Serbia to Allow Milosevic Funeral in Belgrade

[Darius11 12]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/international/europe/13cnd-serb.html?ei=5094&en=305a94398b559d18&hp=&ex=1142312400&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1142284255-ri0PeFXORKrttLW/y/cyqA&pagewanted=print

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Serbia to Allow Milosevic Funeral in Belgrade
By NICHOLAS WOOD
BELGRADE, Serbia, March 13 — The Serbian government offered to allow the funeral and burial of Slobodan Milosevic to take place in Belgrade, paving the way for a gathering of nationalists and supporters of the former president that has not been seen in more than five years.

Government officials said a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic, would be removed, enabling her and her family to attend what the one senior government official insisted would be a private ceremony.

Ms. Markovic had been wanted by a court in Belgrade after she failed to appear at a hearing to face fraud charges last year. The underlying charge, of fraud related to an apartment sale, still hangs over her, in theory. She is believed to have been living in Moscow for the last three years, during much of the time when her husband stood trial in The Hague on charges of committing war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo in the 1990's.

Mr. Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, was found dead in his cell on Saturday, months before the case would have ended. He was 64.

An autopsy showed that a heart attack killed him, the United Nations war crimes tribunal said in The Hague on Sunday. The result was disclosed as new evidence emerged that Mr. Milosevic had been taking medicine not prescribed by his physicians, including an antibiotic known to diminish or blunt the effect of the medicines he had been taking for heart and blood-pressure problems.

The timing of the funeral was not announced. Despite the government's wishes for a quiet private ceremony, nationalists and supporters of the former president are certain to seize on it as a chance to rally.

Members of Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party appeared to be seizing the opportunity to revive its flagging poll ratings and plan a mass gathering of supporters. The party was once the largest in Serbia, and now one that commands just over 5 percent of the vote.

Serbia's ultra-nationalist Radical Party, currently the most popular political party in Serbia, was also expected to ask its supporters to attend, party officials said. "I believe that first he has to be placed somewhere so people have a couple of days to express their respects, and then a large funeral," said Vladimir Krsljanin, a former foreign relations adviser to Mr. Milosevic.

"There will be foreign delegations and speeches and so on," Mr. Krsljanin said. He added the government needed to provide for the kind of ceremony the former president deserved.

"Such a large gathering of people and emotions can turn into something else, if the government doesn't show maturity," he said. "You cannot act against the masses."

Preparing the way, Deputy Prime Minister Mirosljub Labus told regional news stations that the government had informed the Milosevic family that it would allow the family to attend "a private funeral."

According to the independent news agency Beta, an assistant prosecutor in Belgrade, Mira Ilic, said the state prosecution service had asked that a detention order for Ms. Markovic be annulled by the county court. The court was expected to take its decision on Tuesday morning.

She is believed to have been living in Moscow for the past three years, with her son. At the same time, pressure grew among Mr. Milosevic's supporters abroad for a further investigation into his death and more specifically the discovery of a drug normally prescribed for tuberculosis in his blood. Russia's foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said he had prepared a team of doctors to take part in the investigation under way by The Hague tribunal.

Russia had offered guarantees that if Mr. Milosevic could travel to Russia for treatment, he would later return to The Hague, Mr. Lavrov said.

"In essence, they did not trust Russia," he said. "This cannot help but disturb us. And it cannot help but alarm us that Slobodan Milosevic died shortly after that.

"Since they did not believe us, we also have the right not to believe and not to trust those performing the post-mortem examinations," he said. "We have requested that the tribunal allow our doctors to take part in the examination, or at the very least to peruse the results."

The Russians and Serbs have long had close relations, and much of the Milosevic family has worked or taken refuge in Moscow. The Russian general, Leonid G. Ivashov, who visited Milosevic in prison in The Hague and testified on his behalf, said in Moscow: "I suspect that one of the reasons the tribunal did not allow his trip to Russia was because in Moscow, they would discover what drugs he had been given by the prison doctors, and they were afraid of being exposed."

In Belgrade, Mr. Milosevic's supporters appeared already to have come to a similar conclusion that their former leader had been murdered. Outside the headquarters of the Socialist Party in Belgrade, party members queuing in the rain to sign a book of condolence messages had no doubts he had been deliberately poisoned.

"They slipped it into his food," said Gjorgje Stejic, a 51-year-old machine engineer. "I am sure he was killed. That's what all of us think."

A 74-year-old retired high school teacher, Kolja Tanakovic, said, "They didn't have the evidence to convict him and so they murdered him."

Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor at the tribunal, said at a news conference on Sunday before the autopsy result was released that she did not rule out suicide. She also said Mr. Milosevic had been thoroughly monitored by medical aides, and that it was "very strange, even if it is of course possible, that he should have died so suddenly without these medics having noticed a worsening of his condition."

The death of Mr. Milosevic sent shock waves through the tribunal, putting it on the defensive just as a defining moment in the history of the Yugoslav war crimes prosecutions appeared at hand. His death also raised a whole set of new issues for the United States and European Union, which had hoped that the conclusion of his four-year trial, with conviction widely expected, would help expedite resolution of other problems that are vestiges of Mr. Milosevic's catastrophic rule in the 1990's. A January report by the prison doctor that was disclosed Sunday by Zdenko Tomanovic, one of Mr. Milosevic's lawyers, said an antibiotic known as rifampicin, used to treat serious bacterial infections, like tuberculosis and leprosy, had been found in Mr. Milosevic's blood.

Marlise Simons contributed reporting from The Hague.

This piece of shit deserves no respect. He is responsible for mass murders, torture, and raps.

I can't believe there is even talk about people paying him respect.


I can't think of a better guy to go to hell.

I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not." - Kurt Cobain

[narcimund 0]

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I can't think of a better guy to go to hell.

Last time I checked (and admittedly it's been a while) very few religions give to governments the responsibility for choosing who goes to hell.

First Class Citizen Twice Over

[warpedskydiver 0]

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I can't think of a better guy to go to hell.

Last time I checked (and admittedly it's been a while) very few religions give to governments the responsibility for choosing who goes to hell.

yeah instead we will let Narci decide, I think I know where he will send me!

note to self: buy lots of SPF 1 million suncreen and Nomex underwear

[narcimund 0]

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... Narci ...

Dropzone.com is at its most entertaining when people progress from (1) arguing against a position with me to (2) arguing against EVERYTHING I say to (3) stalking me just to make it personal.

Like this fellow here who uses this serious thread about the Serbian government and their ex-head-of-state to spontaneously introduce speculation about my personal view of himself.

Talk about non sequiturs and obsession with personalities!

Edited to add for the less well-read among us:

non sequitur: noun
1. An inference or conclusion that does not follow from the premises or evidence.
2. A statement that does not follow logically from what preceded it.

Or more commonly: A statement with absolutely no discernible connection to what preceded it.

First Class Citizen Twice Over

[dropoutdave 0]

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...and raps.

------------------------------------------------------
May Contain Nut traces......

[Elisha 1]

Here is my small contribution to SC, as I hardly stop by here. I pretty much agree with the columnist - Slobo was no saint, but most of the media don't have all the facts. I have no idea where the column came from.


March 13, 2006
Rest Easy, Bill Clinton: Milosevic Can't Talk Anymore
by Jeremy Scahill

Slobodan Milosevic is characterized in the obituaries as the "Butcher of the Balkans." If that is the story you want to read about, please go to almost any other media outlet and read it again and again. Some are now suggesting that death is Milosevic's final revenge, that he "ended up cheating history" by dying before judgment was passed. But the world has already passed judgment on Milosevic, and what is being cheated by his death is history itself.

What the corporate media overwhelmingly ignores in Milosevic's death is what they ignored in his life as well – his intimate knowledge of U.S. war crimes in Yugoslavia. While Milosevic was undoubtedly a war criminal who deserved to be tried for his crimes, he was also the only man in the unique position of being able to expose and detail the full extent of the U.S. role in the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In fact, that is precisely what he was fighting to do at his war crimes trial when he died.

Because of the rule of victors' justice in the ad hoc tribunal system (a poor and unfair substitute for a true international court), Milosevic's case would have been the only international trial to potentially expose the details of the illegal, U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999. While the U.S.-backed court consistently tried to limit Milosevic's right to speak, stripping him of his right to self-representation, Milosevic battled regularly to raise U.S. war crimes. Sadly, with Milosevic will likely die the last hope the victims of these crimes in Yugoslavia had of getting their day (if it could even be called that) in court – a tragic and unjust reality to begin with that speaks volumes about the twisted state of international justice.

Milosevic's cause, regardless of what one thinks of it, was a casualty of 9/11 – an event that relegated him and his trial to the annals of history before it was even over. Most people in the world – with the exception of those in the Balkans, where the proceedings were broadcast live, daily – probably didn't even know Milosevic was still on trial in The Hague. It became an obscure sideshow to the blood and gore unfolding constantly on the international stage.

