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Nicholas Camerota spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited Politics site and thought you
should see it.
To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited Politics site, go
to http://politics.guardian.co.uk
Pinter: I won't be silenced
Playwright Harold Pinter does not believe Slobodan Milosevic is innocent. But neither
are Nato's leaders, he tells Matthew Tempest
Matthew Tempest
Friday August 03 2001
The Guardian
Is it the notion of a transnational, or supernational, justice system that you object
to per se?
No, absolutely not. I regard this particular court as illegitimate and, in fact, with
no proper international substance. I regard it as an American-inspired court, really.
I mean, [former US secretary of state] Madeleine Albright kicked the whole thing off,
so I think it's a really partial court and has no proper legal foundation or substance.
I believe an international criminal court is really very much to be desired - and in
fact, as you must know, there is a whole movement to get an international criminal
court in the world, voted for by hundreds of states - but with the one noticeable
absence of the United States of America, who won't allow it to take place, because
they say that no American citizen will ever be arraigned if they have anything to do
with it, in a real international criminal court.
They've also said - part of their constitution, I think, they've used a rather obscure
clause, but they mean it - that if such a court did arraign an American citizen, they
would actually send in the marines.
They've said that?
Yes, absolutely. Well, they didn't actually say the marines, they said: "We would take
any action we saw fit, including military action." Which really means, traditionally,
sending in the marines.
So in this particular instance, of Milosevic, you don't object to him being tried, if,
concurrently, there was a trial of Blair and Clinton?
Those are other matters. I think that all I'm saying is firstly, if Milosevic is to be
tried, he has to be tried by a proper court, you know, an impartial, properly
constituted court which has international respect.
This court certainly has not.
Incidentally, let me come in here: one of your colleagues, Henry Porter, this morning,
actually said a number of things. He chose to discuss my actual position, or as he saw
it, and he said "where was I on Pinochet?" - that my position on Pinochet contradicted
my position on the trial of Milosevic.
This is really not the case at all, because when I talked about Pinochet, I said that
Pinochet should be tried by a proper court, and if that court was in Spain or in
Chile, it was of no moment.
One other thing I want to say though, about the curious manifestation of the Guardian
reportage here, is that you may have noticed I did send a letter to the Guardian this
morning... The Guardian said that I said - I don't know who did it - I was quoted as
saying: "Milosevic is innocent." This quote was attributed to me.
That is a total lie.
And whoever actually said this, should be ashamed of themselves. And I'd like the
Guardian to take some responsibility for this.
It is rather curious, isn't it, that the Guardian, so highly respected and regarded,
sees fit to actually, just for the sake of a headline, if you like, a little nice
quote - it's a good quote, isn't it: "Milosevic is innocent, says Pinter." It's a lie.
I've never said that. And the fact they can do that I think is pretty deplorable.
So what I'm really talking about is it's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent
to be mocked.
When I say propaganda, there is an enormous amount of propaganda about Milosevic. We
were told initially that he was responsible for the deaths of 100,000 people. That of
course has never been proved, and is obviously not the case.
He was called the "Butcher of Belgrade". He was called "Hitler", and so on. So he's
already convicted in the eyes of the public - he's a guilty man, the mass murderer -
and I believe this has to be proved in a proper court of law.
You touched on a topic there on how it's easy to mock dissent. You are almost setting
yourself up as a laughing stock by defending Milosevic, who is public enemy No 1 in
the west. Is your own reputation in this something that worries you - obviously you're
not an apologist for Milosevic.
(Laughs) No, I'm not at all. I just asserting he should be given a fair trial in a
proper, legally constituted proceeding, which I don't believe is happening at all.
After all, he was more or less abducted and taken to the Hague. The Yugoslavs only did
that because they received $1.3bn from the United States, so it was a clear case of
bribery. And the United States want to get Milosevic, and they probably will.
Coming back to Clinton and Blair - I would certainly say that I regard them as
criminals. I believe the Nato action itself was illegal, illegitimate, against
international law and in contempt of the United Nations.
Therefore it was a bandit act in the very first place, and the civilian bombings were,
I believe, acts of murder, and I believe they were deliberately intended to terrorise
the civilian population - and to a great extent, succeeded in doing so.
You know, from 15,000ft up in the sky, not one Nato pilot suffered even a blemish or a
scratch, and they just blew people to pieces by the use of cluster bombs and depleted
uranium, the results of which we don't yet know. That's going to take a long time to
manifest itself, although in Iraq it already has, where we are still dropping bombs.
