Invictus
by Nebojsa Malic
www.antiwar.com
Slobodan Milosevic, 1941-2006
In the morning hours of March 11, news came from the Scheveningen prison near
The Hague: Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, was
found dead in his cell. It was the second death in Scheveningen in a week; on
March 5, Milan Babic, once a leader of the Serb rebellion in what is today
Croatia, had allegedly committed suicide while waiting to testify in another
trial. Babic had plea-bargained with the Inquisition and received a sentence of
"only"
13 years.
News of Milosevic's death prompted an outpour of vitriol in the mainstream
Imperial media. Milosevic was the man it wasn't only politically correct to
hate, it was dangerous for one's political credentials in the West not to. AP,
AFP, Reuters, BBC, CNN, all the major newspapers in the UK, France, Germany,
the U.S., and just about everyone else raced to see who could publish the most
venomous denunciation of the man they blamed for everything that happened in
the Balkans over the past 15 years.
In producing this stream of abuse, everyone was governed by the assumption that
all the charges against Milosevic had been proven, if not in the court of law,
then in the "court of public opinion" - in which they, of course, have been the
judge, jury, and executioner all along.
"Sole Culprit"
Consider, for a moment, this editorial that appeared in the Washington Post on
Tuesday:
"Ethnic and sectarian rivalry was real in a cobbled-together state, but few
people expected, much less wanted, a civil war. Mr. Milosevic, a Communist
Party apparatchik in Serbia, deliberately and methodically nursed this latent
tension from a flicker to a conflagration and used it to consolidate a criminal
regime in Belgrade. He bombarded Serbs with lies and hateful demagoguery about
their supposed victimization at the hands of Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and
Kosovo Albanians, and he convinced them that the only solution was a Greater
Serbia created through war and ethnic cleansing. ...
"More than is generally recognized, at least in his own country, he was
personally responsible for the most destructive conflict, and most terrible
atrocities, recorded in Europe since World War II. There were other
protagonists and other criminals, some of them Croatian, Bosnian, and Albanian.
But without Mr. Milosevic the Yugoslav wars wouldn't have happened."
Just about everything here is false. Milosevic never called for war - unlike,
for example, Izetbegovic or Tudjman. His famous 1989 speech in Kosovo, often
said to be a call for conflict, actually called for coexistence. That is why it
is never actually quoted. By describing the very real atrocities of Croats,
Muslims, and Albanians allied with Hitler as the fruit of Milosevic's malicious
imagination, the Post simply engages in Holocaust denial. The claim that
Milosevic desired and pursued a "Greater Serbia" is pure propaganda-inspired
fiction. As for his "personal responsibility"... well, the Hague Inquisition
spent three years trying to prove it, with thousands of investigators, paid
experts, and Imperial troops at its call, and managed to produce...
nothing.
Another popular claim made in the press is that Milosevic had "started four
wars." Again, it's pure fiction. The only war he could have started was the one
in Kosovo - and the blame for that one lies squarely on the shoulders of NATO
and its allies, the terrorist UCK.
Though he claimed he was defending Yugoslavia, in truth Milosevic was all too
willing to yield to separatists. He was the driving force behind the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, established by Serbia and Montenegro in April 1992,
implicitly recognizing the secession of everyone else. It was the United States
that refused to recognize the FRY, insisting on a fiction that Belgrade was
claiming other territories.
Out With the Old
Milosevic's rise to power in the late 1980s was just one of the stories in
post-Tito Yugoslavia, which had functioned for decades as a Communist
dictatorship where expressions of ethnic identity were approved only when they
benefited the Party agenda. After the death of Tito in 1980, the Communists,
unable to choose a successor, governed by committee; between economic woes
caused by decades of central planning and bad debts, and political problems
stemming from inter-ethnic rivalries Tito had exploited to secure his power,
Yugoslavs were getting increasingly frustrated. A bad constitution (1974)
complicated the already complex system of governance - especially in Serbia,
the only Yugoslav republic with additional provinces (Vojvodina and Kosovo).
When Milosevic emerged from the ranks of bland Communist apparatchiks to
supplant the inept, dogmatic leadership in Belgrade, moved to amend the 1974
division of Serbia in line with the other republics, and declared that after
decad!
es of Communist suppression that being a Serb was not a fountainhead of
"bourgeois reactionary evil," he became an overnight hero to millions.
