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| Fatty Pickens |
[This was written for a conference held at the Sava Center in Belgrade in February 2007. The event was sponsored by the Serbian Radical Party, at that time the oldest and most popular party in the country. Dr. Seselj, its leader, had been locked down at The Hague facing charges of war crimes and crimes against Humanity since turning himself in in February 2003. He finally came to trial in November 2007 and was convicted of 'disrespecting the court' for blogging the names of the Trib's 'secret witnesses' in December 2009. His bid was fifteen months--time served.--mc]
Serbian Radical Party
SRS head Dr.Seselj Former Serbian President Nikolic WHO’S WHOSE VICTIM OF ‘HATE SPEECH’?
Mick Collins, CM/P
‘Hate Speech’, like most of the other terms in the ad hoc Tribunals’ dys-lexicon of repossessed juridical double-speak, serves as just another brick in the globalists’ ‘Security Fence’ which serves to obscure the basic, even primal, crime of unprovoked international aggression, the ‘mother of all war crimes and crimes against humanity’, or what the Nuremberg Tribunal called ‘a crime against peace’. Along with ‘internal aggression’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘genocide’, and even the ubiquitously and uncritically used term (esp among Leftists), ‘civil war’, the implications of ‘hate speech’ lift the responsibility for military violence from the initial aggressor, whose motives and malice are all too clear, and transfer it onto certain victims of this targeted destruction, then explain the inexplicable but inevitable regime-o-cide as having resulted from internal ‘hatred’, ethnic or religious or national animosities, rivalries that are always ages old.
But unlike the ICTY’s favored means of shirking the traditional burden of proof, of evading its obligation to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the charged political and military leaders harbored the criminal intent, the mens reas (legalese for guilty mind), though they may not have actually committed or even commanded the crimes themselves, this nearly evidence-free shyster-trope: the ‘joint criminal enterprise’ (or JCE, which the usually unfunny Canadian jurist Wm Schabas has humorously suggested stands for: ‘Just Convict Everyone’ ); the charge of ‘Hate Speech’ can be applied to all those who were never part of the actual command and control structures but merely took part in the public debate over the war and how to defend their people against this aggression..
So, whereas President Milosevic, as political leader of Serbia and then Yugoslavia, was the perfect model for this new back-combed legal concept: like the cure for which there is not yet a disease, the JCE is a charge for which there is not yet, necessarily, any specific crime; Dr Seselj, as a public figure in the ‘Serbian opposition’, could only be charged with his ‘hateful contributions to the discourse and discord’ of preserving the sovereignty of Yugoslavia. One might call ‘Hate Speech’ a sort of JCE-Lite.
But you have to hand it to the ad hocs. The Tribunals in The Hague for Yugoslavia and in Arusha, Tanzania, for Rwanda, have been able turn the entire history of the law in both its adversarial (common law as practiced in the US and Canada) and inquisitorial (civil law as practiced in Europe) upside down and inside out in a relatively short time, a decade and some, while shaking down their imperialist patrons for important sums of money.
John Laughland in ‘Travesty, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the corruption of International Justice’ ŠPluto Press, 2007Ć, and Tiphaine Dickson and Alexandre Jokic in their essay, ‘Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil: the unsightly Milosevic case’Šwww.springerlink.comĆ, go into some detail to demonstrate that these courts have made it possible not only to convict the morally and objectively innocent, but to convict them of crimes that may never have taken place—or were not consider crimes at the time of their commission. The Tribunals have adjusted the old legal saw, ‘no law, no crime’, to better fit their needs: they’ve given us ‘no evidence, no problem.’
The most glaring examples of this latter bait and switch prosecutorial technique are the ‘genocides’ in Yugoslavia (coded as ‘Srebrenica 1995’) and Rwanda (killing confined to the 100 days between 6 April and 17 July, 1994). At neither Tribunal has evidence been produced that would actually qualify these crimes as ‘genocides’—even the death tolls have been uncritically accepted without forensic corroboration: 8,000 at Srebrenica, 800,000 in Rwanda—with any and all questions as to the accuracy of these body counts getting tossed into the waste baskets of ‘negationism’ and, yes, ‘Holocaust denial’. The Hague has been satisfied merely to stipulate to a ‘genocide’ at Srebrenica; but in Arusha, on 16 June 2006, the Appeals Chamber issued a ruling that the Trial Chambers must ‘take judicial notice’ of the ‘fact’ that ‘between 6 April 1994 and 17 July 1994 there was ‘genocide’ in Rwanda against the Tutsi ethnic group. This motion was undoubtedly forced by the overwhelming and ever-growing amount of evidence which has recently been delivered by the Defence teams in the Military I and II trials against anything like a ‘genocide’ on the part of the Rwandan government of murdered president Habyarimana, the Interim Government headed by Prime Minister Jean Kambanda ŠLaughland in ‘Travesty’ mistakenly calls President Milosevic the first sitting head of state to be brought before an international tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity, when, in fact, that dubious distinction belongs to Rwandan (interim) PM Kambanda—edĆ, the National Gendarmerie, Habyarimana’s MRND party youth group known as the Interahamwe militia, or, and especially, the government and army of France.
