Who killed Slobodan Milosevic?

sandersresearch.com ^ | March 14, 2006 | John Laughland

[Proctor]

March 14, 2006

Who killed Slobodan Milosevic?

By John Laughland

Dutch toxicologists—aren’t you sick of them? Following the death of Slobodan Milosevic in custody at The Hague, Professor Dr Donald Uges, a forensic toxicologist at the University Hospital in Groningen, was reported as having performed tests on the late president’s blood. This followed allegations, made by Milosevic himself before his death and by his son, Marko, after it, that he was being poisoned: Marko Milosevic said on 13th March in The Hague that his father had been murdered. Dr Uges said that he had discovered traces on an antibiotic, rifampicin, in Mr. Milosevic’s blood and that the effect of this drug would have been to neutralise the effects of other medication to reduce his blood pressure. Uges said that Milosevic was himself taking the rifampicin in order to worsen his own health condition so that he would be let out of The Hague to visit a heart clinic in Moscow, thereby implying either that he had deliberately committed suicide or that he was at least responsible for his own death.

But how is it possible to tell from traces in someone’s blood where the antibiotic came from? Shortly before his death, Milosevic claimed in a letter to the Russian foreign ministry that he was being given the wrong medicines and that The Hague authorities were therefore trying to poison him. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, indicated that he partly believed the former Yugoslav president: he said that Russia did not trust The Hague’s assurances to the contrary, and he dispatched a team of Russian doctors to accompany Marko Milosevic to The Hague to examine the body. But it was too late, at least from a propagandistic point of view: Uges’ intervention was sufficient to allow the theory to circulate for a day or so in the media that Milosevic had indeed deliberately tried to ‘escape justice’.

It seems to me that a responsible toxicologist would never have said how the rifampicin got into Mr. Milosevic’s blood. Uges was not Milosevic’s doctor and, as far as I know, had never examined him before. His intervention therefore resembles that of another Dutch toxicologist, Bram Brouwer, in the controversy surrounding the alleged poisoning of the then Ukrainian presidential candidate (now president), Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. As I reported at the time, the whole poisoning allegation was nonsense. Bram Brouwer had contacted Yushchenko in Kiev after seeing his disfigured face on television: a blood sample was sent to him in the Netherlands and he found dioxin in it. He was the therefore the source for the diagnosis of deliberate poisoning, an incendiary allegation which (forgive the pun) immediately made its way into the bloodstream of public opinion, from whence it has never since been dislodged even though there have never been any prosecutions of anyone for Yushchenko’s supposed poisoning. But when I telephoned Brouwer himself, he admitted that in fact he could not possibly know how the dioxin had got into Yushchenko’s body; that it is impossible to kill a human being with dioxin anyway, since it is not a fatal poison; and that the only precedent for the levels of dioxin found in Yushchenko’s blood was a case of two Austrian women in 1998 who had contracted dioxin poisoning from an industrial accident, i.e. not as the result of malicious intent.

We live in an age in which ‘experts’ are assumed to respect the highest standards of professional conduct. Unfortunately many of them do not. Many abuse their expertise in some areas in order to stray into other disciplines of which they are ignorant or in which they are not specialists. Dr Brouwer is a case in point: he is an environmental toxicologist, i.e. a food inspector, not a forensic toxicologist and certainly not an adept of Ukrainian politics. Another case in point was the late Dr. Barend Cohen, also a Dutch toxicologist, who became very heavily involved with the Albanian cause in Kosovo. Before his death last year, Cohen travelled frequently to Kosovo and addressed numerous events with other politically-motivated people on issues like civil society and human rights. Whether he was malicious, I cannot say, but I think he definitely got involved rather too deeply in something he did not understand: his web site on human rights abuses in Kosovo was linked, at one or two removes, to web pages on which hard-core drug enthusiasts wrote about their ‘trips’ after taking various combinations of synthetic narcotics. Readers of this column will not be surprised to know that Cohen and Uges—the man who has just accused Milosevic of worsening his own health—were close colleagues who had known each other for twenty years, for instance speaking together at a conference on forensic medicine and human rights in 2003.

In spite of this intriguing link, it seems unlikely that either Marko Milosevic or Donald Uges are right about the rifampicin. Rifampicin would not have drastically worsened Slobodan Milosevic’s health, and it is highly improbable either that it was used to kill him or that he deliberately tried to worsen his own condition. Instead, these poisoning allegations obscure the far more important and indisputable fact that, on 24th February, the judges at The Hague tribunal refused to let Milosevic visit the heart clinic, even though they had known for years of his fragile and deteriorating health. He died a fortnight later.

The judges had manipulated Milosevic’s medical condition for their own ends before. In 2004, they took the inexcusable decision to impose defence counsel on him, even though the charter of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia states clearly that defendants have the right to defend themselves. Their ruling will doubtless now constitute a precedent for future trials, including perhaps ones conducted in national jurisdictions: people will be henceforth able to be silenced in court and convicted on the basis of a defence conducted by a lawyer they have not appointed and whom they do not trust.

The judges took this decision in spite of the fact that they had previously repeatedly ruled the other way, rejecting the Prosecution’s application for a lawyer to be imposed. From the very beginning of the trial, the Prosecution had realised that Milosevic was a brilliant master of his brief, and that its task would have been made much easier with a malleable and incompetent defence lawyer in his place. But in 2004, the judges rescinded their earlier decisions, supposedly on the basis of medical reports which, they claimed, said that Milosevic was too ill to defend himself but not so ill that he could not stand trial. (Milosevic had repeatedly asked to be let out for health reasons.) When I wrote to The Hague to ask to see the reports in question, my request was refused and I was told they were confidential. It seems impossible that a professional medical report could make the kind of distinction which the judges said it made. But then with Dutch doctors—who knows?

At every stage during the Milosevic trial, and in the other trials over which they preside, the judges at The Hague have disgraced themselves by collaborating with the Prosecution. They have violated numerous precepts of established jurisprudence and international law. They have allowed a trial to continue for years when it should have ended in months. No fewer than seven defendants have died while in their custody (The Hague tribunal is the only court in the world which has its own prison). Their names are: Simo Drljaca, Dragan Gagovic, Djordje Djukic, Slavko Dokmanovic, Milan Kovacevic, Milan Babic (who committed suicide on 6th March 2006) and now Slobodan Milosevic.

In my view, it is the Hague judges who bear clear responsibility for Milosevic’s death, Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson in first place. They had every reason to want him dead. Four years of trial had failed to prove his guilt or anything like it, and if he had survived another few months they would have faced the impossible task of dressing up Nato’s war propaganda from 1999 in the form of a guilty verdict ostensibly based on legal reasoning. This kangaroo court is a threat to very values of the West: its employees should be dismissed for professional misconduct and the court itself should be immediately closed down.

[Cicero]

Well, I guess we'll just have to keep talking to the Albanians until they get on board. Meanwhile, if they burn a few churches or kill a few Serbs, we wouldn't want to offend their feelings by holding them in jail, would we?

[Lion in Winter]

Most definitely NOT!! Poor widdle tings would just cry and cry and then, stab us in the BACK!