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HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR BALKAN ARCHIVES  PART ONE Greek Court ruling Prebombardment genocide in Kosovo Supporters and opponents of the war Places we've bombed since WWII Collateral damage Ibrahim Regova PART TWO Speech by Sam Smith, April 2000 Speech by Sam Smith, April 1999 Speech by Harold Pinter Hashim Thaqi Nuremberg prosecutor speaks out Reasons to stop the war

Balkan News from The Progressive Review EARLIER NEWS MARCH 2003 FEW TEARS FOR DJINDJICK BRIAN REDMAN, GUARDIAN - It is still unclear who fired the shots that killed Zoran Djindjic. The likelihood is that it was an underworld operation, his links to organised crime finally catching up with him. But, harsh though it sounds, there are many in Serbia who would willingly have pulled the trigger. On a recent visit to Belgrade, I was struck not only by the level of economic hardship, but by the hatred almost everyone I met felt towards their prime minister, whose poll ratings had fallen below 10%. The lesson from Serbia for today's serial regime changers is a simple one. You can try to subjugate a people by sanctions, subversion and bombs. You can, if you wish, overthrow governments you dislike and seek to impose your will by installing a Hamid Karzai, General Tommy Franks or a Zoran Djindjic to act as imperial consul. But do not imagine that you can then force a humiliated people to pay homage to them. AUGUST 2001 WILLIAM BLUM, ROGUE STATE: Beginning about two weeks after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began in March, 1999, international-law professionals from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the American Association of Jurists began to file complaints with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, charging leaders of NATO countries and officials of NATO itself with crimes similar to those for which the Tribunal had issued indictments shortly before against Serbian leaders. Amongst the charges filed were: "grave violations of international humanitarian law", including "willfully killing, willfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health, employment of poisonous weapons and other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, unlawful attacks on civilian objects, devastation not necessitated by military objectives, attacks on undefended buildings and dwellings, destruction and willful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences." The Canadian suit names 68 leaders, including William Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and NATO officials Javier Solana, Wesley Clark, and Jamie Shea. The complaint also alleges "open violation" of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions, and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The complaint was submitted along with a considerable amount of evidence to support the charges. The evidence makes the key point that it was NATO's bombing campaign which had given rise to the bulk of the deaths in Yugoslavia, provoked most of the Serbian atrocities, created an environmental disaster, and left a dangerous legacy of unexploded depleted uranium and cluster bombs. In June, some of the complainants met in The Hague with the court's chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour of Canada. Although she cordially received their brief in person, along with three thick volumes of evidence documenting the alleged war crimes, nothing of substance came of the meeting, despite repeated follow-up submissions and letters by the plaintiffs. In November, her successor, Carla Del Ponte of Switzerland, also met with some of the complainants and received extensive evidence. The complainants' brief in November pointed out that the prosecution of those named by them was "not only a requirement of law, it is a requirement of justice to the victims and of deterrence to powerful countries such as those in NATO who, in their military might and in their control over the media, are lacking in any other natural restraint such as might deter less powerful countries." Charging the war's victors, not only its losers, it was argued, would be a watershed in international criminal law . . . In an interview with The Observer of London, Del Ponte was asked if she was prepared to press charges against NATO personnel. She replied: "If I am not willing to do that, I am not in the right place. I must give up my mission." The Tribunal then announced that it had completed a study of possible NATO crimes, which Del Ponte was examining, and that the study was an appropriate response to public concerns about NATO's tactics. "It is very important for this tribunal to assert its authority over any and all authorities to the armed conflict within the former Yugoslavia." Was this a sign from heaven that the new millennium was going to be one of more equal justice? Could this really be? No, it couldn't. From official quarters, military and civilian, of the United States and Canada, came disbelief, shock, anger, denials . . . "appalling" . . . "unjustified". Del Ponte got the message. Four days after The Observer interview appeared, her office issued a statement: "NATO is not under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO during the conflict in Kosovo. ROGUE STATE: A GUIDE TO THE WORLD'S ONLY SUPERPOWER OLD WARS *** BBC: The European Court of Human rights is to hear a case against NATO on Wednesday over the bombing of Belgrade's main TV station during the Kosovo conflict. Their relatives say the attack, which killed 16 people, was in breach of Europe's human rights charter and that they deserve