‘Judicial notice’ is usually taken of facts that are so obvious, like the street address of the court or the time of day, that there is no need to spend time proving them. But to ask the court to take ‘judicial notice’ of the very crime that is to be adjudicated in trial is the sort of judicial contortionism worthy of Tod Browning’s circus freaks.2)
That the Obvious need not be proven has become one of the faith-based tenets of the new Authoritarian Consciousness (i.e., the sort of mind that depends on a ‘higher authority’ for its formation, an updated version of Horkhiemer and Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality) to which the ICTY and ICTR have made such significant contributions. Those who question the Authoritarian Obvious, as both President Milosevic and Dr Seselj did as to the origins of the violence in Yugoslavia; as Thierry Meyssan Šno friend of Serbia/Yugoslava or Rwanda he or his Reseau Voltaire, mais quand meme, when you’re right, you’re right—edĆ did as to the presence or absence of an airliner, American Airlines flt 77, at the Pentagon on 9/11; as Christine Maggiore and Dr Peter Duesberg did as to the causal relationship of HIV to AIDS and the real implications of medicating against this voodoo virus; as so many others, like Chris Black and Tiphaine Dickson and Jacques Vergès and Dr Patrick Barriot and Ramsey Clark have done as to the illegality, even the murderous indecency of the militarized global tyranny that these Tribunals represent: these brave or, maybe, foolhardy souls have found themselves cast from the congregation of respectable, happy communicants and relegated to the great and somber outback where their only companions are the truth, reason, a few good aging comrades and their certain knowledge that they did the right thing—and not necessarily for the money. But, then, no one ever got rich telling the truth, and, as Machiavelli says, ‘All good men are poor’.
What makes the charge of ‘Hate Speech’ plausible? If homicide is excusable when the killing is in self-defense, then no one would claim that real acts of self-defense are motivated by malice or hatred. In order for the charge of ‘Hate Speech’ to stand up against the defenders of a nation under attack from abroad, history must be revised in such a way as to fuzz out the original international aggression that initiated the military violence, and force the public’s concentration into considerations of internecine, tribal, ethnic, or sectarian wars, civil wars. We see this today in Iraq where the March 2003 ‘shock and awe’ invasion has all but been forgotten in the paroxysm of fiery death and destruction that is now being referred to as a ‘civil war’. But this phenomenon occurred on the ground in Rwanda before it did in Yugoslavia.
The heavily armed and US-backed invasion of that small, densely populated Central African nation by forces of the Ugandan National Resistance Army on 1 October 1990, a perfect fit for the Nuremberg Tribunals ‘crime against peace’ jacket, was renamed a ‘border incursion’, and is even presently referred to as a ‘trespass’ by the ICTR. Then the Ugandan invaders were declared to be Rwandan (Tutsi) refugees and the violence, which claimed more than 30,000 lives in just the first month of October 1990, was declared to be a ‘civil war’. By 1993 the Rwandan government was declared, by a Commission headed by the ever-witty maitre Wm Schabas and backed by the UN and a passel of Humanitarian NGOs, to have committed grave violations of the Human Rights of Rwandans since, strangely enough, 1 October 1990 that, if left unchecked, would eventuate in a ‘genocide’.
Schabas and Co. had to back off that future genocide beef, but they had set the steps for the line dance: Aggression, to What Aggression, to Civil War, to ‘smells like Tutsi Genocide’, to a definite ‘This Nation’s under new ownership’ sign out front in Kigali, with all the privatization, social expropriation, militarization and misery that that entails.
The armed foreign aggression against Yugoslavia was a little more protracted and on the down-low: Germany and Austria had been arming and financing the remilitarizations of Slovenia and Croatia for some time—maybe from as early as the 1970s—; the EU then threatened their Yugoslav client republics with a cut-off of trade and aid unless they seceded from the Socialist Federation; private military contractors like Dyncorp and MPRI were organizing, arming and training Croatian ‘special police’ in violation of the UN and EU arms embargos; Enron, the Texas criminal elite, had made a deal with Franjo Tudjman, as they would later with Arnold Schwartznegger in California, to guarantee his election in exchange for the rights to broker energy deals in the newly deregulated Croatian market. ŠRichard Holbrook did much the same thing for Bosnia from his broker’s chair at Credit Suisse/First Boston—edĆ The predictable result of this replacement of Croatia’s privileged relations with its Russian energy suppliers through Yugogaz Šthe Yugoslav national gaz company once headed by Slobodan Milosevic—edĆ with a bunch empty Armanis from EU brokerage houses was that Croatian energy rates tripled—as did Croatian suicide rates because of the impossibility of life at those prices.
