Template for World "Justice"
New American
October 13, 1997,
Vol. 13, No. 21
By William Norman Grigg
For fair use only
Published under the provision of
U.S. Code, Title 17, section 107.
To appreciate
the potential danger of a permanent United Nations International Criminal
Court, the following experiment would be useful: Imagine that you are a
retired mayor living in a small town a short distance from your former
jurisdiction. One evening, two strangers pay a visit to invite you back
to your old hometown to help iron out some of its civic affairs. You are
initially somewhat reluctant, as there are parties in that city who may
seek to harm you. However, amid assurances from the strangers that they
will provide for your safety, you accept the invitation. Once you leave
your home, however, you are seized by foreign troops and informed that
UN authorities have placed your name on a "sealed indictment."
Your captors bundle you onto an airplane which conveys you to a UN holding
facility in a foreign country, where you are to stand trial for "crimes
against humanity."
You will not enjoy any of the procedural
rights or immunities provided for in the Bill of Rights. There will be
no trial by jury, the right to confront your accusers will be refused,
no bail will be set, and the court will not be guided by a presumption
of evidence. The prosecutors and judges will work in tandem under the same
mandate, seeking the same results: the creation of historically binding
precedents in "world law," not the vindication of individual
justice. Both the judges and prosecutors will be accountable to no one.
The verdict will be handed down from a three-judge panel that may include
jurists from Cuba, Bulgaria, Russia, or Red China, and the same court that
renders a verdict will hear your appeal.
Your defense attorney - who will be provided
by the court and given a tiny fraction of the budget used by the prosecution
to create its case against you - will have no opportunity to interview
the prosecution witnesses prior to the trial, and will not have access
to unedited transcripts of the pre-trial testimony. Accordingly, he will
not be able to establish whether a witness has altered or embellished his
testimony. Not that this will matter in the long run, as the court will
accept as "evidence" hearsay, double hearsay, and self-contradictory
and speculative statements from witnesses.
During your trial, you will be surrounded
by a phalanx of heavily armed security troops and treated
as if your guilt had already been established. Your trial may be
simulcast on global television as an illustration of "world law"
in action. You will be kept physically separated from your counsel, supposedly
for "security" reasons, thus reinforcing the presumption of your
depravity. You may even be called upon to provide evidence against yourself
- and if you refuse to make a statement in the courtroom, this may be regarded
as evidence against you. As the proceedings unfold, it will become clear
that the UN Tribunal wasn't established to acquit those who stand before
it. It was created to punish those thus arraigned.
This
Kafkaesque nightmare is not hypothetical. Every element of
the scenario has been realized by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia, which is intended to be a model for a permanent
International Criminal Court (ICC).
World Law in Action
"Not many eyebrows will be raised at
the revelation that there is a prison, in a small foreign country, where
you can be indefinitely incarcerated
without trial, or where you can be delivered on the orders of an ad-hoc
Court which sets its own rules as it goes along, and sometimes
issues warrants only after politically motivated arrests had been performed,"
observes Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, executive director of the Lord Byron Foundation.
"Some may be surprised, however, that this "faraway country"
is not North Korea, Bourkina Fasso, or Syria, but the civilized little
Holland. The prison is in the North Sea resort of Scheveningen.... The
court in question is ten miles away, in The Hague...."
Dr. Trifkovic, a former commentator for
Radio Free Europe, lived under the communist tyranny of Tito and is thus
well-acquainted with the modalities of communist "justice." His
study of UN "world law" in action has led him to conclude that
the Hague Tribunal is "the New World Order's posthumous tribute to
Felix Dzherzhinsky," founder of the Soviet KGB.
Nikola Kostich, a defense attorney from
Milwaukee, is well-acquainted with the Tribunal's peculiar version of "justice."
Kostich is a first-generation American who was born in Yugoslavia during
World War II. His father fought the Nazis under the heroic leadership of
General
Drazha Mihailovich, a stalwart anti-communist who was betrayed by his
supposed allies in the American government and executed by Tito's communists.