compensation . . . The hearing is only the first step to determine if the European Court of Human Rights has the jurisdiction even to hear the case. On the night of 23 April 1999, NATO aircraft attacked the government-run studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade, in which those killed, most of them production workers, had been ordered to report for work. The attack was part of NATO's air campaign to force the Yugoslav Government of former President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw its forces from Kosovo. At the time, NATO defended the air strike by saying the TV station was a legitimate target because of its role in what NATO called Belgrade's campaign of propaganda. MORE JULY 2001 [Little attention has been paid to the questionable provenance of the war crimes tribunal currently judging Slobodan Milosevic. As we are enthralled with the awful acts of Milosevic, a group of UN-appointed jurists will be quietly clipping away at national sovereignty on the basis of vague and ad hoc law that no citizens anywhere in the world had the chance to consider. The NY Times is one of the few to address this issue] NY TIMES: The tribunal was created in 1993 by the Security Council, which obliged all United Nations members to "take any measures necessary under their domestic law to comply with the tribunal." Moreover, Mr. Milosevic implicitly recognized the tribunal when he signed the 1995 Dayton accords ending the war in Bosnia: the agreement required the signatory states to cooperate with the court, and as a member of the United Nations, Yugoslavia had an obligation to cooperate and hand over Mr. Milosevic, who was spirited out of Belgrade. "The aspiration of the world after World War II was for some form of universal jurisdiction for a limited number of crimes, including genocide," said Owen Fiss, a professor of law at Yale. "But it is only in the decade of the 1990's that this aspiration has been given some substance, and Mr. Milosevic's trial is the culmination." The corollary is the erosion of national sovereignty, a development that Mr. Fiss called "the most significant phenomenon of the end of the 20th century." But many countries - including the United States, which has declined to ratify a treaty setting up a permanent international criminal court - have reservations about this trend. Mr. Milosevic, it seems clear, will argue that the extension of "international law" in fact equals the bending of that law and its application across the world to suit the political and strategic designs of the dominant powers, particularly the United States NY TIMES: Trial judges at this United Nations tribunal are particularly important because the three magistrates that are put in charge of each trial act as both judge and jury. Their task is complex because they test and make law as they deal with a body of international law that has, for the most part, never been applied. AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE: Judge Richard May cut off the microphone used by to interrupt him during the former Yugoslav president's dramatic appearance at the UN war crimes tribunal, a spokesman for the court in The Hague said. "It has happened before. The judge has a button on his desk that enables him to cut off the sound," spokesman Jim Landale told reporters . . . At least twice during the 10-minute hearing -- during which a defiant Milosevic said the UN court was "false" and "illegitimate" -- Judge May reached for the button . . . A lawyer defending Milosevic on domestic charges of corruption in Yugoslavia earlier said Judge May had denied the former president the right to defend himself at The Hague. "[His] right to defense was denied. We should have heard what he had to say," said Veselin Cerovic, one of the lawyers representing Milosevic against domestic charges of corruption and abuse of power. NEWS FROM THE COLONIES MELANIE MCDONAGH, NEW STATESMAN, LONDON: The difficulty with the [Milosevic] indictment is its starting point - it will deal with events after January 1999 - which means that the crimes against humanity in question begin and end in Kosovo. Yet the sins of Milosevic are greater with respect to the war in Bosnia . . . Our attention is focused on Kosovo rather than Bosnia because the collective attitudes of western governments underwent a dramatic change between the end of the war in Bosnia and the start of the conflict in Kosovo . . . During one war, John Major and Douglas Hurd were in charge; during the other, it was Tony Blair . . . In the Bosnian war, Britain supported Milosevic. It dealt with him as a peace broker - from the start, it had set its face against the idea that the Bosnian government should be supported in fighting to prevent the dismemberment of its territory. And by maintaining the arms embargo, Britain consolidated the weakness of the Bosnian army vis-a-vis the Serbs. Indeed, as a forthcoming book by the Cambridge academic Brendan Simms makes clear, Britain was decidedly lukewarm about the establishment of the international war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia, lest it make Milosevic that bit less likely to strike a deal. That is why it would be useful, as well as necessary, for the indictment of Milosevic to be expanded to include the war in Bosnia. It would make his real culpability apparent. And ours. MORE JAMES RIDGEWAY, VILLAGE VOICE: NATO is the war criminal, Slobo will say. He makes the following key points: Environmental harm: Bombing oil and petrochemical plants near the cities of Novi Sad and Pancevo spread cancer-causing toxins across civilian areas and contaminated the