Hospitals & Asylums
Obituary of
Slobodan Milosevic HA-11-3-06
On Saturday morning, 11 March 2006, a prison guard found the former Yugoslav leader, Slobodan
Milosevic, lifeless in bed. It was an abrupt end to his four-year U.N. war
crimes tribunal for orchestrating a decade of conflict that ended with 250,000 dead
and the Yugoslav federation torn asunder.
There was no comment from Milosevic's wife, Mirjana,
who was often characterized as a power behind the scenes during her husband's
autocratic rule and has been in self-imposed exile in Russia since 2003. Their son, Marko, also lives in Russia, and their daughter, Marija,
lives in Montenegro. Just 10 days ago,
Milosevic complained in court of a "thundering noise" in his head.
The next day he cut short an examination of a witness because of another
headache. The following day, Feb. 24, he protested the refusal of presiding
Judge Patrick Robinson to let him go to Moscow for treatment, but Robinson cut him off. "I'm not
going to consider this," Robinson told him. The tart exchange was typical of many over
the course of the first such trial involving a former head of state - this one
a man reviled by the United States as "the butcher of the Balkans"
but a hero to many Serbs despite losing four wars and impoverishing his people
in the 1990s while trying to unite Serbia with Serb-dominated areas of Croatia
and Bosnia. This denial of specialist
care is in violation of the Standard Minimum Rules
for the Treatment of Prisoners, adopted Aug. 30, 1955 by the First United
Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders,
U.N. Doc. A/CONF/611, annex I, E.S.C. res. 663C, 24 U.N. ESCOR Supp. (No. 1) at
11, U.N. Doc. E/3048 (1957), amended E.S.C. res. 2076, 62 U.N. ESCOR Supp. (No.
1) at 35, U.N. Doc. E/5988 (1977) that states, “Sick prisoners who require specialist
treatment shall be transferred to specialized institutions or to civil
hospitals”.
Milosevic apparently died of
natural causes, according to the U.N. tribunal that was trying him on 66 counts
of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. His chronic heart ailments
and high blood pressure had caused numerous long recesses in the trial. The
death came nearly five years after Milosevic was arrested by Serb authorities
and extradited to The
Hague as the first
sitting head of state ever to be indicted for war crimes. It meant there would be no judicial verdict
for the leader accused of ethnic massacres and other atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and was sure to increase criticism of the
tribunal for what has been a long, expensive and ultimately wasted proceeding. The trial, which began in February 2002, will
be terminated, tribunal spokeswoman Alexandra Milenov
said. The chief U.N. war crimes
prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, expressed regret, saying she believed she would
have won a conviction. "I also regret it for the victims, the thousands of
victims, who have been waiting for justice," Del Ponte told Swiss
Television DRS while visiting her native Switzerland.
Former President Clinton, whose
administration confronted Milosevic's regime, also lamented that no verdict
would be reached. "I am sorry that his trial will not be completed, and
that he did not acknowledge and apologize for his crimes before his death.
Nevertheless, his capture and trial will serve as a reminder that egregious
crimes against humanity will not be tolerated," Clinton said in a statement released by his office in New York.
Milosevic was accused of being
behind a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs during the wars
that erupted as the Yugoslav federation began breaking apart in 1991, and his
death was cheered by many in the Balkans. "Finally, we have some reason to
smile. God is fair," said Hajra Catic, who heads an association of women who lost loved
ones when ethnic Serb troops slaughtered 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the
eastern enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
In Serbia, where many people praised Milosevic for trying to
preserve Serb dominance, supporters declared his death a "huge loss."
The tribunal said a guard at the U.N. jail in suburban Scheveningen
found Milosevic's body between 9 and 10 a.m.
Saturday. It said an autopsy would be conducted Sunday by Dutch officials -
with a pathologist from Serbia-Montenegro in attendance - to determine the
cause of death. Milosevic's older
brother, Borislav, said the family did not trust the
tribunal to carry out an impartial autopsy.
He blamed the tribunal for his brother's death because it rejected his
request to get medical treatment in Russia, which offered assurances that Milosevic would be returned
to finish his trial. "All
responsibility for this lies on the shoulders of the international tribunal.
He asked for treatment several months ago, they knew this," Borislav Milosevic told The Associated Press in Moscow, where he lives. "They drove him to this as they
didn't want to let him out alive."
Zdenko Tomanovic, the defendant's legal
adviser, told Serbia's independent B-92 radio from The Hague that Milosevic had
complained that "someone wants to poison" him. Tomanovic
later told state Serbian TV that Russian experts would be permitted to attend
Sunday's autopsy. The White House said
it was waiting for more information. "We have seen the news that Slobodan
Milosevic has died in his prison in The Hague," spokesman Blair Jones said. "We do not have
all the details yet."
Milosevic's trial and Saddam
Hussein's war crimes proceeding in Iraq were widely seen as together constituting the most
important legal test for the international community since German and Japanese
leaders were tried after World War II. Both
trials drew stiff criticism over frequent interruptions and the ability of the
defendants to use the courtroom as a stage to launch vitriolic anti-Western
diatribes. Reveling in the spotlight, Milosevic insisted on serving as his own
defense lawyer, he was able to stay as the Serbs' leader for 13 years despite a
crumbling economy and increasing international isolation. He once described himself as the
"Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia," assuring his prime minister, Milan
Panic, that "the Serbs will follow me no matter what."