Kostich is volubly proud of his Serbian roots and has served as a legal
adviser to the government of the Republika Srpska (the Serbian portion
of the UN-created "nation" of Bosnia-Herzegovina). However, he
readily admits that "all sides did horrible things in that war"
and accurately describes Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic as "an
unreconstructed communist." Kostich is intimately familiar with the
workings of the UN's war crimes tribunal, having represented Bosnian Serb
prison camp guard Dusko Tadic during his recent trial in The Hague. He
has also provided legal counsel to several other Bosnian Serbs who have
been indicted by the UN for "crimes against humanity."
Defense Challenge
Kostich explained to The New American that,
as a defense attorney, "my immediate responsibility is to provide
the best possible defense for my client. However, my ethical responsibility
is to contribute to a process whereby justice is achieved. But the UN tribunal
is pursuing a different objective; it is dedicated to the creation of precedents
in international law, and in pursuing those precedents it is literally
making up the law as it goes along. This provides a defense attorney with
an interesting challenge, to say the least."
One reason why the "law" applied
by the Tribunal is so protean, Kostich elaborates, is that "at any
given time, most of the 11 judges who either hear trials or appeals will
be representatives of countries outside the Common Law tradition. Some
of them come from communist or Islamic nations in which the systems are
much more prosecution-oriented, and look upon a "trial" as an
exercise in fixing penalties, rather than weighing the facts to reach a
verdict."
The rules of evidence followed by the Tribunal
are vastly different than those recognized in American courts. Explains
Kostich: "Indictments have been
filed on the basis of hearsay - that is, a witness testifying as to what
another party was supposedly told - and even double hearsay, in which an
investigator offers hearsay testimony regarding witness' hearsay account.
Evidence like this was admitted against Tadic, for instance, since the
court ruled that it was "probative" - whatever that means."
Kostich notes that the Hague Tribunal does
not provide an opportunity for the accused to confront his accuser: "Accusatory
testimony is offered via closed-circuit television, and the witnesses remain
anonymous. This not only denies the accused a basic right protected in
our system, but also denies the victim an opportunity to confront his assailant.
These confrontations are not only cathartic for the victim, but also carry
a lot of weight in a jury's eyes. It is much more credible when a witness
offers testimony in the presence of the accused, particularly when he can
look the accused in the eye, point his finger, and say, "he did this."
But in the UN court, witnesses are kept anonymous and isolated from the
courtroom, and given extraordinary leeway in terms of the consistency of
the testimony they offer."
Accountability Question
"The fact that there is no jury in
that system also stacks the deck against the accused," Kostich continues.
"The judges who hear the evidence also interrogate witnesses and offer
summations before reaching a verdict, which suggests a blending of their
role with that of the prosecutor. A jury composed of the peers of the accused
would not only separate those roles, but would provide a natural check
in the form of identification with the accused. This would lead a jury
to examine the evidence more critically and deliver a verdict that hopefully
reflects the preponderance of evidence. Our American jury system assumes
that a panel of one's peers is endowed with sufficient common sense and
critical intelligence to make a sound determination based on the facts.
The UN system apparently assumes that unaccountable appointed judges can
fill that role - although I have no idea what pool those supposedly impartial
judges can be drawn from."
It is the UN Tribunal's lack
of accountability that most deeply offends Kostich's sense
of justice. "If a district attorney or a federal prosecutor is guilty
of malfeasance, there are people above him who will hold him accountable,"
he observed to The New American. "The same is true for the other officers
of the court who might be corrupt, incompetent, or abusive. But the Hague
Tribunal, its prosecutors, and its officers are all completely unaccountable.
They define their own rules of procedure, their own rules of evidence,
and their own jurisdiction. The law
they apply is newly minted by them in their courtrooms. And they have no
difficulty employing criminal means
in the pursuit of what they define as the global good. After all, who's
going to stop them?"
