Intelligence

Slobodan Milosevic Leaves the Court

Kommersant: Slobodan Milosevic Leaves the Court

// The last president of Yugoslavia dies in The Hague
Death
Former president of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic died on Saturday in the prison of The Hague Tribunal. He was the main defendant in the bloody Yugoslavian drama at the end of the last century. After he left politics, and even now, after his death, two great myths that accompanied him through his political life continue to live. The first is that he fought to preserve Yugoslavia and the unity of the Serbian people. The second is that he was a great friend of Russia. In reality, Yugoslavia, the Serbs, Russia – they were all just small change in Milosevic's big game, the grand prize in which was absolute power.
The End of Milosevic

The last time Slobodan Milosevic was seen alive was at 4:30 p.m. on Friday. A day earlier, Kommersant has learned, he spoke with his brother Borislav, who lives in Moscow. Borislav Milosevic said that his brother was feeling fine at that time. At 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, guards making their rounds at The Hague Tribunal Prison found Slobodan Milosevic in his cell apparently dead. They called for the prison doctor, who confirmed his death. Later in the day, the death of the former Yugoslavian president was announced officially. It was reported that the most likely cause of death was high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, which he is known to have suffered from.

His close associates began to claim that he was poisoned, however. Milosevic's lawyer Zdenko Tomanovic suddenly recalled that his client had expressed concern in recent days that someone was trying to poison him. Tomanovic said that Milosevic sent a letter to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday saying that they were giving him the wrong medicine and asking him for help. The lawyer did not reveal any other contents of the letter but said that Milosevic was being treated with medicines used “only for leprosy and tuberculosis.” Mikhail Kamynin, an official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, said immediately that no letters had been received from Milosevic.

In circles connected with the tribunal, it is thought that the claims of poisoning are conjecture, or fabrications intended to prepare the public for the news traces may be found in his blood of substances that were not prescribed to him by Hague doctors. On the tribunal, they suspect that Milosevic was taking his own medications of some sort. In January, the prosecution said, a confidential report on an analysis of Milosevic's blood was given to the judges on the tribunal. In the report, it said that the defendant “is manipulating medicinal substances” by not taking the ones prescribed to him by doctors, but taking massive amounts of other substances that he was receiving from unknown sources, which was leading to a deterioration of his health. The court doctors' facts were confirmed by authoritative independent experts. The prosecutor concluded that the defendant was intentionally affecting his medical condition with the goal of being sent to Moscow for treatment.

In December, Milosevic asked the judges' permission to travel to Moscow to Bakulev Cardiovascular Surgery Center for examination. In January, the Russian government presented guarantees to The Hague Tribunal for “the personal safety of Milosevic during his stay in Russia and his return to The Hague within the time limit set by the tribunal.”

On February 24, however, the judges refused Milosevic's request. They stated that the defendant had not shown that Bakulev Center was the only place where he could be examined. But the main impediment was that the judges simply did not believe that he would return.

An autopsy was performed on Milosevic's body yesterday at the Dutch Forensics Institute. Relatives of the former president insisted that the autopsy and toxicological analysis be performed in Moscow, but the tribunal refused that request, instead allowing pathologists from Belgrade and Moscow to be present at the autopsy in The Netherlands.

The majority of the former president's supporters reject the possibility of suicide. “Milosevic would never do harm to himself,” his legal adviser Stephen Kaye said,” even though both of his parents committed suicide. The administration of Scheveningen Prison, where Milosevic was being held, made it clear that he was under special observation. The tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, did not rule out the possibility of suicide, however, saying that the tribunal's main defendant could thus challenge the tribunal a last time.

Relatives and supporters of Milosevic are accusing The Hague in his death. “All responsibility for Slobodan's death lies with The Hague Tribunal,” his bother Borislav said. Milosevic's widow Mira Markovic went even further, telling CNN that “the tribunal killed my husband.” The Socialist Party of Serbia, which Milosevic was honorary chairman of, made similar statements.

