Per le puntate precedenti sul caso di P.-H. Bunel si veda:
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/1437
===*===
mercredi 12 décembre 2001, 18h59
Bunel condamné à deux ans fermes et écroué pour trahison
Par Thierry Lévêque
PARIS (Reuters) - L'ex-officier français Pierre Bunel
a été condamné à Paris, après deux jours de
procès, à cinq ans de prison, dont deux fermes,
pour trahison au profit de la Yougoslavie en 1998.
Il a été reconnu coupable d'avoir livré à un
agent de Belgrade des documents secrets de l'Otan.
L'ancien officier a été arrêté à l'audience
pour être incarcéré, comme le veut la procédure. Il a
déclaré qu'il ne savait pas encore s'il allait
faire appel. Entre deux gendarmes et entouré d'une
nuée de caméras, il a de nouveau nié avoir trahi son pays.
"J'ai commis une faute professionnelle mais pas
une trahison", a-t-il lancé. Avant d'être emmené
par les gendarmes, il a expliqué avoir le sentiment
d'un "gâchis énorme".
La cour d'assises spéciale du tribunal aux armées,
composée de sept magistrats professionnels, n'a
délibéré qu'une heure.
Elle est allée au-delà des réquisitions du procureur
Janine Stern, qui avait requis une peine de
cinq ans de prison mais sans exclure que cette
peine soit totalement assortie du sursis.
Pierre Bunel, 49 ans, a déjà été détenu durant
près de dix mois dans cette affaire, du 31 octobre
1998 au 23 août 1999. Il ne lui resterait donc
que quelques mois à purger.
Il risquait une peine maximale de quinze ans de détention criminelle.
Défense et accusation sont tombées d'accord à
la fin du procès pour estimer que l'ancien
commandant avait agi de sa propre initiative,
pour tenter de jouer un rôle qui dépassait les tâches
bureaucratiques où il était confiné.
Pierre Bunel a reconnu avoir livré en juillet
et octobre 1998 à un agent secret de Belgrade, Jovan
Milanovic, une synthèse de deux documents classés
"secret-Otan" présentant deux options des projets
de bombardements sur le Kosovo.
Pierre Bunel était alors chef de cabinet du général
Pierre Wiroth, responsable de la
représentation militaire de la France au siège
de l'Otan à Bruxelles. La Yougoslavie était sous la
menace de frappes de l'Alliance en raison d'une
brutale répression des albanophones de la province
du Kosovo.
Le procureur Stern, magistrate détachée à l'armée
qui a le grade de colonel et requiert en
uniforme, a montré une grande sévérité dans sa lecture des faits.
---
"Foutre la trouille aux Serbes"
---
"M. Bunel, vous avez voulu être un héros. En réalité, vous avez
trahi vos camarades, l'armée, la France, les alliés de la
France. Vous avez discrédité la France auprès de ses alliés,
détruit la crédibilité de la France sur la scène internationale",
a-t-elle dit.
La simple transmission de documents secrets, quelles qu'en
soient les raisons, suffisait, selon le
procureur, à entraîner la condamnation.
Me Eric Najsztat, avocat du militaire, a de son côté
abandonné dans sa plaidoirie la thèse d'un
ordre donné par la sécurité militaire française, évoquée
par l'accusé mardi.
"Il voulait foutre la trouille aux Serbes, sans ordres,
sans mission, comme l'électron libre qu'il
s'était décrété lui-même", a dit Me Najsztat. Il
a souligné que l'accusé n'avait pas travaillé pour
de l'argent, ni voulu nuire à la France ou donner
un avantage au régime de Belgrade.
L'avocat a estimé par ailleurs que c'était "la volonté
de la France de détruire la légende d'une
armée pro-serbe" qui avait conduit le gouvernement
à déférer l'affaire à la justice, au lieu de la
traiter en interne par des sanctions disciplinaires.
L'ancien commandant a lui-même semblé abandonner
la thèse d'un ordre ou d'une demande de la
sécurité militaire française.
"Cette audience m'a appris beaucoup de choses sur
moi-même. Je n'aspire plus qu'à une chose, mener
enfin une vie normale", a-t-il simplement dit à la fin des débats
===*===
World Socialist Web Site
> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/dec2001/brun-d11.shtml
French officer accused of collaborating with Milosevic government
By Francis Dubois and Paul Stuart
11 December 2001
Pierre-Henri Bunel, a former French intelligence
officer, is appearing before a military
tribunal charged with treason. Bunel is accused
of handing over to Serbian intelligence
secret plans for the Alliance's air strikes
on Yugoslavia, one year before the bombing
campaign commenced in spring 1999.