It has been said that the first battle of the Croatian ‘war of liberation’ was in Borovo Selo, a small town in Eastern Slavonia on the Croatian border with Serbia, built around a shoe factory. The Serbian Radical Party and Dr Seselj were supposedly involved in keeping Croatian ‘special police’ out of this multi-ethnic suburb of Vukovar: e.g., the 1991 census recorded 84,189 inhabitants of which 36,910 were Croats (43.8%), 31,445 Serbs (37.4%), 1,375 Hungarians (1.6%), 6,124 "Yugoslavs" (7.3%), and 8,335 (9.9%) others or undeclared. Just who killed how many of whom and what sort of horrors were visited on the cadavers of the enemy is the stuff of Balkan legends. But the interesting thing to me is that the objective of one of the first attacks by Croatian ‘special police’ was to take down the flag from the top of the Borovo Selo Post Office. What kind of flag was flying over the Borovo Selo Post Office? Croate? Serb? Hungarian? SOS? No. That’s right. It was a Yugoslav flag.
So after changing all the locks and street names and border signs and other identifying national symbols, the secessionists went after ‘the sixth republic’, the Yugoslav army—several of the top generals of which were Croats.
But according to the ICTY, according to the charges filed nearly a decade ex post facto against mostly Serb military and political leaders and VIPs, as early as 1992 Yugoslavia had ceased to exist as a nation—everyone referred to it as the ex- or former-Yugoslavia; or it was conflated with Serbia as the realization of its nationalist dream of ‘A Greater Serbia’, where all Serbs ŠalreadyĆ lived in one state—and the JNA, the People’s Army, had been dissolved or broken up into regional armed forces and the Balkans were in full ‘civil war’. So anyone agitating for peace through the preservation of an already defunct Yugoslavia was quite likely to be taken for a hateful nationalist ‘warmongering’ toward the creation of an ethnically pure ‘Greater Serbia’. Hence the dependence of ‘Hate Speech’ on the ‘civil war’ conceit, and all this flatulent rhetoric is aimed at the obfuscation of the initial foreign aggression.
But was there really a civil war in Yugoslavia? Is it a civil war that is today blowing a powdered Baghdad back into the Tigris and Euphrates? Here’s an article off the CM/P blog about the situation in Yugoslavia ca. 1995—well before NATO’s infamous 78-day terror bombing of Serbia/Yugoslavia. Tell me if you see a civil war without any active foreign aggressor present:
Serb Civilians? Not Important.
28 August 1995, an explosion in the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo left 29 dead and 90 wounded. Without waiting for any evidence to be analyzed, it was immediately attributed to the Serbs and served as a pretext for the Americans and NATO to launch an air assault, Operation Deliberate Force. This pretext was completely invented as the UN Experts were unable to determine where the shell had come from. General Charles G. Boyd, commander and chief of the US European Command from 1992 to 1995, testified:
From American intelligence reports of radar surveillance of Sarajevo, we have confirmed that there were no penetrations by any kind of projectiles. . . Once again, the government of Sarajevo planted an explosive charge in the marketplace of its own city. . . . Members of the US Congress as well as representatives of US and British Intelligence know well of the strong collusion between US officials and members of the Izetbegovic government in the creation of a casus belli. . . What the Americans want is to turn the war in favor of the Muslims.
(Defense and Foreign Affairs, 7/8/95)
(Defense and Foreign Affairs, 7/8/95)
In the course of the next two weeks, the NATO bombers flew 3,400 sorties, targeting (among others) the Serb positions around Sarajevo, Gorazde, Doboj, Tuzla and Mount Ozren. The weapons utilized included Tomahawk missiles and bombs and shells of Depleted Uranium (DU). In all, 10,800 such munitions.
Now this is some significant ‘humanitarian intervention’, another euphemism for foreign aggression. Someone pointed out to me that the 1995 NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serbs was far worse that Hitler’s fifty years before. At least the Luftwaffe, which saw its first action since WWII in this 1995 bombing campaign, took every other day or so off to allow the Yugoslavs to bury their dead.
In June 1996, 20 Dutch soldiers who had served in Lukavica (a quartier of Sarajevo) in a unit of the SFOR testified on TV in Holland that they had contracted Šan swings?Ć. The union for Dutch servicemen and women and the Green Party demanded that these reports be investigated, but the whole affair was quashed.
Two and a half years later, in December 1998, the Belgrade newspaper Dnevni Telegraf published an alarming report. In the town of Doboj, there had been a sharp increase in the incidence of certain cancers, illnesses almost unknown there until then. During the previous Spring, instead of sprouting as usual, the leaves on the trees immediately dried up. The same phenomenon was observed among different flora and fauna in the neighboring region of Mount Ozren, which was home to the TV transmission tower that had been destroyed by NATO bombs. In this location there were unusually strong reading of radioactivity and a large increase in cancers and other maladies: anemias, headaches, respiratory difficulties, exhaustion, etc.
