Speaking on Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear with Brian Becker, human rights lawyer Christopher Black notes that the ICTY was "funded by NATO countries, corporations, George Soros, and the Open Society Institute, all of which have an agenda of destroying Yugoslavia and breaking it into pieces."

Author Richard Becker further asserted that Yugoslavia, a country of 24 distinct nationalities, was ripped apart by outside forces – Germany, the United States, Britain, and Italy – who funded opposition leaders while stripping the country of resources.

Black reiterated this alternate perspective, referring to the Rambouillet Agreement wherein Madeleine Albright demanded that, in order for a cessation of hostilities and to avoid destruction, Milosevic and the government of Yugoslavia would "allow the immediate occupation of the entire country by NATO forces and it was to convert from a Socialist to a private enterprise country overnight."

Thursday’s verdict surprised precisely no one. The ICTY was pretty much created to prosecute Karadzic – or rather, the complete Serb political and military leadership during the Wars of Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s. The very purpose of the ad-hoc tribunal, a brainchild of the Clinton administration’s “human rights interventionists,” was to deny any legal legitimacy to the Serbs, while bestowing it on the US and its regional clients and proxies.

While Germany was the principal outside backer of the governments in Slovenia and Croatia when they sought to secede from Yugoslavia in 1991, by the following year that role was taken over by Washington. Embracing the narrative of “democratic” Slovenes, Croats and others waging the righteous fight against “Communist Serbian aggression,” the US backed the Muslims in Bosnia in reneging on the power-sharing agreement with the republic’s Christian majority.

Both Serbs and Croats took up arms in response. By 1994, however, the US had midwifed an alliance between the Croats and Muslims, and later arranged for the Serb leadership – civilian president Radovan Karadzic and military commander Ratko Mladic – to be indicted for genocide and war crimes.

A major feature of US intervention in the Balkans was the way in which it bypassed, co-opted or sidelined the United Nations. While insinuating NATO into the UN mission until it finally took over, Washington systematically torpedoed peace talks until it could hijack the process with a self-appointed “contact group” and stage the end of the Bosnian War in Dayton, Ohio in 1995.

One key element in the process was the US-inspired creation of the ad-hoc tribunal in May 1993. Yes, it was established by the UN Security Council, in Resolution 827. However, the Security Council claimed to act under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, allowing the creation of “measures to maintain or restore international peace and security.” The very inception of the ICTY required stretching the definition of “measures” to include judicial power the UNSC clearly lacked – and therefore could not delegate.

Even if the tribunal were perfectly legitimate to begin with, its pattern of indictments should have been a signal something was amiss. The ICTY and its backers clearly believed any Serb atrocities were systematic and deliberate, while those committed by anyone else were random or incidental. While every single senior Serb official in present-day Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia was hauled before the court, only a few lower-level Croat, Bosnian Muslim or Albanian officials were even indicted – and most of them were acquitted outright, or on appeal. Only Serbs were charged with genocide – by definition, a systematic crime. Only Serbs were accused of a "joint criminal enterprise," a category specifically constructed for the tribunal by a US jurist.

On May 27, 1999, two months into the illegal NATO war against Yugoslavia, the Tribunal indicted Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes and genocide. In July that year, the very same tribunal decided NATO’s declaration it was not guilty of anything was good enough, and merited no further investigation.

“NATO countries are those that have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers… so let me assure that we and the Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals brought to justice and I am certain that when Justice Arbour goes to Kosovo and looks at the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav nationality and I don't anticipate any others at this stage,” NATO spokesman Jamie Shea told reporters on May 17, 1999. Telling enough?

Milosevic was arrested in 2001 by a government installed in a US-backed coup, which sent him to The Hague via extrajudicial rendition. He died in March 2006, under mysterious circumstances, before the trial could be concluded.

On July 11, 2013 – a date deliberately chosen to coincide with the alleged “genocide” in Srebrenica – the ICTY rejected Karadzic’s motion to dismiss the charges. Among the “evidence” cited by US judge Theodor Meron was a hearsay claim that Karadzic had decided “in the early 1990s” to kill a third of the Muslims, convert a third to Orthodoxy, while the rest would leave on their own.

While such a plan did exist, it was the brainchild of the WW2 Nazi-allied Croatian government, and its intended targets were Serbs living in present-day Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ICTY was accusing the Serbs of doing what was actually done to them 70 years prior – and when Karadzic tried to argue the point, the prosecutors dismissed WW2 as ancient history.

Wednesday’s revelation by Peter Robinson, Karadzic’s legal adviser, that the prosecution chose to share 200-plus pages of exculpatory evidence less than 24 hours before the verdict, is the perfect illustration of how the Tribunal has mocked the rules of due process.

“The falseness of the entire situation here defies description,” Karadzic said in his opening defense statement. Thursday, he was proven right.

The ICTY has acquitted numerous other participants of the Yugoslav civil war in the past, including Croatian General Ante Gotovina, Kosovo Albanian Ramush Haradinaj, and Bosnian field commander Naser Oric, according to the statement.

“The civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the NATO bombardments are a tragic chapter in world history,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said. “It is hard to imagine that only one side committed all the crimes in that war. The ICTY, however, continues building a myth of the Serbs’ sole responsibility for those events.”

This kind of approach has undermined interethnic reconciliation in the Balkans, the Foreign Ministry stressed.

Karadzic had served as the Serb’s leader in Bosnia during the civil war in the 1990s. The ICTY found him guilty on 10 out of 11 charges on Thursday.

The only charge that was dropped related to allegations that Bosnian Serb forces had committed genocide in seven Bosnian municipalities.

He had been indicted on two counts of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity, and four counts of violations of the laws of war for his role as President of Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb Republic) from 1992 to 1996.

The Serbian Justice Minister, Nikola Selakovic, also accused the Hague-based court of bias against Serbs.

“All justice that leads to the conviction of one people for crimes that were committed by everyone is selective,” said Selakovic, adding that the ICTY’s work over the last two decades has left a “bitter taste.”

In the meantime, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Gennady Gatilov, stated that the ICTY’s activities have been “politicized”.

The Russian Foreign Ministry pointed out that Russia supported the creation of the ICTY back in 1993, but warned that the court should not become an instrument of revenge or a place to settle old scores.

“These expectations have not come true,” the Foreign Ministry said, adding that the ICTY judges don’t even bother to hide some of the more questionable methods adopted by the court.

Moscow also pointed out that the ICTY was set up as a temporarily body and has been working on an ad hoc provisional basis for the past 20 years. Moreover, the court has continually ignored deadlines set by the UN Security Council.