* Lettera aperta a Carla del Ponte
* La RF di Jugoslavia chiede all'ONU la abolizione del Tribunale-farsa
---
>
> AN OPEN LETTER
>
> 2 June 2000
>
> TO: Carla del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor,
> International Tribunal for Yugoslavia,
> The Hague
>
> FROM: Raymond K. Kent,
> Emeritus
> History Department,
> University of California,
> Berkeley, CA. 94720
> U.S.A.
>
> I am a former secretary to a California-based Citizen’s Committee
> set up to monitor the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ITY) since
> its establishment. I resigned in 1997 but you will find me in an article
>
> I had sent to the Tribunal and the Secretary General of the United
> Nations as a reprint from the Paris-based trilingual journal Dialogue
> (no20,1996). It is entitled “Contextualizing Hate—The Hague Tribunal,
> the Clinton Administration and the Serbs.” A copy is enclosed.
> The ITY was set-up, under open indictments, ostensibly to punish all
> those involved in the armed intra-ethnic conflicts who killed innocent
> civilians since 1991. It became obvious by the third year of its
> operation that the Tribunal’s Prosecutor pursued only the Serbs as
> alleged criminals in a tripartite conflict. In one prominent case, two
> high-ranking officers of the Bosnian Serb Army were kidnapped in
> Sarajevo after Dayton and delivered to the Hague without being accused
> of anything. This is the case which led to a change from open to secret
> indictments to pre-empt additional accusations against a Tribunal with
> an anti-Serb bias impossible to mask.
> Although two Chief Prosecutors have followed the one from South
> Africa and although some alleged criminals of Croat and Bosnian Muslim
> background were indicted, there is hardly any doubt that the reality
> emerging in the first three years of ITY’s work is the same. It pursued
>
> mainly Serbs. This is also confirmed by the fact that the alleged Croat
> and Bosnian Muslim criminals have been accused of doing harm to one
> another’s civilian populations but not to Serb civilians. It is only in
>
> the most recent times that the ITY has looked at all at what was done to
>
> the Serb civilians in Western Slavonia (August 1991- March 1992) and
> Krajina (mainly August 1995). This was done only under pressure from a
> variety of complaints.
> Against this background, it is not surprising that you have rejected
>
> international (not only Serb) claims that NATO committed war crimes
> without mentioning the other two areas in ITY indictments, those of
> crimes against humanity and peace. You simply did not have the will and
> courage to bite the hands that feed you as the major NATO players in the
>
> 78 days of bombing are also the major supporters and financial backers
> of your Tribunal. Nor is it surprising that you have claimed to have
> been “stupefied” to “even hear” Russia’s claims that the ITY is
> “politicized” and “biased” against the Serbs. At this point it seems
> salutary to show you just how the Tribunal is really polluted with
> political considerations.
> Tuzla is a major NATO base in Bosnia. One of its Discotheques is
> run by Nasir Oric. He was the Bosnian Muslim Commander at Srebrenica. He
>
> happens to be a self-admitted war criminal of the most bestial kind. For
>
> nearly a year, from the UN-protected Srebrenica, Oric and his “elite
> corps” raided its Serb countryside. They destroyed 48 Serb villages,
> looting, torching and killing about 1,800, including women and children.
>
> The good old Ottoman art of impaling was "enhanced" by roasting the
> victims of the mujehadin alive on the spit. May we send you the
> photographs of [partly carbonized] victims? This is what led to the Serb
>
> capture of Srebrenica, the evacuation of its women and children, and the
>
> flight of the Muslim soldiers under Izetbegovic's orders, to northern
> Bosnia.
> Oric bragged to at least two foreign reporters and showed one of
>
> them a video tape of the mayhem. You do not even have a “secret”
> indictment against him under the bogus claim that he had been” killed.”
> He will not be grabbed by the NATO troops and sent to the Hague out of
> fear that this would alienate and radicalize the Bosnian Muslims against
>
> NATO ground personnel.
> Exactly the same type of fear of alienating NATO's allies concerns
> the case of Agim Ceku, General of the Kosovo Liberation Army. He is now
> a major player in what is happening in Kosovo but you have excluded
> Kosovo’s Albanians from the category of war criminals since the war at
> Kosovo is defined as an internal civil war while Bosnia was
> internationalized in order to get at the Serbs. Actually, you are
> seeking evidence of mass murders of Albanian civilians at Kosovo from
> which to shore-up an indictment against Milosevic (curiously made public
>
> after Judge Arbour’s visit to Madeleine Albright, ITY’s “Mother” in
> Washington), stemming from the Bosnian conflict. Yet, Agim Ceku was a
> general of the Croat Army responsible for the ethnic cleansing of
> Krajina in August 1995, the looting and torching all of the Serb
> properties as well as killing several hundred, probably more, of older
> Serbs who either could not or would not run. Agim Ceku is now saluted by
>
> NATO troops and remains the behind-the-scenes coordinator of the ex-KLA.
