Alexander Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as "the
>only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of
>hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and
>execution of the verdict." He was probably mistaken about "human
>history" but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite
>imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments politically
>motivated, initiated and controlled; arbitrary evidence gathering; trial
>by media and assumption of guilt.
>
Precisely these techniques, honed by the totalitarian
>scum of our century, have become the hallmark of the
>International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
>(ICTFY), based in The Hague. After the decline of higher cynicism in
>the name of human progress, we now witness the ascent of higher
>cynicism in the name of Human Rights. It is the New World Order's
>posthumous tribute to Felix Dzerzhinsky.
> ICTFY was established by the Security Council of the United
>Nations in 1993 on the basis of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter
>(Resolution 827), with the "jurisdiction" for crimes committed after
>January 1, 1991. Why only "the former Yugoslavia," and why only the
>past five years? The strict answer is that the US did not want to put its
>generals on trial for killing Vietnamese civilians, and did not want the
>embarrassment of charging the Croat mass murderers who have
>been untouched since 1945.
>
But the U.S. Ambassador at the United Nations, Madeleine
>Albright, supplies a more attractive, less honest answer. Speaking at
>the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on April 12, 1994, she declared
>that "there is no more appropriate a place to discuss the War Crimes
>Tribunal for former Yugoslavia." In other words, the enormity of
>recent crimes in the Balkans supposedly sets them apart from all other
>wretched spots on our planet, and makes them comparable only to the
>Ultimate Horror of Auschwitz, Babi Yar and Belsen.
>
According to Rudolph J. Rummel in the Journal of Peace
>Research (1994), in the five decades since the Nuremberg and Tokyo
>trials, there have been well over one hundred million fatalities due to war,
>genocide, democide, politicide, and mass murder. Pol Pot's Khmer
>Rouge killed two million of their compatriots - one third of Cambodia's
>population - in only four years (1975-78). This was but an offshoot of
>Mao's less known, more grandiose attempt at social engineering after
>1949, which physically destroyed some thirty five million men, women
>and children. The Indonesian Army and its affiliates killed half a million
>people in 1965-66. The precise number of victims of India's partition is
>unknown, but exceeds one million. This figure was easily exceeded by
>Pakistan's brief and savage democide in today's Bangladesh in 1971.
>Dictatorships in Afghanistan, Angola, Albania, Romania, Ethiopia,
>Iraq, North Korea, and Uganda have contributed their own hecatombs
>to the total. Even that old darling of western liberals, Marshal Tito, after
>being brought to Belgrade by the Red Army in October 1944,
>dispatched hundreds of thousands of Yugoslav citizens; the victims
>were not only the Volksdeutsche of Vojvodina who did not survive
>deportations in 1945-47, but any real, potential, or imagined enemies
>of the regime.
While democracies murder relatively few of their own citizens
>(which is scant comfort to a child burned at Waco, or to Randy
>Weaver), they are less restrained in killing foreign civilians in declared
>or undeclared wars. Dresden and Hiroshima have set the scene for
>indiscriminate bombings of Vietnamese and Iraqi cities. We know that
>the general strategic bombing policy of the Allies in 1942-45 was to
>terrorize urban centers. However, it may be years before we are told of
>the estimate for civilian deaths, in Hanoi in 1972, in Baghdad in 1991,
>or in the Bosnian Serb Republic in 1995; and there will be no trials of
>culprits.
> Compared to the horrors of Afro-Asian postcolonial killing
>fields, the war in the Balkans can be seen for what it is: a medium-
>sized local conflict. Before any facile comparisons of Yugoslavia to the
>Holocaust are accepted at face value, it is legitimate to ask how many
>have actually died. For President Clinton, addressing the nation on
>November 27 1995, the easy answer was 250,000 - and that in Bosnia
>alone. For his Defense Secretary, William Perry, two sets of figures
>seem to be equally valid. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services
>Committee on June 7, 1995, he said that in 1992 "there were, by our
>best estimate, about 130,000 civilian casualties..." But four months
>later, on October 18, he told the House International Relations
>Committee that "more than 200,000 people" were killed.
