I met Slobodan Milosevic only once, in Scheveningenprison in The Hague. I was there to see if I might somehow make a small contribution to his defense at the NATO-managed International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Despite the abnormal circumstances, President Milosevic was a perfect host, offering me coffee with a warm handshake and friendly smile. He certainly didn’t need my defense as all the facts were on his side. He was calm and confident. He had every reason to believe that his defense would set the record straight, even in the hostile atmosphere of the tribunal run by his enemies.
Only his death in prison under questionable circumstances prevented him from completing his defense.
Establishing the truth about Slobodan Milosevic requires recognizing the criminal behavior of the Great Powers that branded him a criminal as part of their self-justifying narrative.
The NATO powers controlled public opinion through mass media and the Hague Tribunal.
To gain Western public support, the NATO narrative portrayed the Yugoslav disintegration as a remake of Nazi aggression. In this grotesquely distorted fiction, the Serbian leader was cast as “the new Hitler”. Western media, even on the left, portrayed the democratically elected President as a dictator, an extreme nationalist, a “thug”. Even now, day after day, Serbia suffers from the taint of a collective guilt imposed by the NATO narrative.
For the crime of war, Milosevic had no motive. NATO had very strong motivation.
Throughout the Yugoslav conflicts, the principal objectives of Milosevic were clear: insofar as possible to preserve Yugoslav unity, when this failed to protect the Serbian people and most of all, to find compromise and make peace.
For the United States, destroying Yugoslavia, with its remnants of socialism and ties to the nonaligned Third World, was the first act in solidifying U.S. domination of Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even worse, Yugoslavia was used as an experimental laboratory for the post-Cold War phase of U.S. imperialism. Humanitarian intervention was used as a pretext for military intervention, providing NATO with a new global mission to ensure its survival and expansion after the collapse of its theoretical adversary, the Soviet Union.
In reality, President Milosevic was probably the least responsible for Yugoslavia’s destruction of all its post-Tito leaders. His very efforts to find compromise were portrayed as sinister. The Americans who at Dayton exploited his determination to end the conflict in Bosnia rewarded him with continued sanctions and decisive support to the armed uprising by criminal elements in Kosovo.
NATO then committed a pure act of aggression against Yugoslavia, in a one-sided terror bombing designed to force Milosevic to give up Kosovo. It was not a war between adversaries, but blackmail by bombing. Give up or we destroy all your infrastructure. In the midst of this crime, on May 24, 1999, the Canadian prosecutor at the Hague Tribunal, Louise Arbour, issued her indictment against Slobodan Milosevic, accusing him of crimes against civilians in Kosovo. No proof of these alleged crimes was ever found, but at that time NATO was actually killing civilians in Kosovo by bombing them. The real crime being blatantly committed at the time was the NATO bombing.
The defense of Milosevic is much more than the defense of the memory of one man, or even of the honor of the Serbian nation. It entails radically revising the standard version of history in the Western world, used to justify U.S. and NATO military intervention anywhere in the world. The ignominious Western retreat from Afghanistan should be a step toward this revision. But Western arrogance is deeply rooted in both institutions and the mentality of elites, and establishment of the truth is likely to be a very long and difficult task.
But the world is more than the West, and Serbia has its honorable place in this greater world.
I send you my best wishes.
Diana Johnstone
(Speech at the International Conference MILOSEVIC – AGAINST NATO CRIMES, FOR A NEW WORLD)