When I initially read “The Politics of Genocide” [2010] by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson I was easily able to assimilate their critique of the brazen misapplication of the term “genocide” to events in Bosnia (Srebrenica) and Kosovo, since I was familiar with those issues and had worked at the Hague Tribunal, the place where the propaganda was ultimately reformatted to resemble authoritative, quasi-judicial court verdicts. But like most members of the general public, I thought that those authors’ deconstruction of the Rwandan conflict was exaggerated and tendentious because I knew practically nothing about it, aside from the steady stream of horror stories that were fed to news consumers in the 1990s (the authors fittingly called it “enduring lies” in a related volume). To paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, Rwanda was literally a “quarrel in a far-away country, between people of whom we know nothing,” and that made it quite easy to fool all of us. In retrospect, the Rwandan pattern should have raised red flags for adhering too closely to the Bosnian script. But viewed in a factual vacuum and without any particular local expertise, the torrent of Rwandan genocidal allegations appeared largely credible and indisputable. Exactly as the “Srebrenica genocide” narrative must appear to most superficially informed members of the public.

It is only with the publication of Herman and Peterson’s meticulously researched and persuasively argued book that critical questions about Rwanda began to arise. The authors argued that the label “genocide,” far from being merely descriptive or following the legal criteria set by the UN convention, was in fact highly politicised and generally used by governments, journalists, and academics to brand as evil those nations and political movements that in one way or another interfered with the imperial designs of the global West. Two sets of rules govern the application of the term “genocide.” It is seldom used when the perpetrators are U.S. allies (or even the United States itself), while it is applied almost indiscriminately when murders are committed or are alleged to have been committed by enemies of the global West and its business or political interests. After removing media blinkers to study more closely the factual background of the Rwandan affair and applying Herman and Peterson’s analytical framework, events there came into focus and the received narrative about Rwanda was no longer making sense.

A recent reminiscence by Phil Taylor and John Philpot on Global Research about the judicial lynching of Rwandan Colonel Théoneste Bagasora, who recently passed away in prison after enduring many years of incarceration for his alleged role in genocidal killings, recalled not just the sordid impact of propaganda in misshaping public perceptions of important contemporary political issues. More importantly, it highlighted the squalid part played by “gekaufte Justiz,” as Udo Ulfkotte would undoubtedly have called it if he were alive to write a book on this subject today, in seemingly confirming and reinforcing propaganda’s toxic lies.

Taylor and Philpot demonstrate that Bagasora was railroaded by the ICTR, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in Arusha, Tanzania, where he and scores of other Rwandan officials were tried. ICTR is the somewhat lesser-known but equally pernicious mirror image of the more infamous ICTY, or the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Attorney Christopher Black, with hands-on experience in both the Hague and Arusha, is unequivocal: “Bagasora was framed up. Not guilty of anything, but this is true of every one of the accused at the Rwanda Tribunal. They were all framed up.”

Black describes the technology of judicial lynching: “The prosecution targeted selected people to try to paint a picture of a government, so a few officers, politicians, party people, administrators, any Hutu intellectuals, etc. were indicted. They concocted stories and charges, all in the name of propaganda to justify the war the West conducted against Rwanda to overthrow its government.

“In 2007 thirty-seven of the [Rwanda] accused sent a letter to the UN declaring that they were political prisoners of the UN. Just think of that, the UN holding political prisoners. And it is a fact that they were.”

Black continues: “At the time I tried to get some of the accused at the ICTY [the Hague Tribunal] to join this action, but received no replies from anyone. The lawyers at the ICTY were sweetheart lawyers for the most part, except in the case of Milosevic.”

Referring to the structure of the pseudo-judicial twins, ICTR and ICTY, Black says that they are “identical in the way they chose people to target, the way they concocted evidence and arranged witnesses, in the way they tried to ensure that only weak lawyers were allowed to defend the accused (a constant battle at the ICTR), and in their control by NATO personnel at every level and in every department. They had the same prosecutor in charge of both [Carla Del Ponte], judges that went back and forth between the two, the same appeal chamber, etc. etc. Hans Köchler’s book about the two tribunals, “Global Justice or Global Revenge”, describes it best. He showed how the judges were all finally approved by the U.S.” Hence, one supposes, the indicative note in the blurb to Köchler’s book, that “the author’s main intention is to reflect upon the legal and philosophical foundations of international criminal law in the context of politics.”

“The two ad hoc tribunals were (and still are in the “Mechanism”) entirely show tribunals created to run show trials to frame up scapegoats for the crimes of the NATO countries involved,” Black concludes with understandable bitterness in his private communication with this author.

Going back to the Herman and Peterson analysis, both “tribunals” have been essential tools in perpetuating crude propaganda fabrications, that otherwise would probably have remained ephemeral, about the Bosnia and Rwanda conflicts by repackaging them in deceptive judicial wrapping. These sorry excuses for “international courts” are not merely a disservice to jurisprudence, to which they have inflicted incalculable damage, whose full scope will become apparent only with the passage of time. Inexcusably, they are guilty also of an appalling distortion of the historical record, arguably an even more grievous offence that may take much longer to rectify.

The jury is now in on former Hague prosecutor Geoffrey Nice’s London travesty earlier this month, audaciously misnamed the “Uyghur Tribunal.” For those mindful of the spirit and practice of the Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) who were following the June 4 – 7 2021 proceedings of this so-called Tribunal which was staged in London, most of what was seen and heard there was eerily familiar.

The thrust in both instances can be summarised in terms of the pinning on the designated target the charge of “genocide” and the application of ICTY’s nebulous concept of Joint Criminal Enterprise as the overarching mode of its criminal liability. The allegation of genocide was made explicitly by practically all “expert witnesses” brought so far to give evidence before the Uyghur Tribunal and the alleged data they presented tended uniformly to support such an inference. During this session, the JCE liability concept was strongly suggested rather than explicitly advanced. That may, of course, change between now and the Second session scheduled to take place in September. It should be borne in mind that, though extremely unfavourable to the party to which it is applied, genocide is by now an overused and mainly propagandistic device with little legal substance left to it, resorted to largely to discredit and make seem abhorrent the targeted party. Joint Criminal Enterprise, on the other hand, is a more serious matter because it purports to explain the mechanism and assign specific responsibility for genocide and other heinous offences imputed to the target. It is therefore important to stress that in the present phase of the London proceedings a foundation is being laid for asserting at some point later that a JCE, involving the highest officials of the Chinese Government in executive positions, is what best accounts for the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law that are alleged to be taking place in Xinjiang at their behest.

That is plain when considering two characteristics of these proceedings. First, “fact” witnesses who claim to have seen or suffered numerous forms of grave abuses coincide in the common narrative that these alleged violations of international law, potentially amounting even to genocide, are widely dispersed throughout the province of Xinjiang. Evidently well coached in the law of genocide, they are careful to stress that targeting is being conducted of Turkic Muslim inhabitants not as individuals, but as a group. Second, the evidence of “expert witnesses” does not just echo these allegations but goes a step further, to offer an interpretation of why and how these outrages could have occurred. The point of convergence of all “expert” interpretations is that such widespread occurrence of identical phenomena throughout Xinjiang could not have occurred without the involvement of the coordinating hand of the central government in Beijing. The language that almost all “expert witnesses” use is that these phenomena are “neither isolated nor sporadic” (direct quote from the evidence of purported expert Sean Roberts), clearly implying that they are orchestrated from a superior centre. Thus, the stage is being set, when the political moment is judged to be opportune, to flesh out this particular mode of criminal liability for the crime of genocide and a long list of other grave alleged offences by simply inserting the names of specific Chinese political officials at the national level.

It may be noted, based on a careful listening to Geoffrey Nice’s introductory remarks for the opening session on 4 June, that a discrete reformulation, or at least amplification for public purposes, of the “Tribunal’s” agenda may have taken place.

Nice pointed out that “the Tribunal follows but is entirely separate from the China Tribunal that investigated forced organ harvesting.” While focusing on alleged mistreatment of Falun Gong practitioners, Nice said, that Tribunal also “heard some evidence” of persecution of the Uyghur ethnic minority, linking the two events (at 9:02-9:03 minutes).

Further on in his introductory remarks, Nice made reference to what he termed some historical precedents for a “people’s tribunal,” of the sort that he is heading. (In wartime Germany, that institution was known as the Volksgerichtshof, and it was presided by the notorious Nazi judge, Dr. Roland Freisler.) Nice cited as a precedent the Women’s Tribunal which considered allegations of sexual abuse committed by Japanese Imperial forces during World War II. He pointedly noted in his remarks that in its “judgment” in 2002 the Women’s tribunal found that criminal culpability was attributable to Japan’s head of state, the then “long dead Emperor” (4 June video record, at 9:06 minutes). The allusion to that emperor’s very much living analogue, in the country currently being targeted by Nice’s operation, is quite transparent and not at all difficult to decipher.

