GONE,
BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
To
begin with, he was gone from office, but not from the
country – and, unfortunately, Yugoslavia is not Japan,
where such a record of monumental failure could only have
ended in seppuku. i.e. suicide, as the one honorable
way out. Naturally, the moment he was out of office he
was out of luck politically: most of his followers abandoned
him when the system of cronyism and outright embezzlement
he presided over came to an abrupt end. His remaining
nutball followers (mostly elderly) in the fragmented Serbian
Socialist Party are not a significant political force,
and are not about to retake power as a result of his being
handed over to the "International Criminal Tribunal
for War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia" (ICTFY)
in The Hague. But the sheer stupidity and wrongheadness
of US policy in the region is underscored by the remarkable
ability of the NATO-crats to turn a third-rate gangster
into a symbol of Serbia's national sovereignty – and that,
of course, is the point.
ENJOY
THE SHOW
With
Slobo in the dock, the NATO-crats and their kangaroo court
can point to a "war criminal" as a rationale for their
righteous Slavophobia. As the stream of testimony floods
the Western media with stories (some true, some false)
of Yugoslav atrocities, the Albanian amen-corner in the
US and Europe will take up the cause of the "National
Liberation Army" of Macedonia: no doubt we will be treated
to another CNN-driven "humanitarian" intervention, as
streams of Albanian "refugees" (who will actually be returning
to their original homes in Kosovo) flee "repression" and
"ethnic cleansing." As the background music for phase
two of NATO's war of aggression in the Balkans, the trial
of Slobodan Milosevic will drown out any doubts about
the wisdom of such a course: the idea, at least in theory,
is that the audience (Western public opinion, and especially
elite opinion) will suspend disbelief, relax, and enjoy
the show.
SHOW
TRIAL BOOMERANG?
But
the trial could provide a few surprises, and may turn
out to be a mixed blessing for NATO and its cheerleaders.
To begin with, there is the (admittedly slim) possibility
that he could be acquitted of all or at least some of
the charges. The rules of evidence in force at The Hague
do not bode well for any defendant – for example, the
accused have no right to face their accusers, testimony
can be submitted anonymously, and, if the court chooses,
the proceedings can take place out of public view. But
while the ICTFY is not a bona fide legal institution in
the American sense, its function as a propaganda vehicle
requires some level of credibility, even if it
is only a fig-leaf of faux-legality. The whole propagandistic
point of staging such a show trial would be lost if it
were held in secret, and, besides, that would provoke
too much suspicion that, just maybe, the proceedings were
not entirely fair. But the minute the trial opens, and
the charges are read out in court, the NATO-crats are
going to have a big problem on their hands.
NATO's
REALITY GAP
We
all remember the prelude to the Kosovo war: those long
months of hysterical fulminations on the part of the US
State Department and its journalistic auxiliary that the
Serbs were guilty of committing a crime of Hitlerian dimensions
in Kosovo, and that we had to intervene in order
to prevent a Balkan Holocaust. Well, now that the NATO-crats
finally have their hands on this alleged moral monster,
the supposed Serbian "Hitler," it turns out that the old
devil is not to be charged with the crime of genocide,
or even attempted genocide. Instead, the prosecution has
filed lesser charges against the man they compared to
the killer of 6,000,000 Jews. The Kosovo indictment accuses
him of "persecution" and exactly 7 (yes, s-e-v-e-n)
murders. All in all, the alleged victims of his perfidy
total 340. That is such a looooong way from the
charges made in 1999, when NATO was bombing some of the
oldest cities in Europe, that even the war's most vociferously
self-righteous supporters will have a hard time explaining
the yawning gulf between reality and NATO's lies.
NATO's
LIES EXPOSED
At
the height of the war hysteria, CNN was estimating between
a half- and a quarter-million victims of Serbian "ethnic
cleansing." Even after the war, when little or no evidence
of such a large-scale mass murder was uncovered, NATO
and its pet journalists were estimating that as many as
10,000 had perished at the hands of Milosevic and such
mediagenic personalities of the Serbian "paramilitary"
movement as the late (and unlamented) "Arkan." But none
of these numbers has panned out: the swarms of investigators
and forensic specialists who poured into Kosovo to collect
evidence for this trial found, not a holocaust, but approximately
3,000 bodies, including Serbs and other non-Albanian
nationalities. Naturally, this was hardly reported at
all in the Anglo-American media, but now these relatively
paltry numbers will be spotlighted by the publicity accompanying
Slobo's trial, providing fresh embarrassment for NATO's
media handlers, not to mention the handled.
