[NYC-L] Film Screening on ICTY - Justice Unseen

[ak2480 at columbia.edu]

In light of Milosevic's death and its implications on tribunal
proceedings at the Hague, I thought some of you may be interested
in viewing the film, Justice Unseen - directed by Aldin Arnautovic
& Refik Hodzic (2004).
Here's more info. below.

Kindest Regards,
Antigona Kukaj


More than a decade after the United Nations established the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY),
two filmmakers from Sarajevo set out to examine the tribunal's
progress in bringing war criminals to justice and reconciling a
dark record of human rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia. 
Justice Unseen transports the viewer to the tribunal proceedings at
The Hague, as well as to two Bosnian communities--Prijedor and
Konjic--to examine the public's response to the ICTY and its
performance to date.

Film screening will be followed by a Q&A with Director Refik
Hodzic.

Refreshments will be served.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006
8 p.m.at Columbia University
Schermerhorn Hall, Room 501
1190 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027

Map:http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/schermerhorn.html

If you are unable to attend this screening, you are welcome to
attend the ICTJ screening:

Wednesday, March 22, 2006
7:00-9:00 p.m. at the International Center for Transitional Justice
20 Exchange Place (corner of William Street) 34th floor
New York, NY 10005

Please RSVP to info at ictj.org or (917) 438-9330 by Friday, March 17,
2006. (For ICTJ screening only.)
___________________

About Refik Hodzic

Refik Hodzic was born in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  He
worked as a reporter for Bosnian national TV and radio, before
becoming an editor-in-chief of a local radio station and news
magazine.  In 1998, he joined the United Nations and worked as a
spokesperson in missions in Bosnia and East Timor before joining
the ICTY where he served as Outreach Coordinator for Bosnia and
Herzegovina. In January 2005 he joined the War Crimes Chamber of
the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina as the head of Public
Information and Outreach. Mr. Hodzic is one of the founders of XY
Films, an independent film production company in Sarajevo
specializing in documentary films on war crimes committed during
the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.  A co-writer
and co-director of Justice Unseen, he is currently filming a
documentary on the search for a boy who disappeared after the fall
of Srebrenica.


