Da: ICDSM Italia
Data: Lun 7 Giu 2004 14:29:03 Europe/Rome
A: icdsm-italia @ yahoogroups.com
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Still on Stancy Sullivan, and other liars by
profession
[ Tra i "bugiardi di professione" che hanno lavorato sulla tragedia
jugoslava in questi anni spicca Stancy Sullivan, della agenzia di
disinformazione strategica IWPR...
Vedi anche le critiche mosse da E.S. Herman / SEE ALSO:
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/icdsm-italia/message/73 ]
1. The Yugoslavian Fairy Tale (G. Szamuely)
2. Genocide without corpses... Journalism without truth!
(W. Dorich)
=== 1 ===
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405fairytale.html
The Yugoslavian Fairy Tale
By George Szamuely | May 28, 2004
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
It is always fascinating to watch the eagerness with which so-called
progressives unquestioningly accept an official history full of
virtuous U.S. officials and villainous savages trying the patience of
the peaceful, law-abiding Great Powers. Case in point: the wars in the
former Yugoslavia, and Stacy Sullivan’s recent account of them in
Foreign Policy In Focus
(http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402milosevic.html). The actual
sequence of events that caused those wars is very different from the
reporting of the establishment media and, unfortunately, much of the
progressive media. According to this story, the wars of the past decade
were all started by the Serbs, who sought to destroy Yugoslavia and
turn it into a mono-ethnic Greater Serbia.
The West, well-meaning and indecisive as ever, stood by unwilling to
intervene as the Serbs went on their rampage to carve out lands
belonging to the other nations of Yugoslavia and drive out all
non-Serbs. Not until the United States was finally moved to act to
bring the Serbs to heel was peace and independence possible. And,
thanks to the efforts of the United States, the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia came into being to ensure that there
would be no impunity for Serb leaders and their campaign of genocide
and ethnic cleansing. Today, tribunal judges supposedly toil away on
behalf of the war crimes’ victims, painstakingly trying to balance
judicial fairness against the need to ensure that such things never
happen again.
The problem is that not one part of this fairy tale is true. The wars
in Yugoslavia started with the electoral triumph of anti-Communist
nationalists in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia in the country’s first
multiparty elections in 1990. Slovenia and Croatia, with encouragement
from abroad, particularly Germany and the United States, pushed for
independence right away, in violation of the constitution of
Yugoslavia. Serbia’s position, in accord both with the Yugoslav
constitution and with democratic aspirations, was that the constituent
nations of Yugoslavia could neither be forced to stay nor forced to
leave Yugoslavia against their will.
Deconstructing Yugoslav History
The so-called international community’s unseemly and irresponsible
recognition of independent Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 was not only
flagrant interference in Yugoslav internal affairs, it violated
innumerable international treaties such as the Helsinki Final Act, the
Montevideo Convention and the United Nations Charter.
Sabotage of peace plans, bad faith negotiations and a yearning to
resort to force characterized U.S. policy in Yugoslavia throughout the
1990s. On May 30, 1992, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
issued a report commending the government of Yugoslavia for the
withdrawal of its armed forces from Bosnia and criticizing Croatia for
its refusal to withdraw its armed forces, the U.S. sought to suppress
this report and to push the United Nations to impose sanctions against
Yugoslavia, though not Croatia. Every proposal put forward by the E.U.,
like the Vance-Owen plan and the Owen-Stoltenberg plan was sabotaged by
Washington as it egged on its proxies, Bosnia’s Muslims, to reject
everything on the table in favor of the absurd and unrealistic option
of a unitary state of the three ethnic groups—something that the United
States had insisted couldn’t possibly work at the Yugoslav federal
level.
During this time, the United States was secretly arranging air drops of
weapons to Bosnia’s Muslims, in violation of the United Nations arms
embargo, as well as facilitating the flow of arms and mujahedin
fanatics into Bosnia from Iran and Saudi Arabia. In addition, the
United States, Great Britain and Germany were arming and training the
Kosovo Liberation Army. The objective was to instigate terror and
mayhem so as to provoke a reaction from the Yugoslav authorities that
could then be designated a humanitarian crisis and used as a pretext
for the armed attack that the Clinton administration had been seeking
to launch for years. However, the Serbs were no fools and they refused
to be provoked. Consequently, two further frauds were needed. First,
there were the alleged killings at Racak. And then there were the bogus
settlement negotiations at Rambuillet.
On Jan. 15, 1999, following a military operation by Yugoslav armed
forces against a KLA stronghold at Racak, KLA leaders led OSCE
observers to a gully where 45 bodies were piled on top of each other.
Without waiting for any investigation, the United States, through
Ambassador William Walker, immediately announced that the Serbs had
carried out a massacre of unarmed Kosovo Albanian civilians. As we
learn more about Racak, the story of the massacre is becoming
increasingly hard to sustain. On March 17, 1999, a week before its
onslaught on Yugoslavia, NATO organized a press conference at which
Helena Ranta, the leader of the Finnish forensic team hired by the OSCE
to investigate Racak, announced her findings. Though the Finnish team’s
report was never published, the U.S. government, with the New York
Times in tow, touted her inconclusive findings as confirmation of
William Walker’s initial statement that a massacre had taken place at
Racak.
Recently, Ranta revealed the pressure she was under to make her
findings conform with NATO requirements. In an interview with Berliner
Zeitung, she declared that she knew at the time of her investigation
that there were:
“KLA-fighters buried around Racak…At that time I received information
that proved that several Serb soldiers had been killed as well.
Unfortunately, we will never know the exact number of Serb soldiers
that died that night…When Ambassador Walker said that there was a
massacre at Racak, this statement had no legal value. I declared at
that time that the OSCE-observers forgot to take all steps necessary to
secure a crime scene: isolating the area, refusing admission to all
unauthorized persons and colleting all material evidence…[It was clear]
that a bunch of governments were interested in a version of Racak that
blamed only the Serb side. But I could not provide this version.”
As for the negotiations at Rambouillet, U.S. bad faith was nicely
summarized by a State Department official who boasted later: “We
intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need
some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” If the Serbs
rejected a deal, they would get bombed; if the KLA rejected a deal, the
U.S. would simply shrug its shoulders. Thus, the United States insisted
on including Appendix B in any accord knowing full well that Serbia,
like any other sovereign state, would reject a proposal to allow NATO
forces to enjoy unrestricted movement throughout the country as well as
complete criminal and civil immunity.
Except for Appendix B, Slobodan Milosevic is on record as having
supported every single peace plan the so-called international community
proposed. Yet Stacy Sullivan worries that he might escape a conviction
for genocide. That all the evidence points to the opposite conclusion,
that his government, unlike that of the United States, sought peace
even if it entailed the loss of the historic achievement of the state
of Yugoslavia, does not matter in the slightest. The U.S. got its
bombing of Yugoslavia that was not justified by any Security Council
resolution, any imminent threat of attack on a NATO power, any threat
to any of Yugoslavia’s neighbors or indeed any humanitarian crisis
since the refugee flow out of Kosovo began after the bombing.
The Illegitimacy of the Court
U.S. policy in the Balkans was cynical and war-mongering. It seems
strange that a journal of progressive opinion should unquestioningly
accept the doctrine that small nations should simply accept the diktats
of great powers. Nor should it unquestioningly accept its claims about
humanitarian crises when even the most superficial survey of the
historical record will show that it was the policies of the Great
Powers that caused these crises. Finally, it is surprising that it
unquestioningly accepts that a court largely funded and staffed by the
very great powers that had caused so much havoc in Yugoslavia ($17
million in 2003 from the U.S. alone) should act as a disinterested
impartial judicial body.
To prove that day is night a very peculiar kind of court had to be
created, one that falls outside of the two chief sources of
international criminal law, treaty law and international customary law.
The Security Council possesses neither legislative nor judicial
functions. It can neither create new international law nor make binding
interpretations of existing international law. The UN has no
jurisdiction or authority to try, punish or imprison individuals, not
even those who have violated international law. Nor is punishment of
individuals for international crimes among the Security Council’s
enumerated powers listed in the UN Charter. The 1948 Genocide
Convention explicitly states that national courts are the appropriate
venue to try individuals accused of genocide.
According to the ICTY’s statute, the waging of aggressive war is not a
crime that falls within its domain. This is a curious omission. The
most important war crimes court since Nuremberg has decided to dispense
with the most important crime under the Nuremberg standard. This is
scarcely surprising. Under its rubric, NATO would undoubtedly have been
guilty of a crime. Every jurisdiction in the world plainly recognizes
the difference between violence committed while acting in self-defense
and violence committed while acting aggressively.
Given this, it is hardly shocking that the court violates every
judicial norm whether in the civil law or common law tradition.
Indictments are often kept secret and suddenly sprung on the court’s
victims. Bail is rarely granted, and detainees can wait years in prison
before their cases come to trial. Prosecutor and court are one and the
same. There is no jury. Appellate court and trial court are also one
and the same. The court is answerable to no one. There is no jury. The
court is financed by interested parties like the U.S., assorted NATO
governments, U.S. corporations and, of course, the ubiquitous George
Soros—this in fact violates the tribunal’s own statute that funding can
only come from the United Nations.