Since then, silence. It wasn't until 2000 and the death from leukemia of an Italian soldier who had served in Bosnia, Sergeant Andrea Antonacci, that the scandal over DU exploded and public opinion began to change.
Some questions were asked of different parliamentary bodies, and Various European Defense ministers found themselves in very Uncomfortable positions. These officials who swore, with their hands over their hearts, during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, that not a single bomb of DU had been used (like the German Sharpling and the Brit Robertson), were forced to face some real hard evidence, especially when the death toll mounted: seven dead and eleven other soldiers stricken with leukemia in Italy; five cases in France, two dead in Germany, and two more in Portugal. But, (in the words of an old French song) 'qu'a cela ne tienne, tout va bien, madame la marquise' (loosely, 'Don't you worry 'bout a thing, sweet mama, 'cause e'rythang's gonna be aw'ight--oh, yeah, oh, yeah.) was NATO's chirpy refrain. Absolutely no connection between these deaths and DU was ever established. Go back to sleep, we're just gonna keep on using these weapons as long as they work so well. . .
No connection, really? If the examples of Doboj and Mount Ozren are not enough, there's the story of Bratunac (in Eastern Bosnia) where still live the Serbs who fled the 1995 NATO bombing of Hadzici, a suburb of Sarajevo: In one day, NATO aircraft dropped more than 500 bombs. Balkans Infos did a long story on this in its No 52.
Obviously, these were only Serb civilians who died by the dozens. No reason to make a big deal out of a few Serbs, right? Messieurs les ministres? This Balkans syndrome is another myth--just like the Gulf syndrome. It's just propaganda by those who were against the NATO intervention, as the Albanian pacifist (sic) Ibrahim Rugova put it. As for the 12 tons of DU generously dumped on Bosnia and Kosovo, it looks like just more of that funky fertilizer we've gotta thank the West for.
–Bosko DUKANAC, Avrille
–Bosko DUKANAC, Avrille
1 April 2001 Paris
from my ‘Notes for Yugoslavia’, found on the CM/P Žblogcollective.com
from my ‘Notes for Yugoslavia’, found on the CM/P Žblogcollective.com
And NATO’s devastation of JNA, like the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF) decimation of the already sorely handicapped Rwandan Armed Forces, was ably assisted by the ICTY’s parent, the UN and its Department of Peacekeeping Operations—Kofi Annan’s old bailiwick. After Blue Berets under the command of Canadian Army general Roméo Dallaire assisted the Rwandan ‘rebels’ in murdering their host, President Juvénal Habyarimana and his Burundian Hutu counterpart, Cyprien Ntaryamira, it was no surprise that their compadres in the black-robed legal goon squad at The Hague would oversee one of the most gruesomely protracted hostage executions in the history of state murder with the iatrogenic assassination of Slobodan Milosevic on 11 March 2006.
So just as, in July of 1995, the ICTY’s prosecutor Richard Goldstone issued indictments against Radovan Karadzic Šwhose son’s house in Bosnia was recently raided by a NATO death squad—20 February 2007—in another act of pure terrorism against the Serbs—edĆ and General Ratko Mladic to keep them out of the Dayton negotiations—so would the admitted war criminal Louise Arbour Šwho ordered quashed UN investigator Michael Hourigan’s inquiry into the RPF’s responsibility in the double assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents on 6 April 1994, and joined with her employers, the US, Canada and the UN, in the criminal enterprise of covering up war crimes with the by-now tired claim of having ‘no authority’ over this aggressionĆ, in May 1999, dead off in the middle of the NATO terror bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo, file genocide in Kosovo charges against President Milosevic effectively to take him out of any negotiations to end the further destruction of his already ravaged country. And so, too, with Dr Seselj’s indictment for ‘Hate Speech’: it came at a time when the SRS and its leaders were gaining popular support by questioning the policies of the comprador Kustunica/G-17+ government—including one of the most craven examples of collaborationism this side of France: the extinguishing of the ‘Eternal Flame to the memory of the victims of the NATO bombing’ so as not to ‘embarrass’ Western investors.
Are these purely judicial gestures? Attempts, through the application of international criminal law, in a fair and open public trial, to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused individuals beyond any reasonable doubt? Or are they purely political instruments to expedite the colonial subjugation and perpetuate ad infinitum the indenture of the targeted country?
