ICC siasat komando Israel serang flotila
THE HAGUE 15 Mei – Mahkamah Jenayah Antarabangsa (ICC), semalam membuka kertas siasatan terhadap kes serbuan komando Israel ke atas flotila antarabangsa ke Gaza pada 2010 yang mengakibatkan sembilan aktivis Turki maut.
Pendakwa Raya ICC, Fatou Bensouda dalam kenyataannya berkata, siasatan itu dijalankan untuk meneliti sama ada tindakan rejim Zionis Israel itu telah melakukan jenayah perang atau jenayah kemanusiaan.
“ICC akan melaksanakan siasatan awal ke atas kes berkenaan bagi menentukan kriteria kes itu sebelum siasatan penuh dilakukan,” jelasnya.
Sembilan aktivis Turki maut dalam insiden itu, selepas komando Israel menyerbu enam buah kapal yang menyertai flotila keamanan ke Gaza pada 31 Mei 2010.
Bensouda berkata, beliau turut mengadakan pertemuan dengan barisan peguam di Turki yang akan membantu ICC dalam kes tersebut.
“Selepas melakukan analisis secara teliti berdasarkan maklumat yang diperolehi, saya akan mengumumkan tentang proses kes ini kepada umum,” katanya.
Barisan peguam yang menyerahkan kes setebal 17 muka surat itu berkata, serangan ke atas flotila itu telah memberi kesan yang serius kepada masyarakat antarabangsa dan ICC merupakan sebuah institusi yang sesuai untuk menegakkan keadilan.
Jelas mereka, tindakan Pasukan Pertahanan Israel (IDF) itu secara jelas menunjukkan dasar rejim Zionis Israel sanggup menggunakan kekerasan bagi menghalang misi kemanusiaan ke Gaza.
“Serangan IDF ke atas flotila dilihat sebagai jenayah perang dan jenayah kemanusiaan,” kata mereka. – AFP
The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi
For nearly 11 years, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been a prisoner in Guantánamo. In 2005, he began to write his memoirs of his time in captivity. His handwritten 466-page manuscript is a harrowing account of his detention, interrogation, and abuse. Although his abuse has been corroborated by U.S. government officials, declassified documents, and independent investigators, Slahi tells his story with the detail and perspective that could only be known by himself and the people who have kept him captive. It is impossible for us to meet with him or independently verify his account. Until now, it has been impossible for him to tell his story.
This week, Slate has published a three-part series of excerpts from Slahi’s declassified memoirs. You can also read a single-page view of the three excerpts here. The entire project, including supplementary materials, is below.
Warlord jailed for 45 years for Sarajevo war crimes
By Maja Zuvela
Known as the “Monster of Grbavica,” a Montenegrin warlord was sentenced Friday to the longest term yet given by the Bosnian war crimes court for what the judge called “horrid, cruel and manifold criminal acts.”
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — A Montenegrin warlord was jailed for 45 years Friday for murder, rape and torture of non-Serb civilians in Sarajevo in the Bosnian war, receiving the longest sentence handed down so far by the Bosnian war crimes court.
Veselin Vlahovic, nicknamed Batko, was found guilty of the murders of 31 people, rapes of at least 13 women and torture and robbery of dozens of civilians in Grbavica and Vraca, Serb-occupied areas of Sarajevo, in 1992, said presiding judge Zoran Bozic.
Vlahovic, known as the “Monster of Grbavica,” carried out “horrid, cruel and manifold criminal acts,” Bozic said.
Prosecutors compiled a 65-count indictment against Vlahovic, the most extensive ever for crimes committed in the Bosnian 1992-95 war. The 45-year sentence is the maximum that can be given for such crimes.
Bozic said Vlahovic, a member of a paramilitary group allied to the Bosnian Serb army, often demanded ransoms of money or gold for his captives.
“Victims who could not pay for their lives would be typically taken to a recognizable location on Trebevic hill and shot in the head,” Bozic added.
