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The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, also known as ICTY, was illegally founded in May of 1993 when the Security Council of the United Nations was steamrolled into adopting a politically engineered resolution to that effect. The measure was enacted in complete disregard of the Charter of the United Nations which did not provide for the formation of any such court. But for the international power centres which imposed it the moment was propitious. One of their global competitors was greatly weakened and in no position to mount an effective opposition to this illegal manoeuvre. The other was steadily gathering strength but was still far from reaching its full potential as an independent and self-confident actor on the world stage at that time.
ICTY, with its seat at The Hague, was created ostensibly to prosecute serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991. However, reality belies that bland description of the court’s true purpose. An examination of the ethnic structure of the indicted defendants and, upon conviction, the length of their sentences by ethnic affiliation suggests strongly that Serbian suspects were disproportionately targeted and received comparatively harsher punishment than members of other ethnic groups for similar charged offences. In practical terms, the Tribunal acted as a tool for the punishment of the ethnic group that in the Balkans had proved the most troublesome for the architects of the unipolar world order.
Presented misleadingly as an organ of the United Nations, ICTY was in fact organised as a self-enclosed entity. Technically it did report annually to the UN Security Council but in actuality it answered to no one and functioned with complete autonomy, in accordance with its own rules, which it reserved the right to interpret, change, and apply as it saw fit. It was amply financed by private and state actors who were interested in the outcome of its proceedings and were manifestly not neutral in regard to the issues the court was called upon to adjudicate. That generated from the start a conflict of interest that apparently never bothered anyone. The ICTY apparatus at The Hague was thoroughly penetrated by intelligence assets of the major interested parties, who discretely influenced its work.
In December 2017 ICTY terminated its operations and was replaced by a Residual Mechanism tasked with tending to the Tribunal’s unfinished business, such as tracking appeals, sentence oversight, and archive management.
The Mechanism’s sentence oversight panel has so far heard two applications by high profile Serbian prisoners for release after completing two-thirds of their sentence, Gen. Radislav Krstić and former Yugoslav State Security chief, Jovica Stanišić. Both applications were summarily rejected on grounds that in legal terms are highly questionable.
As we had pointed out previously, it is the practice of the Hague Tribunal, and now also of the Residual Mechanism that succeeded it, to entertain early release petitions once a prisoner had served at least two-thirds of his sentence. The court’s response to such a petition is discretionary as there are no mandatory rules governing the way it should react. But following an informal practice, the vast majority of early release petitions submitted to the President of the Tribunal and now the Mechanism have been routinely adjudicated in the applicant’s favour. Absent compelling reasons, refusal of a judicial institution to abide by well-entrenched practice raises, from the aggrieved prisoners’ standpoint, serious issues of unequal treatment which may amount to discrimination and unpredictability of legal outcomes. Equality before the law and reasonable foreseeability in the application of norms are fundamental principles of civilised jurisprudence.
Gen. Krstić was a major Srebrenica defendant who was found guilty of genocide and on appeal was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. Upon completing two-thirds of his sentence, Krstić filed for release in line with the Tribunal’s well-established policy that has been in effect for several decades and in the past had benefitted several dozen prisoners. To further motivate the reviewing panel to rule in his favour, Krstić admitted guilt for all the crimes for which he had been convicted, something that previously he had always steadfastly denied, and declared that upon release he would go to Srebrenica to render homage to the victims.
Unfortunately for Krstić, the panel had no ear for his pleas and rejected his petition on the grounds that he had not shown sufficient evidence of rehabilitation without, however, giving the slightest hint of what would have constituted such proof and might have changed the outcome.
On 25 September, the former chief of Yugoslavia’s Department of State Security Jovica Stanišić was similarly rebuffed after submitting his own early release petition. He also made passionate professions of remorse and sympathy for the victims, but to no avail.
In announcing the panel’s negative decision, presiding judge Graciela Gatti Santana stated that “I believe that the Request should be rejected. Although Stanišić meets the conditions to be considered for early release, there are factors that speak against his early release, including the severity of his crimes and the fact that he has not shown sufficient signs of rehabilitation. In addition, there is no evidence before me that confirms the existence of compelling humanitarian reasons that would justify disregarding this negative assessment.”
