According to wire and newspaper reports, Slobodan Milosevic, the man Empire loves to hate, may be too ill to stand trial – even a show one, staged so ineptly by the Hague Inquisition over the past two years. His defense, scheduled to begin Monday, was postponed till July 14, due to Milosevic’s ongoing blood pressure problems.
Cartoon from The Guardian (thanks to Ian Miller for the link).
The process, frivolous in the extreme, has recently suffered a series of setbacks. First the presiding judge Richard May had to resign due to ill health – and died last week from the mysterious illness. His replacement, Iain Bonomy, was chosen just in time for a ruling on the motion by the Inquisition-appointed amici curiae to drop several of the 66 charges against Milosevic (including genocide) due to the prosecution’s lack of evidence. The motion was dismissed out of hand. Furthermore, Milosevic’s defense – which he is conducting himself – has been shackled with requirements that he submits witness lists and evidentiary material to the prosecution well in advance – something the prosecutors almost never did themselves; indeed, they often submitted last-minute materials and made frequent changes in schedule, with no objections from the “judges.” Par for the course for ICTY, but hardly justice.
Milosevic also got half the time alloted to the prosecution, and only two months total to prepare his case (while the prosecution had three years). Given that he is facing a “kitchen sink indictment,” usually thrown at the accused in hope that at least something will stick, he has to go over thousands of pages and hours of videos, something humanly impossible in the time he has allotted. But he has no choice; the way the Inquisition works, if the defendant does not contest the prosecutors’ allegations, they are assumed to be correct and thus “established” as fact.
Now the “judges” have to decide whether to impose counsel on Milosevic, dismiss the case, or something else altogether. A dismissal is unlikely – the Milosevic trial is at the heart of ICTY’s existence, and his conviction is absolutely necessary for continuing to assert the dubious legitimacy of that “court,” and more importantly, its hideous rewrite of history. But the imposition of counsel, however cheered by the Inquisition’s partisans, has been explicitly rejected by Milosevic. If they impose a defender on him, it will be too glaringly obvious the former Serbian leader is being railroaded. What the ICTY “judges” will do is anybody’s guess, but expect it to be in the interest of the ICTY – and the Empire – and not the interest of justice, fairness or any sort of principle.
Easy on the salt, indeed.