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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. NY Times Article on Milosevic's Death (KL3V1S)
>
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2006 09:32:37 -0800 (PST)
> From: KL3V1S <euroguy666 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [NYC-L] NY Times Article on Milosevic's Death
> To: nyc-l at alb-net.com
> Message-ID: <20060312173237.20794.qmail at web52605.mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Mr. Cohen could not have summed it up better!  Much thanks to him
> for bringing out the truth in such a powerful and clear way!  As
> I read this article today, I could just see the thoughts of all
> those who suffered under this man's brutal blood campaigns,
> portrayed in it.  I am including the article below as published
> on Lexis-Nexis today March 12, 2006.
> Klevis
>
> Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
> The New York Times
> March 12, 2006 Sunday
> Late Edition - Final
> SECTION: Section 1; Column 4; Foreign Desk; DEATH OF MILOSEVIC:
> AN APPRAISAL; Pg. 1
>
> LENGTH: 1815 words
>
> HEADLINE: To His Death in Jail, Milosevic Exalted Image of Serb
> Suffering
>
> BYLINE: By ROGER COHEN
>
>  BODY:
>
>
> To the last, a solitary death yesterday in a United Nations cell
> near an international court he derided, Slobodan Milosevic clung
> to the notion that all the Balkan destruction he ignited and
> presided over was no more than a response to aggression against
> his long-suffering Serbian people.
>
>  ''My aim is to present the truth, and that takes time,'' the
> former Serbian president told the tribunal in The Hague, a
> prelude to painstaking circumlocutions that sought over more than
> four years to cast the author of Yugoslavia's destruction as a
> misunderstood man bent only on that country's defense.
>
> In fact, the truth for Mr. Milosevic was always a commodity to be
> manipulated in the single-minded pursuit of power. Everyone --
> Croats reinvented as World War II fascists, Bosnian Muslims
> recast as marauding Ottoman Turks, multiplying Kosovo Albanians
> redrawn as agents of ''demographic genocide'' against the Serbs
> -- was fit material for Mr. Milosevic's overriding myth of
> Serbian suffering.
>
>  That myth held a heady power over many years. As Communism
> collapsed in Europe and his own Yugoslavia in the late 1980's,
> Mr. Milosevic seized the potential of nationalism as what
> Miroslav Hroch, a Czech political theorist, has called ''a
> substitute for factors of integration in a disintegrating
> society.''
>
>  Deploying a blunt slogan -- ''Serbia does not kneel'' -- Mr.
> Milosevic, 64, engineered a giddy apotheosis from what had been a
> humdrum career as a banker and Communist bureaucrat. He was found
> dead in his bed, apparently of natural causes, according to the
> tribunal. An autopsy was to be performed today in the
> Netherlands. [Page 12.]
>
>  His method was unsubtle -- the defense of Serbs and a glorious
> vision of Serbian history -- but it played well to a people with
> a long-held conviction that Tito's Communist Yugoslavia had
> cheated them of rightful power.
>
>  One result was a violence not seen in Europe since 1945. No
> Stalin, no Hitler, Mr. Milosevic nevertheless proved himself over
> 13 years in power to be a ruler of exceptional ruthlessness
> always ready to use force in a series of wars, from Croatia in
> 1991 to Kosovo in 1999. [Obituary, Page 34.]
>
>  In effect, Mr. Milosevic destroyed the delicate balance of the
> Yugoslavia he professed to defend and then expressed wonderment
> at its violent destruction. ''Who, me?'' he always seemed to ask,
> both as leader and later during his long season in court, when
> confronted with the repetitive evidence of his own
> destructiveness.
>
>  By the time Yugoslavia began to unravel in 1991 in the wars that
> left more than 200,000 people dead, Mr. Milosevic has quashed the
> autonomy of Kosovo and another province, Vojvodina, and installed
> a subservient leadership in Montenegro. As a result, he
> controlled four votes in the eight-member collective Yugoslav
> presidency.
>
>  When the leaders of other Yugoslav republics balked, suggesting
> Mr. Milosevic had transformed Yugoslavia into ''Serboslavia,''
> the Serbian leader performed a typical pirouette, declaring that
> Serbs were on the defensive because they only wanted to remain
> within a threatened Yugoslav state. Having smashed all the
> furniture, Mr. Milosevic blamed everyone else for no longer
> wanting to sit down with him.
>
>   Wars followed -- briefly in Slovenia, then in Croatia, most
> devastatingly in Bosnia, and finally in Kosovo. As they did --
> and that delicate early 20th-century creation, Yugoslavia, was
> destroyed as utterly as the old Ottoman bridge at Mostar -- Mr.
> Milosevic never wavered in attempting to portray himself and the
> Serbs as victims of ''Muslim propaganda'' or other baleful forces
> beyond his control.
>
>  ''The national and historic being of Serbs is a liberating
> one,'' Mr. Milosevic declared during his rise to power in the
> 1980's. It was to this vision that he and many of his disoriented
> people clung through the discovery of an array of Serbian
> concentration camps in Bosnia in 1992 and even through the
> killing of thousands of Muslims near the eastern Bosnian town of
> Srebrenica in 1995.
>
>  During his trial on charges of crimes against humanity and
> genocide, Mr. Milosevic, acting as his own lawyer, called dozens
> of witnesses, from former Communist Party aides to Russian
> politicians, in an attempt to bolster his case that none of the
> killings and forced evictions known as ''ethnic cleansing'' took
> place at his instigation.
>
>  Wars are nasty, he argued in essence, and bad things happen to
> everyone. But, he insisted, the notion of a plan for a Greater
> Serbia brutally emptied of non-Serbs was an invention of the many
> enemies of his people.
>
>  His argument ignored multiple realities -- the systematic arming
> of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia; the coordinated nature of the
> camps in which tens of thousands of unarmed Muslim civilians
> suffered or were killed in 1992; the conversion of the
> Serbian-dominated Yugoslav army into an agent of Serbian
> expansionism; the financing of that operation from Belgrade; and