Imperial "official history" tries to paint the triumph of nationalism among the
Slovenians, Croats, Muslims, Albanians, and Macedonians as a reaction to
Milosevic's rise. To do that, however, one would have to deny the historical
roots of such nationalisms, or the convictions of their champions. Leaders of
Slovenian and Macedonian separatists were former Communist officials, whose
peoples had profited handsomely from the Yugoslav arrangement. Croatia's
Tudjman, a Holocaust-denier with a soft spot for the WWII Croatian regime
allied with Hitler, and the Bosnian Muslims' Alija Izetbegovic, an unrepentant
Islamic revolutionary, were not responses to Milosevic - they had worked on
their programs long before he ever appeared on the political scene.
Separatist political parties had already been elected in Ljubljana, Zagreb, and
Sarajevo before Milosevic won the first election in Serbia in the fall of 1990.
Demonized
To secure independence, Slovenia, Croatia, and later on Izetbegovic's Bosnian
government claimed they were victims of "aggression" by the Federal Army and/or
Serbia. Yet it was Milosevic who never disputed the Croats', Slovenes', and
Muslims' right to secede from Yugoslavia; he only supported the right of 2-odd
million Serbs living in Croatia and Bosnia to secede themselves. Zagreb and
Sarajevo chose to resolve that dispute violently; both Tudjman and Izetbegovic
made statements to that effect, and they are publicly available.
It was during the 1991 conflict in Croatia that PR agents in the West started
demonizing Milosevic as the president of Serbia, which was labeled the
"aggressor" in what was actually an ethnic war. As clashes started in Bosnia in
1992, flaring up into full-scale war upon Izetbegovic's declaration of
independence in April, demonization of Serbs and Milosevic in particular became
a staple of war reporting from the Balkans.
"Peacemaker" to "Hitler"
Throughout the conflict in Bosnia, the U.S., Europe, and the UN acted as if
Milosevic was controlling the Bosnian Serbs, and blamed him every time the
peace talks failed - even when the Muslims were responsible.
Serbia remained under a crippling UN blockade from April 1992 to 1996, imposed
as punishment for the alleged Serb massacre of a breadline in Sarajevo.
Milosevic got no credit for his blockade of the Bosnian Serbs in 1994, or for
standing by while U.S.-backed Croatian forces ethnically cleansed hundreds of
thousands of Serbs from zones nominally under UN protection. He was maneuvered
into heading the Serb delegation to the Dayton peace talks by Washington, with
the "coincidentally"
timed indictments of Bosnian Serb leaders by the nascent (and
U.S.-sponsored) Hague Inquisition.
In Dayton, Milosevic had to deal with treachery, deceit, and bad faith on
behalf of not the Muslim or Croat delegations, but the American "mediators."
Richard Holbrooke proudly described in his memoir how he tried to cheat
Milosevic, and only regretted getting caught. And it is Holbrooke who credits
Milosevic with saving the talks, which Izetbegovic threatened to sink at the
very last moment. It may have been pretentious of Milosevic to claim himself as
the "key factor of peace in the Balkans," but he had at least partially earned
that designation in Dayton, and from his most bitter enemy.
Three years later, however, it was the very same Holbrooke spearheading
Washington's effort to force Milosevic into a war over Kosovo, where the
terrorist Albanian "Kosovo Liberation Army" (with Washington's
support) was fighting for secession.
Today Holbrooke claims Milosevic had broken every deal he'd signed; that's a
lie. It was Holbrooke's employer who did so, from Dayton to Kumanovo, and it
was Holbrooke's employer who was responsible for the
1999 Rambouillet "agreement" - a travesty of diplomacy not seen since the 1914
Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Belgrade. Washington today accuses Milosevic of
starting the 1999 war over Kosovo by "negotiating in bad faith," but it is hard
to imagine diplomacy in worse faith than the American "peace effort" in
Rambouillet, the frame job in Racak, and the subsequent naked aggression
disguised as "humanitarian intervention."
It was 1999 when Milosevic was indicted by the Hague Inquisition, again
"coincidentally" with the crisis of morale in NATO headquarters as Serbia
refused to surrender and more and more images of NATO's civilian victims became
available to the public. Armed with the indictment, the pro-NATO media went
into high gear in their demonization of Milosevic, routinely comparing him to
Hitler and the Serbs to Nazis. He had become the Emmanuel Goldstein of the new
world order, whom everyone bellyfelt as evil.
Captive
Milosevic stepped down as president of Yugoslavia in the evening hours of Oct.
5, 2000, after the mob organized by the "Democratic Opposition of Serbia" had
demonstrated claiming election victory, sacked the federal parliament, and
stormed the state TV. Ballots documenting the alleged DOS victory conveniently
perished in the fires set by protesters. The DOS, funded and organized by
Washington in what would later become a pattern for "revolutions" in Georgia
and Ukraine, soon established a new government under the leadership of Zoran
Djindjic. In April 2001, Djindjic had Milosevic arrested. In June, he broke
half a dozen Serbian and Yugoslav laws and handed Milosevic to the Hague
Inquisition.
