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Alexander Wolfheze discusses the case of General Ratko Mladić and the victor’s justice imposed by the West after Serbia’s defeat.

See also part one and part two.

Part Three: Spandau-am-See

Report on an Attempted Visit to General Ratko Mladić

(The Hague, July 2023)

After being indicted by the Western-created International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1995 and living in hiding after the Western-supported ‘Bulldozer’ colour revolution overthrow of (Yugoslav President) Slobodan Milošević in 2001, General Ratko Mladić (born Bozhanovici, Bosnia,i 12 March 1942), Supreme Commander of the army of the break-away Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War (1992-95), was arrested by a multi-agency special forces unit in Lazarevo, Serbia, in the early hours of 26 May 2011, only to be extradited to the same tribunal, located in The Hague, five days later. Ever since that day — over twelve years ago now — General Mladić has been subject to the fury of the Atlanticist-defined ‘international community’, hell-bent to punish the General’s temerity to defy the Atlanticist-imposed ‘New World Order’ at its triumphalist zenith (the Yugoslav conflict started just after that order’s formal announcement in March 1991) — he has not walked in the sun or breathed the air as a free man since then. Following its insane — because megalomaniac — self-appointed role as ‘global conscience’, the triumphant West chose to deny the General his proper rights as a simple Prisoner of War, instead subjecting him to the farcical ‘international law’ proceedings of its own purpose-designed ICTY: not satisfied with the mere defeat of its Yugoslav and Serbian enemy, Western leaders decided to subject their defeated enemies to the humiliation of being branded as maximally-monstrous ‘war criminals’. Of course, in terms of ‘narrative marketing’ and ‘perception management’, the persecution of the best-known enemy war leaders, including the General, was best served by imposing various ‘remit restrictions’ on the ICTY, making sure that the ultimate instigators of the Yugoslav bloodbath would enjoy effective ‘legal immunity’ from persecution. Even the most obviously bloody-handed of Western political puppets and military yes-men were carefully shielded from the ICTY: neither Bill Clinton and Tony Blair nor Wesley Clark (born Kanne) and Javier Solana were ever indicted. Similarly, the political and military leaders of the Western-backed break-away states from Yugoslavia, even if most were obviously involved in and responsible for bloodshed, were by and large left alone by the ICTY. The irredeemable anti-Yugoslav and anti-Serbian bias of the ICTY was further proven by its consistent refusal to investigate obvious cases of Croatian war crimes, such as the Medak Pocket massacre (1993) and the shelling of Knin during Operation Storm (1995). These events were simply ‘memory-holed’: no publicity, no recriminations, no official record… [it] simply never happened (Chossudovsky, 95). In the final analysis, the ICTY failed to uphold even the illusion of impartiality: it merely served to demoralize the defeated. Of course, the old-fashioned practice of the victors [is] putting the vanquished to the sword, behind a facade of retroactive law and elegant speeches. …A powerful aggressor, if undefeated in war, cannot and will not be punished (David Irving, Nuremberg. The Last Battle). In the final analysis, the ICTY that convicted General Mladić was nothing but a kangaroo court: it allowed the Western MSM to spin a short-span narrative about General Mladić as a war criminal, but this will not alter his place in his own country’s long-span history, which is that of a war hero.

… every true warrior — and, if anything, the General was that — prefers to die with honour, either on the field of battle or by a firing squad, than to be kept in a cage with his honour smeared. But, of course, that is exactly what is here intended: to deny the courtesy, respect and honour due a now vanquished but once formidable enemy.

The ICTY, now defunct after serving its purpose from 1993 to 2017,ii was a typical product of its time: it derived its international legal authority based on United Nations Security Council Resolution 827, passed at the triumphalist height of the ‘unipolar moment’, the zenith of Atlanticist power just after the fall of the Soviet Union. At that time, with the end of the Cold War, the defeat of the ‘Second World’ East Bloc and the disarray of the East Bloc’s erstwhile ‘Third World’ allies, the ‘First World’ West Bloc’s writ ran virtually unchallenged around the globe. The victorious leaders of the self-styled ‘Free West’ decided they were now the masters of the world and would create a ‘New World Order’ of which they would be the sole-superpower arbiter: they would simultaneously write, persecute and execute its laws — they would be jury, judge and hangman all rolled into one. Post-Cold War, the West’s attitude to defeated Yugoslavia was similar to the Allies’ attitude to defeated Germany post-World War II: the West’s vae victis verdict — the calculated cruelty, ruthless exploitation and shameless self-exaltation it imposed on a defenceless nation — was written with the same words of self-righteousness. If anything, the ICTY’s cloak of pharisaic hypocrisy in pronouncing on the rights and wrongs of Yugoslav history at The Hague was even thicker than the Allies’ International Military Tribunal that had pronounced sentence on German history at Nuremberg. Whereas ‘Nuremberg’ was a clear-cut and unabashed example of the Allies’ victor’s justice, meted out amid the smouldering rubble to which Germany had been reduced by these same Allies’ terror bombing, ‘The Hague’ was a fully-fledged attempt to create ‘international law’ ex nihilo. Following up on tentative attempts at building a theoretically ‘universal’ but practically West Bloc-defined ‘rules-based order’ in the wake of World Wars I and II (respectively, the ‘Commission of Responsibilities’ set up by the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the International Military Tribunal set up at Nuremberg in 1945), the 1993 ICTY and the copy-cat 1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda were major milestones in the West Bloc’s campaign to permanently enshrine its world-view as absolute ‘international law’. The final stage of this campaign began in 1998, with the formal establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), also in The Hague. According to its foundational Rome Statute, which came into effect in 2002, the ICC has full transnational authority, overriding national legislation and diplomatic protocol, to prosecute individuals from the statute’s signatory states who have been deemed to have infringed upon certain ill-defined crimes such as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘crimes of aggression’. Thus, it serves as a moral as well as legal reference point for the West Bloc-defined ‘rules-based order’: many of those who have dared to defy that order since the ICC was established, including several heads of state such as Muammar Ghadaffy of Libya, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast, have been recipients of its indictments. As was the case with the early-globalist ICTY and the ICTR, the full-globalist ICC’s focus seems to be on ‘rogue leaders’ in ‘rogue states’ in the hic sunt dragones margins of the ‘civilized world’, outside the ‘golden billion bubble’ of the ‘rules-based order’ and especially on Black African or Orthodox Christian leaders. In this sense, the ICTY’s indictment of General Mladić, in July 1995, seems to have been a mere warm-up exercise for the much larger quarry in the ICC’s sights: more than a quarter century later, in March 2023, the ICC indicted President Putin of Russia. As was the case with the ICTY and ICTR, the legal status of the ICC as an instrument of ‘international law’ may be highly doubtful (major powers such as China and India do not recognize the ICC and both the US and Russia have withdrawn from the Rome Statute), but the overall trajectory is clear: the globalist elite of the West Bloc is creating a legal framework for its ‘New World Order’ project. Within that framework every non-compliant leader is not merely a threat to Western-imposed ‘global security’ but also a threat to the Western-defined ‘rules-based order’. In this sense, the ICTY-imposed punishment of the top figures of Yugoslavia’s recalcitrant political and military leadership, including Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, Krajina Republic President Milan Babić, Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžić and Republika Srpska Army Commander General Mladić, above all served the purpose of creating a precedent in ‘international law’. Thus, a stark warning was sent to potentially recalcitrant leaders elsewhere: this is what will happen to you if you do not play by our ‘rules’. In this sense, the West Bloc’s ‘rules-based order’ narrative is heavily invested in — even dependent on — upholding the punishments it inflicted upon its defeated enemies through ICTY: these punishments not only serve to remind defeated nations, such as Serbia, of their past defeat and humiliation — they also serve to remind as-yet undefeated enemies, such as Russia, of the future fate that they will suffer if they allow themselves to be defeated and humiliated.

Of all ICTY convicts still alive, only General Mladić is still detained in The Hague, the self-proclaimed ‘city of international justice’ — the other detainees have either served their sentences or have been transferred elsewhere. And a statistically remarkable number of them have died. Only one of these deaths may be credibly explained: Croatian General Slobodan Praljak took poison at The Hague ICTY during sentencing, in plain view of his persecutors, preferring Goering-like suicide over un-military dishonour. The ‘causes’ formally given for multiple other ‘deaths in custody’ are not quite as convincing, with the most high-profile controversy surrounding that of the tribunal’s main defendant, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević. Whatever the exact circumstances of these other, highly suspicious cases, it is clear that imprisonment in The Hague facilities of ‘international justice’, or what MSM whorenalists often called the ‘Hague Hilton’, is not particularly healthy or conducive to a long life expectancy. At the moment of writing, of all ICTY only General Mladić still survives there. With the former ICTY defunct, with his former fellow inmates either dead, released or transferred, with the new ICC in place and with multiple globalist wars of aggression — from Iraq to Ukraine — pushing the Yugoslav wars into the forgotten past, the General’s presence in The Hague is becoming more and more of an anachronism: a left-over fixture from the past — a trophy kept to adorn the globalist ‘city of international justice’. The General’s detention in The Hague, more specifically in the seaside suburb of Scheveningen, is becoming something of a time-warp aberration — not unlike the continued detention of Rudolf Hess in what became the single-detainee prison of the riverside Berlin suburb of Spandau Prison. In the same way as Hess’ Spandau imprisonment then, the General’s Scheveningen imprisonment now combines long-term victor’s justice ‘functionalities’: a reminder of who is in charge by insistence on continued imprisonment, an embarrassment to the nation that is made to host the prison — and an ‘example made’ in the simple human suffering of the prisoner. Because it should not be forgotten that every true warrior — and, if anything, the General was that — prefers to die with honour, either on the field of battle or by a firing squad, than to be kept in a cage with his honour smeared. But, of course, that is exactly what is here intended: to deny the courtesy, respect and honour due a now vanquished but once formidable enemy.

