http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/19263
ZNet
October 30, 2008
Poor Marlise:
Her Old Allies Are Now Attacking the Tribunal and Even Portraying the Serbs
as Victims
By Edward S. Herman
Marlise Simons, the New York Times's main reporter on the Milosevic trial
and International Criminal Trial for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), has had a
difficult year. Perhaps most painful was the disclosure that in 1999 the
Kosovo Albanian KLA sent as many as 300 captive Serbs to Albanian to be
killed and their internal organs "harvested" for sale abroad, a matter
barely mentioned in the New York Times (see below). I was sorely tempted to
write to Marlise Simons and offer her my sympathies: "Marlise, if only the
villains in this case were Serbs, what a fine front page article you could
have had here!"
She and her paper did have a windfall with the arrest of former Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadzic and his transfer to the Hague for trial in July
(18-21), which was exploited to a maximum with nine bylined Simons articles,
multi-day front page coverage, a stream of pictures of grieving (or
capture-celebrating) victim family members, and the usual complete absence
of any critical context on either Bosnian history or the nature and record
of the ICTY. (For an analysis of Simons' sorry record and background on the
issues at stake, see Herman and Peterson, " Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia
Tribunal: A Case Study in Total Propaganda Service," ZNet, March, 2004; for
good reviews of the role of the ICTY, John Laughland, Travesty [Pluto:
2007].and Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder [Pluto: 2004];
for a broader analysis of the issues, Herman and Peterson, "The Dismantling
of Yugoslavia: A Study in inhumanitarian intervention—and a Western liberal
left intellectual and moral collapse," Monthly Review, Oct. 2007).
Simons and the Times have adhered closely to the establishment narrative on
the issues involved in the wars and dismantlement of Yugoslavia, including
the good-evil dichotomy, steady demonization of the evil (Serbs),
gullibility, suppression of inconvenient facts, and high praise for the work
of the ICTY. Simons had a very flattering article on the ICTY prosecutor,
Carla Del Ponte back in 2002 ("The Saturday Profile: On War Criminals'
Trail, an Unflagging Hunter," New York Times, February 9, 2002), and
throughout the Milosevic trial Simons reported Del Ponte's claims (and those
of her PR associate Florence Hartmann), on an almost daily basis and without
the slightest trace of skepticism. (This was helped along by simply ignoring
some of Del Ponte's more egregious acts and statements, such as her appeals
for public support of the ICTY by making strong public claims of the guilt
of people on trial, and her statement that she would not pursue alleged
NATO war crimes in bombing Serbia because she takes NATO's word for it that
they didn't do anything illegal---she was "very satisfied that there was no
deliberate targeting of civilians or unlawful military targets by NATO
during the bombing campaign"; any that happened were "genuine mistakes.").
But Simons' old friend Del Ponte has written a book, thus far published only
in Italy, entitled La Caccia: Io e i criminali di guerra (i.e., "The Hunt:
Me and the War Criminals"), co-authored with Chuck Sudetic, which makes
several dramatic claims that would be highly newsworthy for a non-party-line
and minimally honest Newspaper of Record. For one thing, it claims that
U.S. pressure steered the ICTY away from Croatian, Muslim and Kosovo war
criminals, and that NATO non-cooperation and the ICTY's dependence on NATO
for "the rest of the Tribunal's work" (i.e., pursuing Serbs) made any
investigation and indictment of NATO officials politically impossible. Her
hypocrisy and self-deception here are massive, but it is still interesting
to see her now admit the political basis of the ICTY's allowable work.
Simons and the Times have never explored this crucial subject, and of course
never reviewed John Laughland's and Michael Mandel's books that discuss the
issues involved here in detail. (Laughland's Travesty, fully demonstrates
the ICTY's corruption of judicial procedure; Mandel in How America Gets
Away With Murder shows compellingly that the ICTY was a political arm of
NATO and was designed to facilitate war, not peace--or justice).
More spectacular than her admission of politicization, Del Ponte reports
in her book the point noted earlier--that the Kosovo Albanian KLA was
involved in a program of sending Serbs, mostly seized civilians, to an
Albanian location where "doctors extracted the captives' internal organs,"
which were sent off for sale. She estimates that 300 kidnapped Serbs were
so treated. (For a partial non-authorized translation of Del Ponte's
account, Harry de Quetteville, "Serb prisoners were stripped of their organs
in Kosovo war," Daily Telegraph, April 11, 2008). This was done at the very
time UN and NATO forces were deploying to Kosovo as the "humanitarian
intervention" war was ending in 1999. Human Rights Watch has found "serious
and credible allegations" on the organ-extraction and sale issue in a series
of reports, but Del Ponte claims that here again, as with NATO's possible
war crimes, it was difficult to get a serious investigation and process
underway on the matter. The New York Times has mentioned this charge only
once, in a single sentence deep in an article on another subject, in which
the charge is dismissed with contempt by KLA terrorist and high-ranking
Kosovo Albanian official Ramush Haradinaj (Dan Bilefsky, "Ex-Soldier May Go
>From The Hague's Docket to Kosovo's Ballot," New York Times, July 12, 2008).
The dismissal by the ICTY of the case against Haradinaj, as well as one
against Bosnian Muslim leader Naser Oric, also presented a problem for
defenders of the ICTY as an independent and genuinely judicial enterprise,
with the result that these cases were kept virtually out of sight during the
same period in which the Karadzic case got enormous publicity. Haradinaj had
been indicted and brought to the Hague in 2005, but was allowed to return to
Kosovo to campaign for high office although an indicted war criminal! This
was in the same time frame in which the very sick Milosevic was refused
permission to go to Moscow for medical treatment, with a Russian guarantee
of return. (He died in prison two weeks after this ICTY denial of medical
attention.). Both Haradinaj and Oric were not only leaders of organizations
that killed large number of Serb civilians, in contrast with Karadzic and
Milosevic they were both hands-on killers—which added to the likelihood that
an unbiased court would have given them long prison sentences.