The ICTY’s procedures would be unacceptable in any serious
jurisdiction. Hearsay (essentially rumor and gossip) is admissible.
Testimony presented at one trial can be introduced as evidence in
another trial, without any cross-examination. Prosecutors can present
pretrial witness statements as witness trial testimony. Since
statements made to, and prepared by, the prosecutor, are essentially
prosecutor statements, it means prosecutorial assertions are treated as
evidence in chief. Prosecutors can introduce illegal wiretaps whose
authenticity has not been established and whose provenance is kept
secret. As evidence in a trial of one of the most serious charges
known—genocide—any self-respecting court would throw them out.
Witnesses can testify anonymously or even by videotape. Moreover, the
same judges preside over a number of trials at one and the same time in
which the same issues are being presented and argued over, which is
clearly prejudicial to all of the defendants. Another innovation is the
giving of multiple statements, to enable witnesses to remember more and
more and thereby to ensure that their statements get closer and closer
to the prosecutorial or official version of events. Prosecutorial
misconduct is rampant. Witnesses are blackmailed using the threat of
indictment to compel them to come up with the right version of the
events. Much of the proceedings take place in closed session,
ostensibly to protect witnesses but, more likely, to protect the court
from serious scrutiny. The tribunal can alter its procedures and rules
of evidence as it goes along and apply it ex post facto to ongoing
cases. Prosecutors, unlike defense attorneys, take part in this
rule-changing process.
With so many rules rigged in favor of prosecutors, much of what takes
place at the ICTY has the character of something out of Alice in
Wonderland: “Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one
can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much
practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for
half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six
impossible things before breakfast.” Stacy Sullivan appears to be a
devotee of the Queen.
(George Szamuely, a writer based in New York City, was born in Hungary
and educated in England. He has served as an associate at the Manhattan
Institute, editor at Freedom House, film critic for Insight, research
consultant at the Hudson Institute, and as a weekly columnist for the
New York Press.)
=== 2 ===
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/media_watch/html/dorich.html
GENOCIDE WITHOUT CORPSES ...
JOURNALISM WITHOUT TRUTH!
William Dorich
Reprinted in The American Srbobran, Sloboda and the Voice of Canadian
Serbs.
In the November 4th issue of Newsweek, Stacy Sullivan poses the
question of how is it possible to have genocide without corpses? The
answer is simple, remember it was Newsweek that broke the story about
'50,000 Rapes,' that turned out to be the most successful piece of
propaganda of this war. It was a lie!
Tom Post, the author of the article admitted that 'the Bosnian
officials concede that their estimates of 50,000 was based on a
relatively small number of testimonies.'
Remember, too, it was Newsweek that carried the skeletal figure of 'a
Bosnian Muslim POW' on its August 17, 1992 cover. Slobodan Konjevic,
37, was identified by his sister in Vienna as a Serb. She said in
telephone interviews that 'Slobodan has suffered from Tuberculosis for
10 years' ... 'he was a common
criminal before the war and he was caught looting' ... 'his skeletal
figure was due to his disease not the starvation from 3 months in a
Serb detention camp,'
If I were Newsweek I would distance myself from this public deception,
too! In its January 4, 1993 issue, Newsweek once again resorted to lies
and distortions by showing a photograph of several bodies with the
accompanying caption: 'Is there any way to stop Serbian atrocities in
Bosnia?' The photo was actually of Serbian victims, including one
clearly recognizable man wearing a red coat. The photo, with the same
man in his red coat, is identical to a scene in television footage from
Vukovar a year earlier. Shame on Newsweek for their apparent lack of
integrity and their arrogant silence.
Particularly offensive in this article is Ms. Sullivan's last line,
'They (the war crimes investigators) can only hope they won't be beaten
by the war criminals who live there year-round.' In other words, Ms.
Sullivan paints all Serbs with collective guilt, little wonder she is
capable of writing such a scathing article, she, too, has no integrity,
or worse, no conscience. The use of
the photo of a coffin containing 'a 6 week-old Muslim baby exhumed from
a mass grave,' in this article was yet another technique to further
demonize the Serbs. Would Ms. Sullivan and Newsweek like the color
photographs of roasted Serbian soldiers, or how about the picture of 3
year-old Ilinka Cecevac, a Serbian baby shot in the forehead at point
blank range because some lunatic considered her an enemy of the state?