>
> To grab him and ship him to the ITY at the Hague could alienate the
> still-extant KLA from NATO and impel some of its more extreme elements
> to cause harm to the NATO and U.N personnel in situ. Clearly, Madame
> Prosecutor, your Tribunal is “politicized” as is documented beyond
> refutation by the two cases. Both Oric and Ceku should have been
> indicted, tried and sentenced long ago if your Tribunal really belonged
> to a civilized judicial system, with the mechanics of a real court of
> law. It is an instrument of an emerging neo-Nazism. What makes it Right
>
> is the Might of NATO and more specifically the U.S. Super-Power. Its
> would be lofty ends justify the dirtiest of means and humiliations of
> Serbs in particular.
> The ITY is a tragi-comic political theater, draped in judicial robes,
>
> engaged in over-blown acting and pompous self-esteem, providing endless
> perqs and high-paying remunerations, a “sweetheart deal” for those
> “pre-selected” to sit on it and most unlikely to oppose any secret
> indictments or pre-conceived verdicts against the Serbs. Let me now
> pass on the components of your rejection.
> You have not denied in any known instance that the accusations against
> NATO indeed fall within the Tribunal’s mandate from the Security
> Council. In fact, one of the key assignments in your Security Council
> mandate demands it. However, you tabled, in the MAmerican sense, for
> the time being these accusations because you were” too busy searching
> for mass graves at Kosovo.” Well, your legal staff acted pretty fast as
> the accusations were multiplying in several European countries and in
> the United States. You are, I am sure, at least aware that Citizens
> Tribunals have been working for some time to indict NATO leaders and
> principal actors as having committed war crimes, crimes against humanity
>
> and against peace. In rejecting the war-crimes charge you are quoted to
> have said that while “accidents” have taken place, you are “ satisfied
>
> that there was no deliberate targeting of civilians.” I am not sure what
>
> evidence you had examined in person but the numbers of churches,
> schools, non-military factories, water purifying facilities, heating oil
>
> depositories and even medical facilities fully or partially destroyed,
> add up to staggering numbers. ALL OF THEM ARE CIVILIAN TARGETS EVEN IF A
>
> SINGLE CIVILIAN WAS NOT DIRECTLY KILLED IN ANY. Targeting all of them
> could not have been an “accident.”
> If you need another proof of NATO war crimes here it is and you can
> look it up. In her 10th May last speech at the University of
> California’s Berkeley Campus, Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright
> admitted: “to have raised the bar” high enough so that “Milosevic could
> NOT jump over it” because “YUGOSLAVIA NEEDED A LITTLE BOMBING.” This is
> a prima facie confession of the “Mother” of your Tribunal. It refers to
> the addition of Appendix B at Rambouillet after the Serbs were ready to
> sign an agreement to restore Autonomy to Kosovo. Appendix B demanded the
>
> occupation of Yugoslavia, including Belgrade, by NATO troops. The intent
>
> is deliberate bombing of a country and not even you can exclude its
> civilian population simply because you do not have the courage to
> practice law instead of politics.
> There is also a memo, which your legal toadies could not somehow
> excavate from the NATO files. It reveals the change from going
> exclusively after military targets into the civilian ones. It is a prima
>
> facie document showing that CIVILIAN TARGETS WERE DELIBERATELY INCLUDED
> after the initial bombings failed to produce Milosevich’s signature to
> the main text and Appendix B of the proposed Rambouillet Accord. I am
> sure that you must be aware how ridiculous is the claim of NATO
> Secretary General Lord Robertson that the “alliance acted entirely in
> accordance with international law.” It is illegal, under extant
> International Law, by international convention, to secure Presidential
> signatures with a pointed gun and the threat to use it. It is further
> illegal under International Law to mount 78 days of bombing a sovereign
> state without a mandate from the Security Council. The U.N. Charter
> demands it but it was shredded instead. As there was not even a formal
> declaration of war, the Constitutions of at least two member-states,
> France and the United States, were violated because they allot that
> power to declare war only to their respective Legislatures. Lord
> Robertson is simply extending ad infinitum the lies and propaganda used
> first to mount the NATO attack and later to whitewash this collective
> crime and its aftermath.
> You cannot negate the physical evidence of destruction from the air
> in Yugoslavia (which still includes in theory Kosovo itself), enshrined
> with pictures, names, dates and targets actually hit. The Yugoslav
> government has published four factual volumes that need no further
> discussion about authenticity. No one can deny that civilian targets
> have been extensively hit. Figures for civilian deaths and for those
> injured more or less seriously do vary. Some 3000 dead have been claimed
>
> at the maximum with three times that number for the maimed. On the
> lowest end about 300 dead and some 2,000 injured are on hand. We even
> have a visually recorded tragedy in the complaints of General Clark that
>
> NATO’s civilian authorities would not allow him to “further extend” the
>
> number of civilian targets, another item of evidence “missed.” Clearly,
> Madame Prosecutor, your entire case for rejection rests only on the
> presumed lack of INTENT to punish the Serb civilians. The intent is
> clearly admitted by the U.S. Secretary of State more than a year after
> the bombs stopped falling on civilian targets in Yugoslavia. The INTENT
> WAS TO ACTUALLY PUNISH YUGOSLAVIA. How much more proof do you need to
> shed your judicial glaucoma and see the real shapes of dead Serbs and
> Albanians from NATO bombs, parachuted mines, cluster bombs (many
> unexploded and killing daily), shells with depleted uranium which will
> be hitting local genes for decades to come since it is a mutant without
> known limits?
> When you were appointed to replace Louise Arbour, a reputation
> preceded you from your native Switzerland. Its criminal elements and its
>
> politicians could not “crack” your judicial integrity. In fact, they
> deflected you because of it, like “The Godfather” of Mario Puzo, with
>
> an offer you could not refuse.
> It is a pity that what ordinary criminals and local politicos could
> not do has been reversed by the heady brew of rendering some sort of
> “international justice”. It is curious that you "missed” a major
> collective crime committed under the open sky -- rockets and cluster
> bombs against Sunday markets, against bridges, passenger trains and
> busses by day, maternity hospitals by night.
>
> Sincerely,
> Raymond K. Kent
>
---
STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
Yugoslavia calls on U.N. to disband war-crimes tribunal
June 4, 2000
Web posted at: 5:28 PM EDT (2128 GMT)
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (Reuters) -- Yugoslavia called on the United
Nations on Sunday to disband its war crimes tribunal, saying the body
had become an accomplice of NATO by refusing to probe the alliance over
its air campaign against Yugoslavia last year.
Information Minister Goran Matic urged U.N. Security Council ambassadors
to wind up what he called an "illegal, illegitimate and biased body" and
sack its prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.
"I am astonished by Ms. Del Ponte's statement that during last year's
aggression against Yugoslavia NATO did not deliberately target civilian
facilities and that it did not commit war crimes," Matic said in a
letter to the envoys carried by state news agency Tanjug.
Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the Hague-based tribunal, said Friday she
believed no grounds existed for opening an investigation into NATO's
alleged war crimes, though she said the alliance had made mistakes.
Del Ponte made her decision after studying complaints against NATO from
lawyers acting on behalf of Yugoslavia and a Russian parliamentary
commission.
"With Carla del Ponte's speech in the Security Council the Tribunal has
definitely sided with the aggressor and become an accomplice to NATO
crimes against Yugoslavia," Matic said.
"I propose that (she) be relieved of duty at once and that the Hague
tribunal be immediately disbanded, as an illegal, illegitimate and
demonstrably biased judicial body."
On Saturday, Russia criticized Del Ponte's decision, saying it showed
the court was politically biased.
The Hague tribunal has indicted scores of people for war crimes
committed in former Yugoslavia. A year ago it indicted Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic and four other top Yugoslav officials for
alleged war crimes in Kosovo.
NATO waged an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last year to
try to prevent repression of ethnic Albanians in Serbia's Kosovo
province.
Matic said NATO had committed a series of crimes during the campaign,
including the killings of 16 people when Serbian state television was
bombed on April 23, 1999.
He also accused the tribunal of silence over crimes committed by ethnic
Albanian extremists against Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo now
administered by international forces.
Last month the Yugoslav justice minister lashed out at the court, saying
Yugoslavia did not recognize it and would not agree to any Yugoslav
citizen being extradited to it.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
* La RF di Jugoslavia chiede all'ONU la abolizione del Tribunale-farsa
---
>
> AN OPEN LETTER
>
> 2 June 2000
>
> TO: Carla del Ponte, Chief Prosecutor,
> International Tribunal for Yugoslavia,
> The Hague
>
> FROM: Raymond K. Kent,
> Emeritus
> History Department,
> University of California,
> Berkeley, CA. 94720
> U.S.A.
>
> I am a former secretary to a California-based Citizen’s Committee
> set up to monitor the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ITY) since
> its establishment. I resigned in 1997 but you will find me in an article
>
> I had sent to the Tribunal and the Secretary General of the United
> Nations as a reprint from the Paris-based trilingual journal Dialogue
> (no20,1996). It is entitled “Contextualizing Hate—The Hague Tribunal,
> the Clinton Administration and the Serbs.” A copy is enclosed.
> The ITY was set-up, under open indictments, ostensibly to punish all
> those involved in the armed intra-ethnic conflicts who killed innocent
> civilians since 1991. It became obvious by the third year of its
> operation that the Tribunal’s Prosecutor pursued only the Serbs as
> alleged criminals in a tripartite conflict. In one prominent case, two
> high-ranking officers of the Bosnian Serb Army were kidnapped in
> Sarajevo after Dayton and delivered to the Hague without being accused
> of anything. This is the case which led to a change from open to secret
> indictments to pre-empt additional accusations against a Tribunal with
> an anti-Serb bias impossible to mask.
> Although two Chief Prosecutors have followed the one from South
> Africa and although some alleged criminals of Croat and Bosnian Muslim
> background were indicted, there is hardly any doubt that the reality
> emerging in the first three years of ITY’s work is the same. It pursued
>
> mainly Serbs. This is also confirmed by the fact that the alleged Croat
> and Bosnian Muslim criminals have been accused of doing harm to one
> another’s civilian populations but not to Serb civilians. It is only in
>
> the most recent times that the ITY has looked at all at what was done to
>
> the Serb civilians in Western Slavonia (August 1991- March 1992) and
> Krajina (mainly August 1995). This was done only under pressure from a
> variety of complaints.
> Against this background, it is not surprising that you have rejected
>
> international (not only Serb) claims that NATO committed war crimes
> without mentioning the other two areas in ITY indictments, those of
> crimes against humanity and peace. You simply did not have the will and
> courage to bite the hands that feed you as the major NATO players in the
>
> 78 days of bombing are also the major supporters and financial backers
> of your Tribunal. Nor is it surprising that you have claimed to have
> been “stupefied” to “even hear” Russia’s claims that the ITY is
> “politicized” and “biased” against the Serbs. At this point it seems
> salutary to show you just how the Tribunal is really polluted with
> political considerations.
> Tuzla is a major NATO base in Bosnia. One of its Discotheques is
> run by Nasir Oric. He was the Bosnian Muslim Commander at Srebrenica. He
>
> happens to be a self-admitted war criminal of the most bestial kind. For
>
> nearly a year, from the UN-protected Srebrenica, Oric and his “elite
> corps” raided its Serb countryside. They destroyed 48 Serb villages,
> looting, torching and killing about 1,800, including women and children.
>
> The good old Ottoman art of impaling was "enhanced" by roasting the
> victims of the mujehadin alive on the spit. May we send you the
> photographs of [partly carbonized] victims? This is what led to the Serb
>
> capture of Srebrenica, the evacuation of its women and children, and the
>
> flight of the Muslim soldiers under Izetbegovic's orders, to northern
> Bosnia.
> Oric bragged to at least two foreign reporters and showed one of
>
> them a video tape of the mayhem. You do not even have a “secret”
> indictment against him under the bogus claim that he had been” killed.”
> He will not be grabbed by the NATO troops and sent to the Hague out of
> fear that this would alienate and radicalize the Bosnian Muslims against
>
> NATO ground personnel.
> Exactly the same type of fear of alienating NATO's allies concerns
> the case of Agim Ceku, General of the Kosovo Liberation Army. He is now
> a major player in what is happening in Kosovo but you have excluded
> Kosovo’s Albanians from the category of war criminals since the war at
> Kosovo is defined as an internal civil war while Bosnia was
> internationalized in order to get at the Serbs. Actually, you are
> seeking evidence of mass murders of Albanian civilians at Kosovo from
> which to shore-up an indictment against Milosevic (curiously made public
>
> after Judge Arbour’s visit to Madeleine Albright, ITY’s “Mother” in
> Washington), stemming from the Bosnian conflict. Yet, Agim Ceku was a
> general of the Croat Army responsible for the ethnic cleansing of
> Krajina in August 1995, the looting and torching all of the Serb
> properties as well as killing several hundred, probably more, of older
> Serbs who either could not or would not run. Agim Ceku is now saluted by
>
> NATO troops and remains the behind-the-scenes coordinator of the ex-KLA.