Finally, Nice drops a huge hint that in light of the evidence presented to the Uyghur Tribunal questions may arise “whether the definition of genocide may have to be expanded” (4 June at 9:27 minutes). Immediately following, he introduces a reassuring caveat, that in rendering its judgment in December the Tribunal will “confine itself to factual conclusions based on the law as it is, when satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt only on the basis of the evidence received” (4 June at 9:28 minutes). However, notwithstanding the prudent backpedalling, it would be a serious error to disregard the possibility that the thought of even further expanding and diluting the Genocide convention, to enable the inclusion within its purview of all manner of offences not originally contemplated, has occurred to those for whom Nice is fronting. Such a reframing of the legal concept of genocide would conveniently make it possible to target and tarnish a much broader range of uncooperative states, institutions, and individuals. It would correspond to the ominous tendency that Prof. George Szamuely has aptly termed “defining genocide down.”

In sum, already in his opening remarks Nice alluded to what may have been some discretely guarded features of what all along might have been the Uyghur Tribunal’s actual agenda. By linking that Tribunal’s formation and activity to the previous “China Tribunal” of a few years back, he confirms the coordinated role of both in a continuous effort to put political pressure on China. By highlighting that aspect of the Women’s sexual abuse tribunal judgment which imputes criminal liability far beyond direct perpetrators, all the way up to the head of state, he clears the way for taking a similar approach in the current proceedings as well. Finally, by raising even the possibility (though at this point carefully confined to the hypothetical level) that the legal definition of genocide might have to be expanded (presumably in response to the projected findings of this “tribunal”) he hints at his sponsors’ desire to turn the Genocide convention into an even more broad-ranging and efficient tool for prosecutorial targeting of non-conformist individuals and entities.

These flawed proceedings, as broadcast by the Uyghur Tribunal itself in direct transmission, essentially vindicate our previously expounded anticipations of their likely course. Many will be dismayed by Geoffrey Nice’s own statement on the first day that “the Tribunal has no rules of procedure and will operate by free evaluation of evidence, unrestricted by technical rules on admissibility” (4 June at 9:17 minutes). That admission, that the panel has not been furnished with any normative precepts to assist it in sorting out what passes as evidence that is put before it, appears at first glance incompatible with Nice’s commitment, expressed earlier on, that the “evidence [is] to be tested and assessed” (4 June at 9:10 minutes). In accordance with what criteria is the testing and assessment of evidence to take place?

The prospects raised by such a freewheeling approach are rendered even more disturbing by Chairman Nice’s description of the role of “witnesses of fact giving evidence of things they had seen and sometimes told to them by others” (4 June at 9:18 minutes). This readiness to admit what in the Western legal tradition is impermissible hearsay evidence (which in the witness statements published on the Uyghur Tribunal’s website often takes on multiple forms) vitiates fact testimony wherever it appears. That sort of witness evidence, however, is a standard feature in the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where Nice was a prominent prosecutor and where presumably he perfected his trade.

The Uyghur Tribunal conducts its business in disregard of numerous precepts of legal procedure considered fundamental in the Western legal tradition. To illustrate its flawed character, it is sufficient to highlight just two.

First, the principle of cross-examination of witnesses to test the veracity of their evidence, detect and point out inconsistencies and possible bias, and where warranted to impeach them, is completely absent and disregarded in the proceedings of the Uyghur Tribunal. The role of cross-examination in a properly conducted trial was cannot be overemphasised. It was stressed long ago by the distinguished American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes when he called cross-examination the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.”

While there is a “counsel” (Hamid Sabi) who plays a quasi-prosecutorial role by prompting witnesses, there is no officer of comparable rank and stature to put to them probing questions once they are finished giving their evidence. Panel members are allowed to ask questions; however, these questions amount to requests to the witness to clarify and enlarge upon his or her testimony and thus do not serve to critically probe but merely to enhance the witness’ evidence.

As a result, the “evidence” remains totally uncontested and in such form could not pass muster in any British, common law, or even Continental law court.

The second major flaw is the failure of Tribunal organisers, once they understood that at this stage at least China would not be taking part, to institutionalise in some form the protection of China’s interests in the proceedings. They could have done that by appointing an amicus curiae or a qualified barrister to adversarially represent the accused party in order to at least mimic the appearance of fairness. For incomprehensible reasons, unless one should explain it by arrogance and the secure expectation that the entire operation is under such tight political and media control that they did not need to bother with trifles, they have chosen not to do that. Even the Hague Tribunal is careful to observe that formality whenever the need arises to give its proceedings a veneer of regularity.

Nefarious practices of the Hague Tribunal in fact pervade the proceedings of its Uyghur counterpart.

Notable among these uncreative replications is the use of prima facie unrealistic and obviously exaggerated figures. One such example is the claim that “up to a million Uyghurs” in Xinjiang are missing. No factual basis for such a figure is provided, just as no forensic basis is given for the claim that 8,000 prisoners were executed in Srebrenica. And there is another clever detail that is common to both narratives. The dubious figures are preceded by the easily overlooked caveat, “up to.” Up to a million can be anything between just one and a million victims. Estimates given in this deliberately vague form are psychologically effective but substantively meaningless. They conveniently preserve deniability in the event that accurate figures are at some later point discovered and must be explained away.

Another standard ICTY device used also by Uyghur Tribunal witnesses is the Srebrenica narrative meme of “men and boys.” The insertion of “boys” is designed to tug at the audience’s heartstrings and to enhance the abhorrence of the imputed crime. In the Srebrenica narrative the usual age range of the “men and boys” victim group is between 16 and 40. In the London proceedings, exactly the same Uyghur victim age range has been alleged by various “fact witnesses”, with some even putting the lower limit at 12 years of age. (Evidently aware of the inherent absurdity of incarcerating virtual children, a witness suggested that the Chinese authorities’ motive was that the young man was found to have had a prohibited application in his telephone.)

Rape is also a commonly cited allegation that links both narratives. In both instances the alleged incidence of rape is accompanied by mind-boggling numbers. In Bosnia, initial reports advertised figures of “up to 50,000,” only to be later whittled down to about 2,000, encompassing victims from all ethnic groups, once serious and independent inquiries had been conducted. Uyghur Tribunal witnesses alleged hundreds of thousands of rapes (as well as forced sterilisations). The authenticity of these figures could have been tested by effective cross-examination, of which there was none. One witness, Qelbinur Sidik, alleged that in the female concentration camp where she was teaching detainees her professional subject, Mandarin Chinese, which must have been useless to the detainees, she estimated the presence of 8,000 to 10,000 women prisoners. All the women were according to her raped by the guards on a nightly basis and consequently were unable to sit up straight in her class. Again, this is another instance where one sorely misses cross-examination as the proverbial legal engine that could have assisted us to sort out the truth of this highly improbable tale. (Whether the Chinese guards were permanently high on Viagra is obviously one of the first questions that a competent trial attorney would have put to her.)

ICTY’s generally sloppy use of unverified exhibits was made even sloppier in the Uyghur Tribunal proceedings. At ICTY, documents, pictures and other exhibits are introduced by the prosecutor for acceptance by the chamber through a particular witness who may have had some connection to them. At the London proceedings, it appears that the witness is permitted to bring exhibits he or she deems supportive of the evidence and that these items are then submitted to the panel without any particular examination of their provenance or relevance, a practice that is unacceptable in a regular courtroom situation. (As we learned from Chairman Nice, in his “tribunal” that is not a problem because it has no rules of procedure that might govern the handling of such matters.) Uyghur Tribunal witnesses could be seen bringing in “exhibits” that they themselves could not possibly have acquired, such as purported aerial photographs of concentration camps where Uyghur detainees were allegedly held and tortured. Such visual evidence, even if authentic, could only have been prepared and given to them by intelligence agencies.

What is the basic lesson to be learned from this appalling travesty of any semblance of legal process? In order to sound a thousand alarms, one need not be too concerned about the Chinese; they are big boys with nuclear toys and presumably can fend for themselves. From a global standpoint, it is supremely concerning that there lurks behind this a deliberate effort not just to lower standards in international justice, be they formal or informal. With the bogus ad hoc tribunals that had been set up over the last several decades that was successfully accomplished and these standards have already been dragged into the gutter.

