I n t e r n a t i o n a l C o n f e r e n c e
The Hague Proceedings against Slobodan Milosevic: Emerging Issues in International Law
The Hague, Saturday, 26 February 2005
Keynote Address
(transcript)
by Ramsey Clark
Thank you very much, particularly Vladimir, for bringing us together for this important opportunity to analyze the meaning of the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic and what people who want peace on earth ought to do about it.
I have to look at the case from, and present it as I see it, from a historical standpoint, because of the devilization in misunderstandings that is so pervasive in all of the recent problems of aggression in international criminal justice that we’ve had.
Humanity has struggled to create organizations that afford some opportunity for independence, true independence – economic, political and social, and peace, and among them was the idea that a Federation of Southern Slavs would be an important element in any hope for peace and independence from foreign economic, political, military exploitation. And as we look at the history before World War I, you see that there is a lot of evidence to support the idea a Federation of Southern Slavs is of utmost importance to peace in that region and the viability of political independence for the Slavic peoples in the South of Europe. And the beginning of that effort followed World War I, many believing that at least the triggering factor in the violence was the assassination in Sarajevo.
The first dismemberment or cannibalization – if you want to think of it that way – of a Federation of Southern Slavs occurred rapidly in April of 1941, though it needs to be remembered and thought of in connection with even the charges in this trial. Suddenly, that first week in the springtime month of April, the Slavic Federation was invaded by Germany, by Italy, by Hungary, by Bulgaria and even by Albania. And it was chopped to pieces. Croatia was given the appearance of political sovereignty and independence through the Nazi government that recovered throughout the region for the next four years, but Slovenia was divided between Italy and we think Germany, but certainly Austria which was part of Germany by this time and after the Anschluss was a major factor – so there goes your richest of the six republics after World War II. The occupation of Croatia – and which it really was, included Bosnia – as we see it today, or saw it after World War II in the new Federation of Southern Slavs. Bulgaria occupied Macedonia and half of that part of Serbia called Kosovo; Albania occupied the other half. Hungary came down as far as Novi Sad and – I don’t pronounce all of these Yugoslav words right any more than I do all the English words – but Vojvodina, whatever it is, an area that had a history during the Austro-Hungarian Empire of having a lot of Hungarians in there but it was part of the Yugoslav Federation.
So here you had a war of aggression in the only proper definition of “place at peace” – it was no threat to its neighbor, suddenly attacked and invaded by its neighbors’ military forces. And the moral of the studies of human misery which are many and some are dire, you don’t find many that are really worse than the four years of the early ‘forties in what has been called Yugoslavia from time to time – the genocides of Romany and Serbs and anybody else that happened to look around to someone. Then finally came the end of World War II and at Nuremberg, where the tribunal, following the Charter which listed as the first crime against peace, the war of aggression, determined that the war of aggression was the supreme international crime, and included among the wars of aggression that were adjudicated, the defendants accused and found guilty, was the cannibalization of Yugoslavia.
We talk about history repeating itself. When I first went into Yugoslavia in 1946 – I was a young marine who was shot at. I can still remember looking out the window at the anti-aircraft fire. I thought, why are those people shooting at us? It took me a long time to realize how right they were. They were shooting at us because they were angry, because they didn’t think we had any business coming in there. I was just going in delivering mail, so to speak, classified documents for courier servicemen.
I went back in 1951 and I went through the country and saw it reviving – I mean, the devastation was still bad as it was all over Europe. I had seen all of this devastation of Europe really all the way out to Moscow, Warsaw, all of it in 1945 and 1946. But the people were together and the Yugoslav Federation was working. It was working, and somehow or other, with all the history and all the problems and all the national divisions there was cohesiveness and it had the strength among all these East European countries to lead and maintaining a high degree of independence between the United States and Western Powers and the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. It helped form the non-aligned and it was hard to kick around. It was right in the middle.