Case Study
Kostich and other observers of the Hague
Tribunal contend that the case of Slavko Dokmanovic, former mayor of the
city of Vukovar in Eastern Slavonia, illustrates the Tribunal's willingness
to employ criminal means to carry out its self-appointed mandate. Eastern
Slavonia, a hotly contested corridor between Serbia and Croatia, is to
be turned over to the Croats in January 1998. Vukovar was nearly destroyed
in vicious fighting in the early stages of the war in 1991, and is presently
being "reconstructed" under a UN protectorate - although Kostich,
who has spent a great deal of time in the region, insists that the UN "peacekeepers"
assigned to it have "done nothing to rebuild that city. They're too
busy running every imaginable variety of racket."
Until June, Dokmanovic was residing in western
Serbia, although he occasionally visited Vukovar. He was aware that Croat
officials had included his name on a list of "war criminals"
but insisted that this was simply a politically motivated fabrication.
Last June, the former mayor received a visit from two men claiming to be
representatives of the UN transitional administration for Slavonia (UNTAES).
They invited Dokmanovic to return to Vukovar in order to assist in the
transition to Croatian control. "Dokmanovic initially balked, as the
Croats had made no secret of their intention to seize him and drag him
before a court in Zagreb," Kostich recalled to The New American. "But
he wanted to help the remaining Serb population work out their property
claims and other affairs. Eventually he agreed to go, after the supposed
UNTAES representatives assured him of safe passage to and from Vukovar."
In the company of a friend, Dokmanovic met
the UN representatives on June 27th in Bogojevo, a town on the Serbian
side of the Danube river. "The officials met him there in two vehicles,
both of which were black vans," Kostich narrates. "He and his
friend got into the first van and started across the bridge over the Danube.
About half-way across, the vans stopped suddenly, and 20 armed commandos
wearing ski masks jumped out of the trailing vehicle and seized Dokmanovic."
The two men posing as UNTAES representatives informed Dokmanovic that they
were actually investigators hired by the Hague Tribunal, and that the court
had issued a "sealed indictment" against him for war crimes.
"Dokmanovic knew that the Croats had
listed him as a "war criminal," but had never been informed that
the UN had placed him on what was essentially a secret list," Kostich
points out. "He was acting in good faith to cooperate with UN authorities
in the transition to Croat control (of Vukovar), which suggests that he
wasn't a fugitive from international "justice." The
UN authorities acted with premeditated dishonesty to use
Dokmanovic's good faith against him." The commandos who apprehended
Dokmanovic were provided by the NATO Stabilization Force (SFOR). They reportedly
included members of Britain's SAS and U.S. Navy SEALS in a support capacity.
Atrocity in Vukovar
According to press accounts, Dokmanovic
is under indictment for participating in a
massacre of 261 civilians in Vukovar Hospital in 1991. Bosnian Serb
authorities maintain that the former mayor was not even present in the
city when it fell to a combined assault by elements of the Yugoslav National
Army (JNA) and Serb partisans. The battle for Vukovar was vicious. Serbian
reports allege that as the JNA advanced, Croat soldiers directed their
rage at Serbian civilians. The indictment against Dokmanovic and three
other defendants (all of whom, unlike Dokmanovic, were officers of the
JNA) records that "in the last days of the siege, several hundred
people sought refuge at Vukovar Hospital - in the belief that it would
be evacuated in the presence of neutral international observers.... In
addition to the sick and wounded, civilians, families of hospital staff,
and (Croat) soldiers who had been defending the city, some posing as patients
or hospital staff, gathered on the hospital grounds."
When JNA units arrived at the hospital on
November 19, 1991, they captured about 400 men. The soldiers loaded 300
onto buses and let the remainder go free. Several dozen more were identified
as hospital staff and released after spending approximately two hours inside
the buses. The rest were driven to a site four kilometers outside of the
city, divided into groups of ten or twenty, and systematically shot, then
buried in a mass grave.