On October 19, 1998, Bunel was imprisoned
in Paris without a trial. He was brought
before a magistrate and charged; the story
of his arrest broke on November 2 that year.
At his original trial, the civilian court
ruled that it had no jurisdiction over the case and
transferred it to a military court. This
move to a closed military court was imperative
for the French ruling elite and its armed
forces. Even then it has taken two years for
the court to have "amassed" material against Bunel.
Bunel is no minor figure in French military
circles. He received the Légion d'honneur,
France's highest military decoration, for
his intelligence work in Bosnia in 1995. He
was attached to the French NATO delegation
in Brussels in mid-1996, serving as head
of staff to the delegation's senior military
adviser, General Pierre Wiroth. He had
access to most of NATO's classified information.
Speaking fluent Arabic, Bunel is an expert
on the "Muslim world" who served in the
Jordanian desert prior to the Gulf War and
also undertook missions in Somalia and
Rwanda on behalf of French imperialism.
His latest book is entitled Menaces
Islamistes (The Islamic Menace).
When arrested, officials said Bunel's activities
were those of an "isolated individual".
Bunel denies this, however. His legal defence
explained in a statement, "What he did
was not an act of treason. His actions were
sponsored by a French service."
Neither Bunel nor his lawyers have indicated
which arm of the French state they allege
instructed him to pass on secret files. Bunel
has said, "I admit passing on information
classified `secret' to a Serb agent... But this
was confidential information, not top
secret: top secret in NATO is classified `Cosmic'.
I never passed on flight plans or
operational orders." He continued, "I passed
documents on to get certain key
messages across. They were that France would
take part in the conflict [in Kosovo],
that the five principal NATO countries had
agreed to strike Yugoslavia, and that if
Milosevic did not withdraw his troops the
carnage would be terrible."
According to Canadian journalist Steve Albert,
Bunel told investigators, "He decided to
hand over NATO plans after a meeting [with]
Lieutenant-Colonel Jovan Milanovic in a
Serbian restaurant in Brussels... Milanovic
was sent to Brussels with the express
purpose of finding out these plans." It was
highly unlikely to have been a chance
encounter and would have been arranged beforehand.
When Bunel was first arrested, he was accused
of meeting with Milanovic on four
occasions between July and October 1998 and
passing on sensitive information,
including operational orders, flight plans and
target lists.
French divisions over Yugoslavia
Defending his actions, Bunel wrote a book called
War crimes at NATO * and set up a
website in which he insists, "It is nonsensical
to undertake a military action if it does
not correspond to a political solution."
Investigative reports published so far indicate
that he was not acting alone, but on behalf of
those within the French elite who were
opposed to breaking political relations with
Serbia and viewed participation in a US-led
military attack in Europe as a betrayal of
France's national interests.
There have been at least two other incidents
said to prove collaboration took place
between French military intelligence and the
former Yugoslav regime. In a report first
aired on the France 2 news programme Envoye
Special (Special Correspondent) in
1996, it was alleged that the commander of
UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection
Force) General Bernard Janvier, took part in
secret negotiations with General Mladic
and General Perisic, Commander in Chief of the
Serbian Army, to obtain the freedom of
captured French UN troops, in return for a
promise not to order air strikes if Srebrenica
were attacked.
In 1998 Washington accused Major Hervé Gourmelon
of warning Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadzic that he was facing imminent
arrest for war crimes, foiling a NATO
plan to take him into custody. According to
Time magazine, Gourmelon was a French
spy who, in 1994, "while a press officer for
UNPROFOR... was caught on hidden video
rifling through the desk of UNPROFOR's military
commander, Gen. Michael Rose".
It is well known that at the same time France
was acting as part of the UN's so-called
"peace keeping" force during the period of
the Bosnian War, it repeatedly carried out
separate negotiations with the Bosnian Serbs
and the Milosevic regime, in direct
opposition to UN regulations and NATO policy.
