from RT!
When will our oligarch controlled media be condemned by the International Court of Justice as crimes of complicity?
When will we stop citing and paying attention to such criminal media?
When will we be rid of the CBC and all such "soft" criminals under the guise of concerned progressives?
No link to a story. 
Neil Clark has a piece with the same title at RT.
I rather think the western MSM is going to be very quiet about this story. Booing Russians at Rio will get press, sure, but this one is going to be disposed of quickly.
ikosmos, is there anything you actually find defensible in Milosevic, Mladic, and Karadzic's actions?
You wouldn't really justify the Siege of Sarajevo, would you?
Please tell me you don't defend rape as a combat tactic.
The ICTY’s conclusion, that one of the most demonized figures of the modern era was innocent of the most heinous crimes he was accused of, really should have made headlines across the world. But it hasn‘t. Even the ICTY buried it, deep in its 2,590 page verdict in the trial of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic who was convicted in March of genocide (at Srebrenica), war crimes and crimes against humanity.There was no official announcement or press conference regarding Milosevic‘s exoneration. We’ve got journalist and researcher Andy Wilcoxson to thank for flagging it up for us.
So the story barely made it out. But remember back in 2002?
How very different it all was when the trial of the so-called ‘Butcher of the Balkans’, began in February 2002! Then, you‘d have to have been locked in a wardrobe not to be aware of what was going on.CNN provided blanket coverage of what was described as “the most important trial since Nuremberg.” Of course, Milosevic’s guilt was taken as a given. “When the sentence comes and he disappears into that cell, no one is going to hear from him again,” declared US lawyer Judith Armatta from the Coalition for International Justice, an organization which had the former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, as an advisory board member.
Anyone who dared to challenge the NATO line was labeled a “Milosevic apologist”, or worse still, a “genocide denier”, by ‘Imperial Truth Enforcers’.
But amid all the blather and the hype surrounding the ’trial of the century’ it soon became apparent the prosecution was in deep, deep trouble. The Sunday Times quoted a legal expert who claimed that “Eighty percent of the prosecution’s opening statements would have been dismissed by a British court as hearsay.” That, I believe, was a generous assessment.
link: John Pilger debunks the lies
That was way back in 2000.
Slobodan Milosevic may have been acquitted in that trial(if he really hadn't done anything, why did he and his lawyers keep delaying the proceedings for years and years, all the while massively overeating in the apparent hope of dying before a verdict could be announced?) but he did cause the deaths of massive numbers of innocent people and launched a totally unjustifed campaign of ethnic cleansing throughout what had been Yugoslavia(yes, so did the Croats, but most of the people who were cleansed weren't partisans of any particular faction).
The Siege of Sarajevo, a beautiful, peaceful city in which Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims had lived together in peace and harmony for centuries before "Slobo" and his fascist stooge Radovan Karadzic came along, was indefensible and unforgiveable.
I grant that the Croats were no angels, but there was nothing in any of this that couldn't have been worked out through negotiations. Nobody had to be driven out of their home for being the wrong ethnicity, or for the rapes, or for anything else that happened in the Milosevic era.
The U.S. has been an imperial force in the world, but nothing Milosevic did was "anti-imperialist". It's not "anti-imperialist" simply to do something the State Department doesn't like. The creation of "Greater Serbia" was never going to lead to the human race defeating imperialism and living in peace and dignity, free of exploitation.
Anti-imperialism means working for a just world, free of suffering and want-NOT obsessing about and seeking bloodsoaked revenge for The Battle of Kosovo(a battle that had taken place five centuries before and whose outcome was of no consequence whatsoever to the Serbs of the late Twentieth Century).
ikosmos, is there anything you actually find defensible in Milosevic, Mladic, and Karadzic's actions?
You wouldn't really justify the Siege of Sarajevo, would you?
Please tell me you don't defend rape as a combat tactic.
Sure, OK. Agreed. Now please tell us how your beloved NDP Parliamentary cretins stand up for Palestinians against Israeli ethnic cleansing.
