Kuhner: The U.N.'s gulags
Issue Date: www.insightmag.com
Sept. 26-Oct. 2, 2006, Posted On: 9/29/2006
Kuhner: The U.N.'s gulags
Commentary by Jeffrey Kuhner
Zagreb, Croatia, Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2006: Croatian journalist Domagoj Margetic lies in a hospital bed following a 33-day hunger strike (picture courtesy of Croatian Worldwide Association).
The United Nations is now in the business of persecuting and imprisoning journalists. One of the U.N.'s major courts, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), is targeting Croatian journalists. The ICTY was created by the U.N. Its mission is to bring to justice violent war criminals from the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Instead, the U.N. court is systematically muzzling criticism in Croatia's press.
The latest victim is Domagoj Margetic. A reporter and blogger, Mr. Margetic has been a foe of the ICTY. For this, he has been imprisoned without charges in a crude attempt to crush dissent.
What was his crime? He published the names of witnesses testifying at the ICTY in The Hague, Netherlands, on his Web site, www.domagojmargetic.com.
“I have committed no crime,” he said to Katharine Harris, a correspondent for Insight on the News.
But the ICTY's chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, is determined to go after Mr. Margetic and other Croatian journalists whose only “crime” has been to do what good journalists are supposed to do: inform their readers about all the relevant facts concerning public officials. For Ms. Del Ponte and her U.N. cronies, however, freedom of the press is not something they are particularly concerned about. They are claiming that Mr. Margetic is in “contempt of court,” and therefore, he must be punished.
Mr. Margetic is accused of revealing the names of witnesses who testified in 1997 to the tribunal against Bosnian Croat General Tihomir Blaskic. One of the witnesses was Stipe Mesic, current president of Croatia.
Mr. Margetic published the ICTY's witness list on his site July 23 of this year. He insists he published the list because U.N. prosecutors gave it to him. The list of witnesses was common information and not sealed until Aug. 22. On Aug. 4, he was arrested and taken to a jail in Croatia's capital, Zagreb, and sentenced to 30 days in jail without an arrest warrant and with no charges filed.
“As a reporter and journalist, I felt obligated to publish the witness list on my stance and full and complete belief in freedom of the press,” the 32-year-old journalist told Insight.
Faced with false imprisonment, Mr. Margetic decided to fight back: He went on a hunger strike in which he almost died from lack of food. He was released from jail in early September, and was immediately admitted to a hospital to recover from damage to his internal organs.
Yet Ms. Del Ponte wants to put him in prison again. She has issued a new indictment for “contempt of court” against Mr. Margetic. If convicted, he faces up to 7 years in prison and a 100,000 Euros ($121,000) fine.
Another victim has been Josip Jovic, the former editor of the Split-based daily, Slobodna Dalmacija. Mr. Jovic is a maverick and champion of human rights. During the 1990s, his commitment to honest journalism landed him in trouble with the authoritarian regime of Croatia's late President Franjo Tudjman.
He is now being persecuted by the U.N. tribunal. The ICTY recently fined him 20,000 Euros-a substantial sum in Croatia-for publishing Mr. Mesic's identity when he was editor of Slobodna Dalmacija. Mr. Jovic has also been stripped of his popular weekly column at the paper. So, now, Mr. Jovic along with Mr. Margetic are to be impoverished or rot in jail for exercising their basic rights as journalists.
“Witness protection issues are questions of life and death,” Ms. Del Ponte said in a Sept. 6 statement. "Should witnesses lose faith in the ICTY's ability to protect them, we might as well close the tribunal." To not prosecute the Croatian journalists, she added, was to invite others in the media to follow suit.
Ms. Del Ponte is wrong-and she knows it. This has nothing to do with “witness protection issues.” The U.N. court is abusing its power in a blatant attempt to silence its critics in the Croatian press. It is an open secret Mr. Mesic was the secret witness in the Blaskic case. Other Croatian media outlets-Globus and Vjesnik-have published Mr. Mesic's identity. Mr. Mesic has also publicly revealed his role. Yet the U.N. tribunal is not pursuing them for one reason: They are supporters of Ms. Del Ponte and the ICTY. This is a case of selective justice and selective prosecution to advance a political agenda.
Ms. Del Ponte's actions are a direct assault on Croatia's basic press freedoms and its fledgling democracy. It is an irony of history that the U.N. is now replicating some of the horrors of the communist past. In Soviet Russia, a system of Gulags or prison camps was established to eradicate dissent. It was no different under the former Yugoslavia, where Croatian journalists critical of the communist regime were routinely imprisoned, tortured and fired from their jobs. In fact, it was precisely this desire to reject the evils of communism that prompted Croatia to secede from Yugoslavia in 1991.
The U.N. is using the Croatian judicial system to install its own new Gulags, in which opponents of the ICTY regime are to be harassed, silenced and if need be imprisoned. Mr. Margetic and Mr. Jovic are reminiscent of the Andrei Sakharovs and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns of a previous age: principled dissidents who are fighting for basic freedoms-only now the enemy is based not in Moscow or Belgrade, but in The Hague. The more things change the more they stay the same.
- Jeffrey T. Kuhner is editor of Insight on the News (www.insightmag.com).