The Inside Story of How Carl Bildt,
Intelligence Agencies from the Nordic countries, Serge Brammertz, Florence
Hartmann, Mirko Klarin And Others Are Connected to the “Controversy” Designed
to Discredit the ICTY’s President, Judge Theodor Meron
By
Luka Misetic
As
controversy continues to engulf the ICTY as a result of Judge Fred Harhoff’s seemingly
senseless email, over the past week I have been asked the same question
repeatedly. Journalists, former
prosecutors, defense attorneys, friends and relatives have all asked me the
exact same question:
“What
is going on here?”
Allegations
are flying, from the pages of the New York Times to the website of the BBC to
the cafeteria inside the ICTY itself, that the ICTY’s President, Judge Theodor
Meron, has been corrupted by the government of the United States. Judge Fred Harhoff passed along these rumors to
56 of his “closest friends”, thus triggering the “controversy.”[1] Of course, there has not been a single shred
of evidence to support this claim.
Nevertheless, the “story” continues to be driven by several individuals,
many with close connections to the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY.
This
blog post is my attempt to begin to answer to that often repeated query: “What
is going on here?” As I will explain in
great detail below, the interests of many with an agenda against Judge Meron and/or
Ante Gotovina have aligned, including current and former members of the Office
of the Prosecutor, foreign intelligence services who have/had operatives inside
the Office of the Prosecutor, a number of journalists, and the government of
Serbia, among others. Their objective is
to so thoroughly discredit Judge Meron that they will (1) force his removal as
President of the ICTY; (2) discredit the acquittals of Gotovina, Markac,
Perisic, and Jovica Stanisic and create such an unbearable political climate
that the judges will somehow reverse their acquittals even after final
Judgement, and (3) in the case of former Prosecution spokeswoman Florence
Hartmann, discredit her conviction for contempt of the Tribunal (of which all
eight judges of the ICTY who reviewed her case found her guilty, unanimously).
In
short, I argue that we are witnessing a Joint “Criminal” Enterprise
unfolding against Judge Meron (the “crime” in this case being his defamation). The “common purpose” of the Meron JCE is to
destroy Judge Meron’s reputation so as to discredit the acquittals of Gotovina,
Markac, and Perisic. ICTY precedent
holds that such a JCE can exist even if the participants in it have never
formally agreed to such a conspiracy, and indeed even if they do not know of
each other’s existence. (See Gotovina
Trial Judgement, page 985). What is
important is that they all share the same goal: to discredit Theodor Meron.
I.
Introduction
To
understand “what is going on here,” some basic facts about Operation Storm and
the Gotovina case must be established
at the outset. First point: Judges Meron, Robinson and Guney got it
right when they acquitted Gotovina.
Contrary to the Prosecution’s novel theory at trial, and Judge Orie’s Trial
Judgement based on his invented “200 Meter Standard” (which all five Appeals
Chamber judges agreed was erroneous), the Serbs from “Krajina” were not
ethnically cleansed by an unlawful artillery assault launched by Ante Gotovina.
I do
not intend to re-litigate the Gotovina trial here. In summary, the Prosecution argued at trial
that the Serbs were deported from Croatia because they were allegedly
terrorized into leaving by Gotovina’s merciless artillery assault on civilians
and civilian objects. But if you ask
Serge Brammertz today whether the Prosecution has ever been able to identify
(1) a civilian killed or injured by artillery shelling during Operation Storm
or (2) a civilian who claimed to have left the “Krajina” due to fear of
artillery shelling, Brammertz will concede to you that they were never able to
find any such person. There are no known
victims of the alleged unlawful artillery assault or of the so-called “Brioni
JCE” led by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman.