Why would ANYONE still defend Slobodan Milosevic? He was a brutal, anti-democratic, objectively anti-socialist right-wing nationalist, concerned solely with giving Serbs total dominance over every other group in the Balkans. He had no progressive or humane objectives as part of his program. Nothing he did served the anti-imperialist cause in any way. Nothing he did freed anyone anywhere from oppression.
What is the point of treating this man as if he were some sort of a victim?
Anti-imperialism is not "the enemy of my enemy is my friend".
They don't, and I condemn them for their silence on that issue(as do most rank-and-file NDP supporters, from what I've seen).
And I have never defended anything the Israelis have done in the West Bank(I also think compensation, apologies and acknowledgement are due to Palestinians living inside Israel who were treated horribly in the post-1948 period).
There are more than two sides in the world.
Why would ANYONE still defend Slobodan Milosevic? He was a brutal, anti-democratic, objectively anti-socialist right-wing nationalist, concerned solely with giving Serbs total dominance over every other group in the Balkans. He had no progressive or humane objectives as part of his program. Nothing he did served the anti-imperialist cause in any way. Nothing he did freed anyone anywhere from oppression.
Neil Clark's reply ...
The trouble for NATO was that by the time Milosevic’s trial was due to start, the Kosovo narrative had already unraveled. The lurid claims made by the US and its allies about genocide and hundreds of thousands being killed, catalogued by the great John Pilger here, had been shown to be false. In September 2001, a UN court officially held that there had been no genocide in Kosovo.So in an attempt to beef up their weakening case against Milosevic the prosecutors at The Hague had to bring in new charges relating to the war in Bosnia, accusing ‘Slobo’ of being part of a ‘joint criminal conspiracy’ to kill/ethnically cleanse Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims in pursuance of a ’Greater Serbia’ project.
In normal criminal prosecutions evidence is collected and then, if it’s deemed sufficient, charges are brought. But the opposite happened in the case of Milosevic: he was charged for political reasons and the hunt for evidence then followed.
The irony is that the former Yugoslav President had already been praised by President Clinton for his role in brokering a peace deal in Bosnia in 1995, which was signed in Dayton, Ohio.
The truth is that Milosevic was no hardcore Serb nationalist but a lifelong socialist, whose commitment was always to a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.
His aim throughout his time in power was not to build a ’Greater Serbia‘, but to try and keep Federal Yugoslavia together, as the ICTY now belatedly acknowledges.
...
"Not only was Milosevic not responsible for ethnic cleansing which took place in Bosnia, he actually spoke out against it. The ICTY noted Milosevic’s “repeated criticism and disapproval of the policies made by the Accused (Karadzic) and the Bosnian Serb leadership.” Milosevic, a man for whom all forms of racism were anathema, insisted that all ethnicities must be protected."
If anyone wants to conduct the thankless task of actually finding a report of this ICTY finding - that Milosevic was innocent of the most heinous crimes he was accused of - in the Western MSM, then good luck to you.
I haven't found anything yet. Only alternative press, or RT, so far.
Like I said, booing Russian athletes in Rio, and lamenting that they're even allowed to compete (or live), is much more important.
Like I said, booing Russian athletes in Rio, and lamenting that they're even allowed to compete (or live), is much more important.
Will we have better luck finding MSM coverage of why Russian athletes shouldn't be allowed to live?
Milosovic was a nasty man who took advantage of NATO's tearing apart of his country but that doesn't change the fact that NATO caused the destruction of Yugoslavia and all the resulting deaths are on their shoulders. Blaming the people that fought after the West created the chaos is rather disingenuous. In the same vein I hear Sitting Bull was a really nasty terrorist leader.
Like I said, booing Russian athletes in Rio, and lamenting that they're even allowed to compete (or live), is much more important.Will we have better luck finding MSM coverage of why Russian athletes shouldn't be allowed to live?
It's actually easy to find NATO and US missives basically denying the Russians their sovereignty or right to their own independent policies. When the US regime says that Russia is an "existential threat", and then lists terrorism and the Ebola virus in the same breath (POTUS Barak Obama at the podium of the UN, if you please) as the top 3 threats to the US, then, yeah, it's as close as they can come to saying, "Russia should drop dead" without actually saying it.
