[The Economist is a weekly magazine with a worldwide circulation. Supported by its own Intelligence Unit, it is widely respected for the quality of its journalism and writing. We post this article, with our comments in bold italics, because we believe it demonstrates how even journalists at the high end of the spectrum were happy to repeat the version of events in the Balkans which had been fed to the media by propagandists. Twenty-four-hour news and falling revenues were already having their effect on standards of research and fairness.]
The Economist
February 2002
Last Thursday, after nearly two days of grim recitals of atrocities committed during his tenure as president of first Serbia and then the former Yugoslavia, Mr Milosevic finally got a chance to speak at length, and he gave the tribunal’s prosecutors a taste of what they are up against. He continued speaking on Friday and finally finished his opening statement on Monday Feburary 18th.
Over many hours on all three days, Mr Milosevic lambasted NATO and its leaders as the true war criminals. As he has done for months, he challenged the very legality of the tribunal, dismissing it as a tool of the NATO powers. “Your bosses broke up Yugoslavia,” he told the tribunal’s judges, They pushed Bosnia into a civil war. The Serbs did not start the war. It is nonsensical to accuse the wrong side. The proceedings, he said, were “an ocean of lies” concocted by western powers to justify the NATO bombing of Serbia during the Kosovo war. “The truth is on my side. That is why I feel superior here, the moral victor,” he said. “The public will speak up. They are the jury, this tribunal doesn’t have one.” [Every one of these points was already known to be true by those who had followed events with a degree of rational scepticism. The ICTY was established illegally because the UN Charter included no power for the UN to create a criminal court. The western powers had, from 1989 onwards, taken steps to destroy the Yugoslav economy. This, too, was done in plain sight.]
Mr Milosevic also insisted that the entire Serb people were being put on trial, a claim which the prosecution team had already been at pains to deny. “Our citizens stand accused, citizens who lent their massive support to me,” declared Mr Milosevic, wearing the Serb national colours of red, white and blue. “My conduct was an statement of the will of the people.” Like the prosecutors, he showed television news footage supporting his arguments. [By 2006 it was already obvious to anyone who looked that the ICTY was only interested in pursuing and convicting Serbs. Obvious war crimes committed by the Croatians and Bosnian Muslims were largely ignored. Those who were indicted, such as Nasir Oric the brutal commander of Bosnian Muslim forces garrisoned in Srebrenica, were dealt with in an entirely different way – Oric, responsible for the cold-blooded murder of some 3,000 Serbs in the Srebrenica safe area was given a sentence of just 3 years by the ICTY and was then freed within a few months on a ridiculous technicality.]
And he replied to some specific charges. Serbia was not involved in fomenting war in Croatia or Bosnia. It was western nations which had really started the war, by encouraging Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia to secede from Yugoslavia. “Nationalism was incited, the flames were fanned, to become a full-fledged civil war,” he said. He supported his claim by showing in court a television documentary entitled “Yugoslavia, the Avoidable War’ which has been widely broadcast in the United States. The programme quoted Lord Carrington, a former British foreign secretary and James Baker, a former American secretary of state, among others. [Here Milosevic was making only a self-evident point: it was Slovenia, Croatia and Muslim Bosnia that were following a strategy to become independent sovereign nations. Serbia wanted to preserve the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, an aim which in the early 1990s commanded substantial support in all the Yugoslav republics. ‘Yugoslavia, The Avoidable War’ was an excellent documentary, based on the work of the famous former Foreign Correspondent of The Observer, Nora Beloff, which showed among other things how the United States had sabotaged the peace deal negotiated by Lord Carrington and Jose Cutileiro which had been agreed and signed by all sides. This led to three more, wholly unnecessary years of fighting.]
