Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- [For some reason the author seems to be an admirer of Mr. Kostunica, but otherwise his points are worth taking.] CRIMES UNDER THE GUISE OF HUMAN RIGHTS Dr. Milan Tepavac September 1, 2001 It seems to me that I've never in my life read something so disgusting, distorting and poisonous as this piece of a NGO which calls itself "Human Rights Watch" (see below). If Goebels and Zdanov were alive they would die of envy. We have here an example of what the Orwellian New World Order has done to the mind and soul of some people.This is my first and last time that I pay any attention to that organization. 1. Can the United Nations Security Council establish an international court? Of course not. The fact is that the Security Council, when adopting the resolution 827, "establishing" International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugososlavia (ICTY) acted ultra vires and the passing of time cannot validate it. Quod initio invalidum est, non potest tractu temporis convalescere. That resolution is really a "black hole" of international law, and - I do not hesitate to say - that those fifteen sitting in the SC who adopted it are criminals under international law because they delivered a death blow to international law and should be accountable for it under its very law - Article 7(4) of its Statute. Many international lawyers have the same opinion about ICTY. A German NGO from Berlin simply states: 1. The "indictment" [against Mr. Milosevic] issued by the "Chief Prosecutor" of the so-called "International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia" is legally invalid because this "Tribunal" has no jurisdiction whatsoever in the present or any other case. 2. The "Tribunal" derives its raison d'�tre exclusively from Security Council resolution 827, adopted at the Council's 3217th meeting on 25 May 1993. In this resolution, establishing the so-called "International Criminal Tribunal," the Security Council states that it acts "under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations." 3. When adopting the above resolution, the Security Council acted ultra vires. According to the provisions of the U.N. Charter, the Council has no competence whatsoever in judicial matters. The provisions of Chapter VII determine the Council's competence in matters of international security but not in matters of criminal justice or other judicial matters. The sole authority in international judicial matters rests with the International Court of Justice Now, any further discussion about ICTY from the legal point of view should stop here. But, let's, for the sake of argument, suppose that it were established legally. So, even if ICTY were established according to international law, its Statute would invalidate it with many of its provisions and - its omissions! The Security Council had no right whatsoever to formulate substantive rules of international criminal law and prescribe penalties for them, since it is not legislative body!!. But, omissions are even more interesting! It lacks the prime, supreme international crime - the crime of aggressive war, whether international or internal, civil war. It was purposely done by those fifteen criminals in the Security Council: in order to protect from criminal responsibility those who planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of the secessionist wars in Yugoslavia and NATO aggression against it. So, we have the situation that a Bosnian peasant worker gets life imprisonment, while real culprits - Tudjman, Kucan, Izetbegovic, Gligorov, Genscher, Kohl, Clinton, Pope, Badinter, Carrington, Albright, Zimmermann, Eagelberger, Wesley Clark and many more - get red carpets. So, those fifteen of the SC made a mockery of international law and irreparable damage to the concept of justice. It is a deadly blow to our civilization. Maybe the greatest crime today against international law and order is the attempt to impose the pronouncements of such a Tribunal as international law! 2. "Indictment" against president Milosevic Now, let us turn to the "indictment" against Mr. Milosevic, disregarding, again for the sake of argument, the illegality of the ICTY and its Statute. The conditio sine qua non for the application of the international humanitarian law is the existence of the "war" or "armed conflict" on a given territory. Without a war or armed conflict there are no violations of the rules of IHL. So, the "chief prosecutor" of the ICTY Louise Arbour had to have a war or armed conflict in the sense of international humanitarian law. She needed it. So, she just invented it by stating that there was in Kosovo the state of war! Let's look at the positive international humanitarian law: Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts (Protocol II) in para 1 of Article 1 states that it "develops and supplements Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 without modifying its existing conditions of application". Then in para 2 states: "2. This Protocol shall not apply to situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence and other acts of a similar nature, as not being armed conflicts." That is exactly what we had in Kosovo. There was no war there. Even when the real war started on March 24, 1999, it was the war between NATO and Yugoslavia, and not a civil war between Albanian and non-Albanian inhabitants of Kosovo. We have now similar situation in Macedonia, although Macedonia even uses helicopters and jets against the rebels, and before