PLAYING
THE NUMBERS
When
the ICTFY announced these meager numbers, the reflexive
"spin" of the War Party was, I thought, rather imaginative.
Graham Blewitt, ICTFY deputy prosecutor, averred that
we ought not to play a "numbers game" while alleging that
the final number would be closer to 4,000 or 5,000. It
is true that one does not let a murderer off because he
has "only" killed 340 people, but the real question here
is: do we go to war with every country that may
be guilty of killing that many? It was the NATO-crats
who started the "numbers game": tens of thousands
were supposed to be perishing, and thousands more held
in Serbian-run "concentration camps." We were told
that to oppose intervention would be to countenance "genocide,"
a moral stance made possible by the evocation of some
pretty high (and very wrong) numbers.
A
LOTTA NERVE
Blewitt
proffered one explanation that we're bound to hear during
the trial: that We May Never Know how many were killed,
because the Serbs systematically destroyed all the evidence.
That's a pretty ingenious way to get around the glaring
lack of evidence: instead of "the dog ate my homework,"
it's "Milsovic's dog ate the evidence." They couldn't
get away with such a nervy display of disregard for truth
in the American legal system, but with the ICTFY all things
are possible. Even nervier was NATO spokesman Mark Laity,
who stoutly maintained that: "NATO never said the missing
were all dead. The figure we stood by was 10,000. If it's
wrong, I'm prepared to put up with a little bit of egg
on our face if thousands are alive who were thought to
be killed." A little egg? More like several omelet's
worth. Remember, way back in May 1999, when US Defense
Secretary William Cohen told CBS News that 100,000 men
of military age were missing? They "may have been murdered,"
he opined. Does anyone recall David Scheffer, US envoy
for war crimes issues, continually reiterating that more
than 225,000 ethnic Albanian men between the ages of 14
and 59 were missing? And now they're telling us
that the victims of this alleged "holocaust" number 340?
AMERICAN
EXCEPTIONALISM
I
know a lot of American conservatives are going to point
to this trial as evidence that there is a potential threat
to American soldiers from such globalist institutions
as the ICTFY, and that the next thing you know G.I.s will
be sitting in the dock at The Hague, on trial for "war
crimes." Relax. It'll never happen. Among the many
crimes of William Jefferson Clinton, besides perjury,
selling presidential pardons, and generally lowering the
level of political (and cultural) discourse in his own
country, certain war crimes stand out. The continual bombing
of Iraq (and the murderous sanctions), the destruction
of an aspirin factory in the Sudan (a night watchman died
so that Monica would be off the front pages for a few
days), and the killing of 700 Yugoslav civilians in the
Kosovo war come immediately to mind. Instead of being
dragged to The Hague, Clinton was feted in the capitals
of Europe and assiduously wooed by American publishers
for his long-awaited memoirs. Christopher Hitchens wonders
why his bete noir, Henry Kissinger, has yet to be indicted
by chief prosecutor Louise Arbour, but as a supporter
of the Kosovo war he can't afford to look too closely
at the legal niceties of the ICTFY: I don't know about
him, but I wouldn't submit my worst enemy to such
a spurious form of justice as is practiced by Arbour's
Inquisition.
AN
EXPERIENCED LAWYER
A
lot depends on how good Milosevic's lawyer, Toma Fila,
turns out to be. He certainly has plenty of experience:
whenever the name of some alleged Serbian war criminal
has been reported in the news, there, too, is Toma Fila,
advocating for the defense. But his record is inconclusive,
to say the least: one client had the charges dropped because
he was terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. The other
one that I know of, the case of one Goran Lajic, accused
of being a concentration camp guard who murdered and raped
his charges, was a case of mistaken identity: the German
authorities who picked him up and handed him over to The
Hague simply had the wrong Goran Lajic, and, although
it took the court three months to realize that a mistake
had been made, Lajic was released. But a look at this
weird case underscores the Orwellian flavor of the ICTFY
system, which the US and its NATO allies want to impose
on the rest of the world if not themselves.
LAJIC
VS. ICTFY
Lajic
stoutly maintained his innocence the whole time, and said
he had never been anywhere near the area in which his
alleged crimes occurred: zealous German prosecutors didn't
bother checking. Of course Lajic was lying: isn't
that just like a war criminal? He was held for 56 days
before being handed over to the ICTFY. When Lajic appeared
before the court he again said he was the innocent victim
of a case of mistaken identity and that he did not even
know where this so-called concentration camp was. The
prosecution, however, wasn't going to be so easily fooled:
this was the "real" Goran Lajic, they averred. In an American
courtroom, such a matter would be quickly settled: just
arrange for a lineup and ask the witnesses to identify
the accused from among a randomly selected group. Ah,
but ICTFY-style justice presented another solution: the
judge decided that a photograph of the accused
would be shown to the witnesses, alongside photos of a
number of other individuals. But this gambit backfired
badly when 9 out of 10 witnesses failed to recognize Lajic,
and the tenth said he had seen Lajic, but not the
crimes he was accused of. A shamefaced ICTFY let Lajic
go on June 17, 1996.
