To view this item online, visit
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30222
WorldNetDaily
Saturday, December 28, 2002
Instrumentalization of justice at the Hague
Posted: December 28, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Aleksandar Pavic
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
What better proof of the rightness of the Bush administration's
refusal to sign the International Criminal Court treaty earlier this
year than the sham "admission of guilt" by former Bosnian Serb
president Biljana Plavsic to charges of ethnically and racially
motivated "persecution as a crime against humanity" before the ad hoc
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague
last week.
As the West's mainstream media unceasingly celebrate Mrs. Plavsic's
virtual "admission" and "remorse" for virtual crimes before a virtual
court, "official" historians are busy writing a new, virtual history
of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, "cleansed" of inconvenient
facts, complexities and, in the end, truths. The virtual history being
written for this parallel propaganda and PR-managed universe will be
free of things such as:
* moderate Bosnian Muslims betrayed by the West;
* Western sabotage of a viable Bosnian peace agreement before the
bloody conflict even started;
* the Western states' (particularly Germany's and parts of the EU)
own role in the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia and their
accompanying violation of international law;
* the Islamic fundamentalist and extremist nature of Bosnia's
Western-supported Muslim leadership, as well as the cover-up of
that leadership's own war crimes committed not only against
Bosnia's Christian populations, but also against their own people
in their PR struggle for the "hearts and minds" of the West.
One of the best hidden facts about the Bosnian civil war is that it
was preventable, that the leaderships of that former Yugoslav
republic's three constituent peoples - the Serbs, Croats and Muslims
(of South Slavic, mostly Serb ethnic origin) - agreed to a deal
brokered by Portugal's then foreign minister, Jose Cutileiro, the
so-called Lisbon Agreement, which provided for an independent Bosnia
and Herzegovina cantonized according to ethnic lines.
This was Feb. 23 1992: The situation in Bosnia was admittedly tense
but, except for a few minor incidents, no war had broken out. The
Bosnian Serbs had already organized a referendum of their own, with a
99 percent vote in favor of remaining a part of Yugoslavia, but were
willing to compromise in order to avoid war. What happened next,
however, was that the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic,
reneged on the deal, which practically made war inevitable. As
Izetbegovic himself put it at the time, he was willing to "sacrifice
peace for sovereignty." Obviously, sovereignty itself wasn't the true
goal - radical Islamic domination of Bosnia was.
Izetbegovic could not have made the move on his own, without outside
diplomatic support. While that support was clearly coming from the
majority of the world's Islamic countries, along with Germany - which
had its own stake in the break-up of Yugoslavia into smaller, "more
manageable" units - it also came from the then U.S. ambassador to
Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, who advised Izetbegovic that he
should hold out for a better deal. That better deal came in the shape
of a 42-month bloody civil war with tens of thousands killed and
hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Another inconvenient truth that remains little-publicized is the fact
that Izetbegovic was not even the most popular Bosnian Muslim leader
at the time. That honor belonged to Fikret Abdic, who received more
votes than Izetbegovic during Bosnia's first multiparty elections in
the fall of 1990. For reasons that are still unclear even today -
although much points to pressure from the outside - Abdic stepped
aside and allowed Izetbegovic to assume the leadership position, even
while remaining his political opponent, advocating peaceful ethnic
coexistence either within a reformed Yugoslavia or a newly-created,
secular (instead of fundamentalist) Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Abdic eventually broke openly with Izetbegovic during the war, forming
his own "autonomous region" in Western Bosnia, which is another fact
in a sea of obfuscation for the West's information-satiated,
truth-starved media audiences. And then - here's the real shocker -
Abdic actually formed an alliance with the dreaded "genocidal,"
"Muslim-hating" Serb forces, with which he mounted joint operations
against the 5th Corps of the Izetbegovic-controlled Bosnian Army,
(which was ultimately saved by NATO threats that it would bomb Serb
and, by extension, moderate Muslim forces if they entered the city of
Bihac). It wouldn't be the first - or the last - time that NATO served
as the air force for Balkan-based Islamic fundamentalists.
Reaping the rewards of his peace-making efforts, Abdic is presently
rotting in a Croatian prison on trumped-up "war crimes" charges,
forgotten by the West, while the openly fundamentalist Izetbegovic
continues to be celebrated by liberal Western circles for supposed
tolerance and commitment to "mutiethnicity," while he and his
followers go quietly about their business of establishing a beachhead
for radical Islam in the Balkans, as several U.S. Senate Republican
Policy Committee papers have clearly stated. Not surprisingly,
Izetbegovic even has a Western prize named after him, and it was duly
presented by none other than Prince Charles earlier this month in
London to a "deserving" British Muslim. This would be the same as if
the FBI decided to halt its increasingly frequent raids on U.S.
offices of Bosnian-based "charities" that raise funds for terrorists
and began passing out good citizenship awards to their staffs instead.
