URGENT: JOIN THE INTERNATIONAL APPEAL TO STOP THE WITCH HUNT AGAINST FORMER YUGOSLAV LEADERS!

["Jim Yarker" <jyarker at attcanada.ca>]

Dear friends in the anti-war and progressive movements, 

 

We hope that the appeal below can serve as a gathering place for the names
of all those who oppose the ICTYs campaign to impose its phony kangaroo
justice on Mr. Milosevic and on other former Yugoslav/Serbian leaders and
officials, and to register their protest at the collusion of elements in
the DOS régime with NATO and the Hague Tribunal.  Supporters of the appeal
can have their names added to it by replying to this email address:
action at srpska-mreza.com and providing their name as well as town, state and
country of residence.

 

The appeal can be found on the web, with regularly updated lists of
signatories, at:

http://www.srpska-mreza.com/action/appeal.htm

 

We are asking you to add your names and any affiliations you'd care to
list. Please feel free to circulate the appeal or its web link on any lists
you think appropriate, and to link to it from your own website if you
operate one.

 

In solidarity,

Barry Lituchy, New York City, USA

Jim Yarker, Toronto, Canada

 

 

URGENT ACTION: PLEASE ADD YOUR NAME TO THIS INTERNATIONAL APPEAL TO STOP
THE WITCH HUNT AGAINST SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC

MARCH 10, 2001

We, the undersigned, wish to register our disgust with and opposition to
the planned trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic by the
current Serbian authorities at the request of the United States and its
NATO partners.

While NATO's criminal aggression against the people of Yugoslavia goes
unpunished, and reparations go unpaid, we are witnessing the repulsive
spectacle of DOS ministers and officials (the new regime in Belgrade)
serving as judicial handmaidens to NATO's criminal leaders and their
illegal puppet court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague.

We charge the ICTY and the American government with falsifying war crimes
charges against President Milosevic solely for the purpose of manipulating
public opinion against "the Serbs," justifying NATO's barbaric 78-day
campaign of terror against Yugoslavia in 1999, and to deflect attention
from the bombing's horrific consequences. Meanwhile, the ICTY has
exonerated its NATO sponsors of responsibility for a host of
well-documented war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the
deliberate bombardment of vital civilian infrastructure, conspiracy to
initiate a war of aggression, the lethal targeting of journalists, the use
of anti-personnel weapons such as cluster bombs in areas of high civilian
concentration, and bombing with the intent and effect of unleashing
environmental catastrophe. 

Having cleared her NATO paymasters of criminal responsibility for their
deliberate bombing of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) in Belgrade, which
killed 16 journalists and support staff, ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla Del
Ponte now asserts that Mr. Milosevic and the RTS director, Dragoljub
Milanovic, were culpable in these victims' deaths because they had been
"notified in advance" that the facility would be bombed! Despite Del
Ponte's promises, no evidence to support these charges has been made
public. Mr. Milanovic has been ordered detained by a Belgrade judge, a
clear effort by the DOS forces to dignify Del Ponte's outrageous claim.

While some DOS spokesmen refer openly to the need to cooperate fully with
the ICTY, others affect a different-sounding stance, calling for
prosecuting Mr. Milosevic in a "Serbian trial," on charges of "corruption,"
and "war crimes." But their call for a domestic trial of Milosevic is
nothing but "patriotic" fakery: a pathetic trick aimed at concealing their
own craven duplicity in carrying out the orders of their foreign masters.
As the experience in Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe has shown,
bowing to Western pressure will never improve living standards; and
imposing political repression will only leave deep and long lasting scars
on the national psyche.



Let it be known that we categorically reject the case against President
Milosevic:

* Milosevic the so-called "ethnic cleanser" preached multinational unity,
not nationalist intolerance. His famous 1989 speech that supposedly called
for Serbs to shed Albanian blood actually said: "Yugoslavia is a
multinational community and it can survive only under conditions of full
equality for all nations that live in it." The effort to prosecute
Milosevic is an attack on all who support multinational unity.

