At Halfway Point of Milosevic Trial, Prosecutor Is Confident
By Marlise Simons
( for further information on Marlise Simons see https://www.balkan-conflicts-research.com/archive/marlise-simons-a-study-in-total-propaganda-by-edward-herman-david-peterson/ )
Published: March 1, 2004
THE HAGUE, Feb. 29 2004
”The familiar morning mantra”, Case No. 0254, the Prosecutor vs. Slobodan Milosevic” will not ring through Courtroom I at the United Nations war crimes tribunal for a few months.
The prosecution has just rested its case, and Mr. Milosevic, the first modern head of state who has to answer for atrocities before international judges, has until June 8 to prepare his defense.
In her spacious corner office, Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor, took stock. Looking weary, she said she was relieved that after 24 months, this portion of the trial was finally closed. She said she was certain of a conviction on all charges, but conceded that she had presented only circumstantial evidence, “no simple smoking gun,” ”no written order or letter signed by Mr. Milosevic”, to support the gravest charge, genocide.
But then, few may have expected such proof from the former Serbian leader and Yugoslav president. He wrote down very little and went to extraordinary lengths to hide his hand in the three wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990’s that killed more than 200,000 people and uprooted several million. [Ms Simons was evidently unaware that by 2004 the ICTY’s own demographers had revised down their estimate of deaths from 200,000 to 100,000 – a figure that was itself a huge extrapolation from the few thousand bodies that had actually been recovered].
Belgrade authorities have sanitized and cut crucial portions from the minutes of wartime meetings of the Supreme Defense Council, which Mr. Milosevic attended, an official close to the case said last week. [Unnamed official, unsupported allegations].
Officials in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, recently handed over the incomplete records after much international pressure. There was credible information, the court lawyer said, that the complete records had contained instructions providing a link to killings and even genocide.[“Credible information”? Very hard to discern anything like this in ICTY proceedings.]
All the same, prosecutors have compiled the most detailed record known of the Milosevic era, reconstructing the methods and secret machinery they say Mr. Milosevic used for his plan to seize more land for ethnic Serbs in a collapsing Yugoslavia. [By 2004 the infamous ‘Operation Horseshoe’ document, which purported to be a detailed plan for the creation of a Greater Serbia, had been brutally exposed as a fake created by the German secret service. This had been formally admitted by the German government in 2001.]
Mrs. Del Ponte said there was abundant evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia’s Kosovo Province. “I believe we have proved genocide with many pieces of the puzzle,” she said. [Claims of genocide in Kosovo were comprehensively disproved by some 90 UN observers stationed within Kosovo throughout the bombing. As soon as the war ended, they carried out a thorough assessment of what had happened. They concluded there were no mass graves in Kosovo and that total deaths on all sides were just over 4,000, split almost evenly between Serbs and Albanians. They found also that some 50% of the deaths had been caused by the Nato bombing.]
Legal experts agree that the evidence of war crimes is ample. Some, however, dispute whether the prosecution has proved that Mr. Milosevic was guilty of genocide in Bosnia. A finding of genocide requires proof that the accused intended to destroy a people or group, not just to kill many of its members. [The ICTY’s greatest difficulty was that it had never, at any stage of the Balkan conflicts, carried out any kind of professional criminal investigation. Its very small investigation team, led by two former middle-ranking policemen from France and Australia, relied principally on briefings from western intelligence services, media coverage and interviews with Nato commanders, UN officials and aid agency representatives. A painstaking academic study of the prosecution case in the Milosevic trial concluded that 92% of the evidence heard had been hearsay – a form of evidence not admitted by proper courts].
“Intention of course is a subjective element, a difficult element,” she said. “We will fully demonstrate this intent at the end of the trial.”
