December 19, 2002
More
Dirty Lies
Courtesy
of The Hague Inquisition
Just
recently, this column examined the many facets of falsifying
history, noting in passing the role of the Hague Inquisition
in currently the largest such effort in the world. Indeed,
the ICTY is an endeavor more massive even than the current
campaign to conjure a reason for invading Iraq, and it seeks
not merely to modify history, but to rewrite it wholesale.
Lubyanka,
not Nuremberg
Its
main thesis, that Slobodan Milosevic and other Serb leaders
organized a vast conspiracy, a "joint
criminal enterprise," to murder, expel or conquer
other Balkan peoples and "defy the West" in the
process, is a transparent attempt to recast Balkans actors
as modern-day Axis and Allies. In this production, Slobodan
Milosevic is starring as Hitler, his fellow Serbs
as Nazis, and Albanians, Croats and Bosnian Muslims as
their innocent victims, while the ICTY invokes the spirit
of Nuremberg.
Apart
from this being a deeply ironic role reversal from the original
production, which ran in blood from 1941 to 1945, the "Tribunal’s"
methods and practices reflect far more the Soviet show
trials of the Stalin era. It doesn’t help that the accused
are presumed guilty until proven innocent, just like those
in Lubyanka,
or that its "holding facilities" in Scheveningen
were
used by the Nazis to imprison Dutch patriots.
For
almost a year, however, Milosevic has been making a mockery
of the prosecutors’ efforts to railroad him. He has successfully
demolished every witness and every argument brought out against
him, while refusing to recognize either the Inquisition’s
authority or its rules. Milosevic’s outspoken defense made
a striking contrast to the conquered Balkans, where the Empire
had managed to silence virtually all the voices of dissent
and resistance.
Beria’s
Heirs
Having
failed in a head-on confrontation, despite playing with heavily
loaded dice, the Inquisitors tried a different route. In September,
they managed to extort
a confession from a former Bosnian Serb leader, Biljana
Plavsic, in which she not only admitted to participating in
the planning of atrocities, but also implicated Milosevic
and other Serb dignitaries.
Bits
of Plavsic’s plea cited
by the media sound like they were written by the prosecutors:
[She]
acknowledged she covered up crimes, ignored widespread
allegations of criminal acts and "publicly rationalized
and justified the ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs"
in a document setting out facts underpinning her guilty
plea.
"Mrs.
Plavsic embraced and supported the objective of ethnic separation
by force and contributed to achieving it," said the document
admitting her role in killings, expulsions and cruelty inflicted
by Bosnian Serbs on non-Serbs in 1992. … (Reuters)
It’s
as if the Inquisitors took lessons in purging "traitors
to the Party" directly from Lavrenti
Beria’s NKVD. Such extorted confessions are part and parcel
of any show trial, but even the ICTY has not been this blatant
before.
Why
Plavsic confessed is a mystery. She claims it was remorse,
and that Serbs committed
crimes out of fear, but both explanations sound more pathetic
than reasonable. She
does have a strong dislike for Milosevic, and she enthusiastically
collaborated with Bosnia’s NATO occupiers between 1996 and
1998. Plavsic's true motives may be an enigma, but the Inquisition's
are not. They have seized upon the confession to re-launch
allegations of Nazi-like
conduct by the Serbs, while "rewarding" Plavsic
with a "lenient" sentence of life
imprisonment.
'Nazi'
Slander Resurrected
The
assault came this week, at Plavsic’s sentencing hearings.
One of the Inquisitors’ star witnesses was no other than Madeleine
Albright. The former U.S. Secretary of State has never
tried to hide her Serbophobia, nor has she ever expressed
an ounce of remorse for masterminding the criminal act of
NATO aggression in 1999, which led to the present occupation
of Kosovo. In fact, she has been outright proud of it, as
well as of her support in establishing the Inquisition.
Albright
was supposed to testify to Plavsic’s willingness to collaborate
with the NATO occupiers, but also to provide the association
between the alleged Serb crimes and the Holocaust. Events
in Bosnia were "reminiscent of pictures that reminded
one of World War II," she
said, adding, "We saw pictures of people being taken
into what could only be labeled as concentration camps."
Reinforcing
the Nazi analogy further was Holocaust celebrity Elie
Wiesel. Even during the war, Wiesel sided with the Bosnian
Muslim campaign to depict their side as the victim of "Serb
Nazis," despite the fact that many Muslims joined
the actual Nazis sixty years ago. Since he neither knew
Plavsic or possessed intimate knowledge of the alleged atrocities
in Bosnia, Wiesel’s testimony was intended purely for emotional
value in absence of real arguments.
