The trial of Slobodan Milosevic is expected to last for at least two years. On Feb. 12, 2002, the first day of the trial, Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, addressed the Tribunal. BBC News immediately excerpted her address on the Internet, with this summary of it under her photograph: "Del Ponte said Milosevic was driven by quest for power."
What a triumph for a three-year criminal investigation! A startling prosecutorial discovery, indeed. Three years ago, Milosevic was being described by President Clinton, his State Department and the Tribunal itself as the Hitler of today, and Yugoslavia was attacked to save the Albanians of Kosovo from Hitler-like extermination.
For three years the Tribunal, headed by its chief prosecutor, had been working on the case of the Hitler of today, and here, on Feb. 12, 2002, she came up with the epoch-making and bloodcurdling discovery that Milosevic "was driven by quest for power."
As everyone knows, innocent people such as Carla del Ponte and Bill Clinton are never driven by "quest for power," "ambition" or any other such vices of Hitler and Milosevic.
True, some evil tongues may insinuate that Carla, a short time ago an obscure nonentity, mentally at the level of a "retarded 7-year-old" (as Milosevic put it, without naming her by name for obvious reasons), has been driven by the ambition to be a world celebrity, to be a new global Solon, who has appeared as a female about 26 centuries after the male Solon of Athens – nay, to be the founder of new international justice under which Hitler, Stalin and Mao would have been put on trial in The Hague at the first sign of their crimes against humanity, such as the invasion of the Netherlands.
But axiomatically, all of Carla's motives can be only virtuous. As for Bill Clinton, who can doubt that he has been as all-virtuous as Carla?
Inversely, listen in horror to what she said about Milosevic in the final one-third of her address, entitled on the Internet "Quest for Power." (Keep this from children under 12, for Carla's revelations of something so heinous may traumatize them psychologically.)
Thus we learn that "a mediocre strategist, Milosevic did nothing but pursue his ambition."
Can you imagine Carla being mediocre and pursuing
How could their honors listen to this without fainting? I hope there were no children under 12 in the audience! But this was not all.
"One must not seek ideals underlying the acts of the accused," she concluded.
Carla! Have a heart! You cannot do that to us! No ideals! Not only is he the Hitler of today, as everyone already knew three years ago, but he also has no ideals either! Such an unspeakable villain must be sentenced by the Tribunal to death by hanging at the very least!
Yet prepare for something even more heinous. While "the search for power is what motivated Slobodan Milosevic," he concealed that search behind ...
Some judiciary simpletons or laymen may suppose that he concealed his heinous motivation behind his brilliant speeches; Hitler was a brilliant speaker. Oh, no! Only innocent people, having ideals and unmotivated by power, ambition or vanity, such as Carla or Bill Clinton, can be brilliant, original and talented, while Milosevic concealed his vices behind "the grandiloquent rhetoric and the hackneyed phrases he used."
You see? He is guilty of mediocrity – nay, a triteness, sterility, bad taste. Take any phrase of Carla or Bill Clinton. Can it be hackneyed? Never, ever! It is always a gem of intellectual brilliance, originality and profundity, to say nothing of ideals and other virtues.
If Carla or anyone else at the Tribunal had had a sense of humor, they could have been told Mark Twain's joke about someone first accused of having murdered his parents and then of having taken to smoking.
In 1999, Milosevic was accused of having been the Hitler of today, and in 2002, after nearly three years of building the case and collecting evidence, Carla accuses him of being mediocre, pompous, trite, seeking power and having no ideals. Has he taken to smoking, too?
In his speech, Milosevic spoke as a person abducted by criminals who are trying to prove that
I will not quote his speech (apart from his remark I quoted above about the mental level of Carla del Ponte), since he is an interested party and there are quite a few distinguished outsiders in all countries who share his view.
Thus, early in 2001, in the Ottawa Citizen of Canada, former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bisset summed up "the Tribunal" as follows:
As of Feb. 19, 2002 – a week after the beginning of the trial – the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic consisted of representatives of 20 countries. The United States was represented by 11 members of the committee, including former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, its co-chairman.
On one occasion in the past, Clark and I spoke together publicly against Soviet persecution of dissidents under the pretense of a "trial." His attitude toward the trial of Milosevic is the same, that it is political persecution, not legal prosecution.
