Carla del Ponte’s strategy rejected in Milosevic trial

Chief Prosecutor of the Hague Court sees her strategy fail as judge rejects plan to join three charges into one case. Milosevic calls accusations “absurd”, claiming he should be given credit for his part in peace.

Carla del Ponte, the Chief prosecutor of the International Court of Justice, at The Hague, one which the United States of America does not recognise, tried to tie three accusations against Slobodan Milosevic together into one case. She claimed that the case was the same, namely the attempt to create a “Greater Serbia” at the expense of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

The ex-President of Yugoslavia called this accusation “monstrous” and stated that Serbia was a multi-ethnic state in which “there has never been discrimination founded on an ethnic or religious criterion”. Furthermore, he accused Carla del Ponte of trying to cover up the connections between the Clinton administration and the Albanian terrorists, connected to Al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist movement.

Slobodan Milosevic called the attempt to blame him for genocide in the Balkans “supremely absurd” because being one of the signatories of the Dayton agreement, he had been instrumental in signing an end to the conflict. He claimed he should be “given credit for the peace in Bosnia and not for the war”.

The British judge presiding over the case, Brian May, refused to allow Carla del Ponte’s strategy to be adopted and declared that two charges would be brought in two separate cases. The first will be tried on January 12th, on Slobodan Milosevic’s role during the Kosovo conflict, 1999. The second, regarding the conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia between 1991 and 1995, will be judged later, due to the need for more time to collect the data.

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru