From: icdsm-italia
Subject: [icdsm-italia] J. Widell on previous attempts to kill Milosevic
Date: July 28, 2006 11:51:17 AM GMT+02:00
To: icdsm-italia @ yahoogroups.com
J. Widell on previous attempts to kill Milosevic
[L'articolo che segue ripercorre i tentativi di assassinare Milosevic precedenti a quello, riuscito, degli aguzzini dell'Aia.
Come rivelato dall'ex agente dell'MI6 Tomlison, già nel 1992 i servizi segreti britannici avevano elaborato dei piani per togliere di mezzo Milosevic, per esempio con un finto incidente automobilistico del tipo di quello in cui ha trovato la morte Diana Spencer; in seguito, l'abitazione di Milosevic a Belgrado è stata bombardata dalla NATO (aprile 1999).
Oggi che Milosevic ha perso la vita in un carcere "superprotetto e supersorvegliato", i responsabili di questo assassinio (che sia per avvelenamento o per omissione di soccorso fa poca differenza) non sono sottoposti ad alcuna indagine ed il lurido lavoro del "Tribunale dell'Aia" ai danni della Jugoslavia e della verità storica può proseguire indisturbato. (A cura di ICDSM-Italia)]
July 15th, 2006
Did NATO try to kill Milosevic? “Yeah, right,” you might say, and ask who killed the Kennedy’s when after all it was you and me. But wait a minute. If somebody had asked the same question on April 22, 1999, the reaction would have been quite different. Only a fool could have denied that NAT O did try to kill him then. In case you have forgotten, April 22, 1999 was when NATO sent a missile in Milosevic’s bedroom. The time was 3.10 a.m. As it turned out, Milosevic was not in his bedroom at that time.
The truly amazing thing is how fast we forget. And in case you have forgotten, NATO was bombing Belgrade at that time. In 1999, NATO was doing all kinds of nasty things which it dismissed as collateral damage, like the bombing of the Chinese Embassy. According to Human Rights Watch, NATO killed 500 civilians in its air war against Yugoslavia. Others have put the figure at 2500.
When the Canadian participation in the US-led attack on Iraq was being discussed, the Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler told the Canadian Parliament that the attack on Iraq had not been authorized by the Security Council, unlike the Kosovo war. Actually what he said was that the ”preponderance of members of the Security Council” supported a resolution authorizing an intervention in Kosovo but it was torpedoed by the Russian veto. According to Cotler, the resolution was deemed to have legitimacy anyway because the “preponderance of members of the Security Council” supported it (Commons Debates, April 3, 2003 at 5126). That was absolutely (almost) right, except that there was no resolution for the Security Council to pass and therefore nothing for the Russians to veto. The reason there was no proposal was the much-touted ”certainty” of the Western powers that Russia would veto such a resolution so there was no point in preparing a proposal. But how could the preponderance of members of the Security Council support something that did not exist? How could something that did not exist have legitimacy? NATO was acting on its own. That’s how fast we forget. Maybe the point was that the Russians are bad, and that is something we have never been allowed to forget.
NATO might have dismissed the missile attack in Milosevic’s bedroom as a harmless prank it thought Milosevic might enjoy. In fact, NATO did explain that the attack was nothing personal. But NATO cannot deny that it thought of killing Milosevic, and had it known where Milosevic was on April 22, 1999, it would certainly have killed him then and there.
But was NATO really acting on a whim? Killing Milosevic seems to have been a long-term priority in some circles. The year before the bombing started, in 1998, the ex-MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson wrote a letter to John Wadham, head of the civil rights organisation Liberty and also Tomlinson’s solicitor. In his letter he stated that MI6, the British Intelligence Service, planned the assassination of Milosevic as early as 1992. Here is the letter:
Dear Sir,
I would like to bring to your attention a proposal by MI6 to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia. My motive in doing this is to draw to your attention the casual and cavalier attitude that many MI6 officers have to British and international law. The officer who wrote this proposal clearly could (and in my view, should) be charged with conspiracy to murder. He will no doubt escape unpunished, like many other MI6 officers who routinely break the law. This lack of legal accountability of MI6 officers needs to be addressed urgently.
