Manufacturing another great Satan

Available evidence does not seem to warrant charges of genocide levelled against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, writes Faiza Rady
Described as "the most important trial since Nuremberg," the case against Slobodan Milosevic's at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) at The Hague is now entering its fourth week without showing any sign of dropping out of the public spotlight.
The former Yugoslav president faces three separate indictments in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. In Bosnia, Milosevic is charged with "genocide" and "crimes against humanity." The prosecution holds him responsible for ordering the widespread killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. The indictment specifically refers to the July 1995 massacre at Srebrenica where "almost all captured Bosnian Muslim men and boys, altogether several thousand, were executed at the places where they had been captured or at sites to which they had been transported for execution." According to the terms of the indictment, "Milosevic knowingly and wilfully" participated in criminal action in Bosnia.
In a second indictment, Milosevic is similarly accused of having committed "crimes against humanity" in Croatia between 1991 and 1992. He is held responsible for the killings of hundreds of civilians and the expulsion of 170,000 non-Serbs from their homes.
In Kosovo, Milosevic is also charged with "crimes against humanity" in a period dating between January and June 1999. In addition, he is accused of ordering the deportation of 800,000 Kosovo Albanians, which constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions -- the UN protocol regulating the treatment for prisoners of war.
Despite the gravity of the charges, Milosevic has -- so far -- done rather well. Notwithstanding the prosecution's formidable resources, its high-powered lawyers and the testimonies of a battalion of witnesses, observers agree that the ICTFY has yet to provide credible evidence of the former Yugoslav president's "crimes against humanity" and "acts of genocide." The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any act "committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such."
During last week's court session, the star witness for the prosecution, Besnik Sokoli -- a Kosovo Albanian and an ICTFY translator -- told the court how the Serb police had beaten him in a hotel in Pec and then driven him to the Albanian border in March 1999. "I was forced to leave Kosovo out of fear. I was afraid something bad would happen to my family and myself. I did not leave because of NATO bombing," said Sokoli. Although Sokoli testified about police brutality and illegal deportation procedures, his testimony fell short of the definition for "genocide" and "crimes against humanity."
Conducting his own defence, Milosevic cross- examined the witness. Asked if he knew about incidences of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) committing crimes against Serbs and those Albanians who were "loyal to the state," Sokoli denied having such knowledge. Milosevic then recited the names of victims, with dates and details of KLA attacks -- blasting the KLA as a CIA-backed contra militia, created and nurtured by the US to destabilise and fragment the former Yugoslavia.
While the prosecution reprimanded Milosevic for irrelevant political posturing and speech- making, his point was on-target. Although largely celebrated by the mainstream Western media as a national liberation army struggling for Albanian self-determination in Kosovo, the KLA has another, darker face.
Like the Nicaraguan US-based counter- revolutionary mercenaries, which the Reagan administration used in the 1980s to destabilise the progressive Sandanista regime, the KLA grew out of the so-called Atlantic Brigade -- a special US-trained mercenary force mostly composed of exiled anti-communist Albanians.
In 1991, contingents from this contra brigade linked up with a number of Kosovo clans and founded the KLA, with the sole platform of freeing the Kosovo Albanians from Serbian rule. By the mid-1990s, the KLA had developed into a 40,000-strong, well-equipped army, with training in Albania, Iran and Pakistan. When NATO started bombing Kosovo, the KLA became their foot soldiers in the field. "In May 1999, the KLA had virtually become the ground forces of the NATO operations," explained prominent writer Noam Chomsky.
At that time, writes Chomsky, the KLA appointed the infamous Agim Ceku, as its military commander. In 1995, Ceku had gained notoriety as one of the architects of the Krajina ethnic cleansing operation. With the tacit consent of the Clinton administration and tactical support from the US military, the Croatian army marched into Krajina on 5 August, slaughtered more than 2,500 Serbian civilians and evicted an estimated 200,000 people who were forced to flee for their lives, said political analyst Gregory Elich in The invasion of Serbian Krajina.