Mr Milosevic also insisted that he did not order the mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. They fled the NATO bombing campaign and the depredations of the Kosovo Liberation Army. In Kosovo Serb forces were fighting terrorists, just like the Americans, who sent their forces to the other side of their world to do the same in Afghanistan. Most importantly of all, his army was disciplined and patriotic. It did not commit atrocities. He conceded that these may have occurred, but he never ordered any such crimes. “I’m not saying that some individuals did not do this, but the police and army defended the country courageously and honourably.” [Once again, these points made by Milosevic were true and were known to be so at the time by many individuals working for the US, Nato, the UN and some of the military commanders.]
In addition, he demanded the right to call scores of high-level witnesses in his defence, including former American president Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, Helmut Kohl, former Chancellor of Germany, Kofi Annan, the UN General Secretary, and Madeleine Albright, the former American secretary of state. [Milosevic was not playing games when he tried to call these witnesses. By 1996 it was clear that each one of them had made devastating claims about Serbian culpability which were totally untrue. As became clear when, within weeks of the end of the war, the UN published a fully-documented figure of just over 4,000 deaths in Kosovo during the illegal 78-day Nato bombing, half of which were directly linked to the Nato bombing. There were big and crucial questions for these individuals to answer.]
Showing a series of gruesome photos of Serb victims of NATO bombing in his presentation, he was obviously aiming his remarks at the Serb audience at home. He has made clear for some time that he intends to disrupt the proceedings and to use them as a platform to defend himself and to vilify western leaders, not to win acquittal. A trained lawyer himself, he will pose a formidable challenge to the tribunal. [The ICTY prosecution had resorted time and time again to playing excerpts from the documentary series ‘The Death of Yugoslavia’ which included similar sequences of suffering. He was surely entitled to remind the court that it was not just Croatians and Bosnian Muslims that had been affected.]
The biggest fish
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, The Hague court¹s formal title, has been accused of bias by almost all sides in the former Yugoslavia, something of a tribute to its concerted attempts at impartiality. Although over half of the 76 people indicted by the tribunal are Serbs, it has also indicted and convicted several Bosnian Croats and Muslims. The tribunal is also understood to have issued secret indictments against at least four prominent Kosovo Albanians for the killing of Serb civilians during and after the 1999 Kosovo war. [It’s true that a tiny number of non-Serbs were indicted by the ICTY. This was necessary because even the supine western media had noticed the vast imbalance in the indictments.]
The tribunal was founded by a resolution of the UN Security Council in 1993, since when its prosecutors have pursued a strategy of putting lower-level officials on trial first‹partly because they were the only ones they could initially build a case against or apprehend‹and then working up the chain of command to more senior figures. Mr Milosevic, the biggest fish of all, was indicted in 1999 during NATO¹s war with Serbia over Kosovo. He was toppled by widespread public protests in 2000 after losing that war, and then handed over to the Hague last year by Serbia¹s newly-elected government, after the EU and America threatened to withhold aid. [When the UN Security Council first discussed a resolution to create a war crimes tribunal the UN General Secretary, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, made it crystal clear that the only ways in which the UN could create an international court would be by amending its Charter to include a new power, requiring unanimous support from all UN member states, or by creating a new international treaty. Madeleine Albright, knowing that neither of these ways would succeed, put Boutros-Ghali under huge pressure by threatening to cut off US contributions to the UN (by far the largest part of the UN budget) which were already some $3 billion dollars in arrears. Boutros-Ghali never changed his original advice, but did say that the creation of a ‘humanitarian court’ would be expedient if it prevented humanitarian tragedy (which wasn’t happening) and would be consistent with the UN’s ‘direction of travel’ towards more humanitarian intervention. This didn’t save his neck: Albright vetoed his reappointment for a second term, making him the only UN Secretary-General to suffer this fate. Milosevic was eventually defeated in the Serbian Presidential Election after massive US $70 million dollar intervention in the campaign, supported by grand promises of financial aid if Milosevic was not re-elected.]
