[11 March 2013 marks the 7th anniversary of the death of President Slobodan Milosevic at the hands of his NATO tormentors.
At this time of Private Waste Capital's going all in for global chaos as its final strategem for gaining and holding on to financial and commercial domination over the brokerage of our planet's decimation, it is more important than ever to listen to this great tragic hero's analysis of how his once proud and independant nation was brought under the yoke of NATO and the IFIs, the 'meta-group', the third force of international organized crime.
That force has been at work, using eerily similar tactics and strategies, in Syria for the last two years. As always, claiming goals of democracy and freedom while implementing the sort of grotesque, barbaric counter-revolution that has been spreading throughout the world since the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought on the privatization of war.
National armies no longer wage these wars of conquest. Presidents and Foreign Minsiters no longer guide these conflicts. And military commanders are merely flacks for their nations' defense industries. Western economies are now driven by the forces of production for destruction. If peace were to break out, the NATO powers would be broke in a week.
And just as NATO air power provided cover for the mujahadeen in Bosnia and the KLA mafia in Kosovo, so have these privately organized multinational militias (like Dyncorp, MPRI, Sandstone, Blackwater {or wetfe they're called now} laid waste to Libya, Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Congo.
Ten years ago President Milosevic warned us of all this. And like all good communists, death will not silence him. --mc]
====================================
Opening Statement of Slobodan Milosevic
at the so-called "ICTY" Regarding the
Bosnia & Croatia "indictment"====================================
Opening Statement of Slobodan Milosevic
at the so-called "ICTY" Regarding the
Bosnia & Croatia "indictment"====================================
What follows is the first part of Slobodan Milosevic's opening statement regarding the so-called "Bosnia & Croatia indictment." This transcript is from September 26, 2002. The transcript from the conclusion of Milosevic's opening statement given on September 27th will be posted as soon as it is available. (attached below)
2 [Defence Opening Statement]
3 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.
4 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] First of all a technical question.
5 Can we clarify that, Mr. May? As for my statement, you have restricted my
6 time to three hours. It is exactly quarter of eleven right now. I would
7 like to state that, already speaking in net terms of time, as for today,
8 20 minutes are missing. Please bear that in mind so that I would get
9 those remaining 20 minutes at the beginning of tomorrow's session.
10 JUDGE MAY: Yes. You will have the time which you've been
11 allocated.
12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well. Before I start to speak,
13 I would like to have a cassette played first. Could you please start
14 playing the tape now.
15 [Videotape played]
16 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic -- just let the tape stop for a moment.
17 Mr. Milosevic, there's no point playing this to us unless we have a
18 translation. We've got no translation of it into one of the languages.
19 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, I assume that you can get an
20 interpretation from Serbian, because this statement of Simon Wiesenthal
21 has subtitles in the Serbian language and it won't be a problem for the
22 interpreters to read that. It's very brief. The rest of the text is
23 either in English or with a translation into English if the original is in
24 Dutch.
25 JUDGE MAY: We will make an inquiry of the interpreters as to
2 Could the interpreters let us know whether we can follow the
3 course which the accused is suggesting, translating from the subtitles?
4 THE INTERPRETER: The interpreters will do their best.
5 JUDGE MAY: Thank you. Very well. Replay the tape again, please.
6 [Videotape played]
7 THE INTERPRETER: [Voiceover]
8 "SPEAKER: I know. I know. This was written by Hermann Neuburg
9 [phoen] the East/West task. And Hitler sent him to Croatia. After the
10 war, he was sentenced in Yugoslavia to 20 years in prison, and then he
11 returned. Then he wrote a book about his conversations with Ante Markovic
12 and the rest. They said to him that we have a problem with the Serbs:
13 One-third of them have to die, one-third have to become Catholics, and
14 one-third can remain alive. That was their programme.
15 "SPEAKER: The programme objectives of the HDZ are nothing else
16 but a renewal for the Ustasha Independent State of Croatia. However, they
17 forget that this was not only a quisling state but it was also an
18 expression of the wishes of the Croat people to have their own state as
19 well as of various other factors, in this case, Hitler's Germany that
20 wanted to introduce a new order in Europe and to change borders.
21 Therefore, the independent state of Croatia was not a mere caprice of the
22 axis powers but it was also due to various historical factors.
23 "SPEAKER: I saw them all over; Munich, Paris. For them, the war
24 was not over. They never felt defeated.
25 "SPEAKER: Our friends the Serbs, who are persuading and they had
2 the Sava or the Danube. They had bitten Vojvodina after the year 1918.
3 They are biting Macedonia. They are biting Montenegro. They are well
4 into biting at Bosnia-Herzegovina, and now they have started biting
5 Croatia. Are we going to permit that? Are we Croats not capable of
6 taking to arms and, therefore, pro patrium?
7 "SPEAKER: And some people, some individuals in Croatia and
8 especially abroad who were not friends of Croatia, were saying that there
9 shouldn't have been a war, that we were also guilty of war. I was saying
10 and I say, yes, there would be no war if we had given up our aim, creating
11 a self-reliant and independent state of Croatia.
12 "SPEAKER: I think that I have fulfilled my task. There is no
13 more Yugoslavia. Thank you.
14 "SPEAKER: Regardless of where they are, to all of them, male and
15 female, young and old, jihad, on the path of God for the liberation of our
16 Muslim people here in Bosnia and wherever they may be. It is God's order
17 to us and human obligation.
18 "SPEAKER: Which held the country together now became a target for
19 those who wanted to break it apart. At a Croatian separatist rally in
20 Split in May of 1991 demonstrators strangled a young soldier of the
21 federal army and then tossed his dead body onto the street. This and
22 similar events seemed to bear out predictions by the US Central
23 Intelligence Agency.
24 "SPEAKER: The CIA said in 1990 October, that Yugoslavia faced
25 break-up, probably violent, as early as six months from the time of the
2 government.
3 "SPEAKER: By June of 1991, however, US Secretary of State James
4 Baker decided to make one attempt to prevent a disaster. He flew to
5 Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, to confront leaders of the six
6 republics.
7 "SPEAKER: He said, Don't any of you take steps that are not
8 agreed on by the others.
9 "SPEAKER: However, Milan Kucan and Franjo Tudjman, leaders of the
10 Slovenia and Croatian republics, were confident that they could ignore the
11 US Secretary of State. They declared their independence just days later,
12 on June 25th. Because they could count on the support of German Foreign
13 Minister Genscher and Austrian Foreign Minister Alois Mak. The cycle of
14 violence which would destroy Yugoslavia began when Slovene President Milan
15 Kucan ordered his troops to seize customs posts on the Yugoslav borders
16 with Austria and Italy and the Slovene capital of Ljubljana. Yugoslav
17 flags were taken down and replaced with Slovenian flags.
18 "SPEAKER: The Slovenians thought they had a right to take down
19 those flags, the end of an internationally-recognised friendship. I don't
20 think that for a moment Belgrade expected there would be violent
21 resistance.
22 "SPEAKER: German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher flew to
23 the Austrian border with Yugoslavia to join President Kucan and warned the
24 federal army against efforts to maintain control of federal borders.
25 Kucan ordered his forces to fire on Yugoslav army troops, including those
2 by Germany, Yugoslav President Markovic ordered the federal army to
3 withdraw from Slovenia without a serious attempt to counter separatist
4 forces. Slovene leaders conducted a masterful public relations effort.
5 Foreign reporters were kept occupied in an underground press centre, with
6 briefings that suggested that Slovene forces had defeated the fourth
7 largest army in Europe. Journalists in the press centre routinely
8 reported as news fanciful briefings from Slovene officials on various
9 battles, including some that had never happened.
10 "SPEAKER: What was going on in Slovenia, where the Slovenians
11 declared independence and set up customs posts on the road, tended to be
12 seen and portrayed on television as the Yugoslav army acting aggressively
13 against Slovenia as opposed to the Slovenians declaring independence.
14 "SPEAKER: The manipulation of the foreign press corps set the
15 tone for new wars of secession in Croatia and Bosnia. Repeatedly, the JNA
16 was described as an occupying force dominated by Serbs. The reality was
17 different, however. The army's Chief of Staff, Veljko Kadijevic, was half
18 Croatian, half Serb; air force chief Zvonko Jurijevic was Croatian, and
19 the commander of the navy, Stane Brovec, was Slovenia. If German and
20 Austrian leaders still believed that Slovenia and Croatia could be
21 separated from Yugoslavia without a wider war, the Americans strongly
22 believed otherwise.
23 "SPEAKER: Because we said if Yugoslavia does not break up
24 peacefully, there's going to be one hell of a civil war. It nevertheless
25 broke up non-peacefully. It broke up through the unilateral declaration
2 countries, republics, of their border posts, which was an act of force and
3 which was an act that was in violation of the Helsinki principles. But
4 the European powers and the United States ultimately recognised Slovenia
5 and then Croatia and then Bosnia as independent countries and admitted
6 them to the United Nations. The real problem was that there was a
7 unilateral declaration of independence and a use of force to gain that
8 independence rather than a peaceful negotiation of independence, which is
9 the way it should have happened.
10 "SPEAKER: While most of Europe, including England, France and
11 Russia, opposed the break-up of Yugoslavia, only the Americans were strong
12 enough to oppose Germany.
13 "SPEAKER: The United States saw that Germany would have to be
14 largely responsible for the incorporation of Eastern Europe and Central
15 Europe into the West, because Germany was -- had a national interest; it
16 was its neighbour, its periphery, and it was financially the most powerful
17 country in Europe and had the resources to do it.
18 "SPEAKER: In the post-Cold War period, Germany wanted once again,
19 the evidence is very clear, to re-colonise Yugoslavia, to re-colonise the
20 Balkans. And the United States tied itself to German policy through its
21 need of German power and influence in stabilising Eastern Europe, Western
22 Europe through the exercise of dominion by the European Community, now the
23 European Union, and potentially eventually in the lands of the former
24 Soviet Union. The problem was that there was one very important country
25 standing in the way of this, and that was Yugoslavia.
2 whether to remain in Yugoslavia, the separatists were led by the most
3 extreme elements, remnants of the pro-Nazi Ustasha. As The New York Times
4 colonist A. N. Rosenthal would write, in World War II, Hitler had no
5 executioners more willing, no ally more passionate than the fascists of
6 Croatia. They are returning from 50 years ago from what should have been
7 their eternal grave, the defeat of Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler considered
8 Yugoslavia to be an artificial creation of the hated Versailles treaty
9 which ended World War I. To break it up, he set up a puppet state and
10 enlarged Croatia, which also included Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was the task
11 of top Muslim leaders who, with few exceptions, collaborated with Hitler
12 and the Croatians.
13 "SPEAKER: There was in occupied Bosnia, also under German
14 patronage, a strong Muslim wing which was very anti-Western. It was
15 represented internationally by the mufti of Jerusalem. You heard of his
16 viciously anti-Western views, and he was brought to Sarajevo and mobbed by
17 enthusiastic crowds.
18 "SPEAKER: After the war ended, Croatia and Bosnia were never
19 de-Nazified. Not only were there no apologies to the Serbs, Jews, and
20 Gypsies, but attitudes remained frozen under the surface of Tito's
21 official policy of socialist fraternity amongst peoples. Following the
22 death of Yugoslavia's long-time leader Tito in 1980, right-wing emigre
23 organisations took out an advertisement on the opinion page of the New
24 York Times, stating that Yugoslavia would not survive and offering a map
25 which included all of Bosnia as part of Croatia. It was a map nearly
2 communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, Croatian separatists pinned
3 their hopes on a former communist general named Franjo Tudjman who had
4 been gaoled for excessive nationalism by Tito in the 1970s.
5 "SPEAKER: You know, I met him very soon after he came out of
6 communist gaol, while Tito was still alive. He had then championed the
7 racialist form of nationalism, and when he came out of prison, instead of
8 doing what you would think a dissident would do and say to hell with the
9 conformists, he said, Oh, what are we going to do with the regime? It is
10 those horrible Serbs who are repressing us and the Serbs are responsible
11 for everything and the Serbs are guilty and the Serbs began it all.
12 "SPEAKER: Tudjman received important help from outside Croatia in
13 his rise to power.
14 "SPEAKER: The German secret service was enormously active in
15 Croatia and in all of Yugoslavia, trying in the '80s to build bridges
16 between what were called the national communists, Stipe Mesic, Franjo
17 Tudjman, in Yugoslavia and the Ustasha revanchist organisations which
18 lived in the diaspora of Croatia, that is to say all of the people of
19 weight and influence who had fled the former Nazi puppet state in 1945.
20 "SPEAKER: Tudjman found it useful to make -- come to terms with
21 them and because he was running on this xenophobic platform, there was
22 really no difficulty about it. What was difficult was when he was trying
23 to sell his cause in the West. And he managed to, partly because he had a
24 very good lobby, a very effective and much more effective than the Serbian
25 lobby, and partly because he covered up his intentions.
2 supporters, such as German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. For instance, Tudjman
3 had written a book minimising the crimes of the Ustasha and claiming that
4 the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated. 'Thank God my wife is neither a
5 Serb nor Jew,' he told one interviewer. For the national flag, Tudjman
6 chose a replica of the chequerboard emblem that flew over the Croatian
7 death camps of World War II where Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were
8 exterminated.
9 "Tudjman's anti-Semitic views were covered beneath rhetoric
10 acceptable to the West. With the help of Ruder and Finn, a high-powered
11 American public relations firm, The New York Times found space for General
12 Tudjman's new and misleading image on its opinion page. In the article,
13 Tudjman promised that there would be no purges against the Serbian
14 population in Croatia if it separated from Yugoslavia.
15 "SPEAKER: Tudjman's racist slogan. Croatia was for the Croats,
16 that was his slogan, a racist slogan, Croatia for the Croats, with the
17 implication people who weren't Croats, and there was a very substantial
18 Serb and Yugoslav mixed variety, didn't feel that they had any
19 -- they were in fact second-class citizens, and he recognised them as
20 such.
21 "SPEAKER: A full six months before fighting broke out, Serbs were
22 purged from positions in government, news organisations and the police.
23 Their homes were dynamited in cities such as Zagreb, Zadar and Dubrovnik.
24 For the first time since World War II, Serbs in Eastern Croatia began to
25 flee across the Danube River.
2 loyalty oaths. Those who did not sign were fired; those who did sign,
3 were fired later. Serb homes, apartments, and businesses were attacked.
4 "SPEAKER: President of the Republic of Croatia, Mr. Franjo
5 Tudjman, allowed us for the first time to set up unarmed detachments under
6 the auspices of the HDZ.
7 "SPEAKER: Expulsion of Serbs in Croatia was removed by Tomislav
8 Mercep, a senior member of Tudjman's ruling party, the HDZ. Mercep would
9 later be identified by Croatian police reports as one of two Croatian
10 leaders who directed death squads that murdered hundreds of Serbian
11 civilians in Eastern Slavonia around Vukovar and Osijek in the fall of
12 1991. He received little press coverage in the West but Mercep was in
13 many ways the spark that set the fire of war in Slavonia, the disputed
14 region of Croatia where the Yugoslav war began. Mercep's co-leader of the
15 Croatian death squads was Vladimir Glavac, of Osijek. Unlike more
16 discreet members of the HDZ party Glavac made no secret of his
17 identification with the World War II Croatia Ustasha as he welcomed
18 returning Croatian prisoners of war.
19 "Feel free to say that you are Ustasha. You are and you have
20 come here.
21 "SPEAKER: Intellectuals were hailing Croatia as part of the New
22 Europe. Old and familiar forces were at work. Osijek became a magnet for
23 neo-fascist groups fighting with Glavac. They included British skinheads,
24 German and Austrian neo-fascists, and followers of the French extremist
25 Jean Marie Le Pen.
2 but not from the regular Croatian army. We're going with the right wing
3 Croatian defence force. We'll leave for the front somewhere in Slavonia.
4 "SPEAKER: The United States, which soon adopted Germany's
5 approach to the Balkans, ignored recent history and offered a simple
6 explanation for the fighting which broke out in the predominantly Serbian
7 region of Croatia which was known as the Krajina. Assistant Secretary of
8 State Richard Holbrooke, who spent the early years of the Yugoslav war as
9 the American Ambassador to Germany, represented what became the official
10 American view.
11 "SPEAKER: The Serbs started this war. The Serbs are the original
12 cause of the war.
13 "SPEAKER: Those who tried to prevent the war saw it differently.