The danger is that with the repetition of each such charade people will become progressively more accustomed to deviations from accepted practice, and it does not matter whether the offending body is a government court or an informal citizens’ inquiry. The same general rules for establishing the truth should apply to both. It is to be feared that corrupt practices such as have already characterised the Uyghur Tribunal are meant to gradually seep into the procedures of what legitimate courts still remain. Such a development would be to the grave detriment of what over the centuries has evolved in the West into a legal process designed to establish truth and secure justice. We can plainly see that Nice has used many of the tricks he learned at ICTY, except that this time round he has done it in a way that degrades the legal process even further.

Last but not least, China’s participation in the next phase would enable it to at least prepare and submit to world public opinion a Final Brief summarising its view of the proceedings, demanding that it be attached to the “tribunal’s” judgment scheduled to be announced in December of this year. That would deprive “tribunal” organisers of the coveted prize of a one-sided, unchallenged litany of fabrications (see here and here) being misrepresented to the largely unsuspecting public as the legitimate fruit of an honestly conducted citizens’ inquiry.

Such a triumph must not be conceded to Geoffrey Nice and his sinister directors.

We will soon be lucky enough to learn the answer to one of the few remaining mysteries of the Yugoslav Tribunal at the Hague. At this point it is entirely irrelevant how you choose to call it, ICTY or The Mechanism (the latter being the official, sinister-sounding name of its final incarnation). The issue concerns the appellate judgement in the case of General Ratko Mladic, commander of Serbian forces in the 1992 – 1995 Bosnian war. He stands accused, and in the trial verdict was found guilty, of the long list of usual heinous offences, topped by genocide and Srebrenica, that a person of his stature and ethnicity would normally have to face at the Hague Tribunal. On June 8, at the end of the appellate phase of the proceedings, we shall find out what the appeals chamber think about it.

The interesting thing about Mladic’s appellate chamber is that, in contrast to past practice, it is not composed of “good ole boys” drawn mostly from NATO countries. It is a chamber whose complexion, at least since the surprisingly successful recusal in 2016 of good ole boys Meron, Agius and Pocar, after a defence complaint of bias, BLM would probably approve (though the unsuspected presence of Uncle Toms can never be entirely discounted). Still, the new set of Mladic appellate chamber judges have solid Third World credentials. How that will impact their ruling, we shall soon find out.

But by far the most interesting member of this group is its presiding judge, Zambian jurist Prisca Matimba. In 2012 she sat on the trial chamber of General Mladic’s right-hand man, General Zdravko Tolimir, whom the majority found guilty and packed off to life imprisonment. Mrs. Matimba, however, sent shock waves by composing a fascinating dissenting opinion in which she compellingly argued that there was no evidence of Gen. Tolimir’s guilt on any of the charges laid against him (see chapter XIII of Judgment) and that instead of being sent to prison the defendant should be sent home. In the best British legal tradition, Zambian judge Matimba turned the tables. She supported her conclusion with a brilliant legal analysis reinforced by a panoply of lethally formulated First World arguments. But her singlehanded bravado performance failed to make even the slightest dent in her majority colleagues’ determination to reach a diametrically opposite result. Nevertheless, she in effect demolished not just her fellow-judges’ legal findings in the Tolimir trial but implicitly thrashed her institutional employer, the Hague Tribunal, as well.

Theoretically, on June 8 judge Matimba could tweak the Tribunal’s tail again by repeating her memorable 2012 performance. There is no ostensible reason for her to now take a different position in the Mladic case. Not only are all the basic charges the same as against Tolimir but, more importantly, so is the evidence, for whatever it is worth. Major witnesses are much the same and the crime base, as alleged by the prosecution, is also virtually identical, certainly in the key segments of genocide and Srebrenica. But before getting one’s expectations too high, worth pondering is the career of another ICTY judge, Christoph Flügge, who also briefly got out of line and then had to fight hard for “rehabilitation” (meaning job, salary and benefits).

Following the apprehension of Radovan Karadzic, Flügge was appointed a pre-trial judge in that case. But in 2009, in an inexplicable outburst of nonconformism, he told Der Spiegel that the term “genocide” in his view was no longer judicially viable: “Which is why I believe that we should consider devising a new definition of the crime. Perhaps the term mass murder would eliminate some of the difficulties we face in arriving at legal definitions. It would also work in Cambodia, where Cambodians killed large numbers of Cambodians. What do you call that? Suicidal genocide? Sociocide?” Still, as a properly repentant German, he concluded his academic musings on this delicate subject by maintaining that “strictly speaking, the term genocide only fits the Holocaust”.

But it turned out that the Tribunal would have none of Flügge’s new definitions and Massenmoerder nonsense because it understands all too well the nature of its overriding political task. It is to aim straight for the jugular, which in plain terms is genocide. After this incautious interview, Flügge promptly vanished from the Karadzic pre-trial panel. It is a matter of speculation in which political re-education camp judge Flügge spent the next year or so of his life (the ones in Xinjiang had not yet been officially opened) but after some time he emerged as a totally new and right-thinking man. He even apparently managed to regain a modicum of his employers’ trust, which included the privilege of serving on the Mladic trial chamber. And after his remarkable genocide epiphany he was happy to sign the verdict, in which the “genocide” charge evidently no longer bothered his delicate conscience.

The Flügge precedent is therefore something well to keep in mind when calibrating expectations from judge Prisca Matimba, without derogating in the least from the significance of her extraordinary dissenting opinion in the Tolimir case. No matter what, that will remain a unique and inspiring expression of professional integrity and can still be inhaled as a rare breath of fresh air in the miasmic swamp of the Hague Tribunal.

On June 8, General Ratko Mladic’s appointed judgment day, we will find out if there are any limits to the power of the Hague Tribunal to reengineer recalcitrant human souls. Should it succeed in whipping into line even the brave Zambian lady and superb legal professional Prisca Matimba, that will come as a sad disappointment indeed but also as another ringing confirmation of the inherent fallenness of human nature.

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab sounded jubilant as he commented on the impending transfer of Radovan Karadzic, the former President of the Bosnian Republic of Srpska entity, from the Hague to Great Britain. But no, Great Britain is not preparing to host Dr Karadzic for a state visit, including an audience with the Queen. The plan is to transfer him to that country as a prisoner (or, as Karadzic pointedly put it in stating his vigorous objection to such a disposition, as a “prisoner of war”) to serve the rest of his life sentence in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Raab may have some personal as well as official reasons to gleefully anticipate the indicated decision about Karadzic’s final destination. As BBC Diplomatic correspondent James Landale observes, “One of the young lawyers who drafted the legal procedure to transfer Karadzic to the UK was a certain Dominic Raab, who is now the Foreign Secretary – and who ultimately agreed to the request from the UN that the former Bosnian Serb leader should serve out his term in a British jail.” But as Landale lets on, there may also be an official dimension to British glee at having bagged that particular guest: “British intelligence played a role in his capture in Belgrade in 2008 after 13 years on the run. British judges and lawyers were involved in the trial against him at a United Nations tribunal that the UK helped to set up.” So it would be a really nice way to wrap it all up by hauling the man to a British gaol to do his time, right? There is no discernible conflict of interest in all of this, of course.

But there are some very serious safety concerns at least in this otherwise impeccable plan. British prisons, with their diverse (to put it politically correctly) population are not the most suitable repositories for inmates accused of committing red flag crimes such as “genocide” against the Bosnian Muslim coreligionists of many of the prisoners who would be sharing common space with Dr Karadzic. Putting aside Landale’s pious explanations such as “Officials say the reason the UK agreed is because it is on the list of UN members willing to detain those found guilty of global crimes, and it wished to show its continued support for the international rules-based order” (for more on the particulars of that “order,” see here), the hard reality of the matter is that there already was a precedent for precisely the sort of potentially lethal incident that it is feared could involve Dr. Karadzic.

In 2010 another high profile Serb prisoner, General Radislav Krstic, was shipped from the gaol of the International Tribunal in the Haag over to the British gaol of Wakefield to do his sentence. Krstic was brutally assaulted by some British prisoners who wanted to express their religious solidarity with Krstic’s alleged victims in Bosnia, with intent to slash his throat and improve on the excessively mild 35-year sentence imposed on the general by ICTY. Fortunately for Krstic, his agonized cries for help attracted the attention of the guards, who arrived just in time to rescue him. But the incident prefigures a likely scenario that might at some point befall Dr. Karadzic as well, as he relaxes to spend the last days of his life in merry old England.

All of which is not to suggest that ICTY judges (or the Secretariat, or whoever makes these arrangements at the Hague), or their British counterparts, sought wilfully and deliberately to cause Dr Karadzic’s premature and violent death. But there are plenty of reasons to suspect that neither are they are overly concerned by such a possibility, and that such an outcome – should it occur – would not greatly perturb them.

