{"id":1123,"date":"2004-07-07T01:01:03","date_gmt":"2004-07-07T08:01:03","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2004-07-07T01:01:03","modified_gmt":"2004-07-07T08:01:03","slug":"another-snag-in-the-milosevic-show-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2004\/07\/07\/another-snag-in-the-milosevic-show-trial\/","title":{"rendered":"Another snag in the Milosevic show trial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>According to wire and newspaper reports, Slobodan Milosevic, the man Empire loves to hate, may be too ill to stand trial &#8211; 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&#8217;s ongoing blood pressure problems. <\/p>\n<p><img src=http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/photos\/perm\/bell1.jpg><br \/>\nCartoon from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/cartoons\/stevebell\/0,7371,1255059,00.html\">The Guardian<\/a> (thanks to Ian Miller for the link).<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>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 &#8211; and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/yugo\/article\/0,2763,1252052,00.html\">died last week<\/a> from the mysterious illness. His replacement, Iain Bonomy, was chosen just in time for a ruling on the motion by the Inquisition-appointed <i>amici curiae<\/i> to drop several of the 66 charges against Milosevic (including genocide) due to the prosecution&#8217;s lack of evidence. The motion was <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/news?tmpl=story&#038;u=\/nm\/20040616\/wl_nm\/warcrimes_milosevic_dc_2\">dismissed<\/a> out of hand. Furthermore, Milosevic&#8217;s defense &#8211; which he is conducting himself &#8211; has been shackled with requirements that he submits witness lists and evidentiary material to the prosecution well in advance &#8211; 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 &#8220;judges.&#8221; Par for the course for ICTY, but hardly justice.<br \/>\nMilosevic also got half the time alloted to the prosecution, and only two months total to prepare his case (while the prosecution had three <i>years<\/i>). Given that he is facing a &#8220;kitchen sink indictment,&#8221; usually thrown at the accused in hope that at least <i> something<\/i> 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&#8217; allegations, they are assumed to be correct and thus &#8220;established&#8221; as fact.<br \/>\nNow the &#8220;judges&#8221; have to decide whether to impose counsel on Milosevic, dismiss the case, or something else altogether. A dismissal is unlikely &#8211; the Milosevic trial is at the heart of ICTY&#8217;s existence, and his conviction is absolutely necessary for continuing to assert the dubious legitimacy of that &#8220;court,&#8221; and more importantly, its hideous rewrite of history. But the imposition of counsel, however cheered by the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.scotsman.com\/latest.cfm?id=3166451\">Inquisition&#8217;s partisans<\/a>, 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 &#8220;judges&#8221; will do is anybody&#8217;s guess, but expect it to be in the interest of the ICTY &#8211; and the Empire &#8211; and not the interest of justice, fairness or any sort of principle.<br \/>\nEasy on the salt, indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>According to wire and newspaper reports, Slobodan Milosevic, the man Empire loves to hate, may be too ill to stand trial &#8211; 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&#8217;s ongoing blood pressure [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_social_image_id":0,"_social_image_url":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-1123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","_social_image_id":false,"subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1123"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}