Deceptively, Ms. Sullivan omits any reference to, Nasir Oric, a war
criminal responsible for killing over 640 Serbs in villages that
surrounded Srebrenica, he is not even indicted! This Muslim criminal
has created video films of his exterminations. These videos are being
sold on street corners in the Arab world showing Nasir Oric
decapitating and murdering innocent Serbian victims, the Muslim world's
version of pornography. Oric used the "safe-haven" of Srebrenica as a
military base to destroy 42 Serbian villages in the year prior to
Srebrenica's fall. Nasir Oric is also the same Muslim that converted
the Serbian
Orthodox church in Konjic into a public toilet and the Serbian church
in Srebrenica into a stable.
ICRC document 37, dated September 13, 1995, reveals that 'apx. 5,000
Srebrenica Muslims left the enclave prior to its fall and that the
Muslim government has admitted that these men were reassigned to other
units of its armed forces.
The fact that family members were not informed of it was justified by
the obligation to keep it a military secret.' Ms. Sullivan proves
capable of ignoring any evidence that contradicts her own Roman
Catholic bias toward the Serbs. In the week before the Dayton Agreement
negotiations began, Haris Silajdzic proved just how capable he was of
pulling the wool over the eyes of the West! Silajdzic went before the
CNN cameras to tell the world that his government had just discovered a
mass grave containing the bodies of '520 Muslim victims.' I telephoned
the international desk at CNN to inquire how it was possible to know
the exact body count in a grave that had yet to be exhumed? In the
subsequent telecast CNN revised the remark saying 'the mass grave is
believed to contain 520 victims.' In the weeks that followed, NATO and
ICRC excavated the site to discover that it contained only one body,
the body that was shown in the mud during the CNN telecast of this
so-called new event.
Haris Silajdzic is the same liar that used the Human Rights Conference
in Vienna on June 15, 1993 to announce that '200,000 Bosnian Muslims
have been killed in this war.' A lie of hideous proportion that was
used by the media for the ensuing three years. In January of 1993,
Associated Press and UPI accounted for '17,000 victims on all sides.'
In other words, in a five month period from January to June, Silajdzic
convinced the world that 183,000 Muslims had been killed, a figure that
represented more than 36,000 victims per month in 42 months of war. Nor
a single document anywhere in the world by any
humanitarian or government agency has been able to account for more
than 60,000 victims in this war. Yes, Ms. Sullivan this is genocide
without corpses and you and your ilk at Newsweek are in the kind of
truth squads reminiscent of Communist regimes that we despised.
Praising David Rohde for receiving a Pulitzer prize for discovering the
mass graves of Srebrenica is praising an arrogant fraud. This is the
same David Rohde that proved what a successful forger he was in
falsifying the documents that gave him access to Serbian territory.
This is the same David Rohde that convinced the American public that
the Serbs stupidly left 'arms and legs protruding from the mass grave.'
But, Rohde has no explanation why wild animals, birds and insects did
not devour the rotting flesh of those arms and legs from July to
October when he made this miraculous discovery.
Self-serving journalists have been handsomely paid for their deception.
Public relations firms were hired to promote propaganda. Front page
exposure titillated the American public with stories based on hearsay
and double hearsay and outright fabrication, an indication of the depth
to which the major media will stoop to make a buck. More than 50
Million dollars has been paid to public relations goons by Croats and
Muslims in an arrogant attempt to manipulate U.S. foreign policy
through the use of phony rape stories, faked photographs of Dubrovnik
burning and death figures grossly exaggerated in order to claim
genocide so that the United States can find reason to become involved
in a civil war.
Ten times as many people have died and are dying in Rwanda and the lack
of concern by the American government is shocking. Why? Because these
800,000 victims are black?
I remember, too, that another Pulitzer winner, John Burns of the New
York Times, did a story in the winter of 1993 in which he wrote about
12 people freezing to death in a Sarajevo nursing home. He gave
gruesome details of the victims as they were placed on a flat bed truck
and he even accompanied them to their burial, and still, John Burns
omitted from his story the fact that all 12 victims were Serbs, buried
in the Serbian Orthodox cemetery in Sarajevo.
This is the same moronic journalist who totally ignored Serbian
Victimology during this war while stooping to write a story about how
the dogs were managing to survive in Sarajevo. In the week that Burns
wrote that hideous dog story, 8 Serbian babies died from a simple lack
of antibiotics, 16 elderly Serbs died of diabetes because of a lack of
medication and 4 elderly Serbs committed suicide rather than starve to
death.
Goebbels said: 'Tell a lie a hundred times, it becomes the truth.'
Genocide without corpses is only possible when journalists like Stacy
Sullivan practice omission journalism, or worse, yellow journalism!
