Posted on 03/14/2009 5:16:08 AM PDT by Ravnagora
Julia Gorin's unpublished letter to the Washington Times:
The Washington Times recently gave print space to William Walker, described as a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer and former ambassador. But Walker is much more than that. In Kosovo, he remains a hands-on operative who has trained, and implemented the demands of, our terrorist ally the KLA — which as predicted now controls the Serbian province as its “legitimate” rulers. The piece (“A Separate Take from Serbia”, Feb. 24) was presented as a response to an op-ed by Serbian President Boris Tadic, when in fact it was an attempt by essentially a KLA apparatchik to recycle and reinforce the long disproved propaganda that conned us into becoming the KLA’s air force in the first place. Walker, like so many D.C. bureaucrats and lawmakers, is desperately trying to bury our blunder and seal our deal with the devil.
In 1999, the Washington Times understood better what we’d wrought in Kosovo than it does today after 10 years of Clinton’s war being exposed as a farce. On May 3rd, 1999 it ran the headline, “KLA finances fight with heroin sales – terror group linked to crime network.” The following day the even more disturbing headline appeared: “KLA rebels train in terrorist camps - Bin Laden offers financing, too.”
It’s certainly interesting that Walker is sweating as he is for our adopted demon child, Kosovo, at a time that his forensic investigator, Helena Ranta, is finally revealing the truth about his having coerced her report on the January 1999 Racak “massacre” that was used as a trigger for Clinton’s NATO bombing. A biography about Ranta, released in October, reveals that as head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, Walker “broke a pencil in two and threw the pieces at her when she was not willing to use sufficiently strong language about the Serbs,” the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported. Quoting Ranta herself now: “[Walker] says to this day that it was a massacre and that the Serbs were to blame. But I never said that. I never made any reference to the perpetrators.” She added that Walker has been “putting words into my mouth…What angered him most was that I refused to use the word massacre and say who stood behind what happened in Racak.”
News organizations including the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, Die Welt, BBC and Le Figaro raised doubts about the alleged massacre early in 1999, after forensic investigators concluded the bodies weren’t civilians but armed KLA guerrillas who started shooting at Serb police when the latter came to make arrests for ambushes of Yugoslav police. An AP TV crew filmed the entire day of fighting as it followed the Serbian police around, and witnessed no massacres. The conclusions of the above-cited newspapers, like those of Belorussian, Yugoslavian and ultimately Finnish forensic experts, were that the bodies had been disarmed, re-dressed in civilian clothes, then shot additional times and cut with knives several hours after death.
Milosevic trial observer Andy Wilcoxson noted in April 2005 that Walker “was given access to the village by the KLA while forensic investigators were kept out [initially]. Walker, instead of taking steps to secure the alleged crime scene, brought journalists to that gully and let them trample all over the place. One of the journalists was Franz Josef Hutsch, a German newspaper reporter. According Mr. Hutsch, who testified at the trial on October 12, 2004, Walker just stood there while journalists moved the bodies around to take their pictures.”
Walker’s propaganda job is repeating itself as the tenth anniversary of America’s greatest historical crime approaches this month — on March 24, the day America bombed Europe on the cusp of a new century. The Washington Times’ desire for balance is understandable, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of the truth. Walker is still trying to portray the KLA as “a tiny band attempting to stem the tide of violence inflicted by the government,” when the late Daniel Pearl and the NY Times’ Chris Hedges demonstrated as early as 1998 and 1999 what the supremacist KKKLA is all about. The KLA itself has been clarifying it over the course of the past 10 years that it’s had the run of Kosovo and 250,000 non-Albanians have fled the province. Ask the Albanians who sit with their mouths shut in Pristina in fear for their lives — as the author of the book Hiding Genocide in Kosovo can attest — whether Walker’s KLA resembles the one they know and had to cheer on February 17, 2008 along with the in-denial Albanian Diaspora in Times Square and everywhere else.
To reinforce his house of cards, Walker writes, “In the mid-1990s a tiny group of Albanians — tired of seeing their villages attacked, looted, burned to the ground; their men and boys jailed, tortured and executed; their access to education, health care and other public services cut off by Belgrade — took up arms and attempted to defend their villages, their families.”
