-third allegedly don't believe war crimes were committed at
Srebrenica. She gives an apologetic context to Operation Storm to give
it legitimacy; whereas she never mentions the Srebrenica background
of Bosnian Muslim killings of Serbs that might suggest a vengeance
motive and interfere with the ideological/political premise of pure
unprovoked evil. The double standard, based in good part on
misrepresentation of the facts, is gross.
Del Ponte notes that Croatian General Ante Gotovina was indicted in
2001 for war crimes in Operation Storm, but a number of questions
arise: Why did it take six years after the event for Gotovina to be
indicted, whereas Bosnian Serb General Mladic and President Karadzic
were indicted within days of the Srebrenica massacre and before the
facts of the case could be minimally verified? Why has NATO never sent
military forces into Croatia to capture Gotovina as they have done on
several occasions in Bosnia and Serbia seeking Mladic and Karadzic?
Could this indictment have been connected to the seizure of Milosevic
and the need to give the appearance of balance? Why was Croat
President Tudjman not indicted for these war crimes, in parallel with
Milosevic (who the ICTY has striven mightily and unsuccessfully to
link to the Srebrenica massacre, whereas Tudjman's link to Operation
Storm is clear)? Why were Clinton, Albright and Holbrooke not indicted
for documentable approval and support for Operation Storm? [24]
The answers to these questions, and the key to Del Ponte's double
standard and misrepresentations, clearly rest on the fact that the
massive ethnic cleansing operation by the Croats in Krajina was
carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support, whereas the
Serbs were the targeted U.S. enemy. [25] Thus, just as NATO was exempt
by virtue of the structure, control and purpose of the ICTY, so also
are the leaders of client states, though a few bones like Gotovina may
be thrown (belatedly, and with lackadaisical enforcement) to provide a
not very convincing aura of fairness.
A key theme in Del Ponte's speech was the importance of "justice" for
bringing reconciliation to the area. The guilty must be brought to
trial and punished; the victims and/or their heirs must feel that
justice has been done to their victimizers in order to be reconciled
and ready for peace. This principle is not applied in cases like
Indonesia in East Timor, where a U.S. and British ally engaged in mass
murder; and of course it would never even be thought of where the
United States and its British ally committed aggression and killed
large numbers of civilians, as in Iraq.
It has also not really been applied by the ICTY in its work in the
ex-Yugoslavia, where the ICTY's selective "justice" has shown its true
face as vengeance and a cover for political ends. Ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia was by no means one-sided, and deaths by nationality were not
far off from population proportionality; [26] the Serbs claim and have
documented thousands of deaths at the hands of the Bosnian Muslims and
their imported Mujahedeen cadres, and by the Croatians, and they have
their own group examining and trying to identify bodies at an
estimated 73 mass graves. [27] This victimization has hardly been
noticed by the Western media or ICTY -- the distinguished Yugoslav
forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic observed back in 1996 that "the
fact that his team had previously identified the bodies of 1,000
Bosnian Serbs in the [Srebrenica] region had not interested prosecutor
Richard Goldstone." [28] Instead, there is a steady refrain about the
Serbs tendency to whine, whereas Bosnian Muslim complaints are taken
as those of true victims and are never designated whining. Thus the
question never arises for Del Ponte and her allies (including the
Western media)--if "justice" is required for "reconciliation," what is
to reconcile the victims and heirs of the thousands of Serb victims
of the ethnic cleansing wars, such as the thousand or more killed and
250,000 expelled from Croatian Krajina, if their claims are ignored?
Won't they be even more embittered by a one-sided pursuit of justice?
Apart from this double standard on the need for justice as a means for
producing reconciliation, the claim that ICTY justice will serve that
end is fraudulent anyway. Rather than producing reconciliation the
steady focus on Srebrenica victims and killers has made for more
intense hatred and nationalism on the part of those supposedly
obtaining justice, just as the Kosovo war and its violence exacerbated
hatred and tensions there and showed that Clinton's claimed objective
of a tolerant multi-ethnic Kosovo was a fraud. In Kosovo, this
one-sided propaganda and NATO control has unleashed serious and
unremitting anti-Serb (along with anti-Roma, anti-Turk,
anti-dissident-Albanian) violence, helped along by the willingness of
the NATO authorities to look the other way as their allies -- the
purported victims -- take their revenge and pursue their long-standing
aim of ethnic purification.
In Bosnia, a British foreign office proposal to use the tenth
anniversary commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre for a
"statesmanlike initiative" of public reconciliation among the
different groups reportedly received short shrift from Bosnian
representatives on all sides. [29] David Chandler points out that
"the international community's focus on the war has given succour to
the most reactionary and backward political forces in Bosnia," and
that "those most socially excluded from Bosnian life have been able to
dictate the political agenda and oppose the politics of
reconciliation, because their social weight has been artificially
reinforced by the international dominance over the politics of this
tiny state. Without political, social and economic dependency on
external actors that are legitimized by the idea of Bosnian
victimhood, it is unlikely that the war would have remained so central
in Bosnian life." [30]
In both Bosnia and Serbia, not to mention Kosovo where they are still
under assault after a major bout of ethnic cleansing, the Serbs have
been under steady attack, humiliated, and their leaders and military
personnel punished, while those who stand accused of crimes among the
Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and NATO powers, with minor exceptions suffer
no investigation or penalties and may even be portrayed as dispensers
of justice. The record strongly suggests that the objectives of the
retribution-pushers are not justice and reconciliation - - in addition
to straightforward vengeance, they are to unify and strengthen the
position of the Bosnian Muslims, to crush the Republica Srpska, and
possibly even eliminate it as an independent entity in Bosnia, to keep
Serbia disorganized, weak and dependent on the West, to provide the
basis for the formal removal of Kosovo from Serbia, and to continue to
put the U.S. and NATO attack and dismantlement of Yugoslavia in a
favorable light. The last objective requires diverting attention from
the Clinton/Bosnian Muslim role in giving al Qaeda a foothold in the
Balkans, Izetbegovic's close alliance with Osama bin Laden, his
Islamic Declaration declaring hostility to a multi-ethnic state, the
importation of 4,000 Mujahadeen to fight a holy war in Bosnia, with
active Clinton administration aid, and the KLA-al Qaeda connection. [31]
In sum, the ICTY was created by the NATO powers, not to bring either
peace or justice to Yugoslavia, but to serve the U.S. and NATO aims
there, which called for the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, the crushing
of Serbia, and the conversion of the new mini-states of the
ex-Yugoslavia into NATO-power dependencies. As the Serbs were the main
obstacle to this program, they had to be demonized, their leaders
driven from office and incarcerated, and their people humiliated and
punished. This called for an ICTY focus on "justice" (selective) that
helped demonize and provided the justification for undermining peace
settlements and making war. The ICTY has performed this service
effectively, with the help of a gullible and patriotic Western media
and intellectual class. The trial of Milosevic and continued pursuit
of Mladic and Karadzic are the final efforts of the ICTY: the latter
to justify continued pressure on the Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia and
Montenegro, the former to prove that the NATO wars were based on
justice, and both to put "humanitarian intervention" by the imperial
powers in a good light. Carla Del Ponte and the ICTY have been useful
instruments of these ends.
Notes
1.
http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/2005/speech/cdp-goldmansachs-050610-e.htm
Address at Goldman Sachs, London," Carla Del Ponte, International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, October 6, 2005.
2. Katarina Kratovac, "Five years after Milosevic, Serbs still await a
better life," (A.P.), Philadelphia Inquirer,
Oct. 5, 2005; Ian Traynor, "Nato force 'feeds Kosovo sex trade',"
Guardian, May 7, 2004; ThomasGambill on mafia takeover of Kosovo,
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/9/27/101219.shtml
3. On these objectives, see Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade:
Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press: 2002),
Introduction.
4. Quoted in Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, p. 125.
5. See Johnstone, p. 45.
6. Quoted in Mandel, p. 67.
7. Quoted in ibid., p. 126.
8. Quoted in Johnstone, p. 95.
9. Quoted in Mandel, p. 132; for compelling details, Mandel, pp. 132-146.
10. Ibid, pp. 80, 135.
11. Only in the case of Serbs has the ICTY adopted the notion of
"command responsibility" extending to the highest officials.
12. Michael Scharf, "Accounting for atrocities conference," Bard
College, Oct. 5-6, 1998:
<http://www.bard.edu/hrp/atrocities/index.htm>www.bard.edu/hrp/atrocities/index.htm;
cited in Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Sutton
Publishing: 2002), p. 187.
13. The judge's handling of the Walker testimony and cross-examination
are discussed in detail in Mandel, pp. 168-173..
14. Ibid., pp. 174-5.
15. In his testimony at the Milosevic trial on Jan, 26, 2004, ICTY
investigator Dean Manning testified that 2,570 bodies had been found
in total, with only 70 identified. "Milosevic Trial Transcript," Jan.
26, 2004, pp. 31428-31437.
16. See Edward Herman,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=8244
Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre," ZNet, July 7, 2005.
17. See Mandel, pp. 155-6.
18. Michael Mandel, "The ICTY Calls It 'Genocide'." in Edward Herman
et al., Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes, forthcoming.
19. "The UN dossiers, with their voluminous evidence, have been given
to the Crimes Investigators (of the ICTY) on October 6, 1993. Since
then there has been nothing but silence." Cedric Thornberry, "Saving
the War Crimesa Tribunal: Bosnia Herzegovina," Foreign Policy,
September 1996.
20. See "Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence France Press, Aug.
4, 2004; Veritas at http://www.veritas.org.yu/>www.veritas.org.yu.
21. These numbers are given in privately circulated tabulation of the
characteristics of these remains by Dr. Zoran Stankovic, a longtime UN
forensic specialist who worked extensively on the Srebrenica case.
22. Burg and Shoup give "several hundred thousands" as their estimate;
Lord David Owen, 150,000.
23. Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force (Center for Defence and
Security Studies: 1999), p. 192.
24. See footnote 11.
25. On that support, see Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds
Croat Troops 'Cleansed' the Serbs," New York Times,
March 21, 1999.
26. See Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, "Casualties of the 1990s War in
Bosnia-Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and the Latest
Results" (Sept. 23, 2004), Demographic Unit, Office of the Prosecutor,
ICTY, Paper Presented at The IUSSP Seminar on the Demography of
Conflict and Violence Jevnaker, Norway, 8 to 11 November 2003.
27. Slavisa Sabljic , "The Trade in Bodies in Bosnia-Herzegovina":
http://www.serbianna.com/press/010.html Joan Phillips, "Victims and
Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
28. "Relations with Rest Of Former Yugoslavia: Yugoslav forensic
expert says no proof about Srebrenica mass grave," BBC Summary of
World Broadcasts, July 15, 1996.
29. David Chandler,
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAC9B.htm>Srebrenica:
Prolonging the Wounds of War," Spiked Online, July 20, 2005
30. Ibid.
31. See Johnstone, pp. 51-64.
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The Hague Tribunal: The Political Economy of Sham Justice
Carla Del Ponte Addresses Goldman Sachs on Justice and Profits
By Edward S. Herman
November 20, 2005
On October 6, 2005, Carla Del Ponte, prosecutor of the International
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), gave a talk before an
audience at Goldman Sachs in London that throws light on the role of
the ICTY as well as the character and qualities of Ms. Del Ponte and
her efforts. [1]
Speaking before this business audience, Ms. Del Ponte emphasized that
the ICTY and other UN organizations are not profit-making bodies, but
that they, and the ICTY specifically, facilitate profit-making for
others. "Preventing wars or bringing justice doesn't fill the UN or
anybody's bank accounts," she said. The private sector can't carry
out these functions. But Ms. Del Ponte claims that such services not
only save lives, reduce human suffering and destruction, they also
help bring stability: "This is where the long-term profit of the UN's
work resides. We are trying to create stable conditions so that safe
investments can take place." This will make for "a reasonably
prosperous democracyŠa factor of peace and stability in the world."
In trying to sell the ICTY to this business group as a partner or
servant of neoliberalism, Del Ponte runs into the difficulty that the
actual work of her organization has been highly destabilizing, did
not "save lives" or diminish human suffering and destruction, and that
it has left its main areas of intervention--Bosnia/Herzegovina, Serbia
and Montenegro, and Kosovo-- in a state of semi-permanent crisis and
with conditions singularly unattractive to private investment (except
for the drug and sex trades, which thrive in Kosovo). [2] On the other
hand, insofar as the ICTY contributed to the real ends sought by
Clinton, Blair, and other major NATO powers, which included helping
NATO celebrate its 50th anniversary in 1999 and showing that NATO
still had a role to play, as a U.S.-dominated organization; destroying
an independent and socialist-inclined Yugoslavia and bringing its
constituent parts into the NATO orbit of influence; and preparing the
ground for further "humanitarian interventions," [3] the ICTY could be
said to be an agent of the dominant Western powers and therefore of
neoliberalism broadly viewed.
In her opening remarks, Del Ponte says that the ICTY is tasked with
"bringing peace, security and justice," but shortly thereafter "peace"
and "security" fade out and she asserts that "our primary objective is
to bring justice." Justice ranks high, she says, because it
"contributes to the reconciliation between peoples who have been torn
apart by the wars of the nineties." Before I explain why this is a
fallacy, especially with justice perceived in the one-sided and highly
politicized fashion of Del Ponte, the ICTY and NATO, it should be
recognized that there may be a conflict between pursuing "justice" and
"peace." It is no coincidence that just as the work of the ICTY has
been associated with chronic instability in the ex-Yugoslavia, so also
its work ran parallel with both outbursts of ferocious local warfare
and closely linked Western wars of intervention in those areas, and
certainly failed to contribute to "peace." In fact, an excellent case
can be made that the ICTY's focus on "justice" was well suited to
avoiding peace, and that its very design was to facilitate war, a
dismantling of Yugoslavia, and a specific attack on Serbia.
This case is made compellingly by Michael Mandel in his How America
Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes
Against Humanity (Pluto Press, 2004), where he points out that the
formation of the ICTY was immediately preceded by a December 1992
speech by the U.S. State Department's Lawrence Eagleberger, who named
three top Serb leaders who needed to be brought to justice, and stated
explicitly that "the international community must begin now to think
about moving beyond the London [peace] agreement and contemplate more
aggressive actions." [4] Even before this, the United States had
sabotaged the promising Lisbon agreement of February 1992 by
encouraging Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to withdraw and
break the plan that the Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and (previously)
Izetbegovic, had accepted. [5] Following Eagleburger's talk, in
February 1993, as Lord David Owen wrote bitterly, ""We have more or
less got a peace settlement but we have a problem. We can't get the
Muslims on board. And that's largely the fault of the Americans,
because the Muslims won't budge while they think that Washington may
come in on their side," so that in reality "the Clinton people block
it." [6] These crucial facts and informed judgments did not interfere
in the least with the established view that it was Milosevic and the
Bosnian Serbs, seeking a "Greater Serbia," that made peace unattainable.
The role of the ICTY in this peace-sabotage business was to indict
Serb leaders in order to demonize them and make them ineligible for
any peace negotiating process-in Mandel's words, the ICTY function was
to help the Americans "justify their intention to go to warŠby
branding their proposed enemies as Nazis." [7] As presiding judge
Antonio Cassese said at the time regarding Bosnian Serb leader Radovan
Karadzic, "Let us see who will sit down at the negotiating table now
with a man accused of genocide." [8] Later, in the 1998-1999 run-up to
the NATO bombing war on Yugoslavia, the ICTY turned unremitting
attention to denouncing Serbs, and as Mandel points out, its work in
this period "had nothing to do with trying and punishing criminals,
and everything to do with lending crucial credibility to NATO's
cause." [9] During the 78-day NATO bombing war, which began on March
24, 1999, the ICTY served as an aggressive public relations arm of
NATO, most dramatically in indicting Milosevic in May 1999 just as
NATO was drawing criticism for extending its bombing targets to
Serbian civilian facilities. In short, the ICTY, serving as an arm of
NATO, helped prevent peace settlements in the Bosnian conflict in
the deadly years 1992-1994, and helped justify and sustain NATO's 1999
assault on Yugoslavia.
This ICTY service was based on structural facts: the institution was
created by the NATO powers, with the United States in the lead; it was
funded heavily by these powers and closely allied NGOs (Soros's Open
Society Institute); it was staffed with NATO country personnel, often
seconded to the ICTY, and its high officials were vetted by NATO-power
leaders; and it depended on NATO for information and police service.
But this meant that NATO itself would be exempt from "justice," and
that it would be difficult to bring to justice NATO clients, even if
they committed crimes similar to or even worse than those committed by
Serbs. Mandel points out that when he presented the ICTY prosecutor
with a three volume dossier and complaint on NATO war crimes in May
1999, it took a year for the prosecutor to decide to reject this
application, without ever having made a formal investigation, whereas
in the case of the alleged Racak massacre, attributable to the Serbs,
the prosecutor declared this a war crime and rushed into action on the
very same day, based solely on information supplied her by the U.S.
representative in the scene, William Walker. [10] Of the leaders in
the Balkan wars, Clinton, Blair, Izetbegovic and Tudjman have never
been indicted by the ICTY, only Milosevic, although on the logic
applied in the Milosevic prosecution, an equal or better case could be
made for each of the exempted leaders. [11]
This highly politicized justice brought by the ICTY not only served
war rather than peace, it cannot be regarded as justice at all.
Justice that is not even-handed is deeply compromised. And if it is
clearly serving a political end and meeting an external political
agenda it is almost certain to be biased and fail to bring justice
even in dealing with politically eligible targets. If it is
politically corrupt it will do its work corruptly and bend its
supposed judicial process to meeting those same political aims. This
has been evident throughout the ICTY's operations-in the case of the
numerous indictments that met a NATO political or PR need of the
moment (e.g., the indictment of the Serb paramilitary leader Arkan in
March 1999, just as the NATO bombing commenced; Milosevic in May 1999,
just as NATO's bombing of civilian sites was creating a PR problem),
its steady resort to publicity that compromised supposed judicial
proceedings, and with endless illustrations of judicial malpractice in
the ICTY proceedings themselves.
According to Michael Scharf, an ICTY supporter, over 90 percent of the
evidence brought forward in the Milosevic trial was hearsay, [12] all
freely admitted into the record by the judge, although almost none of
it had any connection with proving orders or the sanction of war
crimes by the man on trial (and all of which could be readily
duplicated for Bosnian Muslim and Croat treatment of Serbs or U.S.
bombing attacks on the Serbian civilian infrastructure). It did,
however, set a tone in creating a moral environment of target
demonization that served NATO political aims, even if it compromised
the possibility of a fair trial.
From a steady stream of cases, the absence of judicial equity may be
illustrated by the fact that with William Walker on the stand for the
prosecution, Judge Richard May never interrupted him once as he ranged
far and wide, even covering his view of Milosevic's "general
attitude"; and although the "Racak massacre" claim was the basis of 45
charges of murder against Milosevic, and Walker was a key driver of
that claim, May gave the defendant a fixed time limit for questions
and interrupted his questioning over 60 times in the process of
preventing a serious cross-examination. Athough allowing a stream of
hearsay from prosecution witnesses, Judge May refused to permit
Milosevic to enter into the record articles from Le Monde and Figaro
that raised serious doubts about the Walker version of events at
Racak. [13]
With General Wesley Clark testifying for the prosecution, the judge
allowed the U.S. government to force a closed session and to redact
the testimony before release, he permitted Clark to talk about
anything he pleased, including ten minutes of self-adulation (without
judicial interruption), and he was permitted to phone Bill Clinton to
request a letter of support, contrary to the stated rule that no
outside communication was permitted in the midst of testimony; whereas
Milosevic was not permitted to ask questions challenging Clark's
credibility or anything not directly responsive to Clark's verbal
claims. [14] More recently, during the defense's presentation of its
case, the ICTY judge allowed the prosecution to present a video of an
alleged killing of six Bosnian Muslims back in 1995, although it had
no bearing on the ongoing questioning of the defense witness and was
presented without prior notice to the defense, which was not permitted
to question the video presentation. However, introduction of this
video did serve to dramatize claims about the Srebrenica massacre at a
time when that event was being given tenth anniversary memorial
publicity by the Western establishment.
Del Ponte states authoritatively in her Goldman Sachs talk that 8,000
Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered at Srebrenica in the "only genocide"
in Europe since World War II. The 8,000 figure was given by the Red
Cross back in July 1995 based on crude and unverified estimates of
3,000 captured by the Bosnian Serbs plus 5,000 initially claimed to be
"missing." It was very soon recognized by the Red Cross and other
observers that several thousand of the "missing" had escaped to
Bosnian Muslim lines and to Yugoslavia itself, and that several
thousand more were almost surely killed in fighting. But that 8,000
number withstood not only this needed correction, but also the fact
that fewer than 3,000 bodies were found in the Srebrenica area, [15]
with an unknown but probably large fraction killed in the savage July
1995 fighting or earlier. Belated claims of reburials lack
plausibility, and run into the problem that although Madeleine
Albright warned the Serbs that "We will be watching you," no satellite
photos have ever been displayed publicly showing digging, burying, or
trucks moving bodies. In short, the stable figure of 8,000 rests on a
propaganda need that has sustained a politically convenient
myth-inflation, supported by the combination of NATO officials, the
mainstream media, and the ICTY. [16]
Del Ponte's claim in her Goldman Sachs speech that this was a case of
"genocide" follows a pattern of ICTY findings and conclusion that
don't withstand the slightest scrutiny and even suffer from internal
contradiction. ICTY judges repeatedly stated as an established fact
that 7-8,000 Muslim men had been executed, while simultaneously
acknowledging that the evidence only "suggested" that "a majority" of
the 7-8,000 missing had not been killed in combat, [17] which yields a
number substantially lower than 7-8,000, plus uncertainty. Can you
have "genocide" in one small town? The judges suggested that pushing
the Bosnian Muslim inhabitants out of the Srebrenica area while
killing many males was itself genocide, and they essentially equated
genocide with ethnic cleansing.
The Tribunal dealt with the awkward problem of the genocide-intent
Serbs busing Bosnian Muslim women and children to safety by arguing
that they did this for public relations reasons, but as Michael Mandel
points out, failing to do some criminal act despite your desire--in
this case entirely unproven and resting on an ideological/political
premise of ICTY personnel--is called "not committing the crime." [18]
The Tribunal never asked why the genocidal Serbs failed to surround
the town before its capture to prevent thousands of males from
escaping to safety, or why the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were willing to
leave their women and children as well as many wounded comrades to the
mercies of the Serbs; and they failed to confront the fact that
10,000 mainly Muslim residents of Zvornik sought refugee from the
civil war in Serbia itself, as prosecution witness Borisav Jovic
testified.
It is notable that the ICTY has never called Operation Storm, the
August 1995 Croatian ethnic cleansing of some 250,000 Krajina Serbs,
"genocide," although in that case many women and children were killed
and the ethnic cleansing applied to a larger area and larger victim
population than in Srebrenica. It was also preceded by an earlier
series of Croatian army attacks, first on the Serbian villages of
Medak, Citluk and Divoselo in the UN- protected Krajina region back in
1993, in which a hundred or more unarmed civilians were slaughtered,
and then in the brutal ethnic cleansing trial run for Operation Storm
with "Operation Flash" carried out in Western Slavonia in May 1995
with many hundreds killed. There was no ICTY response to any of these
major death-dealing operations, even though a UN dossier was
submitted to the ICTY that described the 1993 crimes. [19]
The ICTY's extreme bias and politically-based double standard in
treating Srebrenica and Krajina is dramatically evident in Del Ponte's
discussion of the two cases before the Goldman Sachs audience. In the
Srebrenica case, she transmits without question a corrupted
interpretation of the word genocide and an inflated and unproven
number of victims, and mentions no context, such as the fact that
Srebrenica had been the base of Bosnian Muslim commander Naser Oric
who had sallied forth from 1992 into 1995 in Serb massacre and
destruction forays that left well over a thousand dead Serb civilians.
Her treatment of Operation Storm and the Krajina massacre makes an
enlightening contrast and is worth quoting at length:
"Another typical case is Ante Gotovina. This Croatian general was
indicted in 2001 for crimes committed against Serbs in 1995 [Operation
Storm]. Over 100 were killed and a hundred thousand forced to leave
their homes while their houses were looted or destroyed. These crimes
were committed in the course of a military operation, undoubtedly
legitimate as such, aimed at re-taking the part of Croatian territory
which was occupied by Serb forces. The operation was a success, and
Croatians remember it as one of their finest hours. Gotovina was one
of the commanders and, quite naturally, he is revered as a hero. The
mere mention of the war crimes committed in the course of the
operation was taboo for years. . The logic was: only enemy forces
committed war crimes, defenders were innocent by definition. It is
only recently that the government has acknowledged that, yes, crimes
were committed, and those responsible for these crimes, including
Gotovina, must be tried in The Hague."
This is straightforward apologetics for ethnic cleansing, with a
number of omissions and serious misrepresentations of fact. She never
mentions that Krajina had been a UN protected area, like Srebrenica,
brazenly violated by the Croatians in 1993; nor does she mention the
May 1995 Operation Flash assault in which the Croats killed many
hundreds of Serb civilians. She doesn't mention the fact that the UN
continued to urge a negotiated settlement of the Krajina dispute,
ignored by the Croats in the massive attack of August 1995. She says
that these crimes "were committed in the course of a military
operation," but so were the Srebrenica crimes, and in fact Srebrenica
was defended (and abandoned) by a military force relatively stronger
than the Krajina Serbs had maintained. Her statement that the Krajina
operation was "legitimate" because it was "aimed at re-taking the part
of Croatian territory which was occupied by Serb forces" gives this
operation an apologetic context that involves serious lying-this was a
carefully planned campaign, not mainly to remove "Serb
forces"-relatively weak in Krajina and arguably there to defend a
civilian population against Croatian army massacres such as occurred
earlier at Medak and in Operation Flash-but to remove the Serb
civilian population that had lived in that area for centuries. This
was deliberate ethnic cleansing, but Del Ponte cannot admit the fact
in this case. Can you imagine Del Ponte saying that the Serb attack on
Srebrenica was to "remove Bosnian Muslim forces," or that the Serb
operations in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 were to "remove KLA forces"?
Serb actions are invariably ethnic cleansing, Croatian actions of
comparable or greater anti-civilian scope are merely "military
operations," never ethnic cleansing, in accord with a clear political
agenda.
Further misrepresentations are her statement that "over 100 were
killed," and that "a hundred thousand" were "forced to leave their
homes." Just as she swallowed the inflated 8,000 for Srebrenica, so
here Del Ponte grossly underestimates the toll of the politically
inconvenient victims. The Serb human rights organization Veritas
estimated that 1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm; [20]
and their list of victims included 368 women and children--the Croats
didn't bus women and children to safety as did the genocidal Serbs at
Srebrenica. Operation Storm may well have involved the killing of
more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the
Srebrenica massacre: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters,
not civilians (only one of 1,883 bodies in the graves around
Srebrenica was identified as female). [21]
As to numbers expelled, even conventional studies give a figure of
200,000 or more for those driven out of Krajina. [22] Del Ponte
strives to minimize these numbers because 250,000 civilians ethnically
cleansed is hard to explain away as merely part of a "military
operation" to deal with "Serb forces." In contrast with her usual
dramatizing of Serbian violence, Del Ponte uses gentle language in
describing Croatian actions: the 100,000 were "forced to leave their
homes," not "deported," "driven out," or "ethnically cleansed" as she
and her allies would describe comparable Serb actions. She provides no
details on the impressively ruthless Croatian actions, such as: "UN
troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead
Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full
of rounds from the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies
under the tracks of a tank." [23]
So for De Ponte this massive ethnic cleansing of civilians was
reasonably seen by Croats as "one of their finest hours," because it
was a military success, though some incidental "war crimes" were
committed; whereas she would never suggest that the Bosnian Serb
capture of the better defended Srebrenica was a creditable military
success of which Serbs might properly be proud-any such success was
unmentionable in the face of war crimes, and she berates the Serbs
because one-third allegedly don't believe war crimes were committed at
Srebrenica. She gives an apologetic context to Operation Storm to give
it legitimacy; whereas she never mentions the Srebrenica background
of Bosnian Muslim killings of Serbs that might suggest a vengeance
motive and interfere with the ideological/political premise of pure
unprovoked evil. The double standard, based in good part on
misrepresentation of the facts, is gross.
Del Ponte notes that Croatian General Ante Gotovina was indicted in
2001 for war crimes in Operation Storm, but a number of questions
arise: Why did it take six years after the event for Gotovina to be
indicted, whereas Bosnian Serb General Mladic and President Karadzic
were indicted within days of the Srebrenica massacre and before the
facts of the case could be minimally verified? Why has NATO never sent
military forces into Croatia to capture Gotovina as they have done on
several occasions in Bosnia and Serbia seeking Mladic and Karadzic?
