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From: "John Jay" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] >
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] , [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [TW] Gotovina's Amicus - IN RESPONSE TO IVO.
Date: Mon, Sep 3, 2001, 11:10 am
Ivo,
Indented below, I've put some point-by-point responses
to your thesis.
John
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>From: Ivo Skoric <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: [TW] Gotovina's Amicus
>Date: Sat, Sep 1, 2001, 9:04 pm
>
> Tribunal Watch archives since 1995
> http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/archives/twatch-l.html
> ======================================
What brought Milosevic to power and kept him there for so long
was his ability to create the continuous instability around himself
and make the development of any process dependent on himself.
What he is doing in The Hague with refusing to have a lawyer is the
same what he did with the Eight Congress in Serbia, what he did
with Serbian and Yugoslav political structures after that, what he
did in Dayton, what he did with Kosovo, etc.
Milosevic refuses to be represented by a lawyer on obvious
and perfectly reasonable grounds. Namely, that he regards
the ICTY formum itself - plus his kidnapping and enforced
confinement in a foreign jail merely to suit that forum's
own ends - as illegal.
And in this view he is very far from alone.
No one who is kidnapped should be forced to instruct legal
representatives to plead their case before the kidnappers,
the kidnappers' own agents or on the kidnappers' terms...
Since the mere fact of doing so would imply legitimacy where
none exists to a criminally implemented - 'Kangaroo' - court...
which is exactly what NATO and Carla del Ponte intended.
He simply refuses to play by the rules. And that works. Because it
makes his moves unpredictable. He makes his own rules. And
then breaks them at will. After a while, it is very difficult to
play any game with him. He makes it intentionally so. By re-writing
every game, he dictates the pace and direction of game to serve his
own goals.
But when such "games" - an appropriate term - are fraudulent
ones, proposed solely to serve the interests of his conniving
accusers, and to deprive a publically libelled and criminally
imprisoned man of his legal "human" rights, he is well advised
not to play them.
Of course, this all worked fantastically for him because he was in
the position of power. One would think that now that he is in prison
he wouldn't be able to pull the same tricks. But he sensed the crisis
that looms over The Hague Tribunal, as well as he sensed the crisis
that loomed over former Yugoslavia. And just as he floated to the top
in the chaos that he created there, he now intends to run the show in
The Hague.
"The crisis that looms over The Hague Tribunal" is
simply that Milosevic is smart enough to realise (as are
his private advisers) that NATO and Carla del Ponte have
more to fear from widespread public exposure of the truth -
all the truth - and nothing but the truth! - than he has...
And The Hague, therefore, is rapidly being shown up in
public as desperate not to allow the truth to be exposed.
A "crisis" indeed - for The Hague!
ICTY - just as this was the case with Nurenberg - cannot escape
the label of a political tribunal in the world still based on the
nation-state paradigm. However, with Nurenberg nobody opposed the
findings, because the people of this planet kind of decided by
consensus even before the trial that Nazis were guilty as hell and
should hang. Also, their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler shot
himself. The Hague has not that luck. Just about everything there
is contested, so it often seems that tribunal is on trial, not the
defendants.
Too bad for NATO - (who had hoped by a process of
media-lies and deception alone to persuade "the people
of this planet... to kind of 'decide', by 'consensus'...
even before the 'trial'... that [he] was guilty as hell") -
that the case against Milosevic, unlike Hitler, remains
very far from established. And that their so-called
"evidence" against the former Yugoslav leader (unlike
Hitler's wrongdoing, which was abundantly plain for all
to see), has failed to materialise...
ICTY has to show that an international criminal court is possible.
The establishment of permanent ICC depends on the success of ICTY
to convince the participating nation-states that an international
court can preserve the rights of defendants, including the due process,
right to an attorney, etc. Therefore, ICTY has to behave as a model
court. Meanwhile, it has none of the mechanisms that nation-state high
level courts have on their disposal to enforce and enact its rulings.
A subpoena from ICTY can easily be ignored, for example.
It is precisely because the ICTY is very far from
anything approaching a "model court" and so spectacularly
fails to preserve the rights of defendants - that Washington,
which installed and maintains the ICTY, wants no part of any
truly independent international criminal court (ICC)...
Milosevic knows all that. And he is taking advantage of that
weakness. He knows that they can't shut him up and that they
have to treat him princely although he is just a prisoner. When
would he be able to give an interview for Fox TV from a prison in
Serbia? He is a lawyer and a statesman - he knows how courts
and how bureaucracy works. He knows that they hate to deal
directly with defendants, because that makes proceedings
unpredictable and uncertain. That's why his first move in
recognition of the tribunal was to elect to represent himself without
an attorney. This creates uncertainty. This throws the court out of
balance. This also gives him a pulpit to accuse his accusers of
illegitimacy over and over again. And to build a martyr out of
himself.
ICTY's response to create the amicus position seems to be logical.
But it is also a desperate attempt to keep things running as
planned. Which is exactly what Milosevic does not want. It is likely
that he will obstruct co-operation with his amicus whenever he can.
It is also likely that he may chnage his mind half-way through and
employ a lawyer. It is also likely that he fires him in a month. And
to ask that everything that lawyer said get struck out from the
records. With the same tactics and gusto with which he denies
that he knew that the war crimes were taking place committed by
people under his command and jurisdiction at Kosovo. And of
course - he will ask for Holbroke, Baker, Pardew, Galbraith,
Zimmerman, Eagleburger, Scowcroft, Vance, Kissinger, Clark, etc.
to cross-examine them.
Gotovina, although a far 'smaller fish' learns well from Milosevic.
Maybe he decides to represent himself, as well. Maybe he gets an
'amicus', too. His main line of defense is that Americans helped
Croatia win the war. I can see Ali Ahmeti repeat the line in a couple
of years. But Gotovina's defense is right on one point: Croatian
generals cannot be blamed for the exodus of Serbian civilians from
Krajina, unless all war is outlawed. They can be blamed only for
the massacres that ocurred under their command in the areas they
took over, and arbitrary killings and ambushes of the civilians that
tried to flee. That should suffice for putting them in prison. And the
relation between them and the killings is easier to establish that
relation between Milosevic and the crimes perpetrated by his
regime.
But it won't earn them a genocide conviction. However, as the Wall
Street Journal rightly noted, if Gotovina stands trial for all the
Serbian civilians that left the area before Croatian army took over,
in speculative fear of what might have happened to them should they
have waited, then those who helped Croatia execute the offensive,
should share the responsibility. Of course, that would not be politically
opportune, and it would bury the idea of ICC forever in the U.S.
ivo
Indeed - we know Washington has no stomach for even-handed
justice... That's why a genuinely independent ICC should
be implemented at once by as many other participating
states as possible. This would isolate the USA, give the
lie to its absurd posture of "world leadership" and
undermine NATO's future war-mongering escapades, claimed
to be on behalf of some mythical "international community."
JJ
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