The trial has been a joke, as this Sept 03, 2004 cached CBC item shows.
After 2½ years and 296 witnesses, Milosevic's trial hasn't yet reached the halfway mark.
The timeline of the United Nations "International Criminal Tribunal" trial illustrates the problems that include humiliating cross examination of the prosecution, the retirement and death of a judge, exposure of the utter incompetence of the United Nations to the extent that even the legitimacy of the Tribunal itself is in doubt. Certainly the procedures are confused. Some had doubts even before the trial.
The Tribunal itself is a show piece for Internationalism under UN auspices. Supposedly a descendant of the Nuremburg trials, the problem is that those trials were conducted due to and in absence of a functioning German court system. The UN Tribunals are based upon an international treaty (unsigned by the U.S. under Clinton) in a court unrecognized by non-signees to the treaty, a court where no established law or precedent exists. In addition, the trial itself insults the concept of the nation-state, not to mention the distrurbing similarity to the Russian show trials of the 1930s that became verdicts in search of law.
UN International Criminal Tribunal
UPDATE: An AP story from the Toronto Sun quoted James Bissett, Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia.
In court, Milosevic read a letter from James Bissett, who was the Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia when the Balkan wars erupted in the early 1990s, saying the trial "had taken on all the characteristics of a Stalinist show trial."
"I do not wish to appear," Bissett wrote in the letter. "I have from the outset had serious misgivings about the legitimacy of the tribunal." He wrote that the tribunal, created by the UN Security Council in 1993, "is a political court rather than a judicial body operating in the interests of truth and justice."
Contacted in Canada, Bissett confirmed the accuracy of the letter. "My own view is that the court is trying to find Milosevic guilty as a scapegoat for what went wrong in the Balkans," he told The Associated Press.
He has an article on Serbia that is well worth reading, particularly his criticism of the United States that confirms much of what most of us suspected about the Clinton foreign policies. [Bolding is mine.]
The reason the Americans decided to intervene was because they suddenly discovered that arising out of the Yugoslav turmoil there was an opportunity of pursuing two short term United States foreign policy objectives.
The first of these occasions was the opportunity presented in Bosnia of displaying to the Islamic world that the United States was not anti-Muslim. This was particularly important following the first Iraq war. It was thought that by throwing US support behind Alija Izetbegovic and promising him US recognition for Bosnian statehood that US relations with the Muslim world would be strengthened. Izetbegovic’s dream of becoming the leader of the first Muslim state in Europe since the Ottoman Empire was to be realized.
The certainty that this policy would cause a civil war in Bosnia and lead to the death and displacement of many thousands was of little importance. Similarly, the possibility that in the long term United States intervention on the Muslim side would create a potential base for Islamist terrorists in the Balkans was obviously not considered.
The second opportunity for the United States was offered later by the deteriorating situation in Kosovo. By intervening on the side of the Albanians the USA was able to reassert its primacy over NATO and to revitalize a dormant institution that had lost its reason for existence after the Warsaw Pact armies had gone home.
As for the first reason, there is a distinction between the U.S. under Clinton and other administrations. This was purely a Clinton decision to support Albanian Muslims. It was not to right any perceived injury to Muslim relations after the first Iraq war. That was a war Clinton nor his party supported with any enthusiam. The purpose of supporting the Izetbegovic was expressly to establish a Muslim foothold in Europe. It was just an extension of the Jimmy Carter foreign policy that, after all, created the terrorist-supporting state of Iran.
As for the use of NATO, I suspect that had more to do with the re-admission of France to NATO after twenty years and French desires to gain influence with their Muslim friends.
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