Milosevic tirade against 'the Nazis of Nato'

THE man who presided over a decade of terror in the Balkans took the stand to rage at a hostile world yesterday, the innocent victim of an international conspiracy against his country.

Indignant, vehement, jabbing his finger at the international war crimes tribunal bench through an uninterrupted four-hour tirade, Slobodan Milosevic said he had been a righteous and peace-loving ruler faced by the “neo-Nazi, neo-colonialist” force that was Nato; his country destroyed by a German-led plot.

Wearing a tie in the red, white and blue colours of Serbia and banging on his desk, he cast himself in the role of a scapegoat, punished in the name of his people.

“This court case is a crime against a sovereign state because you are seeking to try me for deeds that I carried out as head of state. This is also a crime against the truth and a crime against justice and the whole world knows that this is a political trial. Might becomes right.”

His delivery was gruff and grating as he made a speech in Serbo-Croat that often ran too fast for the English language interpreters.

One of the two women translators spoke in soft tones that failed to convey the former Yugoslav President’s anger; the second had a harsher voice that followed Mr Milosevic as his words came with increasing force and velocity, piercing into the headsets needed to hear proceedings through plate-glass windows.

But the body language was eloquent. The former leader leaned forward, sneered, flushed red, smiled as he pin-pointed a prosecution error, and then leant forward again as he denounced what he said was the plot against Serbia.

After responding point by point to the prosecution case, he showed a series of photographs of burnt, distorted victims of the Nato bombing campaign in 1999.

He said that he would summon President Chirac of France to the witness stand to justify the Nato intervention, and implied that he might call Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

“This accusation is a terrible fabrication and manipulation,” he said. “They want to ascribe to me crimes that they perpetrated themselves and this is an outrage to the whole Serbian people and an insult to a whole nation.”

Throughout his speech, he cast fierce glances at Richard May, the British presiding judge, and at the prosecutors, Geoffrey Nice, QC, and Carla Del Ponte. But his words were aimed mainly at world — and particularly Serb — opinion. “This is my first opportunity to address the public,” the defendant said, going on to call the present Yugoslav Administration a puppet regime.

Looking straight at Judge May, and suggesting that he was under orders from European and American politicians, Mr Milosevic said: “Your bosses broke up Yugoslavia. All the people of Yugoslavia were punished in the war that was started when they forced Bosnia to leave Yugoslavia. Serbia did not start a war or any of the conflicts, your bosses did.”

At times he exuded distrust bordering on paranoia. He had fought to keep the Yugoslav republics united in the 1990s, he said, but had been undermined by a German-led plot.

“The prosecutor did not mention Nuremberg by chance. Not satisfied with the crime of breaking up Yugoslavia to avenge their defeat in two World Wars, they bring me here to reverse the roles of the Nuremberg hearings. After killing Yugoslavia, they are crucifying me here and they are doing that with their one-time enemies and now allies.”

As for the exodus of Kosovan Albanians in 1999, this was not the deportation by Serb forces that was reported by the world’s media, rather, it was orchestrated by the Kosovans themselves.

“The people of Kosovo were expelled by the Kosovo Liberation Army which ordered them to be beaten and killed together with Nato armed structures,” he said. “That is the truth.” The Nato intervention over Kosovo was a drive “to take Serbia back to the Stone Age”.

“The goal for this aggression was geo-strategic — the expansion of Nato.” If atrocities had been committed, it was by “individuals or groups and not by the army or police. The army acted with honour and chivalry, and these crimes cannot be ascribed to the army, to the people or to my Government.”

Yet along with the fury and indignation, there were carefully planned attacks on the first prosecution of a head of state for crimes committed in office. “We have heard the prosecutors saying that they are trying an individual because it is sensitive to link an individual to a whole nation. But my conduct was an expression of the will of the population and the prosecution here is is accusing the population. Indeed, my behaviour here is the expression of the will of the people.”

The former Serb President had refused to employ the lawyers who are advising him in court, choosing instead to represent himself as a mark of contempt for the tribunal. But it became clear yesterday that he had prepared for the case with meticulous and methodical determination.

He began by showing German and British-made documentaries that called into question the massacres of Kosovan Albanians in the run-up to the Nato airstrikes in 1999. “This is an atom of truth in an ocean of lies,” he said.

Finally, he accused Nato of the very crimes with which he himself has been charged: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. “Children, women, the elderly, pregnant women, they all suffered from the Nato bombing, so did journalists doing their work, refugee columns and salesmen at marketplaces.

“The bombing of civilian targets was merciless, the more victims and the more that lives were imperilled the better. In the photographs I will show you, you will see corpses that have been destroyed, bodies that have been carbonised, injured people and buildings that have been destroyed. These are the same sorts of images we were shown at school when we were told about World War Two. Only the Nazis could have conceived of bombing villages like this.”

