The Srebrenica Massacre - Nova Srpska Politicka Misao

Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Testimony at The Hague
most exclusive and oftentimes microscopic focus on Serb conduct.
Within the same framework, a major effort was made to link these to
alleged policy decisions, plans, and conspiratorial behavior by Serb leaders
in Belgrade and Pale. Toward this end, the ICTY coerces and cajoles
witnesses as it builds the historical record. It threatens to indict. It exploits
witness fears of reprisals. Above all, it uses the plea-bargain process
to impel witnesses-for-the-prosecution to internalize and then recite its
historically-correct scripts back to it.
For those who genuinely believe in the importance of the rule of law
and justice in international affairs, the ICTY provides a depressing and
cautionary spectacle. The use of hearsay, even double and triple hearsay,
not only is permitted but encouraged for prosecution witnesses. Perjury
is suborned from frightened defendants who understand that the likelihood
of their acquittal is virtually nil.
Meanwhile, the larger political issues that arose during the violent
break up of Yugoslavia—the covert arming of U.N.-protected “safe
areas” by the United States and its sometime allies, the introduction of
foreign Islamic jihadists into the Bosnian civil war with tacit U.S. approval,
NATO’s collaboration with the terrorist Kosovo Liberation
Army, and the launching of a war of aggression against a sovereign country
in the name of “human rights” and propagandistic claims about preventing
“genocide”—are never addressed by the Tribunal.
The victims of the wars in Yugoslavia, whom the ICTY supposedly
represents, have been very badly served by this political inquisition masquerading
as a court of law.
Notes
1 Michael Scharf, “Making a Spectacle of Himself; Milosevic Wants a Stage, Not
the Right to Provide His Own Defense,” Washington Post, August 29, 2004.
2 See, e.g., Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral
Damage and Crimes Against Humanity (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004);
John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International
Justice (Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2007); and Edward S. Herman
and David Peterson, “The Dismantling of Yugoslavia,” Monthly Review, October,
2007, .
3 For the original, pre-Srebrenica-related indictment, see Richard J. Goldstone,
The Prosecutor of the Tribunal against Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, IT-95-5-
204