By any measure, this was an atrocity and
a war crime. What role did Dokmanovic play in it? The indictment, which
was authored by Richard Goldstone, the Tribunal's South African prosecutor,
simply maintains that Dokmanovic "at all material times - aided and
abetted or otherwise participated in these events." Specific allegations
are lodged against his co-defendants, all of whom allegedly had hands-on
participation in the selection and execution of the victims. However, the
document simply describes Dokmanovic's role as that of "President
of the Vukovar Municipality" - meaning, apparently, that his elected
position made him "criminally responsible" for "beatings
- killings - grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, violations
of the laws or customs of war (and) crimes against humanity."
"I'm the first to acknowledge that
the JNA's actions in Vukovar were appalling," Kostich states. "I've
been there, and that city was almost entirely destroyed. Nobody in that
fight came out with clean hands. But Dokmanovic has never been materially
connected to any of those crimes. The indictment does not list an action
he took, a specific omission for which he is liable, or even put him in
a specific place where he could either materially assist in the crimes
or by conscious omission be party to them. It simply envelops him in a
vague liability for those actions, apparently on
the basis of his political
position."
It is useful to contemplate the potential
precedent Dokmanovic's indictment sets for political
leaders who somehow provoke the disfavor of the United Nations.
Might a UN criminal court some day arraign U.S. municipal authorities and
hold them responsible for "human rights violations" allegedly
committed by policemen? Could the same principle apply to other elected
officials as well?
Muzzling the Media
Another ominous precedent being set in Bosnia
involves the use of UN-authorized military
personnel to censor media outlets that publicize anti-UN
news and opinions. This development is an outgrowth of the UN Tribunal's
indictment of former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and military
leader Ratko Mladic, and the escalation of SFOR's efforts to isolate them
in anticipation of arresting them.
In late August, U.S. troops in the northern
Bosnian town of Brcko were pelted with rocks and bottles during a heated
confrontation with enraged Bosnian Serbs. NATO and UN authorities maintained
that the mob had been incited by televised reports in which images of WWII-era
German tanks were "morphed" into images of SFOR tanks from the
ongoing occupation. This message was readily understood by Bosnian Serbs,
many of whom have deep ancestral memories of the atrocities inflicted upon
the Serbs by the Nazis, their Croatian
Ustashi minions, and their Muslim
allies during WWII. Media officials loyal to current Bosnian Serb President
Biljana Plavsic reacted to the transmission by cutting off media access
to studios run by Serbs loyal to Karadzic and his top aide, Momcilo Krajisnik.
The UN-authorized occupation force, having
felt the sting of the Nazi parallel, promptly vindicated it. On August
29th, according to the Los Angeles Times, NATO's commander in Bosnia, U.S.
Army General Eric Shinseki, and German diplomat Gerd Wagner warned Krajisnik
that "the Serbian Radio Television network (SRT) was being given its
last chance to tone down its rhetoric or it
(would) be subjected to permanent censorship by an imposed outside monitor...."
Among the "inflammatory" messages
deemed unacceptable by the occupation force was the charge that the UN
and NATO had "overstepped its mandate" in Bosnia by overtly supporting
Plavsic. "We are basically telling them that the SRT's days are numbered,"
a UN media official told the Times. An August 30th Associated Press report
was more explicit, noting that the options being considered by UN/NATO
occupation troops "include blowing up transmitters, removing broadcasting
equipment and jamming broadcasts...."
Javier Solana, the Spanish Marxist who serves
as NATO's secretary- general, warned that NATO troops "will not hesitate
to take necessary measures, including the use of force, against media networks
or programs inciting attacks." Three hundred American troops were
sent to make good on Solana's threat by occupying a television tower near
Tuzla, which had been held by Karadzic's supporters. According to the September
4th New York Times, "The Americans withdrew when Serbian hard-liners
agreed to moderate their propaganda war against the Bosnian peace agreement."