From March 1992 until September 1993 I worked in the East European controllerate of MI6 under the staff designation of UKA/7. My role was to carry out natural cover operations (undercover as a businessman or journalist etc) in eastern Europe. The Balkan war was in its early stages at this time, and so my responsibilities were increasingly directed to this arena.
My work thus involved frequent contact with the officer responsible for developing and targeting operations in the Balkans. At the time, this was Nicholas Fishwick, who worked under the staff designation of P4/OPS. We would frequently meet in his office on the 11th floor of Century House to discuss proposed and ongoing operations that I was involved in and, indeed, many other operations which I was not myself involved in.
During one such meeting in the summer of 1992 Nick Fishwick casually mentioned that he was working on a proposal to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia. I laughed, and dismissed his claim as an idle boast as I (naively) thought that MI6 would never contemplate such an operation. Fishwick insisted that it was true, and appeared somewhat offended that I did not believe him. However, I still presumed that he was just pulling my leg, and thought nothing more of the incident
A few days later, I called in again to Fishwick’s office. After a few moments of conversation, he triumphantly pulled out a document from a file on his desk, tossed it over to me, and suggested I read it. To my astonishment, it was indeed a proposal to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia.
The minute was approximately 2 pages long, and had a yellow minute card attached to it which signified that it was an accountable document rather than a draft proposal. It was entitled “The need to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia”. In the distribution list in the margin were P4 (Head of Balkan operations, then Maurice Kendwrick-Piercey), SBO1/T (Security officer responsible for eastern European operations, then John Ridd), C/CEE (Controller of east European operations, then Richard Fletcher or possibly Andrew Fulton), MODA/SO (The SAS liaison officer attached to MI6, then Major Glynne Evans), and H/SECT (the private secretary to Sir Colin McColl, then Alan Petty).
The first page of the document was a political “justification” to assassinate President Milosevic. Fishwick’s justification was basically that there was evidence that Milosevic was providing arms and support to President Radovan Karadzic in the breakaway republic of Bosnian Serbia.
The remainder of the document proposed three methods to assassinate Milosevic. The first method was to train and equip a Serbian paramilitary opposition group to assassinate Milosevic in Serbia. Fishwick argued that this method would have the advantage of deniability, but the disadvantage that control of the operation would be low and the chances of success unpredictable. The second method was to use the Increment (a small cell of the SAS and SBS which is especially selected and trained to carry out operations exclusively for MI5/MI6) to infiltrate Serbia and attack Milosevic either with a bomb or sniper ambush. Fishwick argued that this would plan would be the most reliable, but would be undeniable if it went wrong. Fishwick’s third proposal was to kill Milosevic in a staged car crash, possibly during one of his visits to the ICFY (International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia) in Geneva, Switzerland. Fishwick even provided a suggestion about how this could be done, such as by disorientating Milosevic’s chauffeur using a blinding strobe light as the cavalcade passed through one of Geneva’s motorway tunnels.
There was no doubt in my mind when I read Fishwick’s proposal that he was entirely serious about pursuing his plan. Fishwick was an ambitious and serious officer, who would not frivolise his career by making such a proposal in jest or merely to impress me. However, I heard no more about the progress of this proposal, and did not expect to, as I was not on its distribution list.
I ask you to investigate this matter fully. I believe that legal action should be taken against Fishwick, to show other MI6 officers that they should not assume that they can murder and carry out other illegal acts with impunity.
Truth is stranger than fiction. The amazing thing is that Richard Tomlinson is a real person. Nobody has even tried to deny that. The British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook did not deny Tomlinson’s existence either. Instead, he said Tomlinson had an “irrational, deep-seated sense of grievance” against his former employer.
Tomlinson may have had a grievance but ironically, judging by the government’s reaction, Tomlinson knew what he was talking about. After being dismissed without warning in 1995, Tomlinson started writing a book. He was arrested in 1997, after showing a synopsis of his book to an Australian publisher. He was convicted for breaking the Official Secrets Act.
After his release, he fled Britain. He said that MI6 used false pretences to persuade the French intelligence service to arrest and beat him in Paris in August 1998. He was detained for 38 hours, and his computer equipment was illegally taken from him. The equipment was not returned until six months later. After being released, Tomlinson decided to leave France for his native New Zealand, but “a few days after my arrival, MI6 persuaded the New Zealand Intelligence Service to again detain and search me in Auckland. More computer equipment was confiscated from me, and again was not returned until six months later.”