> Was that figure based on anything but repetition? Counting
>bodies may be poor form ("even one death is one too many"), but it
>has to be done if we are not to abet the further exploitation of lies and
>distortions for political purposes. According
>to the only serious study published on the subject so far, by George
>Kenney (" All Told, How Many People Have Died in Bosnia," New York
>Times Magazine, April 23, 1995), former acting chief of the Yugoslav
>desk at the State Department, "Bosnia isn't the Holocaust or Rwanda;
>it's Lebanon." Kenney insists that the number of fatalities in Bosnia's
>war is between 25,000 and 60,000 on all sides.
> The "Bosnian Holocaust" story was fabricated by the Muslim
>side as part of a wide-ranging and effective PR campaign. In
>December 1992, the Izetbegovic authorities first claimed that there
>were 128,444 dead on the "Bosnian" side (induding Croats and "Serbs
>loyal to the Bosnian Government"). According to Kenney, this figure
>was cooked by adding together the 17,466 confirmed dead until that
>time, and the 111,000 that the Muslims had already claimed as
>missing. He stresses that, at first, such high numbers were not
>accepted:
>
>
> Ever since, Bosnian-Muslim propagandists have peddled the
>story of the "Bosnian Holocaust" without being seriously challenged. In
>fact, after an initial bout of heavy fighting, from 1993 to mid-1995 there
>was a period of relative calm on most fronts in Bosnia,
>interrupted by brief outbursts in isolated localities (Gorazde, Bihac).
>Stories of mass murder and grand-scale atrocities are yet to be
>substantiated with anything better than aerial photos of freshly plowed
>fields. The Red Cross has been able to confirm under 20,000 deaths on
>all sides. Analysts at the CIA and the State Department's Bureau of
>Intelligence and Research put fatalities in the tens of thousands. This is
>close to the view of British military intelligence experts: a year ago
>they estimated fatalities to be 50,000 to 60,000. Even if the as yet
>unknown number of Serbs killed by NATO air power and the
>combined Croat-Muslim offensive last September are included, the
>war in Bosnia is unlikely to have resulted in more than 70,000
>deaths. Including Croatia/Krajina, the Yugoslav wars of 1991-95 have
>killed up to, but not more than, 100,000 people.
> So why the war crimes tribunal? Mrs Albright's answer is that
>"the U.S. Government does not believe that because some war crimes
>may go unpunished, all must." Needless to say, any determination of
>which ones s h o u l d be punished - if left to the U.S. Government -
>becomes not a legal, but a political decision. Susan Woodward of the
>Brookings Institution says that the Tribunal was pushed largely by the
>United States for political reasons: "The accusations became a
>servant of American policy toward the conflict itself, which required a
>conspiracy of silence about parties which were not considered
>aggressors." The Muslims and Croats could thus get away with
>murder, literally and figuratively. The Serbs were to be pilloried, and
>the "Tribunal" was needed to give due legitimacy - and legality - to
>that decision.
> The U.N. Genocide Convention could not, in any case, provide
>the basis for the Tribunal. It is an international treaty, approved by the
>General Assembly and ratified by member-states, which does not
>endow the U.N. with radical new powers. In fact, the Security Council
>acted illegally in setting up the Tribunal; it had no a u t h o r i t y to
>do so. (Boutros-Ghali himself declared that "in asking the Secretary-
>General to consdier this project, the Security Council has given itself
>an entirely new mandate.")
> The formal basis invoked for the Tribunal, Chapter VII of
>the U.N. Charter, deals with "threats to the peace, breaches of the
>peace, and acts of aggression," and to meet them it authorizes the
>U.N. to deploy the armed forces of its member-states in
>peacekeeping operations. It would take a very flexible legal mind
>indeed, to interpret this as c a r t e b l a n c h e to investigate
>people, indict them, try them, find them guilty and keep them in prison.