It has now become known that since well before the trial, a debate has raged among prosecutors over whether the Serbian-led campaign to expel and often kill non-Serbs would meet the legal definition of genocide. [Unlike the forced expulsion of between 250,000 – 400,000 Serbs from the Kosovo region of Croatia in 1995 – where they and their families had lived for around 400 years – the ICTY offered little detail about the ‘Serbian campaign to expel and often kill non-Serbs’. Our research indicates that what was termed ‘ethnic cleansing’ was for the most part when communities from areas of mixed population moved of their own accord to somewhere safer.]
Some argued that there was enough evidence to secure a conviction for war crimes and crimes against humanity and no need to take on the burden of demonstrating genocide. “We had more than enough to prove that Milosevic created, instigated, aided and abetted great conflict and bloodshed and upheaval to stay in power,” said one lawyer involved in the discussions. “Enough for a life sentence.” [This certainly wasn’t true of Kosovo, which is why the prosecution had to implore the ICTY to allow it to add time for the Bosnia and Croatia indictments to be pursued in the trial. Here again, the ICTY prosecution was woeful. 300 anonymous and heavily-coached ‘eyewitnesses’ were far from compelling, as was the admission in report-form only of forensic and DNA evidence that was never put before the court or provided to the defence for independent examination.]
But Ms. Del Ponte and others on her team decided to charge Mr. Milosevic with two counts of genocide or complicity in genocide in Bosnia. “I could not leave out the charges of genocide, based on what we knew,” she said. [Which was very little.]
But many questions still surround the issue of genocide.
The judges must decide whether the large-scale persecution and killing of Bosnian Muslims, called “ethnic cleansing” by many, was a deliberate genocidal campaign.
“Ethnic cleansing can lead to genocide, but did it in Bosnia? ”I’m not sure,” said Antoine Garapon, director of the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies in Paris, a research group that monitors the trial. “I am sure of the proof that Milosevic ordered ethnic cleansing.” [So where is it?]
Some lawyers note that the crime of genocide is often misunderstood and defined in political or humanitarian terms. “One group threatening or killing another is not automatically genocide,” said Heikelina Verrijn-Stuart, a Dutch specialist in international law, following the tribunal. “As a crime, it requires very specific proof and it does not depend on the number of victims.”
The tribunal’s 16 judges still appear divided. The court has ruled three times on genocide but convicted only one person, Radislav Krstic, a Bosnian Serb general, for his role in the 1995 massacre of 7,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica. [The conviction of Krstic exemplifies the rottenness of The Hague Tribunal. General Krstic arrived in Srebrenica on the day it fell to a small Serb force without a shot being fired. He had spent the previous 2 weeks in hospital, undergoing a major operation as secondary treatment for serious combat wounds he had suffered two years earlier. Although his new appointment put him in charge of the Serb forces at Srebrenica, his orders were changed and he was immediately posted to take charge of arrangements for the capture of nearby Zepa, which took place without violence some days later. Krstic had no role at Srebrenica.]
His case, under appeal, is expected to set a standard that may affect the Milosevic case. [It undoubtedly did. The standard it set was appalling – an illegal and corrupt organisation perverting justice in every way imaginable.]
Tribunal staff and those monitoring the trial say that getting to this halfway point has been an ordeal. The scope of the indictment, linking allegations in three very different wars over nine years, was enormous. Progress was hampered by Mr. Milosevic who, acting as his own lawyer, engaged in filibustering and frequently fell ill. A week ago, the presiding judge, Richard May, unexpectedly resigned because of illness. [Milosevic, himself a trained lawyer, chose to present his own defence because he had no trust in the court. He did a very good job, despite the constant hostility of the lead judge, Richard May. His periods of illness were the result of the inadequate care he received for his readily treatable heart condition in the ICTY custody centre. The court’s refusal to allow him to receive specialist treatment lead directly to his unnecessary death in 1996.]
Evaluating the strength and weaknesses of the prosecution case has its pitfalls, trial watchers say. There was an impressive array of about 300 witnesses, and the evidence includes thousands of documents, private diaries, telephone intercepts and films. [On even cursory inspection, this ‘evidence’ was feeble in the extreme. The 300 anonymous witnesses were a prime example of quantity, not quality. The documents invariably proved nothing. The telephone intercepts came in the form of transcripts unsupported by original recordings. The film element came principally from the much-praised documentary series The Death of Yugoslavia which was considerably undermined when it came to light that it had seriously mistranslated a clip from Milosevic’s famous speech in Kosovo in 1989 to suggest that he was a rampant nationalist and racist.]