As any student of the Balkans would know, it was the brutish Kosovo-Albanian policy that threatened death for any Albanian “collaborators” who acknowledged Belgrade’s legal rule — even by working for the postal service or police. Albanians had to “voluntarily” alienate themselves from the host society by refusing the above-mentioned “access to education, health care and other public services.” It was not “cut off by Belgrade,” as Walker lies, knowing that American readers won’t know any better. The Albanians of Kosovo set up a parallel system, in which there were Albanian schools, hospitals and administrative offices which shut out non-Albanians, such that pregnant Serbian women had to cross to Serbia proper to give birth.
Kosovo went from being majority Serb to being 97% Albanian. Who, then, was being “ethnically cleansed”? Within months of Albanians getting their NATO assistance against Serbia, they were on to Macedonia, where they now use the same arguments: that they’re being discriminated against and frozen out of jobs even though they hold government office and occupy the western half of the country as Greater Albania marches on, with U.S. blessing.
The “policy of repression, of ethnic cleansing, of systemic rape, pillage and murder” that Walker cites about Belgrade far better describes how the Albanian hyper-nationalists whom we side with were running the province for three decades leading up to Milosevic’s crackdown. But that’s been the trick all along: invert what was done to Serbs with what was done “by” Serbs, as Daniel Greenfield wrote for the website “Israel e-News” upon Kosovo’s independence: “Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are both triumphs of terrorism, victories by racist nationalists whose aim has always been religious and ethnic cleansing, who have nevertheless managed to portray the countries they have torn to shreds as racist nationalists practicing ethnic cleansing.”
But Walker, who has been bestowed with honorary citizenship by Albania — ostensibly a separate country from Kosovo — shows his Albanian creds by calling all the subsequent discoveries and exposures of his ruse the ranting of “conspiracy theorists and Belgrade” so that the Albanian conspiracy that launched all of this to begin with, and that we signed on to, can avoid unraveling. Obviously, if you’re part of a conspiracy, you’re going to label your whistleblowers as the conspiracy theorists.
Even Kosovo “prime minister” Hashim Thaci has admitted to the Racak ploy, but Walker desperately tries to keep up the disintegrating charade when he writes, “While conspiracy theorists and Belgrade continue to deny that the Serb army and special police units were doing anything other than policing up a ‘separatist terrorist’ movement, one only has to read the OSCE’s human-rights report, the trial record from the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.”
What trial record is he referring to? It doesn’t sound like the same one that saw the Racak “massacre”, among other “atrocities”, removed from the indictment against Milosevic after they fell apart. And people wonder why the trial took 3.5 years and counting until Milosevic was finally denied healthcare and conveniently died.
Walker repeats some oft-used words when he writes, “We were determined to be neutral. That turned out to be impossible.” You can find virtually the same sentence in reporting from Bosnia by the NY Times’ John Burns and others among the “pack reporters” who covered Bosnia by dutifully reporting the information coming directly from Bosnian and Croatian information ministries — information that made these “journalists” likewise “unable to stay neutral” and turned them into co-architects of, and co-belligerents in, a war.
Tom Gambill was security chief for Walker’s selfsame OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). Gambill was the man who in 2005 exposed the entire Kosovo mission as a fraud.
As if the already existing Kosovo myths of the 1990s weren’t enough, Walker adds some new ones when he writes, “One million Kosovar Albanians were routed from their homes, from their villages, transported in cattle cars or forced to walk into exile. On the way they were beaten, robbed, raped and degraded in every possible way.” As Bishop Artemije wrote in his Washington Times letter last week, there were hardly even any lies about cattle cars in the 1990s, much less actual cattle cars. Meanwhile, Albanians themselves have attested to it being NATO’s falling bombs that they were fleeing, as Wilcoxson wrote last year in an article for WorldNetDaily.com:
Eve-Ann Prentice, a British journalist who covered the Kosovo war for the Guardian and the London Times, testified…that rather than being driven out by the Serbs, “The KLA told ethnic Albanian civilians that it was their patriotic duty to leave because the world was watching. This was their one big opportunity to make Kosovo part of Albania eventually, that NATO was there, ready to come in, and that anybody who failed to join the exodus was not supporting the Albanian cause.”
Alice Mahon, a British MP and a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Brussels, also testified during Milosevic’s trial. She said, “The KLA definitely encouraged the exodus.”