The charges against Mr Milosevic are grave: crimes against humanity (the killing of unarmed civilians), violation of the Geneva Conventions and the laws and customs of war and genocide. Conviction on any one of these counts could bring life imprisonment. Mr Milosevic¹s original indictment was for the murders and deportations conducted by Serb forces in Kosovo. Since then, he has also been indicted for atrocities committed in earlier wars in Croatia and Bosnia. [The problem with all the ICTY indictments against Milosevic and other prominent figures was that they were issued before any evidence had been gathered to support the charges. Whereas proper legal systems would require a strong prima facie case before charges were levelled, the ICTY could indulge itself in any fantasy of its choice. The ICTY spent two years trying to substantiate the charges levelled against Milosevic in the Kosovo indictment, but got nowhere. In desperation, they then pleaded for the court to let them move on to the new indictments against him related to Croatia and Bosnia. Here again they failed to make any progress. The prosecution case fell apart and collapsed in chaos.]
Ms Del Ponte, the determined former Swiss attorney-general who serves as the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, has won the right to combine all these charges in a single trial, arguing that they were all part of the same criminal conspiracy to carve an ethnically-pure ‘Greater Serbia’ out of the former Yugoslavia. There are huge amounts of evidence that crimes took place. Bodies have been exhumed and studied by tribunal investigators throughout the region. Her chief challenge will be to tie Mr Milosevic to these crimes, or to prove that he knew they were taking place but did nothing to stop them or punish those responsible. ‘Some of the incidents revealed an almost medieval savagery and a calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare,’ Ms Del Ponte claimed in her opening statement. [No substantive evidence of any kind was ever presented to the court. Forensic and DNA evidence was described to the court in a verbal report from a senior official at the US-established organisation, the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), an American-run, Bosnian Muslim staffed operation. Both Croatia and Muslim Bosnia passed laws to ensure that none of the primary evidence allegedly gathered by the ICMP would ever become available for outside scrutiny. Nor would those who gathered this ‘evidence’ ever be brought before the court to give testimony and be subject to cross-examination by defence teams. Some justice.]
Still at large
There are victims all over the Balkans
Much will depend on what testimony Mr Milosevic¹s former subordinates, colleagues and political allies are willing to offer. Belgrade is rife with rumours about which senior Serbs will testify. Four other top leaders of the Milosevic regime were indicted with him, but remain at large, including Milan Milutinovic, the current president of the Serbia. Also still unapprehended are Radovan Karadzic, the political leader of the breakaway Bosnian Serbs, and Ratko Mladic, the former head of the Bosnian Serb army, both of whom have been indicted for genocide. Ms Del Ponte has often campaigned to get Serb authorities to hand these and others over to the tribunal. [In the event, many of Milosevic’s senior colleagues did give evidence, at great length. The prosecution’s only tactic seemed to be an endless fishing expedition. None of the witnesses incriminated Milosevic in any way – indeed, quite the reverse. The prosecution ran out of new avenues to explore and their case ended much as it had begun four years earlier. Only the extraordinary elasticity of their new law, Joint Criminal Enterprise, left the court with any scope to reach a guilty verdict.]
Critics of The Hague, and a sister tribunal set up in 1994 to try leaders of the Rwandan genocide, argue that they were sops to the consciences of western countries that did little to stop either conflict, and that the tribunals have been expensive flops, unable to hold fair trials or to try all but a handful of people, making the justice they deliver necessarily selective and partial. Supporters reply that, despite hiccups, the trials have been open and fair, that the tribunals can only try those indictees delivered to it by national authorities, and that justice, especially for such enormous crimes, does not come cheap. [The critics of The Hague Tribunal were right. It was a wholly corrupt court in every respect.]
The effects in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia of the trials have been mixed. The Rwandan government has been frustrated that the most important leaders of the genocide there are in international hands rather than its own, and has been harshly critical of the tribunal, in Arusha, Tanzania, for its slow pace and occasional stumbles. Trials in the Hague have run more smoothly, and forced some sort of reckoning in the Balkans, though the new Serb authorities seem keen on co-operating with the tribunal more to keep western aid flowing than to force the kind of soul searching which many believe Serbia needs. Mr Milosevic’s trial could yet change that. It is being broadcast live throughout the Balkans.
The opening of the Milosevic trial, which is expected to last at least two years, comes at a delicate time for international law
The opening of the Milosevic trial, which is expected to last at least two years, comes at a delicate time for what, until recently, looked like a decade-long trend towards the wider and more aggressive application of international law. The setting up of the tribunals themselves seemed to be an important step in this direction. They were followed by proposals for similar tribunals in Cambodia, East Timor, and other trouble spots, and helped to spawn a movement for a permanent international criminal court. The latter was launched at a 1998 UN treaty conference. The arrest the same year of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, in London on torture charges filed by a Spanish magistrate seemed to be another step towards establishing the principle that no one, not even a head of state acting in a supposedly official capacity, should be beyond the reach of international law. [The trial had actually lasted an unprecedented four years by the time the prosecution finished its case. This was not because the prosecution presented a wealth of evidence – it was because, having no worthwhile evidence, they hoped that uncorroborated hearsay from hundreds of carefully coached witnesses would give the impression of an overwhelming case.]
So far, 139 countries have signed the criminal-court treaty and 52 have ratified it. When 60 ratifications are received, as is expected in the next few months, the court will be established, representing something of a belated fulfilment of the promise of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders more than 50 years ago. [This was just a retrospective attempt to legalise the illegal court.]
But in the past few years, the move towards the wider implementation of international law has stumbled, mostly because of American ambivalence.The United States, under President Bill Clinton, had been instrumental in setting up the Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals, and backed them strongly. It had also originally supported the idea of a permanent international criminal court. But it balked at this when other countries‹including its NATO allies‹insisted that the court be independent of UN Security Council control and refused to give America itself an absolute exemption from its jurisdiction.
President George Bush¹s administration has been even more hostile to the idea of the court. And the Bush administration, although invoking international law on occasion as all previous administrations have done, is signally unenthusiastic about the constraints of international treaties, casting doubts on the future of a number of arms control treaties, for example. [The Tribunal had served the purposes of the western allies by facilitating the move away from a world governed by international law to a world governed on the basis of a ‘rules-based’ system where the major powers decide what the ‘rules’ are and then take action to enforce them. The ‘rules’ are not the result of democratic discussion and are not written down.]
Mr Milosevic will do everything he can to disrupt the proceedings, and to brand his prosecutors and judges as tools of NATO and America, and the charges against him as part of a political vendetta
Its reluctance to apply the Geneva Conventions to al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan, and the brushing aside of protests about this from European allies, have also raised doubts about its respect for international law, never mind its willingness to countenance any extension of it. Even many of those who back the world criminal court, and want to see law applied more widely, wonder if this will now be possible while the world¹s sole superpower behaves in this way, or if it becomes unrelentingly hostile to the idea. The UN’s decision this month to give up on plans to co-operate with Cambodia on planned trials of surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge because it found the Cambodians too intransigent could be one sign that small, and still undemocratic, countries already sense which way the wind is blowing.
Into this volatile mix comes Mr Milosevic¹s trial, the highest profile such court case since Nuremberg. Mr Milosevic will do everything he can to disrupt the proceedings, and to brand his prosecutors and judges as tools of NATO and America, and the charges against him as part of a political vendetta. If he succeeds, the losers will not only be the tens of thousands of victims and their families in the Balkans, but also all those who had hoped that the restraining hand of law, as well as the bomb and the bullet, might play a greater role in international affairs. [Milosevic was not disruptive at any stage of his trial, despite incessant hostility from the trial judge, Sir Richard May. His health was a problem from time to time because the court deliberately deprived him of the treatment he needed for angina – even though this treatment was readily available. His sudden death from the condition, just weeks into his defence, got the ICTY off a very awkward hook. How convenient.]