Who killed Slobodan Milosevic?

Dutch toxicologists—aren’t you sick of them? Following the death of Slobodan Milosevic in custody at The Hague, Professor Dr Donald Uges, a forensic toxicologist at the University Hospital in Groningen, was reported as having performed tests on the late president’s blood. This followed allegations, made by Milosevic himself before his death and by his son, Marko, after it, that he was being poisoned: Marko Milosevic said on 13th March in The Hague that his father had been murdered. Dr Uges said that he had discovered traces on an antibiotic, rifampicin, in Mr. Milosevic’s blood and that the effect of this drug would have been to neutralise the effects of other medication to reduce his blood pressure. Uges said that Milosevic was himself taking the rifampicin in order to worsen his own health condition so that he would be let out of The Hague to visit a heart clinic in Moscow, thereby implying either that he had deliberately committed suicide or that he was at least responsible for his own death.

But how is it possible to tell from traces in someone’s blood where the antibiotic came from? Shortly before his death, Milosevic claimed in a letter to the Russian foreign ministry that he was being given the wrong medicines and that The Hague authorities were therefore trying to poison him. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, indicated that he partly believed the former Yugoslav president: he said that Russia did not trust The Hague’s assurances to the contrary, and he dispatched a team of Russian doctors to accompany Marko Milosevic to The Hague to examine the body. But it was too late, at least from a propagandistic point of view: Uges’ intervention was sufficient to allow the theory to circulate for a day or so in the media that Milosevic had indeed deliberately tried to ‘escape justice’.

It seems to me that a responsible toxicologist would never have said how the rifampicin got into Mr. Milosevic’s blood. Uges was not Milosevic’s doctor and, as far as I know, had never examined him before. His intervention therefore resembles that of another Dutch toxicologist, Bram Brouwer, in the controversy surrounding the alleged poisoning of the then Ukrainian presidential candidate (now president), Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. As I reported at the time, the whole poisoning allegation was nonsense. Bram Brouwer had contacted Yushchenko in Kiev after seeing his disfigured face on television: a blood sample was sent to him in the Netherlands and he found dioxin in it. He was the therefore the source for the diagnosis of deliberate poisoning, an incendiary allegation which (forgive the pun) immediately made its way into the bloodstream of public opinion, from whence it has never since been dislodged even though there have never been any prosecutions of anyone for Yushchenko’s supposed poisoning. But when I telephoned Brouwer himself, he admitted that in fact he could not possibly know how the dioxin had got into Yushchenko’s body; that it is impossible to kill a human being with dioxin anyway, since it is not a fatal poison; and that the only precedent for the levels of dioxin found in Yushchenko’s blood was a case of two Austrian women in 1998 who had contracted dioxin poisoning from an industrial accident, i.e. not as the result of malicious intent.

We live in an age in which ‘experts’ are assumed to respect the highest standards of professional conduct. Unfortunately many of them do not. Many abuse their expertise in some areas in order to stray into other disciplines of which they are ignorant or in which they are not specialists. Dr Brouwer is a case in point: he is an environmental toxicologist, i.e. a food inspector, not a forensic toxicologist and certainly not an adept of Ukrainian politics. Another case in point was the late Dr. Barend Cohen, also a Dutch toxicologist, who became very heavily involved with the Albanian cause in Kosovo. Before his death last year, Cohen travelled frequently to Kosovo and addressed numerous events with other politically-motivated people on issues like civil society and human rights. Whether he was malicious, I cannot say, but I think he definitely got involved rather too deeply in something he did not understand: his web site on human rights abuses in Kosovo was linked, at one or two removes, to web pages on which hard-core drug enthusiasts wrote about their ‘trips’ after taking various combinations of synthetic narcotics. Readers of this column will not be surprised to know that Cohen and Uges—the man who has just accused Milosevic of worsening his own health—were close colleagues who had known each other for twenty years, for instance speaking together at a conference on forensic medicine and human rights in 2003.

In spite of this intriguing link, it seems unlikely that either Marko Milosevic or Donald Uges are right about the rifampicin. Rifampicin would not have drastically worsened Slobodan Milosevic’s health, and it is highly improbable either that it was used to kill him or that he deliberately tried to worsen his own condition. Instead, these poisoning allegations obscure the far more important and indisputable fact that, on 24th February, the judges at The Hague tribunal refused to let Milosevic visit the heart clinic, even though they had known for years of his fragile and deteriorating health. He died a fortnight later.