14 "SPEAKER: The Serbs in Croatia, and indeed outside Croatia, had a
15 very vivid memory of what happened in 1941 and 1942 when Hitler declared
16 Croatia a sort of independent puppet state, if you like, and the horrors
17 that went on there, and the murders of the Serbs were still -- I mean, a
18 very large number of Serbs were murdered at that time. I mean, hundreds
19 of thousands. And I think it was very understandable that when Croatia
20 declared its independence and promulgated a new constitution without any
21 safeguard for the 600.000 Serbs who still lived in Croatia, that the Serbs
22 were very perturbed about this.
23 "SPEAKER: From the beginning, the Serbs were blamed, and they
24 were partly blamed out of ignorance because nobody bothered to look back
25 at the history to put it within its historical context and to see why the
2 called Bosnia-Herzegovina, why because of their historical experiences,
3 were so hostile to being under Zagreb or under Muslim Sarajevo rule.
4 "SPEAKER: In hope of heading off disaster, the European Community
5 organised a constitutional conference in 1991, led by respected British
6 diplomat Lord Peter Carrington, to find a compromise between those who
7 wanted to separate from Yugoslavia and those who wished to keep it
8 together. The problem was that administrative borders or internal
9 frontiers devised by Tito in 1943 left one-third of the Serbian population
10 out of Serbia, mostly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. As Yugoslavia
11 slid towards civil war in 1991, two referendums were held on the same day
12 in Croatia. Croatians voted overwhelmingly to separate from Yugoslavia
13 while ethnic Serbs, particularly those from the Krajina region, voted by a
14 similar margin to remain within Yugoslavia. A compromise favoured by
15 European Community negotiators would have permitted Croatia to leave the
16 Yugoslav federation but would have permitted the regions where Serbs
17 formed a majority to remain in Yugoslavia or to gain substantial autonomy.
18 Serbs who lived in an independent Croatia would be guaranteed full
19 citizenship and human rights protections. In the capital city of Zagreb,
20 Croatian President Tudjman seemed reluctantly prepared to accept this
21 compromise which would have prevented a major military conflict. Germany,
22 however, announced they would recognise both Slovenia and Croatia within
23 Tito's administrative borders before the end of 1991. There would be no
24 compromise.
25 "The Serbs were bitter that the first act of a newly-united
2 separate countries. A crucial opportunity to divide Yugoslavia by
3 peaceful means was now threatened by Germany's action.
4 "SPEAKER: It broke up the constitutional conference because once
5 you go throughout the six republics' independence, those two had no
6 further influence to the constitutional conference. You will have to ask
7 the other republics whether they wanted their independence, which meant
8 that you had to ask Bosnia. And it was perfectly plain that Bosnia --
9 there was going to be a civil war in Bosnia if you did do that.
10 "SPEAKER: UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar sent a strong
11 letter to German leaders warning that recognition would be a disaster.
12 Germany and Austria's own ambassadors in Belgrade privately warned against
13 recognition of Croatia.
14 "SPEAKER: The Germans risked being isolated, but the pressure
15 from the -- from the Kohl party and from the huge lobby of -- Croat lobby
16 in the southern parts of Germany, and Bavaria particularly, were such that
17 it was difficult for Genscher to go on postponing the support.
18 "SPEAKER: By the time the war started, the German public had
19 already been prepared by repeated attacks on the Serbs in an influential
20 German newspaper in Frankfurt. The strident commentary of Johan Georg
21 Greismuller which favoured Croatia and reviled the Serbs - any Serbs, all
22 Serbs - reminded Peter Hanke of the way Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph
23 Goebbels once characterised the Jewish race.
24 "SPEAKER: It was the German press in the form par excellence of
25 the right-wing Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and its journalist that
2 "SPEAKER: I remember talking to the Germans in the Foreign
3 Ministry and they said they didn't call it the Frankfurter Allgemeine
4 Zeitung anymore, they called it the Zagreb Allgemeine Zeitung. And it had
5 that reputation and it was a tremendous pressure group, and I think this
6 was a factor.
7 "SPEAKER: German support for Croatian separatists received an
8 unusual tribute: A musical thank you on Croatian state television.
9 "SPEAKER: Thank you, Germany.
10 "SPEAKER: ... public relations firm Ruder and Finn, Croatia
11 successfully used the media to manipulate a larger audience, particularly
12 Germany and the US, to gain support for its separatist agenda. This was
13 particularly evident in the reporting of the war around the resort town of
14 Dubrovnik, a favourite vacation for German tourists. Working through its
15 Washington PR firm, the Croatian government managed to convince much of
16 the world that Dubrovnik was being destroyed by the Serbs in unprovoked
17 attacks which lasted for months during the fall of 1991.
18 "SPEAKER: The public has been led to believe that the federal
19 army attack on Dubrovnik was not precipitated by anything but sheer
20 malice. However, on August 25th of 1991, Croatian forces attacked a base
21 in the Bay of Kotor and the Bay of Kotor, and they were repulsed with
22 heavy losses.
23 "SPEAKER: Yugoslav troops based in Montenegro then fought their
24 way up the coast, confronting Croatian forces near Dubrovnik.
25 "SPEAKER: Targets outside the Old City were hit, consisting
2 by Croatian forces.
3 "SPEAKER: Contrary to news reports, there was little damage to
4 the historic Old City.
5 "SPEAKER: Yes. It has been reported some 15.000 shells rained on
6 the Old City of Dubrovnik. I counted 15 mortar hits on the main street.
7 The Yugoslav federal army could have destroyed the Old City of Dubrovnik
8 in two hours. It is not destroyed.
9 "SPEAKER: Washington Post reporter Peter Maas, who visited the
10 Old City several months after the fighting stopped, found Dubrovnik in
11 what he described as 'nearly pristine' condition.
12 "SPEAKER: There are many people who go to these scenes of mayhem
13 and adventure who don't know where they are, who don't know the languages,
14 cannot really communicate with the people, and who take press handouts
15 from the local authorities. So there is certainly an orchestrated effort
16 on the part of the Croatian and Slovenia, Austrian and German media to
17 portray the Serbs as a bunch of howling, Byzantine uncivilised
18 barbarians.
19 "SPEAKER: These impressions helped strengthen Germany's resolve
20 to lead a reluctant European Community to recognise the separatist
21 republics and thereby dismantle Yugoslavia. To overcome British
22 opposition to recognising Croatia, German Prime Minister Helmut Kohl
23 offered British leader John Major a deal which left Britain free to
24 disregard or opt out of the social provisions of the 1991 treaty creating
25 a unified Europe which was being hotly debated in the British parliament.
2 price.
3 "The French, who needed German help to stabilise France's
4 currency, also dropped their opposition to recognising the separatist
5 republics. The United States, the only power strong enough to oppose
6 Germany, began to waiver. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger,
7 who had once served as US Ambassador to Yugoslavia and spoke Serbo-Croat,
8 knew well the dangers of a wider war if recognition were extended before a
9 settlement had been reached between the different ethnic groups.
10 "SPEAKER: I think the major lesson here is that when you get
11 involved in something like this with a thousand years of history
12 underlying it all, you need to understand that once the dam breaks, the
13 viciousness can be pretty awful, on all sides.
14 "SPEAKER: In the end, here also peace would be sacrificed for
15 domestic politics. There was an American election coming up.
16 "SPEAKER: When we finally went ahead and recognised, one of the
17 reasons we did so is because it had become a major domestic political
18 issue for us here. We have particularly a large Croatian-American
19 community. And Mr. Bush lost most of them in the election that he lost
20 because they were unhappy in our having delayed as long as we did in
21 recognising Croatia.
22 "SPEAKER: While German actions encouraged the armed secession of
23 Slovenia and Croatia, it was US diplomacy, particularly through Ambassador
24 Warren Zimmermann, which helped light the spark for a war in
25 Bosnia-Herzegovina by supporting Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic in his
2 "SPEAKER: And then we were the ones that went to the Europeans
3 and insisted that they recognise Bosnia and then that we would recognise
4 all three of the new states, and that was a deal that was made, and of
5 course, it was precisely that that led to the current war.
6 "SPEAKER: This was a war that European leaders believe could have
7 been avoided.
8 "SPEAKER: The Bosnian Serbs, until comparatively recently, have
9 been in the majority in Bosnia, and then the Muslims, who had a very much
10 higher birth rate than the Serbs, became the predominant -- the majority
11 population. And this, of course, was something very hard for the Serbs to
12 swallow. And they made it abundantly plain very early on that they were
13 not prepared to accept a situation in which there was an independent
14 Bosnia under the constitution which then prevailed. And indeed under the
15 constitution which then prevailed, it was not -- it was illegal for
16 Izetbegovic to declare independence because any constitutional change of
17 that magnitude had to be agreed by all three parties.
18 "SPEAKER: Privately, European leaders worried about Izetbegovic's
19 close ties to Iran and the possibility of a Muslim fundamentalist state in
20 the heart of a newly-unified Europe.
21 "SPEAKER: Izetbegovic himself had ties to the Iranians going back
22 long before they came to power in Bosnia, really beginning not too long
23 after the Iranian revolution, came to power in 1979.
24 "SPEAKER: In his book, 'The Politics of Diplomacy' then Secretary
25 of State James Baker wrote that Ambassador Zimmermann strongly advised him
2 basic diplomatic norms. For a government to be recognised, it must be in
3 full control of its territory, it must have clearly established borders,
4 it must also have a stable population. Not a single one of these
5 essential conditions existed in Bosnia in February of 1992 when Zimmermann
6 made his recommendation. US intelligence analysts predicted that
7 recognition would lead to war. Even the Germans thought that recognition
8 of Bosnia would be a serious mistake.
9 "SPEAKER: We did have some different opinions in early 1992 as
10 the Americans supported the recognition of Bosnia whereas we, the
11 Europeans, believed that we should first establish a framework for the
12 whole region.
13 "SPEAKER: Lord Carrington tried to avert disaster by appointing
14 Portuguese President Jose Cutilheiro to find common ground among the
15 Serbs, Muslims and Croats before an independent Bosnia was recognised.
16 "SPEAKER: I asked him to go to Sarajevo and to Lisbon and to have
17 talks with the three parties in Bosnia to see whether or not some
18 agreement could be reached with an unitary state, I mean a state, an
19 independent Bosnian state but in some sort of federal idea in which you've
20 got the three communities to agree.
21 "SPEAKER: This set up a central government of Bosnia-Herzegovina
22 and three ethnic cantons, on the model of Switzerland.
23 "SPEAKER: It was the last chance, I think, of trying to preserve
24 Bosnia before the war broke out in earnest.
25 "SPEAKER: If the Lisbon plan had been adopted, British author and
2 not have happened.' But two days after signing it, following a meeting
3 with American Ambassador Warren Zimmermann, Izetbegovic changed his mind
4 and disavowed his signature.
5 "SPEAKER: Izetbegovic turned around and reneged, as he's reneged
6 on other things.
7 "SPEAKER: Zimmermann later acknowledged to David Binder of the
8 New York Times that Izetbegovic had reluctantly signed the agreement to
9 gain European recognition. More than a year after the bloodshed began in
10 Bosnia, Zimmermann also admitted that the Lisbon plan was not bad at all
11 but recalls telling Izetbegovic, 'If you don't like it, why sign it?'
12 "SPEAKER: Zimmermann told Izetbegovic, Look, why don't you wait
13 and see what the US can do for you, meaning we'll recognise you and then
14 help you out. So don't go ahead with the Lisbon Agreement, don't accept
15 the Cutilheiro plan, and just hold out for some kind of unitary Bosnian
16 state. So this is a major turning point in our diplomatic efforts.
17 "SPEAKER: The American administration made it quite clear that
18 they thought that the proposals, Cutilheiro and my proposals were
19 unacceptable.
20 "SPEAKER: With no agreement amongst the Muslims, Serbs, and
21 Croats with all sides mobilised for war, the European Community voted, as
22 the US insisted, to recognise Bosnia on April 6, along with Slovenia and
23 Croatia. This act, Roger Cohen of the New York Times later wrote, was 'as
24 close to criminal negligence as a diplomatic act can be.' Indeed,
25 international recognition and the outbreak of the Bosnian war were
2 "SPEAKER: God is great. Allah Akhbar. Call for the holy war.
3 Holy warrior. Allah-u-ekber. God is great. Holy warrior.
4 Allah-u-ekber. God is great.
5 "SPEAKER: ... determined that we should not take sides in this
6 war by becoming a combatant, and we have held firmly to that position and
7 we plan to continue to hold firmly to that position.
8 SPEAKER: By the time US Secretary of Defence William Perry
9 testified before Congress in June of 1995 that the US was not taking sides
10 in the Yugoslav conflict, a full range of secret military assistance
11 operations to the Croatian government and Bosnian Muslim forces were
12 already underway. At a remote air field high in the mountains of the
13 Croatian island of Brac, American intelligence operatives assembled the
14 unmanned aviation vehicles, known as UAVs, for reconnaissance while
15 Croatian soldiers guarded the airport grates. Only one month before
16 Defence Secretary William Perry testified that the US was not taking
17 sides, a predominantly Serbian civilian area, supposedly under UN
18 protection, was suddenly attacked by Croatian forces. Several UN
19 soldiers were killed in what turned out to be a massacre of the Serbian
20 civilian population of Sector West. Thousands of Serbian refugees fled
21 across the Sava River from Croatia into Northern Bosnia. Croatian sources
22 put the number of Serbs killed in the attack at 1.000. Serbian Orthodox
23 Church officials stated that 5.000 civilians were killed. But there is no
24 criticism of this atrocity by American officials, including the killing of
25 UN soldiers, because the US was deeply involved in assisting the Croatian
2 Security Council to place sanctions against Croatia were repeatedly
3 blocked by America's UN representative Madeleine Albright. Six months
4 earlier, in November of 1994, the US Departments of State and Defence had
5 approved a contract between a group of retired four star generals and the
6 Croatian government.
7 "SPEAKER: The Croats paid for it but they were authorised by the
8 Pentagon.
9 "SPEAKER: I had constant reports of American officers who were,
10 quote, retired, no longer on active duty, acting as advisors to the
11 Bosnian government's military, acting as advisors to the Croatian
12 military. And they were very active on the ground.
13 "SPEAKER: The retired generals, described as high level
14 mercenaries, belonged to a private company known as Military Professional
15 Resources Incorporated, or MPRI. MPRI included such luminaries as
16 Lieutenant General Ed Soister [phoen], former head of the Defence
17 Intelligence Agency, Major General Richard Griffiths, Deputy Chief of
18 Operations in Central Europe, and most importantly Karl Vuono. General
19 Vuono and his colleagues at MPRI would be a major asset to the Croatian
20 army in its efforts to forcibly expel the ethnic Serbian population from
21 the Krajina, which was technically under UN protection in sectors north
22 and south. But the destruction of Sector West, a UN protected area for
23 ethnic Serbs, would have consequences in nearby Bosnia. Lord Owen wrote
24 that by acquiescing in the Croatian government's seizure of Sector West,
25 the US had, quote, in effect given the green light to the Bosnian Serbs to
2 launched an attack from Srebrenica against the Serbian village of
3 Visnjica, this time the surrounding Serbian forces counterattacked
4 Srebrenica, entering the city.
5 "SPEAKER: It is well known to anybody who has followed this that
6 Oric was launching repeated attacks out of a supposedly demilitarised zone
7 against surrounding Serbian areas around the Srebrenica enclave, to the
8 point where, after repeated warnings, the Serbs simply could not allow him
9 to continue to do that and decided to take the town.
10 "SPEAKER: Oric and several thousand of his soldiers fled across
11 Serbian held territory to the town of Tuzla several days before Serb
12 forces entered Srebrenica and Zepa. Muslim women and children in
13 Srebrenica were placed on buses by Serbian forces and sent to safety in
14 Tuzla. But between 1 and 2.000 Muslim men were captured by the Serbs who
15 blamed them for participating in a string of massacres led by Naser Oric.
16 A Croatian soldier who claims to have fought with the Bosnian Serbs
17 testified at The Hague that he took part in the execution of 1.200
18 Muslims, although the number of bodies recovered from the site was 200.
19 UN [sic] Ambassador Madeleine Albright, however, used greatly inflated
20 numbers to describe Serbian reprisals at Srebrenica. According to the
21 International Committee of the Red Cross, thousands of Muslim men,
22 allegedly missing, were found serving in Muslim army units near Tuzla.
