The Getz Files

Death at The Hague

Kafka could have written the book, Orwell the screen adaptation, such is
the extraordinary, even absurdist, lengths to which Western
propagandists have gone to invert the reality.

But, in fact, the fanciful vilification of one man, Slobobdan Milosevic,
the completely fabricated demonization of an entire nation, Serbia, and
the impudent revisionist history concocted for an epoch defining
conflict, Yugoslavia, was scripted by neither of these two masters of
social and political satire. It was, instead, penned by an altogether
more sinister hand - 'victor's justice'.

A Kangaroo Tribunal

The controversial death (controversial by virtue of the fact that, by
all accounts, it was entirely preventable) on March 11 of Milosevic in
his prison cell at Sheveningen (near The Hague) capped one of the most
sordid episodes in recent Western imperial history. That the trial
itself was nothing but a show trial, a kangaroo court, there can be no
doubt.

Thus, not only was the tribunal largely funded by American corporations
and the American government in direct violation of its Charter, but it
was entirely staffed through their approval. Nor was it ever ratified by
the UN General Assembly. But then the 78 day bombardment of Yugoslavia
by NATO was, itself, completely illegal under international law having
never been validated by the United Nations Security Council or General
Assembly (a fact conveniently and unfailingly forgotten by official
pundits).

Indeed, there was no comparable tribunal to try the NATO leaders for
this brutal, gratuitous and unlawful attack on a sovereign nation (the
first unprovoked assault on a European nation since the Second World War).

In addition, the protocol of the court itself was/is patently
scandalous, openly defying centuries of normative Western jurisprudence
(hearsay evidence is allowed, witnesses can testify anonymously; there
is no jury, etc).

Moreover, in three years of testimony not a single piece of evidence
linking Milosevic to his alleged crimes was ever produced (his premature
death thus proving something of Godsend to prosecutors). Indeed, despite
having the most meagre of resources at his disposal, Milosevic early on
turned the tables on his accusers by demolishing their witnesses one
after the other. Such was his success that the proceedings quickly began
to resonate less with "echoes of the Nuremberg trials" than with
rumblings of the Stalin show trials. Expecting a staid morality play of
"the Butcher of Belgrade" vs. the Good Guys, journalists at the trial
were, instead, treated to a rousing production of David versus Goliath.

But then the charges against Milosevic were always flimsy at best, where
they were not outright fabrications.

A Short History of Violence

Though virtually the entire corpus of the mainstream media has continued
to paint the civil wars in the 1990s as the sole responsibility of the
Serbs, to do so has required an unremitting dedication to wilfully
falsifying the facts of the case.

It has, for instance, entered Western political mythology that Milosevic
was a rabid nationalist who in his famous Kosovo Field Speech of 1989
stoked the fires of Serb national intolerance. This notion is curiously
at odds with the media's initial reception of the speech which called it
a model of multiethnic tolerance and profound appreciation of the
virtues of peaceful co-existence (as is consistent with the fact the
speech was never thereafter actually quoted).

Moreover, it was clear that leaders such as Croatia's Franjo Tudjman, a
Holocaust-denier with an abiding affection for the old WW2 Croatian
regime allied with Hitler (Tudjman, once in power, had streets, that had
been named in honour of WW2 anti-fascist partisans, changed to honour
fascist leaders), and the Muslim nationalist leader Izetbegovic (who in
his youth had collaborated with Hitler) were intent from the get-go both
in breaking up Yugoslavia and in ethnically 'cleansing' their respective
populations. But to do this they needed outside help. Enter the World
Bank and the IMF.

In December 1989 the IMF imposed draconian conditions on Yugoslavia
aimed at destabilizing and destroying its large state-owned businesses.
In the banking system alone over half a million workers were laid off in
one year. Two out of every three state sector jobs were eliminated. The
result, not surprisingly, was chaos, misery, and the inflammation of
long smouldering nationalist sentiments amongst the various ethnic
enclaves. The initial impulse, then, of the eventual civil wars in
Yugoslavia stemmed from this externally imposed, ham-fisted,
neo-colonialist enterprise.

Now, when Milosevic assumed leadership of Yugoslavia in the fall of 1990
he immediately sought to stem this destruction of the country's largely
socialist economy. But in resisting this process of 'globalization'
Milosevic quickly earned the undying enmity of the great Western powers.
Imperial logic dictated that he would have to go.

