Was Milosevic poisoned?

On March 9, the day before he died in his UN detention cell in The Hague, former Yugoslav ruler and career communist thug Slobodan Milosevic wrote a six-page letter to a legal aide expressing suspicions that he was being poisoned.

Two days after the former Serbian strongman's death, Dutch toxicologist Donald Uges reported finding "rifampicin, an antituberculosis drug that 'makes the liver extremely active' and thus breaks down other medications very quickly, possibly taking away their effectiveness," reported the AP. An official autopsy concluded that Milosevic had died of a heart attack. For several weeks prior to his death, he had repeatedly requested permission to travel to Russia for medical treatment, but those requests had been denied.

Prior to Donald Uges' report, Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY), dismissed the idea that Milosevic had been poisoned. After material evidence emerged lending credence to that claim, Del Ponte insisted that suicide "should not be ruled out" as a last act of "defiance" on the part of the former dictator. Both of Milosevic's parents committed suicide, and the former dictator was prone to dramatic, self-destructive gestures.

But even though a guilty verdict was a foregone conclusion in the Soviet-style UN "trial," Milosevic--serving as his own chief defense counsel--just weeks before his death, pried loose an important piece of evidence that may have gotten him killed.

On February 1, British journalist Eve-Ann Prentice, testifying in defense of Milosevic, told how she had seen Osama bin Laden ushered into the Sarajevo office of Bosnian president Alijah Izetbegovic in 1994. Prentice's testimony, which was publicized by Milosevic's defense team and not contested by the UN prosecution, was ruled inadmissible. Her testimony shows that with the material aid of Washington and its allies, bin Laden and his allies seized control over Bosnia and turned it into a base for terrorist operations in Europe and beyond. This was confirmed by investigative bodies in both the Senate and the Pentagon.

At the time of his death, Milosevic had a request pending before the ICTY to subpoena former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who would certainly have been asked about the role his administration played in helping al-Qaeda gain a foothold in the Balkans--both in Bosnia and later, via the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, in Kosovo.

And now it seems that someone--most likely the dimly-seen but perceptible power elite that presides over practically all national governments, just as the Mafia Commission ruled the constituent "families" of La Cosa Nostra--has pulled the chain on Milosevic. This was likely done to dispose of a defiant and irritating former employee, to shut down a "trial" that threatened to produce some untimely revelations, and to serve as an object lesson to other national leaders who might begin to entertain delusions of autonomy.