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Skeptic Ian Williams questions an earlier president.

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MaximsNews.com Weekly Column

Bosnian U.N. Defender Locked Up

by Ian Williams 

Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com [See his Bio.  See his columns listed below. Ian Williams' email:  uswarreport@igc.org ]

          UNITED NATIONS -- 7 July 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com /  Saddam Hussein is on trial, as is Slobodan Milosevic.  Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the dynamic duo who gave the world the siege of Sarajevo and the slaughter of Srebrenica, are still at large but being sought.

And the U.S.’s part in this movement for international justice and accountability has been to hold former Bosnian Foreign Minister Muhamed Sacirbey for fifteen months in a four by ten foot shared cell in a Federal Prison in New York awaiting extradition to Sarajevo on communist-era charges of “abuse of powers” while he was the Bosnian Mission to the UN.

So why would a State Department that has expended so much diplomatic credit on keeping entirely hypothetical U.S. citizens out of the clutches of the International Criminal Court be so eager to hand over an actual living U.S. citizen like Sacirbey to a country where the State Department’s annual reports regularly excoriate the political pliability of the judiciary and the danger to inmates in its prisons.

Its reports said of Bosnia and Hezegovina last year, “The legal system was unable to protect the rights of either victims or criminal defendants adequately because of its inefficient criminal procedure codes and ineffective trial procedures. 

"The judiciary remained subject to influence by political parties. 

"Judges and prosecutors who showed independence were subject to intimidation, and local authorities at times refused to carry out their decisions.”

Understandably, Sacirbey says his refusal to return to Sarajevo to answer charges is because of his lack of trust in the judicial system there, especially in the face of the political vendetta against him.

If he were a GI awaiting extradition from, say Iraq , to an air-conditioned cell in The Hague under accusation of torture, the Pentagon would be plotting a rescue mission for him!

As it is, either spectacular incompetence, or equally spectacular malice, are the only explanations for the behavior of the U.S. State Department and Justice Department, who, say Bosnian sources, have been pressuring the judge there to maintain the charges, to the extent of drafting his letters to the U.S. Federal Court to smooth over the gaping differences between Bosnian and U.S. procedures.

The U.S. has also hindered attempts by prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia to interview Sacirbey to help in the trial of Milosevic. 

It seems an odd way to repay the man who did so much to help set up the Tribunal which is now trying Milosevic.

Finally, last Friday, on July 1 the Federal magistrate Maas , embarrassed at holding someone who, as he had said a year ago, would have been let out on bail immediately if charged with similar offences in a U.S. court, allowed bail for Sacirbey – under punitive conditions of five million dollars surety and house arrest in Sacirbey’s Staten Island home.

He only did so because the Prime Minister of Bosnia over-rode the local judge in Sarajevo , and wrote a letter stating that his government had no objection to bail. The U.S. Justice Department has opposed bail from the beginning.

Sacirbey was arrested last year just as the invasion of Iraq began, and has been held ever since under an extradition warrant executed under a treaty signed with the U.S . in 1902 by “The Kingdom of Servia” (sic) which the State Department considers to be valid with Bosnia & Herzegovina through four changes of name and political system.

However the Department chose not to invoke Article 5 of this antique document, which states baldly that neither state “shall be bound to deliver up its own citizens,” and Sacirbey is a U.S . citizen.

In fact, the Sarajevo Cantonal Court judge has admitted that there was no indictment in the case: the request is to interview Sacirbey, which the former Foreign Minister is very happy with – if it were in the U.S.

Sacirbey’s legal advisor in the U.S. , American University law professor Paul Williams, maintains that under American law and under the extradition treaty with “Servia,” “There is no provision for extradition for investigation, only when actual charges are filed. 

"The State Department should have bounced this right back to the Bosnians, not passed it on to the Department of Justice,” he explains.

There were early suspicions by Sacirbey and his family that there were political motivations behind the execution of the warrant, based firstly on the timing of his arrest with the start of the war on Iraq and strong U.S. attempts to get Bosnia to sign up both for the “Coalition” in the war against Iraq, and for the so-called Article 98 exemption for U.S. citizens being extradited to the International Criminal Court. 