>
> To grab him and ship him to the ITY at the Hague could alienate the
> still-extant KLA from NATO and impel some of its more extreme elements
> to cause harm to the NATO and U.N personnel in situ. Clearly, Madame
> Prosecutor, your Tribunal is “politicized” as is documented beyond
> refutation by the two cases. Both Oric and Ceku should have been
> indicted, tried and sentenced long ago if your Tribunal really belonged
> to a civilized judicial system, with the mechanics of a real court of
> law. It is an instrument of an emerging neo-Nazism. What makes it Right
>
> is the Might of NATO and more specifically the U.S. Super-Power. Its
> would be lofty ends justify the dirtiest of means and humiliations of
> Serbs in particular.
> The ITY is a tragi-comic political theater, draped in judicial robes,
>
> engaged in over-blown acting and pompous self-esteem, providing endless
> perqs and high-paying remunerations, a “sweetheart deal” for those
> “pre-selected” to sit on it and most unlikely to oppose any secret
> indictments or pre-conceived verdicts against the Serbs. Let me now
> pass on the components of your rejection.
> You have not denied in any known instance that the accusations against
> NATO indeed fall within the Tribunal’s mandate from the Security
> Council. In fact, one of the key assignments in your Security Council
> mandate demands it. However, you tabled, in the MAmerican sense, for
> the time being these accusations because you were” too busy searching
> for mass graves at Kosovo.” Well, your legal staff acted pretty fast as
> the accusations were multiplying in several European countries and in
> the United States. You are, I am sure, at least aware that Citizens
> Tribunals have been working for some time to indict NATO leaders and
> principal actors as having committed war crimes, crimes against humanity
>
> and against peace. In rejecting the war-crimes charge you are quoted to
> have said that while “accidents” have taken place, you are “ satisfied
>
> that there was no deliberate targeting of civilians.” I am not sure what
>
> evidence you had examined in person but the numbers of churches,
> schools, non-military factories, water purifying facilities, heating oil
>
> depositories and even medical facilities fully or partially destroyed,
> add up to staggering numbers. ALL OF THEM ARE CIVILIAN TARGETS EVEN IF A
>
> SINGLE CIVILIAN WAS NOT DIRECTLY KILLED IN ANY. Targeting all of them
> could not have been an “accident.”
> If you need another proof of NATO war crimes here it is and you can
> look it up. In her 10th May last speech at the University of
> California’s Berkeley Campus, Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright
> admitted: “to have raised the bar” high enough so that “Milosevic could
> NOT jump over it” because “YUGOSLAVIA NEEDED A LITTLE BOMBING.” This is
> a prima facie confession of the “Mother” of your Tribunal. It refers to
> the addition of Appendix B at Rambouillet after the Serbs were ready to
> sign an agreement to restore Autonomy to Kosovo. Appendix B demanded the
>
> occupation of Yugoslavia, including Belgrade, by NATO troops. The intent
>
> is deliberate bombing of a country and not even you can exclude its
> civilian population simply because you do not have the courage to
> practice law instead of politics.
> There is also a memo, which your legal toadies could not somehow
> excavate from the NATO files. It reveals the change from going
> exclusively after military targets into the civilian ones. It is a prima
>
> facie document showing that CIVILIAN TARGETS WERE DELIBERATELY INCLUDED
> after the initial bombings failed to produce Milosevich’s signature to
> the main text and Appendix B of the proposed Rambouillet Accord. I am
> sure that you must be aware how ridiculous is the claim of NATO
> Secretary General Lord Robertson that the “alliance acted entirely in
> accordance with international law.” It is illegal, under extant
> International Law, by international convention, to secure Presidential
> signatures with a pointed gun and the threat to use it. It is further
> illegal under International Law to mount 78 days of bombing a sovereign
> state without a mandate from the Security Council. The U.N. Charter
> demands it but it was shredded instead. As there was not even a formal
> declaration of war, the Constitutions of at least two member-states,
> France and the United States, were violated because they allot that
> power to declare war only to their respective Legislatures. Lord
> Robertson is simply extending ad infinitum the lies and propaganda used
> first to mount the NATO attack and later to whitewash this collective
> crime and its aftermath.