That theme was taken up by many present and former Russian politicians. The thought behind their statements was that Milosevic was not being tried in The Hague but taking revenge for his fight to preserve Yugoslavia, the unity of the Serbian people and that he was a great friend of Russia. Those are all myths, however. In reality, Milosevic practically dug the grave for Yugoslavia and caused his own people, the Serbs, much of the suffering in loss that it experiences a decade a go. Russia was simply used by him, as he tried to cause conflict between it and the West for his own benefit.

The Milosevic Formula

Milosevic lived by a formula of gaining and retaining power at any price. A biographer of the former Yugoslav president from the 1980s onward wrote, “I cannot imagine him an average citizen walking down the street.”

Milosevic came to power through a putsch. In 1987, as first secretary of the Serbian communists, he called an extraordinary plenary meeting of the central committee that dismissed head of the republic Ivan Stambolic. Stambolic was not simply Milosevic's patron, he had made him the second-ranking person in Serbia from a simple banking bureaucrat. Thus Milosevic thanked his benefactor in 1987. Thirteen years later, when Stambolic intended to return to politics a the head of the opposition, Milosevic ordered his extermination, as the participants in his kidnapping and murder themselves recounted recently.

In 1991, when Milosevic was hanging onto power by a hair and the opposition was demonstrating in Belgrade and had begun a civil-disobedience campaign, Milosevic started a war with Croatia, calling on his countrymen to unite in the face of a common external enemy. Having been incited to fight for their independence, Croatian Serbs created Srpska Kraina, an independent state within the territory of Croatia. International intermediaries, including Russia, proposed that it have a special status as a state within a state. That proposal was ideal for Serbian national interests, but Milosevic nonetheless rejected it. Two years later, the Croatian Serbs lost everything and were made refugees.

In 1995, Milosevic also betrayed the Bosnian Serbs when he signed the Dayton Accord, which was a painful blow to them. The Bosnian Serbs had been offered several settlement plans before that that were much more beneficial to them than the Dayton Accord. But the Bosnian Serbs rejected them all at the instruction of Milosevic. But Milosevic received the status of guarantor from the Dayton Accord. If the West wanted to maintain peace in Bosnia, it had to agree to keep Milosevic in power.

The war in Kosovo and the NATO strikes in Yugoslavia could have been avoided as well. If Milosevic had signed the Rambouille Peace Agreement in 1999, Kosovo would have remained part of Serbia with broad political autonomy. But Milosevic consciously provoked the NATO bombings to crush the opposition under the cover of wartime conditions and increase his power at the expense of Kosovo.

Milosevic and Russia

Milosevic always applied the same formula to Russia. He refused its help any time there was the slightest chance of reaching an agreement with the West independently.

Two days after the beginning of the bombing of Yugoslavia, Russian foreign minister at the time Irog Ivanov told members of the State Duma the sensational news that “When Russia prevented the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1998 by convincing Belgrade to agree to the presence of an OSCE mission in Kosovo, Milosevic signed two separate agreements with NATO. One was on the maximum number of Serbian troops in Kosovo and the other on fly-over rights for NATO aviation on the territory of Kosovo. Russia had no relation to with those agreements. But it is their violation by Belgrade that NATO is using to justify its bombing of Yugoslavia.”

In June 1999, when Viktor Chernomyrdin, acting as the emissary of the Russian president, convinced Milosevic to accept the peace plan and stop the bombardment, a source close to Chernomyrdin told Kommersant that “if it hadn't been for Chernomyrdin, Milosevic most likely would have made a separate peace with NATO.” According to some sources, at the height of the military operation, Milosevic contacted then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright a propsed a deal: Belgrade would capitulate to the United States if Washington would agree to keep Milosevic in power. But the deal never came off and the Balkan leader soon fell.

The recent trip to Moscow for treatment that never took place was also used by Milosevic's inner circle to try to drive a wedge between Russia and the West. That attempt was unsuccessful.

The attitude of the majority of Serbs to their former leader was expressed by one citizen on the website of the independent radio station B-92 in Belgrade: “How terrible that he died unconvicted.” The Hague Tribunal is in fact responsible for being unable to proof his guilt and conclude the trial in four years. But now not the tribunal, but life itself has sentenced Slobodan Milosevic.
by Oleg Zorin

All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 13, 2006

March 13, 2006 at 01:08 PM in Europe | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home