==========================
ICDSM - Sezione Italiana
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Data: Lun 7 Giu 2004 14:29:03 Europe/Rome
A: icdsm-italia @ yahoogroups.com
Oggetto: [icdsm-italia] Still on Stancy Sullivan, and other liars by
profession
[ Tra i "bugiardi di professione" che hanno lavorato sulla tragedia
jugoslava in questi anni spicca Stancy Sullivan, della agenzia di
disinformazione strategica IWPR...
Vedi anche le critiche mosse da E.S. Herman / SEE ALSO:
http://it.groups.yahoo.com/group/icdsm-italia/message/73 ]
1. The Yugoslavian Fairy Tale (G. Szamuely)
2. Genocide without corpses... Journalism without truth!
(W. Dorich)
=== 1 ===
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0405fairytale.html
The Yugoslavian Fairy Tale
By George Szamuely | May 28, 2004
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
It is always fascinating to watch the eagerness with which so-called
progressives unquestioningly accept an official history full of
virtuous U.S. officials and villainous savages trying the patience of
the peaceful, law-abiding Great Powers. Case in point: the wars in the
former Yugoslavia, and Stacy Sullivan’s recent account of them in
Foreign Policy In Focus
(http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402milosevic.html). The actual
sequence of events that caused those wars is very different from the
reporting of the establishment media and, unfortunately, much of the
progressive media. According to this story, the wars of the past decade
were all started by the Serbs, who sought to destroy Yugoslavia and
turn it into a mono-ethnic Greater Serbia.
The West, well-meaning and indecisive as ever, stood by unwilling to
intervene as the Serbs went on their rampage to carve out lands
belonging to the other nations of Yugoslavia and drive out all
non-Serbs. Not until the United States was finally moved to act to
bring the Serbs to heel was peace and independence possible. And,
thanks to the efforts of the United States, the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia came into being to ensure that there
would be no impunity for Serb leaders and their campaign of genocide
and ethnic cleansing. Today, tribunal judges supposedly toil away on
behalf of the war crimes’ victims, painstakingly trying to balance
judicial fairness against the need to ensure that such things never
happen again.
The problem is that not one part of this fairy tale is true. The wars
in Yugoslavia started with the electoral triumph of anti-Communist
nationalists in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia in the country’s first
multiparty elections in 1990. Slovenia and Croatia, with encouragement
from abroad, particularly Germany and the United States, pushed for
independence right away, in violation of the constitution of
Yugoslavia. Serbia’s position, in accord both with the Yugoslav
constitution and with democratic aspirations, was that the constituent
nations of Yugoslavia could neither be forced to stay nor forced to
leave Yugoslavia against their will.
Deconstructing Yugoslav History
The so-called international community’s unseemly and irresponsible
recognition of independent Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 was not only
flagrant interference in Yugoslav internal affairs, it violated
innumerable international treaties such as the Helsinki Final Act, the
Montevideo Convention and the United Nations Charter.
Sabotage of peace plans, bad faith negotiations and a yearning to
resort to force characterized U.S. policy in Yugoslavia throughout the
1990s. On May 30, 1992, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali
issued a report commending the government of Yugoslavia for the
withdrawal of its armed forces from Bosnia and criticizing Croatia for
its refusal to withdraw its armed forces, the U.S. sought to suppress
this report and to push the United Nations to impose sanctions against
Yugoslavia, though not Croatia. Every proposal put forward by the E.U.,
like the Vance-Owen plan and the Owen-Stoltenberg plan was sabotaged by
Washington as it egged on its proxies, Bosnia’s Muslims, to reject
everything on the table in favor of the absurd and unrealistic option
of a unitary state of the three ethnic groups—something that the United
States had insisted couldn’t possibly work at the Yugoslav federal
level.
During this time, the United States was secretly arranging air drops of
weapons to Bosnia’s Muslims, in violation of the United Nations arms
embargo, as well as facilitating the flow of arms and mujahedin
fanatics into Bosnia from Iran and Saudi Arabia. In addition, the
United States, Great Britain and Germany were arming and training the
Kosovo Liberation Army. The objective was to instigate terror and
mayhem so as to provoke a reaction from the Yugoslav authorities that
could then be designated a humanitarian crisis and used as a pretext
for the armed attack that the Clinton administration had been seeking
to launch for years. However, the Serbs were no fools and they refused
to be provoked. Consequently, two further frauds were needed. First,
there were the alleged killings at Racak. And then there were the bogus
settlement negotiations at Rambuillet.
On Jan. 15, 1999, following a military operation by Yugoslav armed
forces against a KLA stronghold at Racak, KLA leaders led OSCE
observers to a gully where 45 bodies were piled on top of each other.
