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by William Norman Grigg March 25, 2006 On March 9, the day before he died in his UN detention cell in The Hague, former Yugoslav ruler and career communist thug Slobodan Milosevic wrote a six-page letter to a legal aide expressing suspicions that he was being poisoned.
Two days after the former Serbian strongmans death, Dutch toxicologist
Donald Uges reported finding rifampicin, an antituberculosis drug that makes
the liver extremely active and thus breaks down other medications very quickly,
possibly taking away their effectiveness, reported the AP. An official autopsy
concluded that Milosevic had died of a heart attack. For several weeks prior to
his death, he had repeatedly requested permission to travel to Russia for
medical treatment, but those requests had been denied. Prior to Donald Uges report, Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor for the UNs
International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), dismissed the idea that
Milosevic had been poisoned. After material evidence emerged lending credence to
that claim, Del Ponte insisted that suicide should not be ruled out as a last
act of defiance on the part of the former dictator. Both of Milosevics
parents committed suicide, and the former dictator was prone to dramatic,
self-destructive gestures. But even though a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion in the
Soviet-style UN trial, Milosevic serving as his own chief defense counsel
just weeks before his death, pried loose an important piece of evidence that may
have gotten him killed. On February 1, British journalist Eve-Ann Prentice, testifying in defense of
Milosevic, told how she had seen Osama bin Laden ushered into the Sarajevo
office of Bosnian president Alijah Izetbegovic in 1994. Prentices testimony,
which was publicized by Milosevics defense team and not contested by the UN
prosecution, was ruled inadmissible. Her testimony shows that with the material
aid of Washington and its allies, bin Laden and his allies seized control over
Bosnia and turned it into a base for terrorist operations in Europe and beyond.
This was confirmed by investigative bodies in both the Senate and the
Pentagon. At the time of his death, Milosevic had a request pending before the ICTY to
subpoena former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who would certainly have been asked
about the role his administration played in helping al-Qaeda gain a foothold in
the Balkans both in Bosnia and later, via the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia,
in Kosovo. And now it seems that someone most likely the dimly-seen but perceptible
power elite that presides over practically all national governments, just as the
Mafia Commission ruled the constituent families of La Cosa Nostra has pulled
the chain on Milosevic. This was likely done to dispose of a defiant and
irritating former employee, to shut down a trial that threatened to produce
some untimely revelations, and to serve as an object lesson to other national
leaders who might begin to entertain delusions of autonomy. |
