Travesty

John Laughland

Description

Slobodan Milosevic died in prison in 2006 during a four-year marathon trial at The Hague for war crimes. John Laughland was one of the last Western journalists to meet him. He followed the trial from the beginning and wrote extensively on it, challenging the legitimacy of the Yugoslav Tribunal and the hypocrisy of 'international justice' in the Guardian and the Spectator.



In this book Laughland gives a full account of the trial, which was the longest criminal trial in history. From the moment the indictment was issued at the height of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia to the day of Milosevic's mysterious death in custody. 'International justice' is supposed to hold war criminals to account but, as the trials of both Milosevic and Saddam Hussein show, the indictments are politically motivated and the judicial procedures are irredeemably corrupt.



Laughland argues that international justice is an impossible dream and that such show trials are little more than a propaganda exercise designed to distract attention from the war crimes committed by Western states.
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. ‘A little bombing to see reason.’

2. The New World Order

3. Inverting Nuremberg

4. ‘A false tribunal’

5. Potemkin justice

6. Just Convict Everyone’

7. ‘Greater Serbia’

8. Witnesses for the Prosecution

9. Trial in absentia

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Histoire
• Military
• War crime
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715770
• Langue: English

Extrait

Travesty
Travesty
The Trial of Slobodan Milošević and the Corruption of International Justice
JOHN LAUGHLAND
First published 2007 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and
175 Fifth avenue, new York, NY 10010
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the united States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © John Laughland 2007
The right of John Laughland to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2636 8
ISBN-10 0 7453 2636 6
Paperback
ISBN-13 978 0 7453 2635 1
ISBN-10 0 7453 2635 8
ePub
ISBN-13 978 1 7837 1577 0
Mobi
ISBN-13 978 1 7837 1578 7
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. The paper may contain up to 70 per cent post consumer waste.
10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, England
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Printed and bound in the European Union by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
To my darling Emily
Roper: So now you’d give the devil the benefit of law?
Sir Thomas More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the devil?
Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every tree in England to do that.
More: Oh, and when the last law was down and the devil turned ’round on you where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, man’s laws not God’s, and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – do you really think that you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.
Robert Bolt, ‘ A Man for all Seasons’
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Ramsey Clark
Introduction
  1 ‘A little bombing to see reason’
  2 The New World Order
  3 Inverting Nuremberg
  4 ‘A false tribunal’
  5 Potemkin Justice
  6 ‘Just convict everyone’
  7 ‘Greater Serbia’
  8 Witnesses for the Prosecution
  9 Trial in absentia
10 Death in The Hague
Index
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the following people for their help during the writing of this book: Professor David Chandler, Dr Janine Clark, Tiphaine Dickson, Gillian Higgins, Ian Johnson, Steven Kay QC, Emily Laughland, Mark Littman QC, Vera Martinović, Daryl Mundis, John Odgers, Dr Mladen Pupavac, Selva Ramasamy, Professor Branko Rakić, Professor William A. Schabas, Cathrin Schütz.
Foreword
Ramsey Clark
Former United States Attorney-General
Trials have always fascinated people. Criminal trials have both reflected and affected the values of the culture in which they occur. They have absorbed attention in every epoch of every society we know and often altered its destiny.
Think only of a few: Pontius Pilate versus Jesus, the King of the Jews; Joan of Arc Louis XVI; the French Revolution’s Committee of Public Justice; Alfred Dreyfus; Dostoyevsky’s reports of common criminal trials in St Petersburg; the Moscow Show Trials; the Trials of Charles I; Sir Thomas More; the Star Chamber; Peter Zenger in colonial America; the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor General of colonial India; Oscar Wilde; the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson; Sacco and Vanzetti; the Scottsboro Boys; the Chicago Seven; O.J. Simpson; Nuremberg.
The trial of Slobodan Milošević demands special consideration in these times for three reasons of fundamental importance.
This was the first criminal trial of a head of state before a court, created by the Security Council of the United Nations or any other world organisation. The court was named the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Creation of the Court required great care, because illegal conduct by the UN itself can endanger all society and there is no ready means for restraining the United Nations from actions not authorised by its Charter.
