By Sara Flounders
Co-Director, International Action Center, NYC
March 16, 2006–In
the summer of 2004 I met with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
in Scheveningen prison when I was approved as a defense witness. Before
I could get in, I had to pass four totally separate check points, unable
to take in anything but papers. Each level of security was more rigid
than the one before.
No one who has met with
President Milosevic over the past four years would believe he would risk killing
himself rather than finishing his trial. And no one who visited Scheveningen
in The Hague would believe the outlandish claims that somehow he was able
to smuggle in un-prescribed medications on a regular basis. They would instead
suspect that the authorities were desperately trying to cover up their own
crimes.
My role as witness was
based on my trip to Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999, during the 78-day U.S./NATO
bombing. I visited bombed schools, hospitals, heating plants and market places,
recording the harm done to civilians. In addition, I had written since 1993
on the behind-the-scenes U.S. role in the strangulation and forced dismemberment
of Yugoslavia.
Even after my name was
accepted as a defense witness, it was a complicated and lengthy procedure
to make the visit. Though all was approved on the day of the visit, it still
took four hours to get through the checkpoints into the special unit inside
the prison where the defendants for the International Criminal Tribunal for
the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) were kept totally segregated from general population
and closely monitored.
Scheveningen prison is
a maximum-security high-tech facility. Milosevic and other indicted prisoners
are housed in a special prison unit within the larger prison. This section
is spread over four floors with 12 cells each. The unit is specially patrolled
by United Nations guards. Cameras are everywhere. Every movement of the prisoners
is monitored and controlled. When the president was first placed in his cell,
lights were kept on 24 hours a day and every motion was monitored.
WHERE DID RIFAMPICIN
COME FROM?
Now the Dutch authorities
claim that Milosevic was taking a rare, difficult-to-acquire antibiotic used
to treat leprosy or tuberculosis that has the unique ability to counteract
the medicine he was taking to control his high blood pressure. How did this
medicine, rifampicin, get into Milosevic’s system? He was held in a maximum
security prison in triple lock down in a special contained unit within a larger
Dutch prison once used by the Nazis to detain Dutch resistance fighters.
When rifampicin was found
last Jan. 12 in Milosevic’s blood, the ICTY kept the report of the blood tests
secret, even from Milosevic and his doctors, who were complaining that something
terribly wrong was damaging the defendant’s health. While the prisoner and
his defense committee and assistant lawyers were demanding health information,
the ICTY officials sat on this report. If ICTY officials responsible for Milosevic’s
health really believed he was sneaking toxic medications into the prison,
why hadn’t they publicized this report much earlier?
DELAYS HURT MILOSEVIC
Equally outlandish are
the claims that Milosevic staged his illness to delay the trial. The prosecution
delayed the trial, first by adding charges against the president regarding
Croatia and Bosnia when they realized they had no war-crimes case on the original
Kosovo charges, then by bringing hundreds of witnesses to generate 500,000
pages of prosecution testimony from February 2002 to February 2004.
Each time Milosevic was
too sick to continue in court, the prosecution moved to impose counsel and
to take away the prisoner’s right to present his own defense. Milosevic was
determined to use the trial as a platform to defend not only himself but the
people of Yugoslavia, and to indict the U.S., Germany and the NATO powers
for their role in the criminal destruction of his country. He welcomed the
trial as the only platform where he could make the historical record. In his
words to the court he constantly described why, despite his bad health, he
was determined to continue.
When I met Milosevic
it was in the special room that was the only place where the ICTY allowed
him to work or have the court papers to prepare for his defense. Whenever
his blood pressure rose and he was unable to continue the court sessions,
he was also barred from any access to his defense materials.
During each step of the
trial Milosevic’s cardiovascular problems, especially his high blood pressure
had resulted in several delays in the trial. At each step the ICTY officials
tried to use the issue of his health in constant efforts to deny him the right
to conduct his own defense. Neither the illness nor the delays helped his
defense.
The ICTY charged that
Milosevic was secretly medicating himself and avoiding taking prescribed medicines.
Milosevic answered this charge himself for the court record on Sept. 1, 2004:
“You probably don’t know the practice in your own Detention Unit. I take my
medication in the presence of guards. I’m given them. I take them in the presence
of the guard, and the guard writes down in the book the exact time when I
ingested those medicines.”
Despite the life-threatening
cardiovascular risk raised in every dispute with the prosecution, tribunal
officials refused even to secure regular check-ups of the president’s health
condition. They also denied access for months to specialists who were willing
to come to Scheveningen, delaying his care.
The president’s own explanation
of his problem was more consistent and credible than the ICTY’s. In a letter
addressed to the Russian Embassy two days before he died, Milosevic writes
that he has taken no antibiotics in more than four years. He asks why the
medical report on the discovery of rifampicin was kept secret from him for
almost two months. He writes that he believes that “active steps are being
taken to destroy my health.” He warns that he is sure he is being poisoned
and that his life is in danger.
A POLITICAL TRIBUNAL
The ICTY’s handling of
President Milosevic’s death has been like its handling of the entire trial:
an attempt to blame the victim for the crime.
The ICTY is not a real
international court, with the ability to try any accused war criminal. It
is a political court set up by the UN Security Council at the insistence of
Secretary of State Madeline Albright in 1993 in violation of the UN Charter.
Its scope is limited to trying the peoples of the former Yugoslavia and the
vast majority of prisoners are Serbs. It is a propaganda apparatus and internment
camp for political prisoners disguised as an unbiased court. It aims to punish
the victims for the crimes committed against them and to absolve the imperialist
powers who invaded, bombed, dismembered and forced the privatization of the
Socialist Federation of Yugoslavia.
When Milosevic discussed
the trial with me, his scope of historical knowledge, his energy despite his
illness, cut through my own jet-lag and fatigue from the four-hour entrance
hurdle and allowed us to finish the interview with enthusiasm for the next
step of the tribunal.
Now the world is asked
to believe that Milosevic is responsible for his own death. It is a scenario
so incredibly complex, an elaborate suicide story that is as improbable as
the charges he was facing. The bought-and-paid-for corporate media is accepting
and propagating the story of his death in the same servile fashion they accepted
the very existence of this illegal court and the justification for the destruction
of Yugoslavia.
Milosevic is now gone.
But his summation answering two years of the prosecution case and his opening
defense speech live on. He has left a ringing indictment of U.S. and European
big-power intervention in the Balkans in a historic document in an “I accuse”
format. His speech, which contains extensive documentation and factual detail,
has been published in Serbian, Greek, French, Russian and English. This response,
“The Defense Speaks—for History and the Future,” (IAC 2006) will stand long
after the tawdry war propaganda has collapsed.
source:
http://www.workers.org/2006/world/milosevic-0330/
