The controversy surrounding the sudden death of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in his jail cell at the Hague has only deepened with the autopsy performed in the Netherlands and the vague, self-serving statements made by officials of the UN war crimes tribunal.
Slobodan Milosevic is an innocent man. Technically, this is the final outcome of his trial at The Hague. With his death on Saturday, he was able to escape responsibility for the part he played in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. A person is innocent until proven guilty, and since he was not convicted while he was alive of any crime, he has thus died an innocent man. Technically, at least.
Just as negotiations on the "final status" of Kosovo were to start on January 25 under the chairmanship of Martii Ahtisaari, former President of Finland and a seasoned negotiator, Ibrahim Rugova, President of Kosovo, died of lung cancer in the Kosovo capital Pristina. The start of the final status talks have been postponed but should start relatively soon as the negotiating team that Rugova had put together should be able to continue, but without the long-range vision and spirit of reconciliation that Rugova represented.
.gif)
The Dutch and French rejections of the EU constitution make the time ripe for strong measures to create more transparency around lobbying in Brussels. The European Transparency Initiative, created by Vice President of the Commission, Siim Kallas, must not miss this opportunity. The EU's democratic deficit has long been discussed, andyet never seems to go away. The perception continues that the EU is an impenetrable fortress, where corporate and political elites make decisions with no room for citizens' involvement. The estimated 15,000 lobbyists in Brussels, the vast majority working for business interests, combined with dubious public affairs practices and a lack of any credible mechanism for ensuring transparency, give credence to this perception.
In response to an article I wrote in wake of the French "no" vote, a reader commented that I had simply produced "another article not asking why this constitution was rejected". In many ways, he was correct: irrespective of whether you thought the result was positive or negative, people ended up focusing on the consequences, but nobody really looked into why it really happened.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019