23 Washington Post reporter John Pomfritt [phoen] reported that 4.000 armed
24 Muslim soldiers had escaped to a town near Tuzla, yet these same soldiers
25 were still be included in official reports years later as missing Muslims
2 "SPEAKER: Secretary Albright in particular was very insistent on
3 using such numbers like 8.000, 10.000 Muslim men and boys who were
4 executed in Srebrenica by the Serbs. There's simply nothing to document
5 those numbers.
6 "SPEAKER: ... that year whose records of fighters had killed many
7 Serb civilians. Other sources claim Oric knew about that proposal. The
8 subject of Oric wasn't discussed for very long. Mehovic claimed that
9 Izetbegovic referred to his meeting with Clinton.
10 "SPEAKER: Alija told us about Clinton's offer to have the
11 Chetniks enter Srebrenica and that a military intervention would follow.
12 He asked what we thought about that. We rejected this proposal because we
13 thought that this was outrageous, to murder 5.000 persons.
14 "SPEAKER: However, the idea of Clinton proposing that Serb troops
15 attack Srebrenica and carry out a massacre to justify military
16 intervention seemed utterly ludicrous, but the UN investigation shows
17 Hakija's words are not unfounded.
18 "SPEAKER: UN report delegation have stated that President
19 Izetbegovic also told them that he had learned that a NATO intervention in
20 Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible but could only occur if the Serbs were
21 to break into Srebrenica.
22 "SPEAKER: President Izetbegovic denied having made any such
23 remark. He did admit he asked for an opinion on the land exchange.
24 "SPEAKER: We then talked about an exchange. He offered to
25 replace Srebrenica by Vogosca, and we rejected that too.
2 that the maps be altered so that the Bosnian republic acquires Muslim
3 areas along the Drina.
4 "SPEAKER: ... episode, the Croatian army attack on the
5 predominantly Serbian Krajina region was yet to come. On August 1st,
6 1995, Croatian troops launched a massive assault on the Serbian population
7 of the Krajina, sectors north and south.
8 "SPEAKER: It was an operation of about a hundred thousand
9 Croatian military, yes. Tanks, planes, artillery; the works.
10 "SPEAKER: While officially denying any involvement in what the
11 Croatians called Operation Storm, American forces were actively supporting
12 this bloody operation of ethnic cleansing.
13 "SPEAKER: American equipment was used to jam Serbian
14 communications at a critical moment so that command and control, at least
15 in the communications sector, was blocked and then there was a documented
16 pair of raids on Serbian Krajina military facilities by US navy planes
17 flying out of Aviano which knocked out radar and other facilities.
18 "SPEAKER: The shelling of Knin was a deliberate terror
19 bombardment meant to hasten the departure of the remaining Serbs and was,
20 you know, committed against an unarmed populace. They had street cleaners
21 coming in and removing any evidence of the murders or the vandalism before
22 they brought the cameras in to show the triumphant return of the Croats
23 into Knin. So it was all very carefully planned.
24 "SPEAKER: Having denounced ethnic cleansing, American military
25 planners helped Croatia carry out the largest ethnic cleansing of the war
2 "SPEAKER: It would appear to be the largest single incident if
3 you count people affected in the first few days. It was 170.000 people.
4 "SPEAKER: That number quickly grew to 200.000 as a river of
5 humanity clogged the roads. Recently retired US General Charles Boyd
6 Deputy Commander of NATO, confirmed that the US helped plan and implement
7 the attack.
8 "SPEAKER: Croatia would not have taken its military offensives
9 that it has taken, either in Sector West or throughout the north and
10 south, throughout the Krajina, without explicit approval of the US
11 government.
12 "SPEAKER: Roger Cohen of the New York Times quoted a Croatian
13 military journalist who confirmed that General Vuono, of MPRI, met with
14 his Croatian counterpart repeatedly in the days preceding Operation Storm.
15 "SPEAKER: The tactics that they employed when they attack into
16 the Krajina was exactly the same tactics that were used during Desert
17 Storm. They were from American doctrine, attacking on many fronts with
18 lightning-type attacks, and interestingly enough, the Croatian attack was
19 called not Desert Storm but was called Storm.
20 "SPEAKER: The way they deploy and employ their forces is a direct
21 reflection of that training. So it's been very effective and it's been
22 very much a part of the official US policy.
23 "SPEAKER: Canadian UN officers identified an ethnic Albanian
24 commander, Agim Ceku, as responsible for the massacre of Serbian
25 civilians.
2 that were there on the ground, wanted indictments against the artillery
3 commander in particular, the commander of the operation, and even wanted
4 Tudjman, the Croatian President, indicted for his role.
5 "SPEAKER: Emma Bonino [phoen], Refugee Commissioner for the
6 European Union, noted that as many as 10.000 Serbian civilians were
7 missing from the stream of refugees who fled the Croatian attack on the
8 Krajina. Many of these ended up in mass graves.
9 "SPEAKER: When you go to the villages, you will see the
10 cemeteries, the graves without any names. Mostly it's 90 per cent.
11 "SPEAKER: Sometimes when I'm thinking about what happened there,
12 I think also about the role of the Americans in preparing our army. So I
13 really don't know how they educate our soldiers, but if it is the
14 education for democracy, they look very bad.
15 "SPEAKER: I don't think the American people have drawn that
16 correlation of those incredible war crimes that happened recently in the
17 Krajina and the fact that the Croatian army was trained and advised by and
18 virtually almost led by former American military leadership.
19 "SPEAKER: They have in fact been accomplice to a massive ethnic
20 cleansing of Serbs from Croatia who had lived there for many, many
21 centuries. It was their home. I think we need to step back and be
22 representative of the principle because we only -- not only deny our own
23 principles that way but we create more problems than we solve.
24 "SPEAKER: Three State Department sources told former New York
25 Times reporter David Binder that the green light to undertake Operation
2 with Croatian President Franjo Tudjman two days before the attack. At
3 first, Holbrooke insisted that he try to prevent Operation Storm, but in
4 his memoir of the Dayton negotiations, Holbrooke acknowledged that he
5 encouraged Operation Storm which drove ethnic Serbs from their homes in
6 the Krajina.
7 "SPEAKER: If you read Holbrooke's memoirs, he writes he was
8 encouraging the Croatian government in every way he could to move fast and
9 hard to get them out.
10 "SPEAKER: Having blocked UN and European peace agreements to end
11 the fighting in Bosnia, the Clinton administration encouraged a joint
12 military offensive by Muslim and Croat forces in Western Bosnia. Like
13 Operation Storm, the offensive was designed to force Serbian civilians
14 from their homes, the very ethnic cleansing the administration had once
15 denounced. In his book 'To End a War', Richard Holbrooke writes that he
16 even advised Croatian forces which Bosnian Serb cities to attack. Those
17 attacks produced nearly as many refugees as Operation Storm and an unknown
18 number of mass graves in Western Bosnia. The following year, after the
19 Dayton Accords were signed, a mass grave of Serbian civilians at Mrkonjic
20 Grad was unearthed. At the time of its discovery in 1996, it was the
21 largest mass grave the war had produced in Bosnia.
22 "With Muslims and Croats on the offensive in Bosnia during the
23 summer and fall of 1995, the US military began to intervene openly against
24 the Serbs. All that was needed was an incident in one of the safe zones.
25 On August 28th, 1995, yet another explosion occurred in the Markale
2 pretext for NATO bombing.
3 "According to the London Times, French and British investigators
4 determined the shell came from Muslim-held positions in Sarajevo, but this
5 time an American officer overruled their finding.
6 "SPEAKER: Now what's significant at this time is exactly within
7 hours after this, NATO, this incredible air armada that was pulled back,
8 cocked, locked, ready to go, the minute this was -- like it was
9 orchestrated in part of a play, this mighty arm of NATO air launched
10 forward and started attacking Serbian positions. They were waiting for
11 that very excuse.
12 "SPEAKER: I have studied Markale I and Markale II for a long time
13 and at the scene and I've talked to a number of people who were involved
14 in the investigations of both, and I am completely persuaded that those
15 two explosions were caused by Muslim forces.
16 "SPEAKER: Bypassing the UN Security Council, which had the legal
17 authority to act in Bosnia, the US had already picked out Bosnian Serb
18 targets, some of them supplied by Muslim commanders.
19 "SPEAKER: We entered the war, took the side of the Muslims and
20 became their air force, bombing the Serbs on this supposed atrocity
21 created by the Serbs where everyone that was on the ground said it was
22 created by the Muslims, which, by the way, is the oldest trick of war.
23 And we fell for it.
24 "SPEAKER: Selective media coverage of the war had created
25 tolerance, if not enthusiasm, for a US military intervention from the
2 "SPEAKER: What amazed me was that American doves, liberals, my
3 allies from the anti-Vietnam days, the sort of people I thought I could
4 count on to oppose reckless American military intervention, were all
5 screaming for military intervention. They were the biggest hawks of all.
6 "SPEAKER: For the Clinton administration, intervention in Bosnia
7 represented a chance to justify the continuation of NATO, an American
8 dominance in Europe.
9 "SPEAKER: NATO's very problem in the early 1990s was simply that
10 the mission for which it was designed had come to an end. It was designed
11 to protect Western Europe from an aggressively expansionist Soviet Yukon.
12 "SPEAKER: The logic would go: You've got to expand NATO, and the
13 only reason to keep and expand NATO is to have a mission. Where is the
14 mission? Bosnia, Balkans. The Balkans had become hostage to an American
15 power concept which is to keep Europe down and America up.
16 "SPEAKER: Senior military officers were amongst those most wary
17 of administration policy.
18 "SPEAKER: I think the mess we have today is a result of political
19 errors. I think we were all too quick to recognise these individual
20 republics as they declared their independence and asked for recognition.
21 We failed to think through the history of this region. And so it's a
22 little -- a little strained to have that political context and then ask
23 the military to go solve the problem."
24 JUDGE KWON: Mr. Milosevic, before you move on, could you tell us
25 the source of this tape, also as to it is originally one tape or, rather,
Blank page inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and English transcripts.
2 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Well, as you can see, these are all
3 statements exclusively taken from Western sources, and once again
4 exclusively from very prominent personalities which they undoubtedly gave
5 and made, and this is a compilation which just briefly illustrates the
6 whole picture in view of the very limited time that I have at my disposal.
7 JUDGE KWON: If could you later submit to us the programme --
8 names of the programme later, in due course, together with the tape.
9 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I have a lot of original tapes, and
10 it won't present a problem for me to look through them and do that.
11 Now, with respect to international law, in the crisis in
12 Yugoslavia, the sole international legally protected subject was
13 Yugoslavia itself, as a member of the United Nations and the sole bearer
14 of the international legal subjectivity, as a legal subject. So that in
15 that territory, there were no wars. There was just one single war, and
16 that was the war against Yugoslavia. And that war, the fans of that war
17 were flamed [as interpreted] and directed by the greatest power in the
18 modern day world, with reliance on its internal allies, the nationalist,
19 separatist nuclei along with the dominant presence of those forces who
20 were vanquished during World War II.
21 That war used all possible means at its disposal; media,
22 political, military, et cetera. That war, first and foremost, was led by
23 a media campaign that went on for decades. It abused the monopoly over
24 the world information media. Then with a foreign policy intervention
25 which was directed towards the creation of independent states from the
2 against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that can only be qualified as
3 genocide, which went on for many years. And finally, we see the military
4 aggression that took place in 1995 against the Republika Srpska and in the
5 Storm onslaught which we saw a moment ago, along with the participation of
6 NATO forces in the largest possible ethnic cleansing ever recorded, and in
7 1999 against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia itself.
8 This large-scale media campaign, political, economic, and military
9 campaign to break up Yugoslavia and to restructure the Balkans into new
10 spheres of interest were -- they used manipulations on genocide of Serbs
11 that crowned this false indictment and have great pretentions for it to
12 perform a historical task, and that task being that the basic aim is the
13 last intervention in history. That is to say, through a sort of legal
14 procedure and by legal means to transfer falsehoods and manipulation into
15 the truth.
16 It is necessary for the protagonists of the crimes and those
17 responsible for breaking up Yugoslavia over the decades and who were
18 responsible for the crimes should free them, rid them of their
19 responsibilities and then use this judgement as a historical truth in
20 itself. And that is why I should like to say that this illegal Tribunal,
21 Court, does not exist in a legal framework but exclusively in the media
22 framework, because it in itself represents a means of war and part of the
23 crime that is being perpetuated against the Serbian people.
24 However, this war is being waged with greater or lesser intensity
25 against other peoples as well throughout the world. The victors in the
2 they've coined that concept; they don't want to make the world a better
3 place to live in, more humane, more legal, but the first post-war decade
4 clearly showed that this was a concept and means to rule over other
5 countries and their natural resources and human resources and that in fact
6 it was a form of new colonialism.
7 And this process that started with the breakdown of the Berlin
8 wall is not a finished process. It is ongoing and is attended by enormous
9 confusion, this sphere of law and legality, history and philosophy, and a
10 new world order is being seen more and more as world chaos, whereas the
11 first post-war Cold War phase has been aborted. These are even
12 assessments by Western experts and the destruction of Yugoslavia ranks
13 among those as well.
14 The messages, such as Clinton's message to the effect that the
15 Serbs were responsible for causing two world wars - that means that the
16 Germans were not responsible for any world war - have the ability to
17 pacify reality and threaten to become a model for shaping the future.
18 This message, launched by the President of America as a world leader - and
19 when I say a world leader, I mean America, not Clinton himself - can be
20 used as a metaphor for a whole decade of a campaign of lies. And I think
21 the only competition to that is what we have been hearing from the
22 opposite party this morning and from the material they have tendered. And
23 that message, the message that I'm talking about, is particularly absurd
24 and unhonourable if we know that it was precisely in those two wars for
25 which, according to Clinton, it was the Serbs who were responsible, it was
2 same America which was 50 years later to assess that Yugoslavia, and
3 especially Serbia, was standing in its way to realising its new interests
4 and that a free and independent Yugoslavia could not be incorporated into
5 those interests and that with its successful development and
6 freedom-loving spirit, it set a bad example to others and that is why it
7 had to be broken up and turned into a Third World country and, even worse,
8 to send it right back to the Stone Age. And that is why there is nothing
9 more pertinent to the Serbs and Serbia and everybody else, all other
10 freedom-loving people.
11 The great task is to combat lies. And I think that this illegal
12 Tribunal of yours here is quite contrary to the ideas of the people who
13 created it, and despite the restrictions in broadcasting the court process
14 and distorting information, it is part of the decade-long demonisation of
15 the Serbs and a mirror for the perpetrators of crimes against Yugoslavia.
16 This might seem to be paradoxical, but in the historical sense, we have
17 two contradictions here contrary to the ideas of the people that set this
18 Tribunal up. They -- but I would like to have the truth returned to my
19 people and the whole freedom-loving people.
20 This indictment is completely false because in Croatia and in
21 Bosnia it was not a case of aggression but it was a civil war. That is
22 the first point.
23 The second is that in both cases, for the Serb people in Croatia
24 and for the Serb people in Bosnia, it was a defensive war, a war of
25 defence.
2 formally and materially is because it accuses Serbs, and I as its
3 president, for the civil war in Croatia and the civil war in Bosnia,
4 whereas Serbia was not at war nor was the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
5 at war, either with Croatia or with Bosnia-Herzegovina. And it is
6 precisely the Presidents of Croatia and Bosnia, Tudjman and Izetbegovic,
7 the President of the Presidency of Yugoslavia at the time, Stjepan Mesic,
8 it was they who started this war against Yugoslavia and thereby a war
9 against the Serbs, the citizens of Croatia and the citizens of
10 Bosnia-Herzegovina first of all by violent means that were contrary to the
11 constitution by an act of secession and then an armed attack against the
12 Serb population. And the violence in Croatia, in fact, began far before
13 independence was ever proclaimed.
14 In this regard, let me say at the outset that I'm not challenging
15 that Serbs helped the Serbs in Bosnia and in Croatia to survive at all.
16 It would -- what is absurd is something that to you seems be logical:
17 That the Americans, the Germans, the Vatican, Iranians, Austria, Turkey,
18 the Afghanistans, et cetera, were helping the Muslims and Croats, but it
19 was not logical to your mind for the Serbs to help Serbs survive on their
20 own threshold, in front of their own front door.