The committee's Internet postings, which occupied 29 pages as of Feb. 19, are sharper in their outspoken condemnation of the Tribunal than Milosevic was in his speech. They call it a kangaroo court.
The Web site's Internet reprint of a New Statesman article is entitled "Milosevic, Prisoner of Conscience." One of the committee's Internet postings describes a London meeting under this keynote: "Serbia on Trial – NATO Guilty: The 'Trial' of Slobodan Milosevic."
Accuracy in Media, headed by Reed Irvine, began to study the representation of Milosevic as the Hitler of today in early 1999, when that image began to be widely publicized by President Clinton, his State Department and the obliging U.S. mainstream media. I began to study the case for my book in progress about the same time.
I had been in close association with AIM during the time of our joint struggle against the post-1963 tendency to ignore the Soviet rulers' quest for world domination.
But after the Soviet dictatorship fell in 1991, I was out of touch with AIM, and hence all the greater was my satisfaction when I recently discovered through the Internet that having studied the Milosevic case completely independently and often through different sources available to us, we had come to similar conclusions.
What had Milosevic done to be indicted by the Tribunal (or kangaroo court) back in 1999? Speaking at the Brookings Institution on April 5, 1999, as Yugoslavia was being bombed by NATO, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright represented Milosevic as the Hitler of today, whom NATO attacked to stop his genocide of the Albanians in Kosovo.
But the only specific example of this genocide she gave was the alleged massacre of 45 Albanians in the village of Racak, Kosovo, on Jan. 15, 1999. In his last interview before the NATO attack on Yugoslavia (which I will quote from later on), President Clinton described the "Racak massacre" as the cause of the forthcoming attack.
Almost three years later, on Feb. 15, 2002, BBC News headlined on the first page of its Internet report and next to a photograph showing corpses:
BLOODY PAST
Racak massacre haunts Milosevic trial
The 1999 massacre of more
than 40 Kosovo Albanians in
Racak looks set to figure
prominently in the imminent
trial of Slobodan Milosevic. (7)
Indeed, in The Indictment (May 22, 1999), The Amended Indictment (June 29, 2001), and The Second Amended Indictment (Oct. 17, 2001), the prosecutor of the Tribunal stated the following about the "Racak massacre":
At this point, let me just note some strange aspects of the paragraph above and of the list of alleged victims. The KLA is not mentioned, though all reporters present at Racak then and later described the event as a battle between the KLA and the Yugoslav forces.
Did the KLA exist at all, according to the Tribunal? The Yugoslav forces shelled the village with "VJ units" – or just shelled it, according to the Second Amended Indictment. Why on earth, if there was not a single armed KLA man anywhere in sight? To kill civilians?
Then why did not the three Indictments say how many civilians were killed by "VJ units" or other shells? Oddly, the list of victims does not say a word about how each of them was killed.
The list gives only their sex and "approximate age." There are only two females, and three males are aged 13, 70 and 60 (their "approximate age"). All the other persons whose "approximate age" is given are young men, starting from the age of 18 (the conscription age in many countries).
Why did not "VJ units" or other shells kill a single child, and only one adolescent of 13? Racak seems to have been populated almost exclusively by males of the age of soldiers.
Villagers who attempted to flee were shot. Is it mostly young men who attempted to flee, while children, women and elderly men did not, but bravely defied the killers and hence were not killed, with few exceptions?
Also, "approximately 25 men [!] attempted to hide," but were discovered and killed. All these 25 or so victims were men! Had they left their wives, children and parents to their fate and "attempted to hide in a building"?
On the other hand, surely the alleged killers must have understood that having left so many villagers alive, they preserved as many witnesses of their "massacre of 45 civilians." Weirdly enough, the three Indictments say not a word about how many people had been living in Racak, or how many of them had survived, and why the survivors, even under shelling, were mostly women, children and elderly men.
None of the three Indictments indicates the "approximate age" of one of the two women and 23 men. More than two years passed between the Indictment and The Second Amended Indictment, but the survivors at Racak, mostly women, children and elderly men, had not told the Tribunal even "the approximate age" of that woman and those 23 men, who were their neighbors or members of their families.
Why is only the "approximate age" indicated on the list? Do not the parents or siblings know that their son or brother is 13, and not 14 or 12? Can you imagine a village in which no one knows anyone's exact age, while neither the age of one out of two women killed, nor the age of 23 out of 43 males killed is known even approximately?