Though not a lawyer (he is a psychiatrist), contrary to the Tribunal’s well-intentioned advice, Karadzic insisted on exercising the right to represent himself instead of entrusting his fate to one of the “approved” and accommodating attorneys from ICTY’s lawyers’ list. Dr. Karadzic, who is an intelligent guy and apparently a fast learner, then mounted a courtroom performance that should put many a weak-kneed and vacillating “approved” Hague defense counsel to shame. Fortunately, in its infinite arrogance, convinced that publicly proving prosecution cases would be a piece of cake, ICTY miscalculated and set up an imperfect but on the whole acceptable video and transcript system which now preserves its embarrassing legal perversities for posterity. It preserves also much of the defense evidence and arguments, regardless of how systematically ignored they may have been by the chambers in composing their politically mandated verdicts.

Even so, the Karadzic trial chamber could not entirely bypass, for example, pro se defendant Karadzic’s vigorous challenge to the prosecution’s use of the Joint Criminal Enterprise mechanism. JCE is a catchall device to magnify the defendant’s alleged guilt by arbitrarily adding supposed co-conspirators so as to – Vishinsky-style – vastly expand the circle of his alleged associated miscreants. In a discrete admission at paragraph 3460, page 1303 of the Karadzic Trial Judgement, the chamber felt compelled to grant that “there was no sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milosevic agreed with the common plan” [to create territories ethnically cleansed of non-Serbs]. That was a painful admission in the Karadzic case because this statement explicitly undermines one of the Tribunal’s main doctrinal postulates, that the leaderships of the Republic of Srpska and Serbia were linked by a common conspiratorial design to establish a “Greater Serbia” by resorting to criminal methods such as ethnic cleansing and genocide.

In the course of his continually improving cross-examinations, Karadzic managed to deliver quite a few other blows to the prosecution’s (or the Tribunal’s, since they are inseparably merged) case. It is enough to cite just two.

In his cross-examination of Dr. Thomas Parsons, a forensic specialist for ICMP, the agency set up to collect and process Srebrenica mass grave exhumation data, on 22 March 2012 (p. 26633 in the trial transcript) Karadzic extracted from the prosecution witness the notorious truth that Srebrenica victim DNA profiles, helpfully assembled by ICMP and used by the prosecutor to allege thousands of “genocide” deaths, in fact, all featured a crucial deficiency which voided their probative value. The DNA profiles, Dr Parsons was compelled to admit, spoke nothing of the manner of death, at most being able just to corroborate that the individual in question was dead. Whether death occurred by execution, as it had to for the Srebrenica genocide case to stand up, or in combat, as at the same time and in close proximity an entire division of the Bosnian Muslim army was fighting its way out of Srebrenica in combat formation, Dr Parson granted that this important question his evidence could not properly answer.

Dr Karadzic scored more direct hits in his cross-examination of prosecution’s sole allegedly percipient witness-perpetrator in Srebrenica, Drazen Erdemovic, on 27 and 28 February 2012. Genocide, it should be recalled, is a specific intent crime. It can be found to have occurred only if there is proof that the killing was committed with intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part. Asked by Karadzic whether he took part in the execution of Muslim prisoners with the intent to destroy them in Bosnia as an ethnic group or to exterminate them as a nation, Erdemovic was firm in his reply: “No, Mr. Karadzic.” That does not leave much room for the specific intent necessary to prove genocide.

Under continued cross-examination, Erdemovic disclosed that his commander was corrupt and was paid several kilos of gold by unidentified sponsors for arranging the use of his men in the execution of prisoners.

The plain suggestion of that testimony is that someone had bribed Erdemovic’s corrupt commander to lend his unit for the criminal purpose of executing prisoners. Why would a bribe in gold be required if the order to commit the crime came down through the Serbian Army’s chain of command, where the defendant Karadzic himself was commander-in-chief? Wouldn’t a simple order and regular soldiers’ salary be enough?

The Tribunal and its enablers obviously have plenty of reasons to bear a heavy grudge against the Bosnian Serb psychiatrist who outmanoeuvred and often humiliated their best legal minds in the courtroom. Whether their justifiable resentment rises to the level of deliberately setting the stage for his violent death in a British prison may be disputable. But that they will not shed any bitter tears if it occurs there, that much is certain.

There is a Serbian saying that when an idle priest can think of nothing better to do he entertains himself by baptising goats. Bosnia’s High Representative Valentin Inzko apparently finds himself in a similarly absurd position. Oblivious to the Great Reset issues gripping the world around him and even of the dire condition of his own Bosnian raj, Inzko was busy over the last couple of days composing a letter to Nedeljko Čubrilović, speaker of parliament in the Republic of Srpska, Bosnia’s Serb-run entity. Inzko’s message conveyed the preposterous demand that the parliament strip former Republic of Srpska officials, Radovan Karadžič, Biljana Plavšić, and Momčilo Krajišnik of their medals and awards on the ground that they are “war criminals,” duly condemned as such by the Hague Tribunal.

To make sure that everyone grasped the seriousness of the demand he was making, Inzko gave the parliamentarians three months, until the end of April, to comply. The awards and honorable mentions for the condemned individuals had been voted by the parliament of the Republic of Srpska in October 2016, for their signal contribution to the entity’s establishment during the 1990s, a reality that is historically incontrovertible.

Inzko is, of course, cheerfully oblivious of the fact that the people of the Republic of Srpska, about a million of them, do not give a hoot for the judgments of the Hague Tribunal, which they despise. Naturally, they have their own criteria for assigning merit to their country’s historical figures whom they deem worthy of such recognition.

Inzko’s seemingly petty ultimatum to Serbian parliamentarians is actually part of a broader game plan for destabilizing and undermining the Republic of Srpska, Russia’s steadfast ally in the Balkans. Crude attempts over the last couple of years to ignite street disorders by following the Gene Sharp color revolution playbook had failed miserably because the coup leadership selected by Western special services was abysmally incompetent and the public were properly enlightened to see through the entire scheme. Now a new, subtler approach is being taken. A Navalny wannabe, trained “anti-corruption” demagogue, has managed to con citizens of Banja Luka, the country’s capital, to elect him mayor and he is using his bully pulpit to the hilt to enact a sophisticated political performance. As for Inzko, he is working from the same script in coordination with the fifth column to intimidate and humiliate the country’s institutions and leadership.

With Inzko’s threat to use the High Representative’s fictitious “Bonn Powers” to impose a Srebrenica “genocide denial” law in the background, the current campaign actually started some months ago when he demanded that a student dormitory in the war-time capital of Pale, named after Republic of Srpska’s first president, Radovan Karadžić, be renamed for all the obvious reasons. After weeks of defiant refusal, the government foolishly rolled over and finally agreed to Inzko’s demand, just to keep the peace, presumably. Never lacking in a sense of humor, university students informally renamed their facility after “Dr. Dragan Dabić,” which was Dr Karadžić’s nom de guerre while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade from Hague Tribunal’s arrest warrant.

Encouraged by that ill-considered concession, Inzko and the elusive “international community” which issues his marching orders (not that we don’t know who they really are) now scent weakness, so predictably are demanding more. The demand to strip the founders of the Republic of Srpska of their honorific awards is but a prelude to the projected imposition of the Srebrenica “genocide denial” decree, a provocation already announced by Inzko. That is additionally made clear by the truculent language of Inzko’s letter which minces no words in attributing to the Serbian people collective war crimes responsibility. By caving in, Inzko told Serbian parliamentarians, they “will remove the collective responsibility of the Serbian people, and by removing collective guilt and eliminating the burden of the past the entire nation would gain relief…” Inzko, who is Austrian, may have made a Freudian slip, and possibly was actually thinking of the Volk, including his fellow-Austrians, the ethnic stock of the Großdeutsches Reich of recent memory. But the language and the plain reference in the letter are clear enough and it prefigures much additional bullying to come.

There is little doubt that once the “honors-for-war-criminals” affair is over, Srebrenica denial legislation will be the next logical pressure point on the agenda. While this time round Inzko has not specifically invoked the “Bonn Powers,” the threat of doing so is implicit in the three-month ultimatum to the deputies to come to heel, or else. Setting aside the inspiring “rule of law” paradigm such a threat sets, the natural question is what the “or else” could possibly be other than a High Representative dictate, embodied by the Bonn Powers?

Here, a short digression is in order. The Bonn Powers are an entirely fictitious concoction nowhere mentioned in the Bosnia peace treaty agreed in Dayton and signed in Paris in 1995, not unlike the Joint Criminal Enterprise doctrine, which also is not mentioned anywhere in the Statute of the Hague Tribunal but has been used effectively to undergird decades-long prison sentences. Both devices were contrived out of whole cloth to facilitate the fraudulent implementation of specific imperial political objectives. In the present case, it is to enable Bosnia’s High Representative to issue binding interpretations of the Dayton peace agreement in accordance with his whims and the instructions passed on to him by the foreign power centers which control him. The myth of the non-existent Bonn Powers was brilliantly exploded quite a few years ago by the British scholar and at the time Director of Studies at the Paris-based think tank Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, Dr. John Laughland.

After a detailed study of the issue, Dr. Laughland concluded that “it is highly anomalous for the High Representative to invoke both Article 5 of Annex 10 and the so-called Bonn powers when justifying his controversial decisions to annul the decisions of parliaments or sack officials. Yet he does invoke both these very regularly. It is controversial because these are not ‘powers’ in the usual sense of the word. They are not specific executive competences which have been delegated but instead enabling clauses which allow him to interpret his own powers and which are therefore wielded without any judicial, political or parliamentary control.” Need more be said?

So the stage is being set in the Republic of Srpska for what in Texas they call a double whammy. While the new, and it must be admitted cleverly selected, crop of agile fifth columnists are burrowing from within, High Representative Inzko is aiming his artillery fire at the Serbian entity’s institutional infrastructure, to soften it up. Very soon, the graduated pressure being applied will reach the critical point of Srebrenica. The hybrid warfare game plan does not require a rocket scientist to decipher. Once the founders of the Republic of Srpska are successfully ostracized in their own land as “war criminals,” the principle of collective responsibility for alleged war crimes is established, and by Inzko’s illegal decree disputing the fabricated Srebrenica “genocide” narrative is made a punishable offense, the final assault on the Serbs’ remaining relatively free patch of land in Bosnia will not be far behind.

Beyond the cant about lofty humanistic motives, it became evident to perspicuous observers soon after the Tribunal started its sessions that in fact ICTY was brazenly fulfilling a political task on behalf of the states that organized and financed it. Its principal political directive was to wipe clean the nasty role of the Western powers, including Germany, in the violent destruction and dismemberment of Yugoslavia and to cast the defiant Serbs as the designated fall guy for the externally instigated carnage. It was in addition given the task, plainly awkward for an allegedly judicial body, to shape its judgments so as to rewrite history, not just of the Yugoslav conflict in the 1990s but, more ambitiously, to recast the history of the entire region, often going back centuries, to suit its sponsors’ current geopolitical designs and narratives.

Like the shabby B-movie that it is, the ICTY pseudo-judicial theatre also had to have its cut-out, cartoon character “good and bad guys”. One of its best known cut-out villains is Dr Radovan Karadzic, the war-time leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Media magic, buttressed by a generously garnished indictment relying on prosecutor-friendly tools such as Joint Criminal Enterprise, charged Dr Karadzic with every heinous crime in the book, up to genocide and beyond if possible. The soft-spoken Sarajevo psychiatrist and poet was handily turned into a model villain, perfect for the Tribunal’s publicity gallery.

Eventually, Dr Karadzic was sentenced to forty years in prison, but on appeal that severely lengthy sentence based on dubious and circumstantial evidence was malevolently enhanced to life imprisonment, no doubt just to rub it in, because either way it made no difference to a man of seventy-five. Incidentally, Dr Karadzic was not the only ICTY defendant who after making the mistake of filing an appeal ended up with an increased sentence, a practice that – to put it charitably – is most untypical for civilized jurisprudence. (Albania under Enver Hoxha had it, thus making the Tribunal not entirely unique in this regard.)

Assiduous ICTY watcher and our valued U.S.-based associate Andy Wilcoxson (and here) miraculously managed to arrange with prison authorities for a wide-ranging interview with Dr Karadzic. The interview yielded a number of insightful observations about the Yugoslav conflict and its background, some of which are shared here.

Speaking of the preparations for the bloody Yugoslav denouement, Dr Karadzic points out that “all the relevant governments and their services knew for decades in advance that it might happen after Tito’s death, but in spite of that, they instigated the war and carnage. Now, they are pretending to be innocent and searching for a causes in personal psychologies of leaders, as if it was irrational, imagined, unreal and exaggerated event. There was nothing like that in the Yugoslav, nor Bosnian crisis. In addition to that, all of our opponents in this crisis didn’t differ racially from us a bit. As a matter of fact, almost the entire Muslim community previously had been Serbs, but converted to Islam, mainly unwillingly and under duress, during the long Ottoman occupation. Many Croats also had been Serbs of Catholic faith, but after the Austro-Hungarian occupation, after the Berlin Congress in 1878, had declared their Croatian affiliation. (A Russian imperial diplomat Alexander Gilferding wrote a book about it in 19th century.)”

Dr Karadzic continues trenchantly that “since we are living in a ‘post-truth era’, facts are not relevant any more. Simply speaking, the international media, under governmental direction (not the other way around) create an image needed for their purposes, and the process goes on unhindered. All the technological advancement of human kind is (ab)used for the worse. So, the ‘Serbian cause’ was the last defense of a nation’s very survival, not the killing innocent and anonymous people in mosques or on beaches. One may observe what happened to the Serbs in Kosovo, in Croatia, in the Bosnia-Herzegovina Federation (the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia) and what is happening to them now in Montenegro. There are almost no Serbs left in Croatia, because out of more than 600,000 now there is about 100,000 left. There are almost no Serbs in Kosovo, or in the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia. By September 1992 there wasn’t a Serbian settlement on Muslim/Croat territory that was safe, they had already been destroyed, while nothing of the sort happened on the Republic of Srpska territory, where many Muslim or Croat settled places, villages or towns, were untouched. Serbs had never attacked any Muslim or Croat village unless they had previously been attacked from it, and if attacked, the Serbs demanded perpetrators to be handed over to the security forces. If there was a skirmish, civilians might have been hurt only accidentally, and after such a skirmish the rest of civilians would help the Serb forces to collect killed and wounded terrorists, who anyway were not a proper army, but acted deep within Serb territory as terrorists. On the other side, the Muslims, and to a lesser degree Croats, attacked every Serbian village they could reach, killing everyone, even animals, and burning everything. This is all well documented, and there can’t be any doubts about it.”

About his “media image”: “Pertaining to me, Radovan Karadzic, the media had been even more harsh and deceitful than with the denigration of the Serbs. All the negotiators had very correct relations with me, some were even friendly and understanding, and they all certainly realized that it was a civil war with many rogue elements. Even the main European powers were saying the same. Many of the mediators and ‘peace keepers’, including generals Nambiar, Morillon, Rose, McKenzie and others, had seen for themselves what was going on. Many of them reported that media were mistaken and biased, that all the sides are committing atrocities, but only the Serbs admit it, while others deny.”

On the important subject of Richard Holbrooke’s role in the final stages of the Bosnian war: “Most astonishing of all was Holbrooke’s transformation: together we created the Dayton Agreement, in Belgrade, in the presence of Presidents Milosevic and Bulatovic, and our associates…We cooperated well, with mutual understanding, and parted amicably. In June 1996 Mr. Holbrooke led a campaign for my stepping down from office, promising immunity, telling that there will be some rhetoric against me, but no trial. The main concern of the internationals was whether I would run for another term in Presidency in the forthcoming elections. I kept my word. However, he didn’t deliver, maybe he couldn’t, his part of the agreement, while I did deliver my part. This included my absence from public life and media… By keeping me far from the media, they insulated themselves from any of my reactions, comments or denial, and could continue to denigrate me without any risk. Finally, Mr. Holbrooke called me a ‘European Bin Laden’, and said that he regretted that there was no death penalty. Meanwhile, I was informed that many his friends, some obscure individuals, were instigating through NATO to eliminate me by killing me.”

And a very instructive insight into how easily provincial leaders with an inferiority complex fall into the trap of misjudging Western colleagues based on the latter’s proclaimed standards of integrity, instead of relying on their own objective experience and common sense: “When we concluded this agreement of my stepping down, President Milosevic told me that it would be improper and impolite to expect that such a big power’s representative should not be trusted, and to demand from him to sign what was agreed to. ‘If they are not to be trusted’, President Milosevic told me, ‘then they wouldn’t be a great power anymore.’” Did Milosevic remember that conversation as he was being hauled off to the Hague? One wonders.

Concerning the imputation of genocidal enmity toward Muslims and Croats: “The vast majority of [my business associates] had been Muslims, one of them a Croat, and none of them Serb. My internist was a Croat, while my optician, my dentist, both of my lawyers, my tailor, shoemaker, hairdresser, barber, and all other suppliers had been Muslims. (I have published this information, with their initials, and nobody denied it!) Even during the war, I had people of Muslim and Croatian ethnicities as close associates, many of them serving in our Army, where there was even a completely Muslim unit (The ‘Mesa Selimovic’ brigade).”

About the coming world realignment: “Nations that may be targeted by NATO and its member states are looking for new alliances, and seeking new ‘mentors’ that are less dangerous and more useful and reliable. I already said in some interviews than in many cultures there are two main archetypes of female figures: a mother and step mother, a good aunt or fairy and evil witch. Immediately after World War II we in the Balkans perceived the U.S. as a good aunt, while now small nations see China and Russia as good aunts, while the U.S. they see as an evil witch. So, intimidating the entire world is not fruitful strategy and tactics, and it will fail very soon.”

Why were the Serbs selected for exemplary punishment as the “bad guys”?: “First, because of ethnic and cultural closeness with Russia, it is envisaged in the West that they wouldn’t join any action against Russia. Furthermore, President Milosevic was seen by the West as the last Communist dictator, which he really wasn’t. He was a leftist, and he was an autocrat, but he was considered to be very close to America. He was convinced that Clinton would be a great President, and that nothing would spoil traditionally good relations between the two nations. Also… the Balkans had always been of the greatest interest to powers which wanted to keep Russia far from the ‘warm seas’ and to deny it free access to Middle East resources.”

What interests predominated in the decision to attack Yugoslavia in 1999?: “Germany wanted revenge for the two World Wars and to take the region back to the ‘status quo ante’; different circles in the U.S. had an interest to destroy the Yugoslav military industry, since Yugoslavia had 7% to 10% of the world market, particularly in the third world and non-aligned countries; others didn’t want to be out of this affair, or couldn’t resist the pressure of the mentioned powers. The middle range officials in these countries, our allies in all the wars in the 20th century, neglected this long lasting friendship and devotion of the Serbs to the Anglo-Saxon nations (Great Britain and U.S.) and France, smashing Serbia to smithereens, which may be forgiven, but not forgotten, ever. And that is an enormous loss for them, much higher than any benefit. Therefore, this was not in their national interest, but in the interest of small groups and lobbies within these countries… Still it puzzles me – why the U.S. and other Western powers didn’t support some of the secular Muslim parties instead of the fundamentalist SDA.”

But there were, by all accounts, personal pecuniary motives as well: “What makes this ‘business’ even more disgusting is a sort of private interest of the high officials, like the mentioned lady [Madeleine Albright], particularly in Kosovo. Some of them, after playing a disgraceful role in the war, went on to establish their private businesses there, participating in the privatization of resources and assets. Finally, they knew exactly the nature of the conflict in Bosnia, they knew who was doing what, but they did something unimaginable, by forging facts and influencing the media, covering up exculpatory evidence, exerting pressure on judicial institutions… Mr. Holbrooke himself confessed that the main benefit of the Indictment against me was to prevent me from going to Dayton, allowing them to alter the Agreement that was previously reached by the two of us with the assistance of our respective teams.”

Asked how it feels to be perceived as a “war criminal”: “What crosses my mind when they label me a war criminal? As when Mr. Izetbegovic, a friend of Al-Husseini and Hitler, labels his Serb colleagues in the Presidency as “Nazis”? I am not surprised by what the architects of this crisis say about me, because it is inherent to everything they had done. I can hardly believe how many serious, intelligent and educated people are so lazy, sluggish and ready to accept the media presentation of a contemporaneous event. Reading some of them I sometimes think they may be drugged, because they write about the Bosnian crisis as if they had been there all the time, while the majority of them had never been there.”

And, finally, turning with respect to the interviewer, Andy Wilcoxson: “We can see how extraordinary are alert, curious and responsible persons like yourself, who do not take the media truth for granted.”

As from time to time has been the case, Western sources have again disclosed some information about Srebrenica in July 1995, which until recently was kept confidential and therefore not available to the public. The source of this particular batch of documents is the UK Department of Defense. The documents that have finally been declassified contains very interesting assessments and reports that take on even greater significance when cross-checked against data which are already known. The document that has attracted the most attention is a letter from a Ministry of Defense official under the date of July 11, 1995, sent to Roderick Lyne, private secretary to the then Prime Minister John Major. The purpose of the letter was to brief Major through his private secretary on developments in the Srebrenica area in order to enable the Prime Minister to handle expected parliamentary questions on that subject.

A definitive judgment on these until quite recently inaccessible documents (they were released by the National Archive of the United Kingdom on December 31, 2019) must await thorough examination. Both the subject matter and everything we know from these and other official sources suggests the conclusion that these are issues too important to be left to very selective and often shallow media interpretations.

But even if we were to confine ourselves to the fragments with which the general public has now been acquainted, some significant and, for the official Srebrenica narrative, rather unfavorable conclusions may even now be drawn.

First and foremost, we see here a report emanating from the British Ministry of Defense, dated July 11, 1995, which matter of factly informs the Prime Minister that at that particular moment British intelligence services lacked knowledge of any intention on the part of the Republika Srpska Army to conquer Srebrenica and place the enclave under its control. (Bosnian Serb army forces did enter Srebrenica on that very day, but that was widely acknowledged to have been an opportunistic move, no resistance having been encountered.) This British assessment is of great importance because of the implications that emanate from it.

According to the “facts” alleged by the Hague Tribunal in its numerous judgments, the “genocide” is supposed to have begun only two days later, on 13 July. Why is this chronology important?

Because for “genocide” to have occurred in the legal sense of the term, even of a relatively small group of 8,000 people (if we compare that to the scope of the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews under the Nazis, or Serbs in the Nazi-aligned Croation state during World War II), presupposes the existence of specific intent, as well as adequate logistical preparation.

To that end, the Hague Tribunal has unpersuasively construed meetings held at the Fontana Hotel in nearby Bratunac on 12 July to bolster its conclusions (see Krstic Trial Judgment, paragraphs 126-134). In its comments, the Tribunal itself accepts that these meetings were held shortly before the alleged genocidal events, in fact only a day before a crime of such serious magnitude was supposed to have begun, but at the same time it acknowledges that there is no “concrete evidence” of the existence of a genocidal plan. Furthermore, the only direct perpetrator of the “genocide” to have been brought before that court, the mildly punished Drazen Erdemovic, who turned Prosecution witness, when cross-examined by defendant Radovan Karadzic admitted freely that neither he nor his colleagues from the 10th Sabotage Detachment execution squad were motivated by the intent to exterminate Muslims when taking part in the execution of war prisoners at Branjevo. As for logistics, since the intent evidently could not have been formed until the eve of the “genocide”, the issue is practically moot. Since no evidence of logistics to carry out such a large-scale killing operation was discovered, there are no specific allegations or details in ICTY judgments on this important issue.

A review of the documents already publicly available for some time makes it crystal clear that the “sensational disclosures” from the British archives must already have been known to anyone with a serious interest in these issues.

The Hague Tribunal’s long-time chief investigator, Jean-Rene Ruez, said much the same thing as the recently declassified British documents when he testified before the French Parliamentary Commission on Srebrenica in 2001. The British Defense Ministry’s assessment subsequently proved to be essentially correct, but since it was drawn up contemporaneously with the events to which it refers, it did not necessarily have to be. However, Ruez’s assessment is retrospective, made five years after the event, with the benefit of insight into the relevant documentation, and it therefore carries more weight. A very precise sequence of events, which virtually rules out the possibility that the official version of the event could be accurate, was presented by ICTY military prosecutor Richard Butler at the “Pelemis and Peric” trial before the Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Court in Sarajevo in 2010. Therefore, far from constituting a sensation, British MoD documents are important pieces of the mosaic that do not disclose anything basically new. They do, however, round out a picture that was already familiar.

Another important detail that the British documents do not reveal, but certainly do confirm, is the refusal of members of the 28th Division of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose troop strength in July 1995 was about 5,000, to engage in natural and normal conduct in the situation in which they found themselves (also here, footnote 28). The armed outfit in question did virtually nothing to counter “one company and four tanks” (a direct quotation from the British MoD document) of the Bosnian Serb Army that was approaching Srebrenica from the south side of the enclave. To journalists, this may appear as a sensation, but for those who have studied these matters in the context of the Bosnian war — it definitely is not.

Foreign observers who happened to be in the immediate vicinity or who were following the events on the ground in some official capacity have shed light on this mystery. For example, Portuguese General Martins Branco, Deputy Commander of the UN Observation Mission at the time of the events in question, made the following observation in his memoir, “The War in the Balkans,” published in 2017:

“The topography of the Srebrenica region, as well as Eastern Bosnia as a whole, is very hilly. The virgin, densely forested landscapes and deep ditches make it difficult to move combat vehicles and facilitate infantry operations. The numerical ratio of forces, when considered in relation to the terrain properties, which undoubtedly favors the defenders, suggests that the ARBiH forces had more than enough manpower to defend themselves. However, they failed to do so.”

Other observers made similar assertions as Martins Branco (here, pp. 47-48). So once again the British documents did not reveal anything fundamentally new, but the fact that they have been made public is nevertheless helpful because one can never go too far stressing the startling fact that in Srebrenica there was no resistance and that the armed and much more numerous “men and boys” withdrew to the mountains, leaving their womenfolk and elderly unprotected in the face of an “aggressor” who by that time in their eyes had already acquired a genocidal reputation.

Finally, the question must be raised: why did they act that way? Was it to take the opportunity to lure the Serb forces into a strategic trap (remember General Morillon’s testimony at The Hague, where he used precisely such language to describe the situation), hoping the Serbs would slaughter several thousand refugees in Potocari? That certainly would have satisfied the terms of Izetbegovic’s and Clinton’s secret convention, which envisioned exactly such a scenario in order to ensure the political preconditions for a US intervention in the conflict.

It is almost always the case when new files concerning Srebrenica are opened, whether the result is really new data or just a confirmation of already known facts, that not only do these disclosures in no way help the official narrative, but on the contrary they systematically undermine it. It is not surprising therefore for such information to have been kept under lock and key for decades precisely so as not to disturb the prevailing, concocted narrative in the expectation that buying time (and criminalizing “genocide denial”) would assist the narrative in taking hold.

The Karl Rovian way the process of rearranging reality now unfolds was recently explained by Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, in a remarkable article, “The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative”. The ruling establishment, Murray claims, has learnt one important lesson from the collapse of the official lies about the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: “Never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong.”

And the same goes now for all their monumental lies, from the pretext for invading Iraq to Srebrenica, and more recently the political crisis engendered by the cold-blooded assassination at Baghdad airport on January 3. The security services, Murray writes, understand “that in future they just have to brazen it out.” If a hypothetical situation like the mythical Iraqi weapons were to recur today “and the security services decided to brazen it out” by asserting deliberately the false claim that the armaments were in fact found, “there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.“

The rebuttable or easily refuted claims that are blatantly disseminated and parroted, and believed by millions who blindly take them at face value even though evidence refuting them is close at hand, Murray christens “zombie narratives.” Srebrenica is undoubtedly one of the prominent illustrations of Murray’s thesis.

The “declassification” of the British documents is therefore no evidence of Western transparency or democratic will to keep the public informed. It is proof, rather, of a perfidious damage-control tactic. As we have seen, some of the major “disclosures” in the British documents have long been in the public domain and have gradually been seeping into the public discourse. Extending the embargo would accomplish nothing, but the removal of the secrecy mark should impress the simpleminded who may imagine that this is evidence of regrettably belated, but still highly commendable “transparency” of the Western system.

Those who think this way have already forgotten the farce about finally making public the remaining, most sensitive documents about the assassination of John Kennedy. In the 1990s, Congress explicitly ordered that by 2017 everything must be disclosed, even the last scrap of paper. Yet, under a Presidential directive countermanding Congressional instructions, 2017 has come and gone but the most compromising documents remain locked away for several additional decades, for the reasons of “national security” to which Murray has alluded. Locked away and unpublished documents on Srebrenica surely also abound in the secret files of “all the usual suspects,” as Captain Louis Renault picturesquely put in the movie “Casablanca.”

The availability of these British Srebrenica documents — assuming Ambassador Murray is correct — may in some circles achieve a favorable propaganda effect for the UK, but in relation to Srebrenica, a wall of blatantly imposed lies will not permit them to change or meaningfully challenge anything. Tactical damage control operations should not be confused with permission to touch the core of a protected zombie narrative.

If in 2015 the general public were unaware of these “sensational” documents kept in the British Defense Ministry safe, the British government certainly were. Yet, that did not prevent them from attempting to push through in the UN Security Council a resolution chastising the Serbian nation for genocide in Srebrenica. The resolution failed only thanks to the veto placed by the Russian Federation. And as we now learn, British government sources, in their own contemporaneous and confidential report, had frankly stated that their misleading resolution alleging genocide in Srebrenica was to do with an attack undertaken by a local commander, not by the Bosnian Serb military and political leadership in Pale, and therefore even less probably so by the Serbian leadership in Belgrade.

To arrive at such a harsh judgment, the Kosovo court must surely have dug up startling new evidence about what actually happened in Račak that even ICTY failed to produce. In 1999, ICTY amended its initial indictments of Serbian military and political leaders to include the slaughter of Albanian civilians in Račak. The incident was said to be a cold-blooded, genocidal murder of forty-five helpless Albanian peasants, executed by a unit of the Yugoslav army after it had besieged and captured their village. All well and good, while the NATO attack was in progress and public support needed to be drummed up by publicizing shocking atrocity stories. Later however, when things had calmed down and prosecutors would have been obliged to present some semblance of credible evidence to support their claim, the Račak episode was quietly dropped by ICTY, due to lack of evidence to support the accusation.

The reason Račak is so important to the construction of the mythological narrative in which recent Kosovo history under NATO occupation is enveloped is precisely because it served as a conveniently arranged “humanitarian catastrophe” to justify unleashing the military campaign against Yugoslavia that had already been decided on before that. The principal actor in that operation was a certain William Walker, officially billed as a “US diplomat,” at the time head of the Kosovo Verification Mission. His dramatic arrival in Račak and public asseveration that he was shocked by the horror of the crime scene he found there set the propaganda stage for what was to follow. Ironically, Walker had plenty of experience earlier in his career arranging genuine massacres of El Salvadorean peasants during their rebellion against the pro-Western, neo-colonial regime that had been imposed in that country. However, he was quite sloppy and turned a dismal failure when it came to staging the phony massacre in Račak. Since the alleged victims were members of the KLA terrorist outfit killed in a legitimate police operation, they quickly had to be refurbished for public display, while covering up as much tell-tale forensic information as possible. In the process, some mix-ups occurred that gave the game away. In the gully where the victims’ bodies were laid out to be photographed by the foreign media, there curiously was no evidence of blood around the corpses (watch 00:25 – 00:41 seconds). The suspicion that the bodies were hastily dressed up in a different set of civilian clothes not their own, to mask the fact that they were soldiers, was also corroborated by the fact that holes in the victims’ clothing generally did not correspond to the entry wounds of the bullets that killed them.

But none of these details apparently bothered the Kosovo court when it issued its stern judgment against Todosijević for “incitement to ethnic, racial, and religious hate, disorder and intolerance,” just for pointing out some of these incongruities.

Both the court’s procedural swiftness and the categorical nature of its conclusions are understandable in light of the importance of Račak in the historical mythology earlier referred to. The ultimate objective was not to just sentence some poor chap for a thought crime, but something much larger than that. Račak is symbolically the corner-stone of the Kosovo Albanians’ own emerging “genocide” narrative. Never mind that this vacuous charge, raised during the NATO assault on Yugoslavia in 1999, was discarded shortly after peace was restored. It has recently been boldly reinstated, thus successfully questioning Račak would further undermine whatever scant credibility the protected narrative may have.

As the perennial source and model – at least in recent times – of the Balkan “genocide” epidemic, Srebrenica predictably could not long remain outside this picture. Professor Raphael Lemkin may be turning in his grave, but the Bosnia-Herzegovina High Representative Valentin Inzko seems determined not to be outdone by Kosovo Albanians. Just as in Pristina the hapless Todosijević was being court martialed for his incautious remark, in Sarajevo this month Inzko solemnly announced that he would at long last use his mythical “Bonn Powers” to impose a Srebrenica genocide denial law in that unlucky country. The reason such a measure was not enacted long ago was a quirk in the Dayton Agreement requiring consensus on vital interest issues and the Serb entity Republika Srpska’s adamant refusal to be a willing party in the suppression of scholarly research and public discussion of the dubious grounds for the “Srebrenica genocide” accusation leveled against it.

Interestingly, the “Bonn Powers” to override and impose laws and procedures in Bosnia, which Inzko invoked in order to circumvent the legal deadlock which prevents the passage of genocide denial legislation, are just as spurious as the “Srebrenica genocide” itself. The self-serving charade was utterly demolished by Dr. John Laughland several years ago. Such powers are not mentioned anywhere in the Dayton Agreement which ended the war in Bosnia and set up the current constitutional arrangements in that country. Nevertheless, these puzzling powers, whose origins remain unexplained on the website of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, were successfully invoked several times in the past by Inzko’s predecessors to punish and dismiss elected officials who refused to toe the line prescribed by NATO powers, greatly raising tensions and often causing havoc in the country’s political system.

The claim of genocide in July of 1995 in Srebrenica is just as vacuous as the assertion of “Bonn Powers” which may soon be used in Bosnia to prohibit questioning it. The Srebrenica narrative would have collapsed long ago but for the respectability conferred upon it by its corrupt enabler, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), whose dishonorable role in perpetuating the fraud has been conclusively unmasked by a team of international scholars. Oddly for a “genocide,” in Srebrenica there is no evidence whatsoever of dolus specialis, or prior intent to annihilate a group protected under the Genocide Convention (also here). As for the physical evidence, even the heavily manipulated ICTY autopsy reports support a finding of just under 2,000 deaths in Srebrenica, far short of 8,000, as officially claimed. But even those deaths were from a variety of causes, execution accounting for several hundred of the aggregate total.

And as if that were not enough to make Prof. Lemkin’s stomach churn, in 2012 ICTY formally ruled that in the Bosnian village of Zepa another, hitherto unnoticed “genocide” had occurred and that the grand total of just three victims (mayor, military commander, and local religious leader) was quite sufficient to prove it. The feature which, in the Chamber’s preposterous opinion, raised the matter to the coveted status of genocide was that the three individuals were key leaders without whom the local community would collapse and become unsustainable. Unsustainability equals extinction, and extinction equals – genocide. (See also Tolimir Judgment Summary, p. 7.) In a scathing dissenting opinion, Judge Prisca Nyambe, a member of the trial panel, protested vigorously against this absurdity, but to no avail.

With childlike simplicity, most Balkan contenders seemingly would love to be “genocided” by their local enemies provided, however, that they survived to tell the tale to the tabloid media. It is a pity that there appear to be no adults in the room to restrain their exuberance.

But before shouting three cheers for the integrity of “international justice,” it would be good to remember that on that stage appearances do not necessarily convey accurately the underlying reality.

Judge Flugge is remembered also for emitting some impressive integrity noises at the beginning of his Hague Tribunal career, just as he seems to have done it now at the very end. In a 2009 interview with Der Spiegel, he boldly suggested that “genocide” was not the most fitting description for what happened in Srebrenica. That heresy was immediately punished and Flugge was dumped from the Karadžić pre-trial panel, not to be heard of again for several years that followed.

Judge Flugge’s re-education in international justice limbo was apparently successful because it helped him to see the light. By 2011, all was forgiven and he was again trusted enough to be appointed presiding judge in the trial of General Ratko Mladic though the stain on his reputation for questioning the Srebrenica dogma was never erased completely. It comes in handy for periodic flagellation  lest Flugge becomes tempted to succumb again to unconventional ideas.

Flugge’s disingenuous “shock” at the way, ever since its inception, things have customarily worked at ICTY suggests that his last ten years at the Hague may have been spent in a cocoon. The things that have only recently begun to bother him at the institution he has been serving faithfully for a decade were endemic to it from the start, and perhaps even earlier than that.

As a matter of fact, new evidence is emerging continuously about the non-judicial milieu in which the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was conceived, and not merely the questionable circumstances, under the terms of the UN Charter, in which it was later on officially founded. A piece of this jigsaw puzzle is a recently released memo, dated February 1, 1993,  prepared by Daniel Wagner, chief of DCI Interagency Balkan Task Force, for Acting CIA Director John Woolsey. In his analysis of the situation in the Balkans, Wagner outlines for his superior policy options available in the former Yugoslavia.

Tucked away in item 11 on page 7 of the memo is the recommendation to “establish a war crimes tribunal.” That to our knowledge is the earliest official reference to the project that culminated in the formation of the Hague Tribunal. The author of this memo exercised remarkable foresight when he coyly noted that “even treatment of Bosnian transgressions, however, would be regarded as tilting in Belgrade's favor.” The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the institution Flugge until recently worked for, was set up by UN Security Council resolution on May 25 of the same year. That was accomplished on the initiative of the only superpower at that time, to whose intelligence agency Wagner’s original February 1 memo was addressed. Sheer coincidence, no doubt.

It turned out that on the issue of bias Wagner was spot on. As if on cue, all necessary precautions were subsequently taken, for the duration of the Tribunal’s activity, to avoid not just the appearance but also the substance of even-handedness in ICTY’s work.

If judicial independence is an issue that bothers Judge Flugge so extremely, he should appreciate being informed that ICTY’s history is replete with evidence of its non-existence.

Only a few years into its operation, the rather egregious dependence of ICTY on non-judicial patrons was frankly acknowledged by ICTY President Gabrielle Kirk McDonald: “We benefited from the strong support of concerned governments and dedicated individuals such as Secretary Albright. As the permanent representative to the United Nations, she had worked with unceasing resolve to establish the Tribunal. Indeed, we often refer to her as the ‘mother of the Tribunal’” After the release of his February 1 1993, memo intelligence operative Daniel Wagner should perhaps be referred to as its “father.”

With remarkable candor, these warm sentiments attesting to a cozy relationship were matched by Judge Theodor Meron, one of Ms. McDonald’s successors as President of the ICTY, who said the following on October 2003, speaking before the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Washington: “As you know, the United States took a leading role in the creation of the ICTY and remains a staunch supporter. The US's financial contribution accounts for approximately a quarter of the Tribunal's annual budget of approximately $120 million.”

With such close bonds, it is no wonder that during the bombing of Yugoslavia, when the issue of investigating all parties' “transgressions” in Kosovo was raised, some war crimes actors were deemed to be “more equal than others.” On May 16 1999, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea informed the press that when “[then ICTY chief prosecutor] Justice Arbour starts her investigation, she will because we allow her to. (…) NATO countries are those who have provided the finances to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers (…) so let me assure you that we and the Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals brought to justice and I am certain that when Justice Arbour goes to Kosovo and looks at the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav nationality.” 

So much not just for even-handedness, but for ICTY judicial independence as well.

Prof. Michael Scharff was undoubtedly correct when he termed America’s motives in the creation of the Tribunal as “less than pure.” He went on to quote Richard Holbrooke's boast to the effect that, besides being a public relations device, the Hague Tribunal was also a “potentially useful policy tool.”

The ousting of Danish judge Frederik Harhoff in 2013, in the middle of Flugge’s happy tenure at ICTY, for denouncing the alleged interference of foreign powers in judgments rendered by the Tribunal, should have alerted judge Flugge to the gravity of the situation at his workplace. But it apparently failed to stir his professional conscience.

It should incidentally be noted that ICTY is the institution that has been the main prop for the Srebrenica genocide narrative over the years. One might well wonder what credibility ICTY’s Srebrenica judgments have in light of the cited operational facts?

In the infamous episode of Gen. Wesley Clark’s testimony in the Milošević trial, where all procedural rules were cast aside by the Chamber explicitly to accommodate its major financiers and alleviate their “national security” concerns, the Tribunal publicly lived up to Holbrooke’s cynical characterization of its utilitarian mission. That was starkly illustrated and brilliantly explained by Prof. Tiphaine Dickson of Portland State University in her scholarly critique, The Deposition Will Not Be Televised: Wesley Clark’s Testimony in the Milosevic Trial. True, that outrage occurred in 2003, before Judge Flugge was appointed to ICTY. But if judicial independence is one of his major concerns, he should perhaps have researched the professional culture of the institution that invited him to sit on its bench, before accepting.

International criminal lawyer Christopher Black had some harsh things to say about the Hague Tribunal in 2000, not long after it was set up. In retrospect, Black’s trenchant observations seem strikingly well-founded rather than harsh. Judge Flugge must have been living in a parallel universe if he failed to react until a few days ago. He will now profit handsomely from his “see no evil” stance. A generous retirement package and benefits await pensioner Flugge. And on top of that, he will go off into the twilight with the aura of a moral hero for noticing and bringing to the public’s attention, just as he was about to retire anyway, things about the Hague Tribunal that most of us have been saying for years. These are all facts that, to use one of the favorite formulas of the court in which he uncomplainingly sat and rendered judgments for ten years, Judge Kristoff Flugge “knew or should have known” all along.

Photo: Flickr

Eleven years after his death, a second trial chamber at the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has concluded that Slobodan Milosevic was not responsible for war crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.