Croatian General Chooses Heroic End in Face of Unjust Hague Court Guilty Verdict

Croatian general Slobodan Praljak, having heard the guilty verdict with the punishment of 20 years in prison at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, took out a bottle of poison, and no one knows where it came from, opened it.

The tragedy that can be called the main event of the week. Croatian general Slobodan Praljak, having heard the guilty verdict with the punishment of 20 years in prison at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, took out a bottle of poison, and no one knows where it came from, opened it and, with the words, "Praljak is not a war criminal! I reject your verdict," drank the deadly liquid.

At first, The Maltese judge didn’t even understand what had happened, but the poison worked fast. The ambulance took the general to the hospital, but the doctors were unable to help.

 

The ill-fated bottle smelled of bitter almonds, which is a characteristic of potassium cyanide. Later, a lab test confirmed the suspicions.

The Hague Tribunal is a kangaroo court established by the UN Security Council’s decision in 1993. At that time, Russia's foreign policy was still naïve and credulous about the intentions of the West, that's why we voted "yes" at the Security Council, hoping for fairness in the international investigation of war crimes during the break-up of Yugoslavia and the civil wars there.

In response, we ran into treachery. The Tribunal clearly selectively focused on Serbs and Serbian politicians. The processes were long and obviously tendentious. As a result, ex-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic died in 2006 in the Hague jail, never hearing his verdict.

Vojislav Šešelj surrendered to court at first but then left the Hague to be treated for cancer. Later, and it was the rarest case, he was completely acquitted.

If we take a look at the statistics, Serbs predominate among the convicts, 68%.

Vojislav Šešelj said the following: "It was an anti-Serb court the purpose of which was not the establishment of justice but the implementation of the American policy. Something like the US Cavalry or the US Sixth Fleet. A huge number of Serbs and only a symbolic number of Croats and Muslims were convicted. These were very symbolic punishments, and many of them were subsequently acquitted".

So, the Croatian general is an exception in some way. But he also found the Hague verdict unjust. He didn’t give any orders to kill, he didn’t kill himself, he was simply a police general on the side of Croatian Catholics in their confrontation with Bosnian Muslims. But the Croats fought with the Serbs.

Vojislav Šešelj: “Slobodan Praljak was our enemy in this war, our opponent, but he did a heroic deed. He was powerless in his attempts to find justice and decided to go the other way. I won’t assess the extent of his guilt, but these Croats were accused only of crimes against Muslims”.

There were no Serbian victims in the indictment, which also characterizes the tribunal’s policy. But what he did in court was a heroic deed.