The United States of Amnesia: Who's Defending Whom @ The Hague? [Re-Post of 24 August No. 1]
What Gore Vidal called the USA: the United States of Amnesia. But most of what comes across as forgetfulness (Buck Henry once: 'I'd like you to meet my wife, . . . uh, . . . er . . . um?') is just plain old ignorance gracelessly attempting to self-valorize. Aggressive ignorance, that's what the 'A' in USA is these days. And most people in the rest of the world would just rather get out the way, try to avoid it, rather than engage in discourse with someone who doesn't know what either you or he is talking about, but is absolutely certain he is right because he's got all the juice on his side--I said 'juice', ok? --and is just plain nuts on the for-real side.
And for most of these informationally malnourished and therefore pathologically fat-headed web wonks to be tossing out charges like 'fascist' and 'anti-Semite' against their intellectual and political betters is reminiscent of Lenny's 'What, Gestapo? I'm the mailman!'
So to set things straight, let's be clear on just who brought all this nasty Nazi shit into the ICDSM game.
Here's the début post of the CirqueMinime/Paris blog, all about the attempted purges (really more like forced high-colonic baloney implants) the ICDSM went through a year ago. Now, on the eve of the presentation of the Milosevic Defense case (and the beginning of General Ndindiliyimana's trial at the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania), I think it's very important to remember just who's been defending whom.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
29 August 2004
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CirqueMinime/Paris
24 August 2004 No. 1
In just a couple days the little heralded and much deferred Milosevic defense will finally kick off.
Here at CirqueMinime/Paris, where almost ten years ago now we cut our geopolitical teeth on the Balkan wars, we've lately been working on other things and are feeling ever more out of it as concerns our good friends in Belgrade and The Hague.
The enormous—and obscenely ignored—US/UK/UN-backed holocaust in Central Africa (9 million and counting since the 1 October 1990 Rwandan Patriotic Front invasion that began blasting the Free Trade Corridor from Congo to Sudan) has occupied most of the center ring here, and The General's Book on Rwanda (working title) is currently at that 'adolescent' stage where it just wants to sit around the house getting fatter and refusing to go out and make some new friends. So, in this the first edition of the CM/P blog, we're going to reissue the dépêche that exactly a year ago was supposed to raise consciousness and (especially) financial support for the Milosevic defense.
I'm not sure if it succeeded in either of those purposes, but it did do a good deal to separate the sheep from the goats (or the pigs from the truffles, or the chum from the real fish food) in the Free Slobo movement. As usually happens in politics, the bounders, arrivistes, carpetbaggers, dwarves, finks, phonies and anti-communist fags are still circling the main work party, trying to suck off all the energy they can and divert it toward their personal passions: in the case of the defense of Yugoslavia, it seems that these Red/Brownies and the born-again Ziono-fascists, who crawled out from under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, have been using us to make themselves over as truer- and redder'n-ever Leftists while keeping their fund-raising techniques as current (and duplicitous) as Geo Soros’s Rolex.
But this dépêche seems timely enough cause most of the guys it trashes are still trash. And they've been joined by a few fellow stragglers: Here in France, a bunch of the guys who’ve gotten fat inside their berets by surfing the wake of NATO's dynamite fishing in the Balkans, always claiming full support for President Milosevic’s world history course, but, consumed by that Chomskian/Hermanian sense of defining justice, democracy and decency within 'that which is knowable, feasible and acceptable to the powerful', refusing to associate their names with his, have had to ‘come out’ as the simpering 'McGreeveys', the gutless Trotskyite collabos they are.
We love example by anecdote here at CM/P, so here's one: In the dépêche that follows you’ll read about an article called 'NY-Belgrade--aller-retour' which compared 9/11 to the 78-day NATO terror bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. This was not Michael Parenti or Howard Zinn, but still . . . when it was first printed in the monthly French vanity trick-sheet I used to write for, the editor cut the punch line: all about how the recently NATO-installed Kostunica government had extinguished the 'eternal flame' at the memorial for the victims of the -soon-to-be Michael Moore Peace Prize laureate, Wes Clark’s Mortel Kombat pig-out so as not to embarrass potential Western investors in the privatization of Serbia that has led to 40% unemployment. But to this sclerotic old Trot suck-up, currying the favor of the powerful was such second nature (like pissing in the bathtub) that first he claimed the cut was because the article was too long, then completely forgot he’d ever made the cut—or, for that matter, had ever printed the article.
Now, what's that got to do with anything, right? But, see, one of the chief problems with the Milosevic defense today is that the President's real innocence of all the charges against him has been forgotten in a whole lot of heady legal/linguistic maneuverings. I'll leave you with just two examples: One is cited somewhere deep in the article below, but the other--perhaps even more cogent--is almost never mentioned inside or outside The Hague or B’grade.
A bunch of journalists were recently called by President Milosevic as witnesses for the defense. These Canadians, David Pugliese, Garth Pritchard, Scott Taylor, and a Frenchman, Renaud Girard from Le Figaro, have completely o-d’ed on self importance, forgotten what a real court of law is supposed to do and gone completely around the twist about the historical significance of their testimony. These guys casually toss off that they wouldn't dream of defending a 'mass murderer' or a 'corrupt Balkan warlord, Serbian strongman or Stalinist dictator'—as if their dreams were relevant to anything more'n why their bed-sheets are always sticking together. Real courts compel witnesses to testify—if they refuse the court's order, then their dreams will be coming from an iron bunk with a wooden pillow and accompanied by the music of a jailor’s jangling keys. That dim bulb in Le Figaro turned his witness interview at The Hague into some kind of stolen scoop by claiming he'd confronted President Milosevic with certain murders that went down on his watch and other matters of political corruption with which he could have been charged had he not been indicted for war crimes unto genocide. What Girard et Le Fig fail to note is that the President was literally kidnapped from the central jail in Belgrade where he'd been held for some time while the new government tried unsuccessfully to find any evidence that might’ve made any of the Fig-pucker’s charges stick. The real reason the late PM Zoran Djindjic bagged the President off into an RAF jet for The Hague [the popular excuse was that it was a promise of ransom that was never kept] was that Serbia could do nothing at all legally to the thrice elected Slobodan Milosevic, and Louise Arbour’s victimization of NATO’s targets got the New Serbia off the hook. And today, Serbia/Montenegro’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, the craven Vuk Draskovic, taking a page out of my old editor’s playbook after one too many brushes with Western deaths squads, is in full-arm-wave over dropping all charges his country had filed in the ICJ against its NATO tormentors for fear S/E won't get that brass pass to Club Europe.
And then the pièce de la résistance of the defendant's (or ‘The Accused’, as he’s more frequently called) democratic bona fides is that President Milosevic, and NO ONE else, initiated the amendment of the Yugoslav constitution in 1999-2000 to put the office of the President, formerly a rotating appointment among the presidents of the republics and a more or less ceremonial position--other than for its authority over the JNA, the Yugoslav Army, which ceased to be much of a big deal after the secessionist wars of 1991-1995—it was Slobodan Milosevic who put the Yugoslav presidency to a vote of the entire Yugoslav population.