Haradinaj was the leader of the Black Eagles, which kidnapped and killed
hundreds of Serbs and Kosovo Albanians who cooperated with Serbia, but he
was found not guilty on any count—Bilefsky mentions that "lawyers and
judges on the court complained that witness intimidation had been
widespread," but he fails to mention that a number of potential witnesses
against Haradinaj were murdered, and he doesn't point out that the ICTY
judges failed once again to find guilt based on a "joint criminal
enterprise" in a trial of a non-Serb. That ICTY-originated concept is
apparently confined to usage against the ICTY-NATO target population.
The Oric case is even more interesting because he openly bragged about his
participation in the massacre of Srebrenica-area Serbs to Canadian Toronto
Star reporter Bill Schiller and Washington Post reporter John Pomfret, and
showed both of them videos of some of his Serb victims. (Schiller,
"Fearsome Muslim Warlord Eludes Bosnian Serb Forces," Toronto Star, July 16,
1995; Pomfret, "Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica's Tough
Guy," Washington Post, Feb. 16, 1994.) Although there was this kind of
evidence, and although Oric openly claimed to Schiller that he had
participated in the killing of 114 Serbs in a single episode, it took the
ICTY till 2003 to indict him, and he was then indicted for only six killings
carried out between September 1992 and March 1993, not by him but by his
subordinates. The implication that he was not responsible for mass killings
after March 1993, with Srebrenica declared a "safe area" in April 1993, is
contrary to well established facts.
More recently, the Bosnian Muslim Ibran Mustafic, who had been a member of
the Bosnia-Herzegovina Parliament and was president of the Executive Board
of the Srebrenica Municipal Assembly, published a book, Planirani haos
(Planned Chaos), which gives a great deal of evidence in support of the
claim that Oric "is a war criminal without a par" (in Mustafic's words).
Mustafic was scheduled to give testimony in the Oric trial, but after he
argued with the prosecution that it failed to charge Oric with his real
crimes, in the end the judges decided not to let him testify. Neither
Schiller nor Pomfret were called as witnesses to testify before the ICTY on
the Oric case, and their articles were not entered into the evidence. French
General and former UN military commander in Bosnia, Philippe Morillon, who
had been a prosecution witness in the Milosevic trial, had stated there that
the Srebrenica killings of July 1995 were a "direct reaction" to the Oric
massacres of earlier years, was not called as a witness during the Oric
trial.
Oric was then found guilty, not of killing anybody but having failed to
control his subordinates, and was freed with only a two year sentence,
having spent three years at the Hague. This was followed by a further ICTY
court decision that threw out his conviction and two-year sentence on ground
of inadequate proof of Oric's knowledge of what his subordinates were
doing. The double standard on proof of command responsibility and the
laughably limited scope of the original indictment of this major war
criminal fully confirm the ICTY's role as a political instrument and its
process as a "travesty."
Just as Marlise Simons had ignored Naser Oric in earlier years, so with
these trials of exoneration, the Times's coverage was confined to a short
July 4, 2008 blurb taken from Agence France Presse, " Bosnia: Ex-Commander
Is Cleared." Ibran Mustafic's book and testimony has of course never been
mentioned in the paper.
Another development that Marlise Simons has had to dodge is the 2007
publication of a book by Florence Hartmann, Peace and Punishment, which,
like Del Ponte's book, accuses the Western powers of having politicized the
work of the ICTY, specifically in having blocked the capture and trial of
Radovan Karadzic—a claim consistent with Karadzic's allegation of a deal
with Richard Holbrooke. Even more interesting is Hartmann's claim that when
Del Ponte was prosecutor of the Rwanda Tribunal (ICTR), which she was
assigned to along with her service at the ICTY, the United States ordered
her to drop any investigations and charges against the Tutsi army and Paul
Kagame, a U.S. client. She refused and was fired. Earlier, when Louise
Arbour was ICTR prosecutor, her staff had found strong evidence that Kagame
and associates had organized the shooting down of the Hutu president's plane
on April 6, 1994, the act which initiated the escalated killings in Rwanda.
Arbour had followed U.S. orders and closed down the investigation. Del Ponte
refused to do that and was removed.
This was never disclosed in the New York Times when it happened, and Marlise
Simons and company are not about to give Hartmann's confirmation of this
highly important story any publicity today. It does not fit the established
bias. As I have discussed elsewhere and often, when a strong party line
forms within the U.S. establishment, as is true as regards both the
dismantling of Yugoslavia and the Rwanda killings, the New York Times
regularly cooperates, with the result that it performs as a propaganda
agency of the state in a fashion similar to Pravda's service to the Soviet
authorities. This was the case as regards, e.g., the non-existent 1981
Bulgarian-KGB plot to murder the Pope, the U.S. sponsorship of Pakistan's
dictators and help to Bin Laden and the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance in the
1980s, Saddam's threatening (but non-existent) "weapons of mass
destruction" in 2003, Iran's nuclear menace today (devoid of nuclear
weapons) , as well as NATO's phony "humanitarian intervention" to deal with
a non-existent Serb "genocide" in Bosnia and Kosovo. It is a great Paper of
Record, helping manufacture consent to the policies of the imperial state
whose record it keeps with meticulous care and dependable selectivity.