But numerous witnesses testified in closed sessions, reportedly for their own protection, and many electronic intercepts and documents are only available to the judges.
The prosecution set out to prove, first that the crimes occurred, second to show how the chain of command worked, and third to link them to Mr. Milosevic. [In all three respects, the prosecution case was wrong – something that became ever more evident as the trial progressed.]
But the trial has been hard to follow, because testimony has zigzagged, not following chronological order. [This was inevitable because the lead prosecutor, Geoffrey Nice, was constantly trying to invent a case as he went along – this proved impossible because there had been no proper investigation and no real evidence had been collected.]
Mr. Garapon believes the chain of command has been particularly difficult to reconstruct because the military, the police and the militias often operated under different guises. “This is crucial to convince judges that massacres in Bosnia and Milosevic in Serbia are connected,” he said. [Most ICTY judges did not need convincing. They knew they had been recruited to convict Serbs. Plausible evidence was required to convince the world that the ICTY was a proper court maintaining high standards of impartiality and justice. This was also a difficult trick to turn because the ICTY certainly did not come near to meeting these standards.]
Lawyers at the court say there is another reason why the Belgrade authorities still withhold important documents: not to protect Mr. Milosevic but to shield the country from Bosnia’s lawsuit against Belgrade at the International Court of Justice, seeking enormous damages for aggression and genocide. [The Belgrade authorities were reluctant to hand over anything to the ICTY because they knew full well that it was a rogue court dispensing rotten justice.]
Experts say Milosevic genocide case failed
By Anthony Deutsch
The Associated Press
When U.N. prosecutors opened their case against Slobodan Milosevic two years ago, they set out to get him convicted of genocide. The consensus today is that they failed.
Legal experts say prosecutors at the U.N. war-crimes tribunal have assembled solid evidence on lesser charges against the former Yugoslav president. [‘Legal experts’ were frequently invoked to preserve the reputation of the ICTY despite the fact that the ICTY had clearly been set up illegally, had ignored all the conditions set down for its operation by the UN Security Council, and haddriven a coach and horses through all legal best practice.]
Milosevic faces 66 counts including war crimes, genocide and complicity in genocide in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. The most serious relate to the July 1995 killing of at least 7,500 Muslims in the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. [Srebrenica has always been presented as a conclusively proven massacre. The reality is that the only factual evidence to support claims of a massacre, the forensic and DNA evidence allegedly gathered by the Clinton-created International Commission for Missing Persons, was never made available to the court, the defendants or anyone else. And laws passed in Bosnia and Croatia have given the ICMP permanent immunity to resist any demands to make this evidence available for independent examination. Why anyone should take the word of the ICMP, an organisation 93% staffed by Bosnian Muslims, is hard to imagine.]
On Wednesday, after calling 296 witnesses, prosecutors abruptly rested their case earlier than planned, seeking to avoid further delays caused by Milosevic’s illness, which has interrupted the trial nearly 20 times and cost it 65 days. [The prosecution had lasted 4 years. They had tried every angle they could think of, but got nowhere.]
“The prosecution was underwhelming,” said Michael Scharf, international-law professor and author of books on Balkan war crimes.
“But bit by bit, piece by piece, they proved their case, at least for many of the charges. It will at least be enough to put him in jail for the rest of his life,” Scharf said. [Only because a corrupt court could be relied on to do its duty].
“The genocide was the key charge. If Milosevic was acquitted of genocide, it would send a misleading signal about the nonexistence of genocide. I believe it did occur.” [But there was not a shred of compelling evidence to support the claim. Even when the ICTY illegally granted itself the power to charge people with the catch-all crime of ‘Joint Criminal Enterprise’ they were still struggling for a plausible case.]
