This all gives rise to well-founded suspicion that powerful geopolitical interests would rather Milosevic die before the end of his trial than see him acquitted and have their vicious lies exposed. U.S. State Department cables leaked to Wikileaks confirm that The Tribunal did discuss Milosevic’s medical condition and his medical records with U.S. Embassy personnel in The Hague without his consent.[20] They didn’t care about medical confidentiality laws when they were blabbing about his medical records to the American embassy.
It’s an unsatisfying outcome that Milosevic has been quietly vindicated for the most severe crimes that he was accused of some ten years after his death. At a minimum, financial compensation should now be paid to his widow and his children, and reparations should be paid to Serbia by the Western governments who sought to punish Serbia to hold Milosevic “accountable” for crimes that their own Tribunal now admits he wasn’t responsible for and was trying to stop.
Milosevic: ‘No link to genocide found’ – by Chris Stephen – The Guardian
Fresh controversy has hit the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic with a claim from a senior intelligence analyst that the Yugoslav leader is innocent of genocide.
Dr Cees Wiebes, a professor at Amsterdam University, now says there is no evidence linking Milosevic to the worst atrocity of the Bosnian war, the massacre of 7,000 Muslims in the town of Srebrenica.
Srebrenica, which was overrun by Serb forces in July 1995, forms the basis of the genocide charge against Milosevic. Still, Wiebes, a member of a Dutch government inquiry into the atrocity, said there is nothing to link Milosevic to the crime.
‘In our report, which is about 7,000 pages long, we conclude that Milosevic had no foreknowledge of the subsequent massacres,’ he says in a radio programme, The Real Slobodan Milosevic, to be broadcast by BBC Five Live tonight. ‘What we did find, however, was evidence to the contrary. Milosevic was distraught when he learnt about the massacres.’
The prospect of the former Balkan strongman being cleared of the most serious charge he faces is a fresh blow to an already troubled case, which begins hearing defence evidence this week after several months of delays.
Any failure to prove genocide will cast a shadow not only over this case but over the whole practicality of holding tyrants to account in war crimes trials, most obviously in the case against Saddam Hussein.
Wiebes headed a team of intelligence specialists commissioned by the Dutch government to look into the massacre because its forces were present in the town under the UN flag.
He had access to secret files, key diplomats and hundreds of witnesses to a massacre in which Bosnian Serb forces butchered Muslim men and boys as young as 12. But while implicating senior Serb field commanders, including General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian army chief still on the run, Wiebes says Milosevic played no part.
Chris Stephen is the author of ‘Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic’, published by Atlantic Books