ICTY President Theodor Meron would have it this way:
I really believe, and I believe that all my colleagues very strongly believe that this trial is not a political trial. It is a legal trial under human rights and due process to determine, under international law and the Statute, whether to determine whether you are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt or you are not. And we would not have been conducting those proceedings this way if we were not convinced that this is really not only a legal trial, but I believe it is a model of a fair trial. 3)
But ‘experts’ on the new ad hocs like David Scheffer and Michael Scharf, the latter actually bragging about being a founder of the system, see the goals of the Tribunal somewhat differently. Here’s Scharf’s take on what is to be done by the ICTY:
In creating the Yugoslavia tribunal statute, the U.N. Security Council set three objectives: first, to educate the Serbian people, who were long misled by Milosevic’s propaganda, about the acts of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by his regime; second, to facilitate national reconciliation by pinning prime responsibility on Milosevic and other top leaders and disclosing the ways in which the Milosevic regime had induced ordinary Serbs to commit atrocities; and third, to promote political catharsis while enabling Serbia’s newly elected leaders to distance themselves from the repressive policies of the past. May’s decision to allow Milosevic to represent himself has seriously undercut these aims. 4)
So you make the call: Is this Tribunal an independent judicial body in service to the Rule of Law? Or a subdivision of the Imperialist war machine disguised in what Dr Seselj has so aptly described as the gowns of Grand Inquisitors? Is this about Justice or just neocolonial war by other means?
But how did international law arrive at this sad, humiliated and hypocritical state? Was it with the advent of the ad hocs that the honored principle of common law, that many of the guilty might go free so long as no innocent individual is punished, was abandoned? When did rape and population transfers become international Ševen warĆ crimes? ŠWas the daily demoralization delivered to the ICTY bench by President Milosevic’s keen lawyering the real cause of Judge May’s brain cancer?—edĆ One must look to the West, to the western United States, in fact, to find answers to these questions and to see the real beginnings of this new and streamlined prosecutor’s justice—this Victims’ Justice.
Laughland in ‘Travesty’ accurately points up the Tribunals’ tautological concern for Justice for the victims. He cites Carla Del Ponte’s description of her job as ‘to allow the voice of the victims to be heard. 5) Yet he seems unaware of the roots of this victims’ justice when he says:
Some variants of the criminal justice system in Islamic countires allow the relatives of murder victims to play the role of appellants in a civil suit, for instance by deciding the sentence or fine (‘blood money’). It would be ironic if the latests developments in the international criminal law were to cause it to start to resemble systems of criminal justice which are generally rejected as atavistic. 6)
What is really ironic—and just a little puzzling—is that in Ramsey Clark’s commanding foreward to ‘Travesty’ he cites the OJ Simpson trial as being one, along with those of Jesus, Joan of Arc, Dreyfus and even Nuremberg, that may have changed the destiny of society. The OJ trial bore all the grotesque procedural mutilations that Laughlin criticized in the Milosevic trial (inversion of presumption of innocence to presumption of guilt; degraded rules of evidence; reduced burden of proof)—including the suspension of protections againsts double jeopardy, because after Juice’s acquittal of murders of his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman by a jury of his peers, a civil court judge found him ‘responsible’ for the deaths under much diminished evidentiary requirements. This civil judgment gave a good part of Simpson’s earnings to the victims’ families—and initiated a legal syndrome that has found wide-spread expression in the Balkans and Central Africa, and which I have named the OJ-to-Goldman-to-Goldman/Sachs syndrome.
Perhaps others should learn about the history of one of the most financially flourishing of legal practices, a money mill ancillary to what Prof Norman Finkelstein calls The Holocaust Industry: The Victims’ Rights Movement. Much more than any Islamic sharia court, the cynical and duplicitous techniques employed by the ad hocs were spawned in the despoiled beachfront courts of sunny Southern California.
Victims Rights movement:
1965 The first crime victim compensation program is established in California.
1972 The first three victim assistance programs are created:
1. Aid for Victims of Crime in St. Louis, Missouri
2. Bay Area Women Against Rape in San Francisco, California
3. Rape Crisis Center in Washington, D.C.
1. Aid for Victims of Crime in St. Louis, Missouri
2. Bay Area Women Against Rape in San Francisco, California
3. Rape Crisis Center in Washington, D.C.
1974 The Federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funds the first Victim/Witness Programs in the Brooklyn and Milwaukee District Attorneys’ offices.
1975 The first "Victim’s Rights Week" is organized by the Philadelphia District Attorney. The National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA) is formed.
1976 First hotline for battered women established by Women’s Advocates in St. Paul, Minnesota. Women’s Advocates and Haven House established the first battered women’s shelter. James Rowland creates the first Victim Impact Statement to provide the Court with an inventory of victim injuries and losses prior to a defendant’s sentencing.
1977 The National Association of Crime Victim Compensation Boards is formed to promote the creation of a nationwide network of compensation programs. Oregon becomes the first state to enact mandatory arrest in domestic violence cases.
1978 The National Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NCASA) is formed to combat sexual violence and promote services for rape victims. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) is organized and initiates the introduction of the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act in the U.S. Congress. Minnesota is the first state to allow probable cause (warrant- less) arrest in cases of domestic assault, regardless of whether a protective order has been issued.