With the collapse of the economy of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Bloc, the leading economic potential in the whole region was Yugoslavia, and it was growing in dynamic for anybody who went in there. But if by US standards this was to be the end of history there could only thereafter be one form of government and that is capitalist plutocracy if that is not redundant. Because the United States is not a democracy and it’s a gross misunderstanding if you think it is, it is governed by the wealth of the country and the wealthy people of the country. They own the media, they own the Pentagon, they own the munitions factories, they own the major corporations and they determine the policies of the government. And that’s not democracy, when you spend each party, each major party, we only have two, which means you have no real choice because they both have to say the same thing or they’ll lose, you’ve got to get 51 percent of the votes. They both spend a billion dollars in the campaign and 40 percent of the people don’t even think it’s worth voting, then you don’t call that a democracy.
But anyway, Yugoslavia had to go. If you doubt it, ask why was the Congress in the United States insisting bypassing the Federal Government of Yugoslavia that each of the six republics hold elections to elect governments setting aside the governments they had, and unless they did that within the year, there would be no foreign aid, there would be no US cooperation with the individual republic, not with the Federal Government of Yugoslavia which had none anyway, couldn’t expect any. And there would be sanctions separately against the republics as there were sanctions, economic sanctions then imposed upon the Federation. And then you saw the beginning of the coming-apart of the Federation.
By far the bloodiest war for the United States of America, that is, our people, which we ever fought, was fought precisely to prevent the break-up of the Federal Republic of the United States – the Civil War. We lost more lives of American soldiers in that war than all of our other wars put together, from the Indians to what we call the revolutionary war, the war of 1812 against the British, and the Mexican-American war where we took half of Mexico by force. We were taking Texas as my state previously by force, all the way to World War I and World War II, more killed in the Civil War. And the sole basis for the Civil War, some say, it was to free the slaves but let me tell you, anyway it wasn’t about freeing the slaves, it was about holding the Union together because they had to have this aggregate power.
It is precisely what they intended to deny to Yugoslavia. And you saw Slovenia split-off first fairly peacefully, and you saw the President of Yugoslavia negotiate that loss for the Federal Republic. You saw Croatia withdraw and immediately countries like Germany recognizing it and breaking up this Federal Republic that was created by the League of Nations so to speak, the first time, as an essential to peace and then you saw the miserable time in Bosnia. And before all this, 90 percent of all the economic trade of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was among the six federations. In truth, the economic viability of any of the republics depended on that association. The ability to exploit, dominate them, was overwhelming without it. And that’s what’s happening and that’s what it was about in part. But it was also to make a psychological point that it was a failure that the system didn’t work. You saw Macedonia come off. Now you see we are not at the end.
I’ve got in this package two articles from the New York Times of the 22nd and 23rd of this month. On the 22nd, Frank Carlucci, who was a long time CIA Executive, Agent to Executive and Secretary of Defense for almost two years in the Reagan Administration and then Head of the Institute Carlyle – and we need to know what that is if we want to have freedom any place – and is now President of Merits of the Institute Carlyle and he is saying, let’s not forget the war is not over, and the war which is not over, that he is talking about, is Kosovo. And he says, the only solution is the total independence of Kosovo. Does he know what the people of Serbia think about that? Does he know the historic meaning of that? Does he know what’s happened in Kosovo since the war of aggression by the United States and some of its NATO friends at that time? And what is the plan? The plan is to complete the independence by mid 2006. And this isn’t just a casual article, this is what the United States intends to do in Kosovo. On the 23rd you have the Prime Minister and the President of Montenegro saying that separation and full sovereignty of Montenegro now is essential. So you have not only lost five of the republics, with only Serbia, but Kosovo and Montenegro, we won the five republics what we have, and how long will it be before it’ll be the other parts of Serbia, so that, you know, balkanizing is a verb in the English language, it means breaking into small parts, it comes from the history of the Balkans, so they have balkanized the Balkans as they have never been balkanized before.
