From the 1389 Blog mailbox…
A Serbian correspondent has called my attention to this blog post at Julia Gorin’s Republican Riot:
Torture, Evidence-tampering, Beatings, Bribes, Blackmail and Bullying Continue at our International Kangaroo Court: Prosecutors have Witness Kidnapped, Falsely Imprisoned, and Family Detained and Threatened: All in a Day’s Work when a Serb is on Trial
Posted by Julia Gorin
If Americans had any interest in what the future of jurisprudence — and justice — looks like, they would tune in to the Hague’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where Orwell’s world has been a reality for the past 17 years. The ICTY is the body that was set up to try cases whose supposed weightiness was compared to “Nuremberg II.” But so ignored by the public and media alike have the proceedings been, that no one even notices the perversion of jurisprudence and evisceration of justice that have been taking place there.
In a follow-up to the witness intimidation and other prosecutorial misconduct that the Hague itself has been compelled to investigate — that is, to give its best impression of investigating — we have a few updates, including a recent item from Andy Wilcoxson exposing perhaps one of the more blatant corruptions of the Hague.
Balkans: Prosecutors try to stop intimidation probe
The Hague, 21 Oct. (AKI) – The prosecutors of the United Nations war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Wednesday appealed a court decision to launch an investigation into claims that they pressured, intimidated and tried to bribe witnesses.
Several prosecution witnesses in the trial of Serbian nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj, accused of crimes against Muslims and Croats during the 1991-1995 war that followed the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, told the court they were pressured, intimidated and even offered bribes.
The presiding judge in Seselj’s trial, Jean Claude Antonetti has ordered the tribunal Secretariat to name “amicus curiae”, whose identity will remain confidential, to investigate the claims.
In their appeal, the prosecutors said on Wednesday that the court paid unnecessary attention to “false and unbelievable accusations of people, many of who are closely connected to the political party of the indictee”.
Seselj, the leader of the nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS), has been charged with crimes allegedly committed by paramilitaries recruited by SRS, but he himself never carried arms.
Seselj voluntarily surrendered to the tribunal in February 2003 and denied the charges. He claims he was tried for “verbal offence” because the prosecutors had no other arguments in the case.
The prosecutors asked the appeals panel to annul the decision to carry out an investigation, saying witnesses’ claims were “unbelievable and contradictory”.
So here’s just a sampling of the kinds of shenanigans the prosecutors would like dismissed — and no wonder. It of course applies to a different trial — the shocking experiences of a witness in the Karadzic case — and that’s what underscores just how pervasive the Hague’s crimes are:
Karadzic Trial Witness Alleges Extreme Prosecutorial Misconduct (Oct. 18)
Written by: Andy Wilcoxson
Hearing Date: June 30, 2010
On June 30th…the testimony of former Bosnian-Serb justice minister Momcilo Mandic began…Mandic began by telling the court that he would rather testify as a witness for the Chamber, than a witness for the Prosecution.
Mandic explained that the Prosecutor “threatened me, the associates of Mr. Tieger, they told me that if I didn’t come in to testify, I would be incarcerated.”
Mandic was also persecuted by the NATO puppet regime in Belgrade. He said, “In 2003 I was suspected of aiding and abetting and hiding Dr. Karadzic. I spent five months because of that in a solitary confinement cell in Belgrade, and none of my family members could visit me. And The Hague investigators came to see me. The Prosecutor’s investigator, that is, were allowed to come and see me.”
He said, “I was told that if I failed to co-operate and failed to tell them where Dr. Karadzic was, that I would be an accused before this Court and that I would be accused and found guilty by a Serbian Court.”
Mandic told the Tribunal that “My two sons were held in custody. And John Ruttel, one of the [OTP-Office of the Prosecutor] investigators, said to my son that he would be released if I were to come to Sarajevo.”
After the Serbian police released him, Mandic said, “I was kidnapped, as a citizen of Montenegro, and transferred in the space of two hours to a prison in Sarajevo, without any extradition proceedings or anything else. And in the prison there and in the Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the evening hours I was taken out and was interrogated by the operatives and investigators of The Hague Tribunal, or, rather, the OTP. He said, “they asked me, once again, about Dr. Karadzic.”
Mandic said, “I wasn’t able to assist the OTP by telling them anything, because from 1996 I have had nothing to do with Dr. Karadzic. I wasn’t in contact with him at all. I tried to present my arguments and to explain this to them, but they just didn’t want to listen.”
He told the court that “The [Hague] investigators told me that I would be taken to court in Bosnia-Herzegovina and that the prosecutor of the BH Court would raise an indictment against me, and that I would be sentenced to a prison term of eight years. When I said that they had no grounds for filing a lawsuit against me, they said that they would find grounds and that that wasn’t important.”
Sure enough, Mandic told the Tribunal that “everything those operatives told me would happen did happen. I was prosecuted because of the commercial bank in Srpsko Sarajevo, which is owned by me, that I provided credits and loans to firms and companies which assisted Dr. Karadzic. And I was found guilty and given a prison term of eight years. I served five years.”
He was ultimately released from prison when Karadzic was captured and it was obvious that Mandic hadn’t been harboring him. Mandic said, “It was established that I was found guilty of a crime that didn’t exist and that it was all bureaucracy and false testimony on the part of false witnesses. And as an American citizen who had immunity, this person [who perjured herself with her testimony against Mandic] went to Dallas, Texas, and she even took some money from my bank. [The woman in question is named Toby Robinson, who in 2006 was appointed by the UN High Representative in Bosnia to liquidate Mandic’s bank. Interestingly, notes Wilcoxson, she got the job after her predecessor was beaten up and resigned.]
Much more here.
What’s to learn from this?
There’s a lesson a day here. I can’t even begin to scratch the surface. Just for starters:
Judicial corruption has been part of the human condition as long as we have had judges. That is why judges must always be accountable to the members of the public who may appear before them. When judges cannot be recalled from office by the citizenry, and when there is no practical way to remove judges who hold themselves above the law, or who prove to be incompetent, corrupt, cruel, or even insane, the situation quickly becomes intolerable. It is far worse when those judges are themselves tools of a corrupt governing body which serves at the behest of a foreign power. In this instance, the corrupt governing body is the Hague Tribunal, which is under US control. The Hague Tribunal was set up while Bill Clinton was president. But by now, the Obama Administration, with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, has clearly lost the consent of the governed, and is, for the time being, accountable to no one.
While I have no sympathy for anyone involved in the Wikileaks debacle, including the New York Times, those leaks confirmed much that we already knew about the US government and its unwillingness to confront Islam. No, the Wikileaks documents released to the public do not go back far enough to reveal the evil that the Clinton Administration did to the Serbs. (Nor can we expect the same media organizations that had worked hand-in-glove with the Clinton Administration in smearing the Serbs so as to justify the war that the Clintons wanted, to release documents that would have exposed their own wrongdoing.) The Wikileaks documents do confirm that the government, and the news media, have been lying to us at every turn. They confirm that the US State Department is, at best, feckless and incompetent, as well as beholden to our Muslim adversaries. To put it bluntly, the US government threw the Serbs under the bus during the Clinton Administration to appease Muslim countries, and has kept them there ever since. We are now doing the very same thing to Israel, and it’s disgraceful.
If we, the American public, ever hope to win the war against Islamic aggression, we must stop persecuting the Christian Serbs on behalf of the jihadis in the Balkans. As long as we are fighting on both sides of the same war, we are going to lose that war. Yes, that means admitting we were wrong, with all that this implies. We must repent of our wrongdoing and stop being self-righteous. Will we try the Clintons and other politicians involved in this debacle for having participated in war crimes against the Serbs? What about the media shills who faked all sorts of flimsy evidence against the Serbs? What about George Soros, who bankrolled much of the effort? At the very least, can we expose their wrongdoing for all to see, to lessen the chance of it happening again anytime soon?