Is that any way to run a fucking dictatorship?!
So, anyway, here goes
CirqueMinime/Paris
—and don't forget your password:
NOBULLSHIT!
--MC
Cirque Minime Dépêche:
The IC’M
by
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
31 August 2003
We’ve been getting some bad information late and soon. Some real bad information, and it’s getting worse—until all we hear these days is bullshit (too inconsistent and foul smelling even to be called ‘lies’). The Public are constantly forced to ignore what’s really happening, and so they’ve become this ignorant mass that can do nothing to stop—or even to slow down—the complete sublation of their most vital interests into the We-Waste-the-World agendas of today’s born-again, bald-faced Barbarians (Attila was a honey compared to Sharon and Rummy) who determine just what we will and what we won’t know.
Let’s take as an example a case that has been receiving ill service even from some of those who pretend to hold it as a high cause:
The occultation of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, along with a similar media brown-out of recent events that have strong-armed Serbia/Yugoslavia into the role of a NATO farm club, offering up its youth as fodder in the fight for the Empire that recently encouraged and enabled the assassinations of several such kids at a swimming hole in Kosovo, against a former ally, Iraq, are the results of a general obfuscation of History through the use of a totally debased terminology for the purposes of justifying or rationalizing the universally illegal and obviously demented policies that have for the last several decades driven Western commercial/financial/military/industrial interests toward the creation of a globalized waste economy: an essentially criminal enterprise based on the over-valorization of false needs (and artificial scarcities) and the conversion of traditional (re)productive forces into forces for global domination and destruction. And, of course, all this comes with a complimentary Culture in which ignorance is exalted as style, and people know who they are politically by how they gratify themselves sensually.
Very soon now, the prosecution at The Hague Tribunal (Carla Del Ponte, Geoffrey Nice, et alia) will lay to rest its stillborn case against President Milosevic. And though any civilized court would have long ago thrown Del Ponte’s miscarriage of justice back into that bottomless latrine of juridical malfeasance she fished it out of (where can also be found the cases against Dreyfus, Leonard Pelletier and OJ), this long-acknowledged NATO jesters’ court will demand that President Milosevic present his defense, tranquil in the certainty that any additions the man who’s come to be known as ‘Mr. Accused’ might make to the already corpulent body of evidence for the horrific crimes committed by its sponsors against the once-sovereign and UN-founding-member state of Yugoslavia will not be mediated beyond the ICTY steps.
But after nearly two years of jousting with windbags in cross examining hundreds of false witnesses: NGO, UN, MI5-6, CIA, BND, NED, OSCE, USAID, MPRI mercenaries; warlords and snitches,professional and amateur; political hacks from several nations; some badly tortured, some well-paid, all ill-disguised and worse-informed and without a teardrop of good faith in the whole lot (save, perhaps, for one Rade Markovic, former Yugoslav intelligence officer under Milosevic, who, to the great dumbfoundment of the prosecution, told the court that he’d been tortured and offered a ‘new life’ to testify falsely against his former boss, thereby turning on and biting Del Ponte on her ample ass!); and after repeated insults and injuries to the President’s less than robust health—though he, himself, never complains about it!—while this pack of black-clad jackals posing as learned men and true mawkishly proclaim their concerns for the Defendant’s well-being, then use his occasional iatrogenic illnesses as currency to buy life-support-time for the prosecution’s DOA case; and after the imposition of a state of siege against the people of Serbia/Yugoslavia, in general, and the representatives of the former governments led by President Milosevic and his Socialist Party of Serbia, in particular, that has caused the dedicated folks who have consistently furnished the moral, medical, material, legal, financial and informational support for the defense—those not forced into exile!—to find their lives and work very difficult unto impossible; and after subversion and betrayal by some pull-up-the-ladder-Jack-I’m-aboard opportunist Amis-requins from within his very own support Committee—the sort of betrayal that would’ve driven Job to a regime of Prozac enemas: after all this, the resources of the Slobodan Milosevic Defense Forces are at an all-time low.
At this critical phase in the struggle, a great deal of the responsibility for supporting the upcoming defense has fallen to the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) and its various national Committees. Yet the ICDSM, with its origins and strongest sustenance coming from the Communist and Socialist movements of Europe, and especially Eastern Europe and Russia, has not been spared the slings and arrows of some of the West’s most outrageous fortune hunting dirtball provocateurs and pimps for gang-war Capitalism.
—But I’m getting ahead of myself here—time for some backstory:
On 1 April 2001, Belgrade time, but still a few minutes shy of the deadline of midnight 31 March 2001, US time, Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in Belgrade. Less than one week earlier, on 25 March 2001, the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic was founded in Berlin after the first meeting of the European Peace Forum (which was, itself, born from the International European Tribunal on the NATO war against Yugoslavia. You can still find its web page: http://www.nato-tribunal.de.)
The initiative for this Committee came from Professor Velko Valkanov, of Sofia, Bulgaria, who today serves as one of the two co-chairs with Ramsey Clark of the US.
Professor Valkanov was a presidential candidate from the Bulgarian Left (Bulgarian Socialist Party and others) in the 1992 elections. He lost the election to the Rightist candidate, Zhelyu Zhelev, by a narrow margin: Valkanov got 47.15% (2,430,434 votes) to Zhelev’s 52.85% (2,738,416 votes).
Valkanov was for many years a member of Parliament from the BSP. He chose not to run in the elections of 2001 because his party had taken a decidedly pro-Western course. He also served as chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on Human Rights and is currently chairman of the Bulgarian Committee for Human Rights. He is also the president of the Bulgarian Antifascist Union, a broad-based organization made up of both veterans of the WWII resistance and contemporary progressives.
Vladamir Krsljanin, former foreign secretary of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and first assistant to its then president, Slobodan Milosevic, was tasked by the SPS with co-ordinating the formation of the Committee. With legal advice coming from another solid Leftist, Christopher Black, a Toronto attorney and CPC member, with expertise in international criminal defense and a defense counsel at the Rwandan Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, and one of the lawyers who, along with Michael Mandel, filed war crimes charges against NATO in May 1999; and with information and publicity directed by Jared Israel, a 60s SDSer who was pulled back into the political mix after a 30 year hiatus, through his web site, "The Emperor's New Clothes" (TENC): a petition was posted on the internet to find support for the Committee.
Krsljanin, Black and Israel, along with Nico Varkevisser, a Dutch CP member, chairman of an NGO called ‘Global Reflection’ and editor of the magazine ‘Targets’, became the promotionalnucleus for the ICDSM in the West. By the time Israel and Black first met up at the New York-based International Action Center’s (IAC) 10 June 2000 International Tribunal for U.S./NATO war crimes in Yugoslavia, Israel, on the strength of his TENC website, was already tight with the SPS and close to the Milosevic family. As a gesture of Free Slobo solidarity, Black was made an editor at TENC, though after only ten months of frequent disagreements over what then appeared to be Israel’s closet Zionism, he was dropped from the Emperor’s masthead. But all three men, Israel, Black and Varkevisser, had gained the trust of Krsljanin and become vice-presidents on the ICDSM.
On 17 June 2001, the first official Committee meeting was called in Belgrade. During the week of 11 June, Christopher Black had been in Belgrade to study President Milosevic’s legal situation on behalf of the Committee. The President had been held in the Belgrade City Prison, since 1 April 2001, on charges of political corruption and misappropriation of funds.
In his report to the ICDSM, Mr. Black stated:
It is clear that there is not a shred of evidence that
Mr. Milosevic committed any crime. The inability of the
present regime to produce any evidence against
Mr. Milosevic after all this time can lead to only one
conclusion: that his arrest and detention are for
political reasons.
He went on to note that various Yugoslav and Serbian officials with whom he had met all conceded that there was NO EVIDENCE OF ANY KIND AGAINST Slobodan Milosevic. They justified their actions on the grounds that they were doing what the U.S. government wanted.
Mr Black concluded:
The DOS leaders are not demanding that Yugoslavia's national
sovereignty be surrendered to the Hague Tribunal. They are
demanding that Yugoslavia's national sovereignty be surrendered
to the United States.
Then on 28 June 2001, President Milosevic was kidnapped by now-dead Serbian PM, Zoran Djindjic, whisked off to the NATO air base at Tuzla, in Bosnia, and flown by the RAF to The Hague, in the Netherlands.
After his 1999 IAC Tribunal on NATO war crimes in Yugoslavia, Ramsey Clark seemed an indispensable ally, and acting president of the SPS and former Yugoslav foreign minister, Zivadin Jovanovic, fervently requested his assistance. Though Clark’s schedule was quite full with African and Korean affairs, he agreed to come to Belgrade to see how he could be of help. But his trip was delayed by Yugoslav ambassador to the US, Milan St. Protic, who held up his visa request and forced Clark to miss the presidential kidnapping by just hours.
Once in Belgrade, Clark stepped up. He held two press conferences, spoke at an enormous rally in front of the Federal Parliament, and was even received by President Kostunica. Among his statements:
It is an enormous tragedy for Yugoslavia, the Serbian people
and the rule of law. . . . Serbian Prime Minister Djindjic
and other officials should be investigated for high crimes
against the people, and if found guilty should be sentenced
in accordance with the law.
In August 2001, after the overall efforts of the SPS leadership to focus attention on the growing abuse of law in Serbia/Yugoslavia had proven insufficient or ineffective, the SLOBODA Freedom Association was founded. It was SLOBODA, which presently oversees and co-ordinates the activities of the ICDSM, that convened the next meeting of the Committee in October 2001 in Belgrade.
It was at this conference, entitled
Freedom for Slobodan Milosevic - Moral, Political and Legal Imperative
and held at the Sava Centre in Belgrade, 21-22 October 2001, that the ICDSM began to take shape. Krsljanin’s organisational talents made the whole affair run like one of Fulvio Grimaldi’s great documentary films. (Grimaldi is another ICDSM veep with rock-solid anti-Imperialist credentials who played a prominent role in this conference.) And the audience, like the dais, was made up of as many former Milosevic opponents as allies—my favorite among them being Duci Simonovic, PhD, former Yugoslav Olympic roundballer (Stretch is the bonespur Bill [Walton] of the Balkans and coach to Vlade Divac) and currently an engaged and enraged political philosopher and the formidable graphic artist who designed the ‘Welcome To The Hague’ death-head posters that adorned the Conference—all of them joined by the determination to bring a halt to the brutal replacement of Yugoslav sovereignty with a Hitlerian ethnic fragmentation and a New World colonial occupation.
A small part of the final statement of the Conference captures its spirit very well:
The Hague ‘Tribunal’ is a political instrument
of genocide and the satanization of the
Serbian people, and not a court of law.
But this Conference also brought a couple of Big Chief wannabes out of their sweat lodges to make bad gree-gree on their very own Committee. Jared Israel and Nico Varkevisser seemed determined to have the final word on political and ideological qualifications for membership on the executive council of the ICDSM. And they did not suffer criticism well—either on the content or the style of their ‘edicts’. Many of their tactics—like agent baiting and accusations of ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-semitism’—were quite familiar to those, like Israel, who had experienced the infiltration, corruption and eventual neutralisation of the New Left and Black Power movements in the US in the Cointelpro 60s.
At about this time Ramsey Clark accepted a vice-chairmanship of the ICDSM. But to certain Committee members, because of his history of service in the vile Lyndon B. Johnson administration in the late 60s and his work as a defense lawyer for certain political indictees who might have fit into one of the above-mentioned jackets, he was not welcome to this chairmanship. Israel and Varkevisser began to lobby against Clark, then against Professor Mikhail Kuznetsov, the founder and chairman of the Russian Social Tribunal for NATO crimes in Yugoslavia, and chairman of the International Slavic Tribunal, and eventually against several other vice-chairmen of the ICDSM. It became apparent that the large and not-very-quiet American and his faithful Dutch sidekick were more concerned with guarding the exclusivity (and perks) of their power on the executive council of the Committee than they were with actually affecting the liberation of President Milosevic and the people of Yugoslavia.
But so soon after President Milosevic’s kidnapping, everyone was too caught up in the struggle against the on-going crimes of NATO to become involved in Jared and Nico’s ‘ethical cleansings’. And as for my country of residence, France was not as yet represented on the International Committee, and there was no French National Committee. As a representative of the monthly journal Balkans Infos at the October Sava Center Conference, when I presented my paper, ‘Belgrade-New York: aller-retour’, I was referred to as the representative of France. But I am neither French nor Yugoslav.
Finally in early 2002, the world-renowned French defense lawyer, Jacques Vergès, weighed in with some heavy-duty legal analysis of The (unlawful) Hague Tribunal and the non-case against President Milosevic. His book, ‘Legal Apartheid’, written with General Pierre-Marie Gallois and five other French experts on international law, became an important legal reference for the Committee.
After an ill-fated, late starting press conference in the evening of 12 February 2002, the night before Opening Day of the Milosevic trial, in front of hundreds of journalists and a dozen TV cameras—all sent fleeing by a Jared Israel diatribe, white with foam—, a panel of the ICDSM was convened at the Royal Palace Hotel in Amsterdam. On the same dais were representatives of the executive council: Christopher Black, a subdued Israel, a befuddled Varkevisser, Vladamir Krsljanin, the distinguished Italian law Professor, Aldo Bernardini, and, finally, an authentic representative of France, Jacques Vergès. To an audience heavy with international law students from a local college, Maitre Vergès presented a laser-sharp differentiation between ‘extradition’, ‘transfer’, and ‘kidnapping for ransom’, making it unmistakably evident that the President was a victim of the third.
