[www.antic.org] Djindjic's Sale of Milosevic Makes Clinton's National Asset Sales Look Amateurish

[Miroslav Antic]

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Djindjic's Sale of Milosevic Makes Clinton's National Asset Sales Look Amateurish Serbian Prime Minister Sold Milosevic for 1.8 Billion US Dollars BY: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (http://www.bannerofliberty.com) July 2, 2001 Many of us were amazed at the ability of President Bill Clinton to get away with selling national assets to improve his personal fortunes and campaign coffers. His tawdry list of national assets sold or sold out is impressive: the Lincoln bedroom, pardons to drug dealers and other crooks, the seizure of huge stores of environmentally friendly coal in Utah, which was supposed to help fund education in the state, the sale of Elk Hills Naval Petroleum reserves to Al Gores friends and financial supporters at Occidental Petroleum, trying to wreck Microsoft to benefit his supporters in the Silicon Valley who are Microsoft competitors.. However, on Friday Serbian Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic in Belgrade made Clinton look like an amateur by selling the former president of Yugoslavia to the same folks who bombed Yugoslavia for 79 days for something like $1.8 billion. The London Independent over the week-end said of the event: "Serbia's gold rush began this weekend. With the ink barely dry on a £1.28bn aid package for Serbia's reconstruction from the wars of the 1990s, the sharp-suited businessmen who stand to make fortunes out of the bombed-out country have already rolled into town. "In the marble lobby of the glittering Hyatt hotel in Belgrade, men in expensive grey suits clutch leather briefcases and huddle in small groups among the ornate pillars. They are the first wave of carpetbaggers descending on the country, representing the international banks, consultancy firms and organisations hoping to capitalise on the investment to come. "The handover of former president Slobodan Milosevic to the international war crimes tribunal has immediately opened the purses of foreign governments attending a donors' conference in Brussels. Now the men in suits are coming to tell the Serbs how to spend it. "The facilitator of this bonanza is another man in a sharp suit: the Serbian Prime Minister, Zoran Djindjic, who organised the extradition of Mr Milosevic to the Hague on Thursday. A new kind of Serbian strongman, Mr Djindjic rode roughshod over legal niceties and issued a decree when he could not get an extradition law passed by parliament. In the process he defied the pro-Milosevic constitutional court which had ordered that the handover be delayed." This is a bit like a governor of a state, say Florida, selling Bill Clinton to a future International Criminal Court for his actions in ordering the 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan that manufactured 60% of the nation's medicines or the 79 days of bombing everything in sight inYugoslavia in 1999 contrary to International Law The new Yugoslavian president, who took Milosevic's place, Vojislav Kostunica, a former law professor opposed the action. In fact, in October of last year Kostunica called the ITCY court a "monstrosity." What has occurred in Belgrade is a Constitutional crisis. Kostunica is president of the country of Yugoslavia. The Prime Minister of Yugoslavia was Zoran Zizic. Djindjic ignored the Yugoslav Constitution and its sovereignty as a state and orchestrated what really was a kidnapping of Milosevic to sell him to the nation's enemies for money. Zizic promptly resigned, which now requires the government to be reorganized, and thousands of citizens in Belgrade were out in the streets accusing Djindjic of treason. This turn of events can be traced back to the FY01 Foreign Operation Appropriations Act last year passed by the United States Congress. According to Rep. Gary Condit, D-CA, it made "U.S. assistance to Serbia contingent on certification the Yugoslav government is cooperating with the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia including access for investigators, the provision of documents and the surrender and transfer of indictees or assistance in their apprehension." Since it was signed by President Clinton, the new Bush administration is bound by it. In other words, if the Serbs want the power plants, factories, bridges, homes and railroads rebuilt that we destroyed when we were told that a genocide was going on, they have to ignore their Constitution and hand over Slobadon Milosevic, even though it is now known there WAS no genocide. When Milosevic was indicted, Jamie Shea, NATO spokesman in Brussels, was telling the world that "up to 100,000 Albanians have been killed." After almost two years of digging in Kosovo, only a few hundred unidentified bodies have been found, and many of them appear to be Serbs that disappeared in the fighting, not Albanians. In a genocide, the victim population decreases. In the case of the Albanians and the Serbs, it has been the Albanians who INCREASED dramatically in Kosovo between 1981 and 1991, while the Serbs DECREASED. Even the indictment of Milosevic (http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/mil-ii990524e.htm) in 1999 noted: "In 1981, the last census with near universal participation, the total population of Kosovo was approximately 1,585,000 of which 1,227,000 (77%) were Albanians, and 210,000 (13%) were