Muharem Ibraj and Saban Fazliu, two ethnic Albanian witnesses from Kosovo who testified in Milosevic’s trial, said Serbian security forces encouraged civilians to remain in their homes, and that it was the KLA who made the civilian population leave the province.
Fazliu testified that the KLA would kill anybody who disobeyed its orders. He said, “The order was to leave Kosovo in later stages, to go to Albania, Macedonia, so that the world could see for themselves that the Albanians are leaving because of the harm caused by the Serbs. This was the aim. This was the KLA order.”
During the war, the London Times reported how “KLA ‘minders’ ensured that all refugees peddled the same line when speaking to Western journalists” by threatening the refugee’s loved ones. Unfortunately, that report was one of the few honest pieces of journalism to come out of Kosovo.
Sadly, it took something called the World Socialist Web Site to report on a sensational 2001 German documentary in which: “Heinz Loquai, a former general attached to the OSCE who has already published a book refuting some of the German Ministry of Defence’s lies…states: ‘the kind of humanitarian catastrophe that, as a category of international law, would have justified going to war did not exist in Kosovo prior to the war’. And Norma Brown, a US diplomat in Kosovo, says: “There was no humanitarian crisis up to the beginning of the NATO bombing raids.”
As for the Albanians being “beaten, robbed, raped and degraded in every possible way” and the “systematic rape, pillage and murder” of which Walker speaks, in September of 1998 the Yugoslav foreign minister was on TV in Budapest (certainly not in the U.S., whose media made the unusual step in this war of not giving us the “enemy” side), and he desperately tried to relate the now known fact that the KLA were massacring whole villages of their own people and blaming the Serbs in order to provoke the West into entering the conflict. The degradation, meanwhile, really kicked in for those refugees who fled to Albania. As Professor Mark Almond wrote for National Review in 1999: “The local Albanian mafia battened on them, demanding protection money or trying to recruit destitute girls for their prostitution rackets in Italy.”
Based on his self-spun myths and circular argument, Walker asks, “Is it any wonder that [Kosovo Albanians] want nothing further to do with Belgrade?” But wanting nothing to do with Belgrade was the cause, not the effect. Albanians did what they did to Serbia because they wanted nothing to do with Belgrade in the first place; they just wanted its land. Almond again: “The KLA’s propaganda presents the group as emerging in response to Serb repression in the mid 1990s. In fact, its roots lie in an anti-Yugoslav movement created in the early 1980s by the Stalinist-nationalist regime of Enver Hoxha in neighboring Albania. Thaci’s uncle was an activist in this self-declared Marxist-Leninist liberation movement.”
In recent years the covert operative that the Times unfortunately gave a podium to has been meeting with his old KLA contacts to make a plan for taking Kosovo’s more ornery Serb parts by force. Walker’s return to the region in March 2007 alarmed French intelligence, the newspaper Novosti reported at the time:
The information of French intelligence officers is that Walker met with many former KLA members that he had personally trained for special operations against the Serbian forces. The goal of his arrival is the preparation of a scenario and ordering of guidelines to Albanian terrorists for taking measures to seize northern Kosovo [if it’s not surrendered by Serbia]…In Pec in the hotel “Metohija” he met with ex-members of [Ramush] Haradinaj’s special unit which in 1999 conducted the [harshest] crimes against the Serbs and other non-Albanians…He also met with all of his old spies which he recruited during his Kosovo stay as leader of the UN Verification mission prior to the NATO bombardment.
Even Walker’s title “A Separate Take from Serbia” was farcical, given that Walker’s take is not the dissenting view, but the mass produced “consensus” view, while voices of dissent are far and few between. Indeed, Serbia’s is the “separate” take, the one you hardly ever hear in mainstream or even alternative media—much less on Capitol Hill.
The icing on Walker’s hackneyed cake that the Washington Times let him have was calling the liberal, Euro-facing, overly compliant Tadic “not moderate or reasonable,” accusing him of “the same inflammatory nationalistic claims” as Milosevic — a favorite pastime of editorial pages from the Wall St. Journal to the NY Times. The West’s eager cooperator before Tadic was Vojislav Kostunica — only to be promptly labeled a nationalist also, once he figured out we weren’t playing fairly. So along came Tadic as a counterweight to Kostunica — only to find and expose that our policy toward Serbia is one of perpetual trickery, as Canadian former ambassador James Bissett has lamented, and as former Italian foreign minister Gianni de Mikelis admitted in August with a welcome understatement of the century: “A lot of mistakes have been done to Serbia.” Indeed, to Walker and the West that buys his story, there is no such thing as a Serb, only a ubiquitous creature known as the ‘Serbianationalist’.
Every Serbian politician who agrees to play ball and lay his country even more prostrate under Western bidding than his predecessor did in order to deliver Serbia from its manufactured pariah status only finds himself the next pariah when he discovers that complying is met with the next punishment and demand. Going on the guiding principle that we keep our end of bargains and our signature on international agreements — such as Resolution 1244 on Kosovo, for example — actually means something, each subsequent Serbian leader finds an unrecognizable America, cooperation with whom reaps no justice or quid pro quo.
Like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Eliot Engel, George W. Bush, and Wesley Clark, for his dutifulness Walker has a street named in his honor in Kosovo — as do so many other KLA members to whom monuments have gone up all over the Serbian province. But he’d better deliver Kosovo all the way. For despite what he lets on, Walker knows full well what his KLA “friends” are capable of when they don’t get their way — and that is what has been driving our Kosovo policy since our intervention. Washington Times readers should keep in mind that just because a supremacist, narco-terrorist, mafia-clan, jihad-harboring Greater Albania is being promoted under the Red, White and Blue banner, doesn’t make it patriotic to support this policy. Just look at its original architects.
_____________________
“But Walker, who has been bestowed with honorary citizenship by Albania....”
I understand he also receives honorary subhuman status along with his Albanian citizenship.
“Like Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Eliot Engel, George W. Bush, and Wesley Clark, for his dutifulness Walker has a street named in his honor in Kosovo....”
Such appropriate names for the running sewers that pass for streets in the KLA’s Dogvomitstan.
In before the arrival of the mind-numbed Dhimmwits!
Walker - a war criminal extraordinaire...his bloody deeds have been commited all over the world
He and Slimy Clark and all the other monstrous players in this tragic region of the world will not be judged in this world. No Nuremburg for brutal killers like these POS.
Spent his entire career setting up and covering up political murders in South America before he got to Kosovo -- the perfect point (hit) man for the job!
Boka,
I honestly don’t think there is ANYTHING that you do not know. You are a wealth of knowledge on all things Balkan. Thank you.
R.
Thanks, Ravna, but there is LOTS I don't know about the Balkans. But if I ever did find out what I don't know, they'd probably have to kill me -- so what the heck? I'd rather live!
1. John McCain has been chair of the International Republican Institute since 1992. The IRI is an NGO set up by the National Endowment for Democracy and paid for primarily by our tax dollars. It's stated mission is international "democracy building" and it's primary expertise since its inception had been in South America.
2. There is another identical organization for Democrats called the International Democratic Institute, and it's current chair is Madeline Albright.
3. John McCain received substantial financial support ($millions) from the Albanian American Civic League for his various political campaigns since the late 1990's, an organization that seeks to create a Greater ethnic Albania and Kosovo, as a part of that.
4. John McCain championed the 1999 NATO Bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo, and was one of the only Republicans to do so. McCain even introduced a bill into the Senate that would have put US boots on the ground in Kosovo, had it passed.
5. William Walker spent his entire "diplomatic career" in South America, when he is linked to everything from setting up military coups to the outright murder of several Jesuit priests, but the OSCE decides that Walker is "the best guy" to go to Kosovo where he had never set foot until he arrived for "the mission".
6. After Milosevic is removed, the prime contenders for the Serbian presidency are Kostunica and Djindjic. Kostunica, a non-communist who translated the Federal Papers into Serbian during the communist years at great risk to himself, is is labeled "a (evil) nationalist" by the press, in favor of Djindjic. Djindjic gets assasinated and the son of a communist, Boris Tadic (an IRI grad) emerges as a darling of the West. Even the IRI website brags that:
IRI provided assistance to the Tadic campaign at virtually every stage of the process, from training for DS headquarters and regional coordinators in campaign planning and direct voter contact, to polling and message development, and regular consultations with the campaign team and Tadic himself. Tadic’s campaign strategy and message were directly in line with IRI’s recommendations, and campaign plans formulated by DS regional coordinators at IRI’s campaign seminars formed the basis of the DS campaign’s regional campaign plans. The results of the election were widely thought to hinge on voter turnout, with lower turnout benefiting the Radical party. IRI, with NDI and Freedom House, co-sponsored the Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID) to carry out a targeted Get-Out-the-Vote program aimed at motivating democratically-oriented voters."
Please tell me how much of anything was left to chance here? Not much that I can see!
Wow. Great article.
The Serbs were our friends. Then Bill Clinton bombed them and installed a muslim terrorist organization.
God I hate him.
If anyone thinks that they aren't sitting in DC figuring out how to manipulate those "issues of importance" like poking amoebas in a petri dish, then they don't understand politics. Ratchet up "unemployment" on them and "concern for Kosovo" goes down. Push here, and they react there. It's textbook manipulation.
And now they have gotten so good at doing this to other people in the world, they are doing it to us here in the America.
And this is just one NGO, there is also the Democrat counterpart NDI, plus Soros' NGO and many others.
NGO's should be seen for what they are -- lobbying organizations of groups of individuals, not "objective" apolitical organizations.
http://www.emportal.co.yu/en/news/serbia/80470.html Source: EMportal
Five former high-ranking Yugoslav and Serbian political, military and police officials were today convicted by Trial Chamber III of the Tribunal for crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo in 1999.
Five former high-ranking Yugoslav and Serbian political, military and police officials were today convicted by Trial Chamber III of the Tribunal for crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo in 1999.
Former Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister, Nikola Šainović, Yugoslav Army (VJ) General, Nebojša Pavković and Serbian police General Sreten Lukić were each sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment for crimes against humanity and violation of the laws or customs of war. Yugoslav Army General, Vladimir Lazarević and Chief of the General Staff, Dragoljub Ojdanić were found guilty of aiding and abetting the commission of a number of charges of deportation and forcible transfer of the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo and each sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
Milan Milutinović, the former President of Serbia, was acquitted of all charges.
Today’s Judgement is the first handed down by the Tribunal for crimes perpetrated by Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and Serbian forces against Kosovo Albanians during the 1999 conflict in Kosovo.
The Prosecution charged the six with crimes committed during a campaign of terror and violence directed against the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo in early 1999. Each of the Accused was alleged to have participated in a joint criminal enterprise, the purpose of which was to modify the ethnic balance in Kosovo to ensure continued control by the Serbian authorities. The plan was to be executed by criminal means, including deportations, murders, forcible transfers and persecutions of Kosovo Albanians.
Analysing evidence from the trial proceedings in relation to crime sites across 13 of Kosovo’s municipalities, the Trial Chamber found that there was a broad campaign of violence directed against the Kosovo Albanian civilian population during the course of NATO air-strikes in FRY that began on 24 March 1999. This campaign was conducted by army and Interior Ministry police forces (MUP) under the control of FRY and Serbian authorities, who were responsible for mass expulsions of Kosovo Albanian civilians from their homes, as well as incidents of killing, sexual assault, and the intentional destruction of mosques. “It was the deliberate actions of these forces during this campaign that caused the departure of at least 700,000 Kosovo Albanians from Kosovo in the short period of time between the end of March and beginning of June 1999,” Judge Iain Bonomy, Presiding, stated in the courtroom.
Such crimes are found to have happened in 13 municipalities of Kosovo: Orahovac/Rahovec, Prizren, Srbica/Skenderaj, Suva Reka/Suharekё, Peć/Pejё, Kosovska Mitrovica/Mitrovicё, Priština/Prishtinё, Ðakovica/Gjakovё, Gnjilane/Gjilan, Uroševac/Ferizaj, Kačanik/Kaçanik, Dečanin/Deçan and Vučitrn/Vushtrri.
The Trial Chamber found that these crimes were committed in the execution of a joint criminal enterprise, the purpose of which was to “use violence and terror to force a significant number of Kosovo Albanians from their homes and across the borders, in order for the state authorities to maintain control over Kosovo”.
This “widespread campaign of violence that was directed against the Kosovo Albanian population between March and June 1999” was “conducted in an organised manner, utilising significant state resources,” the Trial Chamber found.
The Trial Chamber enumerated other elements supporting the existence of a joint criminal enterprise. They included, “the events leading up to the conflict; the arming of non-Albanian civilians in Kosovo and simultaneous disarming of Kosovo Albanians; the breakdown of negotiations to end the Kosovo crisis at the same time as the October [1998] Agreements were being breached by the FRY and Serbian authorities; and the concealment of bodies of Kosovo Albanians killed by VJ and MUP forces”.
The Trial Chamber found that Nikola Šainović, Nebojša Pavković, and Sreten Lukić all participated in the joint criminal enterprise, and made a significant contribution to its execution.
The Chamber found that Nikola Šainović was “one of the closest and most trusted associates of [Slobodan] Milošević,” the former FRY President and “one of the most crucial members of that common [joint criminal] enterprise”.
“He was a powerful official in the FRY Government, who not only relayed information to Milošević and conveyed Milošević’s instructions to those in Kosovo, but also had a great deal of influence over events in the province and was empowered to make decisions,” Judge Bonomy read.
Although he was aware of the crimes committed by VJ and MUP forces, Šainović failed to use his “extensive authority in Kosovo” or his own initiative to ensure they stop.
Sainović was found guilty of deportation, forcible transfer, murder and persecution as a crime against humanity and violations of laws or customs of war. He was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment.
Nebojša Pavković was the commander of VJ’s 3rd Army, which encompassed both the Priština Corps and the Niš Corps, and therefore “had substantial de jure and de facto command authority over VJ forces in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999”.
“There is no doubt that his contribution to the joint criminal enterprise was significant, as he utilised the VJ forces at his disposal to terrorise and violently expel Kosovo Albanian civilians from their homes,” the Chamber found.
The commission of murder, sexual assault and the deliberate destruction of or damage to mosques, by the VJ and MUP forces, were reasonably foreseeable to Pavković yet “he sometimes under-reported and minimised the serious criminal wrongdoing in his reports sent up to the Supreme Command Staff”.
Pavković was found guilty of deportation, forcible transfer, murder and persecution as a crime against humanity and violations of laws or customs of war. He was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment.
The Trial Chamber found that Sreten Lukić was “a de facto commander of MUP forces in Kosovo from mid-1998 to mid-1999, as well as being the bridge between the actions of the MUP on the ground in Kosovo and the overarching policies and plans decided in Belgrade”. It concluded that he was thus an important participant in the joint criminal enterprise.
The evidence established that Lukić had detailed knowledge of events in Kosovo as they developed, as well as being informed of allegations of criminal conduct by MUP personnel there. However, the Chamber was not convinced by the evidence that Lukić was involved in the concealment of these crimes through the clandestine transportation of civilian bodies from Kosovo to other parts of Serbia.
Sreten Lukić was found guilty of deportation, forcible transfer, murder and persecution as a crime against humanity and violation of laws or customs of war. He was sentenced to 22 years’ imprisonment.
As for Dragoljub Ojdanić, the Chamber found that, as Chief of the General Staff, he “exercised command and control over all units and organs of the VJ”.
While it did not find him to have had the intent to expel Kosovo Albanians from their homes, the Chamber found that, “Ojdanić provided practical assistance, encouragement, or moral support to members of the VJ who he knew intended to commit deportation and forcible transfer. His conduct had a substantial effect on the actual commission of these crimes by VJ forces in some of the locations charged in the Indictment”.
On this basis he was found to have aided and abetted the commission of a number of the charges of deportation and forcible transfer in the Indictment. He was not, however, found responsible for murder or persecution. Ojdanić was found guilty of deportation and forcible transfer as a crime against humanity. He was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
General Vladimir Lazarević, the Commander of Pristina Corps, was not “necessarily aware of all the political decision-making that generally took place in Belgrade, and did not participate in high-level meetings there,” the Chamber found. However, Lazarević was supportive of the commission of crimes throughout Kosovo by Yugoslav Army and Police forces in a widespread and systematic attack targeting Kosovo Albanians and was therefore found to have aided and abetted the commission of a number of the charges of deportation and forcible transfer in the Indictment. Lazarević was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
The Chamber found that the Prosecution had not proved that the former Serbian President, Milan Milutinović, made a significant contribution to the joint criminal enterprise, nor that he had actual control over the actions of the VJ and MUP forces in Kosovo.
Milutinović did not have direct individual control over the VJ, a federal institution, the Chamber found. “In practice, it was [Slobodan] Milošević, sometimes termed the ‘Supreme Commander’, who exercised actual command authority over the VJ during the NATO campaign”.
Milutinović was therefore acquitted on all counts of the Indictment.
Credit will be given for the time each of the accused has already spent in detention.
In addition to today's rulings, the Trial Chamber invited parties to file submissions with regards to three alleged crime sites which the Prosecution was instructed, in accordance with rule 73 bis(D), not to present evidence on during the trial.
On 11 July 2006, the Chamber decided - pending any further Order - that evidence related to incidents in Racak/Reçek, Padalište/Padalishte, and Dubrava/Dubravë Prison should not be presented so as to “improve the expeditiousness of the proceedings while ensuring that they remain fair”. In the same Decision the Chamber noted that “in no way… [are] the three locations of less significance or are not representative of the Prosecution's case against the accused”.
The Trial Chamber today invited all parties to file any submissions they may have on the matter within 14 days.
The Milutinović and others trial was one of the Tribunal’s largest and most complex. The trial proceedings began on 10 July 2006, and concluded on 27 August 2008. During their course the Chamber heard oral testimony from a total of 235 witnesses, and admitted over 4,300 exhibits.
In total, the Tribunal has indicted nine of the most senior Serb and Yugoslav officials for the crimes carried out in Kosovo by Serb forces in 1999.
Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević was the first sitting head of state to be charged for war crimes when the Tribunal indicted him in 1999 for alleged crimes in Kosovo. He stood trial between 2002 and 2006 for the alleged offences in Kosovo, as well as for alleged crimes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but died from natural causes on the eve of the trial’s end and prior to a judgement being rendered.
Vlajko Stojiljković, a senior police official close to Milošević, was indicted but committed suicide in Belgrade in 2002. Vlastimir Đorđević, former Assistant Minister of the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs and Chief of its Public Security Department and a fugitive from justice until his arrest in June 2007, had his trial commence at the Tribunal on 27 January 2009.
Since its establishment the Tribunal has indicted 161 persons for serious violations of humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2001. Proceedings against 116 have been concluded.
*****
Odd statement coming from an Irishman, no? 
“Odd statement coming from an Irishman, no?”
No, the Yankee proddies were wrong. I’m not. :)
Worst of all, we were making progress bringing Russia into the fold, Kosovo gave the Russian hardliners all the support they needed to put an end to all that.
You're not what, Irish? I thought your father was Irish.
“You’re not what, Irish?”
Wrong, Nicky! :)
“Nameless”, clearly you consider the Hague War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia a valid and infallible “court of law”, and an entity that serves “Justice” well.
Why do you hate the Serbs so much?
“Nameless-fool” is on a low-fact, boilerplate-rich diet. Nameless needs (another) nom de guerre: “Factless-fool” would serve. Factless forgets the hottest headline hoax of April 1994 — Gorazde. Thousands being massacred. (General Morillon: “a couple brooms could clean up the damage.”) Factless still finds “Srebrenica” hot button stuff. Factless, explain how it was that NO report of a massacre at this town in eastern Bosnia appeared anywhere until weeks after the purported event of July 10-11 1995. That’s because it took time to fabricate the hoax. Madame Albright went to the UN in August 1995 to lay down a smoke screen to cover the US-run Croatian “Storm” in which 250,000+ Serbs were chased out of Krajina. There she didn’t mention killed, but “missing”. 6000 of these missing made it fully armed to Tuzla. Which WAS reported - by Chris Hedges (NY Times), John Pomfret, George Pumphrey and others. In July 1995 summary execution did take place of hundreds of mujahedin who had fragged, shot, impaled, burnt and crucified over 3000 Serb civilians around eastern Bosnia 1992 to 1993. Want the pictures? Bosnian Serbs were able to conceal the corpses of 8000 “men and boys” by presumably 1000 Serb shooters from satellite eyes, U-2s and the scores of reporters walking around and photographing busloads of Muslims leaving for Tuzla. The pictures are in the daily papers of those days. Get thee to a liberry. Fuel for the Muslim exodus was supplied by the UN. One Dutch soldier was killed when a Muslim dropped a hand-grenade into his UN vehicle. Dutch soldiers are now volunteering to testify in the Hague in Karadzic’s defense. They are denying that No-Fact’s favorite mnassacre took place. But a Hoax was. Factless will deny that.
PS. Mike Wallace went to eastern Bosnia to make a CBS 60Minutes documentary. Ask him why he hasn’t screened that. Would be a sensation.
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