Dear friends, dear comrades,
I thank you for the invitation to speak here.
In this country, many were under the illusion that because of its fascist past, Germany could no longer participate in wars, even though the writing was on the wall. At that time, I did not know Klaus Hartmann’s article “Wo bleibt die Friedensbewegung” (Where is the peace movement?), written in October 1998. At that time, a shiver ran down my spine when Gerhard Schröder opened his declaration of war against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with the words “We are not waging war!
At that time, we founded a working group on the Yugoslav war in Darmstadt and made contact with the Yugoslav club Jadran. Together with the club members we informed every week in the city centre about the illegal war and its destruction. At a demonstration of an action alliance, a Milošević poster of a woman was torn down by fellow demonstrators and it was difficult to maintain unity because the alliance was divided into two factions, those who wanted to defend the attacked country at all costs and those who wanted to demonstrate against NATO and Milošević. This equidistance of the peace movement could not be overcome even in the following illegal wars until today. The AK Yugoslavia War then more or less merged into the newly founded International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM).
The ICDSM was founded on 24.03.2001, three months before Slobodan Milošević was taken to The Hague. It was a far-sighted decision by Velko Valkanov and Ramsey Clark, as an organisational structure was already in place when it came to supporting the defence of the president who did not recognise the illegal tribunal in The Hague.
At the first hearing in The Hague, Hajo Kahlke protested alone with a sign “War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom, The Hague is Justice.” He was immediately arrested and kept in custody for four hours. This already showed the nervousness of the multi-billion dollar, largely non-UN funded, apparatus in The Hague.
But it got much worse for the illegal tribunal. Werner Pirker put it aptly in a commentary for the Junge Welt: “The plaintiffs and judges of The Hague as well as the mob journalism had expected a different Milošević, one who corresponded to their stupid ideas: a disturbed man of violence, disinterested in clarifying the events of the war, devious and cowardly, only concerned with saving his own skin, one who might even whimper for mercy. But then there sat before them an accomplished jurist, an intellectual the likes of which are rarely found among politicians these days, a man who defended not his person but the cause of his life, his country’s right to sovereignty, and who was the only one in the courtroom to shed light on the conspiracy against Yugoslavia.” End quote! Slobodan Milošević has become a symbol of the struggle for justice and freedom in The Hague.
During the trial of Slobodan Milošević, the ICDSM organised several demonstrations, press conferences and a conference in The Hague, all with broad international participation. Three members of the German section worked in the defence team. The support of the defence team was partly financed by donations from German-speaking countries, which unlawfully led to several account cancellations and a house search. But even among people who dubbed themselves left-wing, our commitment was not always met with goodwill. In the beginning, it was not uncommon to be insulted and put in the right-wing corner. At that time it was a new experience, but in the meantime it has become inflationary on all kinds of topics.
One of the objectives of the ICDSM, namely the closure of the illegal tribunals, could not be achieved. Although the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) closed its doors in 2013, it lives on as a “residual mechanism”, which also throws its propaganda bubbles into the countries of the former Yugoslavia by setting up documentation centres where the files are processed in a selected form. The disinformation campaigns of politicians and media cartels have hardly diminished in their severity and are targed against Serbia.
The transformation of the ICDSM into the ICSM was logical in order to carry on the political legacy of Slobodan Milošević and to stand up to the never-ending flood of propaganda. During the process, we were closely bound together by daily necessities. This is no longer the case with our new far-reaching agenda. I am convinced that the activists in the individual countries are working tirelessly for our goals. But we should again set ourselves concrete goals on the basis of our statutes, where we can once again put this unique alliance of people from East and West of the most diverse world views, as someone once put it, to work across countries. I hope that next year we will be able to meet again in person and discuss this.
I would like to conclude with the words that our meantime deceased President Velko Valkanov gave us in 2003: “Here in The Hague, two powers are engaged in a difficult struggle : the world lie and the world truth. In this struggle, we are on the side of world truth. We have no right to lose this struggle, the struggle for the future of humanity.”
Thank you for your attention!
Peter Betscher
(Speech at the International Conference MILOŠEVIĆ – AGAINST NATO CRIMES, FOR A NEW WORLD)