* Milosevic conducted no persecution of Albanian civilians: he did not
drive Albanians from Kosovo, except to clear civilians out of a zone of
combat and bombing. Albanians who fled Kosovo fled NATO bombs and ground
combat between KLA rebels and Yugoslav federal troops. Some 100,000
Yugoslav Albanians lived peacefully in the Serbian capital of Belgrade
throughout the war, suffering no ethnic persecution.

* The most notorious "atrocities" for which Milosevic is accused never
happened: the 40 Albanians found dead in Racak were never "executed" but in
fact were KLA troops killed in action in a variety of encounters, then laid
out together in a ditch for the cameras. The 1500 bodies supposedly buried
in the Trepca mines were never found. NATO specialists sent in to find
proof of mass extermination of 100,000 Albanians in fact found only 2,800
bodies. And most of those were neither Albanian civilians nor even
Albanians, but rather Serbs, Romas, Egyptians, Goranis and other victims of
KLA atrocities.

* There is no evidence whatsoever for the most preposterous and recent
charges: that Milosevic knew in advance of the bombing of the RTS
television station in Belgrade but let 16 people die to create outrage
against NATO, or that thousands of Albanians were stuffed into meat
grinders and disposed of in mineral mine-shafts in Mitrovica, etc.

A trial of Milosevic on these false and outrageous charges would be nothing
but a travesty of justice, a contemporary "show-trial." Those Western
leaders who pursue it put the lie to the claims that the United Nations is
a defender of the sovereignty of nations, or that NATO is a defender of
freedom. This witch hunt also exposes the leaders of the present government
in Yugoslavia as traitors to their own people who dishonor the Serbian
nation and its great history of resisting foreign invaders, including most
notably the Nazis in World War II when the Serbs stood alone against the
Nazi onslaught.

Crimes were committed in Yugoslavia - but not by Milosevic. They were
committed by American and NATO leaders who authorized a low-grade nuclear
war that specifically targeted civilians and left huge portions of the
country contaminated for the next 4.5 billion years with radioactivity from
depleted uranium armaments. 

Crimes were committed by the American leaders who casually ignored their
own constitution's requirement that wars be formally declared by Congress
and then violated the UN Charter and numerous international conventions.

A crime will be committed if the twice-elected President of Serbia is
kidnapped from his own country and made to stand "trial" in an artificially
created, American-made "court" that goes under the fancy-sounding name of
an international tribunal. 

And a crime will be committed if the obedient, made in the USA government
in Yugoslavia endangers the safety of President Milosevic in any way that
might allow gangsters or bounty-hunters to cash in on the $5 million bounty
posted by the US for delivering him into captivity.

Slobodan Milosevic's real offense was that he tried to keep the 26
nationalities that comprise Yugoslavia free from US and NATO colonization
and occupation; his nation's resources, industries, and media from being
stolen by multinational corporations; his nation's institutions from being
controlled by US consultants and advisers. His real offense was to defend
his nation's freedom and sovereignty from a political "opposition" bought
and paid for by the United States and installed into power by US
specialists in psychological operations. He and all those now under attack
resisted Western colonization to the very end, even as American naval ships
waited off the coast of Yugoslavia to ensure the "correct" results in
Yugoslavia's contested elections.

Shame on those DOS leaders who consort and conspire with NATO politicians
while seeking to assign the blame for NATO's crimes on the very patriotic
and progressive figures who did the most to fight NATO's neo-colonial
aggression! In doing so, the DOS dishonors itself and desecrates the memory
of those who lost their lives to NATO war crimes. 

DROP ALL CHARGES AGAINST DRAGOLJUB MILANOVIC!
STOP THE POLITICAL WITCH-HUNT AGAINST PRESIDENT MILOSEVIC 
        AND ALL FORMER YUGOSLAV LEADERS NOW!
BRING THE NATO-KFOR WAR CRIMINALS TO JUSTICE!