After the dust from the Q&A had settled, Luc Michel, of the Belgian National Communitarian Party and the editor of a newsletter in the name of the 'International Francophone Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic', stepped up to introduce himself to maitres Vergès, Bernardini and Black. Everything was quite cordial then, but few of these men would survive the petty intrigues that Israel and Varkevisser got up to at the onset of the Trial.
In April 2002, Luc Michel was proclaimed a ‘Fascist’ by Jared Israel, but in the name of the ICDSM, and ordered to cease and desist all use of the words ‘Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic’ in the bilingual publications of his Belgian francophone committee. This could not have been because of anything Michel had written in his newsletter, but most probably because the folks at TENC were afraid of his horning in on their action and because of word that his NCP received support from Mommar Kaddafy and Libya—an ‘Islamo-fascist’, ‘Arabo-terrorist’ or ‘rogue state’ in the eyes of certain pro-US/Israeli-Imperialist forces.
Then Jacques Vergès came (and remains at this writing) under hysterical attack for being yet another ‘Fascist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ defender of President Milosevic. This was another example of how pure reaction (with the aid of the internet) had cheapened these terms, and what little sense of political and economic history was demanded by those who engaged Jared Israel & Co in discussion. Vergès, it seems, had once stated that he defended Klaus Barbie to implicate Vichy France in the crimes of the Nazis and to point out that France was guilty of similar crimes in Algeria. From this perfectly reasonable and historically sound position, Jared Israel, with all the anile froth he could muster, spewed absurd charges of Vergès’s denying the Jewish Holocaust, the Soviet Holocaust, the Serb Holocaust, and generally being an ally of ‘Arabo-fascoid terrorism’. Only in Amerika, where anyone can blow-up to become a Rush Limbaugh, could such drivel receive a serious (or self-important) audience.
A similar fate again awaited Ramsey Clark. Israel and Varkevisser quoted the founder of the IAC as saying that ‘Islam was the last refuge of the poor’, and that Sheikh Rahman and all others who are set upon by the state, deserved a defense. This made him an ‘Arabo-terrorist symp’, a ‘Fascist’, an Anti-Semite’, and, subsequently, like Vergès, guilty of, first, falsely claiming to be Milosevic’s lawyer, then slandering and abandoning his non-client. And to add insult to irony, these attacks on leaders of the ICDSM appeared on the very website, TENC, that hosted the Committee.
Soon, in coincidence with—if not directly resulting from—certain positions taken in defense of the Palestinians (in the Spring of 2002, at the time of the Israeli massacre—er, I mean, ‘incursion’ into the Palestinian refugee camps, the SPS put out a position statement, co-signed by President Milosevic from his jail cell in Scheveningen, supporting the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation—Jared Israel made no comment!), and because of their refusals to countenance Israel and Varkevisser’s disruptive unto neutralising attempts at purging the Committee’s leadership, even Black and Krsljanin were accused of working against the interests of President Milosevic and the ICDSM (read: against
the financial interests of Israel, both the small theocracy and the large mediocrity).
After the 28 June 2003 ICDSM demonstration in The Hague, organized by Klaus Hartmann and the German Committee, which featured speeches by members of the Serbian diaspora and representatives from many of the other national Committees in front of the Tribunal, and followed-up with a march and more speeches in front of the prison in Scheveningen, there was an executive council meeting where much of the discord within the Committee was to be aired.
Just at the moment when Varkevisser (Israel was not in attendance) was to express his and Israel's complaints about the Committee's failure to remove Ramsey Clark from his co-chair, Heather Cottin, the representative of the IAC and Ramsey Clark and the widow of pro-Yugoslav activist Sean Gervasi, entered the meeting room. Varkevisser ejaculated and stormed out, gibbering about American spooks, betrayal from every quarter, and manifesting all the symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic melt-down.
It’s not that these infantile melodramatics, which seem mainly to ooze from fear of financial destitution—both Israel and Varkevisser, unrestrained by scruples or any sense of decency, have put quite a bit of effort into creating personal incomes from the struggles of the Yugoslav and Cuban peoples and those who support them—(For some time Israel has been supporting his renaissant military Zionism with appeals for donations in the name of the Milosevic defense, and Varkevisser’s magazine, ‘Targets’, named for the symbols on the t-shirts worn by Yugoslavs during the 1999 bombing, sold a lot of advertising to Cubans and then never saw much if any circulation)—it's not that they have thrown a monkey wrench into an otherwise finely tuned and smoothly running Committee. But it hardly needs to be said that while trying to present a united front in fighting the NATO enemy, you really don’t need a couple of your executives pulling an Enron with your treasury and a mini-autodafé on their fellow Committee members.
But, as President Milosevic has asserted again and again, a united front is all important to the support of his upcoming defense. And this united front will be made up of these National Committees and their leaders:
Russian (Alexander Zinoviev)
German (Klaus Hartmann)
Italian (Enrico Vigna)
British (first William Spring, then Paul Davidson,
now /acting/ Ian Johnson)
Irish (June Kelly)
Bulgarian (Stefan Gajtandzijev)
Romania (CP leader)
India (Bhim Singh)
Mr Krsljanin told me that
On the basis of the amount of activity we can
consider also that committees exist in
Ukraine, Belarus, and Greece. They are in the
process of formation in France, USA, Canada,
and The Netherlands.
On verra en France. But the ICDSM and whatever develops as a French National Committee must redirect all their attention and energy to bringing the defense of President Slobodan Milosevic and all the other political prisoners at Scheveningen, and of the people of Serbia/Yugoslavia, back into the center ring of public attention.
The bullshit did not begin with Iraq!
And this will in no way be automatic or easy, because the same people who called the Milosevic case the ‘most important war crimes trial in fifty years’, have effectively turned out the lights on it and are denying the Public any reasonable access to information about this exercise in legal UnReason going down in their name.
Only by putting aside our particular political proclivities; by totally shining-on all those pot-bellied parasites who would piggie-back their personal portfolios on the heroic liberation struggles of decent people; and by pulling together to expose the mis- and dis-information about recent events in the Balkans and elsewhere and to support what might be our last stand against the horrors of privatized and globalized (in)Justice: can we have any hope of redeeming the truth of our own History from those who would colonise, control and enslave us by ‘re-classifying as terrorist-friendly’ any evidence of what they have done to us and ‘tranquillising’ us with ‘humiliation disguised as additional security measures’, until we don’t care who we really are.
If it’s freedom we seek, then only the Truth will break our dependence on that false consciousness that supports The Hague Tribunal farce, the HIV=AIDS=Death wish, the airliner into the Pentagon hallucination, and the current grotesque equation of Liberation with the US/Israeli militarization of everyday life that has brought us into this very real global war without end.
