To: Les H who wrote (17744) | 2/15/2002 4:01:52 PM | From: George Papadopoulos | | | Go get them Slobo! If he keeps this up, I think some Muslim or Croat jailmate (if there are any) will "beat him to death" or he will "commit suicide"...Too bad the pictures he showed don't make it on our press...Wish I could watch this, heck it will be a better show on pay per view than watching freak Tyson<g>
Milosevic: U.S. Was Ally of Al Qaeda in Kosovo Fri Feb 15, 1:08 PM ET
By Andrew Roche
THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites) told his war crimes trial on Friday "genocidal" U.S. forces had been the unwitting ally of Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) in Kosovo, and demanded Bill Clinton and other Western leaders come to testify.
Bin Laden's al Qaeda was "one of the fundamentalist groups which sent a unit to fight in Kosovo" alongside Muslim Kosovo Albanians aided by the United States against Serb forces in 1998-9, the fallen Yugoslav leader told The Hague (news - web sites) tribunal.
"The attacks on New York and Washington show what the terrorism you sponsored looks like when it turns against you," he said in a speech that ranged across centuries of history and much of the globe, and exhausted court interpreters.
Milosevic, 60, was extradited from Belgrade seven months ago to a jail cell in The Hague. On Tuesday his trial began for crimes against humanity in Kosovo in 1999 and in Croatia in 1991-2, and for genocide in the 1992-5 Bosnian war.
Prosecutors have this week portrayed him as prime mover in a decade of massacres, torture, mass rape and expulsions by Serbs.
In a second day of reply to prosecutors' opening addresses, he blamed the carnage entirely on his Balkan enemies and NATO (news - web sites). Echoing the language of his indictment, he said the West itself had committed "genocide and crimes against humanity."
"I'm asking what kind of tribunal this is, if you refuse to try people for these crimes by the leaders and armies of NATO countries," a coolly pugnacious Milosevic told judges.
On the fourth day of what is forecast to be a marathon case, he insisted the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians who fled Kosovo in 1999 during the NATO air war against Yugoslavia had been driven out not by Serbs but by their fellow Albanians.
The guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) "referred to all Albanians who did not flee Kosovo as traitors," he said, creating an "illusion of exodus." "There were hundreds of cameras waiting at the borders to show alleged Serb misdeeds."
The motive was to justify NATO's attack, said Milosevic, showing the court pictures of carbonized bodies of civilians killed by NATO bombs in Kosovo and the rest of Serbia in 1999.
CHINESE EMBASSY BOMBING
NATO missiles destroyed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, in what Washington insisted was a mistake by Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) target planners using an outdated map.
"It is quite clear that (former U.S. president) Clinton wanted to go down in history as the first man to bomb Chinese territory by bombing the Chinese embassy," Milosevic said. "This was no accident."
Milosevic accused Germany of setting out to destroy old communist Yugoslavia by its support for Slovenian and Croatian independence, and by secret backing of Albanian "terrorists."
"The German intelligence service rallied up criminals from all over Europe. They were pushed to Kosovo," he said.
Bin Laden, meanwhile, used anarchic Albania as a launchpad for violence in the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe, he said.
Some Muslim "terrorists" in Kosovo, had they not been jailed by Serbia, would now be "going in chains to Guantanamo Bay" from Afghanistan (news - web sites) instead, the white-haired Milosevic insisted.
"While Americans transport al Qaeda terrorists to Guantanamo...at the same time they demand all Albanian terrorists be freed from prisons in Yugoslavia," he added.
The involvement in the Balkans of Mujahideen guerrillas from Arab states and Afghanistan is well-documented, and U.S. agents followed the trail of bin Laden and his followers in Albania and Kosovo itself, before the September 11 attacks.
Accusing NATO of the use of especially lethal cluster bombs, he showed the court a photograph of a Serb woman killed while plowing her field and corpses of children in pajamas.
"This is an example of bestiality, targeting people in this way," he said, adding NATO bombed at night to maximize deaths among sleeping civilians. He showed pictures of shattered hospitals, an old people's home, buses, houses and workplaces, some strewn with charred and bloodied bodies.
After NATO occupied Kosovo in June 1999, they allowed Serbs to be killed or forced out by Albanian "terrorists" and "savages." More than 100 Serb Orthodox churches were razed in a campaign he likened to Taliban destruction of Buddhist statues.
Kosovo, seen by Serbs as a historic heartland, was now run by an "Albanian drug mafia" and the sex-slave trade, he said.
CALLS CLINTON, ALBRIGHT, BLAIR, SCHROEDER
"I am going to call witnesses here and I want it to be possible to question Clinton and Albright and Kinkel and Schroeder and Kohl and Dini... Kofi Annan (news - web sites)... Blair," he said, listing Western and U.N. leaders involved in Balkan peace talks.
Milosevic wants them to testify that the West used him as a peacemaker in the Bosnian war before turning against him.
Under the tribunal's procedures Milosevic is expected to produce a list of witnesses he wants called. The three judges have the final say on whether witnesses are subpoenaed.
The reformist Yugoslav government, which handed Milosevic to The Hague, on Friday called his testimony "disgusting." But the Russian parliament branded the tribunal a "political" court which had failed to charge NATO states for atrocities.
