| Milosevic tirade { February 15 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active) http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-208881,00.htmlhttp://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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