He described how Vlahovic raped a seven-months pregnant woman in front of her young daughter in their Grbavica apartment, and in another incident raped a woman and then forced her to watch him rape her mother.
Vlahovic, 44, was detained in 2010 in Spain and delivered to the Bosnian court. He had served a jail sentence after the Bosnian war for an armed robbery in Montenegro.
Bosnian Serbs, backed by the Serb-led Yugoslav army, launched an “ethnic cleansing” campaign in April 1992 in which thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats were killed, held captive or driven from their homes.
Within months Serb forces had captured almost three-quarters of Bosnia and encircled its capital Sarajevo, where more than 10,000 people died in a 3 1/2-year siege.
More than 100,000 people were killed in the course of the 1992-95 war.
The Bosnian war crimes court was set up in Sarajevo in 2005 to reduce the workload of the United Nations war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Tiny Montenegro, now independent, was still in union with Serbia during the Balkan wars and many Montenegrins sympathised with the Serb cause against Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Kosovo Albanians.
Bosnia: Man sentenced to 45 years for war crimes
By AIDA CERKEZ
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — A court in Bosnia on Friday convicted a Montenegrin man of multiple counts of murder, torture, rape and looting during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, and sentenced him to 45 years in prison — the highest sentence ever issued in the country.
Judge Zoran Bozic said that Veselin Vlahovic, killed 31 people, raped a number of Bosniak and Croat women and tortured and robbed non-Serb residents of a Sarajevo suburb while fighting for the Bosnian Serbs. Among other crimes, the judge described how Vlahovic cut the throats of two brothers in front of their mother, then killed her and raped the men’s wives.
“We are happy with the maximum sentence,” said Boris Grubisic, the spokesman for the Prosecutor’s office.
He said that during the trial some of the 112 witnesses described the rape of women late in their pregnancies and mothers being raped in front of their children. Grubisic said that Vlahovic committed the crimes over several months. Although he received the maximum sentence, the prosecution still plans to appeal because he was acquitted on six counts.
Vlahovic’s layer Radivoje Lazarevic said he also will appeal the sentence because he believes that some of the 60 counts on which Vlahovic was convicted were not proven.
In 1992, when Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo, they mistreated non-Serb residents of the areas that they controlled. Vlahovic was the commander of a paramilitary unit that went from house to house looking for Muslims and Catholics, then looted their homes, tortured and often killed entire families.
Vlahovic, 43, appeared occasionally bored as the judge spent two hours reading horrific details from the verdict.
He said that in most cases, Vlahovic and his gang entered people’s apartments, asked for money and gold, promising not to kill in return — a promise they often didn’t keep.
After the robbery, women were raped and men beaten and tortured. Some were killed on the spot or driven off in a car after, never to be seen again.
In some cases Vlahovic asked victims to kiss the hand that was beating them. He took one man to a house and ordered him to have sex with the body of a woman whose throat had been cut, the judge said.
“Everything was followed by extremely arrogant and brutal behavior, which led the witnesses to remember him as the Monster of Grbavica,” judge Bozic said.
Vlahovic showed no reaction when the judge pronounced the verdict.
Bakira Hasecic, the head of an association of victims of wartime rape, said the sentence was the best satisfaction that has so far come out of Bosnia’s war crimes court, but added that Vlahovic was such a monster that even the maximum sentence was not enough for him.
Vlahovic fled to neighboring Serbia and Montenegro after the war. He was jailed in Montenegro for armed robbery but escaped from prison. Spanish police then found him in 2010 living in the town of Altea. He was extradited to Bosnia the same year although he is also wanted in Spain for robbery and assault with a firearm.
The war crimes department of the Bosnian State Court was established in 2005 to take some of the burden from the overcrowded U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague.