A review of the United Nations Charter reveals that it grants no power to the Security Council, or elsewhere, to create a criminal court. The Charter itself includes the Statute of the International Court of Justice. It was deliberately denied any criminal jurisdiction.
Examination of the history, background, drafting and approval of the UN Charter will convince everyone that there would never have been a United Nations if the five permanent members established in the Charter: the United Kingdom, the United States, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and China, thought there was any possibility it could create a criminal court.
The only way a criminal court can be created by the UN is after amendment to its Charter empowering it to do so. This is a cumbersome procedure never yet accomplished.
A study of international law reveals the only other way to create an international criminal court is by a multinational treaty. This is how the International Criminal Court, long overdue, finally came into being on 1 July 2002. Its tragically deficient statute has now been ratified by 120 nations, but not the United States, which undermined that statute before approval and has refused to ratify the treaty. The US has obstructed justice by coercing 80 nations, at the latest count, to enter into bilateral treaties that prohibit the surrender of any US citizen, or soldier for trial by the International Criminal Court.
If the Security Council can usurp power to create a criminal court, what limitation is there on its power to do whatever it chooses?
But the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was not only conceived in sin, it violated the first purpose of the United Nations, and principal hope for the human species, ‘to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’. It also violated the first principle of the Charter, the ‘sovereign equality’ of all nations.
Yugoslavia was created after the First World War to bring peace to the Balkans through a federation of small constantly warring ‘southern Slav’ states. After its devastation in the Second World War, the concept of a federation of six predominately Slavic states became a working reality. Situated between western Europe and the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia maintained its sovereign independence from both sides of the deadly cold war. It helped create the Non-Aligned Movement to resist the pressures and threats of violence from both Eastern and Western blocs.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its bloc, the US, Germany and other powerful states acted to break up Yugoslavia, to balkanise the Balkans, to ignore its sovereign equality, to dominate and exploit the small pieces and demonise its former federal leadership by selective, discriminatory, illegal and often false charges of international crimes.
Unbelievably, the US, which heavily bombed Belgrade in 1945, again sent aircraft, which bombed Yugoslavia from Novi Sad to Niš to Belgrade in 1999. The US was joined by Germany and NATO, if only in minor roles, to bomb all of Kosovo until Yugoslavia was no more.
The ICTY was empowered only to indict the victims of US and NATO assaults, not the aggressors. The Court was ‘war by other means’, the corruption of international law and justice to pursue enemies.
I watched Slobodan Milošević on TV during the lengthy peace negotiations he personally led for his country, but first met him in the early days of the heavy US bombardment of Belgrade. His home had been targeted and destroyed. I was invited to see the ruins, then to meet with him in a nearby government building. The next time I saw him was in his cell at The Hague. We met for three consecutive days about four weeks after he arrived there. It was his first unmonitored meeting. Thereafter I met him four or five times in prison, the last was several months before his death. In that meeting his physical deterioration and low energy was obvious. His conduct remained constant on all the occasions; cordial, a little humour, focused on whoever he was talking to and attentive to their words, optimistic, uncomplaining, concentrated and clear and direct in what he said.
His purpose was clear. He sought peace. He wanted to preserve and protect Yugoslavia, the federation of six republics. When he saw this was not possible, he sought to preserve and protect Serbia. He was highly informed, keenly aware of the power confronting his country and pressing his case and he was committed to persevere to the end.
The trial itself is both a monument to the courage, tenacity and competence of a man determined to be master of his fate and to the political abuse of judicial power to the point of death.
Against the vast resources of a determined United States, which coerced the Security Council to create the ICTY through its UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, Slobodan Milošević stood alone before a hostile court created to convict him. Before the Prosecution finished presenting its evidence, two years passed; more than 300 trial days, nearly 300 witnesses, 30,000 pages of trial transcript.
He toiled night and day in the close, damp confines of a prison in The Hague built and originally used by the Nazis. Every effort to provide him with research, analysis, documents and a helping hand as he prepared his lonely stand against a belligerent court and prosecution was largely frustrated. Every effort to protect his patently exhausting physical health with life-saving medical support was rejected.
Two days before