1979 Frank Carrington, considered by many to be the father of the victims’ rights movement, founds the Crime Victims’ Legal Advocacy Institute, Inc., to promote the rights of crime victims in the civil and criminal justice systems. The non-profit organization was renamed VALOR, the Victims’ Assistance Legal Organization, Inc., in 1981.
1980 Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is founded. The U. S. Congress passes the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act of 1980. Wisconsin passes the first "Crime Victims Bill of Rights." The first Victim Impact Panel is sponsored by Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID) in Oswego County, New York.
1981 Ronald Reagan becomes the first president to proclaim "Crime Victims Rights Week" in April.
1982 President Reagan appoints a Task Force on Victims of Crime. The Task Force Final Report makes 68 recommendations, one of which is to amend the Sixth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution to guarantee victims' rights. The Federal Victim and Witness Protection Act of 1982 brings "fair Treatment standards" to victims and witnesses in the federal criminal justice system. The passage of the Missing Children’s Act of 1982 helps guarantee for parents that identifying information about their missing child is entered promptly into the FBI National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer system. California voters pass Proposition 8, which guarantees restitution and other statutory reforms. ;
1983 The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) is created by the U.S. Department of Justice to implement recommendations from the President’s Task force on Victims of Crime. The U. S. Attorney General issues guidelines for federal victim and witness assistance. The International Association of Chiefs of Police Board of Governors adopts a Crime Victims’ Bill of Rights and establishes a victims’ rights committee to bring about renewed emphasis on the needs of crime victims by law enforcement officials nationwide.
1984 The passage of the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) establishes the Crime Victims Fund, made up of federal crime fines, penalties, and bond forfeitures, to support victim compensation and local victim service programs. The U. S. Congress passes the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, which earmarks federal funding for programs serving victims of domestic violence. A victim/witness notification system is established within the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Victim/Witness Coordinator positions are established in the U. S. Attorney’s Offices within the U.S. Department of Justice.
1985 The United Nations General Assembly passes the International Declaration on the Rights of Victims of Crime and the Abuse of Power. The U. S. Surgeon General issues a report identifying domestic violence as a major public health problem.
1986 The Office for Victims of Crime awards the first grants to support state victim compensation and assistance programs. Rhode Island passes a constitutional amendment granting victims the right to restitution, to submit victim impact statements, and to be treated with dignity and respect.
1987 NCADV establishes the first national toll-free domestic violence hotline. Security on Campus, Inc. (SOC) forms and raises national awareness about the hidden epidemic of violence on U. S. college and university campuses. The American Correctional Association establishes a Task Force on Victims of Crime.
1988 OVC establishes funds for the Victim Assistance in Indian Country (VAIC) grant program to provided services to Native Americans by establishing "on-reservation" victim assistance programs in Indian Country. The National Aging Resource Center on Elder Abuse (NARCEA) is established. State Constitutional amendments addressing victims’ rights are passed in Florida and Michigan.
1989 The legislatures in Texas and Washington state pass their respective constitutional amendments which are ratified by voters in November.
1990 The Student Right to Know and Campus Security Act, requiring institutions of higher learning to disclose violent crimes on campus, is signed into law by President ŠGHWĆ Bush. The Victims of Child Abuse Act of 1990, which features reforms to make the Federal criminal justice system less traumatic for child victims and witnesses, is passed by the U. S. Congress. The Victims’ Rights and Restitution Act of 1990 incorporates a Bill of Rights for federal crime victims and codifies services that should be available to victims of crime. Arizona’s victims’ rights constitutional amendment is ratified by voters.
1991 U.S. Representative Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) files the first Congressional Joint resolution to place victims’ rights in the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Attorney General issues new comprehensive guidelines that establish procedures for the federal criminal justice system to respond to the needs of crime victims. The 1991 Attorney General Guidelines for Victim and Witness Assistance implement new protections of the Crime Control Act of 1990, integrating the requirements of the Federal Crime Victims’ Bill of Rights, the Victims’ of Child Abuse Act and the Victim and Witness Protection Act of 1982. The American Probation and Parole Association (APPA) establishes a Victim Issues Committee to examine victims’ issues and concerns related to community corrections. The International Parental Kidnapping Act makes the act of Unlawfully removing a child outside of the U.S. a federal felony.Statutes prohibiting notoriety-for-profit have been passed by many states at this time to prevent convicted criminals from profiting from the proceeds of depictions of their crime in the media or publications. New Jersey legislature passes a victims’ rights constitutional amendment, which is ratified by voters in November.
1992 Five states—Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, Missouri, and New Mexico---ratify constitutional amendments for victims’ rights. Twenty-eight states pass anti-stalking legislation. Massachusetts passes a landmark bill creating a statewide computerized domestic violence registry and requires judges to check the registry when handling such cases.
1993 Congress passes the Child Sexual Abuse Registry Act establishing a depository for information on child sex offenders Twenty-two states pass stalking statutes, bringing the total number of states with stalking laws to 50, plus the District of Columbia. Wisconsin ratifies its constitutional amendment for victims’ rights, raising the total number of states with these amendments to 14.
1994 The American Correctional Association Victims Committee publishes the landmark Report and Recommendations on Victims of Juvenile Crime, which offers guidelines for improving victims’ rights and services when the offender is a juvenile. Six states pass constitutional amendments for victims’ rights, bringing the number of states with amendments to 20. The states are: Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Maryland, Ohio, and Utah. President Clinton signs a comprehensive package of federal victims’ rights legislation as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The Act includes: Violence Against Women Act, which authorizes more than $1 billion in funding for programs to combat violence against women. Enhanced VOCA funding provisions. Establishment of a National Child Sex Offender Registry. Enhanced sentences for drunk drivers with child passengers. Kentucky becomes the first state to institute automated telephone voice notification to crime victims of their offender’s status and release date.
1995 The National Victims’ Constitutional Amendment Network proposes the first draft of language for a federal constitutional amendment for victims’ rights. The first class graduates from the National Victim Assistance Academy in Washington, D.C. Supported by OVC, the university- based Academy provides an academically credited 45-hour curriculum on victimology, victim’s rights, and other related topics.
1996 Federal Victim’s Rights Constitutional Amendments are introduced in both houses of Congress with bi-partisan support. Eight states, including Virginia, ratify the passage of constitutional amendments for victims’ rights---raising the number of states with amendments to 29. The Community Notification Act, known as "Megan’s Law," provides for notifying communities of the location of convicted sex offenders by amendment to the national Child Abuse Registry legislation. The Church Arson Prevention Act is signed into law in July. The Drug-Induced Rape Act is enacted to address the emerging use of sedating drugs by rapists on victims. The Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) within the U. S. Department of Justice issues the Juvenile Justice Action Plan that includes recommendations for victims’ rights and services for victims of juvenile offenders within the juvenile justice system.
1997 In January, a federal victims' rights amendment is re-introduced in the opening days of the 105th Congress with strong bi- partisan support. The U. S. Congress passes the Victims’ Rights Clarification Act of 1997, to clarify existing federal law allowing victims to attend a trial and appear as "impact witnesses" during the sentencing phase on both capital and non-capital cases. In July, the Crime Victims Assistance Act is introduced into the U.S. Senate, offering full-scale reform of federal rules and federal law to establish stronger rights and protections for victims of federal crimes. This legislation further proposes to assist victims of state crime through the infusion of additional resources to make the criminal justice system more supportive of crime victims. A federal anti-stalking law is enacted by Congress.
1998 A new version of the federal Victims' Rights Amendment is introduced in the Senate by Senators Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein. The Senate Judiciary Committee approves the bill, SJR 44, but no further action is taken on SJR 44 during the 105th Congress. Four new states passed state victims' rights constitutional amendments: Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Tennessee. The Supreme Court of Oregon overturns the Oregon state victims' rights amendment, originally passed in 1996, citing structural deficiencies. The fourth National Victim Assistance Academy (NVAA), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office for Victims of Crime was held. Including attendees of this class, the total number of NVAA graduates now number 700. The Child Protection and Sexual Predator Punishment Act of 1998 is enacted, providing for numerous sentencing enhancements and other initiatives addressing sex crimes against children, including crimes facilitated by use of the internet. The Crime Victims with Disabilities Act of 1998 is passed, representing the first effort to systematically gather information on the extent of the problem of victimization of individuals with disabilities. The Identity Theft and Deterrence Act of 1998 is signed into law, outlawing identity theft.
1999 On January 19, 1999, Senate Joint Resolution 3, identical to SJR 44, is introduced in the 106th Congress. The Victim Restitution Enforcement Act of 1999, entitled Bill to Control Crime by Requiring Mandatory Victim Restitution and sponsored by Senator Abraham Spencer, is introduced in the State Judiciary Committee. Senator Joseph Biden introduced the Violence Against Women Act II, a bill that extends and strengthens the original 1994 Violence Against Women Act. Key provisions of this bill would: 1) Strengthen enforcement of "stay away” orders across state lines, 2) boost spending for more women's shelters, 3) end insurance discrimination against battered women, 4) target the "date rape drug" (Rohypnol) with maximum federal penalties. The fifth National Victim Assistance Academy (NVAA) is held, bringing the total of NVAA graduates up to almost 1,000.
2000 The National Crime Victimization Survey shows that victimization rates in 1999 were the lowest recorded since the survey's creation in 1973. The Violence Against Women Act of 2000 is signed into law by President Clinton. This Act authorizes $80 million a year for rape prevention and education programs, $875 million over five years for battered women's shelters, provided $25 million to address violence against older women and women with disabilities, and expands the federal stalking statute to include stalking on the internet. In April 2000, the Federal Crime Victims' Rights Constitutional Amendment is addressed for the first time by the full U. S. Senate. It is eventually withdrawn from further consideration when it became apparent that the measure would not receive a two-thirds majority vote for approval. The Internet Fraud Complaint Center Web site (www.ifccfbi.gov) is created by the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National White Collar Crime Center to help combat internet fraud by providing consumers nationwide a convenient way to report violations. The site also provides a central site for fraud information.