Foreign and domestic judges and prosecutors have processed about 100 cases of war crimes, including genocide, in accordance with international standards and under the monitoring of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Bosnian Serb gets 45yrs for war crimes
Rusmir Smajilhodzic
VESELIN Vlahovic, a former Bosnian Serb paramilitary dubbed the “Monster of Grbavica”, was jailed Friday for 45 years for inflicting a reign of terror on Sarajevo civilians during the 1992-95 war.
“During systematic repression against the non-Serb population he participated in expulsion of his victims, he committed murders, he tortured, raped and imprisoned his victims,” judge Zoran Bozic said at the sentencing in a packed Sarajevo courtroom.
The sentence against Vlahovic, a Montenegrin, is the most severe delivered for war crimes by a Bosnian court.
Dressed in light blue shirt, Vlahovic, 43, showed no reaction when the verdict was read out, drawing applause from members of victims’ associations in the heavily guarded courtroom.
Vlahovic, sentenced on all 60 counts in his indictment, committed the crimes between May and July 1992, in three Sarajevo neighbourhoods controlled by Serb forces during the war — Grbavica, Kovacici and Vraca.
“He killed 31 people, took 14 people who have still been considered missing, raped 13 women,” prosecutor Behaija Krnjic said in a closing statement, having said earlier in the trial that Vlahovic’s “name was the synonym for evil”.
Vlahovic, who had pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial in April 2011, was charged with the “executions, enslavement, rape, physical and psychological torture” of Muslim and Croat civilians, as well as looting, according to the indictment.
Calling for Vlahovic to be jailed for 45 years, Krnjic said: “Such a sentence would be the most just, but even that one will still be insufficient to heal the suffering of the victims.”
A total of 112 prosecution witnesses were heard at the trial, including a number of women who testified behind closed doors to having been raped by Vlahovic, according to Krnjic.
“Vlahovic was not even bothered with the fact that one of his victims was highly pregnant at the time of the rape,” the prosecutor said.
During the trial Vlahovic insulted a witness, a local journalist who reported on his crimes during the war. He also sent an intimidating letter to the family of a victim, the prosecution said.
The case concerned some of the “cruelest war crimes committed during the war, including torture, rapes and executions committed before the eyes of family members of the victims,” it said.
Vlahovic was arrested in March 2010 as a suspect in a number of burglaries in the Spanish town of Altea where he was living under a fake Bulgarian identity. He was extradited to Bosnia in August that year.
Bosnia: Man Sentenced to 45 Years for War Crimes
By AIDA CERKEZ
A court in Bosnia on Friday convicted a Montenegrin man of multiple counts of murder, torture, rape and looting during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, and sentenced him to 45 years in prison — the highest sentence ever issued in the country.
Judge Zoran Bozic said that Veselin Vlahovic, killed 31 people, raped a number of Bosniak and Croat women and tortured and robbed non-Serb residents of a Sarajevo suburb while fighting for the Bosnian Serbs. Among other crimes, the judge described how Vlahovic cut the throats of two brothers in front of their mother, then killed her and raped the men’s wives.
“We are happy with the maximum sentence,” said Boris Grubisic, the spokesman for the Prosecutor’s office.
He said that during the trial some of the 112 witnesses described the rape of women late in their pregnancies and mothers being raped in front of their children. Grubisic said that Vlahovic committed the crimes over several months. Although he received the maximum sentence, the prosecution still plans to appeal because he was acquitted on six counts.
Vlahovic’s layer Radivoje Lazarevic said he also will appeal the sentence because he believes that some of the 60 counts on which Vlahovic was convicted were not proven.
In 1992, when Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo, they mistreated non-Serb residents of the areas that they controlled. Vlahovic was the commander of a paramilitary unit that went from house to house looking for Muslims and Catholics, then looted their homes, tortured and often killed entire families.
Vlahovic, 43, appeared occasionally bored as the judge spent two hours reading horrific details from the verdict.
He said that in most cases, Vlahovic and his gang entered people’s apartments, asked for money and gold, promising not to kill in return — a promise they often didn’t keep.