The French authorities have always been
reluctant to have their military personnel
testifying in front of any court, particularly
the international war crimes tribunal at The
Hague, about the events in the Balkans. French
diplomats and officials have never
hidden the fact that they saw the Hague
tribunal as an "American affair", with French
Defence Minister Alain Richard calling it
a "spectacle". According to some French
commentators, testifying before it would
reveal too much of the murky activities of the
French military and secret services in the
Balkans. They feared that indicted war
criminals might cite documents or transcripts
of telephone calls uncovering French
duplicity or call on "friendly" French officers
to testify in their defence.
The French establishment and military
bureaucracy are divided over what attitude to
take in the Balkans. In contrast to Germany,
for example, France refused to recognise
Bosnian independence for some time. Significant
sections of the ruling class saw
Serbia as a useful ally, which could play the
role of a regional strongman in ensuring
stability in the Balkans. As Paris read the
situation after the 1992-95 Balkan wars, the
territories within Bosnia's borders claimed
by the Serbs would eventually go back to
Serbia. There was open hostility at the extent
to which the US was able to dominate
Balkan events and to America's preferred policy
of encouraging separatist sentiments
in order to undermine the Milosevic regime,
which Washington viewed as an obstacle
to securing its own hegemony. Some diplomats
explained that the Dayton agreement
was " an American show", expressing the
resentment of the French bourgeoisie at
their eventually being forced to work within
the parameters laid down by US policy
decisions in the Balkans.
Even as the Bunel trial gets underway, French
President Jacques Chirac has called on
the people in the Serbian republic of Montenegro
and UN-run Kosovo province to
reject separatism and instead take part in a
reform of the Yugoslav federation.
Speaking at the Belgrade University, he
insisted, "The split of the country can not be a
peaceful and stable solution in the modern
world... a solution can not be found in a
policy of secession, in an approach... based
on the logic of confrontation."
Chirac is the first European head of state
to travel to Serbia since the Western-backed
coup that led to the fall of Milosevic in
October 2000. Also directing his message
towards Macedonia, he insisted, "A renewal
of the Yugoslav federation, with respect
to its integrity, is the best solution, not
only for the stability in the region, but also for a
development of harmonic relations between
different parts of the Yugoslav society."
* * *
* Crimes de Guerre à l'Otan, published by EDITIONS 1, France
Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/1437
===*===
mercredi 12 décembre 2001, 18h59
Bunel condamné à deux ans fermes et écroué pour trahison
Par Thierry Lévêque
PARIS (Reuters) - L'ex-officier français Pierre Bunel
a été condamné à Paris, après deux jours de
procès, à cinq ans de prison, dont deux fermes,
pour trahison au profit de la Yougoslavie en 1998.
Il a été reconnu coupable d'avoir livré à un
agent de Belgrade des documents secrets de l'Otan.
L'ancien officier a été arrêté à l'audience
pour être incarcéré, comme le veut la procédure. Il a
déclaré qu'il ne savait pas encore s'il allait
faire appel. Entre deux gendarmes et entouré d'une
nuée de caméras, il a de nouveau nié avoir trahi son pays.
"J'ai commis une faute professionnelle mais pas
une trahison", a-t-il lancé. Avant d'être emmené
par les gendarmes, il a expliqué avoir le sentiment
d'un "gâchis énorme".
La cour d'assises spéciale du tribunal aux armées,
composée de sept magistrats professionnels, n'a
délibéré qu'une heure.
Elle est allée au-delà des réquisitions du procureur
Janine Stern, qui avait requis une peine de
cinq ans de prison mais sans exclure que cette
peine soit totalement assortie du sursis.
Pierre Bunel, 49 ans, a déjà été détenu durant
près de dix mois dans cette affaire, du 31 octobre
1998 au 23 août 1999. Il ne lui resterait donc
que quelques mois à purger.
Il risquait une peine maximale de quinze ans de détention criminelle.
Défense et accusation sont tombées d'accord à
la fin du procès pour estimer que l'ancien
commandant avait agi de sa propre initiative,
pour tenter de jouer un rôle qui dépassait les tâches
bureaucratiques où il était confiné.
Pierre Bunel a reconnu avoir livré en juillet
et octobre 1998 à un agent secret de Belgrade, Jovan
Milanovic, une synthèse de deux documents classés
"secret-Otan" présentant deux options des projets
de bombardements sur le Kosovo.