So at the ICDSM, we’re still all about
FREE SLOBO!! OFF THE TRIBS!!! DONATIONS TO SLOBODA!!!!!
RIGHT ON!
And for most of these informationally malnourished and therefore pathologically fat-headed web wonks to be tossing out charges like 'fascist' and 'anti-Semite' against their intellectual and political betters is reminiscent of Lenny's 'What, Gestapo? I'm the mailman!'
So to set things straight, let's be clear on just who brought all this nasty Nazi shit into the ICDSM game.
Here's the début post of the CirqueMinime/Paris blog, all about the attempted purges (really more like forced high-colonic baloney implants) the ICDSM went through a year ago. Now, on the eve of the presentation of the Milosevic Defense case (and the beginning of General Ndindiliyimana's trial at the ICTR in Arusha, Tanzania), I think it's very important to remember just who's been defending whom.
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
29 August 2004
****************************
CirqueMinime/Paris
24 August 2004 No. 1
In just a couple days the little heralded and much deferred Milosevic defense will finally kick off.
Here at CirqueMinime/Paris, where almost ten years ago now we cut our geopolitical teeth on the Balkan wars, we've lately been working on other things and are feeling ever more out of it as concerns our good friends in Belgrade and The Hague.
The enormous—and obscenely ignored—US/UK/UN-backed holocaust in Central Africa (9 million and counting since the 1 October 1990 Rwandan Patriotic Front invasion that began blasting the Free Trade Corridor from Congo to Sudan) has occupied most of the center ring here, and The General's Book on Rwanda (working title) is currently at that 'adolescent' stage where it just wants to sit around the house getting fatter and refusing to go out and make some new friends. So, in this the first edition of the CM/P blog, we're going to reissue the dépêche that exactly a year ago was supposed to raise consciousness and (especially) financial support for the Milosevic defense.
I'm not sure if it succeeded in either of those purposes, but it did do a good deal to separate the sheep from the goats (or the pigs from the truffles, or the chum from the real fish food) in the Free Slobo movement. As usually happens in politics, the bounders, arrivistes, carpetbaggers, dwarves, finks, phonies and anti-communist fags are still circling the main work party, trying to suck off all the energy they can and divert it toward their personal passions: in the case of the defense of Yugoslavia, it seems that these Red/Brownies and the born-again Ziono-fascists, who crawled out from under the rubble of the Berlin Wall, have been using us to make themselves over as truer- and redder'n-ever Leftists while keeping their fund-raising techniques as current (and duplicitous) as Geo Soros’s Rolex.
But this dépêche seems timely enough cause most of the guys it trashes are still trash. And they've been joined by a few fellow stragglers: Here in France, a bunch of the guys who’ve gotten fat inside their berets by surfing the wake of NATO's dynamite fishing in the Balkans, always claiming full support for President Milosevic’s world history course, but, consumed by that Chomskian/Hermanian sense of defining justice, democracy and decency within 'that which is knowable, feasible and acceptable to the powerful', refusing to associate their names with his, have had to ‘come out’ as the simpering 'McGreeveys', the gutless Trotskyite collabos they are.
We love example by anecdote here at CM/P, so here's one: In the dépêche that follows you’ll read about an article called 'NY-Belgrade--aller-retour' which compared 9/11 to the 78-day NATO terror bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. This was not Michael Parenti or Howard Zinn, but still . . . when it was first printed in the monthly French vanity trick-sheet I used to write for, the editor cut the punch line: all about how the recently NATO-installed Kostunica government had extinguished the 'eternal flame' at the memorial for the victims of the -soon-to-be Michael Moore Peace Prize laureate, Wes Clark’s Mortel Kombat pig-out so as not to embarrass potential Western investors in the privatization of Serbia that has led to 40% unemployment. But to this sclerotic old Trot suck-up, currying the favor of the powerful was such second nature (like pissing in the bathtub) that first he claimed the cut was because the article was too long, then completely forgot he’d ever made the cut—or, for that matter, had ever printed the article.
Now, what's that got to do with anything, right? But, see, one of the chief problems with the Milosevic defense today is that the President's real innocence of all the charges against him has been forgotten in a whole lot of heady legal/linguistic maneuverings. I'll leave you with just two examples: One is cited somewhere deep in the article below, but the other--perhaps even more cogent--is almost never mentioned inside or outside The Hague or B’grade.
A bunch of journalists were recently called by President Milosevic as witnesses for the defense. These Canadians, David Pugliese, Garth Pritchard, Scott Taylor, and a Frenchman, Renaud Girard from Le Figaro, have completely o-d’ed on self importance, forgotten what a real court of law is supposed to do and gone completely around the twist about the historical significance of their testimony. These guys casually toss off that they wouldn't dream of defending a 'mass murderer' or a 'corrupt Balkan warlord, Serbian strongman or Stalinist dictator'—as if their dreams were relevant to anything more'n why their bed-sheets are always sticking together. Real courts compel witnesses to testify—if they refuse the court's order, then their dreams will be coming from an iron bunk with a wooden pillow and accompanied by the music of a jailor’s jangling keys. That dim bulb in Le Figaro turned his witness interview at The Hague into some kind of stolen scoop by claiming he'd confronted President Milosevic with certain murders that went down on his watch and other matters of political corruption with which he could have been charged had he not been indicted for war crimes unto genocide. What Girard et Le Fig fail to note is that the President was literally kidnapped from the central jail in Belgrade where he'd been held for some time while the new government tried unsuccessfully to find any evidence that might’ve made any of the Fig-pucker’s charges stick. The real reason the late PM Zoran Djindjic bagged the President off into an RAF jet for The Hague [the popular excuse was that it was a promise of ransom that was never kept] was that Serbia could do nothing at all legally to the thrice elected Slobodan Milosevic, and Louise Arbour’s victimization of NATO’s targets got the New Serbia off the hook. And today, Serbia/Montenegro’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, the craven Vuk Draskovic, taking a page out of my old editor’s playbook after one too many brushes with Western deaths squads, is in full-arm-wave over dropping all charges his country had filed in the ICJ against its NATO tormentors for fear S/E won't get that brass pass to Club Europe.
And then the pièce de la résistance of the defendant's (or ‘The Accused’, as he’s more frequently called) democratic bona fides is that President Milosevic, and NO ONE else, initiated the amendment of the Yugoslav constitution in 1999-2000 to put the office of the President, formerly a rotating appointment among the presidents of the republics and a more or less ceremonial position--other than for its authority over the JNA, the Yugoslav Army, which ceased to be much of a big deal after the secessionist wars of 1991-1995—it was Slobodan Milosevic who put the Yugoslav presidency to a vote of the entire Yugoslav population.
Is that any way to run a fucking dictatorship?!
So, anyway, here goes
CirqueMinime/Paris
—and don't forget your password:
NOBULLSHIT!