Could this indictment have been connected to the seizure of Milosevic
and the need to give the appearance of balance? Why was Croat
President Tudjman not indicted for these war crimes, in parallel with
Milosevic (who the ICTY has striven mightily and unsuccessfully to
link to the Srebrenica massacre, whereas Tudjman's link to Operation
Storm is clear)? Why were Clinton, Albright and Holbrooke not indicted
for documentable approval and support for Operation Storm? [24]
The answers to these questions, and the key to Del Ponte's double
standard and misrepresentations, clearly rest on the fact that the
massive ethnic cleansing operation by the Croats in Krajina was
carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support, whereas the
Serbs were the targeted U.S. enemy. [25] Thus, just as NATO was exempt
by virtue of the structure, control and purpose of the ICTY, so also
are the leaders of client states, though a few bones like Gotovina may
be thrown (belatedly, and with lackadaisical enforcement) to provide a
not very convincing aura of fairness.
A key theme in Del Ponte's speech was the importance of "justice" for
bringing reconciliation to the area. The guilty must be brought to
trial and punished; the victims and/or their heirs must feel that
justice has been done to their victimizers in order to be reconciled
and ready for peace. This principle is not applied in cases like
Indonesia in East Timor, where a U.S. and British ally engaged in mass
murder; and of course it would never even be thought of where the
United States and its British ally committed aggression and killed
large numbers of civilians, as in Iraq.
It has also not really been applied by the ICTY in its work in the
ex-Yugoslavia, where the ICTY's selective "justice" has shown its true
face as vengeance and a cover for political ends. Ethnic cleansing in
Bosnia was by no means one-sided, and deaths by nationality were not
far off from population proportionality; [26] the Serbs claim and have
documented thousands of deaths at the hands of the Bosnian Muslims and
their imported Mujahedeen cadres, and by the Croatians, and they have
their own group examining and trying to identify bodies at an
estimated 73 mass graves. [27] This victimization has hardly been
noticed by the Western media or ICTY -- the distinguished Yugoslav
forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic observed back in 1996 that "the
fact that his team had previously identified the bodies of 1,000
Bosnian Serbs in the [Srebrenica] region had not interested prosecutor
Richard Goldstone." [28] Instead, there is a steady refrain about the
Serbs tendency to whine, whereas Bosnian Muslim complaints are taken
as those of true victims and are never designated whining. Thus the
question never arises for Del Ponte and her allies (including the
Western media)--if "justice" is required for "reconciliation," what is
to reconcile the victims and heirs of the thousands of Serb victims
of the ethnic cleansing wars, such as the thousand or more killed and
250,000 expelled from Croatian Krajina, if their claims are ignored?
Won't they be even more embittered by a one-sided pursuit of justice?
Apart from this double standard on the need for justice as a means for
producing reconciliation, the claim that ICTY justice will serve that
end is fraudulent anyway. Rather than producing reconciliation the
steady focus on Srebrenica victims and killers has made for more
intense hatred and nationalism on the part of those supposedly
obtaining justice, just as the Kosovo war and its violence exacerbated
hatred and tensions there and showed that Clinton's claimed objective
of a tolerant multi-ethnic Kosovo was a fraud. In Kosovo, this
one-sided propaganda and NATO control has unleashed serious and
unremitting anti-Serb (along with anti-Roma, anti-Turk,
anti-dissident-Albanian) violence, helped along by the willingness of
the NATO authorities to look the other way as their allies -- the
purported victims -- take their revenge and pursue their long-standing
aim of ethnic purification.
In Bosnia, a British foreign office proposal to use the tenth
anniversary commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre for a
"statesmanlike initiative" of public reconciliation among the
different groups reportedly received short shrift from Bosnian
representatives on all sides. [29] David Chandler points out that
"the international community's focus on the war has given succour to
the most reactionary and backward political forces in Bosnia," and
that "those most socially excluded from Bosnian life have been able to
dictate the political agenda and oppose the politics of
reconciliation, because their social weight has been artificially
reinforced by the international dominance over the politics of this
tiny state. Without political, social and economic dependency on
external actors that are legitimized by the idea of Bosnian
victimhood, it is unlikely that the war would have remained so central
in Bosnian life." [30]
In both Bosnia and Serbia, not to mention Kosovo where they are still
under assault after a major bout of ethnic cleansing, the Serbs have
been under steady attack, humiliated, and their leaders and military
personnel punished, while those who stand accused of crimes among the
Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and NATO powers, with minor exceptions suffer
no investigation or penalties and may even be portrayed as dispensers
of justice. The record strongly suggests that the objectives of the
retribution-pushers are not justice and reconciliation - - in addition
to straightforward vengeance, they are to unify and strengthen the
position of the Bosnian Muslims, to crush the Republica Srpska, and
possibly even eliminate it as an independent entity in Bosnia, to keep
Serbia disorganized, weak and dependent on the West, to provide the
basis for the formal removal of Kosovo from Serbia, and to continue to
put the U.S. and NATO attack and dismantlement of Yugoslavia in a
favorable light. The last objective requires diverting attention from
the Clinton/Bosnian Muslim role in giving al Qaeda a foothold in the
Balkans, Izetbegovic's close alliance with Osama bin Laden, his
Islamic Declaration declaring hostility to a multi-ethnic state, the
importation of 4,000 Mujahadeen to fight a holy war in Bosnia, with
active Clinton administration aid, and the KLA-al Qaeda connection. [31]
In sum, the ICTY was created by the NATO powers, not to bring either
peace or justice to Yugoslavia, but to serve the U.S. and NATO aims
there, which called for the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, the crushing
of Serbia, and the conversion of the new mini-states of the
ex-Yugoslavia into NATO-power dependencies. As the Serbs were the main
obstacle to this program, they had to be demonized, their leaders
driven from office and incarcerated, and their people humiliated and
punished. This called for an ICTY focus on "justice" (selective) that
helped demonize and provided the justification for undermining peace
settlements and making war. The ICTY has performed this service
effectively, with the help of a gullible and patriotic Western media
and intellectual class. The trial of Milosevic and continued pursuit
of Mladic and Karadzic are the final efforts of the ICTY: the latter
to justify continued pressure on the Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia and
Montenegro, the former to prove that the NATO wars were based on
justice, and both to put "humanitarian intervention" by the imperial
powers in a good light. Carla Del Ponte and the ICTY have been useful
instruments of these ends.