Robert Gelbard, the Clinton Administration's special envoy to Bosnia, insisted
that the uprising in Brcko was typical of "a totalitarian dictatorship
losing control." While it is entirely reasonable to describe the late
Karadzic regime in those terms, reasonable people might also point out
that the actions of the UN/NATO occupation
force are typical of a totalitarian dictatorship taking control.
Although the crackdown on dissent was not directly mandated by the Hague
Tribunal, the seizure of opposition media outlets in Bosnia follows a precedent
set in Somalia, in which UN troops seeking to serve a warrant on "warlord"
Mohamed Farah Aidid seized Radio Mogadishu, which had been used by Aidid's
supporters to broadcast views deemed unsuitable by UN authorities. (See
"Behind Our Defeat in Somalia," in the September 5, 1994 issue
of The New American.)
Speaking at a Pentagon briefing on September
3rd, NATO Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark made it clear that
NATO will continue its escalation until Karadzic is delivered to the UN
Tribunal. "I call on him to submit himself voluntarily to justice,"
Clark declared on September 3rd. "He should be turned in. He should
report to The Hague.... (H)e is free in violation of the Dayton agreement.
He should have been turned in long ago by the signatories of that agreement
to face international justice." Clark noted that Karadzic is usually
surrounded by armed bodyguards, and did not rule out the possibility that
a commando raid might be undertaken to seize the former Bosnian Serb leader.
"An Element of
Compulsion"
Officers and partisans of the Hague Tribunal
cite the case of Karadzic as an illustration of the supposed necessity
for a standing court with the means of compelling individuals to submit
to its jurisdiction, and preparations are underway for the creation of
a standing International Criminal Court (ICC). Speaking at an August 11th
session of the ICC's Preparatory Committee, Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald
of the Hague Tribunal insisted that the ICC must be able to employ "an
element of compulsion" in order "to redress gross violations
of human rights and international law...." She also insisted that
the ICC's authorizing statute "should be one of principle and not
of detail.... (It should) be a flexible
statute based on principles which may be developed by the Court as the
circumstances require while still providing sufficient guidance
to establish an international framework within which the Court can work."
In other words, the ICC - according to an
American judge presently serving on the UN's court in The Hague - should
be granted universal jurisdiction, the means to compel submission to its
indictments, subpoenas and judgments, and unlimited
authority to write "international law" at whim.
"Whatever you think of the Bosnian
Serbs, the precedents being set at The Hague are incredibly dangerous in
terms of our national sovereignty," declares Nikola Kostich. "I'm
an ethnic Serb by birth; I treasure that heritage and I admit that it plays
a role in my view of events. But more importantly, I'm American by choice
- a naturalized U.S. citizen - and I'm passionately committed to our Constitution,
our Bill of Rights, and our national sovereignty. Americans have to understand
that the movement toward a permanent UN criminal court is a deadly threat
to all of the above, and if the people promoting it aren't stopped, the
precedents being set and the methods being used by the Hague Tribunal are
going to be used to destroy our own liberties."
Selective "Justice"
Turns Blind Eye to Croatian Atrocities
The preferred refrain of partisans of the
UN's war crimes tribunal in The Hague is that "there can be no lasting
peace without justice." However, the Tribunal's equanimity regarding
a large-scale Croat atrocity in southwestern Bosnia illustrates that both
"justice" and "peace" can be sacrificed in the name
of political expediency when pursuing them might expose the covert machinations
of the very political elite that created the Dayton agreement.
"In
March 1996 I took a Bosnian Serb prosecutor and a camera crew from Court
TV to the site of a mass grave containing the bodies of at least 185 Serb
civilians," Nick Kostich recalled to The New American.