In the summer of 2023, to learn from somebody who embodies history and to have a friendly talk about matters of mutual interest, the author, supported by his Eurasianist Yugoslav friends, applied for permission to visit the General in detention — this application was first delayed and then refused on some bureaucratic pretext. The author may re-apply and the ‘powers that be’ may reconsider but these powers may be subject to ‘higher considerations’ outside of any sane reasoning. After all, the General belongs to a special prisoner category to be kept under special restrictions. But even if the United Nations Detention Unit (UNDU) that keeps the General in custody falls under special ‘international’ jurisdiction (visitors need a passport to enter it), it is still located within an old but partially renovated Dutch prison (Penitentiaire Inrichting Haaglanden) in the seaside Scheveningen suburb of The Hague. The General’s detention is, therefore, something of a legal anomaly: the sentence of actual all-life imprisonment, as currently served by the General, would be illegal and impossible under Dutch law. To illustrate the point: the man responsible for and convicted of the 2002 murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Netherlands’ most high-profile and most impactful political murder since the country’s founding, went free after serving twelve years. Whereas the Netherlands’ eagerness to host prestigious ‘international justice’ institutions such as the ICTY and the ICC may be explained by the wish to cling to the Netherland’s old — and by now fictitious — reputation as a neutral arbiter as well as the wish to cash in on the spin-off business that comes with hosting deep-pocketed foreign diplomates and dignitaries, the Netherlands’ willingness to tolerate the UNDU facility and the General’s interminable imprisonment within it, in stark contradiction to the Dutch tradition of temperance and humanity, is truly intolerable.

Speaking as a Dutch citizen, the writer here wishes to address those of his nation who still possess some sense of proportion and realism about the great affairs of international relations and basic geopolitics. If any degree of sanity can be restored to Dutch politics — which would have to start with denouncing and rejecting any further dealing with all the myriad globalist ‘letter institutions’ that thwart Dutch sovereignty and suffocate Dutch values, from NATO and EU to ICC and UNDU — then a good start may be made by our country’s unilateral decision to release the General and return him to his family, to spend his remaining years on the soil of his fatherland. This would go a long way to restore the friendship between his nation and our nation and it would send an unequivocal signal to all that our country will no longer permit its good name to be lent to the utter travesty and ugly perversion of ‘international justice’ that our transnationalist overlords are projecting from their present The Hague headquarters.

Let us not forget that once before, not too long ago, the very prison where General Mladić is currently held was used by those who sought to make our country part of another transnational utopia. Between 1940 and 1945, this prison was the place where the German occupiers used to imprison Dutch freedom fighters, political dissidents and minority undesirables; it was then known as the Oranje Hotel, Oranje — English ‘Orange’ — being the dynastic name of the Dutch royal family and a symbol of national resistance in the face of foreign occupation. From there, and from the window of General Mladić’s cell, it is but a short walk through the dunes and trees to the Waalsdorpervlakte, the quiet dune valley where the German occupiers shot many Dutch patriots and where the Netherlands’ second most important war memorial service is held, every year on 4 May. The German occupation may be a long time ago, but, in a cruel twist of fate, the Waalsdorpervlakte memorial is now only a stone’s throw away from one of the key power centres of the Netherlands’ new foreign occupation: since 2015, the new, purpose-built ICC ‘justice palace’ and its high corridors of globalist power are located right next to it. The German occupation of the Netherlands lasted five long years — nobody knows how long the globalist occupation of the Netherlands will last. But we may hope that both prisoners, the Dutch nation as well as the General, will outlast it because

The strongest of all warriors are these two:

Time and patience

— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Footnotes

i Note that, at the time of the General’s birth, his native town was formally located on the territory of the Axis-supported ‘Independent State of Croatia’, which had been carved out of the territory of the Axis-occupied first Yugoslav state. Thus, ironically, Božanovići was located in Axis puppet-state territory at the time of his birth, as it is located in Atlanticist puppet-state territory now. From this perspective, the General’s 1992-95 Bosnian War campaign was something rather different than the simple black-and-white, good-Bosniak-against-evil-Serb ‘civil war’ portrayed by the Western MSM: it was an attempt, heroic in some ways, to prevent the foreign (Atlanticist, globalist) re-occupation of territory that had been liberated from foreign (Axis, Nazi) occupation at the cost of the blood, sweat and tears of countless Yugoslavs half a century earlier.

ii Note that the ICTY’s (and the ICTR’s) residual legal tasks were subsequently relegated to the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), set up in 2010 under the terms of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1966. Detainees convicted by the ICTY and now under IRMCT jurisdiction, such as General Mladić, are physically held in the United Nations Detention Unit (UNDU) located in Scheveningen prison, The Hague — the UNDU now also holds ICC detainees.

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Alexander Wolfheze

Alexander Wolfheze received his MA in Semitic Languages and Cultures in 2004 and his cum laude PhD in the Humanities in 2011, both from Leiden University. With extensive research experience in the fields of Assyriology and Cultural Anthropology, he subsequently authored several publications in the field of Near Eastern cultural history.

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