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The tweet ICTY misrepresentation is their latest production.
How does the ICTY misrepresent the Balkan conflicts?
Whenever it is asked – which it frequently is by the news media – The Hague Tribunal asserts that it has fully substantiated the elements which make up the accepted account of the wars. This is completely untrue. The ICTY has never made available real evidence to support any of the serious charges it has
brought against defendants.
How can this be true?
In proper courts, the core evidence against defendants comes from detailed investigations and interviews, all fully supported by documents, recordings and sworn witness testimony which has been carefully checked and corroborated. Forensics, DNA, fingerprints and other forms of technical evidence are all disclosed in full to defendants and their legal teams well in advance of proceedings so that
everything can be independently examined by experts and examined in detail during hearings. None of this happened at The Hague Tribunal.
How did the ICTY get away with this?
Those who should have done so failed to hold the ICTY to account. If they looked at any ICTY case, it was just to read the judgement. Perhaps the inordinate length of ICTY trials put them off detailed study – reading the entire transcript of the 4-year, uncompleted Milosevic trial, would take some 7 years on the basis of a 35-hour reading week. But the signs are they just didn’t care. The ICTY had been set up to
send Serbs to prison for many years and create an impenetrable ring around the official version of the Yugoslav conflicts.
With what results?
Whenever figures such as Karadzic and Mladic are found guilty or have an appeal rejected, journalists trot out the same old lies even though most of them have been comprehensively discredited.
For example?
When Radovan Karadzic’s appeal was rejected by the ICTY in 2018, BBC correspondent Anna Holligan told the Radio 4 Today programme: “these acts of mass murder didn’t happen by chance, they were part of a deliberately constructed political plan to try to permanently remove or ethnic cleanse this territory that they wanted to turn into part of a Greater Serbian republic”. More than a decade earlier Geoffrey
Nice, chief prosecutor in the Milosevic trial, had admitted in an interview that, in four years of trying, the ICTY had found no evidence whatsoever to support allegations of a ‘Greater Serbia policy’.