--MC
Cirque Minime Dépêche:
The IC’M
by
Mick Collins
CirqueMinime/Paris
31 August 2003
We’ve been getting some bad information late and soon. Some real bad information, and it’s getting worse—until all we hear these days is bullshit (too inconsistent and foul smelling even to be called ‘lies’). The Public are constantly forced to ignore what’s really happening, and so they’ve become this ignorant mass that can do nothing to stop—or even to slow down—the complete sublation of their most vital interests into the We-Waste-the-World agendas of today’s born-again, bald-faced Barbarians (Attila was a honey compared to Sharon and Rummy) who determine just what we will and what we won’t know.
Let’s take as an example a case that has been receiving ill service even from some of those who pretend to hold it as a high cause:
The occultation of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, along with a similar media brown-out of recent events that have strong-armed Serbia/Yugoslavia into the role of a NATO farm club, offering up its youth as fodder in the fight for the Empire that recently encouraged and enabled the assassinations of several such kids at a swimming hole in Kosovo, against a former ally, Iraq, are the results of a general obfuscation of History through the use of a totally debased terminology for the purposes of justifying or rationalizing the universally illegal and obviously demented policies that have for the last several decades driven Western commercial/financial/military/industrial interests toward the creation of a globalized waste economy: an essentially criminal enterprise based on the over-valorization of false needs (and artificial scarcities) and the conversion of traditional (re)productive forces into forces for global domination and destruction. And, of course, all this comes with a complimentary Culture in which ignorance is exalted as style, and people know who they are politically by how they gratify themselves sensually.
Very soon now, the prosecution at The Hague Tribunal (Carla Del Ponte, Geoffrey Nice, et alia) will lay to rest its stillborn case against President Milosevic. And though any civilized court would have long ago thrown Del Ponte’s miscarriage of justice back into that bottomless latrine of juridical malfeasance she fished it out of (where can also be found the cases against Dreyfus, Leonard Pelletier and OJ), this long-acknowledged NATO jesters’ court will demand that President Milosevic present his defense, tranquil in the certainty that any additions the man who’s come to be known as ‘Mr. Accused’ might make to the already corpulent body of evidence for the horrific crimes committed by its sponsors against the once-sovereign and UN-founding-member state of Yugoslavia will not be mediated beyond the ICTY steps.
But after nearly two years of jousting with windbags in cross examining hundreds of false witnesses: NGO, UN, MI5-6, CIA, BND, NED, OSCE, USAID, MPRI mercenaries; warlords and snitches,professional and amateur; political hacks from several nations; some badly tortured, some well-paid, all ill-disguised and worse-informed and without a teardrop of good faith in the whole lot (save, perhaps, for one Rade Markovic, former Yugoslav intelligence officer under Milosevic, who, to the great dumbfoundment of the prosecution, told the court that he’d been tortured and offered a ‘new life’ to testify falsely against his former boss, thereby turning on and biting Del Ponte on her ample ass!); and after repeated insults and injuries to the President’s less than robust health—though he, himself, never complains about it!—while this pack of black-clad jackals posing as learned men and true mawkishly proclaim their concerns for the Defendant’s well-being, then use his occasional iatrogenic illnesses as currency to buy life-support-time for the prosecution’s DOA case; and after the imposition of a state of siege against the people of Serbia/Yugoslavia, in general, and the representatives of the former governments led by President Milosevic and his Socialist Party of Serbia, in particular, that has caused the dedicated folks who have consistently furnished the moral, medical, material, legal, financial and informational support for the defense—those not forced into exile!—to find their lives and work very difficult unto impossible; and after subversion and betrayal by some pull-up-the-ladder-Jack-I’m-aboard opportunist Amis-requins from within his very own support Committee—the sort of betrayal that would’ve driven Job to a regime of Prozac enemas: after all this, the resources of the Slobodan Milosevic Defense Forces are at an all-time low.
At this critical phase in the struggle, a great deal of the responsibility for supporting the upcoming defense has fallen to the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic (ICDSM) and its various national Committees. Yet the ICDSM, with its origins and strongest sustenance coming from the Communist and Socialist movements of Europe, and especially Eastern Europe and Russia, has not been spared the slings and arrows of some of the West’s most outrageous fortune hunting dirtball provocateurs and pimps for gang-war Capitalism.
—But I’m getting ahead of myself here—time for some backstory:
On 1 April 2001, Belgrade time, but still a few minutes shy of the deadline of midnight 31 March 2001, US time, Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in Belgrade. Less than one week earlier, on 25 March 2001, the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic was founded in Berlin after the first meeting of the European Peace Forum (which was, itself, born from the International European Tribunal on the NATO war against Yugoslavia. You can still find its web page: http://www.nato-tribunal.de.)
The initiative for this Committee came from Professor Velko Valkanov, of Sofia, Bulgaria, who today serves as one of the two co-chairs with Ramsey Clark of the US.
Professor Valkanov was a presidential candidate from the Bulgarian Left (Bulgarian Socialist Party and others) in the 1992 elections. He lost the election to the Rightist candidate, Zhelyu Zhelev, by a narrow margin: Valkanov got 47.15% (2,430,434 votes) to Zhelev’s 52.85% (2,738,416 votes).
Valkanov was for many years a member of Parliament from the BSP. He chose not to run in the elections of 2001 because his party had taken a decidedly pro-Western course. He also served as chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on Human Rights and is currently chairman of the Bulgarian Committee for Human Rights. He is also the president of the Bulgarian Antifascist Union, a broad-based organization made up of both veterans of the WWII resistance and contemporary progressives.
Vladamir Krsljanin, former foreign secretary of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) and first assistant to its then president, Slobodan Milosevic, was tasked by the SPS with co-ordinating the formation of the Committee. With legal advice coming from another solid Leftist, Christopher Black, a Toronto attorney and CPC member, with expertise in international criminal defense and a defense counsel at the Rwandan Tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, and one of the lawyers who, along with Michael Mandel, filed war crimes charges against NATO in May 1999; and with information and publicity directed by Jared Israel, a 60s SDSer who was pulled back into the political mix after a 30 year hiatus, through his web site, "The Emperor's New Clothes" (TENC): a petition was posted on the internet to find support for the Committee.
Krsljanin, Black and Israel, along with Nico Varkevisser, a Dutch CP member, chairman of an NGO called ‘Global Reflection’ and editor of the magazine ‘Targets’, became the promotionalnucleus for the ICDSM in the West. By the time Israel and Black first met up at the New York-based International Action Center’s (IAC) 10 June 2000 International Tribunal for U.S./NATO war crimes in Yugoslavia, Israel, on the strength of his TENC website, was already tight with the SPS and close to the Milosevic family. As a gesture of Free Slobo solidarity, Black was made an editor at TENC, though after only ten months of frequent disagreements over what then appeared to be Israel’s closet Zionism, he was dropped from the Emperor’s masthead. But all three men, Israel, Black and Varkevisser, had gained the trust of Krsljanin and become vice-presidents on the ICDSM.