And who is to blame for all this? Of course, Slobodan Milosevic is to blame for all that, who else. He is blamed for doing what Abraham Lincoln did in the civil war and that is trying to preserve the union. I hate to use American analogies, but that’s where it comes from and that’s what I know most. Lincoln said many times, that his sole purpose was to preserve the Union, in other words to preserve the Federation of States that made the United States. And here the sole purpose, the United States was to destroy the Yugoslav Union, so the end of history would be real and so it could be done. And to do that, you had to demonize and destroy the leadership that sought to preserve the Yugoslav Union.
And to have its way, United States had to corrupt the UN and international justice, and the way it did it was by causing the Security Council and the role of the great personal passion on the subject, prejudice you might Madeleine Albright led the effort and the Security Council – caused the Security Council to authorize a criminal court, to try those who were responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes in former Yugoslavia. When the supreme international crime is the war of aggression and the war of aggression that was waged against Yugoslavia was not only political and economic, it was military from beginning to end, and it’s still going on there. If equality is the mother of justice, if equal justice under law is the founding principle of the rule of law, then the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia fails to meet both of those standards because it persecutes all the enemies of the United States to ensure further domination of the region. And in a sense it is more deadly than the bombs.
I was in Serbia early prior the bombing in early May and in the last part in June and the bombing was deadly. I mean, there were cluster bombs and apartment development in Novi Sad and a major hospital complex in Nis and all over Belgrade. Billions of dollars of destructions in property and thousands of deaths against an association of defenseless people. If there was any anti-aircraft fire that started to play a hazard against us in 1946 was far more capable defending the country than any anti-aircraft fire they had against the US military assault on Serbia. You bombed Serbia to protect that part of Serbia called Kosovo was the theory. But more important is how the central is how it corrupted the United Nations, because the United Nations Charter – and you can read it as long as you want to – and you’ll never find any provision that authorizes the creation of an International Criminal Court. And it would never have been a United Nations if there had been any suggestion that that Charter contained the power to create an International Criminal Court, because the people who read the Charter would never have permitted themselves to be subjected to the power of that court, because they don’t intend to be accountable to anyone. Which is why you see the United States so feverishly opposing the ICC, why you see it running from country to country to persuade the country to enter into a bilateral treaty not to surrender US citizens or US personnel, it may be aliens in the US-Military to the ICC. Because they intend that their agents be above the law. The court itself is illegal, it ultra violates the Charter and unless that’s addressed, its precedence will remain even if the practice – as we hope – of creating ad hoc tribunals to pursue specific enemies.
I mean, some of us, Chris Black has just spent three months on only one of many trips to Tanzania where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda sits. And all the blood that was spilled in Rwanda in 1994, the majority was clearly the blood of Hutus. A Hutu has never been indicted in that court. The US surrogates, the Tutsis, have never been indicted, yet they were responsible for most of the deaths. They invaded the country if not hours before, at least hours after the plane carrying the Presidents of Burundi and Rwanda, appeared to cause the outbreak of violence. They were invading already, they had pre-positioned people. They had a regiment in the capital of Rwanda itself, Kigali. Then they soon took over the whole country and there has never been a case against them. They’ve caused thousands and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of deaths of Hutus and after 1994 they’ve caused deaths of Hutus in Eastern Zaire as it was called at the time in Congo, and they’ve been in the US service for the Congo and for Burundi and for Rwanda and for Uganda, and they are above the law. While the Hutus are systematically persecuted and more than hundred and ten thousand are still kept in prison since 1994 or they were caught thereafter without trials. The vast majority without even being charged in Rwanda, and here you have this symbol of international justice illegally created by the Security Council, again at the insistence of the United States, prosecuting or persecuting illegally.
So what it is, it’s those who, to borrow a phrase from Professors Singh, those who heroically resist – as President Milosevic did – aggression, and the domination of their countries, pay the price. What you have done is, you’ve used, what you call international justice and power as a weapon of war by other means, and deadly war.