From the outset, prosecutors faced challenges in proving Milosevic guilty, not least because, as president of Serbia, he had no formal ties to murderous Bosnian Serb forces. [The great challenge was trying to convict an individual for crimes that had not taken place for which there was no evidence of any kind.]
The prosecutors fought Serbian officials endlessly to call insiders to testify and obtain important documents, and they were frequently rebuffed.
Trial-watchers believe the prosecutors built an impregnable case that Milosevic was involved in war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during the wars of the 1990s that tore apart the Yugoslav federation. [The trial was monumentally boring for observers. Few stayed with it for long. It has been calculated that the daily transcript of the prosecution case would take a researcher working a 35-hour week some seven years to read. Anyone thinking an ‘impregnable’ case had been made was not basing their conclusion on much.]
But they failed to show an intent to commit genocide, experts said. Judith Armatta of the Washington-based Coalition for International Justice, who closely follows Milosevic’s trial, said a genocide conviction seemed unlikely, but “we might get complicity in genocide.”
To convict a suspect of genocide, there must be proof of a plan to wipe out “in whole or in part” an ethnic or religious group.
The court already has ruled in another case, against Gen. Radislav Krstic, that what happened in Srebrenica was genocide. Krstic was sentenced to 46 years in prison. He is appealing the conviction. [As shown above, Krstic had no role in Srebrenica. His conviction was a travesty of justice, as were the verdicts at his subsequent appeals.]
But prosecutors have found no smoking gun linking Milosevic to the Srebrenica massacres. The closest evidence was an order, not issued by Milosevic, to deploy Serbian troops in the area. [What? The best they could find was a routine military order issued by someone else?]
Yet Serbian political insiders, in their testimony, described Milosevic as a leader who wielded unrivaled influence over the Serbian army, police and special forces responsible for a campaign of murder and persecution to create a larger, united Serb state. [As shown above, the Greater Serbia policy never existed. Who were these ‘Serbian political advisers’? Almost certainly political opponents of Milosevic with an obvious axe to grind.]
“They were damning. They showed Milosevic was there dictating what happened. They showed he had direct-control lines of authority through the Serbian police and security service and the army,” Armatta said.
Balkan peace envoys testified that Milosevic knew Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic, intended to slaughter Srebrenica’s Muslims and did not stop them. Both men top the tribunal’s list of most-wanted fugitives. [This is nonsense. Milosevic’s relations with the Bosnian Serb leadership were not close. It’s well known that, when Srebrenica fell to Mladic’s small force without a shot being fired, Milosevic was concerned that Bosnian Serbs might take reprisals against the Bosnian Muslims in retaliation for the 3,000 cold-blooded killings of Bosnian Serbs by the 28th division of the Bosnian Muslim Army between 1992-95 and strongly warned them not to do this. In the event, Mladic had not such intention.]
If the judges accept the view of Milosevic as omnipotent, it could produce a conviction for complicity in genocide, Armatta said.
But acquittal on the genocide charge” the crime of all crimes, experts say ”would have far-reaching implications”.
Many Serbs would cheer it as vindicating their view that Serbia stands wrongly accused. Others likely will see it as a distortion of Europe’s darkest chapter since World War II.
Milosevic’s defense will open June 8. Zdenko Tomanovic, one of his legal associates, said Milosevic will call “certain very high-ranked people from different countries” to testify.
The defense will demand the court subpoena “certain foreign secret-service executives and army officials in case they would not testify voluntarily, including the NATO leaders,” he said.
Milosevic blames NATO for thousands of civilian deaths in the former Yugoslavia during 78 days of bombing during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He has said he wants to summon Western political and military leaders whom he accuses of war crimes against his country. [As noted above, UN observers in Kosovo throughout the Nato bombing reported total deaths during the war at just over 4,000, with 50% attributable directly to the Nato bombing.]
“The defense case is very important, not only for Milosevic, but for entire Serbia because of the potentially large psychological, historical, economical and legal consequences,” Tomanovic said.