Judges Meron, Robinson and Guney overturned a 24-year conviction of a
man where the Prosecution could not establish a single JCE victim. In any domestic jurisdiction, it would be
Orie’s Trial Judgement and not the Appeals Chamber’s Judgement that would be
deemed the controversial decision. But
for many at the ICTY, this is merely an inconvenient truth.[2]
Ironically,
former Prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann wrote a book in 1999 titled “"Milosevic:
la diagonale du fou (Milosevic: Diagonal of a Madman),” in which she argued
that the “Krajina” Serbs were cleansed by Milosevic, not Tudjman. In a chapter titled the “Abandonment of
Krajina,” the book details why the “Krajina” Serb population left Croatia
during Operation Storm. Hartmann, a
journalist covering the war for Le Monde
at the time of Operation Storm, asserted, “every refugee could confirm that the
population had fled at the request of their own [Krajina Serb] leadership.” Further,
she wrote that every soldier was a witness to the deliberate withdrawal of the
Serbian military, the officers abandoning the night shift at the front and the
retreat of heavy armor. She describes the whole process as the "strategic abandonment" of
'Krajina' by Milosevic and the entire Serbian leadership.
Accordingly,
even Hartmann knows that Judges Meron, Robinson and Guney were right to strike
down the Trial Chamber’s finding that Gotovina deported the “Krajina” Serbs
through unlawful shelling. Nevertheless, Hartmann is one of the principle
members of the “Meron JCE,” attempting to undermine Judge Meron in an effort to
discredit her own conviction for contempt of the Tribunal.
II.
The
Role of Foreign Intelligence Services Inside the ICTY’s Office of the
Prosecutor
In
the early years of the Tribunal, the ICTY did not have the resources to hire
its own staff in large numbers.
Therefore, many of the prosecutors, analysts and investigators working
for OTP in the 1990’s were “on loan” to the ICTY from their own
governments. In her book, “Peace and Punishment,” Florence
Hartmann reveals that some of the “on loan” personnel were really intelligence
agents working more for their home governments than the ICTY. On page 47 of the Croatian edition of the
book, Hartmann describes certain members of the Prosecution staff:
Some barely know where the Balkans even is. They are hounding
the Prosecution, the moving force of the Tribunal, whose judges have been
subdued to the position of arbitrators between the Defense and the Prosecutors.
Military analysts, lawyers and intelligence officers easily blend in the crowd
continuing to occupy humble yet strategic positions and serving more to their
own governments than the ICTY.
This
background information leads us to two Nordic intelligence agents named Joakim
Robertsson (Sweden) and Thomas Elfgren (Finland), who became ICTY Prosecution
investigators and whose stories are interwoven into the Gotovina case and the
recent “Meron JCE.”
III.
Carl
Bildt and the Gotovina Case
Intelligence
agencies from the Nordic countries became heavily involved in the Gotovina case in order to protect the
reputation of Sweden’s top diplomat, Carl Bildt.
Within
9 hours of the commencement of Operation Storm, Bildt, then acting in his
capacity as the European Union’s chief peace negotiator in ex-Yugoslavia,
issued a press release in which he declared that because the Croatian Army had
“shelled the civilian population” in the town of Knin, Croatian President
Franjo Tudjman would be brought before the ICTY.[3] Bildt was in London when he sent this release
and had no first hand information to support the claim.
After
the Croatian takeover of the “Krajina,” international journalists descended on
the town of Knin in order to find the evidence of Bildt’s claim that the
Croatians had “shelled the civilian population.” The international press unanimously concluded
that the allegation was false: there was
no evidence of any unlawful shelling.
Pulitzer prize winner Roy Gutman reported from Knin on August 7th,
1995, three days after Storm began:
At the United Nations base in Knin, UN officers chaffed at a continued
curfew and restrictions on movements, but they acknowledged that the UN had
overstated the damage to Knin during the height of fighting. The UN commander,
Brigadier-General Alain Forand of Canada had said that there had been no direct
hits on Knin's hospital. Reporters saw ... large craters from shells that
shattered most of the windows in a nearby apartment house but there was no
evidence of indiscriminate shelling.[4]
Similarly,
the New York Times reported:
The town does not appear to have been as badly damaged as
reports of the shelling over the past few days would have suggested. For one
thing, the hospital was not shelled, as had been reported. Only one shell hit
the modern hospital building, and the Croats appeared to be aiming at a rebel
Serbian tank firing from nearby, a United Nations official who had been at the
hospital said today. "I don't think they were shelling us," said the
official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In three passes over the town by
helicopter, little evidence was seen of the kind of damage that extensive
shelling would cause. The red tile roofs on most houses are intact. The only
gutted building was the Roman Catholic Church, which served the Catholic
Croats, and the Serbs, who are Orthodox, did that during their occupation.[5]
Finally,
United Nations Military Observers conducted their own investigation into the
shelling of Knin. On 17 August 1995,
they reported that the shelling had been “concentrated against military
objectives,” and that only 3 to 5 shells could be found outside the vicinity of
military objectives.[6]
Accordingly,
the United Nations and the international media had both investigated Bildt’s
claims that Tudjman’s forces had “shelled the civilian population,” and
concluded that they were unsubstantiated.