21 We heard here that we financed and helped the Serbs. The Serbs
22 helping the Serbs. And that seems to be a crime. Why, then, is it not a
23 crime that, for example, the Vatican provided money through the Vatican
24 bank for the purchase of weapons for Croatia, by the same token? And
25 then, as Serbia helped the Serbs, I am a criminal, and as the Vatican
2 the Holy Father.
3 And we helped them to prevent a repeat of the genocide that was
4 conducted over the Serbs in that same region during World War II by those
5 same forces but under the auspices of Hitler and Mussolini during that
6 time, when we saw three Ustashas, for example, taking thousands of Serbs
7 to be slaughtered without anybody standing up to them. And in this
8 regard, both Serbia and I personally invested all my powers and strength
9 in achieving peace, and that is why I said that this particular indictment
10 -- I said this several months ago when you opened the trial, that it was
11 absurd, because Serbia and I myself deserve recognition for working for
12 peace in the area and not as a protagonist of war.
13 Therefore, in view of the fact that Serbia and the Federal
14 Republic of Yugoslavia was not a party in the civil war, not even
15 conceptually or legally or de facto can it be accused of something that
16 went on there. The Security Council ultimately was the sole organ to
17 secure peace and security in the world and assessments about this were not
18 voiced in any of its resolutions or any decisions or public stance with
19 regard to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina nor did it name the Federal
20 Republic of Yugoslavia as the aggressor. It did not point to Yugoslavia
21 as the aggressor.
22 On the other hand, for example, on the 4th of February, 1994, the
23 Security Council adopted a precedential statement cautioning Croatia that
24 it will have to take the consequences unless it withdraws its military
25 units from Bosnia-Herzegovina within the space of two weeks, and then
2 militarily but it did not keep its promise and that is a scandal that we
3 must condemn. So those were the condemnations. They were verbal in
4 character whereas Yugoslavia, although without any foundations whatsoever,
5 was exposed to sanctions, and of course military intervention in the long
6 run and ultimately, whereas the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina started at
7 the time when a majorisation was conducted and a rump referendum accepted.
8 You heard what Lord Carrington had to say about independence. It was
9 held without the Serbian people, despite the fact that the constitution in
10 Bosnia-Herzegovina did not stand, and that that republic was formed for
11 three constituent peoples.
12 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, we have a message from the interpreters
13 that they're finding it difficult to keep up. Could you bear them in mind
14 when you're speaking, please.
15 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Very well. The quotation I made was
16 brief, so I hope they didn't have too much of a problem. But as I was
17 saying, there was a temporary recognition of a state established on the
18 basis of a decision which had no legitimacy whatsoever because it was not
19 supported by all three peoples, and the decision represented a great
20 threat to the fact that the Serb people in Bosnia-Herzegovina should
21 become peoples of the second order within a Muslim fundamental state. You
22 saw a moment ago what the Mujahedin looked like, how many thousands had
23 gathered there in that place, in that new battlefield which was open for
24 the first time in Europe. And you were also -- you have also seen many
25 other things that have been accessible to you, but I'll return to that in
2 During the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Serbia and Montenegro but
3 predominantly, of course, in Serbia, from the wartime clashes several
4 thousand citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina took refuge amongst whom there
5 were several tens of thousands who were Muslims. Now, if it were true
6 that Serbia were the aggressor, then so many thousands of Bosnian Muslims
7 would never have got the idea of taking refuge in Serbia proper. Even
8 some Muslim military units, when they were facing the Serbian army,
9 crossed the Drina River to find salvation in Serbia itself. And Serbia
10 did not send them back but it behaved in a very humane manner towards
11 them; it fed them, it clothed them, it looked after them and then enabled
12 them, via the International Red Cross, to go to other third countries.
13 On one such occasion when I approved a whole Muslim brigade,
14 numbering 850 people, to go across the Drina River and find salvation in
15 Serbia, I wrote a letter to Izetbegovic. I'm not going to read out the
16 whole of that letter but just a small passage from it in which I said:
17 "Your soldiers were not greeted here as enemies, as foes, but as human
18 beings, as neighbours who, through force of circumstance, had entered the
19 flames of war against their will. You know full well that we offered them
20 hospitality in Yugoslavia, to hundreds of thousands of refugees and tens
21 of thousands are your own compatriots. And all of them have the same
22 treatment and our care is afforded to them. More courage is necessary to
23 conclude peace than to start a war. I entreat you to make such a decision
24 in the interests of your own peoples and the people living on the
25 territory of the former Yugoslavia. Just as I would like to ask General
2 to cease hostilities with the representatives of your army."
3 That's the kind of letter that I sent to General Mladic as well.
4 The Serbs in Croatia - let us go back to that broader area; the
5 Serbs in Bosnia, in Republika Srpska, in Krajina, Serbs in Serbia and
6 Serbs in Yugoslavia - not in a single phase of the Yugoslav crisis brought
7 into question or challenged the right of the Croatian people or the Muslim
8 people or any other people, constituent people of Yugoslavia, to their
9 right to self-determination. And this undoubtedly includes the right to
10 secession.
11 The war in Croatia and Bosnia, therefore, had no sense nor did it
12 have any reason in furthering this right to self-determination and the
13 secession of the Croatian people because nobody challenged that right at
14 all. Its sense and meaning was in the crimes perpetrated over the Serbs,
15 in expelling 600.000 Serbs -- Carrington mentions that figure himself so I
16 don't want to change it. So at least 600.000 Serbs from their territories
17 in the then-administrative, non-state borders of the Republic of Croatia.
18 And in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the meaning and sense of the war was in
19 expelling the Serb people and making them second-rate citizens within
20 Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was conceived as a future Islamic republic.
21 In addition to the quotation that, as far as I was able to see
22 wasn't properly interpreted, it was too fast and I don't mind that, on
23 Banja Latic Terriga [phoen] in 1992 what was said was, and I quote:
24 "There would have been no war had Croatia not wished for war." But we
25 assess that it was only through war that we could achieve the independence
2 those negotiations, we set up our armed units. Had we not done so, we
3 would not have reached our goal.
4 And Stjepan Mesic, whom you saw on your screens on television a
5 moment ago for a very brief period, says in the Croatian Sabor, or
6 parliament, and he was the then-president of the Presidency of Yugoslavia,
7 on the 5th of December, 1991, stated the following, his famous line: "I
8 think I have fulfilled my task; Yugoslavia exists no more."
9 Now, if to that you add the well-known fact of the Islamic
10 declaration by Alija Izetbegovic in which he says that among -- between
11 the Muslim religion and non-Muslim states and institutions there can never
12 be peace between the two nor can there be co-existence, and you were able
13 to see them calling for a holy war, the jihad and all the rest of it, then
14 I think that everybody -- you -- who needn't even be well-intentioned but
15 if they are honest must be quite clear on what it was all about. So it
16 was not the Serb who brought into question the right of any constituent
17 peoples to their self-determination. All we considered then and we
18 consider today is that the right of self-determination also belongs to the
19 Serbian people and that everything that was taken away from them by force,
20 by violation of that right does not hold water in terms of international
21 law and legality and cannot be recognised under any pressure whatsoever.
22 As for this false indictment, it deprives the Serbs of all human
23 rights, including the right to life, the right to self-defence, because in
24 Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serbs defended the areas where they
25 had been living for centuries.
2 Deputy Head of the US forces in Europe, he wrote in Foreign Affairs
3 September/October 1995, I'm quoting: [In English] "The popular image of
4 this war is one of unrelenting Serb expansion. Much of what the Croatians
5 called the 'occupied territories' is land that has been held by Serbs for
6 more than three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia
7 where the Western media frequently refer to as the 70 per cent of Bosnia
8 size by rebel Serbs. In short, the Serbs were not trying to conquer new
9 territory but merely to hold onto what was already theirs."
10 [Interpretation] Now the 23rd of July, 1993, the co-chairman of
11 the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia, Lord Owen, when
12 rejecting the possibility of a military intervention in
13 Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is what Clinton's hawks and paid lobbies
14 insisted upon all the time, that rejection of military intervention is
15 something that he explained in the following words, I quote: "It is very
16 difficult to intervene in a situation which is not aggression." And he
17 adds: "That was always a conflict between the Serbs in Bosnia, the
18 Muslims in Bosnia, and the Croats in Bosnia." And the former US Secretary
19 of State Henry Kissinger, in his article in the Washington Post on the
20 17th of May, 1993, says, inter alia, again I'm quoting, that: "In
21 Bosnia-Herzegovina, there is a civil war going on, that there is not a
22 Bosnian ethnic group, and that the international community made a big
23 mistake by recognising that republic." He says that this is a three-fold
24 civil war, not an invasion of a neighbouring state against a sovereign
25 state. Croatia and Serbia support their compatriots in Bosnia. The most
2 recognition of the Bosnian state under the authority of the Muslims.
3 There is the precedent of the premature recognition of Slovenia and
4 Croatia by Germany and in this way the international community created all
5 the new-founded states in the territory of the former Yugoslavia and so
6 on.
7 So I quoted two Americans and one Brit, and not to say an
8 Englishman because David Owen is Welsh, but there are many others, other
9 Americans, Britons, Russians, Frenchmen, Russians, Indians, Germans,
10 Italians who publicly stated what the true state of affairs was. Many
11 will have the opportunity of personally testifying here, as opposed to the
12 practice of false witnesses and secret witnesses that the other side has.
13 I quoted only these three persons in order to make my assertion
14 undisputed; that the truth about the civil war had to be well known to
15 those who were the actual decision-makers. However, the resounding
16 cannonades of the media war made it impossible for the truth to come
17 through. You saw on these films part of it, and I would like to show that
18 this was a very well-organised and very well-paid, well-financed
19 propaganda.
20 Since I do not have time, I'm going to illustrate this by one
21 example, linking it precisely to what you saw in the film concerning the
22 engagement of Rudder and Finn. A special role in demonising the Serbs was
23 played precisely by that company in different periods. A paid -- there
24 was a paid representative of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia.
25 James Hart, the director of Rudder Finn boasted by these
2 intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as he said to a French journalist
3 Jacques Merlinot in April 1993, he was proud of how his firm manipulated
4 the Jewish public opinion. This was a major success because the Croatian
5 President Tudjman was, as he said, very careless in his book 'The Horrors
6 of War', and he could have been accused of anti-Semitism for that.
7 And the Bosnian President Izetbegovic also had serious problems
8 with his image because his book 'The Islamic Declaration' shows that there
9 is far too great support to an Islamist fundamentalist state. Even more
10 so as the past of Croatia and Bosnia is indeed marked by cruel
11 anti-Semitism and that is what Hart admits and speaks of the tens of
12 thousands of Jews who went missing in Nazi camps. And that was a reason
13 why Jewish organisations and individuals should not have much patience for
14 the Croats and Muslims in Bosnia. And he said: "For us it was a
15 challenge to totally reverse such a position, and we did this
16 masterfully." How masterfully they succeeded.
17 You see, if-- Roy Gutman wrote stories in Newsday about the
18 alleged Serb death camps - he indeed won a Pulitzer Prize for this - but
19 it was eventually established that all of this was a lie. And then Hart's
20 people were in a position to mobilise some of the main Jewish
21 organisations, the American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith, the Anti-Libel
22 League, and the US Congress. And he says that this was an incredible
23 success when the Jewish organisations came into the game on the side of
24 the Bosnians. Then we could immediately, he says, turn the Serbs into
25 villains in the entire game. And when Merlinot asked him, "Well, you did
2 whether this was true." And he answered him -- because he said,
3 "Actually, everything you had was just this Newsday article." And his
4 answer was, "Our job is not to check out information. We had a job to do
5 and we did it. We are not paid to moralise."
6 However, it is quite clear that Rudder Finn was not that
7 successful because, as they had put it, masterfully carried through all
8 these promotion tricks. What made the efforts of this firm effective is
9 the receptiveness of the Western media. They were going along with the
10 suggestions of those who were making political moves in Washington, Bonn,
11 the Vatican, and they themselves were creating an anti-Serb atmosphere
12 many months before the Rudder Finn campaign. However, Jewish
13 organisations did not accept this story because they were simply gullible
14 and only because of this masterfully executed job by Rudder Finn; this was
15 also due to the interest they had. They wanted to repel the fury of the
16 Arab states, the Muslim states to anyone, and in this case it was
17 deflected to the Serbs. And that is how they repaid the Serbs for the
18 protection of Jews in the Second World War, in which in the occupied
19 territories of the Balkans it was only Serbs in Serbia who, at the cost of
20 their own lives, managed to protect them from pogroms. And they
21 themselves know that. They are ashamed of that, at least those who talked
22 to me. And I hope that some of them are going to testify about this here.
23 Precisely because of this enormous help given to the Jews and also this
24 brotherhood between peoples, not states. That was between the Serb people
25 and the Jewish people.
Blank page inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and English transcripts.
2 break now for 20 minutes.
3 --- Recess taken at 12.15 p.m.
4 --- On resuming at 12.37 p.m.
5 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.
6 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] So this practically monopolistic
7 communications stream was assisted by some well-paid humanitarian groups,
8 such as Doctors Without Borders; peaceful groups, Women Wearing Black,
9 Human Rights Watch, the Human Rights Committee, along with other
10 organisations.
11 You saw in this film George Kenney, who was in charge of the
12 Yugoslav desk at the State Department. He says the genocide indictment
13 was repeated so many times in relation to Bosnia that proof became
14 irrelevant. The American administration, he says, has no proof of any
15 genocide, and anybody who reads the newspapers can see that there is a
16 lack of evidence regardless of endless speculations. That is blood
17 chilling.
18 Another person who writes about this very extensively in his book
19 To Kill the Nation, is Michael Parenth [phoen], and I gave you this book a
20 couple of months ago. I don't know if you paid any attention to it, but
21 it does contain a great deal of information.
22 However, in order to illustrate how history is falsified and how
23 lies are promoted, I'm going to show you yet another tape, a very short
24 one, only a few minutes, so that you can see how this was done and what
25 the effects were.
2 to explain to you -- you're going to see at the very beginning that on the
3 compact disk, 'The Chronology of the Twentieth Century', when you open the
4 year 1992, then on it, at the very beginning, the symbol for the year 1992
5 is this forged story about the so-called death camps in
6 Bosnia-Herzegovina.
7 Please play the tape now.
8 [Videotape played]
9 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] That's the CD I mentioned, 'The
10 Chronicle of the 20th Century'.
11 Now, when you look at the various years, 1992, you click 1992 and
12 here's the image. It is this fabrication that entered history. You open
13 it and this is what you see; about concentration camps.
14 [Videotape played]
15 "SPEAKER: Here is Thomas Deichmann [phoen]. He was the German
16 journalist who first raised suspicions about these famous ITN pictures.
17 He is saying, Look at some newspapers. Most of the Western media. Not
18 only is there no real difference in opinion on foreign policy matters, but
19 even the same phrases are repeated. You see the same pictures with the
20 same captions again and again. The ITN pictures bothered Deichmann.
21 Looking at them one night, his wife noticed something: ITN claimed the
22 Bosnian Muslims were imprisoned behind barbed wire. Why, she wondered,
23 was the wire attached on their side of the fence? They could pull out the
24 nails. Deichmann smelled a rat. He suspected the photos had been
25 fabricated. He suspected special camera angles, tricky editing. He
2 concentration camp that never existed.
3 "Examining things on location, Deichmann saw what had been done.
4 The reporters, Penny Marshall and the others in her crew, were in a
5 barbed-wire enclosed space near a transformer station and barn. From
6 there, they took pictures of refugees who were walking around quite freely
7 outside the fence. During this visit, Deichmann made a drawing of the
8 buildings and people as they appeared on the day the ITN crew filmed at
9 Trnopolje. There was a barn and a transformer station, a refugee centre
10 building, an open-air reception area, a recreation area near the refugee
11 centre, the fenced-in area from inside which the ITN crew did their
12 filming, and the barbed wire and chicken wire which was portrayed as
13 evidence of a death camp at Trnopolje.