After the robbery, women were raped and men beaten and tortured. Some were killed on the spot or driven off in a car after, never to be seen again.
In some cases Vlahovic asked victims to kiss the hand that was beating them. He took one man to a house and ordered him to have sex with the body of a woman whose throat had been cut, the judge said.
“Everything was followed by extremely arrogant and brutal behavior, which led the witnesses to remember him as the Monster of Grbavica,” judge Bozic said.
Vlahovic showed no reaction when the judge pronounced the verdict.
Bakira Hasecic, the head of an association of victims of wartime rape, said the sentence was the best satisfaction that has so far come out of Bosnia’s war crimes court, but added that Vlahovic was such a monster that even the maximum sentence was not enough for him.
Vlahovic fled to neighboring Serbia and Montenegro after the war. He was jailed in Montenegro for armed robbery but escaped from prison. Spanish police then found him in 2010 living in the town of Altea. He was extradited to Bosnia the same year although he is also wanted in Spain for robbery and assault with a firearm.
The war crimes department of the Bosnian State Court was established in 2005 to take some of the burden from the overcrowded U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague.
Foreign and domestic judges and prosecutors have processed about 100 cases of war crimes, including genocide, in accordance with international standards and under the monitoring of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Ex-Bosnian Serb Paramilitary Member Sentenced to 45 Years for War Crimes
The Bosnian war crimes court has sentenced a former member of the Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces to 45 years in prison — the maximum possible punishment for war crimes committed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war and the longest jail term ever handed down by the court.
Veselin Vlahovic, a Montenegrin nicknamed “Batko,” was found guilty of murdering 31 people, raping at least 13 women and torturing and robbing dozens of people in Grbavica and Vraca, Serb-occupied areas of Sarajevo, in 1992.
He became known as the “Monster of Grbavica.”
Vlahovic escaped from pretrial detention in Montenegro in 2001 but was arrested in Spain in 2010 and extradited to Bosnia.
Tony Blair and Iraq: The damning evidence
Secret testimony to Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence shows former PM ‘accepted Libya was a bigger threat’
Hitherto unseen evidence given to the Chilcot Inquiry by British intelligence has revealed that former prime minister Tony Blair was told that Iraq had, at most, only a trivial amount of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that Libya was in this respect a far greater threat.
Intelligence officers have disclosed that just the day before Mr Blair went to visit president George Bush in April 2002, he appeared to accept this but returned a “changed man” and subsequently ordered the production of dossiers to “find the intelligence” that he wanted to use to justify going to war.
This and other secret evidence (given in camera) to the inquiry will, The Independent on Sunday understands, be used as the basis for severe criticism of the former prime minister when the Chilcot report is published.
Mr Blair is said to have “realised” and “understood” that Libya was the real threat and that he knew “it would not be sensible to lead the argument on Saddam and the WMD issue” according to evidence of a conversation on 4 April 2002, the day before he flew to the US to spend a weekend with Mr Bush.
This was disclosed in a closed evidence session with one of MI6′s most senior officers, named as SIS4. Although details have been redacted, the transcript, later released online with little fanfare, states that Mr Blair “realised that the WMD threat from Libya was more serious than from Iraq”.
During a closed session with former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, redacted evidence claims Mr Blair “had understood that Libya posed a bigger threat than Iraq, and understood the risk, therefore, of focusing on WMD in relation to Iraq”. It refers to a meeting held by Mr Blair at Chequers days before the visit to Mr Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, but is unclear whether the claims were made by Sir Richard or another individual. What is clear is that in 2002, British intelligence “discovered that Libya has an active nuclear weapons programme”, according to Sir Richard.
By contrast, Iraq had no nuclear weapons and any actual WMD would be “very, very small” and would fit on to the “back of a petrol lorry”, according to one senior MI6 officer. They admitted the danger from WMD was “all in the cranium of just a few scientists, who we never did meet and we have been unable to meet ever since”.