In
case anyone missed the point, the prosecutors then showed
the pictures of emaciated Muslims in Serb "death camps,"
recycling that 1992 canard long after its expiration date.
The photo, actually depicting a tuberculosis-ridden Muslim
standing in front of a chicken-wire fence with barbed-wire
top, was debunked
as a malicious camera trick by 1997.
Trotting
Albright to the stand, invoking Wiesel’s fame and recycling
trashy propaganda photos only goes to show that, while the
Inquisition’s vitriolic assault on Serbs as "genocidal
Nazis" shows no sign of slowdown, the actual case against
Plavsic – or Milosevic, for that matter – is pretty much nonexistent.
The only "joint criminal enterprise" is between
them, NATO and the Empire.
Champions
of Falsehood
But
that is not all. Having long since collapsed into itself under
the burden of lies and fabrications, like a black hole, the
ICTY attracts ever more such material from all over the world.
The following two cases come from the UK, but there is plenty
of hypocrisy to go around.
As
the Plavsic hearings unfolded and the Milosevic trial continued,
the London Guardian published a tear-jerking
piece by Jadranka Cigelj, a "rape victim" of
a "Serb death camp." Cigelj’s passionate diatribe
is a masterpiece of propaganda. It blames Milosevic for horrendous
atrocities without a shred of evidence, while also damning
the "West" for its supposed inability to stop him
then, or punish him now.
Though
an author of a book about her alleged ordeal (for it was never
proven in court), and a prominently featured celebrity victim,
Jadranka Cigelj is also a high
official of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), party
of the late Croatian president, ardent Serbophobe and Holocaust
revisionist Franjo Tudjman. She also worked
for the Croatian Information Center, a propaganda arm
of the HDZ aimed at Western reporters, and single-handedly
provided most of the "evidence" for stories of mass
rape and genocide in Bosnia, none of which have ever been
proven. In other words, Ms. Cigelj is a professional propagandist
and a committed Croatian national-socialist. Her story, however
tempting, ought to be taken with healthy skepticism.
Speaking
of accomplished propagandists, one cannot ignore the real
champion in the category, the London-based Institute for War
and Peace Reporting. Their take
on reporting about the Inquisition simply reeks of falsehoods.
They dare use such terms as "hate speech," "misconceptions"
and "negative propaganda," even as their own coverage
is nothing but. One look at their Balkans
report page is enough: tabloid-style headlines heading
columns of malicious drivel. Lascivious services of media
hacks have been a powerful factor in the rise of the modern
repressive State, but IWPR has taken shameless prostitution
of journalism to a whole new level.
Truth?
You Can’t Handle the Truth!
It
is disturbing to see the ease with which outlandish concepts
such as the "Tribunal" itself and the outrageous
lies it peddles are accepted by the general public in the
Empire and elsewhere. But the sad fact of human nature is
that violations of truth and justice are seen as somehow less
despicable the more they are committed.
The
sheer gall of the violators seems to know no bounds. One of
the Inquisitors actually
said, "It is only through the establishment of the
truth that the unhealthy shackles of revisionism that debilitate
the former Yugoslavia and that foster suspicion, ethnic hatred
and civil unrest can be broken."
Everything
in this sentence is a lie. The Inquisition does not establish
truth, but rather forges those very shackles of revisionism,
making sure that the debilitating miseries of former Yugoslavia
are perpetuated!
Burden
of Fiction
Since
its illegal
inception in 1993, the "International Criminal Tribunal"
has faithfully pursued its one and only purpose: to serve
the Empire’s interests in the Balkans. It has done so in part
by usurping the authority of sovereign states and subverting
international treaties and accords, but its focus has been
on fabricating a recent history of the Balkans that would
justify Imperial intervention, occupation and war.
What
makes the ICTY’s lies and hypocrisy so hard to swallow is
the fact that many Balkans atrocities they claim to be prosecuting
actually happened – but not in the way they present
them, and not to the degree alleged by the combatants or the
media. By manipulating very real crimes into false history,
the Hague Inquisition is poisoning the well of collective
memory for generations to come.
Driven
by their demented obsession to falsify facts by casting Serbs
(and sometimes others, for the sake of "diversity"
and political expedience) as evil incarnate, the Inquisition
and its patrons have come to willfully ignore reality. And
in reality, their actions have disastrous consequences, perfectly
exemplified in the recent terrorist attack on Pristina’s Bill
Clinton Avenue, and the situation in Kosovo in general.
Those
who seek to control things that by nature cannot be controlled
are doomed to fail. When the truth finally emerges, and it
has a nasty habit of doing so when least expected, there will
be Hell to pay.
Nebojsa Malic
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