What does all this have to do with the Plavsic case and her war crimes
"admission?" Quite a bit, since it shoots large holes in the basic
premise of the Hague Inquisition's case against former Yugoslav
president Slobodan Milosevic and the entire Bosnian Serb leadership -
that they "engaged in a criminal undertaking" to "cleanse" Bosnia's
Muslim population from its homes, engaging in a "campaign of
genocide" to accomplish their sinister goals.
Plavsic's "admission" to "racially and ethnically-based" crimes by
virtue of her wartime position in the Bosnian Serb leadership is at
odds with the fact that she and the leadership not only agreed to a
pre-war peace deal with the Muslims (and Croats) but also actively
sought alliance with the faction led by the most popular (and least
fundamentalist) Bosnian Muslim leader, Abdic, once Izetbegovic nixed
the Lisbon Peace and the war broke out.
That behavior shows that there was no anti-Muslim prejudice as such
on the part of the Bosnian Serbs but only an anti-fundamentalist
prejudice, which could be excused not just in the post-9/11 world but
in the one that preceded that horrible event as well. Yet, such
behavior is not only being ignored in the Hague Inquisition's version
of history, it is de facto being criminalized at a time when the
global "war on terrorism" is gaining momentum by the minute. Why?
To keep some old skeletons from popping out of the closet? Or, worse,
to appease needed Islamic allies in preparation for the campaign in
Iraq? Are Balkan Christians once again going to be sacrificed and
slandered for the sake of a new Middle Eastern military intervention?
Are terrorists in Bosnia (and Kosovo and Macedonia) going to be
appeased while their brethren in the Middle East are supposedly hunted
down?
It happened once in the 1990s, and it looks certain to happen again.
In fact, the West's pro-fundamentalist, anti-Christian policy in the
Balkans has continued uninterruptedly from the early 1990s to this
day, and one of the Hague Inquisition's primary tasks is to cover up
that shameful policy. There is little doubt that blowback is only a
matter of time, with the caveat that a terror base in the Balkans is
much closer to Western borders than one in Asia.
An honest and fair approach to the legacy of the latest Balkan wars
would, needless to say, have to start from the beginning. If
violations of "international law" are to be enumerated, why not start
with Germany's December 1991 recognition of the then-Yugoslav
republics of Slovenia and Croatia (soon followed by the Vatican and
other Western European states), which was a clear contravention of the
1975 Helsinki Agreement's provision guaranteeing the inviolability of
international borders except by mutual consent?
And why not continue with the spring 1992 recognition of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, which not only violated Helsinki but hardened the
Izetbegovic-led secessionists' resolve to "sacrifice peace for
sovereignty?" What about the Clinton administration's pact with the
Iranians to arm the Bosnian Muslims once the war began, in violation
of a U.N. arms embargo? The list of potential violations that the
tribunal will never deal with is long indeed.
For the Hague Inquisition and its supporters, the most important thing
about Mrs. Plavsic's "admission," in the words of chief Hague
architect Madeleine Albright - who testified during the sentencing
hearing - was the fact that she "recognized the tribunal's
jurisdiction." Indeed, for proponents of global government, the
validation of "international tribunals" is of the utmost importance,
much more so than, say, determining whether genuine genocide did
indeed take place, which in the now-closed Plavsic case will never be
known, at least as far as she is concerned. For, in its zeal to gain
legitimacy, the tribunal dropped "genocide" charges against Mrs.
Plavsic in exchange for her guilty plea to the "lesser" charge of
"persecution as a crime against humanity."
Thus, if Biljana Plavsic did indeed perform genocide in Bosnia during
the 1990s, the victims have been sacrificed yet again, this time at
the altar of The Hague's political requirements and the globalist
agenda at large. What better revelation of global justice's true face,
where a charge of "genocide" is only a bargaining chip in a diplomatic
game, and not an expression of moral outrage by a civilization seeking
to preserve and defend its values. Genocide stands in the category of
absolutes. Either it happened or it didn't. If it did, there can be no
equivocating with its definition, no compromise with its executioners,
no "understanding" for their eventual motives, no mercy when carrying
out punishment. If Biljana Plavsic did indeed commit genocide, who
has the right to let her get off so lightly?