Yet the weekend at Crawford in April 2002 marked Mr Blair’s conversion to Mr Bush’s way of thinking. The former US president was determined to deal with Saddam Hussein. On Friday 5 April, Mr Blair and Mr Bush spent the evening alone, without their advisers. By the end of the weekend Mr Blair appeared to be a changed man, where previously he had said “we don’t do regime change”, according to Admiral Lord Boyce, former Chief of the Defence Staff.
The findings will inform a highly critical attack on Mr Blair when the Chilcot Inquiry publishes its report later this year. “Chilcot has the full story and it’s a very complex one,” a former senior MI6 officer, who would not be named, told The IoS.
And top-secret British government papers suggesting that the two leaders had made a pact to act against Iraq have been given to the inquiry by barrister and Plaid Cymru MP Elfyn Llwyd. The document was leaked to him after the invasion.
“It was quite clear that the deal had been struck firmly that weekend and the wording was quite unambiguous,” he told The IoS. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that weekend saw Blair decide to go to war.” The former prime minister “had his head turned” and was “star-struck” by Mr Bush, he said.
Before the middle of 2002, “Iraq had been relatively low down the scale of preoccupations” in terms of WMD, according to one MI6 officer in evidence to the inquiry. In the months after Mr Blair’s return from Texas, the secret services came under pressure to come up with intelligence to support a move to war.
MI6 was “on the flypaper of WMD”, and had no appetite for war, admitted another officer, SIS4. “Those of us who had been around [redacted] knew perfectly well what a disaster for countless people a war was going to be.” Another MI6 officer, SIS1, described the “handling” of Curveball, the Iraqi source whose claims of mobile chemical weapons laboratories were subsequently exposed as lies, and the “marketing” of the intelligence as “awful”.
The committee is expected to examine why secret warnings from senior Iraqi figures that there were no WMD were dismissed by British intelligence. Iraq “will not be able to indigenously produce a nuclear weapon while sanctions remain in place”, stated a report by the Joint Intelligence Committee in March 2002, which admitted there was little or no intelligence on chemical or biological weapons.
After the invasion in March 2003, SIS4 suggested, there was “a sort of recognition that the WMD thing had served its purpose; we had got in, we had done the war”.
“This report will be absolutely damning on Blair’s style of government, the decision-making process and the planning and execution for its aftermath,” said a source close to the inquiry, speaking before the 10th anniversary on Tuesday of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue.
One authority on Iraq, Toby Dodge of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, agrees. “I think they will rip into him for his style of government, and that there wasn’t due process,” he said. “It’s clear the way the intelligence was handled, filtered out and shaped was an issue. This is a perversion of the use of intelligence.”
A spokesperson for Mr Blair said: “There have been five inquiries into this now. If people do want to see the intelligence reports they are published online. The view that Saddam Hussein had a WMD programme was held not just by the intelligence services in the UK and US but in countries which opposed military action.”
Congolese Rebel Commander Tells War Crimes Court He Was Just ‘a Soldier’
PARIS — Bosco Ntaganda, the rebel commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo with a reputation for extreme brutality, did not live up to his nickname “The Terminator” on Tuesday when he appeared for the first time at the International Criminal Court on charges of rape, murder, sexual slavery and using children as soldiers.
Wearing a court-issued dark suit, Mr. Ntaganda seemed timid and anxious, cutting a slight figure next to one of the burly guards the court had chosen for the occasion. Although Mr. Ntaganda, long a wanted man, was not asked to enter a plea, he quickly told the judge and a room full of black-gowned lawyers, “I was informed of these crimes, but I plead not guilty.”
When the judge, Ekaterina Trendafilova, asked him to state his profession, Mr. Ntaganda, 39, said simply, “I was a soldier in the Congo.”
It was an understated summary of Mr. Ntaganda’s career, which spanned almost 20 years of fighting, first in Rwanda, then in an array of rebel groups vying for control over a mineral-rich part of eastern Congo, and even a stint as a general in the Congolese Army. According to the prosecution, Mr. Ntaganda was one of the most ruthless and cruel of Congo’s rebel leaders.
