Customer Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating account of a show trial
Comment: John Laughland, author of The tainted source: undemocratic origins of the European Union, has written a brilliant denunciation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
After the counter-revolutions in the Soviet Union and Eastern European, Yugoslavia stayed independent and unwilling to join NATO or the EU. So the USA, Britain and Germany acted to carve Yugoslavia into easily controlled devolved regional statelets. The Yugoslav leadership tried to keep their country independent and united, and to defeat the terrorist secessionists.
So the NATO powers demonised the Yugoslav leadership: Blair lied about Serbian `racial genocide' of Kosovans, but after the war the Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY reported that 2,108 bodies had been found, not enough to constitute genocide.
The NATO powers made the UN Security Council set up the ICTY "for the sole purpose of prosecuting persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia" (Resolution 827, 25 May 1993). Not `allegedly responsible', but `responsible', assuming all defendants' guilt. Laughland notes that the United Nations Charter grants no power to the Security Council to create a criminal court.
On 24 March 1999, US and British forces started bombing Yugoslavia, without UN authorisation, an illegal aggression. At the height of NATO's assault, on 27 May 1999, the ICTY issued its indictment of Slobodan Miloseviæ for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In February 2002, it started the first criminal trial by an international tribunal of a head of state. The Court's rules and procedures were stacked against the defendant. The four-year trial, the longest criminal trial in history, paraded hundreds of prosecution witnesses, in an unavailing effort to prove Miloseviæ guilty.
During the trial, Miloseviæ became ill. Sick men are not usually tried, but the Court continued the trial and refused Miloseviæ suitable medical treatment, the Prosecution alleging that he was feigning illness. Instead, the Court used his illness as an excuse to take the unprecedented, and therefore illegal, decision to impose a defence lawyer on Miloseviæ, stopping him from defending himself. The trial ended when he died prematurely on 11 March 2006, aged only 64. Did he feign his death too?
NATO claims the right to intervene to `defend human rights' and to respond to `threats', including `ethnic and religious rivalries, territorial disputes, inadequate or failed efforts at reform ... the dissolution of state ... acts of terrorism ... the disruption of the flow of vital resources'. Of course, all these claims are illegal under international law, whose cornerstone is national sovereignty.
The NATO powers, not Slobodan Miloseviæ, committed a war crime by attacking a sovereign country. NATO and its creature Court held a show trial to cover their guilt.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An excellent analysis
Comment: Laughland shows that the ICTY is not an impartial implementer of international justice, but a tool of the NATO powers. The tribunal was illegally created and had no precedent at all. Its judges (many of whom were not even judges before being appointed) are a power unto themselves, and regularly change or reinterperet their own rules of conduct and statute, not to mention international legal law. For example, the ICTY repeatedly concluded that to impose lawyers on Slobodan Milosevic would be 'absurd' and contradict its own statute - and then subsequently did it, despite admitting that there was no legal precedent for it!
The ICTY's goal is not to implement justice, but to secure politically motivated convictions - the assumption of innocence before guilt having practically been abolished. It works closely with the NATO powers and refuses to even investigate them for war crimes, including the greatest war crime of aggression, even though there is no justification in their statute for this. Prosection lawyer Nice even explicitly stated that the reason they wanted the three indicments (Kosovo, Bosnia, Croatia) united was that if Kosovo was considered separate, then Milosevic would be able to raise the issue of the NATO bombings.
Laughland's analysis of the ICTY and its most famous case, the Milosevic trial, is extremely revelatory, and should be read by all interested in Milosevic, the Balkans, international law, and the evolution of the new 'civilising' mission of the West that has ended up with us in Iraq.
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