Pierre Bunel était alors chef de cabinet du général
Pierre Wiroth, responsable de la
représentation militaire de la France au siège
de l'Otan à Bruxelles. La Yougoslavie était sous la
menace de frappes de l'Alliance en raison d'une
brutale répression des albanophones de la province
du Kosovo.
Le procureur Stern, magistrate détachée à l'armée
qui a le grade de colonel et requiert en
uniforme, a montré une grande sévérité dans sa lecture des faits.
---
"Foutre la trouille aux Serbes"
---
"M. Bunel, vous avez voulu être un héros. En réalité, vous avez
trahi vos camarades, l'armée, la France, les alliés de la
France. Vous avez discrédité la France auprès de ses alliés,
détruit la crédibilité de la France sur la scène internationale",
a-t-elle dit.
La simple transmission de documents secrets, quelles qu'en
soient les raisons, suffisait, selon le
procureur, à entraîner la condamnation.
Me Eric Najsztat, avocat du militaire, a de son côté
abandonné dans sa plaidoirie la thèse d'un
ordre donné par la sécurité militaire française, évoquée
par l'accusé mardi.
"Il voulait foutre la trouille aux Serbes, sans ordres,
sans mission, comme l'électron libre qu'il
s'était décrété lui-même", a dit Me Najsztat. Il
a souligné que l'accusé n'avait pas travaillé pour
de l'argent, ni voulu nuire à la France ou donner
un avantage au régime de Belgrade.
L'avocat a estimé par ailleurs que c'était "la volonté
de la France de détruire la légende d'une
armée pro-serbe" qui avait conduit le gouvernement
à déférer l'affaire à la justice, au lieu de la
traiter en interne par des sanctions disciplinaires.
L'ancien commandant a lui-même semblé abandonner
la thèse d'un ordre ou d'une demande de la
sécurité militaire française.
"Cette audience m'a appris beaucoup de choses sur
moi-même. Je n'aspire plus qu'à une chose, mener
enfin une vie normale", a-t-il simplement dit à la fin des débats
===*===
World Socialist Web Site
> http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/dec2001/brun-d11.shtml
French officer accused of collaborating with Milosevic government
By Francis Dubois and Paul Stuart
11 December 2001
Pierre-Henri Bunel, a former French intelligence
officer, is appearing before a military
tribunal charged with treason. Bunel is accused
of handing over to Serbian intelligence
secret plans for the Alliance's air strikes
on Yugoslavia, one year before the bombing
campaign commenced in spring 1999.
On October 19, 1998, Bunel was imprisoned
in Paris without a trial. He was brought
before a magistrate and charged; the story
of his arrest broke on November 2 that year.
At his original trial, the civilian court
ruled that it had no jurisdiction over the case and
transferred it to a military court. This
move to a closed military court was imperative
for the French ruling elite and its armed
forces. Even then it has taken two years for
the court to have "amassed" material against Bunel.
Bunel is no minor figure in French military
circles. He received the Légion d'honneur,
France's highest military decoration, for
his intelligence work in Bosnia in 1995. He
was attached to the French NATO delegation
in Brussels in mid-1996, serving as head
of staff to the delegation's senior military
adviser, General Pierre Wiroth. He had
access to most of NATO's classified information.
Speaking fluent Arabic, Bunel is an expert
on the "Muslim world" who served in the
Jordanian desert prior to the Gulf War and
also undertook missions in Somalia and
Rwanda on behalf of French imperialism.
His latest book is entitled Menaces
Islamistes (The Islamic Menace).
When arrested, officials said Bunel's activities
were those of an "isolated individual".
Bunel denies this, however. His legal defence
explained in a statement, "What he did
was not an act of treason. His actions were
sponsored by a French service."
Neither Bunel nor his lawyers have indicated
which arm of the French state they allege
instructed him to pass on secret files. Bunel
has said, "I admit passing on information
classified `secret' to a Serb agent... But this
was confidential information, not top
secret: top secret in NATO is classified `Cosmic'.
I never passed on flight plans or
operational orders." He continued, "I passed
documents on to get certain key
messages across. They were that France would
take part in the conflict [in Kosovo],
that the five principal NATO countries had
agreed to strike Yugoslavia, and that if
Milosevic did not withdraw his troops the
carnage would be terrible."