The site of that atrocity was Mrkonjic Grad, a small town in southwestern
Bosnia near Croatia's Krajina region. "I was present when the site
was exhumed," Kostich continues. "The
bodies were not those of military personnel. They were civilians, including
people as much as 80 years old." However, the gruesome
discovery had little impact in the media: "There are videotapes of
the exhumation of that site, and the New York Times published one photograph
of the site with a caption identifying it as the scene of an atrocity,
but there was no story to accompany the photo." Furthermore, the
discovery "has led to no indictments yet, despite the
fact that an investigator from the UN Tribunal's office of the prosecutor
has visited the site."
One
reason for the apparent indifference to the atrocity in Mrkonjic Grad is
the fact that the Croatian army unit implicated in it may have been trained
and equipped by Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), a
"private" military and intelligence consulting firm based in
Virginia. MPRI literature describes the firm as "a professional
services company engaged primarily in military-related contracting in the
U.S. and international defense markets." MPRI's roster of founders,
executives, and directors includes 14 retired U.S. generals, three of whom
- Richard D. Lawrence, Jack Merritt, and Carl Vuono - are members of the
Council on Foreign Relations, the focal point of America's foreign policy
elite.
MPRI information officer Joseph Allred,
a professor at Brigham Young University, explains that through his firm
"the U.S. can have influence as part of its national strategy on other
nations without employing its own army." In accordance with the Clinton
Administration's Balkan strategy - which reduced the complex and tragic
Bosnian civil war into a war of "Serbian aggression" - MPRI was
hired by the Croatian regime of "ex"-communist President Franjo
Tudjman in 1995 to refine his Soviet- created Ministry of Defense into
a modern fighting force.
The February 18th Boston Globe reported
that several months after MPRI signed its contract with Tudjman's regime,
"the Croatian army mounted a summer offensive into the Serb-controlled
region of Krajina,
forcing more than 150,000 Croatian Serbs from their homeland."
Villages were sacked and burned, civilians
were slaughtered, and women were raped. Estimates of total casualties in
the four-day blitzkrieg in August 1995 run as high as 15,000 on the Serbian
side, compared with a mere 118 Croat casualties (according to Croatian
sources) - a disproportion suggesting a slaughter of civilians rather than
a military engagement.
In short, the Croat assault presented all
of the horrors associated with "ethnic cleansing." The four-day
assault, as investigative journalist Ken Silverstein observes, was conducted
by an army that a few months earlier had been regarded as "bumbling
and inept." Although British and French observers on the scene accused
MPRI of planning and directing the assault on Krajina, the firm's spokesmen
insisted that MPRI's role had been limited to instilling "democratic
values" in the "ex"-communist army. Some qualified observers
have greeted that account skeptically.
"No country moves from having a ragtag
militia to carrying out a professional military offensive without some
help," observes Roger Charles, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel
who monitored MPRI's activities in Croatia. "The Croats did a good
job of coordinating armor, artillery, and infantry. That's not something
you learn while being instructed about democratic values." The Croatian
army's "democratic" handiwork in Mrkonjic Grad suggests that
respect for the canons of civilized combat was not part of the MPRI training
curriculum.
Was
the mass grave at Mrkonjic Grad a sample of MPRI's handiwork? If so, the
same political elite responsible for creating the "framework for peace"
in the Balkans is creating the conditions for another round of genocidal
violence. The July 15, 1996 Financial Times of London reported
that a delegation of retired generals representing MPRI had arrived in
Bosnia "to start a programme of instruction for the Bosnian Army,
part of an effort by Washington and several Moslem states to counterbalance
Serb military strength." MPRI's renewable 13-month, $140 million contract
in Bosnia is underwritten by a consortium of Islamic states from Asia and
the Persian Gulf. Coupled with the $100 million worth of weapons pledged
to Bosnia by the Clinton Administration (including tanks and artillery),
the MPRI- trained Bosnian army will have the capacity to sow numerous new
killing fields in the Balkans.
End quote
NOTE: An excerpt from the
above article can be found at New American's web site at
this link.
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