As to the other stuff - that's real easy. See the CBC today as a matter of fact ...
There are Russians poised to win medals, some of them potentially gold and potentially tonight. What happens when or if the Russian anthem is played?
Eww. Russians winning medals. That shouldn't be allowed ... which is the gist of this thinly-veiled bigotry.
I predict huge promotions are in store for Adrienne Arsenault after these Games. Because freedom.
It's actually easy to find NATO and US missives basically denying the Russians their sovereignty or right to their own independent policies.
Do you mean the "win at all costs" policy?
then, yeah, it's as close as they can come to saying, "Russia should drop dead" without actually saying it.
I don't think they were all that close at all, until you tried to nudge them.
Milosovic was a nasty man who took advantage of NATO's tearing apart of his country but that doesn't change the fact that NATO caused the destruction of Yugoslavia and all the resulting deaths are on their shoulders. Blaming the people that fought after the West created the chaos is rather disingenuous. In the same vein I hear Sitting Bull was a really nasty terrorist leader.
Pretty sensible take, there.
This is a very interesting one. Because one reason the story "Milosevic not guilty" was not reported widely is because that's not what the source material says.
RT and other media reporting this all source the same report, from Andy Wilcoxson for Counterpunch. [url=http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/01/the-exoneration-of-milosevic-the-... report, an important piece of reporting, is here[/url].
Wilcoxson writes in the key paragraph about what actually happened:
The presiding judge in the Radovan Karadzic trial, O-Gon Kwon of South Korea, was also one of the judges in the Slobodan Milosevic trial. Milosevic’s exoneration by the Karadzic trial chamber may be an indication of how the Milosevic chamber would have eventually ruled, at least on the Bosnia charges, if Milosevic had lived to see the conclusion of his own trial.
Perhaps so. Now, of course: I Am Not A Lawyer. Maybe someone who knows law better can chime on on whether a finding in one case that there was probably insufficient evidence to convict the defendant in another case is actually an "exoneration."
Was Jian Ghomeishi exonerated by insufficient evidence to find him guilty?
In this case, was Milosevic exonerated because a trial of a different person entirely implied that there would have been insufficient evidence to convict him of direct responsibility for genocide in Bosnia?
It may well have led to an exoneration of Milosevic on the indictment in the Bosnia case, of course, and that is important. But it's not a finding, is it? Would be curious to hear thoughts on this.
Additionally, there were other ICTY indictments against Milosevic on which he was facing trial at the time of his death, related to events in Kosovo and Croatia. Even if the finding of insufficient evidence in Bosnia amounts to an exoneration, can we consider the findings on the Karadzic case, which apply to Bosnia only, to be evidence bearing in any way on the indictments on non-Bosnian cases?
If Milosevic is free and clear because he urged restraint, by the way, is Obama free and clear for the actions of the brutal Erdogan regime in Turkey? After all, Obama urged restriant. Or do we decline to let the US off the hook quite so easily? Should we declare Milosevic innocent of the deaths in the former Yugoslavia carried out by nationalist militias working for the same nationalist goals of Greater Serbia that he promoted? Or do we hold im morally responsible neverthless?
As a last thought, it is nice to see that the findings of the ICTY are now held up as truthful by some of those who always rejected the ICTY as imperialist, illegitimate victor's justice.
Talking about Obama's guilt or innocence is irrelevant because he will never be charged. He can admit to meeting weekly to engage in ordering extra judicial executions and no one cares. But those Serbs or Syrians or Iraqis or Libyans, now they are truly evil and should be held to account for all their crimes.
I'll start believing in the tooth fairy and Jesus right after the miracle occurs of an International Tribunal charging a Western leader with war crimes.
That's a bit of a trick question Swallow. I think only the living can be "exonerated" (by seeing a trial through to the end).
Well, the articles linked here say that Milosevic has been "exonerated," so ...
I think only the living can be "exonerated" (by seeing a trial through to the end).
Bump - since we agree Milosevic wasn't in fact exonerated and I don't want to continue this in the latest ikosmos "bash Amercans" thread.