During his afternoon speech, Milosevic compared Clinton's strategy in fighting the Kosovo war to that of Adolf Hitler's: to establish a strategic base from which to attack Russia. He described the policy the Austro-Hungarian empire had adopted toward the territories of the crumbling Ottoman empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, that of keeping Serbia weak and the Balkans divided, he said. Presiding Judge Richard May urged Milosevic to slow down so interpreters could keep up.
Dressed in a navy suit and a tie in the red, blue and white Serbian colors, Milosevic sits flanked by seated guards in a courtroom sealed off from the public gallery by a bullet-proof glass wall and equipped with computer screens and cameras.
Milosevic is conducting his own defense, after refusing to appoint counsel or enter a formal plea on the grounds the court has no right to judge him, but is advised by Belgrade lawyers.
Judges have entered not guilty pleas on his behalf and appointed three lawyers as "friends of the court" to ensure he gets a fair trial. The "friends" on Friday appealed for judges to give him leeway in the length of his address, and he was allowed to continue on Monday until 1 p.m.
Milosevic could face life in prison if convicted at the end of an epic trial some expect to last at least two years. |
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To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (17747) | 7/17/2002 7:28:53 PM | From: George Papadopoulos | | | not sure if there is anyone left here but I am posting this since we talked about it briefly if my memory serves me right...
Greek Police Catch Suspected Nov 17 Guerrilla Boss Wed Jul 17, 7:07 PM ET
By Maria Petrakis
ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek police Wednesday detained a 60-year-old man who they suspect may be a leader and possibly even a founder of the country's most wanted urban guerrilla group, November 17, a police source said.
In what Greek media were reporting as an "historic day," the source told Reuters the man had been seized by an anti-terrorism squad who landed by helicopter on the island of Lipsi, 160 miles east of Athens, where he has a holiday home.
The source said he was being questioned at Athens police headquarters and documents, a typewriter and a computer had been seized from his main home in the capital.
Earlier Wednesday police said ballistic tests had linked a gun used by November 17 to the murders of seven people including a British military attache and a Greek politician.
Named after the date of a bloody student uprising in 1973 during Greece's 1967-74 military rule, the radical leftist group has killed 23 people since 1975, starting with the murder of Richard Welch, head of the American CIA ( news - web sites)'s Athens bureau.
But until the past few weeks, police had failed to identify, let alone arrest, a single member of a group that ranked with Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang and the Italian Red Brigades.
HELICOPTER RAID
Witnesses on the isolated Lipsi island, with only 600 inhabitants, told Greek television stations that the anti-terrorism squad of six had landed in a fire department helicopter so as not to tip off the suspect.
They said they believed the suspect was a university professor with a French wife, and that police had taken him into custody because they feared he was about to take evidence off the island.
Since the manhunt for November 17 gripped Greece at the end of June, there has been almost unanimous agreement in the media that its founder was a Greek student radical in the 1960s who studied in Paris and received revolutionary training in Cuba.
Hopes already were sky-high that the group's demise was near before the suspect was taken into custody.
An earlier police statement said they had positively linked a .45 pistol discovered in a central Athens hideout to the shooting of British military attache Stephen Saunders and parliamentarian Pavlos Bakoyiannis, son-in-law of a former Greek prime minister.
The hideouts also contained dozens of anti-tank rockets, remote-controlled bombs and disguises such as fake police uniforms.
BOTCHED BOMBING
Police were led to the weapons cache after suspected November 17 member Savvas Xiros was injured in a botched bombing at a Greek shipping company at the end of June.
Xiros, 40, an icon painter and son of a Greek Orthodox priest, is being questioned by authorities.
The police statement said three other people, including two of Xiros's brothers, were also being questioned about their links to the group.
Saunders, the group's last victim, was killed in central Athens while driving to work on June 8, 2000 when two men on a motorcycle came alongside his car and shot him through the windows.
In a declaration, November 17 wrote that he had been targeted for his alleged participation in the orchestration of NATO ( news - web sites)'s bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict, a claim denied by his family.
Saunders's murder set off an outcry in Britain and led to British police joining the investigation along with FBI ( news - web sites) agents already working on the case.
With the Athens 2004 Olympics looming, Greek authorities have thrown all their efforts into tracking down the group.
"All these incidents of the last 27 years...will be solved and they will be fully solved," Greek government spokesman Christos Protopapas told reporters Wednesday.
November 17 has also been linked to the murder of Greek police and industrialists, attacks on Turkish diplomats, a rocket attack on the German ambassador's residence, and bank robberies to finance its operations. |
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To: Yaacov who wrote (17749) | 9/5/2002 11:40:16 PM | From: George Papadopoulos | | | Yaacov,
do you hear the hoopla coming from downtown Belgrade?????????They are going crazy there, Yugoslavia beat the USA in the World Basketball championships and advances to the semis while the NBA prima donas are going to play for places 5-8!!!!!!!
I am alive and kicking of course, just became a father again, I got a baby daughter to join my almost 5 year old son
Life is good, now if only Bush would just shut his mouth about wars with Iraq and the bear running rampant in the markets went away it would be even better<g>
Ciao |
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