Milosevic: murdered
There can be no question but that former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosovic, who died in his prison cell in Scheveningen in the Netherlands on March 11, was murdered:
"Milosevic’s lawyer ... reported that his client had written a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov just a day before he died pleading for help and charging that his jailers were giving him harmful drugs in an attempt to silence him. According to Dutch public television, a blood sample taken from Milosevic last month showed traces of a powerful drug used to treat leprosy which can neutralize other drugs the former Yugoslav leader was taking for high blood pressure and heart disease. ... [What's more] last month the court’s chief judge denied his request that he be allowed to receive treatment in Russia before resuming the trial." (SOURCE)
Milosevic's murder proves that the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) at the Hague is nothing more than a kangaroo court a la Nuremberg (where, as was pointed out in an earlier post, fake documents were used to incriminate surviving members of the Nazi regime). But unlike the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which was perhaps the greatest legal travesty in history, the ICT in the Hague respected basic legal proprieties and Milosevic was given enough latitude to defend himself, which he did ably enough. The longer the trial went on, therefore, the more obvious it became that the case against Milosevic had nothing but the prejudices of NATO war propaganda to sustain it. As John Laughland wrote back in 2004:
"Since the trial started in February 2002, the prosecution has wheeled out more than 100 witnesses, and it has produced 600,000 pages of evidence. Not a single person has testified that Milosevic ordered war crimes. Whole swaths of the indictment on Kosovo have been left unsubstantiated, even though Milosevic’s command responsibility here is clearest. And when the prosecution did try to substantiate its charges, the result was often farce. Highlights include the Serbian ‘insider’ who claimed to have worked in the presidential administration but who did not know what floor Milosevic’s office was on; ‘Arkan’s secretary’, who turned out to have worked only as a temp for a few months in the same building as the notorious paramilitary; the testimony of the former federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, dramatically rumbled by Milosevic, who produced Markovic’s own diary for the days when he claimed to have had meetings with him; the Kosovo Albanian peasant who said he had never heard of the KLA even though there is a monument to that terrorist organisation in his own village; and the former head of the Yugoslav secret services, Radomir Markovic, who not only claimed that he had been tortured by the new democratic government in Belgrade to testify against his former boss, but who also agreed, under cross-examination by Milosevic, that no orders had been given to expel the Kosovo Albanians and that, on the contrary, Milosevic had instructed the police and army to protect civilians. And these, note, were the prosecution witnesses." (SOURCE)
Laughland concluded, "The possibility is now real that a conviction of Milosevic can be secured only on the widest possible interpretation of the doctrine of command responsibility: for instance, that he knew about atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs and did nothing to stop them." This would involve an extremely awkward legal problem however: for "if Milosevic can be convicted for complicity in crimes committed by people in a foreign country, over whom he had no formal control, how much greater is the complicity of the British government in crimes committed by the US in Iraq, a country with which the UK is in an official coalition? This is not just a cheap political jibe but a serious judicial conundrum: the UK is a signatory to the new International Criminal Court, and so Tony Blair is subject to the jurisdiction of the new Hague-based body whose jurisprudence will be modelled on that of the ICTY. So if Slobbo goes down for ten years in Scheveningen jail because of abuses committed by his policemen, then by rights his cell-mate should, in time, be Tony."
The political embarrassment into which the trial had descended "threatened to become even more of a problem for those who organized it after Milosevic, at the end of February, asked the tribunal to issue a subpoena ordering former US President Bill Clinton to testify, apparently with the aim of showing that Washington itself was responsible for crimes against humanity in waging an illegal war against Yugoslavia and conducting a sustained bombing campaign against civilian targets.' (SOURCE)
It is no doubt in order to forestall the possibility of former president Clinton being exposed as the real war criminal that NATO began thinking hard and fast about the best way to ensure that the trial would never be concluded.
COVER STORY (JUST IN): Milosevic took the fatal drug himself as a ploy to worsen his condition (to get a free trip to Moscow). Yep, read all about it here in the oh-so reliable Sydney Morning Herald. But, as Paul Joseph Watson points out, 'This is frankly absurd. Milosevic only had access to the drugs provided to him by UN appointed doctors and took them under close surveillance. Are we to believe that Milosevic had managed to set up a secret drugs lab in his closely watched prison prison cell and then substituted the drugs while under constant monitoring?' (SOURCE)
Further reading: Paul Joseph Watson, Why Milosevic Was Murdered here (Watson errs by referring to Milosevic as a dictator, however), Christopher Black, An Impartial Tribunal? Really? here and Barry Grey, The Milosevic indictment: legal document or political diatribe? here
POSTSCRIPT: SREBRENICA: It is important to remind readers - as well as to point it out to those who do not already know - that Milosevic had nothing to do with the alleged 'genocide' at Srebrenica in 1995. According to Watson, "Srebrenica was supposedly a 'UN safe zone', yet just like Rwanda, UN peacekeepers deliberately withdrew and allowed the massacre to unfold, then blamed Milosevic." (SOURCE) However, it has not been proven that a massacre took place at Srebrenica at all. As early as 1998, a Portuguese UN military observer, Carlos Martins Branco, who was present at the fall of Srebrenica, suggested that the massacre was a mass media hoax. (SOURCE) That it was indeed a hoax - and one wonders why Watson declines to acknowledge the fact - has been established beyond any doubt by George Pumphrey, author of the book Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching (1998), Jared Israel, Francisco Gil-White and, most importantly, by Peter Brock in his recent book Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting Journalism & Tragedy in Yugoslavia (2005). (Incidentally, the latter work is held neither by the British Library nor the Library of Congress. I wonder why?) Here, Swedish peace activist Jan Oberg fights the lies about Milosevic with sarcasm. Brilliant and a must read.