14 "After the conversation with the Red Cross representative, we
15 passed a group of new refugees. They were being registered by the civil
16 authorities. Ms. Marshall chose not to set up her cameras and film in
17 this open area. Instead, she and her crew manoeuvred into a
18 partly-enclosed space used as a storage area for wheelbarrows and the
19 like. The dilapidated fence had chicken wire on the bottom and a few
20 strands of barbed wire on top to discourage theft. Our crew filmed the
21 ITN people as they manoeuvred into this area through a hole in the broken
22 down fence, then we followed and both crews set up within the enclosure,
23 filming the refugees wandering around outside. There were heaps of
24 material in barrels and we kept stumbling over them while trying to set
25 up. Ms. Penny Marshall tried to talk to the nearest refugees but in vain
2 could speak English. Someone in front of the crowd of refugees said,
3 Here, this one speaks English, pointing to go Mr. Mehmed in the overalls.
4 Mr. Bozanic, from the Yugoslav crew, filmed Penny Marshall's conversation
5 with Mehmed. Later, the following was shown on Yugoslav TV, with
6 Mr. Bozanic supplying an informal translation of the English conversation.
7 "'No, no. They're very nice,' says Mehmed. Mehmed adds --
8 "SPEAKER: Do you feel safe here?
9 "SPEAKER: He feels very safe here and, except for the heat,
10 everything was fine.
11 "SPEAKER: This man is very thin, insisted the reporter, and
12 Mehmed said.
13 "SPEAKER: The people are not the same.
14 "SPEAKER: ... cameras behind barbed wire. She was in position.
15 Now she searched the crowd for that perfect look. She wanted a star for
16 her story, the story she would sell the world. You will see her
17 conversation with Mehmed from our camera's angle once again. To make it
18 clearer this time, here is a little diagram showing the position of the
19 two crews. The ITN people are the blue circle on the left. We are the
20 red circle on the right. Because the film crews were a yard apart, we
21 filmed the same shots from a slightly different angle. Sometimes we
22 filmed the ITN people as well. Ms. Marshall is interviewing Mehmed.
23 "SPEAKER: Hello.
24 "SPEAKER: My name Mehmed.
25 "SPEAKER: Now did you come to be here?
2 "SPEAKER: Outside.
3 "SPEAKER: No, no. Inside.
4 "SPEAKER: [inaudible].
5 "SPEAKER: No, no, no. Inside.
6 "SPEAKER: Why did you come here? Are you a fighter? Are you a
7 fighter?
8 "SPEAKER: No. No.
9 "SPEAKER: They came to your house and took you.
10 "SPEAKER: Yes, yes.
11 "SPEAKER: Do you feel safe here?
12 "SPEAKER: I think it is very safe but it's very hot. Other
13 things, it's very --
14 "SPEAKER: This man is very thin.
15 "SPEAKER: He is very thin, but I think that is -- [inaudible].
16 All the people is not the same. [inaudible] I think it's refugee camp
17 [inaudible].
18 "SPEAKER: Where are the women and the children?
19 "SPEAKER: The women and children [inaudible]
20 "SPEAKER: Every day during school holidays.
21 "SPEAKER: It's not a prison. It's refugee camp.
22 "SPEAKER: Where do you want to go?
23 "SPEAKER: Home.
24 "SPEAKER: Do you still have a home?
25 "SPEAKER: [inaudible] [indiscernible]
2 "SPEAKER: The raw material was all there. Back in her editing
3 room, Marshall and her associates saw just how beautiful this raw material
4 could be. Perfect for fabricating a death camp. Give me the lower mask,
5 upper, right, left. So just as the terrible fighting in Bosnia had
6 deprived these unhappy men of their homes, now Ms. Marshall's pictures,
7 which circled the world, cost them their legs as well.
8 "Allow us to demonstrate how Marshall doctored the pictures to
9 make them suitable for use by newspapers and magazines. We'll illustrate
10 by repeating the process. Stop on those two. Now, give me a still shot.
11 Now give me the Nouvel Observateur underneath. Notice the difference in
12 the camera angles. Remember, their crew was shooting more to the left,
13 which is why our camera picked up three men, where their camera picked up
14 two.
15 "Let's go back to the live picture, do the doctoring the way they
16 have done it. Go to the guy in the blue shirt. Stop. Give me the right
17 mask, please. Blow it up. Now add the fellow on the right, the one in
18 black and white. Now kill the colour on the blonde one. Now fade out.
19 That's it. Fade out with the short zoom lens. Move our picture back and
20 below give me the Nouvel Observateur picture. Blow up Nouvel Observateur.
21 "Scan. Compare. Bingo. One Nazi nightmare.
22 "Give me the live picture shot again, the shot where they push
23 Fikret towards Penny. The right and left mask. Upper and lower. Blow it
24 up. Now give us Humanitage image. Give me the live picture again. Upper
25 and lower. The left and right mask. Blow it up. Give me the magazine
2 "The spin-doctors of this world still didn't trust their readers
3 to get the message, so they made it perfectly clear. They added World War
4 II Nazi concentration camp snapshots, complete with real barbed wire.
5 "SPEAKER: In the US, Bill Clinton and George Bush competed over
6 who was the most horrified by the revelations of Serbian so-called
7 atrocities proven by the pictures taken at Trnopolje. Referring to these
8 clips during the pre-election campaign in 1992, Bill Clinton demanded that
9 George Bush immediately bomb the Serbs. Not to be outdone, during a TV
10 speech, George Bush compared the refugee camps with Nazi death camps."
11 JUDGE KWON: Mr. Milosevic, again could you give us the source of
12 this film?
13 JUDGE MAY: Was that -- was that a Yugoslav film that we saw
14 there?
15 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] These are witnesses. Some of them
16 are Yugoslavs, others are not. This man Deichmann, as you know, is the
17 editor-in-chief of the magazine Novo, which was the first to doubt this
18 and go there. You know that Paddy Ashdown spoke of those camps, but when
19 he was invited by the authorities of Republika Srpska to visit the spot,
20 he was unable to find any camps there.
21 JUDGE MAY: Do we take it that the compilation was made by you and
22 your team?
23 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Yes. You may take it that this was
24 prepared for me by my assistants, but these are facts, because there are
25 innumerable witnesses who can prove that this was an open refugee centre
2 that he felt very safe there and that the only thing that was bothering
3 him was the August heat.
4 I would like to remind you, however, that when I quoted those
5 people - I'm referring to Kissinger, Owen - I did this in order to show
6 that those who were pulling the strings knew very well what this was
7 about. It was not about the truth but about interests. The civil war in
8 Yugoslavia was started when the survival of Yugoslavia was evidently
9 contrary to the strategic interests of the USA, the Catholic church,
10 Germany, and others. That Vatican knew what consequences could be
11 expected can be seen from the Papal letter of 1 May 1991 where he speaks
12 of the collapse of communism and says that this could give rise to
13 grievous conflicts and much sorrow. And he asks for international
14 structures to consolidate in order to intervene and arbitrate in the
15 conflicts arising among nations. After the breakout of the war in
16 Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, the Vatican asked for military arbitration by
17 the West, and it is evidently what they meant.
18 This is the Encyclo Sentissimo Anno [phoen], published in Milan in
19 1991.
20 There is no dispute that Germany and the Vatican were the first to
21 recognise Croatia as an independent state. All this, however, especially
22 the military intervention against the Serbian people in Republika Srpska,
23 could not have taken place without the leading role of America in the form
24 of Clinton's administration which will go down in history because of the
25 crimes that took place on the European continent after World War II
2 American policy, Islamic extremism was given precedence, especially
3 because of their role in destabilising the former Soviet Central Asia
4 where there are large reserves of oil. And also because Islamic
5 extremism, unconventional weapons for destroying the future of Russia and
6 partly China, and it is well known that Chinese leaders spoke of the green
7 transversal from China to the Adriatic Sea, and that is because the
8 easiest and cheapest way to break down the anti-Islamic American extremism
9 is because Serbian interests could be neglected. They didn't count.
10 After the 11th of September, I am no longer sure that even American lives
11 were taken seriously by Clinton.
12 I cannot say precisely how many of those thousands of Mujahedins
13 reviewed by Izetbegovic, as we saw on the tape, took part later in the
14 terrorist activities against America, but I can say that under Clinton,
15 America allowed Iran and Saudi Arabia to arm these murderers. Clinton's
16 policy opened up a new European war theatre for Islamic fundamentalism.
17 It was the forerunner of the next step, which was the 11th of September.
18 I have here - I do not want to waste time by giving it to you now
19 but I will tender it - a source which is not Serbian but Croatian; from
20 the gaol in Busovaca, a list of Mujahedin who are in prison, taken
21 prisoner by the Croatian army, coming from Algiers, Tunisia, Pakistan,
22 Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and so on and so forth. Military ID
23 cards, photo copies of these. One of these was a general. His name was
24 Ganed Gamal, from Egypt. From a Special Purpose Unit of the Supreme
25 Command, the Special Purpose Units were the ones who mainly perpetrated
2 However, I have no illusions that the Prosecutor will accuse
3 Holbrooke and Clinton for the ethnic cleansing of thousands of Serbs from
4 Croatia and mass murders or 550.000 Serbs from the Muslim Croatian
5 federation, part of which is in Republika Srpska and part of whom are in
6 Serbia, but I believe that the judiciary of the USA and its citizens
7 cannot easily overlook the facts that show that they are the ones who
8 opened up the door -- opened up the way to September 11th. And they will
9 be called here to answer my questions and explain some facts.
10 When speaking of this, I wish to point out that I'm speaking of
11 Clinton's Administration because I believe that the previous
12 Administration would not have perpetrated such a crime against the Serbs
13 regardless of the strategic interest they had. They would not have gone
14 so far, and they would have stuck to political means. I base this on the
15 statement made by Secretary of State Baker before the American Congress in
16 1995, who said: "It is a fact that Slovenia and Croatia unilaterally
17 declared independence in spite of our warnings. They used force to take
18 the border crossings, and this led to civil war." He says that the
19 position of the USA, the standpoint of the USA, that the territorial
20 integrity of the -- of Yugoslavia should be preserved was supported by 32
21 states of the OSCE, and it is unfortunate that we did not adhere to that
22 policy longer than we did. It was the Clinton administration that changed
23 that policy. And we also heard Powell at the end of the film. But we
24 also heard Holbrooke, who obviously tried to keep up with his boss and his
25 statement about the Serbs being to blame for two world wars. There is no
2 role in incorporating German standpoints into American policy.
3 And as we heard on the film, there were eminent Americans and
4 those who implemented Clinton's policy and the genocide over the Serbs.
5 We saw his role in the attack on the Krajina and on the western part of
6 Republika Srpska.
7 For almost an entire decade, those who developed the strategy, the
8 strategy called Belgrade Cradle of Evil, in Europe, not taking into
9 account what was really happening in the Balkans but how it should be
10 presented to public opinion. However, not everyone was obedient, and I
11 think that history will not be altered here. They will not be successful
12 in that, just as the NATO crimes on Kosovo were not successfully denied by
13 Madam Del Ponte when she said that there was no basis for an investigation
14 against NATO, because the key issue, the issue of human conscience and
15 accepting falsehood as truth will always be present.
16 The role of Germany in the collapse of Yugoslavia is well known,
17 and that is why I will not go into detailed explanations. However, I
18 would like to point out the special role of their interests as well as the
19 role of the Catholic church and the role of Genscher's and Kinkel's party
20 which was founded by Frederich Naumann who published a book in 1915 called
21 'Central Europe' as a project for organising a large part of the European
22 continent around Germany as the centre. Later on, he published a book
23 about Bulgaria and Central Europe in which he envisages a territorial
24 contact after the victory in World War II. It was Naumann who said that
25 the Serbs were a factor that was constantly upsetting the balance there.
2 at the expense of their own freedom. And the situation is the same today.
3 Attempts are being made to falsify history, and this is what Holbrooke
4 advocated.
5 When we bear all this in mind, the expansion of Islamic
6 fundamentalism, and I quote: "The bloody borders are to extend from
7 Indonesia and Somalia to Bosnia." This is what Huntington wrote in his
8 book 'The Clash of Civilisations and The Remaking of the World Order',
9 published in New York in 1996. And when we look at this and compare it to
10 Vatican and the Pope's project, the interests of Germany and, above all,
11 America as the only superpower, it is evident that in the whole world
12 there is no other example of a small nation being drawn into the interests
13 of all the great powers.
14 In spite of that, it was hard to destroy a big and respectable
15 European country, one of the co-founders of the UN, as Yugoslavia was, and
16 it proved to be impossible without the use of force and without a major
17 crime. That is how the war was produced, the war of which all the
18 Yugoslav peoples were the victims. And the Serbian people were victims on
19 a global scale because they were declared to be guilty.
20 That war had the same genocidal character just like the wars waged
21 against Serbia during the Second World War by Ustashas and the rest, and
22 Carrington knew this full well. In his interview to the Vienna journal
23 Profile on the 1st of December, 1993, he said that he was being accused of
24 being pro-Serbian, and he says that is simply nonsensical. It was not
25 easy to say who was the good one and who was the bad one. When the Croats
2 country - and there are 600.000 of them - any guarantees whatsoever.
3 It was therefore understandable that for this reason the Serbs
4 were very worried. First of all, if we bear in mind the villainy of the
5 Ustashas during World War II. And then he says again: "We almost had a
6 solution to the Krajina and Slavonia problem. But at that particular
7 point, the European Community at the end of 1991 decided to recognise
8 Slovenia and Croatia. Croatia received what it wanted, Slovenia did too,
9 and they no longer had the desire for the peace conference to be
10 continued. And what is more important is that, for that same matter, we
11 should enable the same for others. Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first place.
12 But Izetbegovic opted for independence, although it was quite clear to him
13 too that an option of that kind meant war. Hans Dietrich Genscher wanted
14 international recognition for Slovenia and Croatia. Practically all the
15 others were opposed to this."
16 And the New York Times on the 14th of April, 1993, had this
17 following brief news item: Interviewed in the United Nations building,
18 Cyrus Vance said that what he called premature recognition of Slovenia and
19 Herzegovina by the USA had led to the war, the war that was an ongoing
20 one.
21 Editor-in-chief of the New York Times, Rosenthal, in his
22 leading article in December 1994 said that during the winter of 1991 and
23 1992, the Western countries, by their acts, brought woe to the Balkans.
24 And this led to the fact that a civil war was imminent in
25 Bosnia-Herzegovina where the Muslims were never a nation but just an
2 conflict in Yugoslavia was caused precisely by the premature recognition
3 of Yugoslavia under the pressure of Croatia and that the independent
4 Bosnian state was set up as a result.
5 Lord Owen, on the 12th of November, 1995, in an interview to the
6 Spanish daily El Paz, said, "I have great respect for the United States,
7 but in recent years, the diplomacy of that particular country is
8 responsible for the prolonged war in Bosnia. Had Washington supported the
9 peace plan in 1993, a great number of dead would have been avoided. So
10 this is not one opinion but it is the facts that I wish to point to," and
11 that is the end of the quotation.
12 I'm going to skip Cyrus Vance on other occasions, but I will just
13 mention an explanation given by the one-time Greek Foreign Minister
14 Saminos who was present at the meeting of the European Community on the
15 16th of December, 1991, and who on the 20th of November, 1992, at
16 Elostiroskipous, [phoen] explained what was going on. The German Foreign
17 Minister Genscher said, Saminos said on the 16th of December in the
18 evening, that what was unavoidable was that if 11 of us vote for a united
19 Yugoslavia that on the 15th of January, Germany in 1992 will certainly
20 recognise Slovenia and Croatia as independent states. And that is in fact
21 what came to pass. That's what happened. All the other international
22 communities, the Americans later on accepted German policy, says Saminos.
23 And the story goes on, as we know it. Maastricht and a unified
24 European foreign policy, the great powers, the French and the English, had
25 as Saminos said who took part in the meeting, representing Greece, had to
Blank page inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and English transcripts.
2 Turkish Premier said that Yugoslavia should have been preserved and that
3 Turkey had to try to stop the disintegration of that particular federation
4 in the Balkans. Erdjevic blamed Germany and Austria in part for the
5 disintegration of Yugoslavia.
6 "Yugoslavia was our exit to Europe, a region in which we had very
7 good relations in the Balkans. It was our way out towards our possible
8 expansion in the Third World," said Bulan Erdjevic. And Muntas Ozal,
9 another case in point, the Foreign Minister of Turkey, said, "We believe
10 that the Germans made a mistake because the former Yugoslavia was a model
11 for co-existence among different nations. Europe made a mistake, having
12 destroyed that model, and now we can see what the result of that was."
13 Elizabeth Copp, the former Minister in the Swiss government, and
14 an expert in the field of federalism, says the following: "I never
15 understood this. It was a mistake and it was the mistake of one man and
16 one foreign policy, a foreign policy, a man which I respected, Hans
17 Dietrich Genscher. The international community is responsible for having
18 recognised those states without solving the minority question beforehand
19 and without going about it in a coordinated way. This had to have had a
20 tragic end, and this was a big mistake made by Germany and the rest."
