by SLOBODAN DESPOT
General Ratko Mladic’s arrest and his extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were prerequisites for Serbia’s membership in the European Union. This has now been done. As expected, the western media have tagged the defendant as the “Butcher of Bosnia” and piled on as many charges against him as possible, thereby masking NATO’s role in Yugoslavia. But there can be no reconciliation without truth, which, as Slobodan Despot observes, is far more complex than the Manichean account given.
Ratko Mladi? did not serve his country well by hiding from justice for all these years, but his late capture may allow a more serene evaluation of the tragedies in which he was the protagonist, an evaluation that would have been impossible had the trial been held in the immediate post-war period.
At the time when the ICTY indictments were issued, the West unanimously designated a single culprit: the Serbs. Since then, things have changed.
Foreign interference in the conflict, especially by the Americans, has been widely studied and analysed (see the books by Jürgen Elsässer and Diana Johnstone). Similarly, Jacques Merlino, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman & David Peterson and others have conclusively shown how media manipulation on a very large scale was used to influence public perception of the war.
Protagonists presented until recently solely as victims have been accused or convicted of the same crimes as were the Serbs. Tudjman’s Croatia, in “Operation Storm”, in the summer of 1995, massacred thousands of Serbs and ethnically cleansed 250,000 others from Krajina. Hashim Thaci’s KLA in Kosovo massacred Serb civilians and trafficked their organs. Bosnia, led by the late Alija Izetbegovic, president-elect of the Muslim community and theoretician of Islamic fundamentalism, was proved to be a bridgehead for the Mujahedeen, first Saudis and then Iranians, and a haven for terrorists. In fact, most of the terrorists responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, London and Madrid had stayed in Bosnia and Bin Laden himself had a Bosnian passport issued in 1993.
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When I participated in the programme Forum of Radio Suisse Romande, of May 26, 2011, the journalist Philippe Revaz asked a straightforward question to Carla del Ponte, former prosecutor of the ICTY:
“Carla del Ponte, is this genocide?”
The response of the magistrate is significant:
“I say genocide, because, uh, we already had convictions for complicity in genocide, and already we have had confirmation that it was genocide in Srebrenica by the Court of Appeal Tribunal [ICTY] “.
It is highly significant that Ms. del Ponte justifies the term not by describing what happened or by using a universally accepted definition of this crime, but by recourse to the jurisprudence of her own court. “I say that X has committed genocide because someone else has already been sentenced for complicity in genocide”. The tautology borders on the absurd!
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