Counterpunch
March 14, 2006
Pages from the Liberals' War
DID MILOSEVIC OR HIS ACCUSERS 'CHEAT JUSTUCE'?
The Show Trial That Went Wrong
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
"It's hard not to feel that by dying in his cell, Slobodan Milosevic finally
succeeded in his determined effort to cheat justice."
Thus the opening sentence of a New York Times editorial, Tuesday March 14.
The editorial cited without comment Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of
the United Nations tribunal, who told an Italian interviewer that "the death
of Milosevic represents for me a total defeat."
The editorial ended with words of praise for the high purpose of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) established
by the U.N. Security Council in 1994.
In fact Milosevic's death in his cell from a heart attack spared Del Ponte
and the Court (itself a drumhead tribunal set up by the United States with
no proper foundation under international law or treaty) the ongoing
embarrassment of a proceeding where Milosevic had made a very strong showing
against the phalanx of prosecutors, hearsay witnesses and prejudiced judges
marshaled against him. Until his death, "total defeat" had been the prospect
facing Del Ponte, not Milosevic, though she presumably felt justifiably
confident --based on their record of prejudiced rulings against Milosevic --
that the judges would never let her down.
There are now charges and countercharges about poisons and self-medications.
Milosevic's son says his father was murdered. The embarrassed Court claims
Milosevic somehow did himself in by tampering with his medicines. But no one
contests the fact that Milosevic asked for treatment in Moscow--the Russians
promised to return him to the Hague-- and the Court refused permission. As
the tag from the poet A.H.Clough goes, "Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not
strive Officiously to keep alive".
The trial had been going badly from the point of view of the prosecution
(which included the judges) for most of its incredible duration. Here is
what Neil Clark, a Balkans specialist, wrote in the Guardian newspaper of
London, in 2003,
It is two years today that the trial of Slobodan Milosevic opened at The
Hague. The chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, was triumphant as she
announced the 66 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity and
genocide that the former Yugoslavian president was charged with. CNN was
among those who called it 'the most important trial since Nuremburg' as the
prosecution outlined the 'crimes of medieval savagery' allegedly committed
by the 'butcher of Belgrade.'
But since those heady days, things have gone horribly wrong for Ms. Del
Ponte. The charges relating to the war in Kosovo were expected to be the
strongest part of her case. But not only has the prosecution signally failed
to prove Milosevic's personal responsibility for atrocities committed on the
ground, the nature and extent of the atrocities themselves has also been
called into question...
"When it came to the indictments involving the wars in Bosnia and Croatia,
the prosecution fared little better. In the case of the worst massacre with
which Milosevic has been accused of complicity--of between 2,000 and 4,000
men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995--Del Ponte's team have produced nothing
to challenge the verdict of the five-year inquiry commissioned by the Dutch
government--that there was 'no proof that orders for the slaughter came from
Serb political leaders in Belgrade.'
Coverage of the trial in the US was virtually non-existent, though there was
a brief spotlight on what was actually going on when it was reported here
that Wesley Clark's testimony in court was subject to US censorship. Writing
in the British Spectator last November John Laughland painted a trenchant
portrait of the kangaroo proceedings, then four years old:
Even though the former Yugoslav head of state has always pleaded his
innocence, producing scores of witnesses to prove it, the trial is still not
due to end until 2010. With the budget of The Hague tribunal running at
nearly $300 million a year, this is doubtless a comfortable sinecure for the
lawyers involved, most of whom had pretty unsuccessful careers at home. But
such a long trial is by definition a travesty of justice: the Nuremberg
trials lasted just over ten months, from 20 November 1945 to 30 September
1946.
...The trial has heard more than 100 prosecution witnesses, and not a single
one has testified that Milosevic ordered war crimes. On the contrary: only
last Tuesday, a Muslim captain in the Yugoslav army testified that no one in
his unit had ever committed systematic harassment of Albanian civilians in
Kosovo, and that he had never heard of any other unit doing so either. On 9
November the former head of security in the Yugoslav army, General Geza
Farkas, an ethnic Hungarian, testified that all Yugoslav soldiers in Kosovo
were handed a document explaining international humanitarian law, and that
they were ordered to disobey any orders which violated it. What a contrast
with US army practice!
Instead, what has emerged from the trial to the general indifference of the
world's media is that the Serbs were subject to horrendous provocations. ...
In any proper court of law, the Milosevic trial would have collapsed long
ago; for instance, when the previous presiding judge, Sir Richard May,
unexpectedly died in July 2004. Since there are only three judges, this is
equivalent to the sudden disappearance of four jurors, which would cause a
criminal trial in this country to be abandoned or restarted. So determined,
however, are the judges to obtain a conviction of their prize defendant that
they have even ruled that he can be tried in absentia if he is too ill to
defend himself in court. The judges themselves admitted that their ruling
had no precedent in law, but legality has never bothered them much: ever
complicit with the prosecutor, they allowed the addition of new indictments
after Milosevic's transferral to The Hague in 2001, even though this
violates the key tenet of extradition law that a defendant may not be tried
for charges other than those for which he was originally extradited.
Transparency is not of much interest to the judges either: when I asked to
see the medical evidence which, they claimed, showed that Milosevic was too
sick to defend himself but not so sick that the trial should be abandoned, I
was told it was confidential. And when on Tuesday Milosevic pleaded that he
was too sick to continue, presiding judge Patrick Robinson simply barked,
'Are you deaf? I told you to call the next witness.'
Memory of NATO's onslaught on the former Yugoslavia has faded. But perhaps
next weekend, when rallies across the world signal the third anniversary of
the US onslaught on Iraq, some speakers will take the occasion of
Milosevic's court-assisted demise to remind their audiences that the legal,
military and journalistic banditry that have accompanied the Iraq enterprise
from the start were all field-tested in the late 1990s in the Balkans, as
weekly stories in CounterPunch laid out in detail. Later Jeffrey St Clair
and I put together a chronicle of those stories. This week, as Milosevic and
the onslaught on the former Yugoslavia return to the front pages among
predictable obfuscation, we run some relevant extracts here from Imperial
Crusades. These days we have the Neo-Cons' war. Back then we had the
Liberals' War. There's continuity. The lying didn't start with Judy Miller
nor the saber-rattling with Bill Kristol.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
