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By John Catalinotto
November 6, 2004--An "Appeals Court" at the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague on Nov. 1 was forced to override an earlier decision that had barred former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic from acting as his own defense counsel. The new ruling supposedly reinstates the defendant as his own lead counsel.
According to legal experts close to the defense, however, the new conditions are still unacceptable and may be even more dangerous for the defendant. The ICTY still will be able to impose counsel on Milosevic on a day-by-day basis should court doctors deem him too ill to represent himself.
These ICTY-appointed doctors are not of the defendant's own choosing. They have denied Milosevic proper treatment. They have also interrupted the trial in the past even when Milosevic has not himself complained of feeling ill.
This latest decision goes against the opinion of 100 international legal experts, including former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who protested when the ICTY imposed counsel on the president during the summer.
Over two months, the attorneys imposed on Milosevic--Richard Kay and Gillian Higgins--asked 200 witnesses to testify. Only five agreed. The rest refused to cooperate unless Milosevic were allowed to defend himself.
On Oct. 27, Kay and Gillian finally petitioned the court to relieve them of that duty.
Defendant turned tables on NATO
Milosevic represented himself ably during the prosecution portion of the trial, which lasted over two years. First called the "trial of the century" and attended by international media, the case got less and less coverage when it became clear that Milosevic had succeeded in turning the tables on NATO.
According even to reports in the corporate media, Milosevic argued convincingly that the NATO powers, especially the United States and Germany, provoked the wars in the Balkans.
He had only a few months to prepare the defense portion of the case. This contrasted with the two years the court allowed to the highly funded prosecution team. Still, Milosevic managed to submit a list of over 1,000 defense witnesses. It included U.S. and European government figures like President Bill Clinton, as well as witnesses friendly to the defendant or to his case against the court.
One witness who refused to testify unless Milosevic were allowed to defend himself was Sara Flounders, a co-director of the International Action Center. Flounders had been in Yugoslavia during the 78-day NATO bombing war in 1999. Along with her political expertise as a writer and editor of books on the Balkans, she had eyewitness testimony of NATO's war crimes to offer.
Flounders said that "from its beginning, the ICTY has been a travesty of justice. It was a political court set up by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in the early 1990s as a weapon against the Yugoslav Federation. Even the so-called Appeals Court is just another group of ICTY court officers paid for by U.S. funds and private donations from big-business figures like billionaire George Soros.
"The ICTY charged Milosevic in May 1999 during the NATO bombing in order to pressure him to submit to the demands of the NATO countries that were bombing Serbia and threatening to invade. All the charges involved Serbia's Kosovo province. Only after he was in custody in The Hague did the court charge him with crimes regarding Croatia and Bosnia.
"It was all political, with only a pretense of justice. The only possible and reasonable defense was a political defense. His defense is important," said Flounders, "not only because the war on Yugoslavia was a crime, but because it laid the groundwork for further U.S. military aggression.
"Though it had all the advantages," Flounders continued, "from February 2002 until last summer the prosecution was unable to bring any convincing evidence that the former president was guilty. Finally when he was ready to start his defense case, the court changed the rule again.
"The ICTY has violated even its own rules and guidelines along with all existing international law in its continuing attempt to deprive President Milosevic of even the most basic right to present his own defense.
"I joined with other witnesses in refusing to testify if President Milosevic was not conducting his defense. This court has no basis in international law. It has no right to exist. It is strictly a political weapon of the U.S. and NATO."
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