Serbia on Trial
Milosevic is not Serbia. He is just its former president. He might have still been its president has it not been for the millions of dollars pumped by the US into the "democratic" presidential election campaign in Yugoslavia. Either way the results of the election showed clearly that Milosevic was still one of the most popular political figures in the country.
Today in the Hague it is not Milosevic who is on trial, but all of Serbia. In the Western media the trial is compared to the Nuremberg. This is not accidental. This trial is an attempt on the part of the Western powers to get comfortable with their role in the destruction of Yugoslavia. The Nuremberg tribunal naturally comes to mind. The difficulty with the Hague tribunal, however, is in figuring out who is the victim and who is the defendant.
There are top political leaders in the West who need to separate themselves from anything that happened in Yugoslavia in the past decade. In the middle ages people with means could pay eight ducats and buy a letter of indulgence for murder. Prices are a bit higher today: British prosecutors and international tribunal judges are more expensive than your everyday priests and bishops of the middle ages. But it still works about the same.
Why is Milosevic in the Hague? Isn't it against the Yugoslav constitution to extradite its citizens to foreign countries? O, but he wasn't extradited, he was, for the lack of a better word, exported! The Serbian government has hit the jackpot: the export business is booming once again. Only this time it is not Yugoslav shoes that are going east, but its politicians and soldiers who are being shipped west for a healthy profit.
Milosevic was sold. But he wasn't sold by the Serbian people. He was sold by the Serbian government. Are you a Serb? Living in Serbia? How much?
While Milosevic may be sitting in the Hague in front of judges, prosecutors, surrounded by armed guards and still manages to look like the most decent person in the room, it is not him who is really on trial there. All of the Serbs are being charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. Nobody really cares about Milosevic: he only tried to hold his country together in the face of destructive foreign influences and then he was sold for a good price. NATO needs to justify the crimes it committed against the Serbs and that's why it's putting all of the Serbs on trial.
If one tries to think logically, what is NATO? It is a strictly defensive military organisation. NATO's members are required "...to refrain in the international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." (The North Atlantic Treaty, Article 1, April 4, 1949) Obviously a simple press-conference is not sufficient to explain why NATO planes and bombs bombed a country that never threatened NATO. This matter requires an international tribunal.
Consider the elegance of the move: you attack a nation and then put it on trial for war crimes. Why didn't Goebbels think of this in April of 1941? But this is nothing: modern American foreign relation experts managed to attach an "On/Off" switch to the Geneva Convention. The final remaining step is to extend jurisdiction of American courts (or, even better, military tribunals) to match the range of American carrier battle groups. And finally everyone around the world will be able to breathe in the fresh breeze of American democracy.
Venik
Philadelphia,
PA
February 19, 2002