In
reaction to Bildt’s call for Tudjman to be indicted by the ICTY, Croatia
declared Bildt to be persona non grata
in Croatia.[7] Bosnia-Herzegovina quickly followed suit.[8]
Bildt
thus found himself in the role of the EU’s top peace envoy but unable to travel
to Croatia or be received by Bosnia-Herzegovina officials due to his status as persona non grata. Bildt acknowledges this in his memoirs,
even recounting that Croatia had refused his plane landing rights at the
airport in Split as a result of the dispute.[9] With Bildt and the E.U. on the sidelines,
Richard Holbrooke took over as the primary international negotiator with the
parties in ex-Yugoslavia and ultimately became the architect of the Dayton
Peace Accords.
IV.
Nordic
Intelligence To Bildt’s Rescue:
Robertsson and Elfgren Join the ICTY to Investigate Tudjman and Storm
When
Operation Storm began on 4 August 1995, Joakim Robertsson was a Swedish military
intelligence officer stationed in Zagreb as part of the United Nations
Protection Force (UNPROFOR). [10] Three weeks later, while Bildt was persona non grata in Croatia, Robertsson
was sent by Sweden from Zagreb to the ICTY to be the ICTY Prosecution’s lead
investigator into the shelling conducted in Operation Storm. Within weeks, Robertsson was joined by
Thomas Elfgren, an agent with Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation who
was loaned to the ICTY as an “Expert on Mission” to assist Robertsson in the
Prosecution’s “investigation” of Operation Storm.[11]
The
task given to Robertsson and Elfgren was simple. They were to build the case that Bildt’s
allegations against Tudjman were true by proving that the Croatian Army had
indiscriminately shelled civilians, at Tudjman’s direction and on Gotovina’s
orders. Robertsson and Elfgren stopped
at nothing to vindicate Bildt by making sure that Tudjman and his generals
would be indicted for the alleged unlawful shelling of Knin. Robertsson
went so far as to fabricate evidence in the Gotovina
case, and should have been criminally prosecuted for obstruction of
justice. (For a full discussion of
Robertsson’s fabrication of evidence, see http://icr.icty.org/LegalRef/CMSDocStore/Public/English/Response/NotIndexable/IT-06-90/MSC7260R0000280559.pdf).
V.
Elfgren
and Robertsson Leaked Information to the New York Times in 1999 Alleging
Gotovina Indictment Was Rejected Due to U.S. Conspiracy
Elfgren
and Robertsson failed to convince their colleagues in the Office of the
Prosecutor that the shelling of Knin was unlawful. The Prosecution in 1998 held an Indictment Review
and concluded that the evidence was insufficient to include a charge of
unlawful shelling in any indictment for Operation Storm. This should not have come as a surprise given
that (1) the United Nations investigation in the immediate aftermath of Storm confirmed
the lawfulness of the shelling; (2) on site investigations by international
media including the New York Times confirmed the same; and (3) the Prosecution
could never identify a single shelling victim.
Having
failed to fulfill the mission with respect to Bildt, Elfgren and Robertsson
concluded that the failure of their case was not because of the lack of
evidence, but because of a conspiracy led by the United States government to
impede the investigation of Operation Storm.