In fact, Mrs. Plavsic originally pleaded innocent to all charges
before the tribunal, and spent the balance of the past 18 months in
building her defense. Her decision to change course was as sudden as
it was surprising, at least to outside observers. It is almost certain
that she was subjected to great pressure to admit "guilt," and that
she was even convinced that, as she put it, by admitting the imagined
"crimes" in her own name, she would take the onus of "collective
responsibility" from her own people.
By cutting the Plavsic trial short and making a deal before all the
facts could be established, the International Criminal Court for the
Former Yugoslavia showed that it is not interested in justice but in a
political agenda. "War crimes" and "genocide" charges are to be pulled
out of the hat as a political expedient, not as a serious potential
violation of accepted human behavior.
The fact that Izetbegovic's forces, according to U.N. documents,
almost certainly bombed their own people - in the Sarajevo breadline
and marketplace "massacres" of 1992 and 1995 - in order to gain
Western sympathy while pinning the blame on the Bosnian Serbs has
gone unnoticed by the tribunal thus far, as have tens of thousands of
pages of other incriminating documentation against him.
Still, Abdic, the true Muslim moderate, sits in prison (albeit not in
The Hague) on "war crimes" charges, while Biljana Plavsic who - as
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and high representative
for Bosnia, testified before the tribunal - "never participated in
leadership meetings where decisions of war and peace were made," has
been coached to "admit" "crimes" that she didn't commit. If anyone
ever wondered what Stalin's show trials of the 1930s really looked
like, there's no need to read books or dream of time travel. They are
happening right now, as the new year 2003 dawns, in The Hague, the
seat of the future permanent International Criminal Court.
Proponents of "global justice" have always pointed to the ad hoc
tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a "trial run" for the permanent
court. The blueprint is now clear: Among all the world's conflicts,
choose one that fits the needs of a current agenda, selectively
criminalize the actions of the "enemy of the month" without regard to
the larger context, then fire away the guns of "international law" to
finish off the "perpetrator," who has previously been thoroughly
demonized by the cooperative, globally ambitious liberal press. Once
the instrumentalization of justice becomes fully legitimized, however,
ask not tomorrow for whom the bell tolls anywhere on this earth. It
will toll for thee.
Aleksandar Pavic in Belgrade covers Yugoslavia for
WorldNetDaily.com.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30222
WorldNetDaily
Saturday, December 28, 2002
Instrumentalization of justice at the Hague
Posted: December 28, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Aleksandar Pavic
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
What better proof of the rightness of the Bush administration's
refusal to sign the International Criminal Court treaty earlier this
year than the sham "admission of guilt" by former Bosnian Serb
president Biljana Plavsic to charges of ethnically and racially
motivated "persecution as a crime against humanity" before the ad hoc
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague
last week.
As the West's mainstream media unceasingly celebrate Mrs. Plavsic's
virtual "admission" and "remorse" for virtual crimes before a virtual
court, "official" historians are busy writing a new, virtual history
of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, "cleansed" of inconvenient
facts, complexities and, in the end, truths. The virtual history being
written for this parallel propaganda and PR-managed universe will be
free of things such as:
* moderate Bosnian Muslims betrayed by the West;
* Western sabotage of a viable Bosnian peace agreement before the
bloody conflict even started;
* the Western states' (particularly Germany's and parts of the EU)
own role in the dismantling of the former Yugoslavia and their
accompanying violation of international law;
* the Islamic fundamentalist and extremist nature of Bosnia's
Western-supported Muslim leadership, as well as the cover-up of
that leadership's own war crimes committed not only against
Bosnia's Christian populations, but also against their own people
in their PR struggle for the "hearts and minds" of the West.
One of the best hidden facts about the Bosnian civil war is that it
was preventable, that the leaderships of that former Yugoslav
republic's three constituent peoples - the Serbs, Croats and Muslims
(of South Slavic, mostly Serb ethnic origin) - agreed to a deal
brokered by Portugal's then foreign minister, Jose Cutileiro, the
so-called Lisbon Agreement, which provided for an independent Bosnia
and Herzegovina cantonized according to ethnic lines.
This was Feb. 23 1992: The situation in Bosnia was admittedly tense
but, except for a few minor incidents, no war had broken out. The
Bosnian Serbs had already organized a referendum of their own, with a
99 percent vote in favor of remaining a part of Yugoslavia, but were
willing to compromise in order to avoid war. What happened next,
however, was that the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic,
reneged on the deal, which practically made war inevitable. As
Izetbegovic himself put it at the time, he was willing to "sacrifice
peace for sovereignty." Obviously, sovereignty itself wasn't the true
goal - radical Islamic domination of Bosnia was.
