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Milosevic's poison fears 12/03/2006 - 14:09:34 Slobodan Milosevic wrote a six-page letter the day before he was found dead, claiming that traces of a “heavy drug” had been found in his blood and that he feared being poisoned, a legal aide to the former Yugoslav president said today. Zdenko Tomanovic showed the letter to reporters at the UN tribunal, and complained that the court which had been trying Milosevic rejected the family’s request that a post mortem be conducted outside the Netherlands. Milosevic was “seriously concerned” about being poisoned, Tomanovic said. The letter, dated March 10, was addressed to the...

Milosevic's death marks 'total defeat' for UN tribunal, prosecutor says Last Updated Sun, 12 Mar 2006 11:35:20 EST CBC News Slobodan Milosevic's death is a 'total defeat' for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, says the chief prosecutor at his trial. Carla del Ponte made the comments on Sunday, a day after the former Yugoslav president and Serbian nationalist was found dead in his cell at the UN detention centre in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague. An autopsy was being performed on Sunday amid accusations that Milosevic, 64, had been poisoned only months before the end...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Dutch pathologists performed an autopsy on Slobodan Milosevic's remains Sunday amid claims by the former Yugoslav leader's supporters that he was poisoned and a statement by the chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor raising the possibility he committed suicide. ADVERTISEMENT Milosevic, 64, had been ailing throughout the trial, suffering from high blood pressure and headaches. He asked the tribunal for permission to seek treatment in Russia, but that request was denied. Milosevic was found dead in his cell Saturday morning, abruptly ending his four-year U.N. war crimes trial for orchestrating a decade of conflict that killed 250,000...

The U.N. war crimes tribunal hopes an autopsy on Slobodan Milosevic on Sunday will clear up the cause of his death in his cell only months before a verdict was due in his four-year-old trial. Milosevic, branded the "Butcher of the Balkans" for conflicts that tore Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s, was found dead on Saturday, prompting some world figures and relatives of war victims to say they had been robbed of justice. As questions were raised as to why the trial had dragged on for so long, a tribunal spokeswoman said there was no indication the 64-year-old former Yugoslav...

UN war crimes tribunal denies request for Milosevic autopsy in Moscow www.chinaview.cn 2006-03-12 05:50:15 BRUSSELS, March 11 (Xinhuanet) -- The U.N. war crimes tribunal said on Saturday it had denied a request by Slobodan Milosevic's lawyer to have the autopsy of the former Yugoslavia president conducted in Moscow instead of The Hague.A tribunal official also declined to comment on a claim by Milosevic's lawyer that he had been poisoned while in jail. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague on Saturday announced that Milosevic had been found dead on his bed in his cell at...

Why did the International Penal Court at The Hague keep the story silent? Why were Milosevic’s human rights denied him? The ex-President of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, was found dead in his cell at the IPC complex in Scheveningen, The Hague, early this morning, yet it was Belgrade which broke the news, on B92 Radio, not the IPC authorities. Why the silence? Mr. Milosevic was found lying dead on his bed by a guard at the IPC detention centre, where he was taken after being illegally kidnapped by NATO forces in 2001 and where upon arrival, his prosecutor, Carla del Ponte,...

Milosevic feared he was being poisoned: lawyer March, 11 2005 BELGRADE (Reuters) - Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic feared he was being poisoned in his detention cell in The Hague, his lawyer Zdenko Tomanovic said on Saturday hours after the tribunal announced Milosevic's death. "Today, I have filed an official request to the tribunal to have the autopsy carried out in Moscow, having in mind his claims yesterday that he was being poisoned in the jail," Tomanovic told reporters in The Hague. Acting on a request from Milosevic, Tomanovic said he had made a request for protection for his client...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, the so-called "butcher of the Balkans" being tried for war crimes after orchestrating a decade of bloodshed during his country's breakup, was found dead Saturday in his prison cell. He was 64. Milosevic, who suffered chronic heart ailments and high blood pressure, apparently died of natural causes and was found in his bed, the U.N. tribunal said, without giving an exact time of death. He had been examined following frequent complaints of fatigue or ill health that delayed his trial, but the tribunal could not immediately say when his last medical checkup...

<p>Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who orchestrated the Balkan wars of the 1990s and was on trial for war crimes, was found dead in his prison cell at the U.N. detention center near The Hague, the U.N. tribunal said Saturday. He was 65.</p>

THE HAGUE -- Friday – In the continuation of Serbia-Montenegro’s defence against charges of genocide filed by Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serbia-Montenegro legal team argued that the war in Bosnia was not a result of outside aggression, but rather, a civil war between three ethnic communities. “In no case was that war an effort by Serbia to destroy an entire ethnic group.” Serbia-Montenegro’s chief defence attorney, Radoslav Stojanovic, said, adding that during the war, over 20,000 Muslims lived freely in Belgrade. He also cited former UNPROFOR commander Michael Rose, who writes that the war in Bosnia was not “an invasion of one...

The Srebrenica operation was planned so that Bosnian Serb forces were positioned in a shape of a horseshoe, thus intentionally leaving space for the Muslim army and civilians to retreat North, North-West towards Tuzla. The distance of 36km and the configuration of the terrain are such that any man in average physical condition can cross it on foot. The military operation was conducted in this manner with the intention of minimizing the number of casualties, since the Muslims had brought in substantial military forces. If the Muslim forces had been hermetically enclosed, a violent fight would have ensued in which...

Churchill, Hitler, and Newt by Patrick J. Buchanan Posted Feb 19, 2006 You can always tell when the War Party wants a new war. They will invariably trot out the Argumentum ad Hitlerum. Before the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam had become "the Hitler of Arabia," though he had only conquered a sandbox half the size of Denmark. Milosevic then became the "Hitler of the Balkans," though he had lost Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia, was struggling to hold Bosnia and Kosovo, and had defeated no one. Comes now the new Hitler. "This is 1935, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is as close to...

Several anti-Semitic graffiti, including one saying "Holocaust is a Jewish Lie," appeared Thursday on the walls of a World War II Nazi death camp in central Serbia. Jasna Ciric, the head of the Jewish community in Nis, said the graffiti was apparently timed to coincide with the 64th anniversary of the massacre of some 1,100 Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in the camp. "It's unbelievable that such messages are still alive in the 21st century," Ciric said, adding that about 12,000 people were killed by Nazis in the Bubanj concentration camp during World War II. The other paint-written graffiti included: "Serbia...

BERLIN, FEBRUARY 13: A moving drama about Bosnia's post-war trauma and the lingering impact of the systematic rape of Bosnian women by Serb soldiers won cheers at its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Sunday. Grbavica spotlights a hushed-up topic of mass rapes in Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo with a tear-jerking story of a Muslim woman who tries to hide the grisly truth of the past to protect her daughter. The film, seen by critics as one of the Berlinale's best so far, is told against the backdrop of Sarajevo's struggle to come to terms with...

(CNN) -- The war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic enters its fifth tedious year Sunday, and though international interest in the tribunal has waned, it has proved a useful tool in educating Serbs. "Its greatest reverberation is in Serbia itself," where regional media have brought the crimes to center stage by airing and reporting on the proceedings, said Edgar Chen of the Coalition for International Justice, a group that supports war crimes tribunals. Milosevic is charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in last decade's bloody Balkans conflict, and for four years, he has dragged out judicial...

he US yesterday made the case for offering Serbia incentives to reach agreement in negotiations over the final status of Kosovo, while setting out the possibility of independence for the province if the ethnic Albanian majority accepted compromises to accommodate its Serbian minority. Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of state, told a Senate hearing the US was neither championing independence nor autonomy for Kosovo. But diplomats said his testimony was a clear signal the US looked favourably on independence, under certain conditions. In what diplomats also called a significant policy statement, Mr Burns made clear the US had no objection to independence...

MOSCOW, January 18 (Itar-Tass) -- Russia has given guarantees to the Hague International Tribunal for War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia that its ex-leader Slobodan Milosevic would return to The Hague after medical treatment in Moscow. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said on Wednesday that Russia had submitted “the necessary package of documents” to the International Tribunal. Based on these documents, the Tribunal will be able to make a decision on “a temporary release of Milosevic for a trip to Russia for medical treatment”, the spokesman said. However he noted that the submission of the documents “does not mean...

Col. Vlatko Vukovic, the commander of the 2nd Motorized Battalion of the 549th Motorized Brigade of the Yugoslav Army, resumed his testimony at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic on Thursday. The witness exhibited several documents including his unit’s logbook, daily reports, combat reports, and his unit’s war diary. These documents are contemporaneous, and show what orders the unit was given, and what the unit did from hour to hour during the entire duration of the Kosovo war. The documents show that the unit followed the orders it was given and that did not engage in any of the crimes alleged...

Marking the tenth anniversary of the fall of the 'Republic of Serbian Krajina', an eloquent comment from IWPR's Balkan Crisis Report by a journalist who covered the parastate's four-year existence for The Independent (London)Ten years ago I sat in the front room of a house in west London in company with a number of Croats, all eyes glued to the fast-changing footage of the satellite television that was carrying programmes from Croatian state television. ‘Come round,’ my friend had said. ‘Something’s up.’ That ‘something’, it turned out, was the ignominious fall of the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK), the Serb entity that...

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) - A Serbian court, in a landmark verdict, found 14 former members of a Serb militia guilty of war crimes Monday and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from five to 20 years for the execution of 200 Croat prisoners of war in 1991. Eight of the defendants, sentenced for one of the worst massacres of PoWs during the 1990s Balkan wars, received the maximum 20 years in jail. The rest were given prison sentences ranging from five to 15 years, including the only woman among the defendants, who was given a nine-year prison term. Two of...