Tomlinson then decided to move to Australia, but was denied a visa by the authorities. He claims this was again due to intervention by MI6. As a New Zealand citizen, he would normally not require a visa for Australia. Tomlinson then moved to Switzerland. In 2001 he published his book The Big Breach that exposed MI6 to contemporary operations and included claims that MI6 had planned to assassinate former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1992.
Tomlinson’s revelations were connected to the inquiry into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al Fayed in 1997. He suggested that their car crash was staged in imitation of the MI6 plans to have Milosevic killed in a car accident. The following is an excerpt from a sworn and testified statement that he made on May 12, 1999 to the enquiry into the deaths of the Princess of Wales, Dodi al Fayed, and Henri Paul:
[I]n 1992, as the civil war in the former Yugoslavia became increasingly topical, I started to work primarily on operations in Serbia. During this time, I became acquainted with Dr Nicholas Bernard Frank FISHWICK, born 1958, the MI6 officer who at the time was in charge of planning Balkan operations. During one meeting with DR Fishwick, he casually showed to me a three-page document that on closer inspection turned out to be an outline plan to assassinate the Serbian leader President Slobodan Milosevic. The plan was fully typed, and attached to a yellow “minute board”, signifying that this was a formal and accountable document. It will therefore still be in existence. Fishwick had annotated that the document be circulated to the following senior MI6 officers: Maurice KENDWRICK-PIERCEY, then head of Balkan operations, John RIDDE, then the security officer for Balkan operations, the SAS liaison officer to MI6 (designation MODA/SO, but I have forgotten his name), the head of the Eastern European Controllerate (then Richard FLETCHER) and finally Alan PETTY, the personal secretary to the then Chief of MI6, Colin Mc COLL.
As we know, Milosevic died in the United Nations detention unit in The Hague in March 2006. His death did not follow any of the plans discussed by Tomlinson, although an attempt had been made on his life in the missile attack in 1999 (which would suggest that the attempt was inspired by the proposal that he should be killed by a bomb). However, there were originally three different plans, so would it have been impossible to add one or two more?
But Milosevic died in the UN detention center in The Hague. Was MI6 active in the tribunal? William Spring (CANA, London, UK) suggested it was. He addressed the following letter to Judge Richard May, who was at the time the presiding judge in the Milosevic trial:
It is vital to get to the truth about the 1999 NATO war on Yugoslavia.
It may be that as a lawyer you don’t have any regard for the truth, by which I mean you don’t regard its pursuit as a priority.
But as a contemporary historian, and as a concerned citizen, worried at the waste of UK taxpayers’ money spent funding your illicit judicial forum, I do.
My point is you have disqualified yourself by prejudice and bias from any further conduct of this case.
I have made a formal complaint to the Lord Chancellor about your conduct of the trial.
I refer as well to the failure of The Tribunal to provide medical facilities for the prisoner, nor access to family, nor access to lawyers, nor access to potential witnesses, such as myself, nor access to advisers, nor access to telephones and fax machines, nor access to the Internet, nor even access to a computer.
You give him inedible meals and you deny him exercise.
You are engaged in torture.
You sneer at the prisoner - you generally seek to demean him, you inflict indignities and gratuitous humiliation upon him.
I believe you and the other UK officials at the Court, including Steven Kay, the MI6 agent drafted in so the prosecution can also take over the defence, all of you have systematically conspired to deny the prisoner a fair trial, both on account of the numerous rulings you have made against him, and those you have not, particularly in respect to the conditions of his unlawful detention. [...]”
That may sound far-fetched, but Spring did manage to pinpoint some developments which proved fatal later, like the failure to provide medical facilities to Milosevic. He called the treatment of Milosevic torture, which was again heard after his death. Whatever the truth in this matter, the British overrepresentation in the Milosevic trial defied all laws of probability. After Judge May died of brain cancer in July 2004, his replacement, Iain Bonomy, came from Scotland.
