Free Republic

03 April 2008 Pristina // Former Kosovo Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj has been found not guilty by The Hague War Crimes Tribunal. Haradinaj was accused of taking part in a conspiracy to drive Serbs out of Kosovo through murder, rape and torture. Co-defendant, Idriz Balaj was also found not guilty. “Based on the statute, factual conclusions and witnesses, the majority of the body sets you not guilty,” the Presiding judge read before the court. However, Lahi Brahimaj was sentenced to six years imprisonment. The trial of Haradinaj had been closely monitored in Kosovo. Ahmet Isufi, the Deputy Leader of AAK...

Podgorica, Belgrade – The Association of the families of Serbs abducted and killed in Kosvo shall sue the former chief prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal Carla Del Ponte for hiding of crimes committed against Kosovo Serbs by Kosovo Albanians that abducted and killed them, the president of that association Simo Spasic said. ‘In 2004 Del Ponte told us in The Hague that she had information that all abducted Kosovo Serbs were killed later on. She, however, has not told us that before they were killed, their body organs were taken out and sold’, Spasic told ‘Dan’ daily of Podgorica. In...

The Hague - A Dutch appeal court in The Hague has acquitted seven men accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation known as the "Hofstad" group. The men were arrested in 2004 on suspicion of preparing terrorist attacks in the Netherlands. The arrests took place shortly after the killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh. The appeal court ruled that the group was a network, but it did not have a common ideology with terrorist intent. The sentence of the main suspect Jason Walters, originally a US citizen, remains the same at 15 years. He threw a grenade at police shortly...

Hague warns Argentina over Falklands By Ben Fenton in Stanley Last Updated: 1:33am BST 04/04/2007 William Hague, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, warned Argentina that any future British government would have the patience to defend the Falkland Islands and he said Britain should not be "goaded" by increased rhetoric from Buenos Aires. Speaking on the 25th anniversary of the day Margaret Thatcher announced that a task force would be sent to drive Argentine invaders off the islands, he said her resolve had "set the standard" for future British governments and increased international respect for the country. On a one-day visit to...

Islam is taking over, says Dutch politician By Bruno Waterfield in The Hague Last Updated: 2:29am GMT 01/03/2007 An anti-immigrant politician is making a meteoric rise with his call on the Dutch - once one of the most tolerant nations in the world - to stop Islam taking over Europe. Geert Wilders: 'The Prophet Mohammed was a violent man' Geert Wilders, the 43-year-old leader of the Freedom Party, is convinced that governments are being forced to accommodate a 'tsunami of Islamisation' that is fundamentally incompatible with European social values. "Islam itself is the problem. Islam is a violent religion," he...

Can a state commit genocide? Should an entire nation not just its presidents, generals, and soldiers be held responsible for humanity's worst crime? In one of the most momentous cases in its 60 years, the U.N.'s highest court will deliver its judgment Monday on Bosnia's demand to make Serbia accountable for the slaughter, terrorizing, rape and displacement of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s. If it rules for Bosnia, the International Court of Justice could open the way for compensation amounting to billions of dollars from Serbia, the successor state of Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia, although specific claims would be addressed...

UN judge reaffirms 3 Croat generals to go on trialFebruary 11, 2007 1:53 PM THE HAGUE, Netherlands-A judge at the U.N. war crimes tribunal reaffirmed at a hearing Friday that three Croatian generals will go on trial on May 7, unless requests for the dismissal of the cases are granted before then. The suspects are Gen. Ante Gotovina, formerly the top officer in the Croatian army, and generals Ivan Cermak and Mladen Markac. Prosecutors accuse them of involvement in a "joint criminal enterprise" to drive Serbs from the Krajina region of southern Croatia in a campaign of murder and persecution....

Hague warning on Iran bomb By Toby Helm Last Updated: 2:19am GMT 01/02/2007 Britain must keep open the option of military action against Iran so long as Teheran refuses to abandon its nuclear programme, William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary suggested yesterday. In a speech that sought to distinguish Tory foreign policy more clearly from Labour's, Mr Hague said the first task of the international community should be to agree even tougher economic sanctions against the Iranians. But he stressed that the threat of military strikes should be maintained. "We do not at this stage rule it out," Mr Hague...

We'll stand alone from America, says Hague By Toby Helm, Chief Political Correspondent Last Updated: 1:11am GMT 31/01/2007 A Tory government would abandon Tony Blair's exclusive approach to the "special relationship" with Washington and foster closer links with India, China and Japan, William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, will say today. In a speech redefining Tory foreign policy, Mr Hague will pledge to "shift more political weight" to developing friendships throughout the Asia-Pacific region. He will also make clear a Tory administration would break free from US domination by developing its own approach to the Middle East, partly by building...

- Serbian newspapers have hailed nationalist leader and war crimes indictee Seselj’s interruption of a 28-day hunger strike in the Hague jail as a great victory against the United Nations' Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. "Seselj checkmates the Hague," said daily Glas javnosti in a front page article. ;Victory against the Hague and hunger,; said daily Kurir. Other media gave great publicity to Seselj’s decision to break off his hunger strike late on Friday, after the UN tribunal fulfilled most of his demands which prompted him to strike. Seselj, the leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party - Serbia's largest party...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands A war crimes suspect who once compared U.N. judges to medieval inquisitors can act as his own defense lawyer at his trial after all, the Yugoslav tribunal in the Hague said Monday. [...] He has pleaded innocent to 14 crimes against humanity and war crimes charges including murder, torture and persecution. Judges ordered him to accept a court-appointed lawyer in August because of conduct including "obstructionist and disruptive behavior; deliberate disrespect for the rules; and intimidation of, and slanderous comments about, witnesses" during pretrial hearings. The judges clearly were mindful of the courtroom antics of Milosevic, whose four-year...

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) - Prosecutors opened their case Monday against 12 men accused of belonging to a terror network suspected in the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh and plots to attack prominent Dutch politicians. The defendants, mostly young Muslims of North African ancestry, were arrested within days of Van Gogh's death on Nov. 2 - a killing that shocked the nation and triggered retaliatory attacks on Islamic sites. Van Gogh, a distant relative of painter Vincent Van Gogh, was shot and stabbed on a busy Amsterdam street. The killer cut his throat and, in a note pinned to the...

Is the indictment by the Hague Tribunal of Ratko Mladic on war crimes charges based on “justice” or “vindictive triumph”, revenge and retribution? Is he indicted because he prevented NATO expansion and US penetration into Southeastern Europe? Is his greatest crime opposition to the US and NATO and the EU? One person’s war criminal is another person’s hero. On June 30, 2006, the ICTY convicted the senior Bosnian Muslim military commander of Srebrenica of committing war crimes against Bosnian Serb civilians because forces under his control tortured and murdered unarmed Bosnian Serb civilians in Srebrenica. Oric was a convicted war...

Excerpt - THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Former Liberian President Charles Taylor arrived in the Netherlands on Tuesday for a war crimes trial on charges accusing him in the death, rape or mutilation of hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa. An airport official said Taylor's U.N.-chartered plane landed after a direct flight from Sierra Leone, where he had been in detention since March 29. Two police vans and five motorcycle outriders were waiting on the tarmac at a small commercial airport south of The Hague. ~ snip ~

Writing in that fateful year, 1939, T.S. Eliot, intellectual and Christian, admonished his contemporaries who had placed their faith in the triumph of democracy. Democracy is not enough, Eliot wrote. ''As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. ''The term 'democracy,' as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you...

The mainstream Western media coverage of the death of Slobodan Milosevic, while predictably relentless in its clichés (the “Butcher of the Balkans,” guilty of “starting three wars” and ordering ethnic cleansing and genocide in his pursuit of a “greater Serbia,” etc.), has ignored the unresolved mystery surrounding the event itself. Having spent a week in Belgrade talking to a score of well-placed individuals at different ends of the political spectrum, I can present to our readers the facts of the case that are deemed unfit to print by their Gannett, Tribune, NYT, or Knight Ridder outlets. Milosevic was found...

The Democrats’ Athena only differs from Bush on the details. When “the Moose” talks, Democrats listen—just like the Republicans did when he was flacking on their behalf. And the Democrat listening the closest to this Trotskyist-turned-neoconservative is Hillary Rodham Clinton, supposedly the leader of the party’s far-left wing.With his reputation for giving good quote, “the Moose,” a.k.a. Marshall Wittmann, formerly John McCain’s communications director and now a bigwig at the Democratic Leadership Council, is a legendary character in Washington circles. Once a member of the Trotskyist Spartacist League and an officer in the Young People’s Socialist League, Wittmann, like many...

Milosevic deserved justice (Filed: 13/03/2006) Had it happened anywhere else, commentators would be outraged. If a defendant had died after five years in custody, without having been found guilty of anything, we should complain that he had not received justice. Yet, for some reason, those who hold forth most warmly against, say, the internment of terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay seem to have no problem with the farcical proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. This newspaper was no friend to Slobodan Milosevic or his Communist regime. We were, indeed, among the most enthusiastic supporters of military action...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - A Dutch toxicologist confirmed Monday that he found traces of a non-prescribed drug in a blood sample taken from former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic earlier this year. Donald Uges said he was asked to examine the sample after Milosevic's blood pressure failed to respond to medication given by doctors at the U.N. detention center...Uges said he found traces of rifampicin, a drug that could have reduced the effectiveness of his other medications...[snip] ...Tomanovic said Milosevic was "seriously concerned" he was being poisoned...He cited a Jan. 12 Dutch medical report which showed traces of medication used against...

Why did the International Penal Court at The Hague keep the story silent? Why were Milosevic’s human rights denied him? The ex-President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, was found dead in his cell at the IPC complex in Scheveningen, The Hague, early this morning, yet it was Belgrade which broke the news, on B92 Radio, not the IPC authorities. Why the silence? Mr. Milosevic was found lying dead on his bed by a guard at the IPC detention centre, where he was taken after being illegally kidnapped by NATO forces in 2001 and where upon arrival, his prosecutor, Carla del Ponte,...