Milosevic's death means that those who bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days beginning seven years ago this month, killing thousands, will be once and for all protected from any public scrutiny for their crimes. However opportunistic Milosevic may have been, he would have been one of the few people to appear at The Hague who could have – and would have – laid out these crimes in great detail. Now, there is almost certain to be no condemnation of the U.S. bombing of Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers; the cluster bombing of the Nis marketplace, shredding human beings into meat; the use of depleted uranium munitions; and the targeting of petrochemical plants, causing toxic chemical waste to pour into the Danube River. There will be no condemnation of the bombing of Albanian refugees by the U.S., or the deliberate targeting of a civilian passenger train, or the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Milosevic also would have discussed how the U.S. supports a regime in Kosovo that has systematically expelled Serbs, Romas, and other ethnic minorities from their homes and burned down scores of churches. He would have discussed the role of the U.S. in funding and arming the Kosovo Liberation Army, which operates like a death squad, and how the new prime minister of Kosovo, Agim Ceku, is a U.S.-trained war criminal who gained infamy in both the Bosnian war and the 1999 Kosovo conflict. And Milosevic would have talked of the U.S. interference in the Yugoslav elections in 2000 and the ultimate neoliberal takeover that was the aim of Clinton's sanctions and 78 days of bombing. In reality, it would have fallen on deaf ears, but it would have been stated for the record.

It is ironic that Milosevic's last legal battle was an attempt to compel his old friend-turned-nemesis Bill Clinton to testify at his trial. If successful, Milosevic would have grilled the man who was U.S. president through the entire Yugoslav war in what would have been a fiery direct examination. Clinton and Milosevic were once pals who talked collective strategy in the 1990s. Milosevic had many damning stories to tell and, without a doubt, uncomfortable questions to ask Clinton. The judges in Milosevic's case clearly worked to keep those moments from ever happening, and the U.S. government made clear its forceful opposition to such subpoenas of U.S. officials, even considering invading a country that would put a U.S. official on trial. With or without Clinton, Milosevic's defense would have brought to light some serious documentation of U.S. war crimes, but he died, muzzled, before he really got started.

Little attention, therefore, has been paid to Milosevic's long-term efforts – which predated 9/11, the 1999 NATO bombing, and his own trial – to expose the presence of al-Qaeda in the Balkans, from Bosnia to Kosovo. With 9/11, Milosevic's talk of al-Qaeda was easily dismissed as laughable, pathetic opportunism. But those who followed Milosevic's career and more importantly the events of the 1990s in Yugoslavia know it was not. Those allegations were based on events the U.S. does not want discussed in an international court. Following the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, many mujahedin eventually turned their sights on Yugoslavia, where they went to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims against the Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats. Once again, the U.S. and bin Laden were on the same team. To this day, there are reports of training camps in Bosnia, which remains under occupation. It is also a likely training ground for future blowback.

In his opening statement, Milosevic alluded to some of the information he would introduce during his defense.

"In 1998 when [Clinton envoy Richard] Holbrooke visited us in Belgrade, we told him the information we had at our disposal, that in Northern Albania the KLA is being aided by Osama bin Laden, that he was arming, training, and preparing the members of this terrorist organization in Albania. However, they decided to cooperate with the KLA and indirectly, therefore, with bin Laden, although before that he had bombed the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania [and] had already declared war."

Milosevic concluded that "one day all this will have to come to light, these links."

That, however, is unlikely, and more so now that Milosevic is dead.

To be sure, there will never be indictments of these U.S. war criminals at The Hague: Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Jamie Rubin, William Cohen, Sandy Berger, Richard Holbrooke, and Wesley Clark. For many of Serbia's victims of U.S. war crimes, Milosevic's trial was a "Hail Mary" pass, as awful an historical irony as that is, aimed at someone recognizing their forgotten suffering.

It is a sad testimony to the state of international jurisprudence that after many attempts to find justice, the only hope for U.S. victims in the Yugoslavia wars was the trial defense of a man many of those same victims despised. If there was an independent international court that was recognized and respected by the U.S., those responsible for bombing Yugoslavia would have been alongside Slobodan Milosevic in the docks these past years instead of having their responsibility buried with him.

[Kinaa 0]

I can't believe there is even talk about people paying him respect.

[Trent 0]

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This piece of shit deserves no respect. He is responsible for mass murders, torture, and raps.

I can't believe there is even talk about people paying him respect.


I can't think of a better guy to go to hell.

From some of your other posts, I take it you are a religious person to some extent. Just have faith that there is a power that will give him what he deserves. Regardless of the "respect" he is given by misguided fools... he will pay, I'm sure.

Oh, hello again!