On 17 June 2001, the first official Committee meeting was called in Belgrade. During the week of 11 June, Christopher Black had been in Belgrade to study President Milosevic’s legal situation on behalf of the Committee. The President had been held in the Belgrade City Prison, since 1 April 2001, on charges of political corruption and misappropriation of funds.
In his report to the ICDSM, Mr. Black stated:
It is clear that there is not a shred of evidence that
Mr. Milosevic committed any crime. The inability of the
present regime to produce any evidence against
Mr. Milosevic after all this time can lead to only one
conclusion: that his arrest and detention are for
political reasons.
He went on to note that various Yugoslav and Serbian officials with whom he had met all conceded that there was NO EVIDENCE OF ANY KIND AGAINST Slobodan Milosevic. They justified their actions on the grounds that they were doing what the U.S. government wanted.
Mr Black concluded:
The DOS leaders are not demanding that Yugoslavia's national
sovereignty be surrendered to the Hague Tribunal. They are
demanding that Yugoslavia's national sovereignty be surrendered
to the United States.
Then on 28 June 2001, President Milosevic was kidnapped by now-dead Serbian PM, Zoran Djindjic, whisked off to the NATO air base at Tuzla, in Bosnia, and flown by the RAF to The Hague, in the Netherlands.
After his 1999 IAC Tribunal on NATO war crimes in Yugoslavia, Ramsey Clark seemed an indispensable ally, and acting president of the SPS and former Yugoslav foreign minister, Zivadin Jovanovic, fervently requested his assistance. Though Clark’s schedule was quite full with African and Korean affairs, he agreed to come to Belgrade to see how he could be of help. But his trip was delayed by Yugoslav ambassador to the US, Milan St. Protic, who held up his visa request and forced Clark to miss the presidential kidnapping by just hours.
Once in Belgrade, Clark stepped up. He held two press conferences, spoke at an enormous rally in front of the Federal Parliament, and was even received by President Kostunica. Among his statements:
It is an enormous tragedy for Yugoslavia, the Serbian people
and the rule of law. . . . Serbian Prime Minister Djindjic
and other officials should be investigated for high crimes
against the people, and if found guilty should be sentenced
in accordance with the law.
In August 2001, after the overall efforts of the SPS leadership to focus attention on the growing abuse of law in Serbia/Yugoslavia had proven insufficient or ineffective, the SLOBODA Freedom Association was founded. It was SLOBODA, which presently oversees and co-ordinates the activities of the ICDSM, that convened the next meeting of the Committee in October 2001 in Belgrade.
It was at this conference, entitled
Freedom for Slobodan Milosevic - Moral, Political and Legal Imperative
and held at the Sava Centre in Belgrade, 21-22 October 2001, that the ICDSM began to take shape. Krsljanin’s organisational talents made the whole affair run like one of Fulvio Grimaldi’s great documentary films. (Grimaldi is another ICDSM veep with rock-solid anti-Imperialist credentials who played a prominent role in this conference.) And the audience, like the dais, was made up of as many former Milosevic opponents as allies—my favorite among them being Duci Simonovic, PhD, former Yugoslav Olympic roundballer (Stretch is the bonespur Bill [Walton] of the Balkans and coach to Vlade Divac) and currently an engaged and enraged political philosopher and the formidable graphic artist who designed the ‘Welcome To The Hague’ death-head posters that adorned the Conference—all of them joined by the determination to bring a halt to the brutal replacement of Yugoslav sovereignty with a Hitlerian ethnic fragmentation and a New World colonial occupation.
A small part of the final statement of the Conference captures its spirit very well:
The Hague ‘Tribunal’ is a political instrument
of genocide and the satanization of the
Serbian people, and not a court of law.
But this Conference also brought a couple of Big Chief wannabes out of their sweat lodges to make bad gree-gree on their very own Committee. Jared Israel and Nico Varkevisser seemed determined to have the final word on political and ideological qualifications for membership on the executive council of the ICDSM. And they did not suffer criticism well—either on the content or the style of their ‘edicts’. Many of their tactics—like agent baiting and accusations of ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-semitism’—were quite familiar to those, like Israel, who had experienced the infiltration, corruption and eventual neutralisation of the New Left and Black Power movements in the US in the Cointelpro 60s.
At about this time Ramsey Clark accepted a vice-chairmanship of the ICDSM. But to certain Committee members, because of his history of service in the vile Lyndon B. Johnson administration in the late 60s and his work as a defense lawyer for certain political indictees who might have fit into one of the above-mentioned jackets, he was not welcome to this chairmanship. Israel and Varkevisser began to lobby against Clark, then against Professor Mikhail Kuznetsov, the founder and chairman of the Russian Social Tribunal for NATO crimes in Yugoslavia, and chairman of the International Slavic Tribunal, and eventually against several other vice-chairmen of the ICDSM. It became apparent that the large and not-very-quiet American and his faithful Dutch sidekick were more concerned with guarding the exclusivity (and perks) of their power on the executive council of the Committee than they were with actually affecting the liberation of President Milosevic and the people of Yugoslavia.
But so soon after President Milosevic’s kidnapping, everyone was too caught up in the struggle against the on-going crimes of NATO to become involved in Jared and Nico’s ‘ethical cleansings’. And as for my country of residence, France was not as yet represented on the International Committee, and there was no French National Committee. As a representative of the monthly journal Balkans Infos at the October Sava Center Conference, when I presented my paper, ‘Belgrade-New York: aller-retour’, I was referred to as the representative of France. But I am neither French nor Yugoslav.
Finally in early 2002, the world-renowned French defense lawyer, Jacques Vergès, weighed in with some heavy-duty legal analysis of The (unlawful) Hague Tribunal and the non-case against President Milosevic. His book, ‘Legal Apartheid’, written with General Pierre-Marie Gallois and five other French experts on international law, became an important legal reference for the Committee.
After an ill-fated, late starting press conference in the evening of 12 February 2002, the night before Opening Day of the Milosevic trial, in front of hundreds of journalists and a dozen TV cameras—all sent fleeing by a Jared Israel diatribe, white with foam—, a panel of the ICDSM was convened at the Royal Palace Hotel in Amsterdam. On the same dais were representatives of the executive council: Christopher Black, a subdued Israel, a befuddled Varkevisser, Vladamir Krsljanin, the distinguished Italian law Professor, Aldo Bernardini, and, finally, an authentic representative of France, Jacques Vergès. To an audience heavy with international law students from a local college, Maitre Vergès presented a laser-sharp differentiation between ‘extradition’, ‘transfer’, and ‘kidnapping for ransom’, making it unmistakably evident that the President was a victim of the third.