> Invocation of Article 29 in the resolution establishing the
>Tribunal gives the game away: the Security Council may establish
>such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the
>performance of its functions. This amounts to an admission that the
>Tribunal is not an independent court of law but a "subsidiary organ"
>of its political masters. But while the Tribunal remains fundamentally
>subordinate to the Security Council, its statute provides it with
>primacy over national courts, including the authority to demand the
>surrender of the accused. This is in clear violation of the U.N. Charter,
>which insists that the U.N. may not usurp the sovereign rights of
>states.
> A dangerous precedent has been created, and it would be
>short-sighted for the American public to overlook it. ICTFY may yet prove
>to be a step towards the globalist dream of a permanent International
>Criminal Tribunal. But the sponsors of ICTFY - shortsightedly, perhaps -
>do not envisage "international peace-keepers" patrolling America's
>racially or ethnically troubled areas; they do not contemplate Somalese
>or Saudi judges, sitting on such a Tribunal, demanding extradition of
>Americans accused of "hate-crimes" against, say, the Nation
>of Islam.
> The Albrights of this world have a different scenario in mind.
>They do not seek to delegitimise war crimes per se, but to enhance
>their power to decide what is a war crime on the basis of current
>political calculations. Applied in practice, it means that when Bosnian
>Muslims are shelled, driven from their homes, or murdered, they are
>seething with indignation. When Serbs are driven from their homes in
>the Krajina or in Sarajevo in their hundreds of thousands, or are
>discovered with their throats cut, they pretend not to see. When Serbs
>take Srebrenica, it is "genocide." When Serbs are cleansed from Knin,
>Drvar, Grahovo or Petrovac, there is but silence, or an exultant cry
>that they had it coming.
> To the Albrightesque mind there is no danger of the U.S.
>having to accept the jurisdiction of an International Criminal Tribunal
>created by the resolution of the U.N. Security Council, without
>congressional consent, without presidential signature, with primacy
>over the Constitution and over American courts. Such indignities are
>reserved for a Serbia, or a Rwanda. The intent is not to submit, but to
>control; the goal is not a new global superstate but a front for deja-vu
>politics. As C. Douglas Lummis wrote in the N a t i o n ("Time to
>Watch the Watchers," September 26, 1994):
>
> The populist, universalist rhetoric, used by the U.S. foreign
>policy establishment to justify The Hague Tribunal, has been deployed
>a d n a u s e a m to misrepresent "Bosnia" in general. Similar rhetoric
>may be found in Europe's leftist-leaning press (The Guardian, Le Monde)
>and among a small core of professional "intellectuals" (the most
>contemptible of whom are France's trio of laptop-bombardiers: Henri-
>Levy, Fienkelkraut and Glucksman). But among the political class of
>Paris, London, or Rome, Clinton's and Albright's approach is basically
>a heresy, a deviation from the European norm, as it has been ever since
>a misreading of Montesquieu and the revolutionary ardor of a Tom
>Paine divided America's culture from its European roots.
> Lofty rhetoric apart, America's policy in the Balkans has never
>been about the Balkans. President Wilson, while advocating the creation
>of Yugoslavia, did not know, or care, that the unification of Serbs, Croats
>and Slovenes in 1918 was at least a half-century overdue: had it
>happened at the time of Bismarck's and Mazzini's unification projects,
>it could have worked. By the time of Versailles the process of separate
>cultural development and creation of separate national identities among
>the South Slavs had been completed.
> With similar historical inattention, America's present leaders
>are deliberately ignoring the traumatic legacy of the massacre which
>Croat and Bosnian Muslim quislings systematically perpetrated
>against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies in 1941-45. What has happened in
>Croatia and Bosnia in 1991-95 cannot be understood without taking
>account of the Ustase "policy of racial purification that went even
>beyond Nazi practices" (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The murder of
>hundreds of thousands of Serbs during Pavelic's reign of terror is a
>c o n t e m p o r a r y political fact of life par excellence, just as the
>Holocaust is for the Jews.
> But what happened in Washington?
>
There are no
>i n t r i n s i c reasons for the anti-Serb policy of the Administration.
