Yugoslav leader exposed U.S. war crimes in Balkans

U.S. imperialism and its corporate media made a concerted effort to demonize Slobodan Milosevic while he was alive, charging him with crimes in a war of their making. Now they are using his death as another opportunity to slander the last independent leader of Yugoslavia, a multinational country that no longer exists; it has been dismembered by U.S. and European capitalist powers.

The imperialists have the advantage of owning the most powerful propaganda machine in world history. The only advantage Milosevic had, and which he referred to in his opening defense statement, was that truth and justice were on his side.

The Defense Speaks for History and the Future Opening defense statement at The Hague By President of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic With an introduction by Ramsey Clark Available at leftbooks.com

According to early statements from officials of Scheveningen prison in The Hague, Netherlands, the former Yugoslav president was found dead in his cell on the morning of March 11. Finally the early rumors of his death, broadcast first on Serb radio, were confirmed. The person who had led Yugoslavia as it faced open subversion and attack from 1990 to 2000 had died.

International human rights activist and attorney Ramsey Clark has often pointed out that there is nothing in the United Nations Charter allowing the Security Council to set up a body like the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia. The ICTY is a political instrument established to punish anyone in the Balkans who resisted the imperialist takeover of the region. It brought charges against Milosevic right in the midst of the U.S./NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in May of 1999, obviously to bring additional pressure on the Yugoslav leadership.

What much of the world doesn’t know and won’t learn from the corporate media is that President Milosevic’s supporters have been entreating the Security Council to allow him to be examined by his own doctors and to receive treatment in a clinic in Moscow, Russia. The court continued to refuse these appeals and minimize the president’s serious medical condition, of which it was fully aware, until his death at the age of 64.

The U.S. and NATO powers succeeded, with guns and money, in breaking up the Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia. They succeeded in overthrowing the last independent government in Eastern Europe, the one in Belgrade. They succeeded even in confusing many progressives in the West—the imperialist countries—with a well-planned and executed offensive of lies that blamed every problem in the Balkans on Serbia and on Milosevic himself.

This propaganda offensive obscured the interference, subversion and “divide and conquer” tactics practiced by German and U.S. imperialism, most of all, in connivance with neo-fascist groupings in the republics of Croatia and Bosnia and in Serbia’s Kosovo province.

But the ICTY failed miserably when it tried to prove to the world that Slobodan Milosevic was guilty of any of the crimes committed against the people of the Balkans in the 1990s.

What ‘trial of the century’?

It took Milosevic thousands of pages of text to answer the 500,000 pages of so-called evidence against him, yet the ICTY failed to prove its case. The best concise summary of his argument is given in Milosevic’s own 2004 opening defense talk, published in “The Defense Speaks—For History and the Future,” by the International Action Center (IAC). But there is also the “short presentation,” presented with this article, that should convince anyone capable of looking at the facts without extreme prejudice.

When the four-year-long trial started against Milosevic in February 2002, it was called the “trial of the century.” The NATO powers planned it as a show trial against someone who dared to resist their takeover of his country. Everyone expected consistent coverage of the trial and occasional front-page and top-of-the-news treatment. And that might have happened—if the ICTY had come anywhere near making its case.

But it didn’t. Despite an enormous advantage in staff, money, investigators and the state power of all the NATO governments behind it, the ICTY was unable to bring a credible case against Milosevic. The story then dropped from the imperialist media. This lack of coverage alone is an admission of Milosevic’s innocence and U.S.-NATO guilt.

It is too soon after the events to evaluate President Milosevic’s historical contribution as a leader of both Yugoslavia and the Socialist Party of Serbia. This judgment should first be left to the people and working class of the Balkans, certainly not to the imperialist criminals who demolished the Yugoslav Federation.

But one thing is clear. From the day he was kidnapped from a Belgrade prison to Scheveningen in The Hague and placed under NATO imprisonment, he carried out, under horribly unequal conditions, a heroic legal and political battle against the people who ordered him there. Like his fellow Balkans political prisoner of the 1930s, Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dmitrov, who successfully defended himself against bogus Nazi charges that he burned the Reichstag, Milosevic waged his own legal defense in the bogus NATO court.

Milosevic turned the tables on the court and showed that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Gen. Wesley Clark and the rest of the NATO heads of state and government and their generals were the real “butchers of the Balkans” and the ones who deserved to be on trial for war crimes.

Sara Flounders of the IAC pointed out the ICTY had reason to desire Milosevic’s death: “As the case was drawing to a close [Milosevic’s effective defense] presented a terrible dilemma for the court.” For this reason, the IAC has joined the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) to help carry out “an international, independent inquiry into the circumstances and cause of his death” and to ensure that “his family, his party and his supporters be party to that inquiry.”

Catalinotto is co-editor of “Hidden Agenda—the U.S./NATO takeover of the Balkans,” published in 2002 by the IAC.