Posted on 05/29/2002 6:56:06 PM PDT by Spar
UN Lawyer Turns Over Hijacker Info
Wed May 29, 4:06 PM ET
By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor has turned over information about one of the Sept. 11 hijackers to the United States, France and the Netherlands, the U.N. spokesman said Wednesday.
The cooperation between the United Nations (news - web sites) and other countries, especially the United States, has raised concerns that Washington may be exerting undue influence on the world body.
But U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said the United Nations should cooperate in the fight against terrorism — just as its 189 members were asked to do by the Security Council and the General Assembly after Sept. 11.
"The United Nations considers that it too has an obligation to assist countries, particularly if a state has been the target of terror activities," he said.
The war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, said last October that information concerning people "with connections to terrorist groups," primarily in Bosnia, was provided to Pierre Prosper, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes.
On Wednesday, Eckhard confirmed for the first time that the information included material related to "one of the named terrorists said to have been on one of the hijacked aircraft" on Sept. 11. Eckhard refused to name the hijacker but said the information was also shared with the French and Dutch governments.
The United States is clearly interested in any information the United Nations can provide.
"Since Sept. 11, we've had discussions with various U.N. officials on how we can improve the international effort to fight terrorism," a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But some U.N. officials contend the United States has exerted too much power.
Madeline Rees, the head of the U.N. human rights office in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, asked for an investigation in January into the way the United States pressured Bosnian officials to turn over six Algerian terror suspects. She suggested that the move damaged the very legal system Washington was trying to build in postwar Bosnia.
"The international community had definitely played a role in this unlawful handover," she said Wednesday.
Following the terrorist attacks on the United States, Del Ponte was approached by the U.S. Embassy in The Hague (news - web sites), Netherlands and asked for information in identifying those responsible, Eckhard said.
"The office of the prosecutor did in fact have some information in relation to one of the named terrorists said to have been on one of the hijacked aircraft," he said. An electronic version of some of the information was then given to Prosper as well as French and Dutch officials, Eckhard said.
Florence Hartmann, the spokeswoman for Del Ponte, said U.N. investigators may have had information about some Muslim fighters who stayed on in Bosnia after the civil war ended in 1995.
"There were some documents that could be linked" to the hunt for terrorists that were handed over, she said Wednesday.
EDITORS: Associated Press writers George Jahn and Aida Cerkez-Robinson contributed to this report.
On NOW at RadioFR!
6pm PDT/9pm EDT- Listen to Radio FreeRepublic live tonight, as Luis Gonzales interviews G. Edward Griffin and discusses his book 'The Creature From Jekyll Island. A Second Look At The Federal Reserve'. Find out the true nature of our monetary system and how it affects you!
Bosnian Musli butchers helped kill up to 3,000 Americans and I will do all I can to make that garbage heap of an entity vanish from the face of the earth.
WRONG!!!! This is from former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bisset:
Later, as many thousands of Bosnians marched for peace fearing the inevitable blood bath of civil war, a peace settlement seemed to have been reached through the skillful negotiations of the Portuguese Foreign Minister, Jose Cutileiro. The so-called, Lisbon Agreement,of March 1992 held out the last hope that the three religious groups in Bosnia might live peacefully together. It was not to be. The United States dispatched its Ambassador [Warren Christopher] from Belgrade to Sarajevo, who encouraged the Muslim leader, Alia Izetbegovic to withdraw his signature from the agreement he had signed along with his Serbian and Croatian counterparts. This US intervention guaranteed civil war in Bosnia and the death and displacement of thousands of people.
It was not "Serb genocidal mania" that caused the bloodbath in Bosnia, but New World Order/muslim collusion. Moreover, Izetbegovic's "Bosnia" was planned from the beginning to be a haven for muslim thugs and subversives, especially those from Iran, the Gulf states, and Pakistan, whom Izzie was dealing with from the git-go. The Serbs DIDN'T COUNT in Izzie's plans--after all, his Islamic Declaration stated that there was no place for Christians in his islamic state unless they converted to islam!!!!
By the way, where do you get off tallking about "you Serbs"? Spar is not Serbian. Serbophobes--whether "Western" ones or muslim ones, assume that no one but Serbs would ever take the Serbian side of anything, since the Serbs are supposed to be so "evil". Well, it just isn't true!!!!
And I--as well as many other Freepers--think that you are not really "ABrit", but "AShiptar"!!!! If you are a Brit, maybe you're Noel Malcolm, who is almost as much an honorary Shiptar as I am an honorary Serb!!!!
What a laugh that is!!
Our agency is no longer bringing bosnian muslims into the city....the emphasis now is to re-unite Serbs with their relatives who HAVE BEEN IN REFUGEE CAMPS INSIDE SERBIA FOR QUITE AWHILE....actually, since that shipturd ceku and his slimely croatia ethnic cleansers, ran over 250,000 Serbs out of the Krajina!!
Good question, I don't know the answer, and neither do you.
"The Americans now backed the Lisbon conference, at which Bosnia's ethnic partition was for the first time endorsed as a solution nobody knew to what. Though the plan was rejected by the Bosnian assembly, Zimmermann encouraged Izetbegovic to accept anything the European Community was ready to endorse. Only after Karadzic had rejected the Cutileiro plan and declared his own republic, when all easy options were gone and Bosnia was sliding unprepared into a bloody war, did Zimmermann recommend to Washington that Bosnia be recognized: 'Now the EC had recognized Croatia and Slovenia, Izetbegovic's Bosnia was threatened with isolation in a Milosevic-dominated "Serbo-slavia".Link
"After the first multi-parti elections in December 1990, together the three major political parties representing each of Bosnia's national-confessional groups formed a coalition under the leadership of the mild mannered, rational, and statesmanlike Alija Izetbegovic, leader of the Party of Democratic Action, overwhelmingly Muslim in composition. Izetbegovic became a hero of the Bosnian Muslims for his defense of their right to practice their religion without persecution by the state.(14) He had been jailed in the early 1980s on trumped up charges that he intended to create an Islamic Republic modeled on Khomeini's Iran and to convert all Croatians and Serbs to Islam by force. Izetbegovic had merely written works of political philosphy in which he speculated about the ethical basis for democratic government in an Islamic society and the position of Islam in the modern world. His writings contained no proposals to create an Islamic state in Bonsia-Hercegovina. By the time Izetbegovic assumed office as president of a tri-national, tri-religious coalition in late 1990, he was clearly a partisan of a secular democratic Bosnia and a secular and democratic Yugoslavia in which members of all religious groups could live together in harmony, peace, and equality."Link
VRN
Since completing his Ph. D. in Modern Balkan and Comparative History at UCLA in December 1990, Alan F. Fogelquist has dedicated full time to research and analysis of the post communist conflicts in former Yugoslavia the former Soviet Union and international policies towards these regions. He has spoken at numerous public forums on the current situation in the Balkans and participated in conferences at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D. C. and the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He has worked as a consultant on War Crimes for Helsinki Watch and provided consultation to members of the United States Senate and United States Congress and the Bosnian Mission to the United Nations. Alan Fogelquist is author of the monograph Handbook of Facts on the Break-up of Yugoslavia, International Policy and the War in Bosnia Hercegovina (Ann Arbor, Michigan: AEIOU Publishing, 1993) as well as several articles for scholarly publications and newspapers. He is currently writing a comparative study of conflicts arising from the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Dr. Fogelquist has visited Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Kosova, Macedonia and other areas of former Yugoslavia on several occasions. He lived in Sarajevo from 1981 to 1984. He has an excellent knowledge of Bosno-Croatian, Spanish and Portuguese and a good working knowledge of Persian, Russian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian, and French. Alan Fogelquist is currently a post-doctoral scholar in Modern Balkan and Comparative History at the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.