According to Canadian journalist Steve Albert,
Bunel told investigators, "He decided to
hand over NATO plans after a meeting [with]
Lieutenant-Colonel Jovan Milanovic in a
Serbian restaurant in Brussels... Milanovic
was sent to Brussels with the express
purpose of finding out these plans." It was
highly unlikely to have been a chance
encounter and would have been arranged beforehand.
When Bunel was first arrested, he was accused
of meeting with Milanovic on four
occasions between July and October 1998 and
passing on sensitive information,
including operational orders, flight plans and
target lists.
French divisions over Yugoslavia
Defending his actions, Bunel wrote a book called
War crimes at NATO * and set up a
website in which he insists, "It is nonsensical
to undertake a military action if it does
not correspond to a political solution."
Investigative reports published so far indicate
that he was not acting alone, but on behalf of
those within the French elite who were
opposed to breaking political relations with
Serbia and viewed participation in a US-led
military attack in Europe as a betrayal of
France's national interests.
There have been at least two other incidents
said to prove collaboration took place
between French military intelligence and the
former Yugoslav regime. In a report first
aired on the France 2 news programme Envoye
Special (Special Correspondent) in
1996, it was alleged that the commander of
UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection
Force) General Bernard Janvier, took part in
secret negotiations with General Mladic
and General Perisic, Commander in Chief of the
Serbian Army, to obtain the freedom of
captured French UN troops, in return for a
promise not to order air strikes if Srebrenica
were attacked.
In 1998 Washington accused Major Hervé Gourmelon
of warning Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadzic that he was facing imminent
arrest for war crimes, foiling a NATO
plan to take him into custody. According to
Time magazine, Gourmelon was a French
spy who, in 1994, "while a press officer for
UNPROFOR... was caught on hidden video
rifling through the desk of UNPROFOR's military
commander, Gen. Michael Rose".
It is well known that at the same time France
was acting as part of the UN's so-called
"peace keeping" force during the period of
the Bosnian War, it repeatedly carried out
separate negotiations with the Bosnian Serbs
and the Milosevic regime, in direct
opposition to UN regulations and NATO policy.
The French authorities have always been
reluctant to have their military personnel
testifying in front of any court, particularly
the international war crimes tribunal at The
Hague, about the events in the Balkans. French
diplomats and officials have never
hidden the fact that they saw the Hague
tribunal as an "American affair", with French
Defence Minister Alain Richard calling it
a "spectacle". According to some French
commentators, testifying before it would
reveal too much of the murky activities of the
French military and secret services in the
Balkans. They feared that indicted war
criminals might cite documents or transcripts
of telephone calls uncovering French
duplicity or call on "friendly" French officers
to testify in their defence.
The French establishment and military
bureaucracy are divided over what attitude to
take in the Balkans. In contrast to Germany,
for example, France refused to recognise
Bosnian independence for some time. Significant
sections of the ruling class saw
Serbia as a useful ally, which could play the
role of a regional strongman in ensuring
stability in the Balkans. As Paris read the
situation after the 1992-95 Balkan wars, the
territories within Bosnia's borders claimed
by the Serbs would eventually go back to
Serbia. There was open hostility at the extent
to which the US was able to dominate
Balkan events and to America's preferred policy
of encouraging separatist sentiments
in order to undermine the Milosevic regime,
which Washington viewed as an obstacle
to securing its own hegemony. Some diplomats
explained that the Dayton agreement
was " an American show", expressing the
resentment of the French bourgeoisie at
their eventually being forced to work within
the parameters laid down by US policy
decisions in the Balkans.
Even as the Bunel trial gets underway, French
President Jacques Chirac has called on
the people in the Serbian republic of Montenegro
and UN-run Kosovo province to
reject separatism and instead take part in a
reform of the Yugoslav federation.
Speaking at the Belgrade University, he
insisted, "The split of the country can not be a
peaceful and stable solution in the modern
world... a solution can not be found in a
policy of secession, in an approach... based
on the logic of confrontation."
Chirac is the first European head of state
to travel to Serbia since the Western-backed
coup that led to the fall of Milosevic in
October 2000. Also directing his message
towards Macedonia, he insisted, "A renewal
of the Yugoslav federation, with respect
to its integrity, is the best solution, not
only for the stability in the region, but also for a
development of harmonic relations between
different parts of the Yugoslav society."
* * *
* Crimes de Guerre à l'Otan, published by EDITIONS 1, France
Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved