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Statuto della Corte Penale Internazionale (CPI, 1998)
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ICTY - processo Milosevic Slobodan Milosevic
Autodifesa di Milosevic
Documenti

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Trial ongoing - Defence case

MILOSEVIC Case IT-02-54
"Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina"


Slobodan MILOSEVIC,
born on 20 August 1941 in Pozarevac, Serbia, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (hereinafter "FRY").
Arrested: 1 April 2001 in Belgrade by local authorities.
Transferred to ICTY: 29 June 2001.
Initial Appearances:
3 July 2001, "not guilty" plea entered for all counts on the "Kosovo" Iindictment.
29 October 2001, "not guilty" plea entered for all counts on the "Croatia" Indictment.
11 December 2001, "not guilty" plea entered for all counts on the "Bosnia" Indictment.

See also case Milutinovic et al.
(IT-99-37) Pubblicazioni
Centro italiano Studi per la pace
www.studiperlapace.it - no ©
Documento aggiornato al: 2000

 
Sommario

Nel processo Milosevic (IT-02-54 / IT-99-37-I), l'accusa sostiene che tra il 1 gennaio 1999 ed il 20 giugno 1999, il 52mo Battaglione dell'Esercito Federale Yugoslavo, le forze di polizia della Federazione, le forze di polizia serbe e gruppi paramilitari, sotto direzione e con il sostegno o l'appoggio degli imputati abbiano dato corso ad una campagna di terrore e violenza contro gli albanesi civili kossovari, con lo scopo dichiarato di allontanare gran parte della popolazione albanese del Kossovo/Kosova per radicare il controllo serbo sulla regione.

Di seguito, il testo di una dichiarazione dd. 30 agosto 2001 dell'imputato, al quale è stato impedito leggerla in aula.

 
Abstract
 

STATEMENT OF PRESIDENT SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC
ON THE ILLEGITIMACY OF THE HAGUE "TRIBUNAL"

There are three fatal legal flaws in the so called International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Each has disastrous consequences for the human quest for peace, the rule of law, democracy, truth and justice.

1. THE CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS DOES NOT EMPOWER THE SECURITY COUNCIL TO CREATE A CRIMINAL COURT

The U.N. Security Council has seized power it does not possess, corrupting the Charter of the United Nations, placing itself above the law and threatening "We Peoples of the United Nations" with a lawless future in which a superpower employs the scourge of war to have its way. Nothing in the history of the planning, drafting, discussion, approval or ratifications of the U.N. Charter implies, or is consistent with an intention to empower any body created by, or under, the Charter to establish any criminal tribunal.

The words of the Charter and their textual inferences, the structure and allocation of power and duties, including those in the incorporated Statute for the International Court of Justice, all negate the existence of any capacity under the Charter to ordain criminal courts. The Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia is illegitimate and its creation a corruption of the United Nations.

There would never have been a United Nations if its Charter stated, or implied, that a criminal court could be created under its authority. No one who believes in historical truth, or that words have meaning can, after examining the history of its creation and its text, contend that the Charter of the United Nations empowers the Security Council to create a criminal court.

An International Criminal Court Can Be Created Only By A Multinational Treaty, Or Amendment To The Charter Of The United Nations

The national representatives ho have served on the Security Council and in the General Assembly and the scholars, lawyers and experts who have labored for more than thirty years to bring into being an international criminal court have recognized that the only lawful and binding way such a court can be created is by an agreement among nations through a treaty agreed upon for that purpose, or by amending the Charter of the United Nations under its strict provisions regulating amendments to authorize, or establish a court.

When an International Criminal Court was finally agreed upon in July 1998 by 120 nations meeting in Rome, it was by treaty which had been studied, drafted and debated for years. The United States, the most powerful participant in that long process, consistently sought to weaken the treaty to exempt U.S. leaders and military personnel from prosecution before it. Having failed the U.S. was then the most prominent and powerful of the handful of nations that refused to sign. As of August 1, 2001 37 nations, the Netherlands the most recent, had ratified the treaty.

The United States is vigorously trying to persuade, coerce, or bribe nations not to ratify. Creation Of The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia Was A Lawless Act Of Political Expediency By The United States Designed To Demonize And Destroy An Enemy And Frustrate Creation Of A Legitimate International Criminal Tribunal

At the insistence of the U.S. the Security Council nearly fifty years after it came into being forged a new and powerful weapon capable of demonizing a nation and its people and depriving individuals of their liberty for the rest of their lives and placed it largely in the hands of the United States. The principal precedents for such pseudo judicial actions over several millennia preceding the creation of the U.N. are trials of leaders and soldiers of vanquished populations by the victors in war, and courts used by colonial powers to control and punish subjugated peoples. The precedents are many and the violence and cruelty and hatred they usually exposed and caused was extreme.

Unless It is Limited By The U.N. Charter And International Law, The Security Council Can Do Whatever It Chooses To Do

If it is not restrained by the United Nations Charter, the Security Council can commit any act it desires disregarding all law. Early proponents of United States world power claimed such unbridled discretion for the Security Council publicly. Thus in 1950 John Foster Dullas wrote:

"The Security Council is not a body that merely enforces agreed law. It is a law unto itself... No principles of law are laid down to guide it, it can decide in accordance with what it thinks is expedient."

If unchallenged, this concept of Security Council power means that the most powerful international organ created by the Charter of the United Nations "to end the scourge of war" is above all law, domestic and international.

But absolute discretion is the very definition of lawlessness and has been called "more destructive of freedom than any other of man's inventions," by U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. All rights of all nations, races, religions, cultures, political parties and individuals are thereby subordinated to the will of the Security Council, and the single superpower that too often will dominate it. All but fifteen nations are excluded from Security Council counsels. Each of the five permanent members can veto its actions.

The Security Council is subject to domination by a single nation. The representative of each member votes as instructed by the national government that appoints him and to serve the interests of that government, not as an international statesman serving all peoples and the purposes for which the U.N. was created. The Security Council is inaccessible, anonymous and less responsive to democratic processes than any other international political institution.

2. A ONE TIME, ONE EPISODE COURT TARGETING ONE COUNTRY, CREATED BY INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL POWER TO SERVE ITS GEO-POLITICAL INTERESTS IS INCAPABLE OF EQUALITY AND CONDUCTIVE OF DIVISION AND VIOLENCE

The illegitimate Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia corrupts justice and law because it is incapable of acting equally among nations, or within the politically targeted nation. It will increase violence, division and the risk of war with neighboring nations and peoples and within Yugoslavia among the segments of the society the U.S. policy of balkanization of Former Yugoslavia has set against each other and against the new government the U.S. has installed for its own purposes.

If the United Nations Charter had authorized the Security Council to create criminal courts, it could not create a court for one nation, or episode for political purposes, to persecute selected groups, or persons and such a court is incapable of equal justice under law. An ad hoc court violates the most basic principles of all law. Equality is the mother of justice. An international court established to prosecute acts in a single nation and primarily, if not entirely, one limited group is pre programmed to persecute incapable of equality.

If the Security Council can create a criminal court to prosecute conduct in a single country like Yugoslavia, it can appoint a court for any country, selecting enemies or political and economic opportunities for targeting one at a time, while never exposing itself, or those who comply with its wishes to such selective prosecution. If the U.S., or any ally or client state it chose to protect was the subject of a serious effort by the Security Council to be honored with a criminal tribunal in its own name, the U.S. would veto the threatened action.

A Court created only for crimes in one country is by definition discriminatory, incapable of equal justice, a weapon against chosen enemies, or antagonistic interests and war by other means. If there is to be any international criminal court, it must act equally as to all nations with none above the law. The ad hoc tribunal for a single nation corrupts international law.

By its very nature, the ad hoc Tribunal can be created only after the conduct the Security Council decides justifies creation of the Court since there is no other excuse for its creation. It is in every case ex post facto. This violates an ancient principle of law. It also requires the Security Council, if there is to be a rational basis for its action, to make some preliminary claim to finding of facts, a task such a political body is not designed for, that inherently incriminates a country, or faction by placing the imprimatur of the Security Council of the United Nations on a political decision of fact necessary to justify creation of the Tribunal. The very charge of the Security Council - genocide, crimes against peace, war crimes, or crimes against humanity demonized any person thereafter accused.

The Selection Of A Nation For Prosecution On Political Findings Of Genocide, War Crimes And Crimes Against Humanity Creates A Compulsion to Convict.

Investigators, prosecutors and administrative personnel who join a temporary Tribunal to pursue allegations of humanities greatest crimes against a people and leaders already demonized will feel they have failed if there are not convictions. The very psychology of the enterprise is persecutorial. Few judges appointed to serve on a Tribunal created under such circumstances will feel free to acquit any but the most marginal, or clearly mistaken, accused, or to create an appearance of objectivity.

Powers That Create Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunals Divert Attention From Their Own Offenses, Or Failures, Or Those Of Allies And Their Political Surrogates While Continuing To Inflect And Threaten Mass Destruction With Impunity.

The ad hoc Tribunal which targets a country is incapable of prosecuting what may be greater crimes committed in the same conflict, by a power, coalition ally or political agents that was and remains a much greater source of violence and threat to peace. Most often the power which forced the creation of the target tribunal to further damage and demonize their enemy is shielded from criticism by the avalanche of propaganda against the accused supported by the appearance of United Nations neutrality and peace making efforts.

What court will consider the criminality of aerial bombardment by U.S. aircraft of defenseless civilians, their housing, water systems, power plants, factories, office buildings, schools, hospitals, which take thousands of lives directly and causes billions of dollars of property damages in Belgrade, Nis, Novi Sad and scores of other cities, towns and villages? What threat to peace continues from the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy?

Who will be held accountable for the devastation of Pristina by NATO planes, or the attacks on refugee columns in Kosovo and Metohia? Is the U.S. use of cluster bombs exploding razor sharp metal fragments over an area as large as a soccer field in the courtyard at the hospital in Nis no crime? Will the Security Council act to prevent and punish the use of depleted uranium by the U.S. which is as indiscriminate in its radiation as the air, the water, the soil and food hain it touches and contaminates for millions of years?

International law accepts bombing of defenseless civilian populations by a militarily advanced technology that can destroy a country without even setting foot on its soil because supper power controls international prosecutions and determines violations. The dominant element in modern military power is mass destruction. Victors are nations with the greatest capacity for mass destruction. This places civilian populations at maximum peril infrastructure supporting civilian life, buildings, water, power, transportation, communication, food production, storage and distribution, health care, schools, churches, mosques, synagogues, foreign embassies were the direct object of U.S. aerial and missile attacks. Several thousands of civilians were killed directly and many more indirectly. The U.S. claims it had 159 casualties, a third from friendly fire, none from combat.

In 1998, the U.S. directed 21 Tomahawk Cruise missiles from international waters to destroy the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan which provided more than half the medicines available for a people who are very poor and have been unable to replace that supply. The U.S. continues to support insurrection in the South of Sudan and threaten Sudan with prosecution in an ad hoc international criminal tribunal.

NATO does not claim it prevented violence within Kosovo and Metohia among the Serbian, ethnic Albanian and other peoples. In fact, NATO accelerated that violence. It bombed Serbia for 79 days targeting civilians and citizens destroying billions of dollars worth of civilian facilities, using illegal weapons including cluster bombs, destroying the civilian Serbian TV and radio buildings. It bombed Kosovo and Metohia heaviest of all, destroying most of Pristina, killing thousands of Albanians, Muslims, Serbs, Romany, Turks and others, and causing hundreds of thousands of people to flee from Kosovo and Metohia. Damage to the Yugoslavia military was negligible. In the summer of 2001 the U.S. continues to use cluster bombs in northern and southern Iraq which it attacks on most days.

And in 1999 when the U.S. and NATO countries came into Kosovo and Metohia, as a "security force", they refused to intervene on the ground to protect people who were endangered in the province.

There will be no remedy or relief for Serbian victims of atrocities, some 500.000 purged by Croatia with the approval, if not on instructions of the U.S., forever from their homes in Krajina, the more than 330.000 permanently purged from Kosovo and Metohia since the cease fire in 1999, or for the thousands of Serbs, Romany and others killed by the U.S. and NATO bombing assaults, or by the U.S.-supported terrorist organization, the so called KLA, before, during and after the assaults. The Macedonians killed, injured and driven from their homes by U.S. condoned if not instigated KLA aggressions which threaten civil war in Macedonia and general war in the Balkans will not lead the Security Council to create a Court to prosecute the perpetrators.

Major Powers Are Not Accountable For Their Actions Which Cause War, Insurrection And Violence Within Targeted Countries.

There will be no accountability by the U.S., Germany and other nations whose acts and pressures forced the break-up of Yugoslavia, stripping Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and attempted stripping of parts of Serbia like Kosovo and Metohia.

The U.S. and several European nations have balkanized the region in the most artificial and forced apartheid the Balkans, or any other part of the world has ever known. Their acts have made peace, stability and prosperity impossible. Economic viability of small fragmented parts depends on foreign economic interests intended to dominate and exploit the region. The new apartheid leads to U.S. planned conflicts between the western Catholic Croatians and the eastern Orthodox Serbs, creating conflict and a wall between western and eastern Europe. More dangerous, it sets the stage for violence, encouraging international conflicts between Slavic peoples and Muslims to decimate and debilitate the obstacles to the U.S. world order. Kosovo and Metohia, as a part of Serbia, and Macedonia are current examples in a long list of tragic and avoidable violence between Muslims and Slavs, which has occurred to different extents in Afghanistan, Dagestan, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Bosnia.

A Federal Republic Of Balkan States Long Set Against Each Other By Foreign Powers Was Formed To Established Peace, Cooperation And Prosperity.

The idea of Yugoslavia, a Balkan federation to heal divisions and provide a better chance for living together in peace and prosperity, was seen as important in the years after World War I as a means to peace. While the idea floundered between the two worst wars in history, it worked with remarkable success after World War II in which it was ravaged, but unconquered. An independent and unified Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a long term successful solution for south Slavic peoples. It was a bulwark of the Non Aligned Movement. With the collapse of the Soviet and Eastern bloc economy it was the remaining socialist government threatening capitalist control of Europe. With its mixed market economy it offered an example to former Eastern bloc countries for revival of their economic and political independence. With a successful, functioning Federal Republic of Yugoslavia there was living proof history had not ended, that more than one economic system was possible.

After the collapse of the Eastern bloc economy a greater Balkan federation a south eastern European Union was seen by many in the region as the means to prevent economic exploitation, avoid violence and develop a strong and independent political, social and economic region.

Foreign capital and the geopolitical interests of the U.S. considered this a dangerous obstacle to their plans for the new world order, globalization, new colonialism.

The United States Having Demonized Yugoslavia Attacks It With Impunity And Persecutes Its Leadership.

The U.S. mercilessly bombed Yugoslavia for 79 day. It tried to assassinate me by bombing my home, offices and other places, where it believed I might be. It attempted to kill Libya's head of State Muammar Qaddafi in its 1986 raid on Tripoli and Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on numerous occasions beginning in 1991, including its 1993 cruise missile attack on the Al Rashid in Baghdad at a time it believed he would be there meeting international Islamic leaders.

Through economic sanctions, the most extreme and overt form of forced impoverishment and economic assault, the U.S. has coerced the Security Council into complicity in the longest deadliest and cruelest genocide of the last decade, the sanctions against its enemy Iraq which have killed at least 2 million people, the majority children. The United States has forced economic sanctions against Yugoslavia, severely damaging its civilian economy and eroding its will to independence.

Can a criminal tribunal for Yugoslavia which ignores pervasive violence by the U.S. and diverts public awareness from United States conduct and legitimatizes by silent acceptance aerial and missile assaults on civilians and illegal weapons use against one country after another, making its repetition expected before it occurs, contribute to the hope for the rule of law, justice or peace?

The United States, itself, immune from control, or prosecution and above the law, uses its power to cause the persecution of enemies it selects to terrorize and further demonize. It manufactures and sells arms to chosen nations, to groups seeking to overthrow governments it opposes, uses illegal weapons against defenseless people with impunity, continues to consolidate and expand its near monopoly of nuclear weapons and sophisticated rocketry, spends trillion on unilateral protection from Star Wars assuring a continued arms race while poverty overwhelms billions, hunger cripples millions, starvation takes hundreds of thousands of lives and AIDS spreads among poor nations.

It cripples international environmental protection, undermines control of nuclear weapons by threatening to withdraw from long standing protections of the ABM and Non Proliferation treaties. It refuses to ratify treaties to protect life from land mines which it continues to manufacture, sell and deploy. It threatens to undermine a treaty controlling biological and chemical warfare. And the United States regularly engages in covert operations and violent military interventions in other nations in violation of their sovereignty and law.

The so called ICTY is not just another arrow in the arsenal of the United States with which it persecutes and demonizes enemies and corrupts international law. The ICTY celebrates inequality in the rule of law using criminal sanctions to destroy selected leaders and governments.

It is poisonous arrow destructive of the foundations of peace among independent nations of equal rights and dignity.


3. THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR FORMER YUGOSLAVIA IS INCAPABLE OF PROTECTING FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS, OR PROVIDING DUE PROCESS OF LAW.

Such an ad hoc Tribunal has a temporary and limited purpose without helpful precedent, common tradition or relevant experience.

It lacks power to enforce orders, or compel the disclosure of evidence and presence of witnesses, particularly for the defense.

It is not capable of finding facts fairly, or defining and applying legal principles equally.

It cannot do justice.

The statutory mandate for the ICTY makes it hostile to concern for the rights of those accused before it, because it is told the crimes charged have occurred and the accused have been demonized.

The right to assistance of counsel, so firmly established in international law, has been denied and frustrated by the Tribunal even in its most prominent cases. The Registry denied to me the right to consult with lawyers of my choice on legal matters for several weeks after my arraignment.

The Registrar wrote that for the one attorney who visited me during that time and for only two hours, it would have been ''inappropriate'' to discuss the case because the conversation was monitored and confidences would be violated. Lawyers from Yugoslavia I ask to consult, with one exception, a monitored two hours visit, were still denied approval and visas to enter the Netherlands seven weeks after my arraignment.

Instead I was held in solitary confinement. I was able to visit my wife only after more than two weeks imprisonment and then only through sound proof glass using monitored telephones. She was prohibited from speaking with the press and kept isolated from all public contacts while in the Netherlands, a virtual prisoner in her hotel room, except as she traveled between the airport, the prison and the hotel.

The Ad Hoc Tribunal Is Intended To Demonize And Destroy, Not To Fairly Determine Facts, Protect Rights Of The Accessed, And Apply Legal Principles Equally.

Unfair phenomena is inherent in the purpose and the nature of temporary ad hoc tribunal, struggling without personnel who are part of a legal tradition, far removed from the place the accused came from and the events occurred where the court is charged by its creator not to presume innocence, but that terrible crimes have occurred and the accused are from the group that committed them. They do this to protect thr real criminals, the NATO leaders who killed thousands of innocent people in NATO's criminal aggression.

Truth Is Beyond The Reach And The Purpose Of The Ad Hoc Tribunal Which Is Intended To Punish, Destroy And Divide.

It has been impossible in all cases before powerless ad hoc Tribunals for the accused to obtain needed evidence and witnesses for their defense. The ICTY has been unable to obtain custody of many accused in the former Yugoslavia and has resorted to, or condoned, improper and illegal means to pressure their surrender.

Ad Hoc Tribunal Terrorize And Punish Those In Yugoslavia Who Dared To Oppose NATO Aggression And To React To Criminal Acts Of Terrorists Who Were Killing Serbs, Albanians, Muslims, Turks etc.

In Yugoslavia, the U.S. in violation of international and domestic laws of both Yugoslavia and the U.S., has installed a government of its choice in the Republic of Serbia and ousted President Milosevic for the presidency of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by bombing, economic coercion including sanctions, physical threats, covert operations and corruption of the electoral process.

The U.S. Creates Client Governments By Forcing Elections, Using Millions Of Dollars to Purchase Unity For Its Candidate , Then Finance A Campaign That Buys Votes And Corrupts Democracy.

The U.S. injected more than $ 100.000.000 (US) to defeat the Government of Peoples Unity that was in power until October, 2000.

The U.S. has intervened in many foreign elections and often installed governments subservient to its interests by that means.

The creation of an ad hoc international criminal tribunal with threats and indictments of the leadership of the government it seeks to remove is an additional devastating assault on the democratic process and the government targeted for destruction.

My Abduction and Surrender To The ICTY By A U.S. Installed Serbian Government Was Done In Violation Of The Constitutions Of The Federal Republic Of Yugoslavia, The Republic Of Serbia, The Statute Creating The ICTY While The Federal Constitutional Court Of Yugoslavia Reviewed The Request For Surrender For A Bribe Of, Supposedly, 1.3 Billion Dollars.

The U.S.-installed government of Serbia abducted and surrendered me in violation of the Constitutions of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia and its Laws while the request for surrender was under review by the Constitutional Court of Yugoslavia, which had forbiden any act related to surrender until the Court's final decision. That was also a violation of the U.N. Security Council Resolution creating the Tribunal which provides that surrender shall be accomplished in accordance with the domestic laws of the nation requested to make the surrender. The United States threatened to block $1.3 billion (U.S.) in international loans and aid for Yugoslavia unless the surrender was accomplished by a date it set. Such conduct and the participation and acceptance of it reveals contempt for the rule of law by the Tribunal, the new government of Serbia, or the United Nations.

The illegal seizure of an individual and his delivery to isolation in the prison of an illegal international criminal tribunal in a distant nation threatens the freedom of everyone. For the United Nations to engage in, or accept, international kidnapping of political leaders tells that world the old ways of violence, deceit and coercion are its ways. Those ways will be met in the only way they can be met, by the same means.

The New U.S. Installed Government Of Serbia Is Using Its Police Power To Crush Political Opposition In Serbia.

The current government of Serbia is engaged in crushing and demonizing its domestic political opposition. The regime will surrender accused persons to the ICTY in violation of its own laws as it surrendered me in order to destroy political opposition at home and receive payments of money and support from abroad for the ruling politicians. It acts to frustrate any support or investigation for my defense, even attempting to ban entry and deport Ramsey Clark when he flew to Belgrade in June to discuss my political persecution. In the hope of eliminating rival domestic political power, it put hundreds of people in detention on purely political grunds.

That government may fabricate evidence, destroy evidence and control and coerce witnesses to assist in convictions by the ICTY, and it will seek to frustrate defense efforts to obtain documents, other evidence, and witnesses in Yugoslavia needed for the defense in the Hague.

The People Of Serbia And Yugoslavia Risk A Tragic Future From The External Manipulation And Control Of Their Governments.

The new government of Serbia is a puppet for the United States. If there is any expectation a U.S. supported government might be better for the people of Serbia, or Yugoslavia, ask Iranians if they believe they fared better under the Shah of Iran, enthroned in 1953 by the U.S. for 25 years, than they would have under democratically elected President Mossadegh and elected successors. Was a long line of military governments which brutally repressed the people of Guatemala for decades better for the people than democratically elected President Arbenz who was removed by United States forces in 1954. Was Mobutu, who for four decades brutalized, bankrupted and corrupted the country, better for the people than democratically elected Patrice Lumumba assassinated with U.S. complicity in 1960? Did General Pinochet better serve democracy, human rights and the welfare of the people for decades than the democratically elected Salvador Allende murdered in a U.S. supported golpe in Chile in 1973? It would be difficult to find four greater national tragedies in the last fifty years, all brought about by the United States determination to control those regions.