Notes
1.
http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/2005/speech/cdp-goldmansachs-050610-e.htm
Address at Goldman Sachs, London," Carla Del Ponte, International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, October 6, 2005.
2. Katarina Kratovac, "Five years after Milosevic, Serbs still await a
better life," (A.P.), Philadelphia Inquirer,
Oct. 5, 2005; Ian Traynor, "Nato force 'feeds Kosovo sex trade',"
Guardian, May 7, 2004; ThomasGambill on mafia takeover of Kosovo,
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/9/27/101219.shtml
3. On these objectives, see Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade:
Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press: 2002),
Introduction.
4. Quoted in Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, p. 125.
5. See Johnstone, p. 45.
6. Quoted in Mandel, p. 67.
7. Quoted in ibid., p. 126.
8. Quoted in Johnstone, p. 95.
9. Quoted in Mandel, p. 132; for compelling details, Mandel, pp. 132-146.
10. Ibid, pp. 80, 135.
11. Only in the case of Serbs has the ICTY adopted the notion of
"command responsibility" extending to the highest officials.
12. Michael Scharf, "Accounting for atrocities conference," Bard
College, Oct. 5-6, 1998:
<http://www.bard.edu/hrp/atrocities/index.htm>www.bard.edu/hrp/atrocities/index.htm;
cited in Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Sutton
Publishing: 2002), p. 187.
13. The judge's handling of the Walker testimony and cross-examination
are discussed in detail in Mandel, pp. 168-173..
14. Ibid., pp. 174-5.
15. In his testimony at the Milosevic trial on Jan, 26, 2004, ICTY
investigator Dean Manning testified that 2,570 bodies had been found
in total, with only 70 identified. "Milosevic Trial Transcript," Jan.
26, 2004, pp. 31428-31437.
16. See Edward Herman,
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=8244
Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre," ZNet, July 7, 2005.
17. See Mandel, pp. 155-6.
18. Michael Mandel, "The ICTY Calls It 'Genocide'." in Edward Herman
et al., Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes, forthcoming.
19. "The UN dossiers, with their voluminous evidence, have been given
to the Crimes Investigators (of the ICTY) on October 6, 1993. Since
then there has been nothing but silence." Cedric Thornberry, "Saving
the War Crimesa Tribunal: Bosnia Herzegovina," Foreign Policy,
September 1996.
20. See "Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence France Press, Aug.
4, 2004; Veritas at http://www.veritas.org.yu/>www.veritas.org.yu.
21. These numbers are given in privately circulated tabulation of the
characteristics of these remains by Dr. Zoran Stankovic, a longtime UN
forensic specialist who worked extensively on the Srebrenica case.
22. Burg and Shoup give "several hundred thousands" as their estimate;
Lord David Owen, 150,000.
23. Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force (Center for Defence and
Security Studies: 1999), p. 192.
24. See footnote 11.
25. On that support, see Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds
Croat Troops 'Cleansed' the Serbs," New York Times,
March 21, 1999.
26. See Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, "Casualties of the 1990s War in
Bosnia-Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and the Latest
Results" (Sept. 23, 2004), Demographic Unit, Office of the Prosecutor,
ICTY, Paper Presented at The IUSSP Seminar on the Demography of
Conflict and Violence Jevnaker, Norway, 8 to 11 November 2003.
27. Slavisa Sabljic , "The Trade in Bodies in Bosnia-Herzegovina":
http://www.serbianna.com/press/010.html Joan Phillips, "Victims and
Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
28. "Relations with Rest Of Former Yugoslavia: Yugoslav forensic
expert says no proof about Srebrenica mass grave," BBC Summary of
World Broadcasts, July 15, 1996.
29. David Chandler,
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAC9B.htm>Srebrenica:
Prolonging the Wounds of War," Spiked Online, July 20, 2005
30. Ibid.
31. See Johnstone, pp. 51-64.
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