After the dust from the Q&A had settled, Luc Michel, of the Belgian National Communitarian Party and the editor of a newsletter in the name of the 'International Francophone Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic', stepped up to introduce himself to maitres Vergès, Bernardini and Black. Everything was quite cordial then, but few of these men would survive the petty intrigues that Israel and Varkevisser got up to at the onset of the Trial.
In April 2002, Luc Michel was proclaimed a ‘Fascist’ by Jared Israel, but in the name of the ICDSM, and ordered to cease and desist all use of the words ‘Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic’ in the bilingual publications of his Belgian francophone committee. This could not have been because of anything Michel had written in his newsletter, but most probably because the folks at TENC were afraid of his horning in on their action and because of word that his NCP received support from Mommar Kaddafy and Libya—an ‘Islamo-fascist’, ‘Arabo-terrorist’ or ‘rogue state’ in the eyes of certain pro-US/Israeli-Imperialist forces.
Then Jacques Vergès came (and remains at this writing) under hysterical attack for being yet another ‘Fascist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’ defender of President Milosevic. This was another example of how pure reaction (with the aid of the internet) had cheapened these terms, and what little sense of political and economic history was demanded by those who engaged Jared Israel & Co in discussion. Vergès, it seems, had once stated that he defended Klaus Barbie to implicate Vichy France in the crimes of the Nazis and to point out that France was guilty of similar crimes in Algeria. From this perfectly reasonable and historically sound position, Jared Israel, with all the anile froth he could muster, spewed absurd charges of Vergès’s denying the Jewish Holocaust, the Soviet Holocaust, the Serb Holocaust, and generally being an ally of ‘Arabo-fascoid terrorism’. Only in Amerika, where anyone can blow-up to become a Rush Limbaugh, could such drivel receive a serious (or self-important) audience.
A similar fate again awaited Ramsey Clark. Israel and Varkevisser quoted the founder of the IAC as saying that ‘Islam was the last refuge of the poor’, and that Sheikh Rahman and all others who are set upon by the state, deserved a defense. This made him an ‘Arabo-terrorist symp’, a ‘Fascist’, an Anti-Semite’, and, subsequently, like Vergès, guilty of, first, falsely claiming to be Milosevic’s lawyer, then slandering and abandoning his non-client. And to add insult to irony, these attacks on leaders of the ICDSM appeared on the very website, TENC, that hosted the Committee.
Soon, in coincidence with—if not directly resulting from—certain positions taken in defense of the Palestinians (in the Spring of 2002, at the time of the Israeli massacre—er, I mean, ‘incursion’ into the Palestinian refugee camps, the SPS put out a position statement, co-signed by President Milosevic from his jail cell in Scheveningen, supporting the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation—Jared Israel made no comment!), and because of their refusals to countenance Israel and Varkevisser’s disruptive unto neutralising attempts at purging the Committee’s leadership, even Black and Krsljanin were accused of working against the interests of President Milosevic and the ICDSM (read: against
the financial interests of Israel, both the small theocracy and the large mediocrity).
After the 28 June 2003 ICDSM demonstration in The Hague, organized by Klaus Hartmann and the German Committee, which featured speeches by members of the Serbian diaspora and representatives from many of the other national Committees in front of the Tribunal, and followed-up with a march and more speeches in front of the prison in Scheveningen, there was an executive council meeting where much of the discord within the Committee was to be aired.
Just at the moment when Varkevisser (Israel was not in attendance) was to express his and Israel's complaints about the Committee's failure to remove Ramsey Clark from his co-chair, Heather Cottin, the representative of the IAC and Ramsey Clark and the widow of pro-Yugoslav activist Sean Gervasi, entered the meeting room. Varkevisser ejaculated and stormed out, gibbering about American spooks, betrayal from every quarter, and manifesting all the symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic melt-down.
It’s not that these infantile melodramatics, which seem mainly to ooze from fear of financial destitution—both Israel and Varkevisser, unrestrained by scruples or any sense of decency, have put quite a bit of effort into creating personal incomes from the struggles of the Yugoslav and Cuban peoples and those who support them—(For some time Israel has been supporting his renaissant military Zionism with appeals for donations in the name of the Milosevic defense, and Varkevisser’s magazine, ‘Targets’, named for the symbols on the t-shirts worn by Yugoslavs during the 1999 bombing, sold a lot of advertising to Cubans and then never saw much if any circulation)—it's not that they have thrown a monkey wrench into an otherwise finely tuned and smoothly running Committee. But it hardly needs to be said that while trying to present a united front in fighting the NATO enemy, you really don’t need a couple of your executives pulling an Enron with your treasury and a mini-autodafé on their fellow Committee members.
But, as President Milosevic has asserted again and again, a united front is all important to the support of his upcoming defense. And this united front will be made up of these National Committees and their leaders:
Russian (Alexander Zinoviev)
German (Klaus Hartmann)
Italian (Enrico Vigna)
British (first William Spring, then Paul Davidson,
now /acting/ Ian Johnson)
Irish (June Kelly)
Bulgarian (Stefan Gajtandzijev)
Romania (CP leader)
India (Bhim Singh)
Mr Krsljanin told me that
On the basis of the amount of activity we can
consider also that committees exist in
Ukraine, Belarus, and Greece. They are in the
process of formation in France, USA, Canada,
and The Netherlands.
On verra en France. But the ICDSM and whatever develops as a French National Committee must redirect all their attention and energy to bringing the defense of President Slobodan Milosevic and all the other political prisoners at Scheveningen, and of the people of Serbia/Yugoslavia, back into the center ring of public attention.
The bullshit did not begin with Iraq!
And this will in no way be automatic or easy, because the same people who called the Milosevic case the ‘most important war crimes trial in fifty years’, have effectively turned out the lights on it and are denying the Public any reasonable access to information about this exercise in legal UnReason going down in their name.
Only by putting aside our particular political proclivities; by totally shining-on all those pot-bellied parasites who would piggie-back their personal portfolios on the heroic liberation struggles of decent people; and by pulling together to expose the mis- and dis-information about recent events in the Balkans and elsewhere and to support what might be our last stand against the horrors of privatized and globalized (in)Justice: can we have any hope of redeeming the truth of our own History from those who would colonise, control and enslave us by ‘re-classifying as terrorist-friendly’ any evidence of what they have done to us and ‘tranquillising’ us with ‘humiliation disguised as additional security measures’, until we don’t care who we really are.
If it’s freedom we seek, then only the Truth will break our dependence on that false consciousness that supports The Hague Tribunal farce, the HIV=AIDS=Death wish, the airliner into the Pentagon hallucination, and the current grotesque equation of Liberation with the US/Israeli militarization of everyday life that has brought us into this very real global war without end.
So at the ICDSM, we’re still all about
FREE SLOBO!! OFF THE TRIBS!!! DONATIONS TO SLOBODA!!!!!
RIGHT ON!
posted by CirqueMinime/Paris at 7:37 PM
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