Danube, thus threatening the drinking water supplies of thousands of downstream inhabitants. Infrastructure damage: U.S. forces in effect attacked civilians when they knocked out Serbia's electric-power and water-purification systems-a tactic the Clinton White House classified as terrorism in 1998. The following year, Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich told the House that cutting off electricity to hospitals was "almost certainly a war crime." Nuclear fallout: NATO ignored a demand from Italy this year that it investigate the use of depleted uranium in U.S. armor-piercing shells fired in Kosovo and Bosnia. Six Italian soldiers died, allegedly of exposure to depleted uranium, while on a peacekeeping mission, as did Belgian and Portuguese soldiers. "We're a military alliance," said a NATO spokesperson, "not a medical alliance." But Doug Rokke, a physicist who directed a U.S. Army team monitoring the use of spent uranium shells after the Gulf War, pointed out that whenever the military fires spent uranium ammo in the U.S., the Pentagon cleans up the area and fences it off to protect the public. Nonmilitary targets: To protect pilots and limit protest at home, the Clinton administration approved bombing above 15,000 feet, a high-altitude launching point that all but guaranteed bombs would be sent off course and land in civilian areas. TELEGRAPH, LONDON: Slobodan Milosevic is planning to embarrass Britain and other Western governments by revealing at his war crimes trial at The Hague the secret deals which he claims propped up his regime during a decade of bloodshed in the Balkans. Lawyers for the deposed Serbian president will name three former Foreign Secretaries, Lord Hurd, Lord Carrington and Lord Owen, in a strategy designed to implicate British and American diplomatic figures in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. They will claim that he was given a "green light" for many of his most controversial actions, including the use of force, by Western governments. Branimir Gugl, one of Milosevic's lawyers, told The Telegraph yesterday: "Mr Milosevic feels that Nato are the real criminals and that will be part of his defence." MORE STEVEN ERLANGER, NY TIMES: On one level, the transfer of Mr. Milosevic is a crucial and necessary step toward the reconciliation of Serbia with the rest of the world, let alone with the rest of the region, broken apart in the wars of Yugoslav secession. But on another level, the quick transfer of Mr. Milosevic by the Serbian government, in defiance of a Constitutional Court ruling and without bothering to inform the elected federal president, Vojislav Kostunica, will be seen by many Serbs as a craven response to international blackmail, further undermining the country's independence and damaged legal system. It is not that too many Serbs will shed any tears for Mr. Milosevic, whom they once revered. They voted against him in large numbers in October, in part because they were sick of the isolation and penury he had brought them . . . But the transfer is likely to be seen by many as less about justice than about money, and the way large, victorious nations get their way over small, defeated ones. It is money that the desperate Serbian economy needs, and it is money that the Serbian government must have to try to dampen criticism that its electoral victory has brought few tangible benefits to ordinary people . . . "We sold him for money, and we won't really get very much money for it," said Aleksa Djilas, a Belgrade historian and political scientist. "The United States is the natural leader of the world, but how do you lead? This just feeds the worst American instincts, reinforcing this bullying mentality." PETER FORD, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: The murderous carousel of civil war and "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans seems set for another bitter turn, as Macedonia teeters on the edge of all-out war. Ten years to the week since Yugoslavia began to break up, plunging into its cycle of violence, ethnic Slavs and Albanians are at each other's throats again. But as European diplomats fight to pull Macedonia back from the brink of disaster, Western views of the protagonists differ sharply from the days when NATO went to war in neighboring Kosovo to protect vulnerable ethnic Albanians from Serbian Slav oppression. Today, NATO secretary-general George Robertson brands the ethnic-Albanian guerrillas fighting for greater rights in Macedonia "armed thugs." Western diplomats are supporting the Slav-dominated government there, even as they try to moderate its stance . . . Two years after the Kosovo war ended, "perceptions of Yugoslavia have changed dramatically," says Daniel Serwer, a Balkans analyst at the US Institute for Peace in Washington. So have Western attitudes to ethnic Albanians. "There is a huge sense of betrayal in Western governments about what the Albanians have been doing," says Tim Judah, the London-based author of two books on the Balkans. "People feel a bit fooled." The former victims in Kosovo are now seen as the aggressors in Macedonia. The Albanian guerrillas themselves - many of whom fought in Kosovo - appear to believe they are doing the same thing now as they did two years ago: defending their people against Slav oppression. In Western eyes, however, "it is completely different," says Mr. Serwer. "In Kosovo, the United States came to see the KLA [guerrillas] as its ground force" fighting a government that Washington, too, viewed as the enemy. In Macedonia, "where we support the government ... the guerrillas are a pain in the neck." MORE EARLIER NEWS