Ex-Canadian Envoy: NATO Air War VS Yugoslavia Was Illegal
THE HAGUE (AP)--A former Canadian envoy to Belgrade testified Thursday at former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial that NATO's 1999 air war against the former Yugoslavia was illegal. Defense witness James Bisset said the NATO charter forbids the alliance from using violence to settle international conflicts. "And, yet, in March of 1999 , it began to bomb a country that was a sovereign country, that was no threat to its neighbors," he said. Milosevic, who is defending himself against 66 counts for war crimes allegedly committed in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia, blames the military alliance for war crimes. In an hour on the stand at the U.N.'s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Bisset backed Milosevic's defense that he was trying to keep together the six-nation federation as it broke apart during the wars of the 1990s. Yugoslavia collapsed, Bisset testified, because Germany first egged on Slovenia and Croatia to secede and, later, inept Western diplomacy caused the rest of it to disintegrate into war. Bisset was Canada's ambassador to Belgrade from late 1990 to mid-1992 when the wars in Croatia and Bosnia started, shortly after they declared independence from Belgrade. The opening article of the NATO's founding treaty commits the allies "to settle any international dispute in which they may be involved by peaceful means (and) refrain ... from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." NATO began its 78-days air campaign against Milosevic because of his crackdown on independence-minded rebels in Kosovo, the southern Serb province with a predominantly ethnic Albanian population. He is accused of orchestrating "a deliberate and widespread or systematic campaign of terror and violence" against the ethnic Albanian population. Referring to the Kosovo Liberation army, Bisset said Milosevic tried to " suppress an armed rebellion by an organization that had a year before been described by the (US) state department as a terrorist organization." He also challenged the prosecution charge that Milosevic oversaw the dismissal, in the early 1990s, of thousands of ethnic-Albanian doctors, teachers, professors, workers, police officers and civil servants on ethnic grounds. "To my knowledge they were not dismissed," testified Bisset. "They simply voluntarily withdrew from their positions (and) continued to do their work, but under a sort of underground, parallel government" in Kosovo. His testimony was based on conversations at the time with diplomatic staff visiting Kosovo and ethnic Albanian delegations. Also Thursday, Milosevic was again examined by a doctor. He suffers from chronic heart problems and high blood pressure. His trial is in its fifth year and his repeated illnesses have forced several months of delays. He has called 49 witnesses. (END) Dow Jones Newswires 02-23-061301ET Copyright (c) 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. http://www.nasdaq.com/aspxcontent/NewsStory.aspx?cpath=20060223\ACQDJON200602231301DOWJONESDJONLINE001002.htm&selected=9999&selecteddisplaysymbol=9999&StoryTargetFrame=_top&mkt=WORLD&chk=unchecked&lang=&link=&headlinereturnpage=http://www.international.na Serbian News Network - SNN [email protected] http://www.antic.org/
