For a wide variety of reasons, thoughtful people have tended to be critical of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. John Laughland’s “Travesty! The trial of Slobodan Milošević and the corruption of international justice” [2006] is perhaps the most eloquent indictment of its procedures. The damage to international jurisprudence caused by ICTY is, however, greatly augmented when its flawed practices are eagerly transposed into the setting of domestic courts which are also engaged in the war crimes punishment business and, quite often, in a form that is even more extreme.

[The official narrative on Srebrenica is in rigor mortis, and its proponents know it well. Personal attacks on all who engage in critical thinking about what passes for “Srebrenica genocide” evidence and efforts in many countries to criminalise free inquiry are desperate attempts to remove Srebrenica from the list of discussible topics. The reason for that is simple: in any open and free debate the partisans of the propaganda narrative would lose ignominiously. Oliver Kamm’s rant on the subject is characteristic of the way this boisterous group (which also includes such luminaries as George Monbiot, Marko Attila Hoare, Danijel Toljaga, Michael Dobbs and a host others) operates. For more on Kamm, we recommend http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/hp220110.html: "The Oliver Kamm School of Falsification: Imperial Truth-Enforcement, British Branch" by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. The column that follows is by Srdja Trifkovic ]

    The extraordinary recent revelations of the sordid crimes committed by the Argentine junta under the leadership of the dictator, General Jorge Rafael Videla, give us a glimpse into the double standard which prevails in the administration of what passes for “international justice”.

    General Videla was quoted in the Buenos Aires daily “La Nacion” [1] as admitting that during his seven-year reign in Argentina from 1976 to 1981 “about 7,000 to 8,000 people who needed to die” were “disappeared” (i.e. executed) by the authorities under his command, while several thousand children were forcibly removed from the custody of their parents, who were suspected of being “subversives”, and transferred to the care of government-approved “good” families.

[This is the text of Prof. Edward Herman’s videotaped message to the Serbian public for the occasion of the Round Table conference organized by Srebrenica Historical Project [1] at the Russian Cultural Centre in Belgrade on 5 April 2012 and devoted to the study “Srebrenica Massacre: Context, evidence, politics”, which he edited.  The Serbian translation of Prof. Herman’s remarks was read by film producer Boris Malagurski, author of the noted documentary “The Weight of Chains”.]

[Dragan Obrenovic’s case is paradigmatic for the way the Hague Tribunal works. Most of the principal features of this non-standard judicial institution, whose legitimacy has been challenged from the moment of its inception, may be observed there. The makeshift nature of the indictment; the co-optation of the co-defendants to give evidence against each other, and against other defendants who will appear in due course; the use of psychological pressure and blackmail to break the targeted defendants’ personalities; on the whole, the low quality of assistance provided by opportunistic lawyers from the “politically suitable” list kept by the Registry; these are but some of the characteristics of that bizarre court. However, due note having been taken of the fact that its acts may be null and void from the standpoint of morality and legal procedure, its judgments undoubtedly have proved effective from the standpoint of propaganda and are quite useful politically. Perhaps that satisfies the needs of the cynical authors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. They probably believe that they can dispense with legitimacy grounded in traditional institutions. Their motto is ex chaos ordo. In their boundless hubris they consider themselves the creators of a new world which requires no reference to the values and traditions of the old, which they are in fact systematically undermining. The Dragan Obrenovic affair illustrates the impact of that destructive endeavour in the domain of international law and what it portends for the future.]   

Besides “satellite photos” (which turned out not to be that at all and are unavailable for expert scrutiny anyway), autopsy reports prepared between 1996 and 2001 (when exhumations of Srebrenica-related mass graves were abruptly terminated because there were none left to open and the numbers generated up to that point did not look good at all), the notoriously flawed evidence of “Star Witness” Dražen Erdemović (whose latest performance was at the Karadžić trial on 27 and 28 February 2012), and ICTY’s latest gimmick –independently unverifiable DNA matches (introduced at the Popović at al. trial and publicised vigorously ever since), intercept evidence is another very important evidentiary component of the Hague trials.

The letter reproduced below, written by forensic anthropologist C. E. Moore II, who took part in the work of forensic exhumations teams sent to the Srebrenica area by ICTY Office of Prosecutor in 1996, is an important and revealing document. Our own analysis of ICTY’s Srebrenica forensic work has disclosed numerous problems which cast serious doubt on the overall reliability of the results and therefore on the validity of court decisions that were based uncritically on such dubious data. Our critique is bolstered by Dr. Moore’s impressions, which paint a devastating picture of the unprofessional procedures employed in the field. It is reasonable to conclude that the results of such sloppily conducted field work cannot be significantly better than the methods that were used to obtain them.

[As you are probably aware, the medical condition of ICTY political prisoner Vojislav Šeselj is now critical and nearing the point of judicial murder. Coincidentally, on January 24 in Paris the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, headed by distinguished Russian historian Natalia Narochnitskaya, conducted a round table conference on the Hague Tribunal in which the president of “Srebrenica Historical Project” participated. The focus of the conference was on three cases: Karadžic, Mladić, and Šešelj. Stephen Karganovic’s  remarks concerned the Šešelj case. Here they are on the IDC web page in English: http://www.idc-europe.org/en/The-Šešelj-Trial and in French: http://www.idc-europe.org/fr/-Le-proces-Šešelj:-peut-on-encore-esperer-que-la-justice-soit-rendue-

Maximum publicity for Šešelj's predicament is perhaps the only chance we have got to ensure that he gets adequate medical treatment and an opportunity to stay alive long enough to again demolish the prosecution in the closing arguments scheduled for March. If you have that possibility, please reprint and distribute these remarks as widely as possible in order to raise public awareness and to exert pressure on the Hague Tribunal to desist from withholding proper medical attention from Vojislav Šešelj. Once that is successfully accomplished, the next step is for his case to be given proper legal attention, including an objective assessment of whether there are any grounds for continuing the failed trial. If not, the ICTY prisoner of conscience, Vojislav Šešelj, must be released immediately. The effort to prevent the judicial murder of Vojislav Šešelj and to ensure that internationally recognised legal procedures are applied in his case is a matter of principle for all who believe in human rights and the rule of law. It is not a comment on or endorsement of his political views.]

[Our first edition of the new year is off the press. It is a carefully researched study of a little known episode of the recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina: the assault on the Serbian community of Bukvik, comprising eight villages located several kilometres from the town of Brčko. The analogies with Srebrenica are striking. There was a final assault, involving pillage and destruction of personal property and killing and expulsion of the inhabitants, which took place after a siege that lasted six months. What follows is the summary of the monograph in English. So far there have been virtually no prosecutions of perpetrators and no compensation to the victims, an all too familiar pattern in cases where the targeted community was Serbian. The monograph is richly corroborated with primary source materials. Serbian speaking readers can download the entire monograph from the Serbian side of our website.]

The past year has been challenging but it was also successful for “Srebrenica Historical Project”. That does not mean that we have moved mountains or reversed the widespread perception of what happened in Srebrenica. What it does mean is that we have made significant progress and that the Srebrenica lobby has been on  the defensive more than it has ever been before.