>The Serbs had lived in one state since 1918, when "Yugoslavia" came
>into being. When the breakaway republics tried in 1991-92 to force over
>two million of them to become minorities, literally overnight, they reacted,
>and often overreacted. The issue was not that of aggression versus
>collective security; instead, the principle of territorial integrity of the
>former republics (Croatia, Bosnia) fatally clashed with the principle of
>self-determination of the people (the Serbs). There could have been
>no objection to the striving of Croats and Bosnian Muslims to create
>their own states. But equally there could have been no justification for
>forcing over two million Serbs west of the Drina river to be incorporated
>into those states.
> This begs the fundamental question of the Bosnian war: If
>the collapse of Yugoslavia was due to the allegedly insurmountable
>contradictions between its ethnic groups, is not Bosnia even less a
>viable state? Are not the divergent interests among its ethnic groups
>even more strongly pronounced? The American advocates of a
>"multiethnic" Bosnia have never satisfactorily explained the paradox
>that their pleas are also the arguments for the reintegration of
>Yugoslavia, while their objections to such reintegration are also the
>arguments against Bosnia's viability.
> What, then, is the motive for the United States to disregard
>all such questions - reasonable in themselves - and to insist on forcing
>the Serbs to submit to the rule of their enemies, or accept mass exodus,
>such as the cleansing of the Krajina last August, or Sarajevo today?
> The motives of this anti-Serb stance in Washington are not
>rooted in the concern for the Muslims of Bosnia as such, or indeed any
>higher moral principle. United States policy has no basis in the law of
>nations, or in the notions of truth or justice. It is the end-result of the
>interaction of pressure groups within the American power structure.
>United States foreign policy in general, and "Bosnian" policy in particular,
>reflects those groups' concern for their particular interests and global
>policy objectives.
> A Washington insider put it bluntly in the early days of the
>conflict:
>
> There are two key strategic goals of American foreign policy
>today. One is that the United States retain its role as the perceived leader
>of the "international community." The other is that America remain the
>foremost economic power in the world. Thus the war in the Balkans
>evolved from a Yugoslav disaster and a European inconvenience into a
>major test of "U.S. leadership." This was made possible by a bogus
>consensus which passed for Europe's Balkan policy. This consensus,
>amplified in the media, limited the scope for meningful debate.
>"Europe" was thus unable to resist the new thrust of Bosnian policy
>coming from Washington.
> While Europe resorted to the lowest common denominator in
>lieu of coherent policy, a virulently anti-Serb, agenda-driven form of
>R e a l p o l i t i k dominated America's Bosnian policy. Instead of the
>neo-Wilsonian "moralist" approach - however misguided - egotistic
>unilateralism had grown rampant in Washington. Globalist
>phraseology should not mislead us.The intent is no longer to achieve a
>consensus; it is to force others to acquiesce to the American position.
>Just as Germany sought to paint its Maastricht D i k t a t on Croatia's
>recognition in December 1991 as an expression of the "European
>consensus," after 1993 Washington's f a i t s a c c o m p l i s - the
>Hague Tribunal included - were straightfacedly labeled by the
>administration "the will of the international community."
> Just as the EU has lived with the consequences of its
>acquiescence to Herr Genscher's fist-banging in Maastricht, NATO
>has felt the brunt of the new American agenda in foreign policy. Most
>NATO partners were resentful but helpless when the United States
>resorted to covert action - with the support of Turkey and Germany -
>to smuggle arms into Croatia and Bosnia in violation of U.N.
>resolutions. America's refusal to support pre-1994 attempts to end the
>war (the EU Lisbon formula in 1992, the Vance-Owen and Owen-
>Stoltenberg plans in 1993), and its unilateral actions to directly aid the
>Muslim and Croat cause have frustrated the Europeans, but they were
>helpless.
> The rest is history. Predictably, catching "war criminals" in
>Bosnia has now become another American obsession, a media-fed
>crusade that may yet make a durable peace impossible. The American-
>led operation was initially presented as a limited effort to implement
>the Dayton peace accord by creating a "zone of separation" between
>the factions and enforcing a cease fire. But a fully fledged p o l i t ic a l
>campaign is under way in Washington to turn IFOR into an
>international gendarmerie, obliged to assist the Hague Tribunal in
>apprehending accused war criminals.
> At the root of the problem is a deeply flawed model of the new
>Balkan order, designed in Washington and Bonn, which seeks to
>satisfy the aspirations of virtually all ethnic groups in former
>Yugoslavia - e x c e p t those "eight million Serbs." This is a disastrous
>strategy for all concerned. Even if forced into submission now, the
>Serb nation shall have no stake in the ensuing order of things. This will
>cause imbalance and strife for years, or decades. It will entangle the
>United States in a Balkan quagmire, and guarantee a new war as soon
>as Clinton's and Albright's successors lose interest in underwriting the
>ill-gotten gains of America's new Balkan clients.
> The little known details of the way the Hague Tribunal
>operates go beyond the issues of legality and politics; they constitute a
>moral debacle of the highest order. Here are some of the facts. First,
>in October 1992, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution
>780, establishing a five-member commission of experts to investigate
>war crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law in
>the former Yugoslavia. DePaul University law professor Mammoud
>Cherif Bassiouni was chosen to serve on the Commission and to serve
>as its "rapporteur", to gather and analyze the evidence of war crimes.
>Bassiouni subsequently became the chairman of the Commission, and
>its work provided the initial impetus to the advocates of The Hague
>Tribunal. The "War Crimes Project" at DePaul was the first data base
>to the Tribunal's prosecutor.
> Professor Bassiouni is a devout Muslim. He has never sought
>to conceal his core values and prejudices in his books and articles,
>which include the following: "The Palestinians' Right of Self-
>Determination," "Introduction to Islam," "The Islamic Criminal Justice
>System," "Jewish-Arab Relations," "Criminal Procedure (Islamic Law),"
>and "The Palestinian Intifada: a Record of Israeli Repression."
> Obviously, entrusting Professor Bassiouni with collecting
>evidence in a conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims was
>tantamount to putting Count Dracula in charge of a blood bank. It was
>a gesture of contempt for the Serbs and appeasement of oil-rich
>friends. As expected, he had consistently refused to accept evidence of
>Croat and Muslim crimes against the Serbs, while his staff have not
>hesitated to include third-hand hearsay and anonymous submissions
>from Muslim and Croat sources.
> Bassiouni initiated and legitimized a selective approach to
>evidence gathering which has become habitual at The Hague, and
>which prompted David Binder of The New York Times to declare the
>entire War Crimes Tribunal unfair:
>
> Bassiouni's "Final Report" unambiguously blamed the Serbs
>for aggression, premeditated ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, and all the
>rest. It was widely circulated in five languages under the U.N. cover.
>The outside world perceived it as an official U.N. document based on
>facts. It was an exercise in disinformation worthy of Goebbels. Few
>copies of the 3,000 page Annex were circulated, with primary evidence
>on which the findings were based. This Annex simply listed thousands
>of anti-Serb submissions, without attempting to evaluate their veracity.
>Bassiouni's m a g n u m o p u s would have been laughed out of any
>real court, in the United States or anywhere else in the Western world -
>just as he himself would have been disqualified from serving on an
>American jury in any dispute involving a Muslim and a non-Muslim.
> Second, he who pays the piper calls the tune. As Brecht put it,
>"You want justice, but do you want to pay for it, hm? When you go to a
>butcher you know you have to pay, but you people go to a judge as if
>you were off to a funeral supper."
> In the first months of its existence, The Hague Tribunal
>received 93.4% of its funding from two Islamic countries, Pakistan and
>Malaysia. M i r a b i l e d i c t u: both have been given the right to
>appoint judges to the panel. Both countries have also been among
>the staunchest supporters of the Muslim side in Bosnia ever
>since the beginning of the war, supplying it with weapons in
>violation of U.N. resolutions. The British journalist Nora Beloff says
>that such composition of The Hague Tribunal precludes it from
>meeting Western standards for an independent judiciary:
>
The panel also includes a Nigerian (where they execute poets
>for their writings), a Chinese (where nobody has been prosecuted for
>Tienanmen, let alone the horrors of the Mao era), and an Egyptian
>Muslim. With guardians like these, the New World justice needs no
>transgressors.
