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Milosevic tirade { February 15 2002 }

Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
   http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-208881,00.html

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-208881,00.html


February 15, 2002

Milosevic tirade against 'the
Nazis of Nato'
From Adam Sage in The Hague


THE man who presided
over a decade of terror in
the Balkans took the stand
to rage at a hostile world
yesterday, the innocent
victim of an international
conspiracy against his
country.

Indignant, vehement,
jabbing his finger at the
international war crimes
tribunal bench through an
uninterrupted four-hour
tirade, Slobodan Milosevic
said he had been a
righteous and peace-loving ruler faced by the “neo-Nazi,
neo-colonialist” force that was Nato; his country
destroyed by a German-led plot.

Wearing a tie in the red, white and blue colours of
Serbia and banging on his desk, he cast himself in the
role of a scapegoat, punished in the name of his
people.

“This court case is a crime against a sovereign state
because you are seeking to try me for deeds that I
carried out as head of state. This is also a crime
against the truth and a crime against justice and the
whole world knows that this is a political trial. Might
becomes right.”

His delivery was gruff and grating as he made a speech
in Serbo-Croat that often ran too fast for the English
language interpreters.

One of the two women translators spoke in soft tones
that failed to convey the former Yugoslav President’s
anger; the second had a harsher voice that followed Mr
Milosevic as his words came with increasing force and
velocity, piercing into the headsets needed to hear
proceedings through plate-glass windows.

But the body language was eloquent. The former leader
leaned forward, sneered, flushed red, smiled as he
pin-pointed a prosecution error, and then leant forward
again as he denounced what he said was the plot
against Serbia.

After responding point by point to the prosecution case,
he showed a series of photographs of burnt, distorted
victims of the Nato bombing campaign in 1999.

He said that he would summon President Chirac of
France to the witness stand to justify the Nato
intervention, and implied that he might call Tony Blair
and Bill Clinton.

“This accusation is a terrible fabrication and
manipulation,” he said. “They want to ascribe to me
crimes that they perpetrated themselves and this is an
outrage to the whole Serbian people and an insult to a
whole nation.”

Throughout his speech, he cast fierce glances at
Richard May, the British presiding judge, and at the
prosecutors, Geoffrey Nice, QC, and Carla Del Ponte.
But his words were aimed mainly at world — and
particularly Serb — opinion. “This is my first opportunity
to address the public,” the defendant said, going on to
call the present Yugoslav Administration a puppet
regime.

Looking straight at Judge May, and suggesting that he
was under orders from European and American
politicians, Mr Milosevic said: “Your bosses broke up
Yugoslavia. All the people of Yugoslavia were punished
in the war that was started when they forced Bosnia to
leave Yugoslavia. Serbia did not start a war or any of the
conflicts, your bosses did.”

At times he exuded distrust bordering on paranoia. He
had fought to keep the Yugoslav republics united in the
1990s, he said, but had been undermined by a
German-led plot.

“The prosecutor did not mention Nuremberg by chance.
Not satisfied with the crime of breaking up Yugoslavia to
avenge their defeat in two World Wars, they bring me
here to reverse the roles of the Nuremberg hearings.
After killing Yugoslavia, they are crucifying me here and
they are doing that with their one-time enemies and
now allies.”

As for the exodus of Kosovan Albanians in 1999, this
was not the deportation by Serb forces that was
reported by the world’s media, rather, it was
orchestrated by the Kosovans themselves.

“The people of Kosovo were expelled by the Kosovo
Liberation Army which ordered them to be beaten and
killed together with Nato armed structures,” he said.
“That is the truth.” The Nato intervention over Kosovo
was a drive “to take Serbia back to the Stone Age”.

“The goal for this aggression was geo-strategic — the
expansion of Nato.” If atrocities had been committed, it
was by “individuals or groups and not by the army or
police. The army acted with honour and chivalry, and
these crimes cannot be ascribed to the army, to the
people or to my Government.”

Yet along with the fury and indignation, there were
carefully planned attacks on the first prosecution of a
head of state for crimes committed in office. “We have
heard the prosecutors saying that they are trying an
individual because it is sensitive to link an individual to
a whole nation. But my conduct was an expression of
the will of the population and the prosecution here is is
accusing the population. Indeed, my behaviour here is
the expression of the will of the people.”

The former Serb President had refused to employ the
lawyers who are advising him in court, choosing
instead to represent himself as a mark of contempt for
the tribunal. But it became clear yesterday that he had
prepared for the case with meticulous and methodical
determination.

He began by showing German and British-made
documentaries that called into question the massacres
of Kosovan Albanians in the run-up to the Nato
airstrikes in 1999. “This is an atom of truth in an ocean
of lies,” he said.

Finally, he accused Nato of the very crimes with which
he himself has been charged: genocide, crimes
against humanity and war crimes. “Children, women,
the elderly, pregnant women, they all suffered from the
Nato bombing, so did journalists doing their work,
refugee columns and salesmen at marketplaces.

“The bombing of civilian targets was merciless, the
more victims and the more that lives were imperilled the
better. In the photographs I will show you, you will see
corpses that have been destroyed, bodies that have
been carbonised, injured people and buildings that
have been destroyed. These are the same sorts of
images we were shown at school when we were told
about World War Two. Only the Nazis could have
conceived of bombing villages like this.”

The photographs included images of Kosovan
peasants killed in a Nato airstrike on April 14, 1999. As
a dislocated head, an arm and a leg appeared on the
screen, Mr Milosevic commented upon them gruffly and
then ordered the clerks to show the next scene.

These were part of a strategy that will present Judge
May with difficulties. Now Mr Milosevic has abandoned
his previous indifference, his aim is to highlight what he
says is its political nature.

In a tribunal that has only a small body of case law upon
which to draw, the bench will have to decide whether to
admit such items as photographs of Nato bombing
victims. It will also have to rule on Mr Milosevic’s
application to summon heads of state and government.
Refusal would reinforce his claim that he is the victim of
a plot. Acceptance could push the case on to highly
political terrain.



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