Oui Bono?

The “war crimes trial” at the Hague took a dramatic turn when the accused became the accuser.



Exclusive to American Free Press

By James P. Tucker Jr.



Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia who is on trial for war crimes, told the tribunal at The Hague he would call former President Bill Clinton and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, to testify about atrocities committed during the U.S.-led 78-day bombing campaign over the embattled Yugoslav republic of Kosovo.

Other prominent Americans would also be called to respond to his charges that the United States carried out a policy of genocide in the Balkans, Milosevic said.

While the UN International Criminal Tribunal had ruled in an earlier case that sitting world leaders cannot be compelled to testify, that would not necessarily apply to Clinton and Albright. The court has no power to compel testimony, but experts said they would come under tremendous moral pressure to appear.

“The theory is that states should cooperate with the tribunal,” said a lawyer involved in other cases before the court. “Any witness who doesn’t want to turn up is going to look bad. It reinforces Milosevic’s message that this whole thing is a NATO stitch-up.”

He added: “I think some of them will make quite interesting witnesses—dirty deeds were done.”

Insiders contend that Milosevic specifically named Albright in the suit because it is widely believed that, while secretary of state in 1998, she was one of the loudest voices pressing for U.S. intervention in the bloody internecine fighting.

Shortly before the U.S.-led bombing campaign commenced, while negotiating a peace deal in France, it was reported that U.S. officials were overheard saying that what Yugoslavia needed was “a little bombing.”

MORE WAR CRIMINALS?

In addition to Clinton and Albright, Milosevic said he would call UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and the entire U.S. negotiating team at the 1995 Bosnian peace talks in Dayton, Ohio.

In two days of opening comments, beginning Feb. 14, Milosevic pointed out that, under prompting by Washington, NATO had invaded Yugoslavia. Obviously, Yugoslavia posed no military threat to Western Europe or the United States.

It was the only time in more than a half-century of existence that NATO had fired shots in anger. In invading Yugoslavia, NATO violated its own stated policy of being a defense force, originally established to check expansion of the Soviet Union.

Milosevic showed numerous photos of dead civilians and burning buildings from the 78 days of NATO bombing, mostly by the U.S. Air Force. He scoffed at the U.S. claim that striking the Chinese Embassy—the hub of China’s intelligence apparatus in Western Europe—was an accident.

Milosevic’s charge that the bombing campaign in 1998 had largely targeted civilians was partially supported by Richard Dicker, director of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.

Dicker said NATO had been “more than negligent” in failing to define its targeting rules.

Questions have been raised by a number of critics of NATO’s handling of the terrible infighting that plagued Yugoslavia for a decade, namely if Milosevic is a bloody Stalinist killer, does that justify a coalition of Western states attacking his country?

Moreover, would prosecuting Milosevic for his heavy-handed attempts at keeping Yugoslavia from disintegrating lead to further cases being brought against world leaders such as Clinton for his handling of Waco, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his involvement in massacres in Chile, Indonesia and Greece, and George W. Bush for bombing innocent civilians in Afghanistan?

“This is a crime against the truth,” Milosevic said. “The whole world knows that this is a political trial that has nothing to do with the law whatsoever.”