There was no trace of the once-accommodating, compromising Milosevic at The
Hague. That man had probably perished with the first NATO bombs in 1999.
Instead, the Inquisitors faced a proud and defiant man, who threw the
accusations back into their faces and insisted not only on his innocence, but
on the illegitimacy of the ICTY and the culpability of NATO and Washington for
the bloodshed in Yugoslavia. The prosecutors took over two years to present
their "kitchen sink" indictment charging him for war crimes in Croatia and
Kosovo and genocide (!) in Bosnia.
Milosevic systematically demolished their witnesses in cross-examinations and
successfully challenged their "evidence,"
despite the hostility of the judges, who would often cut him off. In September
2004, Milosevic began his defense, after defeating the efforts of the "court"
to impose counsel on him without consent.
But the trial had taken a toll on his health, and he'd been complaining of high
blood pressure, headaches, and heart problems for months.
Prosecutors and the media derisively claimed he was "faking it." Just last
week, the Inquisition refused his request for medical treatment at a Russian
hospital, despite Moscow's guarantees that he would return.
Three days after he wrote to the Russian government, claiming he was being
poisoned, Milosevic was found dead in his cell.
Poison Plot
In the letter, sent on March 7 to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Milosevic
claimed that a non-prescribed drug found in his system in January indicated
that someone was poisoning him, and that he feared for his life. The
Inquisition responded through one of their trusted reporters, Marlise Simons of
the New York Times. Simons found a Dutch toxicologist who had formulated a
"theory" - based on finding a rare drug in Milosevic's blood that could have
interfered with his blood pressure medication - that Milosevic was poisoning
himself so as to be transferred to Russia, where he would escape. "It's like a
James Bond story," Dr. Donald Uges told Simons.
Though the Inquisition previously claimed that Milosevic was faking illness and
not taking his medication, they suddenly rushed to confirm Uges' "James Bond
story" - through unnamed sources, of course. But Uges himself noted that the
drug was nearly impossible to obtain in the Netherlands, that it was
near-impossible to smuggle things into Scheveningen, and that the dose would
have to be very precisely calibrated to produce the exact symptoms Milosevic
was showing - hardly something doable by an amateur. Milosevic knew nothing
about medicine; his fields of expertise were banking, law, and politics.
Propaganda Court
Although the "court of world opinion," composed of "judges" such as Richard
Holbrooke and the Washington Post, had already found him guilty of being Hitler
Reborn, Slobodan Milosevic was never convicted of any crime, in any court, even
the kangaroo "Tribunal" in The Hague. His marathon trial was formally closed on
Tuesday, without reaching a verdict.
Chief Inquisitor Carla Del Ponte told the press Milosevic's death robbed her of
a chance to convict him, and that she considered it a defeat. But as John
Laughland observed in The Guardian,
"[T]o say that Milosevic escaped justice by dying ... assumes that 'justice'
means not due process but a guilty verdict. The day we start to believe that we
will have abandoned the rule of law completely."
Neither the Imperial hegemony-mongers, nor the masses convinced by years of
two-minute hates that Milosevic was the sole culprit for the ills that have
befallen them, care a whit about the rule of law, due process, or the
presumption of innocence. The majority of Croats, Muslims, and Albanians need
to blame Milosevic in order to continue believing themselves to be purely
innocent victims (Bosnian Muslims have gone the farthest in internalizing this
sort of thinking). Even a great many Serbs find it easier to blame Milosevic
for the wars, sanctions, bombing, and postwar humiliations; conditioned
gut-hatred is easier than soul-searching or critical thinking.
But to blame Milosevic for everything that happened in the Balkans since 1989
is to believe a malicious, irrational fiction.
Free
A day before Milosevic passed away, the Hague Inquisition decided to allow KLA
terrorist Ramush Haradinaj to return to politics, despite the indictment
against him. Another KLA terrorist, Agim Ceku - whom the ICTY never
investigated, much less indicted - became the "prime minister" of occupied
Kosovo. The campaign to resolve the "Serbian question" by dismembering Serbia
continues unabated; Milosevic's death provided a good pretext for more
supporting propaganda.
At the time of his death, Milosevic was a prisoner. Unlike his country,
however, he refused to accept his captivity and fought against it any way he
could. Whatever one may think of the way he lived or governed, in his final
four years, he stood alone against the Empire, embodied in the Inquisition: an
overwhelming force seeking to dominate all of humanity, willing and able to
twist history, facts, and logic into a sinister fiction. Milosevic did not have
to resist it; he chose to. For years, the greatest coercive force in the world
tried to break him, and failed. He died free.
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