> You cannot negate the physical evidence of destruction from the air
> in Yugoslavia (which still includes in theory Kosovo itself), enshrined
> with pictures, names, dates and targets actually hit. The Yugoslav
> government has published four factual volumes that need no further
> discussion about authenticity. No one can deny that civilian targets
> have been extensively hit. Figures for civilian deaths and for those
> injured more or less seriously do vary. Some 3000 dead have been claimed
>
> at the maximum with three times that number for the maimed. On the
> lowest end about 300 dead and some 2,000 injured are on hand. We even
> have a visually recorded tragedy in the complaints of General Clark that
>
> NATO’s civilian authorities would not allow him to “further extend” the
>
> number of civilian targets, another item of evidence “missed.” Clearly,
> Madame Prosecutor, your entire case for rejection rests only on the
> presumed lack of INTENT to punish the Serb civilians. The intent is
> clearly admitted by the U.S. Secretary of State more than a year after
> the bombs stopped falling on civilian targets in Yugoslavia. The INTENT
> WAS TO ACTUALLY PUNISH YUGOSLAVIA. How much more proof do you need to
> shed your judicial glaucoma and see the real shapes of dead Serbs and
> Albanians from NATO bombs, parachuted mines, cluster bombs (many
> unexploded and killing daily), shells with depleted uranium which will
> be hitting local genes for decades to come since it is a mutant without
> known limits?
> When you were appointed to replace Louise Arbour, a reputation
> preceded you from your native Switzerland. Its criminal elements and its
>
> politicians could not “crack” your judicial integrity. In fact, they
> deflected you because of it, like “The Godfather” of Mario Puzo, with
>
> an offer you could not refuse.
> It is a pity that what ordinary criminals and local politicos could
> not do has been reversed by the heady brew of rendering some sort of
> “international justice”. It is curious that you "missed” a major
> collective crime committed under the open sky -- rockets and cluster
> bombs against Sunday markets, against bridges, passenger trains and
> busses by day, maternity hospitals by night.
>
> Sincerely,
> Raymond K. Kent
>
---
STOP NATO: ¡NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM
Yugoslavia calls on U.N. to disband war-crimes tribunal
June 4, 2000
Web posted at: 5:28 PM EDT (2128 GMT)
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (Reuters) -- Yugoslavia called on the United
Nations on Sunday to disband its war crimes tribunal, saying the body
had become an accomplice of NATO by refusing to probe the alliance over
its air campaign against Yugoslavia last year.
Information Minister Goran Matic urged U.N. Security Council ambassadors
to wind up what he called an "illegal, illegitimate and biased body" and
sack its prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.
"I am astonished by Ms. Del Ponte's statement that during last year's
aggression against Yugoslavia NATO did not deliberately target civilian
facilities and that it did not commit war crimes," Matic said in a
letter to the envoys carried by state news agency Tanjug.
Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the Hague-based tribunal, said Friday she
believed no grounds existed for opening an investigation into NATO's
alleged war crimes, though she said the alliance had made mistakes.
Del Ponte made her decision after studying complaints against NATO from
lawyers acting on behalf of Yugoslavia and a Russian parliamentary
commission.
"With Carla del Ponte's speech in the Security Council the Tribunal has
definitely sided with the aggressor and become an accomplice to NATO
crimes against Yugoslavia," Matic said.
"I propose that (she) be relieved of duty at once and that the Hague
tribunal be immediately disbanded, as an illegal, illegitimate and
demonstrably biased judicial body."
On Saturday, Russia criticized Del Ponte's decision, saying it showed
the court was politically biased.
The Hague tribunal has indicted scores of people for war crimes
committed in former Yugoslavia. A year ago it indicted Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic and four other top Yugoslav officials for
alleged war crimes in Kosovo.
NATO waged an 11-week bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last year to
try to prevent repression of ethnic Albanians in Serbia's Kosovo
province.
Matic said NATO had committed a series of crimes during the campaign,
including the killings of 16 people when Serbian state television was
bombed on April 23, 1999.
He also accused the tribunal of silence over crimes committed by ethnic
Albanian extremists against Serbs and other minorities in Kosovo now
administered by international forces.
Last month the Yugoslav justice minister lashed out at the court, saying
Yugoslavia did not recognize it and would not agree to any Yugoslav
citizen being extradited to it.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------