Izetbegovic could not have made the move on his own, without outside
diplomatic support. While that support was clearly coming from the
majority of the world's Islamic countries, along with Germany - which
had its own stake in the break-up of Yugoslavia into smaller, "more
manageable" units - it also came from the then U.S. ambassador to
Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, who advised Izetbegovic that he
should hold out for a better deal. That better deal came in the shape
of a 42-month bloody civil war with tens of thousands killed and
hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Another inconvenient truth that remains little-publicized is the fact
that Izetbegovic was not even the most popular Bosnian Muslim leader
at the time. That honor belonged to Fikret Abdic, who received more
votes than Izetbegovic during Bosnia's first multiparty elections in
the fall of 1990. For reasons that are still unclear even today -
although much points to pressure from the outside - Abdic stepped
aside and allowed Izetbegovic to assume the leadership position, even
while remaining his political opponent, advocating peaceful ethnic
coexistence either within a reformed Yugoslavia or a newly-created,
secular (instead of fundamentalist) Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Abdic eventually broke openly with Izetbegovic during the war, forming
his own "autonomous region" in Western Bosnia, which is another fact
in a sea of obfuscation for the West's information-satiated,
truth-starved media audiences. And then - here's the real shocker -
Abdic actually formed an alliance with the dreaded "genocidal,"
"Muslim-hating" Serb forces, with which he mounted joint operations
against the 5th Corps of the Izetbegovic-controlled Bosnian Army,
(which was ultimately saved by NATO threats that it would bomb Serb
and, by extension, moderate Muslim forces if they entered the city of
Bihac). It wouldn't be the first - or the last - time that NATO served
as the air force for Balkan-based Islamic fundamentalists.
Reaping the rewards of his peace-making efforts, Abdic is presently
rotting in a Croatian prison on trumped-up "war crimes" charges,
forgotten by the West, while the openly fundamentalist Izetbegovic
continues to be celebrated by liberal Western circles for supposed
tolerance and commitment to "mutiethnicity," while he and his
followers go quietly about their business of establishing a beachhead
for radical Islam in the Balkans, as several U.S. Senate Republican
Policy Committee papers have clearly stated. Not surprisingly,
Izetbegovic even has a Western prize named after him, and it was duly
presented by none other than Prince Charles earlier this month in
London to a "deserving" British Muslim. This would be the same as if
the FBI decided to halt its increasingly frequent raids on U.S.
offices of Bosnian-based "charities" that raise funds for terrorists
and began passing out good citizenship awards to their staffs instead.
What does all this have to do with the Plavsic case and her war crimes
"admission?" Quite a bit, since it shoots large holes in the basic
premise of the Hague Inquisition's case against former Yugoslav
president Slobodan Milosevic and the entire Bosnian Serb leadership -
that they "engaged in a criminal undertaking" to "cleanse" Bosnia's
Muslim population from its homes, engaging in a "campaign of
genocide" to accomplish their sinister goals.
Plavsic's "admission" to "racially and ethnically-based" crimes by
virtue of her wartime position in the Bosnian Serb leadership is at
odds with the fact that she and the leadership not only agreed to a
pre-war peace deal with the Muslims (and Croats) but also actively
sought alliance with the faction led by the most popular (and least
fundamentalist) Bosnian Muslim leader, Abdic, once Izetbegovic nixed
the Lisbon Peace and the war broke out.
That behavior shows that there was no anti-Muslim prejudice as such
on the part of the Bosnian Serbs but only an anti-fundamentalist
prejudice, which could be excused not just in the post-9/11 world but
in the one that preceded that horrible event as well. Yet, such
behavior is not only being ignored in the Hague Inquisition's version
of history, it is de facto being criminalized at a time when the
global "war on terrorism" is gaining momentum by the minute. Why?
To keep some old skeletons from popping out of the closet? Or, worse,
to appease needed Islamic allies in preparation for the campaign in
Iraq? Are Balkan Christians once again going to be sacrificed and
slandered for the sake of a new Middle Eastern military intervention?
Are terrorists in Bosnia (and Kosovo and Macedonia) going to be
appeased while their brethren in the Middle East are supposedly hunted
down?
It happened once in the 1990s, and it looks certain to happen again.
In fact, the West's pro-fundamentalist, anti-Christian policy in the
Balkans has continued uninterruptedly from the early 1990s to this
day, and one of the Hague Inquisition's primary tasks is to cover up
that shameful policy. There is little doubt that blowback is only a
matter of time, with the caveat that a terror base in the Balkans is
much closer to Western borders than one in Asia.