Ivica Dacic, a ranking Socialist Party
official, said in Belgrade that Milosevic's death was a "great loss for Serbia, for the entire Serb nation and for the Socialist
party. Milosevic was carrying out not
only his own defense but also the defense of Serb honor," Dacic said. "The entire country must thank him for
this." But in the end, his people
abandoned him: first in October 2000, when he was unable to convince most
Yugoslavs that he had staved off electoral defeat by Vojislav Kostunica, and
again on April 1, 2001, when he
surrendered after a 26-hour standoff to face criminal charges. "It is a
pity he didn't live to the end of the trial to get the sentence he
deserved," Croatian President Stipe Mesic said.
Milosevic was born in Pozarevac, a factory town in central Serbia best known as the home of one of the country's most
notorious prisons. His father was a defrocked Orthodox priest and sometime
teacher of Russian. His mother was also a teacher. Both parents eventually
committed suicide. In high school, he
met his future wife, the daughter of a wartime communist partisan hero. She
also was the niece of Davorjanka Paunovic,
private secretary and mistress of Josip Broz Tito, the communist guerrilla leader who seized power
in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II. Milosevic graduated from law school in 1964
and joined the Communist Party. The party put him in various business
positions, and in 1983 he was appointed director of a major state-run bank. He
became friends with several Western figures, including former U.S. Secretary of
State Lawrence Eagleburger and banker David Rockefeller. He also befriended Ivan Stambolic,
who became leader of the Communist Party in Serbia in 1984. Stambolic picked
Milosevic for the powerful post of party leader in the capital, Belgrade. When Stambolic was elevated to Serbia's presidency in 1986, Milosevic succeeded him as Serbian
communist boss. A year later, Stambolic sent Milosevic to Kosovo, where ethnic Serbs were
demanding protection from the province's ethnic Albanian majority. During a
meeting of local Serb leaders, hundreds of angry Serbs gathered outside and demanded
the leadership hear their grievances. Milosevic
faced the crowd and delivered a fiery speech, telling them: "Nobody has
the right to beat you." Those words
shattered the myth of ethnic "brotherhood and unity" that had been
the slogan of Tito's communist regime - and transformed Milosevic into a Serb
hero. Months later, in September 1987,
he publicly accused his old friend Stambolic and
others of anti-communist and anti-Serbian policies during a party meeting
televised live nationwide. All were forced to resign in a de facto coup. In 1989, Milosevic became president of Serbia in an election widely considered rigged. His rise alarmed
the other peoples of the Yugoslav federation - Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians,
Albanians and others. In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia. Milosevic sent tanks to Slovenian borders, triggering a
brief war that ended in Slovenia's secession. But
ethnic Serbs in Croatia, encouraged by Milosevic, took up arms. Milosevic
responded by sending the Serb-led Yugoslav army to intervene, triggering a
conflict that killed at least 10,000 people.
Three months later, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence.
Milosevic bankrolled a Bosnian Serb rebellion, triggering a worse war that
killed an estimated 200,000 people before a U.S.-brokered peace agreement was
reached at Dayton, Ohio, in 1995. Milosevic's
term as Serbian president ended in 1997 and the constitution prevented him from
running again. However, he exploited legal loopholes to have parliament name
him president of Yugoslavia, which by then included only the republics of Serbia and Montenegro. It was Kosovo, his
old springboard to power, that finally set the stage for his downfall. In February 1998, Milosevic sent troops to
crush an ethnic Albanian uprising there, drawing sanctions from the United States and its allies. In 1999, after Milosevic refused to sign a
Western-dictated peace accord, NATO conducted 78 days of air strikes on Yugoslavia. Before Milosevic
gave in and handed over the province's administration to the United Nations in
June 1999, the U.N. tribunal charged him and four top aides with war crimes and
crimes against humanity in Kosovo. It later broadened the charges to include
genocide. Milosevic sought to hold on to
power by pushing through a constitutional change in July 2000 to permit the
election of president by popular vote rather than parliament. But he had
misjudged his popularity, and Yugoslavs exhausted by years of war and upheaval
backed Kostunica in the election. The
Milosevic-controlled election commission tried to force a runoff, but hundreds
of thousands of people converged on Belgrade, setting off a daylong riot on Oct. 5, 2000. The police and army refused to intervene, and Milosevic
conceded defeat the following day. He
remained sequestered in an opulent villa in Belgrade until his arrest in April 2001. He was extradited to The Hague that June.
The death of Milosevic
HA-11-3-06, so soon after the death of Milan Babic HA-5-3-06, indicates that
there is an organized plot to murder the defendants of the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Judge Patrick Robinsons’ HA-11-6-05, who
was recommended to serve on the US Supreme Court whereas misinformation of
their news service falsely represented him as being from the US although he is
now reported to be from Jamaica. Judge Meron is from the USA. Denial of medical treatment inclines one to
believe that the tribunal poisoned him.
The Tribunal, like so many other prisons, is too corrupted by slavery to
entertain the counsel for defense and instead conspires to commit crimes with
the “enemies” of the friends of freedom and civil justice. They are most likely involved in the US
President’s small military operations units for embassies that have been
installed since 2004 and recently reported by the New York Times and in
Afghanistan & Iraq v. USA HA-2-11-04. The International Criminal Tribunal was
misconceived from the opening of its prison and needs to be shut down
immediately. The judges, jailers and
prosecutors are not very believable, must be punished, all their civil
litigants settled and the prisoners should all be released to supervised parole
and work programs in the countries of their choice by the Human Rights
Commission.
It is recommended to continue the transfer of presidential
judgeship of the Tribunal to a Serbian & Montenegrin Judge with the Mandate
to remove the “Criminal” from the International Tribunal from the Former Yugoslavia.
Sanders, Tony J. Hospitals
& Asylums. International
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. HA-25-12-04. www.title24uscode.org/Yugoslavia.doc