Elfgren leaked an internal Prosecution assessment to the New York Times,
spinning that the U.S. was blocking the Operation Storm investigation.[12]
Prosecutor
Louise Arbour responded to the leak by stating that the Prosecution would
conduct an internal investigation to determine the source of the leak.[13]
Arbour’s investigation ultimately concluded that Elfgren was the source of the
1999 leak to the New York Times, which Elfgren himself confirmed to me via
email recently.
Elfgren
and Robertsson never had any evidence that the United States was blocking an
indictment for the use of artillery in Operation Storm. There was no charge for unlawful shelling
because there was no evidence of unlawful shelling. Indeed, even when the Prosecution ultimately
indicted Gotovina in 2001, it did not include a charge that the Krajina Serbs
were ethnically cleansed due to unlawful shelling. Instead, the Prosecution charged that the
Krajina Serbs were deported because the crimes committed after Operation Storm had prevented their return.[14] It was not until 2006, after Gotovina’s
arrest that the Prosecution first charged that the Serbs had been ethnically
cleansed from Croatia due to the shelling attack.
VI.
Elfgren
and Robertsson Attack Judge Meron
Elfgren
and Robertsson left the ICTY before the judgements in the Gotovina case were issued.
After the Appeals Chamber’s acquittal of Generals Gotovina and Markac in
November 2012, Prosecutor Serge Brammertz travelled to Helsinki, Finland where
he appeared on a panel discussion with Elfgren on 22 January 2013 at Helsinki
University.[15] In his speech addressing Brammertz, Elfgren
once again complained that Gotovina had been protected by the United States:
One could argue, with a
fairly good reasoning, that the ICTY, at the very outset, failed to fulfill its
intended purpose. The Tribunal posed no threat to the perpetrators. The
Srebrenica massacre, also known as the Srebrenica genocide serves as an
example. The widespread killings and forced displacement of the Krajina Serbs
in August 1995 is just another one. Many more could be mentioned…
Criminal justice system professionals have
their focus on technically perfect decisions. Too often they pay too little
attention on the material truth and the importance of reconciliation. Truth and
reconciliation should be on top of the agenda when peace and security is at stake.
In 1995, in the corridors of the ICTY, there
were influential elements who knew that no crimes were committed by the Croats
during Operation Storm. My question is, how could they know this?
Mr. Prosecutor, you did your utmost to prove the opposite,
but you failed. The appeals chamber, in its recent decision shared the view
with those who already had the answer in 1995. [16]
Elfgren
and Robertsson did not stop with this speech in January 2013. Instead, as they had done in 1999 in leaking
to the New York Times, the two began their campaign to discredit Gotovina’s
acquittal by acting as anonymous sources to Helsinki’s leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. One would not typically look to the Helsingin Sanomat for hard-hitting
investigative journalism about the inner-workings of the ICTY in The Hague, but
Elfgren turned to his local paper first.
On
14 April 2013, Helsingin Sanomat published
a sensationalist piece claiming that the United States had influenced the
Tribunal into acquitting Gotovina.[17] Having participated in the Gotovina case and thus having had access
to all confidential materials in the case, I can state with certainty that the
article in Helsingin Sanomat was
filled with outright lies that are intended to create the perception that the
United States attempted to influence the ICTY in the Operation Storm case. For example, the article claims that the CIA
withheld satellite imagery concerning Operation Storm in an effort to protect
Gotovina, despite U.S. denials that such imagery exists. The author of the article reports that his
sources (read: Elfgren and Robertsson) dispute the U.S. denial because “the
investigators had previously received one satellite picture from the Canadian
Colonel Leslie, which he had been given by the Americans. “ Leslie never
produced such a picture and never claimed to have such a picture. If he had, I as Gotovina’s Defence Counsel
would know.