The judges had manipulated Milosevic’s medical condition for their own ends before. In 2004, they took the inexcusable decision to impose defence counsel on him, even though the charter of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia states clearly that defendants have the right to defend themselves. Their ruling will doubtless now constitute a precedent for future trials, including perhaps ones conducted in national jurisdictions: people will be henceforth able to be silenced in court and convicted on the basis of a defence conducted by a lawyer they have not appointed and whom they do not trust.

The judges took this decision in spite of the fact that they had previously repeatedly ruled the other way, rejecting the Prosecution’s application for a lawyer to be imposed. From the very beginning of the trial, the Prosecution had realised that Milosevic was a brilliant master of his brief, and that its task would have been made much easier with a malleable and incompetent defence lawyer in his place. But in 2004, the judges rescinded their earlier decisions, supposedly on the basis of medical reports which, they claimed, said that Milosevic was too ill to defend himself but not so ill that he could not stand trial. (Milosevic had repeatedly asked to be let out for health reasons.) When I wrote to The Hague to ask to see the reports in question, my request was refused and I was told they were confidential. It seems impossible that a professional medical report could make the kind of distinction which the judges said it made. But then with Dutch doctors—who knows?

At every stage during the Milosevic trial, and in the other trials over which they preside, the judges at The Hague have disgraced themselves by collaborating with the Prosecution. They have violated numerous precepts of established jurisprudence and international law. They have allowed a trial to continue for years when it should have ended in months. No fewer than seven defendants have died while in their custody (The Hague tribunal is the only court in the world which has its own prison). Their names are: Simo Drljaca, Dragan Gagovic, Djordje Djukic, Slavko Dokmanovic, Milan Kovacevic, Milan Babic (who committed suicide on 6th March 2006) and now Slobodan Milosevic.

In my view, it is the Hague judges who bear clear responsibility for Milosevic’s death, Presiding Judge Patrick Robinson in first place. They had every reason to want him dead. Four years of trial had failed to prove his guilt or anything like it, and if he had survived another few months they would have faced the impossible task of dressing up Nato’s war propaganda from 1999 in the form of a guilty verdict ostensibly based on legal reasoning. This kangaroo court is a threat to very values of the West: its employees should be dismissed for professional misconduct and the court itself should be immediately closed down.

The Holocaust in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1941-1945

by Carl K. Savich

Bosnia-Hercegovina has for over a millennium been a battleground where the world's major religions, civilizations, cultures, and empires have clashed and collided: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the medieval Serbian, Croatian,and Bosnian Empires, the East and the West. Bosnia-Hercegovina was the dividing line between East and West, between Catholicism and the West and Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism and the East. The churches, the cathedrals,the mosques, and the synagogues are the remaining symbols of this battle and conflict between cultures and empires.

World War I began in Bosnia, one of the bloodiest and most horrific wars in the history of mankind, ushering in the twentieth century. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 sprang from the 1875 insurrection in Bosnia-Hercegovina. During World War II, Bosnia-Hercegovina was one of the bloodiest battlefields of the war and of the Holocaust.

The Bosnian Serbs are representatives of the Orthodox Christian Church and of the Byzantine culture and are part of the larger Serbian nation. The Bosnian Croats are representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the Austro-Hungarian culture and are part of the Croatian nation. The Bosnian Muslims are representatives of Sunni Islam and were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and culture. The Bosnian Jews are representatives of Judaism and are mostly descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain following the Inquisition and expulsion of the Jews.

From 1941-1945, Bosnia-Hercegovina was part of the NDH, Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia and was one of the bloodiest arenas of the Holocaust and battlefields of the war. With the assistance of Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the Bosnian Muslim leadership undertook the systematic extermination of the Jewish and non-Muslim, non-Croat population of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Two Waffen SS Divisions and other Nazi and fascist formations were formed to advance the goals of the Third Reich and of Islam. The goal of the Muslims was to achieve autonomy and independence for Bosnia-Hercegovina under Muslim rule. The period 1941-1945 is crucial in understanding and comprehending the Bosnian civil war of 1992-1995.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Haj Amin el Husseini fled to Europe in 1941 following the unsuccessful pro-Nazi coup which he organized in Iraq. He met Joachim von Ribbentrop and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941 in Berlin. Nazi Germany established for der Grossmufti von Jerusalem a Bureau from which he organized the following: 1) radio propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany; 2) espionage and fifth column activities in Muslim regions of Europe and the Middle East; 3) the formation of Muslim Waffen SS and Wehrmacht units in Bosnia, the Balkans, North Africa, and Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union; and, 4) the formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units. As soon as he arrived in Europe,the Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Muslim leaders. He would spend the remainder of the war organizing and rallying Muslims in support of Nazi Germany.

Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el Husseini was born in 1893 in Jerusalem, then the capital of Palestine, which was a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. In 1917, during World War I, the British occupied Palestine and established the Mandate. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced that Britain was committed to establishing a Jewish homeland in formerly Ottoman Palestine, which was known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

Husseini devoted his entire life and career to the destruction of a proposed Jewish homeland and the prevention of Jewish immigration into Palestine. His goal was to create an Arab state of Palestine with the concomitant extermination or marginalization of the Jewish population..."

(Running through the carnage of two world wars is islam, islam, islam...who said 'you don't win wars by laying down your life for your country, you let the other fellow die for his?' Seems islam has perfected the art of setting us against each other so we do the killing for them. Read carefully):

Gavrilo Princip in prison cell in Theresienstadt

Gavrilo Princip (Serbian Cyrillic: Гаврило Принцип) (July 25, 1894 April 28, 1918) was a Bosnian Serb nationalist who killed Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Countess Sophie in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The event, known as the assassination in Sarajevo, prompted the Austrian action against Serbia that led to World War I.

Early Life Born in Obljaj, Bosansko Grahovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Gavrilo Princip's parents, Petar and Marija Nana Mičić, had nine children, five sons and four daughters, six of whom died in infancy. His health was poor. From an early age, he suffered from tuberculosis, which was his eventual cause of death in 1918, and was also one of the reasons he let himself kill Archduke Ferdinand in the first place.

Princip attended primary school in Grahovo where he excelled in his studies, especially in romantic and historic literature. A teacher at the school gave him a collection of Serbian heroic folk poetry. At thirteen, Princip planned on a military career and went to Sarajevo to study at the Military School. After arriving, he instead chose to pursue a business career so he enrolled in the Merchant's School where he studied for three years.

Contrary to common belief, Princip was not a member of the Black Hand, but was a member of the group Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), which he joined in 1911. The Young Bosnia Movement was a group made up of Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims, committed to achieving independence for Bosnia.

I guess you could say this is what happens if you try to fight islam while there's a Clintoon in the Whitehouse? Arafat gets invited to spend the weekend and Milosovic is thrown to the wolves at The Hague and has his lights turned out...

From trial transcripts:

MILOSEVIC: Please bear in mind the following: For three years, the same doctors have considered me fit from the point of view of health to function, and you yourselves have been able to see that. Even Mr. Nice, in support of his motion that I be given as little time as possible, put forward the argument that I have been functioning very efficiently. So for three years the same doctors have considered me fit to function. Then an independent doctor turns up from Belgium, the country which is the seat of the NATO pact, and he says I'm unfit and then the doctors here agree with him.

Allow me to bring into question this kind of deduction of medical evidence. Please consider my motion and let the experts evaluate the situation, but I ask for an expert from Russia, from Serbia, from Greece, and then you can add two of your own, if you like, whom you will appoint, to see what this is about. Things are being mystified here when in fact they are very simple.

I see this as a manipulation aimed at depriving me of my right to speak here and to speak the truth. That is the essence of it all. Mr. Nice says in support of his argument that a lawyer should be imposed on me, counsel should be imposed on me, that I am too involved and am unable to be dispassionate. However, I feel that the other side is too dispassionate when it comes to the truth. I cannot, of course, interfere in how the other side do their job, but they cannot interfere in the way I exercise my rights. That too is a question of principle. Therefore I wish to reiterate: My right to defend myself is something that I will neither accept having diminished nor will I ever waive it. Please bear that in mind. And you can reach your own decisions, but I receive the medicaments given to me by your people, your employees. What is happening here, I don't know, but I can bring the whole floor of the Detention Unit here to testify to what happened when the food I had was exchanged with the food of the person across the passageway, and there was a big to-do about setting things right, although the food apparently was the same. It appeared to be the same. And I did not raise the issue. I don't know what was going on. But please be kind enough to bear in mind that when, for three years, they have been saying one thing and now suddenly they turn around and say something else, I am right in having suspicions. My suspicions may or may not be justified, but they are well grounded--

[Cut off by Judges as Trial Chamber Confers]

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