2001 The National Crime Victimization Survey Results for 2000 are released, showing that victimization rates continue to drop, reaching a new low of 25.9 million victims. Congress responds to the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 by enacting related legislation, including: providing funding for victim assistance, tax relief for victims, and establishing an new federal compensation program specifically for victims of September 11. Changes were made to the Victim of Crime Act (VOCA), including Increasing the percentage of state compensation payments reimbursable by the federal government and allowing the Office for Victims of Crime to fund compliance and evaluation projects.
2002 The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) Sponsors a series of regional roundtables to hear first-hand from victims and survivors about their experiences with the criminal and juvenile justice systems. OVC, along with Justice Solutions, Parents of Murdered Children (POMC) and the Victims'Assistance Legal Organization (VALOR), sponsor a national public awareness campaign to promote the scope and availability of victims' rights and services nationwide. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam have established crime victim compensation programs to provide financial assistance to crime victims.
2003 The PROTECT Act of 2003, also called the "Amber Alert" law, creates a national network of AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) to facilitate rapid police and community response to abducted children. Congress makes the Office on Violence Against Women a permanent independent office within the Department of Justice. The National Domestic Violence Hotline receives its one millionth call. The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) celebrates its 20th anniversary.
Final accounting of the Victims’ Rights Movement? US domestic Crime rates way down—US domestic prison population way up, the highest per capita in the world.
And after two decades of concern for the welfare of exploited, abused and violated women and children, the tender mercies of the Victims’ Rights movement, with its foreign franchises marketed by four-star NGOs under the heart-warming rubric of Human Rights, were turned toward the shocking and awful invasion of Iraq and the eventual liquidation of more than 650,000 Iraqis, a disproportionate part of this demographic being innocent Iraqi women and Iraqi children.
But one should not be too hard on the hypocrisy of the current US administration—for it may not be hypocrisy at all, but merely another unreflective expression of the speciation of ignorance that is currently wasting Western consciousness as the speciation of poverty disabled the Third World. It was once noted that Bush Jr is too stupid even to fake being human—something his chubby predecessor was actually pretty good at—ed After all, it was during the compassionate and courageous sic Clinton years, that then-UN Representative and soon-to-be US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, laid out her country’s business plan for spreading that special brand of militarized immiseration it calls ‘Democracy’, and declared that the cost in the lives of over one million Yugoslavs, Iraqis and Rwandans was absolutely worth paying—for, as they say at the Chicago School: whatever the cost of doing business: whether it’s the regular double-parking tickets incurred by the Fed-Ex truck making your deliveries, or it’s the extinction of significant portion of the world’s unprivileged and powerless population: Pay it! You’re a Businessman! You deserve to succeed! . . . And it’s not your money you’re paying with anyway.—ed
And what of the International Criminal Courts, with their graceless concerns for ‘Hate Speech’ and ‘War as Hate Crime’ and ‘Victims Justice as Buy Out’?
Today’s International Justice and World History have been sentimentalized into mere spectacular diversions; turned into a couple of court eunuchs, a couple of cross-dressing crack whores, who exist at the whim of and in servile complicity with Surplus Value and the chinless, mindless and soulless elite that administers this condensation of human misery. They perform their particularly grotesque dance of death, in courtrooms and classrooms and in the media, to divert public attention from the global system of production’s sinister dependence on ever-increasing rates of return on investment, a habit more dire, more nose-opening and self-destructive than crack cocaine or even crystal-meth, because it can only be maintained by the complete redirection of all productive forces toward the provocation and prolongation of global war. The consumption necessary to appease, not to say get high on, this current craving for what is euphemized by politicians as defense production, will inevitably reduce our long-suffering planet to piles of putrefying corpses scattered around a toxic wasteland.
But by then there will be no one left to deny or profit from This Final Holocaust.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
24 February 2007
CirqueMinime/Paris
24 February 2007
1) Cf Laughland, ‘Travesty’, (Pluto Press, 2007) pg 122.
2) On Rwanda,see any and all articles by maitre Christopher Black on the CM/P blog @CirqueMinime/Paris @blogcollective.com
3) Cited in Dickson, Jokic, “Hear no evil, see no evil . . .’ pg 25.
4) Ibid, pg 11.
5) Travesty, pg 84
6) Ibid, pg 85
7) ‘In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.’
2) On Rwanda,see any and all articles by maitre Christopher Black on the CM/P blog @CirqueMinime/Paris @blogcollective.com
3) Cited in Dickson, Jokic, “Hear no evil, see no evil . . .’ pg 25.
4) Ibid, pg 11.
5) Travesty, pg 84
6) Ibid, pg 85
7) ‘In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.’