An honest and fair approach to the legacy of the latest Balkan wars
would, needless to say, have to start from the beginning. If
violations of "international law" are to be enumerated, why not start
with Germany's December 1991 recognition of the then-Yugoslav
republics of Slovenia and Croatia (soon followed by the Vatican and
other Western European states), which was a clear contravention of the
1975 Helsinki Agreement's provision guaranteeing the inviolability of
international borders except by mutual consent?
And why not continue with the spring 1992 recognition of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, which not only violated Helsinki but hardened the
Izetbegovic-led secessionists' resolve to "sacrifice peace for
sovereignty?" What about the Clinton administration's pact with the
Iranians to arm the Bosnian Muslims once the war began, in violation
of a U.N. arms embargo? The list of potential violations that the
tribunal will never deal with is long indeed.
For the Hague Inquisition and its supporters, the most important thing
about Mrs. Plavsic's "admission," in the words of chief Hague
architect Madeleine Albright - who testified during the sentencing
hearing - was the fact that she "recognized the tribunal's
jurisdiction." Indeed, for proponents of global government, the
validation of "international tribunals" is of the utmost importance,
much more so than, say, determining whether genuine genocide did
indeed take place, which in the now-closed Plavsic case will never be
known, at least as far as she is concerned. For, in its zeal to gain
legitimacy, the tribunal dropped "genocide" charges against Mrs.
Plavsic in exchange for her guilty plea to the "lesser" charge of
"persecution as a crime against humanity."
Thus, if Biljana Plavsic did indeed perform genocide in Bosnia during
the 1990s, the victims have been sacrificed yet again, this time at
the altar of The Hague's political requirements and the globalist
agenda at large. What better revelation of global justice's true face,
where a charge of "genocide" is only a bargaining chip in a diplomatic
game, and not an expression of moral outrage by a civilization seeking
to preserve and defend its values. Genocide stands in the category of
absolutes. Either it happened or it didn't. If it did, there can be no
equivocating with its definition, no compromise with its executioners,
no "understanding" for their eventual motives, no mercy when carrying
out punishment. If Biljana Plavsic did indeed commit genocide, who
has the right to let her get off so lightly?
In fact, Mrs. Plavsic originally pleaded innocent to all charges
before the tribunal, and spent the balance of the past 18 months in
building her defense. Her decision to change course was as sudden as
it was surprising, at least to outside observers. It is almost certain
that she was subjected to great pressure to admit "guilt," and that
she was even convinced that, as she put it, by admitting the imagined
"crimes" in her own name, she would take the onus of "collective
responsibility" from her own people.
By cutting the Plavsic trial short and making a deal before all the
facts could be established, the International Criminal Court for the
Former Yugoslavia showed that it is not interested in justice but in a
political agenda. "War crimes" and "genocide" charges are to be pulled
out of the hat as a political expedient, not as a serious potential
violation of accepted human behavior.
The fact that Izetbegovic's forces, according to U.N. documents,
almost certainly bombed their own people - in the Sarajevo breadline
and marketplace "massacres" of 1992 and 1995 - in order to gain
Western sympathy while pinning the blame on the Bosnian Serbs has
gone unnoticed by the tribunal thus far, as have tens of thousands of
pages of other incriminating documentation against him.
Still, Abdic, the true Muslim moderate, sits in prison (albeit not in
The Hague) on "war crimes" charges, while Biljana Plavsic who - as
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and high representative
for Bosnia, testified before the tribunal - "never participated in
leadership meetings where decisions of war and peace were made," has
been coached to "admit" "crimes" that she didn't commit. If anyone
ever wondered what Stalin's show trials of the 1930s really looked
like, there's no need to read books or dream of time travel. They are
happening right now, as the new year 2003 dawns, in The Hague, the
seat of the future permanent International Criminal Court.
Proponents of "global justice" have always pointed to the ad hoc
tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a "trial run" for the permanent
court. The blueprint is now clear: Among all the world's conflicts,
choose one that fits the needs of a current agenda, selectively
criminalize the actions of the "enemy of the month" without regard to
the larger context, then fire away the guns of "international law" to
finish off the "perpetrator," who has previously been thoroughly
demonized by the cooperative, globally ambitious liberal press. Once
the instrumentalization of justice becomes fully legitimized, however,
ask not tomorrow for whom the bell tolls anywhere on this earth. It
will toll for thee.
Aleksandar Pavic in Belgrade covers Yugoslavia for
WorldNetDaily.com.