Ask the people of the several score other countries who have lived under U.S. supported tyrannies, "our SOB's" as FDR called Somoza in Nicaragua, how they benefited. An ad hoc criminal tribunal created to crush the leadership of the opposition to a U.S. installed government cannot bring peace, reconciliation, protect human rights, or enable a people to live and prosper together. It will create fear, hatred, division and violence.

Consider the peoples of the poorest countries of the world during these last decades obediently struggling to repay loans for projects and purposes they did not choose and that never benefited them while their own citizens die from hunger and preventable illnesses. Consider the economies of eastern Europe, or of the former Yugoslav republics and ask why per capita income is often less than half, sometimes less than 25% what it was just twelve years ago. Ad hoc criminal tribunals will prolong the suffering in poor countries by supporting governments that will maintain foreign domination that seeks benefits that will worsen that condition.

The Violence And Division Within Yugoslavia Since The Collapse Of The Soviet Economy Was Caused By U.S. Lead Acts Designed To Balkanize The Federal Republic And Its Member Republics With The ICTY As Principal Weapon.

The United States engaged in a decade long effort aided by several European countries, to break-up and destroy the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, causing the secession, (remember the American Civil War) of German oriented Slovenia and Croatia with 500 000 Serbs purged from its borders. Then Bosnia was pried away from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and segregated into an unnatural three region religious apartheid, Muslim, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian. Now Macedonia is in turmoil, nearing civil war from U.S. stimulated and supported terrorist organization KLA aggression. Thus Yugoslavia became former, losing half of its population and wealth and leaving only Serbia and Montenegro. Kosovo and Metohia, an historically precious part of Serbia remains occupied by NATO Forces after 79 days of aerial bombardment in 1999.

U.S. lead aerial assaults inflicted billions in damages on civilian facilities, killed thousands of civilians throughout Serbia in the name of NATO. Thereafter the United States and NATO watched as 330 000 Serbs were forced out of Kosovo and Metohia and many hundreds murdered, emboldened by the United States. Violent efforts to remove all Serbs from Kosovo and Metohia continue. And the KLA has been empowered to attack Macedonia.

The ICTY was created at the insistence of the United States which had stimulated violence and secession in republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and attempted division and conflict in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohia and in three municipalities in the south of Serbia and throughout the former six Republics. The U.S. intends to persecute and demonize leaders who together with the people by defending freedom and by resisting aggression of NATO war machinery, had defied its will, and at the same time make the people seem savage. Madeleine Albright, while U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., was the driving force for creation of the ICTY. The U.S. Ambassador to the Tribunal, David Scheffer, concedes the ICTY is ''supported, financed, staffed and provided information'' primarily by the United States.

Now as the idea and existence of ad hoc tribunals are threatened by the treaty creating the International Criminal Court the United States is exerting pressure to prevent nations from ratifying it. It is also pressing for new ad hoc Tribunals for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Sudan and elsewhere, to dominate those regions and defuse the drive for the International Criminal Court. The treaty, signed in Rome in 1998 by 120 nations was ratified by the 37th nation, the Netherlands, in late July 2001.

The United States prefers to select nations for persecution while protecting itself, its allies and favored client states. Ad hoc tribunals which are illegitimate, incapable of equal justice under law, by their nature unable to conduct fair trials, or provide due process and whose victims have long since been convicted in the United States controlled media are a U.S. weapon for establishing long term control and exploitation of targeted nations and regions. That is their globalization, that is new colonialism.

For these reasons, the so called ICTY should be declared illegal and its prisoners, legally and illegally surrendered, should be released.

The Hague
August 30, 2001