MILOSEVIC NOT COWED AT THE HAGUE: NATO WAR CRIMINALS MEET RESISTANCE
By Cecil Williams
The Hague, Netherlands
The former president of Yugoslavia, charged with "genocide" by the very imperialist powers that mercilessly bombed his country for 78 days in 1999, has thrown the charge back in the prosecutor's face.
"Genocide is a method your colonial powers use. North and South, in Africa and Asia, all the colonial powers used genocide. And today our part of Europe is also a target of colonial powers who want to take back what they have lost," said Slobodan Milosevic on Feb. 14 when he finally got a chance to testify here before the International Tribunal for War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia.
The tribunal was set up by the very NATO powers that bombed Yugoslavia. Those governments and private corporations finance it. Its sole purpose is to prosecute and imprison Milosevic and other Yugoslavs who opposed the breakup of their country.
The CIA and German intelligence spent billions of dollars to foment civil war in Yugoslavia and overturn the Milosevic government. Last June, in violation of the Yugoslav Constitution, the corrupt, U.S.-backed regime of Zoran Djindjic handed him over to NATO. Djindjic had hoped for a few billion in aid and loans, but wound up with only $21 million.
Milosevic, imprisoned far from home in this Dutch city, has been denied the right to consult privately with lawyers or speak to the press.
The long-awaited show trial opened Feb. 12 with a half-hour tirade by chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte. Then the British Queen's Counsel Geoffrey Nice gave a melodramatic two-day presentation of NATO's "evidence." Between pregnant pauses, studied sighs and anguished facial contortions, Nice repeated the litany of lies that bombarded the Western public in 1999 while NATO ships and warplanes bombarded Yugoslavia.
Nice charged that Milosevic, motivated by a "ruthless quest for power," had carried out "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" against Bosnian Muslims, Croatian Catholics and Albanian Kosovars.
These NATO powers show no concern that British troops and Protestant paramilitaries have been "ethnic cleansing" in northern Ireland for decades, murdering hundreds of Irish Catholics. Thirty years after British troops gunned down Irish civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday in Derry, not a single British soldier has been penalized.
They applaud when U.S. planes and missiles murder more than 5,000 Afghan civilians or when U.S. and British bombs and sanctions kill 500,000 Iraqi children.
Much of the "evidence" Nice presented has long been exposed as sheer fabrication.
The court was shown discredited ITN footage of Bosnian Muslims allegedly held in a Serb "concentration camp." The British television reporters who set up the shot were actually standing inside a wire enclosure, and the people they were filming were refugees outside looking in.
Nice also brought up an alleged massacre of Kosovar civilians by Serbian police at Racak on Jan. 15, 1999. There is considerable evidence the dead were fighters of the U.S.- funded "Kosovo Liberation Army" who had died in a battle.
The prosecution at times seemed desperate. Nice spent some time making the point that Milosevic, after being elected president of Yugoslavia, had appointed members of his party, the Socialist Party of Serbia, to key posts. Nice also read a Yugoslav PeopleArmy officer's report that his troops had carried out no pillaging, looting or property destruction. "One wonders why he found it necessary to report that," Nice asked.
After two days of this utterly weak presentation, presiding judge Robert May should have thrown the case out of his court. Instead he imperiously rejected Milosevic's right to a hearing to decide if the court had legitimate jurisdiction.
'WESTERN COLONIALISM IS GENOCIDE'
With words and video footage, Milosevic portrayed NATO's destruction of Yugoslav towns and villages. "They bombed by night, when people were fast asleep. Most of the targets were homes and housing blocks." He described the targets: Aleksinacs, a village of miners who worked in the pits, was hit by 14 missiles; 36 people died. People were killed in Vranya, a small farming village, and in Rukovica, a blue- collar neighborhood on the outskirts of Belgrade. In Starigrad Przen, 50 Roma people died. Both Serbs and Muslims died while tending their cows in Novi Pasar, an undeveloped area.
"They especially targeted areas like Novi Sad," said Milosevic, "a part of Serbia where 27 nationalities lived peacefully. That was precisely what they wanted to destroy, that kind of life in Yugoslavia. NATO's object was to break up and terrorize the whole of Yugoslavia." He pointed out that in 78 days of bombing NATO destroyed only seven Yugoslav army tanks but dozens of schools, hospitals and medical clinics.
Milosevic answered the NATO court's claim that the Yugoslav Army had driven Albanian Kosovars from their homes. He gave a list of Kosovar Albanian villages destroyed by NATO bombs and showed photos of the corpses of Albanian children, women and men who died when their convoy was attacked by U.S. warplanes. "They were targeted because they were returning to their homes," Milosevic said. "It was a message to the Albanians: Don't go home, flee in order to justify NATO bombing."
He also told how U.S. planes had bombed Istok prison in Kosovo, killing 78 prisoners, then lied, claiming Yugoslav police had massacred the prisoners. Milosevic showed photos proving the prison had been destroyed by bombs.
Working backwards from the Kosovo war, Milosevic detailed 12 years of U.S.- and German-orchestrated destabilization of Yugo slavia; how the CIA and Germany's BND had set up and financed right-wing separatist movements in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia while at the same time backing right-wing nationalist forces among the Serbs.
He traced the heritage of the secessionist movements back to the World War II Nazi and Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia, and described the horrible genocide of Serbs in western Yugoslavia at the hands of the Hitler-created Croatian Ustashi regime.
Milosevic blasted Nice for referring to his political party as the "Serbian Socialist Party," which would limit it to just Serbian people. "We are the Socialist Party of Serbia," he said. "We have in our ranks Muslims, Albanians, Roma, Goran, all of the 27 nationalities who make up Serbia. Would they join a racist organization?"
He told why the U.S. and German regimes targeted his government. "I stop ped them from implementing the plans they had imposed on the rest of East Europe, including Albania. They wanted to do to Serbia what they did to the rest of East Europe. That's why they tried for 10 years to overthrow me."
To the judges he said, "You do not wish to hold [NATO leaders] accountable because you represent them. But it is worth it to me to spend any amount of time in prison for one chance to speak the truth to the public. I believe most people are honest; if they were not, life would not be worth living. And I believe the people will speak up. They are the jury because this tribunal does not have one."
'BIG POWERS DESTROYED ORDINARY PEOPLE'
In Yugoslavia and elsewhere in East Europe, people are speaking up. Tens of thousands rallied to support Milosevic in Belgrade on Feb. 9, before the trial opened. The tribunal was presented with the signatures of 120,000 Yugoslav citizens demanding Milosevic's freedom. The Russian Duma voted by 316-to-6 to demand his release, as has the Ukrainian Rada.
Few honest observers at the trial were unmoved. A young Iranian woman who works in Kosovo told a reporter, "I came here hoping to see Milosevic hanged, but now I see I've been deceived."
A young Muslim woman from Britain said, "In Yugoslavia, like now in Afghanistan, big powers came in and destroyed the lives of ordinary people."
posted 2/21/2002
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