Serbs. Only estimates for the population of Kosovo in 1991 are available because Kosovo Albanians boycotted the census administered that year. General estimates are that the current population of Kosovo (1999) is between 1,800,000 and 2,100,000 of which approximately 85-90% are Kosovo Albanians and 5-10% are Serbs." The United Nations and NATO consistently used the 90% figure with 1,800,00 as the number of Albanians in a population of 2 million in Kosovo during the bombing. That would leave the number of Serbs in 1991 at 100,000 to 200,000. In other words, in 10 years the Albanian population increased by at least 215,000 people while the Serb population decreasedsomewhere between 15,000 and 115,000 people. After the occupation of Kosovo, according to official reports of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Gnjilane/Gjilan area "had a large concentration of Kosovo Serb communities and no strong (now former) UCK presence and these factors contributed to the low level of damage and activity during the conflict which was occupied by NATO troops on June 14 and 15 1999, ". In about 3 weeks, by 3rd July, the OSCE report said: "the entire Kosovo Serb population had left Prilepnica/Prilepnica. On 4th July, the first of the houses in the Roma quarter of Gnjilane/Gjilan were set alight. On 7th July, it was reported that nine Krajina Serbs had been evicted from Novo Brdo/Novo Berde by the UCK and had moved to Bostane/Bostan." The "Krajina Serbs" refer to Serbs in the Krajina area of Croatia that David Binder wrote about in the New York Times on December 8, 1993:( "Since 1991, the Croatian authorities have blown up or razed 10,000 houses, mostly of Serbs. ...In some cases they dynamited homes with the families inside. Whole families were killed and many were wounded." An estimated 280,000 Serbs were driven out of their homes in Krajina, Croatia in 1993 and many were resettled in the Kosovo province. Elderly and handicapped Serbs who could not flee were killed. These are the figures of the ICTY, the OSCE and the United Nations. How do you get a genocide of the Albanians out of them, when it's the Serbs who are disappearing? And, where did all those new Albanians in Kosovo come from? They came, of course, from Albania. When the Communist Albanian government collapsed in 1992, there was 70% unemployment in Albania. Albanians were fleeing to nearby countries, Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece. In spite of the highest birthrate in Europe, the population of Albania between 1991 and 1998 DROPPED, according to world almanacs, from 3,335,000 in 1991 to 3,330,754 in 1998. A huge number of those fleeing Albanians simply crossed a mountain path into Kosovo - without papers. Later, during their exodus in 1999 after NATO started dropping bombs on Kosovo, they went back home, and announced that the Serbs forced them out of their homes and had "taken" their papers. In the midst of all that, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), indicted Milosevic in 1999 while Yugoslavia was being bombed daily by mostly American planes. The ICTY was given the authority to: "prosecute persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991 in accordance with the provisions of the present Statute (of the International Tribunal.) - http://www.un.org/icty/basic/statut/stat2000.htm#1) The "serious violations" are listed as: (a) willful killing; (b) torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments; (c) willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health; (d) extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly; (e) compelling a prisoner of war or a civilian to serve in the forces of a hostile power; (f) willfully depriving a prisoner of war or a civilian of the rights of fair and regular trial; (g) unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a civilian; (h) taking civilians as hostages. That sort of makes me wonder. If there was no genocide against Albanians, and the Statute lists (f) willfully depriving a prisoner of war or a civilian of the rights of fair and regular trial; and (g) unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a civilian as human rights violations, it seems to me that someone needs to also arrest Djindjic. Djindjic admits that the Constitutional Court ruled that Milosevic could not, under the Yugoslavian Constitution, be extradited. Therefore, the deportation of Milosevic from his native land is a violation of Paragraph (g). And, if Milosevic conveniently dies before his trial or is denied a public trial during which he gets to show the proof of what really happened in Kosovo before, during and after the NATO bombing, the United Nations will be in further violation of his human rights. As for us Americans, we need to remember that what goes around, comes around. If the United Nations can so summarily ignore the Constitution of Yugoslavia, it can ignore the Constitution of the United States. We cannot expect to have one rule for everyone else in the world, and another for Americans. To Comment: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Subscribe to the Reagan Monitor, the newsletter that gives you news FACTS you can USE to make your life, and the world, better go to: Start Your Subscription     To E-mail Banner of Liberty - Click Here Website: http://www.bannerofliberty.com To E-Mail Mary Mostert, Analyst - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax # (801) 426-8316   Return to Banner of Liberty