Indeed State Department official, Janet Bogue, was in Bosnia the same week that Sacirbey was arrested, pressuring Sarajevo to sign such a bilateral agreement.

While the Bosnian press has rehearsed all sorts of allegation against Sacirbey, the actual U.S. warrant from the Southern District DA’s office in Manhattan, which appeared to regard “Bosnia and Herzegovina” as two separate requesting states., says the charge is  “the crime of abuse of position or powers.”

But what led to the charges to begin with? 

In effect Sacirbey is charged with taking money from the UN Mission’s accounts and using it for “unauthorized” purposes. 

The inference drawn by many in Bosnia was that he used the money to maintain an affluent personal life style and the Bosnian press, which often makes the Supermarket tabloids seem like papers of record in comparison, was happy to weigh in with irrelevant but colourful stories about his life style and demeanour.

Sacirbey denies the charge. 

He says he paid out money on the Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic’s orders in support of the ICTY at The Hague and for the ICJ case brought by Bosnia against Belgrade for aggression and genocide. 

Ironically the person who refused to authorize this spending was Momcilo Krajisnik who is now in prison at The Hague for genocide. 

Izetbegovic died while Sacirbey has been in prison.

The Dayton Agreement, masterminded with the same American constitutional expertise now in progress in Iraq , brought the Bosnian’s Serbian enemies into the office, determined to sabotage many of the public relations and legal initiatives the Bosniaks had previously undertaken.

People who worked with Sacirbey at the Mission during the days when he was worth several divisions to the beleaguered Bosnians, point out that he put in immense amounts of his own money to start the Bosnian Mission to the U.N. and keep it going over the years.

Ambassador Diego Arria, who represented Venezuela on the UN Security Council when the Bosnian war raged says “he was fundamental in bringing the attention of the Security Council and the international community to the massacres and genocide going on in his country. 

"He was an ardent and forceful advocate of human rights and the Tribunal. 

"I never had any doubt of his integrity or devotion.”

If there were any substance to the accusation, there is nothing to stop criminal charges being laid against Sacirbey in the U.S. courts. 

But no one has tried that route. 

Extradition in fact represents an Ashcroftian black hole in the justice system on a par with Guantanamo .

Under existing law, the Federal Magistrate’s position is simply to certify that the documentation is in order, and then to hand the papers on to the State Department for a political decision on whether to extradite the prisoner – the same State Department that began the tragicomedy originally by passing the extradition request on to the Justice Department!

One almost worries about publicizing the details in case John Ashcroft does an end run round the Supreme Court decisions on U.S. citizens held as terrorists. 

All he has to do is to get an unsavory client regime to request their extradition and pop goes habeas corpus!

It also highlights the peculiar ideological and totemistic thought processes of the administration. 

It is prepared to confront all its closest allies on the ICC, which has so many safeguards that no sane jurist ever envisages an American official ever facing it, but is working assiduously to keep a real American citizen in prison for a year and send him to a place where he may not survive incarceration and will find it impossible to get a fair trial. 

Go figure.

Oh, and in case you had forgotten, where is Osama Bin Laden?

    Ian Williams' email:  uswarreport@igc.org

  Just Released: 

Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past  

by Ian Williams

Order Now from Amazon.com       http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560256273/wwwmaximsnewc-20/103-2632401-6943852?creative=125577&camp=2321&link_code=as1

Ian Williams' Weekly Columns in MaximsNews.com

Bosnian U.N. Defender Locked Up  7 July 2004

The U.N., the U.S. & the I.C.C.  30 June 2004

The New York Times, William Safire and the United Nations  23 June 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546  16 June 2004

Is the U.S. Clever Enough to Rule the World?  9 June 2004

Humor the Beast: the U.S. and the ICC  2 June 2004

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?  20 May 2004

The Solution to the Iraqi Knot  12 May 2004     

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