> Third, the Bosnian Muslim government has stage-managed
>three well publicized explosions in Sarajevo, in May 1992, February
>1994, and August 1995. A total of 121 civilians were killed by these
>blasts. The first incident (the "breadque massacre") facilitated the
>imposition of punitive sanctions against Serbia and Montenegro. The
>second - the infamous Markale Market incident - led to the imposition
>of a heavy weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo. The third provided
>the pretext for massive air raids against the Bosnian Serb Republic.
> While each of these incidents was blamed on the Serbs,
>Western intelligence analysts and ballistic experts know the truth. The
>facts of each case have been extensively reported in Europe and
>Canada (The Independent, The Toronto Star, The Times) and in some
>American periodicals (The Nation and Chronicles). They have not been
>reported by major American networks, wire agencies, or daily
>newspapers. It would be highly embarrassing to the administration if
>they were, since each of those incidents provides ample grounds to
>take Izetbegovic & Co. on the first plane to The Hague. It is also stiriking
>that Dr. Karadzic and General Mladic have been accused of all manner
>of nastiness, but the inquisitors at The Hague have shirked from
>attributing even one of these highly publicized massacres to the
>Bosnian Serb leadership.
> Fourth, the indictments of the Tribunal are uninhibitedly selective.
>A total of 46 Serbs have been accused of war crimes against Croats and
>Muslims, and seven Croats are indicted for crimes against Muslims.
>In the meantime, the Serbs have come to constitute the largest refugee
>population outside sub-Saharan Africa, and there are thousands of well
>documented cases of atrocities against Serb civilians by Croat and
>Muslim military and civilian authorities.
> The Tribunal's bias has been exposed in the indictment
>against Milan Martic, leader of the Krajina Serbs, for having ordered
>the bombing of Zagreb - which cost five lives. In their attacks against
>Western Slavonia in May and the Krajina in August 1995, Tudjman's
>troops had ethnically cleansed 250,000 Serbs and killed between
>12,000 and 15,000 Serb civillians. Asked to explain the discrepancy
>between what happened in the Krajina and the indictment against
>Martic alone, Minna Schrag, formerly of the ICTY prosecutor's
>office, admitted that the decision was political:
> The model for the Hague Tribunal is not Nuremberg 1946,
>but Moscow 1938. It is a deeply flawed institution, created for dishonest
>political ends. It is also an obscene travesty of justice, as understood
>and practiced in the civilized world. Ted Galen Carpenter lucidly
>summarized the gut feeling of many Americans in a recent column:
>
> The farce of Bosnian Serb General Djukic's arrest by the
>Muslims last February, his transfer to The Hague by IFOR, and his
>indictment by the Tribunal only after his refusal to testify against
>Mladic and Karadzic, is worthy of the judicial proceedings in a Banana
>Republic. Such seedy episodes should not be allowed to continue under
>the honorable Roman name of a "Tribunal." They are consistent only
>with the brave new world in which the United Nations is generating
>criminal law in chilly disregard of the dictum that people can be
>obligated to obey only those laws to which they have consented.
> The Hague sends a clear message to the Serbs, that in
>today's world there can be crime without punishment, and punishment
>without crime, depending on the arbitrary will of "the international
>community" embodied in Messrs. Clinton, Perry, Albright, and
>Christopher. To the rest of the world the message is equally clear:
>keep quiet, toe the line, eat your McDonald's, listen to your Madonna,
>watch your Terminator, forget your history and culture and that
>Eurocentric trash about dignity and the hierarchy of values... and
>you'll be all right. For those who refuse to play along, there will be other
>"Tribunals" globally, and P r o z e s s e n locally. The bell, it does not
>toll just for the Serbs; it tolls for thee...
>