it we had it at southern Serbia. No one, as far as I know, those situations characterizes as "war" or "armed conflict" in the sense of IHL. They are internal disturbances which are dealt with the legitimate measures of state organs in accordance with para 2 of Article 1 of the Protocol II. Of course, in those situations also crimes could be committed, and they as a matter of fact were committed by all involved, but those crimes are ordinary crimes under national legislations, and are not of the concern of international humanitarian law. I sincerely hope that Mr. Milosevic will endure in his determination to fight from the dungeons in the Hague for the truth and justice to the end and show to the world the monstrosity of the NWO and its institution called ICTY. He must. But equally we must help him. Because the only "crime" he and his people committed is that they dared to defend their country and themselves from armed secessionist (remember: it was ARMED sesession as it was in the USA in 1861-65, not just secession and it has been said time and again that if Milosevic is war criminal then Lincoln many times gretar for the war in which more than 600.000 young Americans lost their lives!) vultures and their masters from abroad and NATO aggression without having the permission for it from Washington. To succumb would mean that the concept of truth and justice, the very basis of our civilization, has perished from the face of the Earth and that the monsters have won and overtaken the world into their hands. The attachment to this message - which is his statement presented to ICTY - assures us that he will endure. 3. "The transfer of Milosevic from a Belgrade jail to the Hague was a clear obligation under the United Nations Charter..." says HRW. It was neither "transfer" nor "deportation" but KIDNAPPING, thus in violation of Yugoslav Constitution, Yugoslav law and international law, especially Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights. What we have here? A human rights organization which justifies kidnapping of a former head of state instead of protecting human beings agaist violations of their basic human rights!! Really Orwellian. The International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) was established immediately after Mr. Milosevic was arrested in Belgrade by the Belgrade puppet government at the end of March 2001. Its petition to immediately free Milosevic is by now signed by more than 1400 people from all over the world, among them international lawyers, writers, intellectuals, politicians. Many have spoken and written condemning his arrest and kidnapping. Here is, for example, what Professor Marjorie Cohn from Thomas Jefferson School of Law says. Although she does not use the word "kidnapping", it is fair and honest presentation of the case: The deportation of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was a direct result of blackmail by the United States. Desperate to rebuild its economy, the Serbian government capitulated to U.S. threats: deliver Milosevic to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, or the U.S. would see to it that Yugoslavia didn't get the foreign aid it critically needs. Ten years of punishing sanctions against the people of Yugoslavia coupled with U.S.-led NATO's 78-day bombing campaign have left the country's economy in shambles. Damage to the Yugoslav economy is estimated at $4 billion. One million people live below the poverty level, half the population is unemployed, and Yugoslavia has an annual inflation rate of 150 percent and a foreign debt of $12 billion. The U.S. destroyed the economy of Yugoslavia, killed or wounded thousands of its people - including civilians - and then promised megabucks to the Serbs if they would cough up Milosevic. Usually the ransom is paid to end the kidnapping. This time it was ponied up as a reward for the kidnap. And the payoff? $1.28 billion in aid from the July 29 donors conference, orchestrated by the United States. Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic arranged the deportation by circumventing the recently elected President of Yugoslavia, Vladimir Kostunica. According to Sara Flounders, National Co-Director of the International Action Center, "Milosevic was sold to the U.S. by their man in Belgrade. Imagine a governor of a state in the U.S. overriding the federal government and constitution to surrender a U.S. citizen to another country." Kostunica, adamantly committed to due process, insisted that Yugoslavia's judicial procedures be followed before Milosevic was delivered to the ICTY in The Hague. The deportation, which Kostunica said could not be characterized as legal and constitutional, violated Yugoslavia's constitution, parliament, Constitutional Court, and decisions of President Kostunica. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark denounced the deportation as "an enormous tragedy for Yugoslavia, the Serbian people and the rule of law." While the leaders of the Western world cheer the "extradition" of Milosevic - a misnomer because he wasn't sent to another country, but to an international tribunal - the fragile democracy in Yugoslavia has been dealt a severe blow. Ramsey Clark thinks the real purpose of the deportation, sanctions, bombing and demonization of the Serbs "is to reduce all of the former Yugoslavia to the status of a U.S./NATO colony." Kostunica has decried the impartiality of the ICTY for its hypocrisy in indicting Serbs, but refusing to indict NATO leaders for war crimes committed in the course of the 1999 bombing. NATO bombs killed 1500-2000 civilians and injured thousands more. When I was in Yugoslavia last year, I saw schools, hospitals, bridges, libraries and homes reduced to rubble. The ICTY statute prohibits the targeting of civilians. And even though it also forbids the use of poisonous weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering, NATO used depleted uranium and cluster bombs whose devastating character is widely known. NATO also targeted a petrochemical complex, releasing carcinogens into the air that reached 10,600 times the acceptable safety level... The prosecutors of the Vietnam War - Lyndon Baines Johnson, Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara - were never tried for war crimes for causing the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese people. It was McNamara who defined most of the Vietnamese countryside, populated by peasants, as a free-fire zone. He wrote in a letter to LBJ in 1967: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one." McNamara admitted his complicity in a 1995 memoir. Indeed, the hypocrisy of the United States government is no more evident than in its refusal to ratify the statute for the International Criminal Court, out of fear that U.S. leaders might become defendants in war crimes prosecutions. Yet, our government was baffled when the United States -- the world's human rights policeman -- was voted off the United Nations Commission on Human Rights... A fundamental principle of international law is complementarity: the international tribunals complement - they don't supplant - the courts of nation states. Most of the former Latin American military leaders charged with human rights abuses that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s are facing justice in their respective countries. The Yugoslavians should be able to judge their own leaders before the they are judged by the international community. Count 1 of the Indictment against Slobodan Milosevic charges him with "Deportation, a crime against humanity . . " He must be accountable for what he has done. But the U.S.-engineered deportation of Milosevic is a crime against the people of Yugoslavia. http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumnew25.htm ) (As I write this text I hear from TV that a Dutch court rejected a request by former Slobodan Milosevic to order his immediate release. "The Dutch court is incompetent to rule" on Milosevic's demand for release, the judge said. Nico Varkevisser, head of an international support group for Milosevic, said he will appeal the ruling, and "will go to the highest Dutch court." He said he might return the case to the European human rights court, on the grounds that Milosevic's detention amounted to "kidnapping". In my opinion, the ruling of the Dutch court is untenable and a shame for the people of that supposedly democratic country, for the simple reason that the slavery is not permitted on the soil of the Netherlands under its constitution. The kidnapping of Mr. Milosevic in Belgrade by ICTY and his detention on the Netherland's soil amounts to slavery). *** I take this opportunity to warn all anti-Serbian racists and vultures thirsty of Serbian blood that I firmly believe that the time will come that they will be called to answer for their crimes, for their crimes without precedence in human history: to genocide a nation by lies, distortions, satonization, sanctions, secessionist wars, naked aggression. Alfred Rosenberg was hanged, justly, for being the Nazi Party's ideologist and propagandist, for developing and spreading Nazi doctrines in the newspapers "Voelkischer Beobachter" and "N S Monatshefte". The present-day anti-Serbian vultures have done and are doing far more greater crimes against Serbian nation. The Serbs must find a way to stop them before it is too late, before the genocide against them is completed. We here in Belgrade, in Serbia, in Yugoslavia, impoverished to one dollar a day for biological survival, just can't endure any more the terror of anti-Serbian vultures disguised in human rights robes. ========================================= http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/08/milo-0829.htm Human Rights Watch - Press Release - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE MILOSEVIC: JUSTICE PROCEEDS (New York, August 29, 2001) -- As former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic prepared for a second appearance before the Hague tribunal, Human Rights Watch expressed its disagreement with several contentions in the motion that Milosevic filed with the court in August. Mr. Milosevic had charged that the tribunal was illegitimate and selective. A hearing before the war crimes court will take place on Thursday, August 30 to chart the course for Milosevic's trial. "This is not victors' justice - this is justice for the victims of horrific crimes," said Richard Dicker, director of International Justice for Human Rights Watch. "Slobodan Milosevic was at the top of the chain of command of military and security forces that wrought mayhem in Kosovo in early 1999. He needs to be held to account, with all the protections of a fair trial, for the ethnic cleansing and killings there." Human Rights Watch documented scores of killings by Serb forces during the 1998-1999 conflict that took an estimated 10,000 Kosovar Albanian lives. The most egregious abuses took place during the NATO bombing period from March to June 1999 when Serbian and Yugoslav forces conducted