21 Kissinger says, in the Welt an Zontag on the 8th of September,
22 1996, a German paper: "The recognition of an independent Bosnian state in
23 1992 did not cause the birth of the country but led to a civil war." And
24 we have heard here that it is I who caused that civil war.
25 The Bosnian Muslims, in fact, that their extremist part and their
2 Muslim countries. It was their detriment because it was the purposes of
3 the big powers, and especially America, and this was a screen for their
4 different behaviour towards Muslims and Muslim countries generally with
5 respect to the way in which the big powers conducted themselves. The
6 leaders of the Bosnian Muslims objectively played out their interests
7 because the Bosnian Muslims lived in peace with the Serbs. They lived a
8 normal life. And with the kind of policy they were waging, they did en
9 masse and deliberately proclaim them to be casualties. They betrayed
10 them. And so -- and there were a large number of Muslims in the Serbian
11 army. They didn't join the army to kill the Muslims, I'm quite sure, but
12 to defend themselves from a common evil, which was Islamic extremism which
13 was seen to be a powerful weapon to destabilise the region and, in future,
14 more and more the European continent as a whole.
15 I have a very good illustration here, a document, which in very
16 concrete, specific terms, and clearly, testifies to how this Islamic
17 fundamentalist policy on the part of Izetbegovic and his party was opposed
18 to any kind of peace at all which would have emerged in the tripartite
19 peace negotiations at the Conference on Yugoslavia under the leadership of
20 Vance and Owen and then Owen-Stoltenberg later on. This is a letter from
21 the head office of Izetbegovic's party. It is signed by the secretary,
22 Hasan Cengic, on their memorandum and paper with a stamp and seal. The
23 20th of the January, 1993 is the date. And it was addressed to the Party
24 of Democratic Action, that is to say their leadership, in Trebinje in the
25 territory of Republika Srpska.
2 Trebinje." And then it says: "As the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina is
3 becoming from one moment to the next with regard to security and safety
4 more complicated, especially after the acceptance of the Geneva documents
5 by Karadzic and his clique in Pale, it is necessary in order to have the
6 aspirations of all Muslims fulfilled, that our country,
7 Bosnia-Herzegovina, be strengthened and the following measures are to be
8 undertaken in the terrain of the Trebinje municipality. First, via our
9 activists who animate all Muslims, especially the prominent ones and the
10 wealthier ones, to leave Trebinje as soon as possible and to move to
11 Montenegro. Secondly, their property, mobile and immobile, partially to
12 sell, et cetera, et cetera. And third, to exercise pressure and force
13 against Muslims who do not act in conformity with this order and
14 instructions.
15 There is more but I have to save time. It says, with respect -
16 "Selim Alikum" - the Secretary of the SDA, Hasan Cengic. I will tender
17 this document so you can see it. And it is on the basis of this that this
18 Municipal Board of the SDA, working in Republika Srpska in Trebinje,
19 freely issues its own invitation in which it states the following: "The
20 Serbo-Chetnik armada, together with his leader Karadzic, is trying to
21 prevent us in our holy intentions and then our tricking the public at
22 large in Geneva and shows falsely the loyalty of the Trebinje Muslims to
23 the Serbo-Chetnik dictatorship and their loyalty to Republika Srpska and
24 their military clique."
25 And then he goes on to ask everybody to move out of the area. And
2 the so-called army of Republika Srpska forthwith and that it is our duty
3 in sharing the fate of our entire people, a nation together with their
4 families and our families and the rest of the citizens, that we should
5 leave for Montenegro, et cetera.
6 It goes on along those lines. Does this remind you of the same
7 practice in Kosovo? Whether it does or not, all I can say is that I
8 believe that the general public must associate this with what happened
9 there straight away.
10 So how can somebody serve in an army which is engaged in genocide
11 against his own people? I don't say that this doesn't -- that this means
12 that there were no war crimes. There were, of course. War crimes existed
13 on all three sides. But this does mean that it was not the policy nor was
14 an atmosphere of that kind created, nor did that kind of atmosphere exist
15 in a broad sense.
16 The victims and casualties of war against Yugoslavia were the
17 innocent people from all three nations, all three ethnic groups. They
18 were pushed into these conflicts and clashes because of foreign interests,
19 other people's interests, but along with the full cooperation of their
20 mindless leaders who led them to their death.
21 In Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the war was imposed. In
22 Croatia, it was with confidence that they placed themselves under the
23 protection of the United Nations and a political solution, because what
24 they were promised was that they would be protected and that the problem
25 would be resolved through political means. Up until the arrival of the
2 defence. But from that time on, no military activities were undertaken on
3 their part.
4 I have here the notes from the 31st of December, that is to say
5 the New Year between 1991 and 1992. Cyrus Vance came to see me, and he
6 got my full support to send the blue helmets into Croatia and along the
7 borders between Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. And that in fact at the
8 same time represented an indirect recognition by the international
9 community of the direct involvement of Croatia in the events and
10 occurrences in Bosnia-Herzegovina. And we gave not only verbal support
11 when he came to visit me but also did so officially by an official stand
12 on the part of the government.
13 And when in Geneva from the 10th to the 13th of January, 1992, it
14 was already quite clear that the plan would be adopted, the Muslim forces,
15 on the 16th of January, no less, attacked the Serb municipality of
16 Bratunac and launched a general offensive and perpetrated the massacre
17 over the Serb population there. Otherwise, in the environs of Bratunac,
18 70 Serb villages were set fire to and the population slaughtered.
19 Perhaps this map is a best illustration of how the problem is
20 approached. It is Mr. Nice's map, and it shows Croatia and where the
21 territories were, the territories which the Serbs had allegedly lived on
22 and had allegedly seized. But what this map does not show, he didn't
23 think of showing that it is precisely those territories which were the UN
24 protected zones, and that I assume that the United Nations Security
25 Council, at the proposal of the Special Envoy Cyrus Vance, did not make a
2 been arrived because the Serbs had seized some sort of territory from the
3 Croatian state but because a political solution had to be found. That's
4 why it was done. And they all expected a political solution. Carrington
5 spoke of this, and I quoted him a moment ago. He said that it was
6 imminent.
7 Now, as far as the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina are concerned, they
8 accepted the plan to hold a peace conference in Yugoslavia according to
9 the Cutilheiro plan, as it was called. That happened before the clashes
10 and conflict broke out. It was my stand and the official position of
11 Serbia itself that any agreement which is reached by the three constituent
12 peoples we would be happy to accept. And in visiting Turkey, I spoke
13 about this. I had separate visits with the president of the republic,
14 Mr. Ozal and the Prime Minister, Mr. Demirel, because I considered that it
15 was not up to us to meddle in those affairs. They undertook the
16 negotiations, they found their own solutions. The only thing we did
17 consider was, and this proved to be correct, that the essence was in a
18 solution which would guarantee the interests equally of each of the three
19 constituent ethnic groups.
20 And in my talks with Vance on the 4th of March -- this was
21 publicised in the press and was clearly -- I clearly said to him that a
22 political solution based on a consensus of three equal constituent nations
23 can only represent a basis for defining the status of that republic. And
24 I came out in favour of, on that occasion and that's what they wrote
25 about, for a conference on Bosnia-Herzegovina to discuss the issue.
2 was popularly known as Cutilheiro's plan. I'm not going to dwell on that
3 particular plan now because my time is limited. But I do wish to stress
4 that the vital element in that particular plan was the transformation of
5 Bosnia from an unitary into a complex state form made up of three
6 constituent entities which would prevent any majorisation or domination by
7 any individual national group or ethnic group or two groups over a third
8 group, et cetera. So the Serbs did accept this plan. They did accept an
9 independent, autonomous Bosnia precisely with this element of equality;
10 that all three ethnic groups should be equal within the state.
11 There's a statement of Radovan Karadzic. It was carried after the
12 signing of that agreement, and he says: "Every one of us lost any
13 possibility of domination and got the possibility of not becoming a
14 national minority." So what kind of Greater Serbian ambitions can anybody
15 speak of here?
16 It is interesting, actually. At that very same point in time, the
17 spokesperson of Izetbegovic's SDA party, because Izetbegovic is one of the
18 signatories of the Cutilheiro plan, confirmed -- and the spokesperson's
19 name is Irfan Ajanovic, and I quote: "Confirmed that the SDA is pleased
20 with this last agreement concerning Bosnia." And as for the possibility
21 of the Serb Assembly to reject the Cutilheiro agreement, Ajanovic stated
22 that that would have been an insane thing that would come from the Serb
23 laboratory. And I quote him. "In that case, it's going to be quite clear
24 as to who is deceiving the international community and the chairman of the
25 Conference of Bosnia." End of quotation.
2 would come out of the Muslim laboratory and that the Serb party -- that
3 the Serb side would show maturity, political maturity, and wisdom.
4 Very soon after the signing, Izetbegovic faithlessly withdrew his
5 signature, and we saw that in the testimony on the tape. He did that
6 after talking to Warren Zimmermann, the US Ambassador in Belgrade, and he
7 was talked into it by Zimmermann. So this plan of salvation went down the
8 drain before there was any conflict between them and a civil war began.
9 Cutilheiro himself, surprised by Izetbegovic's decision, said on
10 that occasion, "They obviously decided on a war option, and therefore,
11 they have a great responsibility to assume." Regrettably, the warlords,
12 and we see this here today, ascribe responsibility to the Serbs and to me
13 personally, of course. So the absurdity is complete.
14 After the renewed attempt made towards the end of 1992, I have a
15 note on a meeting with Vance on Owen on the 6th of January, 1993, in
16 Belgrade. My statement is there. I'm convinced that there is no way out
17 of the crisis without respecting the equality of rights of all three
18 peoples in Bosnia-Herzegovina and therefore I believe that the only way
19 out is an immediate cessation of hostilities. And after that,
20 negotiations about the principles that are a basis for respecting the
21 rights of all three peoples. That is the only which in which long-lasting
22 peace can be established. It is our duty to support all peaceful
23 solutions that can lead to peace in this area.
24 That support was confirmed in Geneva as well. And we saw from
25 many elements, and also from the statement made by Owen, and I quoted it,
2 position with regard to the plan, and that is why Owen asked the Americans
3 and Clinton to exercise pressure on Izetbegovic. And even Kinkel on the
4 4th of February, asked the President of the United States to render his
5 support in this peace plan, cautioning against the negative effects if
6 this peace plan were not to be adopted. However, this support did not
7 come, and it can be seen from the document I quoted a few minutes ago that
8 it never crossed their minds to do anything else but to have a unitary
9 Bosnia-Herzegovina conceived as a fundamentalist state. And it is not
10 only that the Islamic declaration says what it's supposed to be.
11 So in the war against Yugoslavia, the ethnic heterogeneity of
12 Yugoslavia was abused. And in Bosnia, which everybody called a
13 small-scale Yugoslavia, it could always have been abused.
14 I can say that from the Berlin Congress in 1878 until the bombing
15 of the Serb positions by NATO in 1995, foreign interference in Bosnian
16 religious and ethnic conflicts always assumed the proportions of a
17 humanitarian intervention. Foreign troops always came to Bosnia under the
18 guise of doing good to the indigenous population. And it was always
19 imperialist objectives and global strategies that were in the play,
20 really.
21 So if what was really wished for was to prevent ethnic and
22 religious conflicts in Bosnia, what had to be upheld all the time was this
23 sensitive ethnic balance and the equality of rights of all three peoples.
24 Equality of rights means that all of the three Bosnian Herzegovinian
25 nations' peoples should have the status of a constituent people that can
2 entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
3 Even according to Izetbegovic's words in Brussels and later
4 according to Cutilheiro's plan, this plan did include certain political
5 autonomies of every one of the political entities within
6 Bosnia-Herzegovina. And conversely, statehood and full autonomy do not
7 allow for any people in Bosnia-Herzegovina to be reduced to the status of
8 a national minority. The best proof of this is the Dayton Accords
9 themselves. There could have been no peace when this balance was
10 disturbed. And when outvoting was encouraged. However, peace was
11 achieved in Dayton through the recognition anew of the right of each and
12 every three peoples to form this joint state and entities within
13 Bosnia-Herzegovina. That was the necessary prerequisite and yet
14 sufficient prerequisite without which this agreement could not have been
15 brought to a successful end.
16 However, it's not only Izetbegovic who was fickle. Obviously, it
17 was the European Community too. Because precisely here in The Hague, at
18 the Peace Palace on the 7th of September, 1991, there was a ceremonial
19 inauguration of the Conference on the former Yugoslavia, and this was
20 pursued by the European Community, and there was a declaration that
21 includes the categorical statement that the community, I quote, "Will
22 never recognise changes of borders that were not established by way of
23 peaceful solutions."
24 I don't have time to quote the positions we held then because time
25 does fly. However, all of them say, and I said personally, many things.
2 and all of this speaks in favour of advocating the equal treatment of all
3 three peoples. I have here all these statements. There will be time for
4 us to bring them to the fore.
5 We supported five plans. And the European Ministerial Conference,
6 at that conference, the last sentence I said: "Gentlemen, the very moment
7 you take an equal attitude [in English] to all actors in the Yugoslav
8 drama, you will take the decision on peace."
9 [Interpretation] That was the position of Serbia. That was my
10 position. That was the position that, in my opinion - and that is what I
11 think today as well - was the only one that was principled in this entire
12 affair.
13 So it was not disintegration that was going on in Yugoslavia.
14 This was unlawful secession, violent secession that gave rise to the first
15 crimes that were committed in spite of the inviolability of borders and
16 other principles enshrined in the UN Charter and the final act of
17 Helsinki. So in fact, the alliance of external and internal protagonists
18 actually opted for secession as the form of liquidating Yugoslavia.
19 Actually, in this alliance, the right of peoples to
20 self-determination, it was said, it did not pertain to peoples but to
21 territories, as if the administrative borders, contrary to international
22 and domestic law, were borders of sovereign states. And then they linked
23 the right to self-determination to people after all, then yet again this
24 did not apply to the Serb people. Yugoslavia as a state came into being
25 through the union and free will of its own constituent peoples. Even the
2 that symbolised the five peoples; the Serbs, Croats, Slovenians,
3 Macedonians and Montenegrins. And then, when the Muslims got the status
4 of a constituent people, then in the late 1960s, a sixth flame was
5 included in the coat of arms of Yugoslavia. So that became part of the
6 coat of arms 20 years after the new Yugoslavia was established, in order
7 to symbolise the sixth constituent people that were proclaimed then. This
8 was actually the Muslim ethnic community.
9 This German success in the campaign of recognition for the
10 independence of Slovenia and Croatia, not to refer to newspaper articles
11 now, however, Lord Carrington, in his letter to van den Brug, who was
12 chairman at that time because the Netherlands was then presiding the
13 European Community, they called it the bell that tolled for the country,
14 and also he said that this was a spark that could set Bosnia and
15 Herzegovina on fire.
16 External political intervention selectively favoured the right to
17 self-determination. In the case of Yugoslavia, the states of the European
18 Community stimulated an anti-European concept of the establishment and
19 creation of states, and they stimulated trampling upon norms of
20 international and domestic law.
21 The French President, Francois Mitterrand, in his statement on
22 television on the 3rd of September in 1992, said that the international
23 community bears part of the responsibility for the conflicts in
24 Yugoslavia. He expressed his regrets that Europe, in the case of
25 Yugoslavia, did not want to defend existing legal norms, and so on and so
2 why he expressed that regret. Unfortunately, too late.
3 In the meantime, the world public opinion already at the very
4 outset of the Yugoslavia crisis had certain prejudices imposed upon them.
5 Geopolitical ones, cultural ones, civilisational differences between the
6 East and West, and that this border was somewhere between Serbia and
7 Croatia. Nobody abided by the norms of international law. Just like
8 Hitler. In the 1930s, his platform was, Who pays any attention to the
9 treaty of Versailles now? This is just a piece of paper from some French
10 castle.
11 We saw, 50 years later, precisely by a move made from that very
12 same centre, the spectre of fascism and of the Ustasha idea emerged again.