Although Krajina is regarded to be the most extreme case of ethnic cleansing in the course of Yugoslavia's wars of secession, the Croat leadership has yet to be indicted for mass murder in the case. The press made sure it looked the other way. Unlike Croats, Muslim Bosnians and Albanians, the demonised Serbs, were deemed to be unworthy victims.
"The Serbs asked for it," rejoiced the headline of the Los Angeles Times, in reference to the Krajina massacre. "If American journalists had bothered to report [the massacre] then perhaps public opinion would have been prepared for the notion that there are no innocent political players in the Balkans," commented the Washington-based leftist journal CounterPunch.
Back at the ICTFY in The Hague, Milosevic's point was to denounce the NATO-KLA during the bombing alliance and present the Serbian army and police attacks on KLA centres and subsequent mass deportation of Albanians as a retaliation to NATO-KLA terror .
Milosevic's argument is corroborated by official Western sources. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the US-led war crime verification team, agrees that the deportation of Albanians from Kosovo followed a trail of KLA strongholds. In their detailed review of war crimes published in December 1999, the OSCE conceded that the evidence "suggests a kind of military rationale for the expulsions, which were concentrated in areas controlled by the insurgents and along likely invasion routes."
Although Milosevic may have scored some points on the deportation charges, the "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" indictments ominously loom ahead.
"Genocide was pinned on Serbia in the early 1990s, but it came into intense use during the NATO 78-day bombing campaign and briefly thereafter," comments distinguished political writer and University of Pennsylvania professor Edward S Herman in Fog Watch, a media watch dog.
Aided and abetted by the media -- which threw its considerable weight into blurring the lines between the Serbian authorities' brutal repression of dissent, and genocide -- Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder and other NATO bigwigs were able to launch their attack with almost unanimous public support.
American-born Bosnian film-maker Nadja Tesich denounced the media lies and the mindless and exclusive demonisation of her people, without historical reference or context. "Everyone looks the same in Yugoslavia so you can use dead or massacred Serbs and claim they are others. Images of dead Serbs are called Muslims or Croats by the time they reach New York, although they were something else in some European papers and in the original photos," wrote Tesich in Nato and the Balkans.
By March 1999, the media had sufficiently demonised Milosevic and the Serbian people to warrant NATO intervention in the form of their unique "humanist" bombing campaign.
Yet there was a problem. The body count simply never added up to justify the charge of genocide -- "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." While army and militia terror was exhibited in equal measures by all parties in the Bosnian civil war, the total number of victims in the 15 months preceding the NATO bombing according to UN figures did not exceed 2000 -- less than the 2500 Serbian victims of the Croatian army's ethnic cleansing rampage in Krajina.
Regardless, the killing fields had to be undug. During and after the NATO bombings, Western journalists went to Bosnia with the specific mission of unearthing mass graves. The disinformation campaign reached its climax with Bill Clinton telling a White House press conference on 25 June 1999 that Milosevic had ordered the killings of tens of thousands of people in Kosovo, recalled CounterPunch. On 4 July, the New York Times trimmed down the figure to a body count of 10,000. Then the UN joined the chorus, when Bernard Kouchner, the organisation's chief administrator reported on 2 August that 11,000 bodies had been discovered in mass graves. Kouchner sourced the figure to the ICTFR, which later denied giving out this information.
At any rate, the 11,000 bodies never materialised. An FBI investigation team has dug up approximately 30 sites of alleged mass graves containing a total of 200 bodies. A Spanish team, the Instituto Anatómico Forense de Cartagena, only found 187 corpses in northern Kosovo. Denying the charge of genocide, Juan Lopez, a member of the team, said: "in former Yugoslavia there have been horrible crimes, but they stemmed from the war. But genocide?" Regardless, the figures stick. The allegations of genocide live on and Milosevic will continue to haunt the West's collective imagination as the modern day Hitler.
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