Without waiting for any investigation, the United States, through
Ambassador William Walker, immediately announced that the Serbs had
carried out a massacre of unarmed Kosovo Albanian civilians. As we
learn more about Racak, the story of the massacre is becoming
increasingly hard to sustain. On March 17, 1999, a week before its
onslaught on Yugoslavia, NATO organized a press conference at which
Helena Ranta, the leader of the Finnish forensic team hired by the OSCE
to investigate Racak, announced her findings. Though the Finnish team’s
report was never published, the U.S. government, with the New York
Times in tow, touted her inconclusive findings as confirmation of
William Walker’s initial statement that a massacre had taken place at
Racak.
Recently, Ranta revealed the pressure she was under to make her
findings conform with NATO requirements. In an interview with Berliner
Zeitung, she declared that she knew at the time of her investigation
that there were:
“KLA-fighters buried around Racak…At that time I received information
that proved that several Serb soldiers had been killed as well.
Unfortunately, we will never know the exact number of Serb soldiers
that died that night…When Ambassador Walker said that there was a
massacre at Racak, this statement had no legal value. I declared at
that time that the OSCE-observers forgot to take all steps necessary to
secure a crime scene: isolating the area, refusing admission to all
unauthorized persons and colleting all material evidence…[It was clear]
that a bunch of governments were interested in a version of Racak that
blamed only the Serb side. But I could not provide this version.”
As for the negotiations at Rambouillet, U.S. bad faith was nicely
summarized by a State Department official who boasted later: “We
intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need
some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” If the Serbs
rejected a deal, they would get bombed; if the KLA rejected a deal, the
U.S. would simply shrug its shoulders. Thus, the United States insisted
on including Appendix B in any accord knowing full well that Serbia,
like any other sovereign state, would reject a proposal to allow NATO
forces to enjoy unrestricted movement throughout the country as well as
complete criminal and civil immunity.
Except for Appendix B, Slobodan Milosevic is on record as having
supported every single peace plan the so-called international community
proposed. Yet Stacy Sullivan worries that he might escape a conviction
for genocide. That all the evidence points to the opposite conclusion,
that his government, unlike that of the United States, sought peace
even if it entailed the loss of the historic achievement of the state
of Yugoslavia, does not matter in the slightest. The U.S. got its
bombing of Yugoslavia that was not justified by any Security Council
resolution, any imminent threat of attack on a NATO power, any threat
to any of Yugoslavia’s neighbors or indeed any humanitarian crisis
since the refugee flow out of Kosovo began after the bombing.
The Illegitimacy of the Court
U.S. policy in the Balkans was cynical and war-mongering. It seems
strange that a journal of progressive opinion should unquestioningly
accept the doctrine that small nations should simply accept the diktats
of great powers. Nor should it unquestioningly accept its claims about
humanitarian crises when even the most superficial survey of the
historical record will show that it was the policies of the Great
Powers that caused these crises. Finally, it is surprising that it
unquestioningly accepts that a court largely funded and staffed by the
very great powers that had caused so much havoc in Yugoslavia ($17
million in 2003 from the U.S. alone) should act as a disinterested
impartial judicial body.
To prove that day is night a very peculiar kind of court had to be
created, one that falls outside of the two chief sources of
international criminal law, treaty law and international customary law.
The Security Council possesses neither legislative nor judicial
functions. It can neither create new international law nor make binding
interpretations of existing international law. The UN has no
jurisdiction or authority to try, punish or imprison individuals, not
even those who have violated international law. Nor is punishment of
individuals for international crimes among the Security Council’s
enumerated powers listed in the UN Charter. The 1948 Genocide
Convention explicitly states that national courts are the appropriate
venue to try individuals accused of genocide.
According to the ICTY’s statute, the waging of aggressive war is not a
crime that falls within its domain. This is a curious omission. The
most important war crimes court since Nuremberg has decided to dispense
with the most important crime under the Nuremberg standard. This is
scarcely surprising. Under its rubric, NATO would undoubtedly have been
guilty of a crime. Every jurisdiction in the world plainly recognizes
the difference between violence committed while acting in self-defense
and violence committed while acting aggressively.
Given this, it is hardly shocking that the court violates every
judicial norm whether in the civil law or common law tradition.
Indictments are often kept secret and suddenly sprung on the court’s
victims. Bail is rarely granted, and detainees can wait years in prison
before their cases come to trial. Prosecutor and court are one and the
same. There is no jury. Appellate court and trial court are also one
and the same. The court is answerable to no one. There is no jury. The
court is financed by interested parties like the U.S., assorted NATO
governments, U.S. corporations and, of course, the ubiquitous George
Soros—this in fact violates the tribunal’s own statute that funding can
only come from the United Nations.
The ICTY’s procedures would be unacceptable in any serious
jurisdiction. Hearsay (essentially rumor and gossip) is admissible.
Testimony presented at one trial can be introduced as evidence in
another trial, without any cross-examination. Prosecutors can present
pretrial witness statements as witness trial testimony. Since
statements made to, and prepared by, the prosecutor, are essentially
prosecutor statements, it means prosecutorial assertions are treated as
evidence in chief. Prosecutors can introduce illegal wiretaps whose
authenticity has not been established and whose provenance is kept
secret. As evidence in a trial of one of the most serious charges
known—genocide—any self-respecting court would throw them out.
Witnesses can testify anonymously or even by videotape. Moreover, the
same judges preside over a number of trials at one and the same time in
which the same issues are being presented and argued over, which is
clearly prejudicial to all of the defendants. Another innovation is the
giving of multiple statements, to enable witnesses to remember more and
more and thereby to ensure that their statements get closer and closer
to the prosecutorial or official version of events. Prosecutorial
misconduct is rampant. Witnesses are blackmailed using the threat of
indictment to compel them to come up with the right version of the
events. Much of the proceedings take place in closed session,
ostensibly to protect witnesses but, more likely, to protect the court
from serious scrutiny. The tribunal can alter its procedures and rules
of evidence as it goes along and apply it ex post facto to ongoing
cases. Prosecutors, unlike defense attorneys, take part in this
rule-changing process.
With so many rules rigged in favor of prosecutors, much of what takes
place at the ICTY has the character of something out of Alice in
Wonderland: “Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one
can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much
practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for
half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six
impossible things before breakfast.” Stacy Sullivan appears to be a
devotee of the Queen.
(George Szamuely, a writer based in New York City, was born in Hungary
and educated in England. He has served as an associate at the Manhattan
Institute, editor at Freedom House, film critic for Insight, research
consultant at the Hudson Institute, and as a weekly columnist for the
New York Press.)
=== 2 ===
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/media_watch/html/dorich.html
GENOCIDE WITHOUT CORPSES ...
JOURNALISM WITHOUT TRUTH!
William Dorich
Reprinted in The American Srbobran, Sloboda and the Voice of Canadian
Serbs.
In the November 4th issue of Newsweek, Stacy Sullivan poses the
question of how is it possible to have genocide without corpses? The
answer is simple, remember it was Newsweek that broke the story about
'50,000 Rapes,' that turned out to be the most successful piece of
propaganda of this war. It was a lie!
Tom Post, the author of the article admitted that 'the Bosnian
officials concede that their estimates of 50,000 was based on a
relatively small number of testimonies.'
Remember, too, it was Newsweek that carried the skeletal figure of 'a
Bosnian Muslim POW' on its August 17, 1992 cover. Slobodan Konjevic,
37, was identified by his sister in Vienna as a Serb. She said in
telephone interviews that 'Slobodan has suffered from Tuberculosis for
10 years' ... 'he was a common
criminal before the war and he was caught looting' ... 'his skeletal
figure was due to his disease not the starvation from 3 months in a
Serb detention camp,'
If I were Newsweek I would distance myself from this public deception,
too! In its January 4, 1993 issue, Newsweek once again resorted to lies
and distortions by showing a photograph of several bodies with the
accompanying caption: 'Is there any way to stop Serbian atrocities in
Bosnia?' The photo was actually of Serbian victims, including one
clearly recognizable man wearing a red coat. The photo, with the same
man in his red coat, is identical to a scene in television footage from
Vukovar a year earlier. Shame on Newsweek for their apparent lack of
integrity and their arrogant silence.
Particularly offensive in this article is Ms. Sullivan's last line,
'They (the war crimes investigators) can only hope they won't be beaten
by the war criminals who live there year-round.' In other words, Ms.
Sullivan paints all Serbs with collective guilt, little wonder she is
capable of writing such a scathing article, she, too, has no integrity,
or worse, no conscience. The use of
the photo of a coffin containing 'a 6 week-old Muslim baby exhumed from
a mass grave,' in this article was yet another technique to further
demonize the Serbs. Would Ms. Sullivan and Newsweek like the color
photographs of roasted Serbian soldiers, or how about the picture of 3
year-old Ilinka Cecevac, a Serbian baby shot in the forehead at point
blank range because some lunatic considered her an enemy of the state?