13 And also, half a century later, the independent State of Croatia as a
14 fascist creation and the free and independent Republic of Croatia was
15 created with the assistance of the Vatican factor, the German factor, and
16 with the maximum assistance of emigres, Croatian emigres. Nobody
17 concealed this; you saw it in that film, Croatia paid them back. That
18 song, "Danke Deutschland," and in the island of Brac, they erected a
19 monument to Hans Dietrich Genscher, still alive, and he was then Foreign
20 Minister of Germany. The Vatican themselves made their role quite clear.
21 Therefore, this so-called indictment for the war in Croatia and
22 Bosnia is just as bad as the one for Kosovo, the previous one. The reason
23 is quite simple: You do not have the truth in your hands, and you have
24 to invent things, manipulate things, present half-truths, bring forth
25 false witnesses. However, at this point in time, one thing does not seem
2 truth is coming to the fore regardless of historical forgeries - and I
3 have given examples of that - and regardless of claims that are based
4 precisely on these interests rather than on the actual state of affairs.
5 In spite of unequivocal arguments that I have presented and that
6 you should be aware of too if you believe that you are discharging your
7 duties conscientiously, you accepted such accusations as it says here. It
8 says: "Slobodan Milosevic took part in the joint criminal enterprise as
9 mentioned in paragraphs," et cetera, et cetera. "The aim was to forcibly
10 expel the Croat and other non-Serb population from one-third of the
11 territory of the Republic of Croatia, a territory for which he planned to
12 become part of a new state under Serb domination," and so on and so forth.
13 In spite of all these facts and during those years, as a matter of
14 fact before these crimes were committed, in the presence of the United
15 Nations, we encouraged the normalisation of relations between Knin and
16 Zagreb, and we thought that through this normalisation the way would be
17 paved for a political solution. For example, on the 30th of November,
18 1994, the government of the Republic of Srpska Krajina, at its meeting in
19 Knin, adopted the package of agreements with the Republic of Croatia, and
20 according to the Prime Minister, once again unequivocally showed that they
21 were in favour of a policy of peace and cooperation with the international
22 community.
23 And then again, on the 11th of January, 1995, at the UNPROFOR base
24 at the Zagreb airport, Pleso [phoen], again a new round started, a round
25 of talks between the delegations of the Republic of Croatia and the
Blank page inserted to ensure pagination corresponds between the French and English transcripts.
2 held behind closed doors and Lord Owen and Thorwald Stoltenberg are
3 present as well. Borislav Mikolic [phoen] heads the Krajina negotiating
4 team and the head of the Croatian delegation is Hrvoj Saranic [phoen].
5 The same month, on the 24th in 1995, Stoltenberg comes to see me,
6 and together we state that, through the efforts of the Contact Group, the
7 peace process will be accelerated, and we supported this normalisation of
8 relations between Knin and Zagreb, and so on.
9 It is not possible to refer to all these elements, but there is no
10 doubt that what was stated here is untrue and a total forgery.
11 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, the time has come to adjourn.
12 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Just one thing. I am really sorry
13 that in the conditions that I am in and, therefore, I have to make
14 handwritten notes for what I am going to say here, I cannot assess how
15 much time I need for presenting - how should I put this? - in the roughest
16 possible terms just to touch upon certain issues. So I'm looking at my
17 remaining notes, and I really don't think that the remaining 20 minutes
18 will suffice, the ones that you allocated to me originally.
19 JUDGE MAY: What we'll do is give you half an hour tomorrow
20 morning. That should be sufficient.
21 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Mr. May, wouldn't it be possible for
22 you to give me the first morning session, the one hour and a half from
23 9.00 until 10.30 so that I try to compress it all into that hour and a
24 half? A lot of time was spent here on many very insignificant matters,
25 and I believe that this is significant.
2 JUDGE MAY: We'll give you three-quarters of an hour. That should
3 be sufficient time to make your points. You will have had rather longer
4 than the three hours which we allocated; much longer, it may be noted,
5 than the Prosecution.
6 If the registry could come up, please.
7 [Trial Chamber and registrar confer]
8 JUDGE MAY: We'll rise now.
9 --- Whereupon the hearing adjourned at 1.47 p.m.,
10 to be reconvened on Friday, the 27th day of
11 September, 2002, at 9.00 a.m.
Part 2
2 [Defence Opening Statement]
3 [Open session]
4 [The accused entered court]
5 --- Upon commencing at 9.02 a.m.
6 JUDGE MAY: Yes, Mr. Milosevic.
7 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Yesterday, we left off when we were
8 talking about the nonsensical position of the alleged criminal enterprise
9 to throw out the Croats from one-third of the area, whereas we see that it
10 was quite the contrary in that third, or what you call a third of the
11 area; it was the Serbs that were forced to leave with the greatest ethnic
12 cleansing that was ever recorded in that entire war against Yugoslavia.
13 And now look at these two positions: In the additional facts, number 94
14 and 95, points 94 and 95. You say that in April and May 1990, elections
15 were held, the Croatian Democratic Community had the majority, won the
16 majority vote, and then you go on to say, "Before the elections in Knin, a
17 nationalistic Serbian Democratic Party was formed, the SDS, which
18 advocated autonomy and later on secession." And that, as you have
19 compiled it, should be and should go to show that it was under the
20 influence of Belgrade, that a movement of some kind of the Serbs for
21 criminal enterprise was set up, et cetera, et cetera. Whereas had you
22 just from the first citizen in the street that you came across, you tried
23 to collect and gather up information and facts, you would have seen that
24 the Serbs in Croatia in 1990, when that party was set up and which went to
25 the elections, the Serbs in Croatia en masse, over 90 per cent of them,
2 particular party. The League of Communists of Croatia, whose president at
3 the time was the present Prime Minister of Croatia, Ivica Racan.
4 And as you know, in the League of Communists in Croatia, there was
5 an enormous number of Croats, too, many more Croats, in fact, than there
6 were Serbs. And of course, members and other sympathisers and so on,
7 party supporters. And that that is true is borne out by the fact that in
8 an area where the Serbs in the majority, Banija, Kordun, Western Slavonia,
9 Sremska the Srem Baranja region, it was the League of Communists of
10 Croatia which won the elections and not what you're saying at all, that
11 there was some kind of movement and especially that it was initiated, to
12 boot, in Belgrade.
13 Twenty-one members in the Croatian Sabor parliament were elected
14 from the list of the League of Communists of Croatia. And it was only the
15 Serbian Democratic Party of Knin that won in Knin, Benkovac, and Obrovac,
16 those two small municipalities, and one more in Donji Lapac.
17 Therefore, it is quite -- if you have the material facts before
18 you and if you look at those facts, then there's no need for me to go into
19 any explanation and to explain that what you're in fact saying here is not
20 at all true, let alone later on or even before that and in the course of
21 that process the Serbs were let go en masse from the state administration,
22 from the police, from other services, there was a mass pogrom, there was
23 the killing of Serbs, the burning of their houses, and so on and so forth.
24 And when Croatia was proclaimed in mid-July and when the League of
25 Communists of Croatia left the political scene to all intents and
2 Serbian Democratic Party because they had nowhere else to go. They were
3 not able to find any support or fulcrum anywhere else for their political
4 life and that's what happened. That was quite logical at that time.
5 The truth, then, is quite opposite to what you are claiming and
6 putting forward here. It was the Serbs who were persecuted, in danger,
7 under threat, and killed, and quite literally they had no chance
8 whatsoever since that Ustasha-type regime came to the fore with Stipe
9 Mesic and Tudjman as its leaders.
10 Now, I'm going to use some of your sources, Western sources, not
11 Milosevic's and Serb sources. Look at what Susan Woodward, for example,
12 writes. She's a well-known US scientist, the Brooklyn Institution, and it
13 is on page 107, published in 1995, 'The Balkan Tragedy' is the name of her
14 book, in which she says the following: "The Croatian government [in
15 English] [previous translation continues]... to protect their citizens
16 from a vicious outburst of anti-Serb terrorism saw mixed communities of
17 Dalmatia in interior during the summer months 1989 - 1989 - when cross
18 zealots smashed storefronts, fire-bombed homes, and harassed and arrested
19 potential Serb leaders. In many parts of Croatia, Serbs were expelled
20 from jobs because of their nationality. Discrimination was not limited to
21 this early flare-up but increased over the following years."
22 [Interpretation] So that was the atmosphere. And the famous
23 Croatian painter, or world renowned - he is a Croatian painter but he is
24 of world renown, his name is Edo Murtic - in the paper Rijecki Novi List,
25 in the year 2000 states the following: "I remember that several months
2 that was Tudjman, and he speaks about that meeting - "because he thought
3 he would make an Augustincic of me for himself, and Augustincic was the
4 sculptor and artist who portrayed Tito. And he started to convince me
5 that we would do what the Ustashas and Pavelic were not able to do in 1941
6 for 250.000 Serbs. He said he'd pack them up, pack their coffers up and
7 send them away. And the next 250.000 would either remain, or disappear."
8 That is what is the truth.
9 Now, take a look at the atmosphere that prevailed. Please look
10 at. The Croatian Sabor Assembly on the 14th of May in 1887, passed a law
11 on the use of the Cyrillic alphabet. On the 14th of May 1887, if you
12 please. After the Second World War, all the constitutions of Croatia
13 contained a constitutional position on the position of Serbs in Croatia as
14 a constituent league entity in Croatia, both the 1947 constitution which
15 speaks, in Article 11, that Serbs in Croatia are equal with the Croats,
16 and in the 1943 -- 1963 constitution where it says that the Croatian
17 people engaged in brotherhood and unity with the Serb people, and in the
18 1984 constitution which states that in the Socialist Republic of Croatia,
19 the language of the Croats and Serbs are used, which is called either
20 Croatian or Serbian, depending on the area it is spoken.
21 So of -- since 1887 when the Croatian Sabor Assembly passed the
22 law on the use of the Cyrillic alphabet right down the line, it was only
23 with the advent of this pro-Nazi pound [as interpreted] authority that the
24 new coat of arms, the chequerboard, et cetera, emblems of the puppet
25 regime and independent autonomous State of Croatia was enforced and that
2 is done away with and abolished. After 103 years of it being in use,
3 roughly. So we can see that it was in use for over a hundred years.
4 And at a meeting of the Croatian Assembly, Sime Djodan, a member
5 of parliament, said that all the citizens in Croatia were Croatians, were
6 Croats. And in the constitution, except in the preamble, in the normative
7 part, no mention is made of the Serbs in any context whatsoever. Article
8 2, paragraph 4 of the constitution says that the Croatian Assembly and
9 people, independent and in conformity with the constitution, shall take
10 decisions, et cetera, et cetera. So it is the Croatian Sabor Assembly and
11 the Croatian people which are mentioned, which means that they are -- have
12 -- they were entering a nationalistic hysteria. That was the atmosphere
13 that prevailed.
14 Look at the holidays that were proclaimed. The Croats had the
15 right to celebrate their birthday for two of their -- Christmas for two
16 days and the Serbs only one day. The same was true for Easter, and the
17 same applied to the Jews; Jews that did not form part of that community
18 had no right to celebrate their holidays.
19 Look at the other laws, the addendum to the law on the government
20 of Croatia. This is the sole law in Europe which enables executive organs
21 to disband legally-elected representatives of the government and power and
22 authority because the government of Croatia was authorised to undertake
23 measures towards municipalities that did not toe the line, and they meant
24 the Serbs there.
25 Then we have the law on the Academy of Sciences, Article 1, the
2 passages - is the legal follower of the Croatian Academy from 1941 to
3 1945. It inherited it and that was the legal follower from the times of
4 Naziism. There is nothing on the law of the press, nothing about the
5 Cyrillic script, and the Italians, Czechoslovaks, Ukrainians, et cetera,
6 are mentioned but there is no mention made of the Serbs at all because
7 they have been wiped out from the constitution. Look at the 4th of October
8 Sabor meeting in 1990.
9 So before any kind of conflicts broke out whatsoever, just a few
10 quotations. At that particular meeting - and these are quotations from
11 Damir Mejovsek, an MP: "I don't believe Serbs even when they bear gifts."
12 Stjepan Sulimanac: "The people that have come to live after 1918 in
13 Croatia and have gained some property there, a law should be passed to
14 protect ourselves from people of that kind." Ivan Milas, another case in
15 point: "With your -- we shall answer and respond to your rights with a
16 brandished sabre." And this all went on in parliament.
17 Andjelko Pavlovic: "All Serbs should be isolated," he said, "just
18 like Iraq isolated the Kurds and set up a blockade. He is calling for a
19 ghetto for the Serbs in 1990. And the Ustasha Ambassador Omrcanin, in
20 Berlin, during Hitler's time, in Slobodni Tjednik, a Croatian paper, says
21 in March: "No pogrom of the Serb people by the Croats existed, especially
22 not in Jasenovac because this was all something that the Jews fabricated."
23 THE INTERPRETER: Could the accused please be asked to slow down.
24 JUDGE MAY: You're being asked by the interpreters to slow down.
25 THE ACCUSED: Okay. [Interpretation] After 73 years, after the
2 was a Croat, Krajacic, Kardelj, and so on and so forth, they called this
3 "the Serb occupation." And one of the leaders of the HDZ party, Praljak,
4 right at the outset, on the 28th of April, 1990, writes the following --
5 and the elections had not been held yet. The HDZ was not in power yet.
6 And he says: "People are already singing outside that we'll do away with
7 the Serbs." And so on and so forth.
8 I have to keep track of the time, but I have lots more orders and
9 decisions that were passed from 1945 onwards for war crimes, people who
10 were found guilty, and their set pensions, double the time they spent in
11 prison.
12 So when you take a look at this general atmosphere that prevailed,
13 all I'm going to ask you: Is it the Serbs that incited and encouraged the
14 Serbs? Who can say that? Is it -- was it Belgrade? Can you really say
15 that?
16 Bosiljko Misetic, the Minister of Justice in the second Croatian
17 government in the paper Slobodna Dalmacija, on the 16th of September,
18 1992, and again in the Vjesnik paper, says: "A child, before it learns to
19 read and write, ought to be taught who its enemies are, and its enemies in
20 these areas are the Serbs," and so on and so forth.
21 Take a look now at what their Dalmatian newspaper writes. It is
22 an opposition paper. I think it was actually, it might still be. And
23 this was on the 24th of April, 2001. It writes the following: "It was
24 late autumn of 1991, and in Croatia, there was a free hunting season for
25 the Serbs. Mercep and the others produced mass corpses in the manufacture
2 out of their homes, out of their houses, and passing the death sentence on
3 them by shooting them in the head on Mount Sljeme, which is a hill near
4 Zagreb. Norac, Oreskovic, and their followers at that same time employed
5 similar methods with the Serbs in Gospic. In Zadar, spectacular Crystal
6 Nights, as they were called, were organised during which tens of thousands
7 of houses were burnt and the owners had the wrong chromosomes and blood
8 sets; they were not Croats.
9 And the Novi List paper on the 22nd of January 2002, also a
10 Croatian source - so I'm just quoting your own sources and Croatian
11 sources - states the following. It says that the leadership of Croatia
12 knew about the liquidation of the Serbs in 1991 because in a report that
13 was sent in to Tudjman and Mesic, they all knew that. Josip
14 Manolic, Boljkovac, et cetera. Unequivocally, it's stated: "There is
15 certain evidence and facts on the unlawful arrests of peaceful citizens of
16 the Serb ethnic group which are taken away and nobody knows whether they
17 are alive or dead."
18 So, gentlemen, those, then, are your sources. And I think that it
19 is quite clear to everybody just how erroneous the qualifications that
20 have been made are. And the picture that is trying to be painted here,
21 that with democratic conditions prevailing in Croatia, there were these
22 nationalistic Serbs. And The New York Times, in April 1997, wrote that
23 Croatian fascism came back from its eternal hunting ground, and called
24 upon the Western powers - USA, France, Germany, et cetera - to implement
25 urgent measures to stop the revamping of fascism in Croatia.
2 perhaps become sufficiently ill in order to allow Croatian fascism to live
3 a life after death?"
4 On the 8th of December, 1993, The New York Times says: [in
5 English] "The government of Croatia has forced thousands of its enemies
6 from their homes and from the country, according to the new Zagreb office
7 of human rights organisation. The actions have been directed mostly
8 against Serbs who once constituted a sizeable minority in Croatia, but also
9 against Croats opposed to the rule of President Tudjman. Since 1999 --
10 1991, the Croatian authorities have blown up or razed ten thousand houses,
11 mostly of Serbs, but also houses of Croats. In some cases, they dynamited
12 homes with the families inside; whole families were killed.
13 "Minister Mate Granic, Foreign Minister, in May, had acknowledged
14 the destruction of 7.000 houses. So far, the justice authorities have
15 investigated about 100. One hundred cases of dynamiting. But there have
16 been no prosecution. Altogether, about 280.000 Croatian Serbs have fled
17 the country."
18 [Interpretation] Then The New York Times asks itself in this
19 article: [In English] "[Previous translation continues]... that the
20 Serbs, the indigenous people and majority people, so one-third of
21 communist Tito-created Croatia had to accept."
22 [Interpretation] That's what I'm asking you. You should answer
23 that question. And then blame the Serbs for not having agreed to be
24 slaughtered as they were in 1941. And all this started in 1989 as the
25 Brooklyn Institution wrote, namely Susan Woodward. It started in 1989,
2 280.000 Serbs, the Nazi Croat practically expelled all Serbs that they had
3 under their control as early as 1993."
4 [Interpretation] Which is correct, because the other half was in
5 Krajina and Croatia, did not have that under their control, and they threw
6 them out during the ethnic cleansing operation in which they were assisted
7 by the Americans.
8 Look at this. The American Jewish Committee: [In English]
9 [Previous translation continues]... "memory, prosperity, property,
10 restitution, and related issues confronting the Jewish communities of
11 Central and Eastern Europe; Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia."
12 September 7 [Interpretation] this year.
13 Ivo Goldstein, representative of Croatia, University of Zagreb,
14 says: [In English] "There is the influence of extremist Croatian
15 political émigrés who never broke off from the Ustasha movement. It was,
16 therefore, necessary to dissociate the Ustasha movement from the odious
17 image of faithful Nazi fascist ally and perpetrator of the worst kind of
18 genocide and crimes against the civilian population during the Second
19 World War. Instead, the intent was to provide the Ustasha with at least
20 some kind of legitimate basis for participating in Croatia's civic
21 development in the predominantly democratic European political
22 environment. This was -- this was shown to be impossible without
23 radically revising history and denying or falsify facts."
24 [Interpretation] That is precisely what that side across the well
25 is trying to do, to deny and falsify the facts and history. All of these
2 I don't have time now, but I'm asking you to look at the
3 Encyclopedia Britannica sections that refer to that. I'm asking you to
4 look at references in the Encyclopedia of Nations, and so on and so forth,
5 all the sections pertaining to that. And there are different explanations
6 provided there.
7 In all fairness, this was published before this new Orwellian
8 "Ministry of the Truth" gave orders to satanise the Serbs. After this
9 order came, of course other explanations came as well.
10 I don't have time to go into all of that. You mentioned Vukovar
11 yesterday. In February 1991, at a meeting of the HDZ for Trpinjska Cesta
12 [phoen] in Bordna Nasadic [phoen], Vekic, Glavas were there, and Mercep
13 was the man in charge, the murder that you saw in that film. Cleansing
14 Croatia from the Serbs. Cleansing. I spoke in London and at various
15 international conferences and at various meetings that are all on film
16 that ethnic cleansing is the greatest crime of all regardless of who
17 commits it. Cleansing all of Croatia. Cleansing Vukovar. And then in
18 the following order, replacing ethnic Serbs from all posts in the
19 municipality, intimidating the Serbs until they leave the territory of the
20 municipality, and the last state, the physical liquidation of those
21 against which the previous measures did not succeed.
22 And here it just says the Serbs, the Serbs, the Serbs, Milosevic
23 are guilty. Milosevic made a speech in Kosovo on the 600th anniversary of
24 the battle of Kosovo. And I read it here. And you see that it's quite
25 contrary to what had been claimed. But nobody's really interested in the
2 accordance with the Vance-Owen plan, that is to say, an agreement with the
3 UN, but on several occasions they tried to abuse the plan, and primarily
4 the fact that the JNA withdrew from the territory of the Republic of
5 Srpska Krajina, according to that plan. And the government of the
6 Republic of Srpska Krajina carried out a demilitarisation. And then there
7 are attacks at the Miljevac Plateau, the Maslenica Bridge, the Medak
8 Pocket, Divoselo, and later, massacres of citizens and the well-known
9 Flash and Storm operations.
10 But let's just take a brief look at Bosnia as well. This most
11 prominent form of that campaign of theirs, in addition to what we saw
12 those Mujahedin doing there, I'm going to show something else to you now.
13 During the war, it had assumed the largest proportions, that is to say,
14 shooting their own people and then planting their own crime to the other
15 side. In order to extort a decision by the Security Council to impose
16 sanctions, they had needed to find a pretext. And before TV cameras, they
17 organised a massacre of civilians in the bread line in the Vase Miskina
18 Street in Sarajevo. This was immediately ascribed to the Serbs, and it
19 was immediately established that this was done by the Muslims. And
20 everything that has been written since speaks that this was done by the
21 Muslims.
22 The Independent newspaper already wrote in that year that the most
23 horrible crimes, including the death of 16 civilians in the bread line,
24 were committed by the Muslims themselves in order to obtain public
25 support. CNN also, Corriere Della Sera and La Repubblica, dated the 23rd
2 that makes the war in Bosnia even more cruel," pointing out that the bread
3 line massacre was committed by the Muslims. Corriere Della Sera says
4 that: "Everything indicates that the defenders of Sarajevo, the Croats
5 and the Muslims, organised several attacks against their own citizens in
6 the hope that in this way that they are going to deepen the drama of
7 Sarajevo and the blame will only be cast on the Serbs."
8 THE INTERPRETER: Could the accused please be asked to slow down.
9 JUDGE MAY: Slow down. Slow down.
10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] When we were on good terms,
11 Holbrooke said to me that Izetbegovic managed to play the role of a victim
12 and that he, Holbrooke, called that - I remember his words - "ruthless
13 ingeniosity." However, this not ingenious at all. This is just
14 heartless; sacrificing thousands of his own citizens in order to be able
15 to accuse the Serbs.
16 I have to rush on. I have a map here. I'll give it to you.
17 Camps for Serbs from 1991 to 1996. They existed at different points in
18 time. Some went on for a longer period of time, some shorter. There were
19 778 of them altogether; 536 in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 221 in Croatia. And
20 here is a list of every one of these camps. It includes many pages.
21 There are many crimes that were committed. I won't have time. I
22 won't have time to show this. Many crimes were committed in Croatia
23 before the independence of Croatia was proclaimed, before it was
24 recognised. There is a great number of crimes committed in Bosnia before
25 the proclamation of independence, before recognition. Please, could you
2 perhaps. These two, rather.
3 Take a look at this. Please put these two on the overhead
4 projector. I'm not going to put any other pictures on the overhead
5 projector. These are crimes from the 26th of March, 1992, in Sijekovac.
6 The units crossed the Sava River and slaughtered the Serbs. Please put
7 the big picture on the overhead projector.
8 That's it. That's what they did. That's what the Mujahedin did,
9 the ones we saw yesterday. And we saw Izetbegovic reviewing them
10 yesterday.
11 What's the matter? Is it not on the screens?
12 JUDGE MAY: It's on the screen. Do you want the next photograph
13 shown?
14 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] But I haven't seen it on the screen.
15 I only see you on the screen.
16 JUDGE MAY: It's on our screen. Make sure you've got the right
17 button.
18 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] All right. All right. You don't
19 want to show this. You don't want to show this to the public.
20 JUDGE MAY: Mr. Milosevic, it is on our screen.
21 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] It's not on the screens that the
22 public sees. Right. I see it on this screen now. But this internal
23 screen only. So he is holding a head, the head of a Serb that he cut off.
24 So those are the 20.000 Mujahedin that were brought to the European
25 theatre of war through Clinton's policy, and most of them remained there
2 Europe. And then when they start beheading your own people in wars to
3 come, then you will know what this is all about.
4 There are many photographs of major crimes.
5 JUDGE MAY: The usher is by the overhead projector. Do you want
6 some other photographs shown to us?
7 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I don't have time, Mr. May. I have
8 12 minutes left --
9 JUDGE MAY: Very well.
10 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] -- according to your shortened
11 procedure. But I want to say one thing to you. For example --
12 JUDGE MAY: Let the usher -- there's no need for the usher to
13 remain there. Give the photographs back, if you would, to Mr. Milosevic.
14 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] Put the other picture on the ELMO,
15 please, the one with the three heads. Take a look at this, these three
16 heads of Serbs in an ammunition case. They cut off heads. These are the
17 madmen that are doing things like that. And that is what Clinton's policy
18 in Bosnia did. They were assembled in Bosnia.
19 Look at Algeria, which is a Muslim country. How many Muslims,
20 Algerians, did they kill so far? This has nothing do with Muslims. These
21 are Islamic fundamentalists who are the enemies of the entire world. Not
22 only of Christians or some others but of Muslims as well.
23 You have --
24 JUDGE MAY: Now, do you want any other pictures shown?
25 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] I don't have time, unfortunately,
2 JUDGE MAY: Very well, let the usher take the pictures.
3 THE ACCUSED: [Interpretation] -- as far as Bosnia is concerned,
4 you can see this. This has to do with the Serb victims of Bosanska Dubica
5 and Bosanska Gradiska, those two municipalities. For all the
6 municipalities, there was a book that was published by the Centre for
7 Investigating Crimes of the Association of Serbs from Bosnia and
8 Herzegovina, and for each and every municipality significant events,
9 victims, inevitable fate, and the perpetrators of the crimes. For each
10 and every municipality, you have at least 100 perpetrators of these
11 crimes.
12 I wish to avail myself of the remaining time to say a few words
13 about Srebrenica that was mentioned here. I have already said that I
14 first heard about this -- I said this six months ago, when I first spoke
15 here, that I first heard about this from Carl Bildt and that Radovan
16 Karadzic swore to me that he didn't know a thing about this. All
17 subsequent information corroborated that, including the subsequently
18 published main report of the Dutch government published in April 2001.
19 In item 10, it says quite literally: "There are no indications
20 that the action was taken out in collaboration with Belgrade, neither in
21 terms of political or military coordination. In this way, gentlemen, as
22 far as I'm concerned, an end could be brought to this, but I don't want to
23 place a full stop there. I want the truth to be revealed with regard to
24 this insane crime, in the interest of justice. It has to be explained
25 before the world public. The information that I have compiled so far, and
2 all kinds of manipulations and held it in -- in his own reserve for
3 various political bargains. And you saw from the statement made by a
4 member of his delegation in the report that was accepted by the UN with
5 regard to the takeover of Srebrenica, the handover of Srebrenica. You saw
6 all of this.
7 Time will show that on the 1st of July, 1995, in the house of a
8 Muslim, the former president of the municipality in Zvornik, where two
9 members of the Muslim government from Sarajevo were present, the
10 representatives of a mercenary military formation within the army of
11 Republika Srpska but not under the command of the army of Republika Srpska
12 but within the French intelligence service, they agreed to have this crime
13 committed, that is to say, to abandon Srebrenica and to carry out this
14 slaughter.
15 All information shows that General Mladic knew nothing about this,
16 nor General Krstic, who was sentenced here. I am personally convinced
17 that the military honour of Mladic or Krstic would not allow them to
18 execute civilians, let alone Mladic, Krstic, generals who throughout the
19 war made a maximum effort to protect prisoners of war and civilians at all
20 times.
21 This mercenary unit was commanded by the same people who sent
22 those same persons only one year later to Zaire so that they would protect
23 Mobutu and crush a rebellion. This same organisation organised the
24 purchase of arms a year later. And since I asked you to adopt a writ
25 of disclosure, please do that. Those people who have a salary for that
2 French intelligence service and the American intelligence service and all
3 other intelligence services, let them disclose all the facts they have on
4 Srebrenica. The information I have available shows that the point of the
5 agreement reached was the following: The underlying French idea was that
6 the war in Bosnia should be ended through effective actions taken by NATO
7 and through military engagement. As a pretext for military engagement,
8 genocide that will be carried out by the Serbs will be made up, and the
9 Serb negotiating side will have to deal with that. The presence of Ratko
10 Mladic in Srebrenica will be used as a confirmation of the responsibility
11 of the military leadership and of Mladic himself for having an indictment
12 issued against him in The Hague by making it appear that a genocide was
13 carried out and anathema will be placed on the leadership of the Bosnian
14 Serbs and then the international community will take measures. The
15 protagonists will not be prosecuted.
16 One insignificant one, a member of the Croat detachments of death
17 who happened to be there was accused, and then for the crimes in
18 Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic should be accused and also the leadership of
19 Republika Srpska headed by Radovan Karadzic. And this agreement was
20 attended by two representatives of the Muslim government, that out of the
21 French, General Janvier was there for sure, and this other person was said
22 to be Morillon but this was not confirmed. There is no reliable
23 information saying that it was Morillon.
24 The agreement was that Srebrenica should be surrendered to the
25 Serbs practically without any fighting, as forthwith withdraw and in that
2 Oric is going to withdraw and award for the action will be 2 million
3 Deutschmark.
4 Mladic was not at that meeting. He was having lunch with those
5 generals later on at the Likovac locality, but according to intelligence
6 data, he did not know what the subject agreed upon was, and he didn't know
7 that he was commanding all the units that took part in that, especially
8 the one that was sent to Zaire later on by the same people that ordered
9 the job to be done. Oric lives in Lukavac near Tuzla today. He has a
10 restaurant on the lake and he destroyed more than 70 villages around
11 Srebrenica and that he is one of the greatest criminals in the war.
12 So let me conclude now. This is how things stand: I have just
13 touched upon some of them, and I should like to emphasise that five peace
14 plans were accepted by us: The Cutilheiro plan, the Vance-Owen Plan, the
15 Vance-Stoltenberg, and the plan of the European Union and the Contact
16 Group plan. All five plans were accepted by us. So as far as Serbia and
17 I personally am concerned, everybody owes us -- everybody owes us
18 recognition for the consistent struggle to attain peace instead of the
19 accusations for war.
20 We have received much recognition, and I personally have too, but
21 I'm only going to quote two individuals who for a long time were -- who
22 spent a long time in Yugoslavia, so they weren't ordinary visitors.
23 Yasushi Akashi, one, the Assistant to the Secretary-General and his
24 special envoy to Yugoslavia, and upon his departure, at a press conference
25 which I did not attend - so he didn't have to address me, I was not there
2 throughout the entire peace process during his entire mandate. And I'm
3 going to ask Mr. Akashi to come forth here and testify. I hope he will
4 accept my invitation.
5 And Thorwald Stoltenberg, who also worked as the presiding person
6 of the conference and worked in Yugoslavia for a long time. What Yusushi
7 Akashi said at the press conference before his departure -- this was all
8 before Dayton and I am the person most responsible for the agreement
9 reached at Dayton and nobody can bring that into question. Thorwald
10 Stoltenberg, on the 12th of December 1995, and I quote, said the following
11 in Oslo. He said that: "President Slobodan Milosevic had played a key
12 role in the peace process in the then Yugoslavia."
13 Therefore, gentlemen, it is with the highest degree of
14 responsibility and with all the facts at my disposal I claim before the
15 international community that the policy of Serbia when it comes to the war
16 in Bosnia-Herzegovina was directed towards peace and all its efforts were
17 geared towards peace. The policy of Serbia was also to support Serbs in
18 Bosnia in their hardships there because they found themselves faced with
19 these hardships thanks to others. But it was the policy of Serbia that
20 was geared first and foremost towards stopping the bloodshed and
21 establishing peace, and arguments that the Serbs should live with others
22 -- those were the arguments. The people that they had lived next to
23 throughout that time.
24 That is the truth. And the people from the international
25 community are -- know that truth full well, even if they are calling for
2 perpetrated. They are asking that I be held responsible.
3 So the tasks, gentlemen, you have before you are impossible unless
4 you make an intervention in history. And if you -- unless you look at the
5 facts. I have only touched upon these facts because of my limited time,
6 but you must declare them null and void if you wish to falsify history
7 completely. But in addition to the quite obvious intention to falsify
8 history here, the indictment has fallen through. It is aborted. Because
9 truth is stronger. And you, contrary to the intentions of the creators of
10 this unlawful Tribunal, have enabled the world to get a glimpse of the
11 truth and to start to understand the truth as it stands. And in the
12 proceedings to come, this will be made even more evident and the truth
13 will be victorious.
14 Thank you. And I have not overstepped the time limits you set.
15 Of course, that was to the detriment of a series of facts which I wished
16 to put before you.
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