a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign in which thousands of ethnic Albanians were killed. Throughout Kosovo villages were systematically cleansed, with long columns of displaced persons leading along roads, into cities and then out of the country. In his motion of August 9, Mr. Milosevic claimed that the tribunal had no authority over him because "his extradition violated" the constitutions of Yugoslavia and Serbia. "The transfer of Milosevic from a Belgrade jail to the Hague was a clear obligation under the United Nations Charter and the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia. Slobodan Milosevic signed the Dayton accord on behalf of Yugoslavia. The authorities in Belgrade had a clear obligation under international law to turn him over to face justice," said Dicker. Below please find a short Q & A on Milosevic's case before the Tribunal. THE MILOSEVIC CASE: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Question: Can the United Nations Security Council establish an international court? Answer: The Security Council has, under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, "paramount responsibility" for dealing with threats to international peace and security. Under this authority the Security Council has taken many steps, including dispatching peacekeepers to conflict zones, including the former Yugoslavia. On May 25, 1993, the Security Council adopted Resolution 827 establishing a court to try those responsible for the worst crimes committed in the Yugoslav conflict. When an earlier defendant before the tribunal challenged its creation, his claims were unanimously dismissed by Tribunal judges from Italy, Egypt, China, Canada, and Pakistan. The Security Council also established a similar tribunal to try those responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The United Nations General Assembly has no such authority. Question: Is there an "anti-Serb bias" at the Tribunal? The Tribunal is empowered to investigate anyone, regardless of nationality, who committed serious crimes in the course of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. As of March 2001, the Tribunal had publicly indicted 66 individuals, 50 of them Serbs. It recently handed a down a forty-five year prison sentence against a Croatian army general accused of war crimes. From its field investigations of the conduct of all sides to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Human Rights Watch has found that the majority of crimes were committed by Serb forces. Not insignificantly, Serb forces were the only ones to participate in each of the conflicts - in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. Question: Can Slobodan Milosevic get a fair trial before this Court which is strongly supported by NATO countries? Isn't the trial of Milosevic "victors' justice"? While the tribunal is not perfect (no court is), the ICTY functions according to the highest standards of international justice. This means that Mr. Milosevic will receive all the guarantees necessary for a fair trial. Its proceedings have to date resulted in the acquittal of a number of defendants, including Serbs, on various charges. If the Tribunal falls short in protecting any of Milosevic's rights to mount a vigorous defense, it should be criticized and change its practice. The ICTY is an international court. The pre-trial judges hearing the initial proceedings are from the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and Morocco. As of April 2001, the Tribunal employed a staff of 1,103 from 74 different countries. While certainly there are citizens from NATO countries serving at all levels of the Tribunal, if there is a specific conflict of interest, that individual should recuse him or herself from the proceedings. Question: Why hasn't the Tribunal tried NATO officials for war crimes in Yugoslavia? The tribunal carried out an investigation into the conduct of NATO forces during the conflict in Kosovo and concluded that there was insufficient evidence to support a prosecution. Human Rights Watch itself conducted extensive field research into the 1999 NATO air war against Yugoslavia. We found that 500 civilians were killed and 90 targets were selected inappropriately because they were civilian targets. We concluded that these incidents, which violated the laws of war, did not, however, rise to the more serious level of "grave breaches" or war crimes that the tribunal is empowered to prosecute. If other evidence of NATO culpability for war crimes does arise, it would be essential for the tribunal to investigate those allegations. If the evidence warrants, the court should investigate and, if need be, prosecute those responsible for the alleged crimes. For a short assessment of what happened on the ground in Kosovo, including the "chain of command" establishing Milosevic's authority, see http://www.hrw.org//press/2001/07/chain-of-command.htm . For more information, please contact: Richard Dicker in The Hague: +31 6 229 36 503 (mobile); +31 70 362 4371 (Park Hotel) Elizabeth Andersen, Washington: +1 202 612 4326 Jean-Paul Marthoz in Brussels: +32 2 732 2009 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! Messenger http://im.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------- This Discussion List is the follow-up for the old stopnato @listbot.com that has been shut down ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9spWA Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: [email protected] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
