|
Milosevic Threatens to Tell of Dirty Deals with West
LONDON, July 1 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Slobodan Milosevic is planning to embarrass Western governments by revealing at his war crimes trial at The Hague the secret deals he claims propped up his regime during a decade of bloodshed in the Balkans, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that lawyers for the deposed Serbian president will name three former British foreign secretaries, Lord (Douglas) Hurd, Lord (Peter) Carrington and Lord (David) Owen, in a court strategy designed to implicate British and American diplomatic figures in the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia.
They will claim he was given a "green light" for many of his most controversial actions, including the use of force.
"Mr Milosevic feels that NATO are the real criminals and that will be part of his defence," Mr Branimir Gugl, one of Milosevic's lawyers, said.
Milosevic will argue the British peers, along with Foreign Office diplomats, were involved in negotiating peace deals designed to keep him in power, the paper said.
Lord Hurd's later role as director of National Westminster Bank in striking a lucrative deal with Milosevic to refinance the Serbian economy is likely to be highlighted during the trial.
The former president, nicknamed the Butcher of Belgrade for his pitiless treatment of ethnic minorities, is said to feel betrayed by Western negotiators.
A senior British Foreign Office official said: "We will not be surprised if Lord Hurd's dealings with Milosevic are raised during the trial but in fact our hands are clean, we have nothing to hide. The French Government may well be nervous about its own friendly relationship with Milosevic right up to 1999 being brought up."
The French are believed to have maintained communications with the Serbs during the NATO bombing campaign, which was beset by leaks of targets. Serbs have claimed that General Bernard Janvier, a French former UN commander, secretly promised to veto air strikes in 1995, provided they released 300 UN hostages, the newspaper said.
A month later, the Serb army attacked Srebrenica, killing 7,000 Muslims in Europe's biggest war crime in 50 years.
|