His warfare of choice during operations he led in the early 2000s, according to the prosecution, was not military confrontation but a sweeping campaign that involved terrorizing villagers, pillaging, raping, killing and using drugged children as his foot soldiers and henchmen.
The international court first issued an arrest warrant for him in 2006 and another in 2012, but Mr. Ntaganda lived openly, seemingly untouchable, until he unexpectedly arrived at the American Embassy in Kigali in Rwanda last week and asked surprised diplomats to turn him over to the International Criminal Court.
Questions about what prompted the warlord to turn himself in remained unanswered on Tuesday, as the issue was not addressed during the hourlong arraignment hearing in court.
But there was a moment of bemused surprise among observers when Mr. Ntaganda’s court-appointed lawyer said that his client would ask to be released until the start of the trial. Such a request is unlikely to be granted to a man who has been on the run for years.
One theory suggests that by entering the American Embassy in Rwanda, Mr. Ntaganda looked to save his life after feeling threatened by members of his own rebel group, known as M23. The group had recently split, leading him and about 700 of his men to flee across the border into Rwanda.
He was on a list of wanted men whose capture the United States government would pay a hefty reward for, exposing him to additional risk.
Some experts who focus on the region said that the Rwandan government, which had long backed Mr. Ntaganda and his rebels, had urged him to give himself up because it wanted to rid itself of an ally who had become too much of a liability.
They said Mr. Ntaganda had gained a reputation not only as a brutal commander, but also as a rich crime boss in the region around Goma, one of Congo’s biggest cities, where he smuggled minerals, sold fake gold and extorted local businessmen, according to a United Nations report. Rwanda plainly told him that it could no longer protect him, one expert said.
Stephen J. Rapp, the American ambassador for war crimes, who knows the region well, said: “I don’t know how or why Ntaganda came to the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda. For him, this route may have offered the least disadvantages.”
Although neither the United States nor Rwanda is a member of the international court, the two agreed to cooperate to deliver the rebel leader to The Hague, where he arrived in a private plane late Friday.
The removal of Mr. Ntaganda from the conflict zone may be seen as a relief, but it is not expected to bring stability to the region.
Rwanda has been seen as an important destabilizing factor in eastern Congo, with United Nations investigators drawing up detailed reports that the Rwandan government had been covertly supporting Mr. Ntaganda’s men and other rebel groups to profit from the lucrative mineral trade across the border. Several Western nations, including the United States, have cut aid to Rwanda and pressured the government to cut their ties to the Congolese rebel groups.
“We want there to be peace in the region,” said Mr. Rapp, a former international prosecutor, who said that in his present job he had been to Congo eight times and had “seen the horrors inflicted on the people.” At one point, in the town of Kiwanja, he said, “I met a woman who had seen the throats of her eight children slashed before her eyes, allegedly by men under Bosco’s command.”
“There were local prosecutions, but Bosco and his men were above the law,” he added. “When one was arrested he was broken out of jail.”
The judge, in reading the charges against him, said Mr. Ntaganda was accused of the war crime of enlisting and using children under the age of 15 as soldiers, and of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, sexual slavery and pillaging.
Last year, the court sentenced Thomas Lubanga, a former associate of Mr. Ntaganda, to 14 years in prison for enlisting child soldiers. The prosecution charges that Mr. Ntaganda was the main person in charge of conscription.
During much of the hearing, Mr. Ntaganda was clearly uncomfortable in the sleek modern courtroom, often looking down or hunching over as if wanting to disappear. He told the court he was born in Rwanda but had grown up in Congo and was a Congolese citizen. When the judge asked if he spoke English or French, the languages of the court, Mr. Ntaganda said, “I understand French somewhat, but I speak Kinyarwanda,” the language of Rwanda.
The next hearing in the case was set for April 15.