All this crazy talk does not come from people who hate the tribunal. Michael P. Scharf served as Attorney Adviser for U.N. Affairs at the State Department during the Administrations of President Bush (the elder) and President Clinton. He should know something about the ICTY as well. He wrote in 1999 (”Indicted For War Crimes, Then What?” Washington Post, Oct. 3, 1999):
From the beginning, the Security Council’s motives in creating the tribunal were questionable. During the negotiations to establish the court–talks in which I participated on behalf of the U.S. government–it became clear that several of the Security Council’s permanent members considered the tribunal a potential impediment to a negotiated peace settlement. Russia, in particular, worked behind the scenes to try to ensure that the tribunal would be no more than a Potemkin court.
The United States’s motives were also less than pure. America’s chief Balkans negotiator at the time, Richard Holbrooke, has acknowledged that the tribunal was widely perceived within the government as little more than a public relations device and as a potentially useful policy tool. The thinking in Washington was that even if only low-level perpetrators in the Balkans were tried, the tribunal’s existence and its indictments would deflect criticism that the major powers did not do enough to halt the bloodshed there. Indictments also would serve to isolate offending leaders diplomatically, strengthen the hand of their domestic rivals and fortify the international political will to employ economic sanctions or use force. Indeed, while the United States and Britain initially thought an indictment of Milosevic might interfere with the prospects of peace, it later became a useful tool in their efforts to demonize the Serbian leader and maintain public support for NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, which was still underway when the indictment was handed down.
According to Scharf, the tribunal was used as a propaganda tool against Milosevic. That had been so “from the beginning”. Scharf did not say that anybody wanted to kill him, at least not in the tribunal, but at the time Scharf wrote that, Milosevic had already been indicted.
Five years later, at the time Milosevic was scheduled to begin his defense, Scharf returned to the same theme (”Making A Spectacle of Himself,” Michael P. Scharf, Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2004):
In creating the Yugoslavia tribunal statute, the U.N. Security Council set three objectives: first, to educate the Serbian people, who were long misled by Milosevic’s propaganda, about the acts of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by his regime; second, to facilitate national reconciliation by pinning prime responsibility on Milosevic and other top leaders and disclosing the ways in which the Milosevic regime had induced ordinary Serbs to commit atrocities; and third, to promote political catharsis while enabling Serbia’s newly elected leaders to distance themselves from the repressive policies of the past. [Trial Judge Richard] May’s decision to allow Milosevic to represent himself has seriously undercut these aims.
Scharf wrote that part of the second objective of the tribunal was to pin prime responsibility on Milosevic. Scharf also repeated his claim that the tribunal had Milosevic in its sights when it was created in 1993. Since the ICTY was not built in a day, the plans must have gone further back than that, and that is where things get murky. The MI6 plan to kill Milosevic dated from 1992.
Scharf was not saying that the original plan was to transfer Milosevic to The Hague, although pinning the blame on him might have implied that. However, after Milosevic had been transferred to The Hague, former assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck wrote that the plan to get him in The Hague went back to the 1995 Dayton agreement. He wrote that if the 1995 Dayton agreement “prolonged Milosevic’s rule ... it also sealed his fate.” By signing the Dayton agreement, Milosevic reputedly recognized the tribunal. When he was arrested in 2001, “the trap that had been set in 1995 at last slammed shut,” wrote Shattuck. It has been observed that if the allegations of Milosevic’s war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia had been true, he would have been indicted in 1995. A lot more bloodshed was needed before Milosevic could be indicted. How much was Milosevic’s own life worth after that?
The strange thing is that Richard Tomlinson was held for questioning after Princess Diana died, even if the connection between her death and the 1992 plans to assassinate Milosevic was tangential at best. Milosevic himself died under the Western authorities’ watchful eye nine years later. Where are the arrests now?
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IN DIFESA DELLA JUGOSLAVIA
Il j'accuse di Slobodan Milosevic
di fronte al "Tribunale ad hoc" dell'Aia"
(Ed. Zambon 2005, 10 euro)
Tutte le informazioni sul libro, appena uscito, alle pagine:
==========================
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LE TRASCRIZIONI "UFFICIALI" DEL "PROCESSO" SI TROVANO AI SITI:
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/transe54.htm (IN ENGLISH)
http://www.un.org/icty/transf54/transf54.htm (EN FRANCAIS)