The Guardian 22 March, 2006
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
The killing of Milosevic
Slobodan Milosevic, four times democratically elected head of the Serbian and Yugoslav state, died in illegal NATO captivity last week. Although never convicted of any crime, he had been in NATO’s Scheveningen Prison for four years, since being kidnapped from Yugoslavia in the middle of the night by NATO special forces.
The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was a long-term aim of both Germany and the USA (and the latter’s sidekick Britain). Germany kicked off the actual dismemberment by arming Tudjman’s pro-Nazi forces in Croatia, encouraging Tudjman to break away from the rest of Yugoslavia and then was the first to recognise the "new" country.
The US promptly rushed in to "help" the other Yugoslav republics to follow suit, by reviving and encouraging religious and ethnic intolerance that had not been a feature of Yugoslav life for half a century. From the leading country of the non-aligned movement, Yugoslavia became the epitome of the process of splitting up comparatively large countries into a host of virtually defenceless statelets (a process aptly called "balkanisation").
To NATO’s fury, Serbia’s leader Milosevic, successfully kept Serbia out of the wave of civil wars that swept the former territory of Yugoslavia. At the same time Milosevic encouraged independent countries everywhere to resist the diktat of Washington’s "new world order", and not to live with one knee bent in subservience to a "superpower".
Imperialist leaders generally and US leaders in particular developed an intense and bitter hatred for Milosevic, especially after he was elected President of what was left of Yugoslavia. The full panoply of imperialism’s media mastery was turned against him, unleashing an unprecedented program to "demonise" the Yugoslav leader.
At the same time, imperialism set about fomenting yet another civil conflict, this time utilising Serbia’s Albanian minority, largely centred in the province of Kosovo. Using the covert links between the Albanian "mafia" and NATO intelligence agencies — links forged via drug trafficking deals, gun running and money laundering — NATO was able to create an "independence" struggle in Kosovo.
Before you could blink, NATO’s leaders were demanding regime change in Yugoslavia and the presence of NATO forces in Kosovo to "protect" the populace from the Serbs. When Serbia understandably resisted this interference in their internal affairs, NATO declared war and launched a wave of air strikes against Yugoslavia.
Milosevic led a popular Yugoslav resistance, but the NATO forces bombed not indiscriminately but selectively, with terrorist intent: maternity hospitals, refugee columns, buses and trains; China was publicly supporting Yugoslavia, so their Embassy was bombed; Yugoslav television accurately reported what NATO was doing so the TV station was bombed off the air and journalists killed.
While imperialism imposed an economic blockade and set about staging one of the multicoloured popular "uprisings" that they are now seemingly able to mount at will, Milosevic stepped down as President of Yugoslavia to spare the country further hardship.
Once he was no longer the President, NATO was able to effect Milosevic’s seizure and removal to a small cell in the Hague. Here a show trial was prepared, with Richard May, a failed politician from a NATO country promoted and paid by NATO to play the role of presiding judge and Geoffrey Nice, a barrister from the same NATO country, was selected and paid by NATO to act as prosecutor.
To the delight of all those who opposed the US empire, however, Milosevic made mincemeat out of the prosecution. What was intended to be a short show trial became instead an exposé of imperialism and a defeat for its carefully chosen stooges. A change of plan was needed.
The charges against President Milosevic were now strung out interminably; his health inevitably began to suffer. Sympathetic foreign organisations began to complain that NATO seemed intent on trying to kill him by fair means or foul.
(Not that Guardian readers would believe for one minute that the United States would stoop so low!)
Meanwhile, the campaign of vilification continued unabated. In Yugoslavia in particular, "pro-democracy" (more correctly "pro-US") forces used anti-Milosevic propaganda as their trump card.
In the Hague, in the Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the basic legal right of the presumption of innocence — the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty — was abandoned from the Tribunal’s inception.
As with John Howard’s terrorism legislation, the onus instead is on the accused to prove they did not do it, rather than on the prosecution to prove they did. When announcing Milosevic’s death, most of the Australian media took the same line, couching it in terms of "Serbian dictator cheats hangman", demonstrating their forgone conclusion that Milosevic would swing for his "crimes".
Milosevic on the other hand steadily denied that he had ever ordered any massacres or ever pursued a policy of genocide. After the initial accusations the Hague tribunal was in fact hard put to find any real evidence to back them up.
So scarce was actual evidence that one international forensic team (from Spain, I think) left in disgust declaring the mass grave they were investigating to be obviously military victims of a battle not a genocidal massacre of civilians. The Spanish experts felt they were being "used" by NATO for its own propaganda purposes.
Now that he is dead and unable to defend himself, Slobodan Milosevic, like other opponents of the US "new world order", will surely become the target of more sustained and lying vilification.