Look at the fairness for a minute, Robert H. Jackson, who is our – when I say our, I mean in the US, because I still consider it part of my responsibility, that’s why I act so frenetically to protest his wrongful conduct, because if the highest form of patriotism is to protest what your country does when it’s wrong, not praise what it does when it’s right or particularly not praise what it does when it’s wrong. But what you see, is the use of these courts criminally, and Jackson at Nuremberg which had its problems, observed that the record on which the Nuremberg case would be tried, would be the same record on which history would judge the judges at Nuremberg.
Here you had the investigation of President Milosevic beginning in 1994 in the fall, in October and November. For two years plus, the first Chief Prosecutor investigated as diligently as his capacity permitted, the culpability of Slobodan Milosevic for what happened in Slovenia and in Croatia and in Bosnia and in a few other places. He wrote in his memoirs after he left that he found no evidence. Then Louise Arbour succeeded him and in May of 1999 she brought the indictment of President Milosevic for acts that allegedly had occurred earlier than 1999. Not in Slovenia, not in Croatia, not in Bosnia, but in Kosovo, at a time when the UN was bombing the daylights out of Pristina, not to mention the rest of Serbia.
And they had all these years to investigate, they presented over a period of more than 300 days of trial, 200 witnesses, 36,000 pages of transcript, 500,000 documents in the case, and they’ve had President Milosevic argue with them most of the time as to whether he could even speak in court or represent himself in any degree, isolated from support and he is supposed to defend this case under those circumstances. There is no intention that he should be able to defend the case or to present his evidence. And even now you see a bunch of judges haggling at him after the long period in which they tried to present evidence but failed of his involvement, saying you’re too slow, or that’s irrelevant or improper, you’re making a political speech, or something like that.
But we don’t want history to have to judge this record, to judge this court, because we know now that the court is illegal and we know now that its purpose is to destroy opposition to the United States.
But there is one extremely important, extremely optimistic and even happy side to this otherwise miserable story, and that is the role of the human spirit. President Milosevic, yesterday when some of us met with him, asked that his very best wishes be extended to everyone here, which I do, is his deep concern for the future of Yugoslavia and his great joy that there are people who recognize it and stand up to see that it’s a better day tomorrow. And his spirit is absolutely undaunted. In more than 4 years of solitary confinement essentially, cut off from family, cut off from friends, cut off from all forms of support, demonized constantly.
The Michael Jackson trial is getting a thousand times more attention than the Slobodan Milosevic trial. I mean that sick, pitiful little trial. Michael Jackson is supposed to be worthy of the attention of the world, but it is, what we hear about.
And his fighting spirit is higher than ever. I’ve watched the law for a long time as you can tell by looking at my face and I don’t know of a more heroic resistance for an individual under every form of adversity, has stood up tall and resisted heroically.
And more than that, for those who heard him, can understand demonstrated that the real criminal acts were by those who were breaking up the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and not those who were trying to preserve the Union. The violence and deaths were caused by the others overwhelmingly. And they are the ones who have created this court that are sitting in justice.
So the question is what do we do? I think, first we have to help create the understanding that the real criminal conduct – it must be examined – is the war of aggression against the former Republic of Yugoslavia as it is called and demand accountability for that.
I think we also have to insist that there be full support for a new effort for a new Federation for Southern Slavs and others in the Balkans. Otherwise they’re going to be servants in the basement of Europe. There’ll be no future and no real hope for them. They are not only cannibalized, they are atomized.
We have to free Slobodan Slobodan Milosevic. We have to see that the ad hoc criminal tribunals of the Security Council are declared illegal, as they obviously are. If we want peace we have to do that which many people are skeptical about, and that is, we have to create a criminal court that can hold power accountable. Because what we are looking at now are abuses of power including the corruption of criminal justice to have its way, and it has to begin somewhere. And we have to help find the means for financing, staffing and supporting an ongoing effort to bring to the attention of the public and those who have the power to accomplish some of the things that we believe are essential to the future of the planet in peace. Because the terrible war of aggression today on the planet and the devastation that it can wreak far exceeds anything that humanity has experienced to date. So in the name and spirit of Slobodan Milosevic, let’s believe that we shall overcome, then act to do it.
