| International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic*ICDSM |
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(from The Spectator: July 10, 2004)
Let
Slobo speak for himself John Laughland says that the case against Milosevic has all but collapsed for lack of evidence For
a few hours on Monday, the world’s human rights establishment was
seized by terror. Slobodan Milosevic had been due to begin his defence
at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
in The Hague, but instead discussion focused on the former president’s
fragile health, which has been made worse by the rigours of the trial.
When the presiding judge, Patrick Robinson, said that a ‘radical
review’ of the proceedings would now be necessary, many do-gooders
feared that their worst nightmare was about to be realised — that the
international community’s main trophy in its crusade for morality
might, if only on medical grounds, be allowed to walk free. Few
human rights activists had ever contemplated such an outcome, still less
an acquittal. The presumption of innocence has never counted for much in
the highly politicised world of international humanitarian law. One war
crimes expert, James Gow, said on Channel 4 on Monday that it would be
better if Milosevic died in the dock, because if the trial ran its
course he might be sentenced for only relatively minor charges. That
ought to be awfully embarrassing for those like Gow who have assured us
that he is as guilty as hell. Fortunately for them, the ICTY is not
really in the business of acquittal. As one academic specialist on the
ICTY, Professor Michael Scharf, has noted approvingly, the ICTY’s
rules were designed ‘to minimise the possibility of a charge being
dismissed for lack of evidence’, a sentiment of which the Queen of
Hearts would have been proud. As
it stands, the judges seem poised to impose a defence counsel on
Milosevic. Far from helping him, of course, the intention here is to
weaken his defence by requiring him to be represented by a lawyer who
knows the issues far less well than he does. Such a move would fly in
the face of the judges’ earlier rulings against this idea — and the
new presiding judge himself was, in the past, especially firm that this
would be contrary to the defendant’s rights. It would at least provide
comfort to the beleaguered prosecution. When he is not trying to get the
court to force Milosevic to give up smoking — a certain death sentence
for any Serb — Geoffrey Nice QC, the lead prosecutor, has repeatedly
sought to accomplish this switch, not least because the two-year
prosecution case has been a nearly unmitigated disaster. Since
the trial started in February 2002, the prosecution has wheeled out more
than 100 witnesses, and it has produced 600,000 pages of evidence. Not a
single person has testified that Milosevic ordered war crimes. Whole
swaths of the indictment on Kosovo have been left unsubstantiated, even
though Milosevic’s command responsibility here is clearest. And when
the prosecution did try to substantiate its charges, the result was
often farce. Highlights include the Serbian ‘insider’ who claimed to
have worked in the presidential administration but who did not know what
floor Milosevic’s office was on; ‘Arkan’s secretary’, who turned
out to have worked only as a temp for a few months in the same building
as the notorious paramilitary; the testimony of the former federal prime
minister, Ante Markovic, dramatically rumbled by Milosevic, who produced
Markovic’s own diary for the days when he claimed to h ave had
meetings with him; the Kosovo Albanian peasant who said he had never
heard of the KLA even though there is a monument to that terrorist
organisation in his own village; and the former head of the Yugoslav
secret services, Radomir Markovic, who not only claimed that he had been
tortured by the new democratic government in Belgrade to testify against
his former boss, but who also agreed, under cross-examination by
Milosevic, that no orders had been given to expel the Kosovo Albanians
and that, on the contrary, Milosevic had instructed the police and army
to protect civilians. And these, note, were the prosecution witnesses. Serious
doubt has also been cast on some of the most famous atrocity stories.
Remember the refrigerator truck whose discovery in the Danube in 1999,
full of bodies, was gleefully reported as Milosevic was transferred to
The Hague in June 2001? The truck had allegedly been retrieved from the
river and then driven to the outskirts of Belgrade, where its contents
were interred in a mass grave. But cross-examination showed that there
is no proof that the bodies exhumed were the ones in the truck, nor that
any of them came from Kosovo. Instead, it is quite possible that the
Batajnica mass grave dated from the second world war, while the
refrigerator truck may have contained Kurds being smuggled to Western
Europe, the victims of a grisly traffic accident. The realisation is now
dawning that lies were peddled to justify the Kosovo war just as
earnestly as they were to justify the attack on Iraq. The
weakness of the prosecution case was underlined by the fact that its
triumphant conclusion in February was to broadcast a TV documentary made
several years ago. This suggests that its two-year marathon has not
served to advance knowledge of the truth beyond the tall stories peddled
by telly hacks at the time. Even professional supporters of the ICTY now
admit that the only ‘proof’ of Milosevic’s guilt has been General
Sir Rupert Smith’s stated ‘impression’ that Milosevic controlled
the Bosnian Serbs, and Paddy Ashdown’s statement that he ‘warned’
the former Yugoslav head of state that war crimes were being committed
in Kosovo. In February, the chief prosecutor herself, Carla del Ponte,
admitted that she did not have enough evidence to convict Milosevic on
the most serious charges. The
supposedly impartial judges have been deeply complicit in this
prosecution bungling. The ICTY has long been characterised by an
unhealthy community of interests between the judges and the prosecutors;
I have myself heard the first president of the ICTY, Judge Antonio
Cassese, boast that he encouraged the prosecutor to issue indictments
against the Bosnian Serb leaders, a statement which should disqualify
him from serving as a judge ever again. In the Milosevic trial, the
judges have admitted a tawdry parade of ‘expert witnesses’ who are
not, in fact, witnesses to anything. In Britain, the role of experts is
rightly under the spotlight after the convictions of some 250 parents
found guilty of killing their babies have been thrown into doubt
precisely because they relied on this kind of testimony; but in the ICTY
you can be a ‘witness’ without ever having set foot in Yugoslavia. Numerous
other judicial abuses have been legitimised by the ICTY. The use of
hearsay evidence is now so out of control that people are often allowed
to testify that they heard someone say something about someone else. It
is common for the ICTY to offer reduced sentences (five years in one
case) to men convicted of hideous crimes, mass murder for instance, if
they agree to testify against Milosevic. The use of anonymous witnesses
is now very widespread, as is the frequency of the ‘closed
sessions’: a glance at the ICTY transcripts shows pages and pages
blanked out because sensitive issues have been discussed in court —
sensitive, that is, to the security interests of the Great Powers which
control it, the USA in first place. The ICTY’s nadir came last
December, when the former supreme commander of Nato, Wesley Clark,
testified in the Milosevic trial; the court agreed to let the Pentagon
censor its proceedings, and the transcripts were not released until
Washington had given the green light. So much for the ICTY’s
transparency and independence. Ironically,
Slobbo has one objective ally: the British prime minister. The
possibility is now real that a conviction of Milosevic can be secured
only on the widest possible interpretation of the doctrine of command
responsibility: for instance, that he knew about atrocities committed by
the Bosnian Serbs and did nothing to stop them. But if Milosevic can be
convicted for complicity in crimes committed by people in a foreign
country, over whom he had no formal control, how much greater is the
complicity of the British government in crimes committed by the US in
Iraq, a country with which the UK is in an official coalition? This is
not just a cheap political jibe but a serious judicial conundrum: the UK
is a signatory to the new International Criminal Court, and so Tony
Blair is subject to the jurisdiction of the new Hague-based body whose
jurisprudence will be modelled on that of the ICTY. So if S lobbo goes
down for ten years in Scheveningen jail because of abuses committed by
his policemen, then by rights his cell-mate should, in time, be Tony. John Laughland’s latest book is Le Tribunal pénal international: gardien du nouvel ordre mondial, published by François-Xavier de Guibert, Paris, 2003.
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