> the deployment of highly trained Serbian militias in Bosnia and
> later in Kosovo.
>
>  But reality was never Mr. Milosevic's preferred domain. He only
> ventured into Bosnia once, the better to conserve the fantasies
> that fed his rise to power.
>
>  Borislav Jovic, a senior aide to Mr. Milosevic, was much more
> forthright. In interviews with the BBC for a documentary on the
> destruction of Yugoslavia, he explained that the aim was always
> to use wars in Croatia and Serbia to consolidate areas with large
> Serb population into a Greater Serbia.
>
>  Before war broke out upon Bosnia's declaration of independence
> from Yugoslavia in April 1992, planning was already in place.
> ''We knew that when Bosnia was recognized, we'd be seen as
> aggressors because our army was there,'' Mr. Jovic said. ''So
> Milosevic and I talked it over, and we realized we'd have to pull
> a fast one. We transferred all the Bosnian Serbs in our Yugoslav
> army to their forces and promised to pay all the costs.''
>
>  One result was that for the initial year of the war, Serbs
> enjoyed a crushing military domination that they put to use
> emptying wide swathes of eastern, northern and northwestern
> Bosnia of Muslims and laying siege to Bosnia's multiethnic
> capital, Sarajevo, whose plight became a symbol of the Balkan
> madness set in motion by Mr. Milosevic.
>
>  The Bosnian campaign was led by Radovan Karadzic, the political
> leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and by Gen. Ratko Mladic, its
> military architect, both of whom remain fugitives.
>
>  But as Mr. Karadzic's risible little headquarters in the skiing
> village of Pale always made clear, the prosecution of the war was
> unthinkable without coordination and financing from Mr.
> Milosevic's Belgrade.
>
>  Still, the Serbian capital and its ruler, enveloped in the
> drumbeat of propaganda, long contrived to keep the war at some
> distance. Indeed, many Serbian illusions survived a full decade
> after the end of the Bosnian war, until 2005, when the showing of
> videotape of the execution of six Muslim men near Srebrenica by a
> Serbian paramilitary police unit provoked widespread shock.
>
>  That the killings of six men could have such an effect in Serbia
> after the killings of tens of thousands of Muslims at Serbian
> hands was one measure of the powers of Mr. Milosevic as an
> illusionist. Convinced that Serbs were eternal victims, he
> contrived to persuade his countrymen that they remained so as
> Yugoslavia disintegrated.
>
>  Even today, as a democratic but still traumatized and relatively
> isolated Serbia tries to move toward membership of the European
> Union, the country's ability to face what happened under Mr.
> Milosevic often appears limited. Croatian and Bosnian Muslim
> crimes against Serbs, whose existence is well documented, are
> always seized upon to mask the far greater crimes of Serbs
> themselves.
>
>  Both American and United Nations investigations of war crimes in
> Bosnia concluded that a vast majority of them -- 90 percent,
> according to a C.I.A. report -- were committed by Serbs.
>
>  The trial of Mr. Milosevic, endlessly long and now forever
> inconclusive, seems to have done little to provide the sort of
> clear accounting that would have served a Balkan future by making
> history, and particularly Serbian responsibility, clear. An old
> nostrum holds that justice delayed is justice denied; its
> validity in this case seems hard to deny.
>
>  Such a failure, or at least absence of success, is no more than
> one of many. The United States and Europe, disoriented by the
> cold war's end, took a very long time to confront Mr. Milosevic
> and stop him.
>
>   At the Dayton talks of 1995, which ended the Bosnian war, he
> was still an accepted interlocutor. Not until the Kosovo war of
> 1999 did NATO try -- successfully -- to undermine Mr. Milosevic
> and force him out.
>
>  As for Mr. Milosevic himself, nothing he said during more than
> four years in court suggests he ever engaged in self-reproach or
> questioning of any kind. The myriad victims of his heady
> nationalism, among those he fought and the Serbs he professed to
> defend, never appeared to impinge on his stubborn defiance.
>
>  Robert C. Frasure, an American diplomat who died in an accident
> near Sarajevo in 1995, dealt extensively with Mr. Milosevic and
> said he was reminded of ''a Mafia boss who desperately wants to
> get out of the business.''
>
>  As the Serbian nationalist tide ebbed during the 1990's, there
> is little question that Mr. Milosevic tried to extricate himself
> from the frenzy of killing he had inspired. Greater Serbia gave
> way to what an American official described as ''Greater Serbia
> Lite''; that in turn gave way to nothing more than ''Greater
> Slobo,'' which is perhaps what drove the whole crazed enterprise
> from the outset. Serbia's much vaunted military prowess proved
> largely empty in the end.
>
>  A joke at the start of the Bosnian war held that the Serbian
> Tourism Ministry's slogan was: ''Visit Serbia before it visits
> you.'' By the time Mr. Milosevic was ousted in 2000, that slogan
> might have been recast as: ''Visit Serbia before it disappears
> entirely.''
>
>  The unraveling that Mr. Milosevic set in motion has proved
> immensely costly to his people and his region. The ''Serbian
> Question'' is still not solved; it is still unclear, long after
> the 19th-century emergence of a Serbian nation state in modern
> Europe, where Serbia's borders lie. The independence of Kosovo is
> being discussed; Montenegro may choose to leave its partner in a
> truncated federation.
>
>   ''Nobody should dare to beat you,'' Mr. Milosevic declared in
> Kosovo on April 24, 1987, to thunderous cries of ''Slobo'' from
> the Serbian crowd. ''Your ancestors would be defiled,'' he said,
> if Kosovo Albanians had their way.
>
>  The words had a ring to them and set a bloody tide in motion.
> But it is precisely the past noble deeds of Serbs -- not least
> those during World War I that led to the very creation of
> Yugoslavia -- that have been most defiled by Mr. Milosevic's
> crushing defeat and failure in the name of a terrible but
> persistent Serbian illusion.
>
>
>
> URL: http://www.nytimes.com
>
>
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