It was at this point that the US and Germany began infiltrating
advisors, weapons and money into the hands of secessionist groups
throughout Yugoslavia. The infiltration was, at first, carried out by
ostensibly private mercenary outfits like Military Professional
Resources Inc. (MPRI), a 'business' with close ties to the Pentagon and
staffed by former high ranking US military and intelligence officers. In
collusion with Slovenian, Croat, Muslim and Albanian leaders MPRI began
to foment the various conflicts that would be uniformly thereafter
blamed on Milosevic, but who, by any objective standards, was alone in
attempting to quell the growing, and by now largely artificially
stimulated, ethnic tensions.

Later outfits included the likes of several thousand Mujahadeen fighters
(with cameo appearances by Osama bin Laden) who had graduated from
CIA-funded training in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and who then found
gainful employment in the service of their old masters in a new and
exciting frontier.

When the inevitable wars of secession finally did occur and when, as in
any civil war, excesses and atrocities were committed on all sides, only
the Serbs' crimes were focused on in lavish, endlessly provocative
detail (this due in part to the US public relations firm Ruder Finn,
colleagues of the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, they of the infamous Kuwaiti
'incubator' lie used as pretext for the 1991 Gulf War). In fact, the
disinformation campaign was worse than this. Many of the larger crimes
attributed to the Serbs were either brazenly decontextualized, grossly
exaggerated or completely fabricated. A few examples are worthy of
exploration.

Welcome to The Trueman Show....

One of the "crimes" (in fact the 'crime') used as a pretext for the NATO
attack on March 24, 1999, was a sensationalized account of a massacre of
48 Albanian Kosovars in the village of Racak by Serb armed forces in
mid-January of that year. The problem with the official version of
events was that a bevy of international observers and an Associated
Press TV crew who happened to be on hand witnessed not a massacre but a
firefight between Yugoslav and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerrillas.
Subsequently two Western forensic teams also cast grave doubt on the
'massacre' which looked more and more like a dog-and-pony show staged by
William Walker, (Washington's man in Kosovo) and the KLA. But NATO and
its dutiful press corps simply suppressed the evidence and reported its
own version of events to a now, well-indoctrinated, anti-Serb Western
audience.

Then there was the infamous "death camp" at Trnopolje, Bosnia, reputedly
filmed by an ITN film crew in 1992. It was later revealed that the crew
had filmed immigrants while stationing themselves behind a chicken and
barbed wire enclosure, i.e. a complete fabrication.

Another egregious piece of propaganda concerns the so-called "ethnic
genocide" in Kosovo in the two years prior to NATO intervention. For
despite the wildly extravagant claims bandied about in the press prior
to the NATO attack (often ranging past a hundred thousand and,
occasionally up to half a million) follow-up investigation by a number
of international forensic teams (including one from the RCMP) yielded
approximately 3000 bodies. And of these, the majority were combatants,
not civilians, and included Serb as well as KLA forces.

In other words, a "genocide" had been fabricated entirely out of thin
air, was later proven to be so, and this fact was then blithely
dismissed as somehow irrelevant to Western political and cultural values.

Irrelevant perhaps, but certainly revealing.

Then there was the ludicrous charge that Milosevic had ethnically
cleansed up to 800,000 Albanian Kosovars during the 78-day NATO
bombardment. In truth, it was the bombardment itself in conjunction with
some timely cattle prodding by the KLA (to provide a continued pretext
for NATO intervention) that led to the mass exodus.

What is worse is that, following the NATO attack, the KLA (long known to
the American Drug Enforcement Agency as virtually coincident with the
Albanian mafia - itself responsible for a sizeable proportion of the
heroin trade in the Western Hemisphere) did, in actual fact, later
ethnically cleanse over 300,000 Serbs, Romas, Jews and others from
Kosovo (and killed several thousand more). And this occurred under NATO
stewardship. Indeed, the almost total ethnic cleansing of up to 2
million Serbs by Croat, Bosnian and KLA forces from their respective
territories remains to this day one of the most blatantly suppressed
facts of the entire Yugoslav conflict.

This latter example points up the utter hypocrisy of the doctrine of
'command responsibility' under which Milosevic was being tried. For if
this doctrine was applied across the board, there is not a leader in
NATO who wouldn't (just for the aftermath of Kosovo alone, let alone
previous or more recent crimes) find him or herself in the dock.