The photographs included images of Kosovan peasants killed in a Nato airstrike on April 14, 1999. As a dislocated head, an arm and a leg appeared on the screen, Mr Milosevic commented upon them gruffly and then ordered the clerks to show the next scene.

These were part of a strategy that will present Judge May with difficulties. Now Mr Milosevic has abandoned his previous indifference, his aim is to highlight what he says is its political nature.

In a tribunal that has only a small body of case law upon which to draw, the bench will have to decide whether to admit such items as photographs of Nato bombing victims. It will also have to rule on Mr Milosevic’s application to summon heads of state and government. Refusal would reinforce his claim that he is the victim of a plot. Acceptance could push the case on to highly political terrain.

Somewhere around three and a half weeks into the Kosovo operation, a Houston TV station did an interview with Milosovic and they handed the guy a straight line which somebody like Klintler would have tried to hit out of the ball park, and it went something like this (best possible from memory):

Mr. Milosovic, NATO is claiming that it has only lost the one aircraft in this campaign and, yet, we are hearing reports from Serbia and the surrounding countries of many NATO aircraft crashing or being destroyed, and that the number might go as high as seventy or eighty; what is your reaction to this?

Slick would have said "Yeah, we've shot down a couple hundred of em, we've got the pilots and we're torturing em till the cows come home!"

Milosevic said something like (again from memory) "You know, we're having to keep under shelter here and those planes are flying at 25000' (because no NATO pilot wants to die for dog-wagging) and, at that altitude, a solid hit will vaporize the aircraft and anything less than solid, and the plane either crashes in the woods somewhere 20 miles from where it was hit or makes it back to base in unrepairable condition and, frankly, we don't have the resources to go out looking for them. My GUESS would be that if you took those numbers you're hearing and divided by two or three, you'd be somewhere ballpark."

In other words, a totally straight up, honest answer which turned out to be spot on. Shame we don't have politicians like that here...

There was not a genocide in Bosnia

A freezer full 1000's of bodies disputes your point. It is true a whole race was not wiped out, but there clearly was some sort of inexcusable activity. In any case, Milo can raise a reasonable doubt defense, and the prosecution has produced no 'smoking gun.'

I am no fan of Milo, but the Belgian court betrays a distinct lack of understanding of the most fundamental and basic concepts of law, just as did the massacres and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia with all sides responsible for contributory actions.

There was not a genocide in Bosnia

A freezer full 1000's of bodies disputes your point. It is true a whole race was not wiped out, but there clearly was some sort of inexcusable activity.

What freezer are talking about, in Bosnia or in Serbia? BTW what number of dead bodies to you expect to be produced by the intense 3 month fighting between tens of thousands of guerillas with tens of thousands Serbian soldiers COMBINED with massive NATO bombing? No sir, this is not a genocide.

What freezer are talking about, in Bosnia or in Serbia?

The one in Bosnia. Milo was theoretically in control of that situation, though how NATO could verify that claim while it was occupying major portions of Bosnia is bit daft. I have seen the freezer, and it is quite imposing, but there was a NATO presence and knowledge of those events on site, whereas Milo was home at the time.

Milo can fairly be accused of misplaying his hand, but the options given him by NATO were essentially the same sort of career move offered the King in 1940 by another foreign power that today also has a military presence in parts of what was once Serbia. Milo lost the game in the opening gambit in relatively minor moves, and the other side simply changed the rules on him. Milo's usefulness to Yugoslavia and it's modern day carcass is long since gone, but the game was always far bigger than Milo and he didn't wake up to that in time.

In any case, Milo is actually earning a small place in my heart for his snub of the Belgian strumpet court.

The one in Bosnia. Milo was theoretically in control of that situation, though how NATO could verify that claim while it was occupying major portions of Bosnia is bit daft.

Milosevic was not realy in control in Bosnia. The Bosnian Serb leadership was not under his orders (although they had communication and some degree of cooperation). Also the low ranking soldiers (Serbs, Muslims or Croat) could not be controlled well in the chaotic condition of the civil war. Still I dare to assume that most of deaths were "normal" war casualties.

Still ascribing the presence of dead bodies in the morgue after the bloody civil war to the guilt of one leader of the one side is very arbitrary. But it might be convincing to the low IQ clowns running the Hague show trial.

This is a very long way to genocide.

Still I dare to assume that most of deaths were "normal" war casualties.

It's a free country, you may so dare, but I have seen enough evidence, including the eyewitness testimony. It's just like the Israeli's accidentatlly shooting those kids. All in the knees or heads, virtually never anywhere else. Just an accident.

I agree Milo was not really in control of the country, but that was to be expected because he was a heavy handed clown, but then, so was NATO and particularly Clinton. It was too bad for Yugoslavia, because now that entity has gone the same way it came, with the decisions of men outside of the country.

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