So I believe these people are acting in a very brutal way, the United States
government and the British government are acting like thugs.
And certainly they should be charged.
But not by this court, because they actually are the court.
You say it was more an act of kidnap - parliamentary procedures were bypassed �
That's right, parliamentary procedures were bypassed. I am absolutely not saying that
Milosevic might not be responsible for all sorts of atrocities but I believe that
what's been left out of public debate and the press is that there was a civil war
going on there. Actually.
And the KLA, supported by the United States - and if ever there was a bandit
organisation, there you have it, was actually also responsible, and still is, now even
more so, for this ethnic cleansing which has been going on in Kosovo for the last nine
months.
Why do you regard the one specific incident - the attack on the television station -
as a terrorist act. In the context of cluster bombings of civilians �
I didn't say it was more a terrorist act than cluster bombs on civilians. It stood
out, pronounced, as a palpable act of murder, because there were no military people in
this television station, it was a television station. They were make-up girls. They
blew the thing apart. And I believe that wasn't an accident, because they said it was
justified, Nato did, our famous and distinguished spokesman, Jamie Shea.
They said it was sending out Serbian propaganda, the things Milosevic wanted them to
say. It's preposterous. They blew the damn thing up and a number of people were killed
and I believe that is an act of murder because it actually defies the Geneva
convention that states no civilian in any war situation can be targeted unless that
civilian is engaging in hostile activities, which means throwing bombs or having a gun
in his hand.
The make-up girl didn't have a gun in her hand.
And there's a reverse argument there too in that there was a lot of criticism of the
UK and western media in that, with no access to the ground, a lot of briefings were
taken live and unmediated from Nato in Brussels with very little independent
collaboration.
Quite. The point is we were supposed to have these smart bombs that were very accurate
and I don't think any hit any military target at all. What they hit were the TV
station and the Chinese embassy, old people's homes, hospitals and schools.
Now I don't think that was accidental. They just hit anything they could lay their
hands on and have almost destroyed the infrastructure of the country.
That's a criminal act on all sorts of levels and on all sorts of counts. But we just
skate away, the US and Nato countries, and call it "humanitarian intervention".
And I think that's a laughable phrase which will go down in history. If we have a
history because what I believe this was all about was an assertion of American power.
Presumably in an international criminal court as you would like to see it formulated
could see [Russia's] President Putin could be charged for the war crimes that
may have taken place in Chechnya, there are massacres in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, the
Congo.
And let's not forget Turkey and Indonesia, please, and all that's happening in
Guatemala and El Salvador.
All those with the support of the US, naturally.
Some of the people who criticise me imply that I'm talking wildly here, at random. But
in fact, my understanding of these world facts are based on the facts themselves, and
very serious research, which I do a great deal of the time.
There was a general arrested today. Do you think that there's too much attention goes
to tracking down the military, because there will be more likely to be direct,
collaborative evidence that they've taken part in massacres and Milosevic and other
political leaders, who by definition get their hands less dirty?
Clinton's hands remain incredibly clean, don't they, and Tony Blair's smile remains as
wide as ever. I view these guises with really quite profound contempt.
So many people on the western side who masquerade as moral arbiters are actually
pathetic, really dangerous and the way the press accepts what these entities say is
very, very dangerous.
It comes back to what we said about dissent being mocked. My position has been
described as being "comic". Do they regard the other 1,000 people who are part of this
committee as 'comic'? Is all dissent comic?
There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force
that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the
theatre, there's a feeling that these people are dilettantes, they're �
... wankers. Actually it's not a tradition that's observed in any other country that
I've been to - France, Italy, Spain, Greece and even the United States, where I've
just come back from. It's simply not observed. But here it's certainly the case.
Well, I don't intend to simply go away and write my plays and be a good boy. I intend
to remain an independent and political intelligence in my own right.
Audio
Hear Harold Pinter talk to Matthew Tempest
Special report
War crimes in the former Yugoslavia
Talk about it
Milosevic's arrest: what do you think?
Related articles
27.07.2001: Free Milosevic, says Pinter
Comment and analysis
02.08.2001, Seumas Milne: Hague is not the place to try Milosevic
01.08.2001, Henry Porter: You can't have it both ways, Harold
Letter
03.08.2001: Henry Porter
Timeline
29.06.2001: Milosevic's long road to justice
Useful links
The UN international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
Harold Pinter's official site
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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