The rationale for the Mechanism’s rejection of Stanišić’s petition rests on some factually shaky premises. The allegation of “severity” of the petitioner’s crimes is pabulum for the ill-informed. Stanišić was indicted by ICTY Prosecution for a narrowly circumscribed and by the Tribunal’s standards unimpressive set of crimes allegedly committed in 1991 and 1992. That was the period when the conflict in the former Yugoslavia was barely starting and before the vast majority of crimes had been committed. The conflict ended much later, in the fall of 1995. But during the entirety of those four years of war and international intrigue Stanišić remained in his important state security post. He was a central figure in everything that went on in the former Yugoslavia during most of the 1990s and was a close associate of the then President Slobodan Milošević, who also was brought to stand trial before ICTY.
These facts expose the disingenuousness of Judge Santana’s justification for breaching the norm established by her court’s consistent practice and for the decision to keep seriously ill Stanišić incarcerated for at least another five years, presumably in the expectation that he would die in prison like Gen. Mladić and never have a chance to write his memoirs.
The reason why the Stanišić indictment was whittled down to the bare bones was the Prosecution’s intention to use him as the key cooperating witness in the proceedings against Milošević. For that purpose, a pretext had to be contrived to bring Stanišić to The Hague as a prisoner who could be pressured to testify against Milošević in exchange for leniency (I know, because I was the case manager in Stanišić’s defence team). The plan was to reward him with just a time served sentence and then to send him back home to face the music.
Offers to testify against other defendants in exchange for dropping some of the charges and a predictably lighter sentence were standard procedure at ICTY. Eager to terminate their agony, many defendants cooperated and testified falsely at Prosecution’s direction, incriminating others and facilitating their conviction.
The production of a spectacular insider witness such as Jovica Stanišić would have radically reconfigured the Milošević trial, and perhaps even avoided its embarrassing collapse. The Prosecution however went away disappointed. Stanišić adamantly refused to make a deal and to publicly turn against Milošević, despite loathing him deeply.
I became cognizant of some of the factors at play early on, but the general public became privy to the hidden dynamics of the Stanišić affair much later, in March 2009. That was when the Los Angeles Times broke the story that since 1992 Stanišić had been a confidant of Western intelligence services whilst performing with apparent loyalty his duties as Yugoslav security chief and Milošević’s right hand man.
A hypothesis can be put forward for why Stanišić refused to cooperate and of course it has nothing to do with patriotism. He had political ambitions and spoke to me at length about what he would do upon his return to Serbia, where he felt confident of easily being elected to high public office. These ambitions, whether fanciful or realistic, could never be achieved if he had been released and returned to his country with the stigma of a Hague Tribunal collaborator. Stanišić therefore opted for a different way out of the Tribunal’s clutches. He calculated that his former associates in the foreign intelligence services, who wielded decisive influence in the Tribunal’s corridors, would remember his past services and feel morally obligated to ensure his release on honourable terms, after acquittal following an apparently proper trial.
But just like the Prosecution, Stanišić also miscalculated. He bet on the wrong horse. In the eyes of his former “friends” Stanišić was a relic of the past, of little or no residual utility. They had fresh faces, other players that they were cultivating to take the helm after driving Milošević out. The most that they would have been willing to arrange for him was a symbolic time served sentence in return for spilling the beans on his former boss.
Jovica Stanišić is another embodiment of Kissinger’s famous dictum, a lesson that Eastern European bumpkins never seem to learn.
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History does seem to like to repeat itself, although often in a different guise. Mistakes are usually the things History uses to make these repetitions work.
Mankind is somehow incapable of stopping itself from making the same or similar mistakes over and over again. What does work in a near-fantastic manner is to give the things new names and new justifications.
One other method used is the designation of terms. Not terms as in negotiations, but in the sense of words. Take, for instance, the term “Genocide”.
Genocide has been reserved for the actions taken by the Nazis in Germany under the government of Hitler and his NSDAP party – the mass killing of minorities and opponents on an industrial scale. With a thoroughness often seen as typically German, everything was bureaucratically calculated and accounted for. The net gain generated by the killing and plundering of the victims was offset against the cost of the act of killing itself. Every part and item of that said person was monetised, and a profit was looked for. This, of course, also included the amount of labour extractable before killing and disposing of the remains.
The term “Genocide” has been dedicated to this issue. It has thus become difficult to use in other contexts. Strange, too, is the fact that only one of the groups of victims of the said genocide use it to justify their own actions today.
The next word designated is the term “defence”.
Up to the second Trump presidency, there were only Ministries of Defence. And in most countries, backward thinking no doubt, these Ministries are still so named. Not so in the modern U.S. Here the Ministry has received its rightful name: Ministry of War. Being honest at last. Calling NATO a defence organisation is something that should get the Trump honesty brush-up too. The same with the “defence industry”.
The personal use of such terms is one thing; to claim exclusivity is another.
The definition of Genocide by the United Nations, for example:
Genocide is defined by the 1948 UN Genocide Convention as certain acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group “as such,” including killing group members. It also covers acts like causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting destructive living conditions, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children.
So now everyone can reach their own conclusion on that term and its usage. Defence and War as ministry names is self-explanatory.
Repeating mistakes is another thing worth looking into a bit.
Trying to get at other people’s goods over and over again is a popular mistake made on a regular basis. Trying to set up one-sided trade agreements is one method. The EU has no good track record when it comes to things like this. Trade with African nations, for example, was carried out with such aims in mind. One anecdote springs to mind. When the EU was caught in the throes of BSE (mad cow disease), the EU wanted to import ostrich meat from South Africa. The EU wanted to dictate to the South African ostrich farmers how their meat should meet EU standards. If not met, no business possible. The ostrich farmer rightly pointed out who had a BSE problem. Did he and his ostriches, or the EU with their standards?
End of discussion.
When confronted with larger nations, able to look after themselves, other methods are needed. Back in the Middle Ages, land and resources were a point of contention, wars being fought for such reasons. In modern times, it is not necessarily land that matters, but foremost controlling other people’s resources.
The Second World War was fought for this reason. Hitler and his Nazi movement were supported, financially and morally, by some of the elites in the U.S. and Great Britain, apart from other countries in Europe. The aim of the U.S. was to have a go at the Russian Communists and take economic control over the British Empire. The second part of the plan worked: Britain lost its empire to the U.S.
The first idea, solving the Communist problem, turned out to be more difficult. They just did not stop and stand and be beaten by the German army, even with all its sophisticated weaponry. The idea the Allies had – turning the German Army into an allied one and going at the Russians – did not come to pass. This was seen by some as being a mistake at the time. The idea was not scrapped but only postponed, as can be seen today.
There we have it again: the mistake being repeated, but with a different justification. Which is where NATO comes to the front once more.
It was always an anti-Russian thing. That and controlling the European Continent. Keep America in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Fun fact: Stalin wanted to join NATO one year before it was founded, but the NATO fathers said no thank you very much. Putin made the same suggestion to Clinton, but he said no thank you too.
Now NATO has done it again and repeated the mistake Napoleon and Hitler and the Finns made – wanting to get hold of the resources Russia calls its own, preferably by force. That saves lengthy negotiations and has always been looked upon as the quickest and easiest method. To do this, NATO came up with a brilliant plan: get Ukraine to do it.
Now let everything go regarding this conflict; enough has been said by more qualified people than me, and I cannot add anything sensible on that subject. Europe is beating the drums of war again, regardless of history or common sense. What will happen in the coming months is anybody’s guess.
One point, however, has, I feel, not been mentioned to the extent it deserves. In fact, Ukraine has been given all kinds of weapons from NATO – the same weapons NATO would have used itself had it come to a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, not using a proxy.
Even the Ukrainians complained that the weapons sent were not up to scratch and outdated, as in “over the shelf time”. Now the thing is, these weapons have proven below par for all the world to see. Not only that, but this conflict has shown that NATO countries, for all their chest-thumping and war talk, cannot produce the quantity necessary to sustain any kind of prolonged military campaign. And that’s ignoring the quality altogether. The big brother in arms, the U.S., has even shown itself to be unreliable when it comes to equipping its allies. To say nothing of the miserable performance of its so-called “best weapons the world has ever seen”.
Now let us for a moment imagine: what if NATO had gone and attacked Russia directly? It would obviously have used these same said weapons and found them lacking, just like the Ukrainians did and do. NATO, meaning Europe, would have been whipped, like back in 1945. Only more thoroughly this time.
How short can memory be to start and make the same mistake again, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, just 80 years ago? Can any European politician in his or her right mind want the European countries to look like they did then, back in 1945? Destroy and lose all the things that have positively come to be since then?
Either they suffer from amnesia, or mental issues that need serious medical attention by qualified staff, or there is another reason.
If the regime in Ukraine is defending our so-called Western values while being Nazi-inclined, blatantly corrupt and definitely non-democratic, led by a cocaine-sniffing dictator, then the answer could be found in the old English saying:
“Birds of a feather flock together.” Who knows?
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