John Laughland’s erudite book, Travesty was published 20 December 2006, nine months after Slobodan Milošević died following five years in custody at The Hague during the longest criminal trial in history.
Below is a recording of a BBC radio debate from January 2007 in which John Laughland was pitted against journalist Adam LeBor, who had written an early biography (more accurately a character assassination) of Slobodan Milošević. The other speaker was Human Rights lawyer, Richard Hermer QC. [Hermer was appointed Attorney-General by the Labour government which took power in July 2024]. Both men seemed to have scant knowledge of Milošević, unaware that the man they characterised as a violent Serbian nationalist had in fact been the only leader of a constituent Republic to fight for the preservation of the multi-ethnic country of Yugoslavia and the only leader who, throughout the conflicts of the 1990s, consistently supported diplomatic rather than military solutions.
(broadcast on BBC Radio 3 programme Night Waves 29-Jan-2007)
Laughland’s excoriating analysis of the trial of Slobodan Milošević at The Hague Tribunal (ICTY), showed with devastating clarity that the ICTY had been created illegally by the United Nations Security Council in 1993 because, under its Charter, the UN Security Council had no power to create such a criminal court. He showed that, having created a monster, the UN abrogated all responsibility for it to the United States who openly used the court as a political instrument to coerce Serbian leaders to obey or else be indicted, arrested and imprisoned. The ICTY Statute ignored all the provisions set down by the members of the UN Security Council which specifically stated that it should not extend international law. It showed that, at all stages, the ICTY was able to behave in an arbitrary manner. Prosecuting almost exclusively Serbs the ICTY served to give a supposedly legal stamp to the media’s already comprehensive demonisation of Serbs in the Court of Public Opinion. With rules written by Americans, funded by US money and a tool of White House policy, the ICTY pretended to be a trail blazing pioneer of impartial, international justice – but would not even consider the actions of NATO infringements during its intensive bombing of Serbia.
This outstanding, scholarly book received scant attention from the mainstream media. Very few journalists or writers showed any inclination to challenge the serious and well founded points it made, preferring merely to make the circular argument that, because there had been so many accounts of the misdeeds of Milošević, they were therefore ‘well-documented’. All this meant was that everyone was happy to repeat uncritically the same stories from the same highly-biased sources – a defining example of “group think” and one of the historic low points of Western journalism.