Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Milosevic l'innocente

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1730274,00.html
Criminal proceedings
 The case against Slobodan Milosevic would never have held up in a
proper court of law
 John Laughland
Tuesday March 14, 2006
The Guardian
 I was one of the last western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic.
Having been called to The Hague as a potential witness, I spent an hour
in his cell in January last year. Like most who met him, I found him
polite and intelligent. "We will win," he told me. "Freedom is a
universal value. They have no evidence against me."
Such statements will shock those who have been assured that Milosevic
was a nationalist dictator bent on establishing a racially pure Greater
Serbia. But civilised societies ought to be reluctant to condone
criminal convictions based on hate campaigns. The fact is that
Milosevic's enemies have never been able to produce a single rabid
nationalist, let alone racist, quotation from his mouth, while in the
four years of his trial at The Hague not a single witness has testified
that he ordered war crimes.
 Instead, witnesses have been trooping into The Hague for nearly two
years now, testifying that there was neither genocide in Kosovo nor any
plan to drive out the civilian ethnic Albanian population, and that
Milosevic could not be held responsible either for the break-up of
Yugoslavia or the subsequent civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Establishing criminal responsibility is an exact science and the fact
is that Milosevic was not in charge of Yugoslavia when it was breaking
up. The 1991 order telling the (multi-ethnic) Yugoslavian army to fight
the secessionist states, Croatia and Slovenia, was given by the then
head of the federal government, Ante Markovic, a darling of the west -
and western intervention made the situation much worse. Milosevic is
often accused of upsetting the internal balance of the Yugoslavian
federal constitution, but few seriously believe that a political system
modelled on Switzerland's stood any chance of long surviving Tito.
The Hague prosecution issued the original indictment against Milosevic
for Kosovo in May 1999, at the height of Nato's attack on Yugoslavia
and in apparent justification of it. It was not until a year and a half
later, and between seven and 10 years after the events, that the
indictments for Bosnia and Croatia were added. This was presumably done
because the prosecutors realised that Nato's allegations about genocide
in Kosovo could not stand up in court. But the Bosnia and Croatia
indictments were problematic too. Milosevic has always denied moral or
legal responsibility for the atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs,
for instance in 1995 at Srebrenica, because, as president of
neighbouring Serbia, he was not in charge of Bosnia or the Bosnian
Serbs. Even if he had influence over the Bosnian Serbs, that is a long
way from criminal responsibility
If the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were a
proper court of law, the charges against him would have been dismissed
long ago. Unfortunately, it is a highly politicised organ, created on
the initiative of the very states which attacked Yugoslavia in 1999,
and whose judges have disgraced themselves by bending the rules to
facilitate the prosecution's task. In 2004, the judges imposed defence
counsel on Milosevic, even though the ICTY's charter states that
defendants have the right to defend themselves, and even though they
knew he was too sick to stand trial. On February 24 2006, at the
prosecution's insistence, they rejected Milosevic's request to be
transferred to a heart clinic: he died a fortnight later.
It is corrosive of the core values of western civilisation for the
chief Hague prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, now to say that Milosevic
escaped justice by dying, for this assumes that "justice" means not due
process but a guilty verdict. The day we start to believe that we will
have abandoned the rule of law completely.
* John Laughland is the author of Le Tribunal Pénal International:
Gardien du Nouvel Ordre Mondial (The International Criminal Tribunal:
Guardian of the New World Order)

proper court of law
E se lo dicie lui... :)
*LOL*
-Stefano

Stefano De Cesari ha scritto:

Hai dimenticato "pat pat" e "disse l'asino al bue".
Ciao ... Dino