Posted on 10/01/2002 1:42:55 PM PDT by bob808
THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The first head of state to testify at Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial accused him on Tuesday of engineering the break up of Yugoslavia and using the army to seize Croat land in the pursuit of a "Greater Serbia."
Croatian President Stjepan Mesic, who took over the rotating Yugoslav presidency in July 1991, said Milosevic invoked the threat of war in his plan to "restructure" Yugoslavia.
The former Serbian president faces 61 charges, including genocide, in this key Bosnia and Croatia stage of the biggest international war crimes trial in Europe since Hitler's henchmen were tried at Nuremberg.
"I'm quite certain that Milosevic did not favor any kind of Yugoslavia that was federal or confederal. What he was interested in was a Greater Serbia built on the ruins of Yugoslavia," Mesic, 67, told the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Prosecutors accuse 61-year-old Milosevic of genocide in Bosnia and crimes against humanity in Croatia in a scheme to create an ethically pure Greater Serbia in the early 1990s.
The court heard minutes from a 1991 meeting of the rotating federal presidency in which then-president Mesic -- who held the Yugoslav post for just a few months before resigning -- warned of Serbian imperialism.
"Gentlemen what they want is territory. They want to grab Croatian land and trick the army into doing it for them," prosecutor Geoffrey Nice quoted Mesic as saying during the meeting with representatives of the army and the five other Yugoslav republics.
"Croatian villages have been burned and cleansed. Territory is being seized," Mesic was quoted as saying.
Milosevic, forsaking a united Yugoslavia for the creation of a Serbian state, approved Slovenian and Croatian secession as part of plans to carve the country along ethnic lines, Mesic said.
"Milosevic said let Slovenia go. We know why he said that because there were no indigenous Serbs in Slovenia. He said let Croatia also leave Yugoslavia but not those Serbs who want to remain in Croatia," Mesic, dressed in a dark suit and striped tie, said.
He said Milosevic planned that Croatian territory on which Serbs lived would remain in Yugoslavia, and said the Serb leader deceived the world with his plans and even Serbs in Croatia.
"The Serbs in Croatia were only needed to ignite the fuse in order for the war be transferred to (neighboring) Bosnia Herzegovina. With regard to Croatia whatever territory could be wrested from it would be joined to Greater Serbia," Mesic said.
Contained in the indictment against Milosevic is the notorious 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II where up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed after Serb forces overran the U.N. "safe area" in Bosnia.
Prosecutors at the U.N. court last month wrapped up their case on Kosovo, where Milosevic and former aides are accused of expelling almost one third of the Albanian population from the disputed Serbian province.
Milosevic was Yugoslav leader during the Kosovo conflict, but experts say convicting him for the Bosnian and Croatian conflicts, when he was Serb leader, will be tough.
How come the outside borders become so meannigless, and the Republican borders become 'inviolable'? You know the Helsinki Agreement was there to prevent wars in Europe! And exactly when Germany and others began to shit on that Agreement, we had the shit hitting the fan in Europe again. Our forefathers were not so dumb as you might think. They knew why this was such an important Agreement!
And Germany knew all allong about the coming collapse of the USSR!?
Not a chance. The exiled Ustashe of Canada, Australia, and the US paid big money to Tudjman for Croatia's immediate independence.
I'm also part Croatian and have many Croatian family and friends. They're very candid about the effort that exiled Ustashe played in gaining German support and Croatian independence.
I would have only accepted a confederal agreemant along the creation of an autonomous Krajina Republic within Croatia! And an agreement, that in case Croatia does finally seek independence from the confederation, there would be an equal opportunity for the Krajina Republic to vote to stay in that Confederation! Hah! :)
What do you think? A fair deal you would have accepted?
None of the three were secret, nor too terribly well hidden.
I expect to read the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Memorandum and hope to read the RAM plan when it gets translated.
As to Milosevic and his culpability, I expect to hear more about intercepted phone calls in the days to come - we don't pour billions into the NSA to not hear other's conversations.
Lions and Tigers and Echelon, oh my!
The original vote of the EC was 11-1 against recognizing Croatia. By the time Germany got done twisting arms it was unanimous in favor. The Germans wanted Yugoslavia split and they were determined to get what they wanted.
There you go kissing NAZI butts! As if the Germans had ever something decent in their sicko minds when it comes to the balkans! But they own now half your coast and all of your banks! Danke Deutschland, indeed!
You don't think I'm taking this serious now? This is totally irrelevant as I said that in case Croatia does finally seek independence from the confederation, there would be an equal opportunity for the Krajina Republic to vote to stay in that Confederation! This is the bottom line, and you know which Tudman's goal was, and compromise would have been a to high price to pay for independence-that means loosing Krajina in the end!
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