Deceptively, Ms. Sullivan omits any reference to, Nasir Oric, a war
criminal responsible for killing over 640 Serbs in villages that
surrounded Srebrenica, he is not even indicted! This Muslim criminal
has created video films of his exterminations. These videos are being
sold on street corners in the Arab world showing Nasir Oric
decapitating and murdering innocent Serbian victims, the Muslim world's
version of pornography. Oric used the "safe-haven" of Srebrenica as a
military base to destroy 42 Serbian villages in the year prior to
Srebrenica's fall. Nasir Oric is also the same Muslim that converted
the Serbian
Orthodox church in Konjic into a public toilet and the Serbian church
in Srebrenica into a stable.
ICRC document 37, dated September 13, 1995, reveals that 'apx. 5,000
Srebrenica Muslims left the enclave prior to its fall and that the
Muslim government has admitted that these men were reassigned to other
units of its armed forces.
The fact that family members were not informed of it was justified by
the obligation to keep it a military secret.' Ms. Sullivan proves
capable of ignoring any evidence that contradicts her own Roman
Catholic bias toward the Serbs. In the week before the Dayton Agreement
negotiations began, Haris Silajdzic proved just how capable he was of
pulling the wool over the eyes of the West! Silajdzic went before the
CNN cameras to tell the world that his government had just discovered a
mass grave containing the bodies of '520 Muslim victims.' I telephoned
the international desk at CNN to inquire how it was possible to know
the exact body count in a grave that had yet to be exhumed? In the
subsequent telecast CNN revised the remark saying 'the mass grave is
believed to contain 520 victims.' In the weeks that followed, NATO and
ICRC excavated the site to discover that it contained only one body,
the body that was shown in the mud during the CNN telecast of this
so-called new event.
Haris Silajdzic is the same liar that used the Human Rights Conference
in Vienna on June 15, 1993 to announce that '200,000 Bosnian Muslims
have been killed in this war.' A lie of hideous proportion that was
used by the media for the ensuing three years. In January of 1993,
Associated Press and UPI accounted for '17,000 victims on all sides.'
In other words, in a five month period from January to June, Silajdzic
convinced the world that 183,000 Muslims had been killed, a figure that
represented more than 36,000 victims per month in 42 months of war. Nor
a single document anywhere in the world by any
humanitarian or government agency has been able to account for more
than 60,000 victims in this war. Yes, Ms. Sullivan this is genocide
without corpses and you and your ilk at Newsweek are in the kind of
truth squads reminiscent of Communist regimes that we despised.
Praising David Rohde for receiving a Pulitzer prize for discovering the
mass graves of Srebrenica is praising an arrogant fraud. This is the
same David Rohde that proved what a successful forger he was in
falsifying the documents that gave him access to Serbian territory.
This is the same David Rohde that convinced the American public that
the Serbs stupidly left 'arms and legs protruding from the mass grave.'
But, Rohde has no explanation why wild animals, birds and insects did
not devour the rotting flesh of those arms and legs from July to
October when he made this miraculous discovery.
Self-serving journalists have been handsomely paid for their deception.
Public relations firms were hired to promote propaganda. Front page
exposure titillated the American public with stories based on hearsay
and double hearsay and outright fabrication, an indication of the depth
to which the major media will stoop to make a buck. More than 50
Million dollars has been paid to public relations goons by Croats and
Muslims in an arrogant attempt to manipulate U.S. foreign policy
through the use of phony rape stories, faked photographs of Dubrovnik
burning and death figures grossly exaggerated in order to claim
genocide so that the United States can find reason to become involved
in a civil war.
Ten times as many people have died and are dying in Rwanda and the lack
of concern by the American government is shocking. Why? Because these
800,000 victims are black?
I remember, too, that another Pulitzer winner, John Burns of the New
York Times, did a story in the winter of 1993 in which he wrote about
12 people freezing to death in a Sarajevo nursing home. He gave
gruesome details of the victims as they were placed on a flat bed truck
and he even accompanied them to their burial, and still, John Burns
omitted from his story the fact that all 12 victims were Serbs, buried
in the Serbian Orthodox cemetery in Sarajevo.
This is the same moronic journalist who totally ignored Serbian
Victimology during this war while stooping to write a story about how
the dogs were managing to survive in Sarajevo. In the week that Burns
wrote that hideous dog story, 8 Serbian babies died from a simple lack
of antibiotics, 16 elderly Serbs died of diabetes because of a lack of
medication and 4 elderly Serbs committed suicide rather than starve to
death.
Goebbels said: 'Tell a lie a hundred times, it becomes the truth.'
Genocide without corpses is only possible when journalists like Stacy
Sullivan practice omission journalism, or worse, yellow journalism!
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