The
article goes on to claim that my fellow Gotovina Defence Counsel, Greg Kehoe,
“opposed” the investigation of Gotovina back during the time when he worked for
the ICTY Prosecution. This is an
outright lie. The Gotovina Trial Chamber thoroughly investigated whether Greg had a
conflict of interest, reviewed all of the Prosecution’s internal memoranda, and
concluded that Greg had no involvement in the Operation Storm case.[18] Given that Greg was prosecuting a Croatian
general (Blaskic) during his time at the ICTY, it is preposterous to suggest
that he was secretly protecting one Croatian general (Gotovina) while successfully
prosecuting another (Blaskic). Remarkably, the article mentions that the lawyer
who prosecuted Gotovina, Alan Tieger, is also an American, suggesting that
Tieger is somehow complicit in the U.S. conspiracy to protect Gotovina.
Interestingly,
the Helsingin Sanomat article ghost
written by Elfgren and Robertsson is the first to attack Judge Meron on the
basis of Wikileaks cables from 2003. Sanomat suggests that Judge Meron spoke
to the U.S. Ambassador in 2003 in an effort to get rid of Carla Del Ponte in
2003 because she had indicted Gotovina.
Two months later in June 2013, other members of the “Meron JCE” have recycled
the Wikileaks cables as new “news”[19]
in an effort to discredit Judge Meron following a leaked email written by, guess who?
The
ICTY’s lone Nordic Judge, the Scandinavian Judge Frederik Harhoff of Denmark.
End of Part I
Coming up in Part II, I will describe the
roles of Florence Hartmann and Mirko Klarin of Sense News Agency in the Meron
JCE, and how and why Serge Brammertz is knowingly using the members of the Meron
JCE in an effort to topple the ICTY’s President.
[1]
For my deconstruction of Harhoff’s email, see my earlier blog post: Debunking
Fred Harhoff’s Outrageous Email, http://miseticlaw.blogspot.com/2013/06/debunking-fred-harhoffs-outrageous-email.html
[2]
For further discussion on why the Appeals Chamber was correct to acquit
Gotovina, see my earlier blog post here: http://miseticlaw.blogspot.com/2012/12/dissenting-from-dissenting-opinions-of.html
[4] Newsday,
In Krajina, Disorder Reigns, (8
August 1995).
[5] New
York Times, “Croats Celebrate Capturing Capital of Serbian Rebels”(8 August
1995).
[6]http://icr.icty.org/LegalRef/CMSDocStore/Public/English/Exhibit/NotIndexable/IT-06-90/ACE80787R0000319865.TIF
[9]
Carl Bildt, Peace Journey, pages
75-80.
[10] See
paragraph 4 and Annexes A and B here: http://icr.icty.org/LegalRef/CMSDocStore/Public/English/Submission/NotIndexable/IT-06-90/MSC7260R0000280212.pdf
. See also Robertsson’s LinkedIn Profile here: http://fr.linkedin.com/pub/joakim-robertsson/4/3b0/879. Note that Robertsson on his LinkedIn CV has
left out the year from September 1995 to August 1996, and claims to have only
worked for OTP from September 1996 to September 1997. In fact, Robertsson worked for OTP from September
1995 to September 1997. See, e.g., Trial
Exhibit P-214 at page 1: http://icr.icty.org/LegalRef/CMSDocStore/Public/English/Exhibit/NotIndexable/IT-06-90/ACE81081R0000320324.TIF.
[11]
See Trial Exhibit P-721, demonstrating Elfgren’s status at ICTY as of December
1995: http://icr.icty.org/LegalRef/CMSDocStore/Public/English/Exhibit/NotIndexable/IT-06-90/ACE81779R0000321386.TIF
[12]
New York Times, War Crimes Panel Finds
Croat Troops Cleansed the Serbs, 21 March 1999, as found at http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/21/world/war-crimes-panel-finds-croat-troops-cleansed-the-serbs.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
[14]
See Gotovina 2001 Indictment, at paragraphs 19-20; Gotovina 2004 Amended
Indictment, at paragraphs 23-24 and 36-37.
[16]
As found on Thomas Elfgren’s Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/notes/thomas-elfgren/failed-justice-or-just-a-reality-of-life/10152119535560260
[19]
See Agence France-Presse, Wikileaks Cables
Support Criticism of ICTY Judge, 18 June 2013, as found at http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130618/wikileaks-cables-support-criticism-icty-judge