Finally, it's worth delving into what is probably the greatest triumph
of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars; the so-called 'Srebrenica
massacre'.

Of the vast repertoire of lies that have been woven into the rotted
fabric of the official history of modern Yugoslavia (including - in
addition to those already mentioned - the Serb refusal to negotiate at
Rambouillet, the 250,000 Bosnian dead, the Markdale massacre, and the
notion of 'Greater Serbia' as the driving impulse behind the Balkan
wars) probably the most resonant, and so the most damaging, is that of
the Srebrenica massacre. For it is 'Srebrenica' that, above all the
others, came to symbolize the bottomless depredation, the utter evil of
the Serbs, in stark and woeful contrast to the limitless victimhood of
their opponents.

The truth of the matter is somewhat more sobering. Thus, of the original
estimate of 8,000 killed (which included 5,000 "missing"), several
thousand were later known to have reached Bosnian Muslim lines. Many
more were later shown to have perished in combat. Despite these well
documented facts, and despite the fact that satellite photos and later
forensic investigation failed to turn up any actual evidence of a
massacre [2,000 bodies were later disinterred in the area but, as in the
case of Kosovo, most (though not all) of these were found to be
combatants, including the bodies of Serb forces] the '8,000' (civilian)
figure continues to live on in Western mythology completely immune from
critical analysis.

Also immune from critical analysis was the political and military
context surrounding Srebrenica. That is, the almost total 'failure' to
publicize how the Bosnian Muslims were using the previously designated
'safe haven' of Srebrenica to launch murderous raids on local Bosnian
Serb villages; or how the 'massacre' was yet another in a long line of
strategically timed revelations/fabrications designed to surmount
political barriers to increased NATO intervention; or how it was used as
propaganda cover for the immediately preceding ethnic cleansing of
Western Bosnia by Croatian authorities, and for the immediately
succeeding and brutal 'cleansing' of the Krajina Serb population (over
150,000 forced out with more civilian deaths than ever documented at
Srebrenica) again by Croatian forces, and with US approval and
logistical support.

Witness for the Prosecution

Following the NATO attack and the subsequent reduction of Yugoslavia to
a splintered string of NATO protectorates dominated by intolerance,
militarism, graft, unemployment, prostitution and rampant privatization
(and the construction, to boot, of the largest NATO military base in
Eastern Europe - Camp Bondsteel), there quickly arose the need to
maintain the fictions employed in the decade long propaganda war. To
this end was Milosevic illegally (i.e. in defiance of the Serb
Constitution) kidnapped and brought to The Hague for prosecution for
‘war crimes’.

Unfortunately for the prosecution, its evidence, consisting of little
more than the war propaganda churned out at a time when the principle
concern of the Allies was not to contrive an airtight criminal case, but
rather simply to win Western public acquiescence for a naked assault on
Serbia, failed conspicuously to stand up under cross-examination.

Indeed, symbolic of the prosecution’s failure was the case of their star
witness, Radomir Markovic, the former head of Serbian secret police.
Called to the stand to tell the dirty on Milosevic, he not only
completely turned the tables (by relating how Milosevic had, time and
again, attempted to quell ethnic tensions, and reign in, discipline and
even prosecute Serbian army excesses), but, and oh by the way, how he
(Markovic) had first been tortured, then bribed by the prosecution to
lie about Milosevic’s ’crimes’!

Judge Richard May immediately attempted to muzzle Markovic. He needn’t
have bothered for the Western press subsequently did the job for him,
almost uniformly failing to report Markovic’s testimony. They also
failed to report many other accounts including the testimony of Dr Cees
Wiebes, a professor at Amsterdam University, whose 7,000 page report on
Srebrenica concluded that, whatever did happen there, it is clear that
Milosevic had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Now, of course, none of this - not the historical record of US and
German intrigue, the questions, the testimony, the pattern of undeniable
and egregious propaganda - none of it has made the slightest dent in the
massive outpouring of mainstream invective directed towards Milosevic
following his death on March 11. Which just goes to point up that,
however justified you may feel in concluding we have apparently,
mercifully, escaped the fate of Orwell’s “1984”, you are wrong.

Antony C. Black