CALLING
JOHNNIE COCHRAN!
I
don't think Milosevic can plead that this is a case of
mistaken identity, however: the best he can hope for is
a lawyer on a par with Johnnie Cochran, who doesn't come
cheap. Mr. Fila doesn't come cheap either, from what I
hear, but then he'll have earned every penny if he can
get his client off the hook. The best way to do that is
by turning this into a political trial – or, rather, by
realizing that this already is a political trial, and
acting accordingly. A really good lawyer would immediately
recognize that his client and the prosecution have certain
things in common, politically, first and foremost their
mutual hostility to Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica.
WOULD
YOU DIE FOR SLOBO?
Kostunica,
the independent market nationalist, is equally disdained
by the US government and Milosevic supporters. The former
want to bring him down because they hate all nationalism,
even the liberal democratic variety: and the latter hate
him simply because he beat them in spite of everything:
both would like to lay the responsibility for Slobo's
plight at Kostunica's doorstep. But it wasn't the federal
government of Yugoslavia that turned him over to the ICTFY
in spite of the decision of the Constitutional Court to
delay so they could rule on the legality of such a transfer:
it was the Serbian provincial government of US sock puppet
Zoran Djindjic that literally kidnapped poor old Slobo
and bundled him off to The Hague. "My attempt to have
our citizens put on trial in our country was prevented
by two things" said Kostunica, in answer to critics, "pressure
from Washington, and me and my party being a minority"
within Yugoslavia's governing coalition. When pressed,
he said that the passage of extradition legislation would
be "the lesser of two evils," and in this he is absolutely
right. At the "free Slobo" demonstration that took place
in Belgrade recently, some in the crowd were reportedly
shouting "We will give our lives for Slobo!" But the rest
of Yugoslavia, unlike the few thousand die-hard militants
of the Slobodan Milosevic Fan Club, is probably not
willing to give their lives for Slobo – and why should
they?
DID
THE SERBS SELL OUT?
The
idea that the Serbs "sold out" their sovereignty and sacrificed
their honor by handing over Milosevic is probably more
popular in far-leftish Western circles than in Serbia.
It isn't as if the Serbs have any choice: after all, they
have been defeated in battle, and, while not subject to
a military occupation, they don't have much more wiggle
room in this matter than the Japanese did after World
War II. Serbia is decimated economically, and is still
being subjected to terrorist attacks from the US-sponsored
Albanian guerrillas. Furthermore, the country is politically
volatile, and it is this volatility that the NATO-crats
are shamelessly exploiting.
TWO
BIRDS AND A STONE
In
the hours before Slobo was rousted out of his Belgrade
jail cell and spirited off to The Hague, Kostunica declared
that Milosevic could definitely not be extradited by Friday.
"The decree," he said, "cannot be implemented in 48 hours,
because that would mean that the defendant is deprived
[of] his right to appeal and from some other rights."
The resulting explosion in the coalition will blow the
federal government apart – and, not coincidentally, shift
the power away from the practically nonexistent Yugoslav
entity and toward the Serbian state government, where
Djindjic rules as Prime Minister. Thus the NATO-crats
kill two birds with one stone.
SERBIA
ON TRIAL
In
the attempt to prove the charges against Milosevic, several
key military figures who served under the old regime will
no doubt be called to testify, and the repercussions of
this can only be imagined. The Tribunal claims not only
the authority to compel the accused to show up at The
Hague, but also the right to summon witnesses and compel
them to testify: in this sense, it is not only Milosevic
who will be placed on trial here, but the entire Serbian
political and military elite. Serbia is to be treated
like a conquered province, to serve as an example to those
– such as the Macedonians – who still believe they can
resist NATO's will.
THE
TEST
Milosevic
and his accusers have more in common than an authoritarian
concept of justice and a penchant for crude propaganda:
politically, both portray themselves as the only alternative
to the other. They have a mutual interest in disproving
the possibility of a third choice, a force that is neither
NATO nor the nutty remnants of the Serbian Socialist Party,
but a [classical] liberal nationalist alternative to foreign
domination and domestic gangsterism. Whether this third
force can withstand such a concerted assault will test
not only Kostunica personally, but also the Serbian people.
