Revolution devours children

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has issued an indictment for contempt of court against the former spokesman for the Prosecution, Florence Hartmann. Hartmann, a former journalist for Le Monde, is one of the attack dogs of modern international justice and she has always taken a very partisan line on the Balkans. In her kiss-and-tell book recounting her experiences, Hartmann attacks the judges of the tribunal, as well as her former boss, for allegedly accepting a deal with Belgrade whereby certain minutes of the country’s Supreme Defence Council could be submitted only in part.

According to her, these documents in fact contained information which could have been used to prove Serbia’s complicity in atrocities committed by the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia if they had been submitted in their entirety. Serbia would then have been condemned for genocide as a state before the International Court of Justice, where a case had been brought by Bosnia. Now the judges have exacted their own revenge by indicting Hartmann for allegedly revealing confidential information in her book, and in an article published online by the Bosnia Institute.

It is ironic that Hartmann herself was still the Prosecutor’s spokeswoman when two Croatian journalists, Domagoj Margetic and Josip Jovic, were themselves indicted for contempt of court although in fact they had only republished information which was already in the public domain. (Their indictment was eventually withdrawn.) The full text of the Hartmann’s indictment can be found on the web site of the ICTY under the section dealing with the Milosevic trial. [www.un.org.icty]. If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of seven years in prison and a fine of $150,000 although to date no one convicted of contempt has received such a punishment.

-- From The European Journal. Sign up for FREE to John Laughland's 'Intelligence Digest' to find out what’s really happening in Europe --