What about the records? Or would the inhabitants of Racak be born, go to school, acquire property, pay taxes, attend the mosque, marry, have medical treatment or receive social benefits – all without any records kept by anyone? What about the documents found on them? Also none?
What was the
Videos shown on U.S. mainstream television in 2001 recorded the flight of New Yorkers away from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. After that date, more Americans can understand the flight of Albanians and Serbs when NATO bombed Kosovo daily and no one knew when the bombing would end.
But the bombing was not all. Kosovo was the area of contention, and hence it was also to be the epicenter of a life-and-death ground war, should not the bombing alone be enough for Yugoslavia to capitulate. Then nothing but ashes and ruins would remain of Kosovo.
The flight of about 1 million people in a country where a private car, let alone a van or a truck, was for many a luxury, involved public transportation. Hence the myth that these Kosovars actually loved NATO bombs or found them harmless, but were carried on trains and trucks against their will away from Kosovo as a matter of "ethnic cleansing," though for some obscure reason not a single Albanian has ever been banished, even from Belgrade itself.
Crime exists in every country, and as in every war, the NATO attack increased the crime rate, but NATO, not Milosevic, was responsible for the war and hence for this war growth of the crime rate in Kosovo, seized by fear and in a vortex of a general stampede, producing anarchy, chaos and impunity for organized crime.
Nor is it impossible that the local nationalists, extremists and homespun strategists among the Serbs (and what nation does not have such in its midst?) interpreted the war, started by NATO, as the need, license or opportunity to add fuel to the stampede caused by the war.
But, amazing as it may seem to the Tribunal, it is not Milosevic who has invented ethnic and religious hatred, strife and crimes, especially crimes during a war. According to Steven Erlanger in the New York Times, over 380 persons were reported in May 1999 to have been arrested in Kosovo for such crimes as ordering Albanians to leave Kosovo (to rob their dwellings, for example) and given sentences of 5 to 20 years by military courts.
The three Indictments create the impression that not a single NATO bomb ever fell on Yugoslavia, or if such a bomb did fall, it was as harmless for civilians as a summer breeze. What flight could there be as a result?
According to Clinton
However, at Clinton's news conference of March 19, 1999, on the eve of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia, there was not a hint of the banishment of Albanians from Kosovo, though the New York Times text of his speech occupies four-fifths of a full page.
Clinton spoke of only one event that justified, required, demanded a NATO attack on Yugoslavia unless and until it left Kosovo and allowed NATO to occupy it. In the village of Racak, Kosovo, on Jan. 15, 1999, "Serb troops massacred 44 civilians," as one of the correspondents present put it.
Clinton described this massacre as the crime against humanity that made it imperative for NATO to launch war against Yugoslavia about two months later in order to save the Albanians of Kosovo, in cooperation with the "Kosovo Liberation Army," from Milosevic and his subordinates, who had killed 44 (or 45) Albanian civilians in Racak, and (consequently?) would kill all the Albanians in Kosovo.
Before quoting President Clinton's historic interview, it may be relevant to note that the "massacre of 44 [or 45] civilians" was a comically crude fake fabricated by the criminally ruthless but far from criminally savvy "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA).
Indeed, on May 10, 1999, the Chicago Tribune published a statement made in Washington by Walter J. Rockler, former prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, who said that "the attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent 'Polish atrocities' against Germans."
The "Polish atrocities" had been fabricated. The "Serbian atrocities" against Albanians, viz., the "massacre of 44 [or 45] civilians," had also been fabricated. The brazenness of the NATO aggression, based on a fabrication, thus matched that of Hitler and those war criminals whom Rockler had prosecuted.
Rockler's indictment in the Chicago Tribune was not picked up by any other periodical or electronic program, as far as I know. The vast majority of people in the United States have never known that the "massacre" was a fabrication, which the former prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials compared to Hitler's fabrication of "Polish atrocities" as the "cause" of his war on Poland.
The above is an excerpt from Lev Navrozov's book in progress, "Out of Moscow and Into New York: A Life in the Geostrategically Lobotomized West in the Age of Terrorism and Post-nuclear Superweapons."
PUBLISHERS: Should you considering publishing this book (please bear in mind that a substantial advance is expected), the 27-page Proposal and the first 106-page section of the book can be mailed to you if you if you apply to me at
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