We have just witnessed the birth of two new conspiracy theories around the same event. They might not play big in the English-speaking world, but they will in certain parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Both of them can be fi led under the heading: Who killed Slobodan Milosevic?

The former President of Yugoslavia/Serbia (seen in mudsmeared poster at right) was found dead in his cell in The Hague – where his trial for war crimes was in its fourth year – on 11 March, apparently of a heart attack. Milosevic had been suffering from high blood pressure and heart problems, but analysis of his blood a couple of weeks before his death also showed the presence of an antibiotic, rifampicin, generally prescribed for leprosy. Unfortunately, this anti-leprosy antibiotic has a nasty side effect: it neutralises heart medication. The toxicologist who found the rifampicin had been called in to examine Milosevic’s blood because the pills he was taking weren’t bringing down his blood pressure. Milosevic had complained to friends, lawyers and the Russian government that he was being poisoned. Ten days later he died. The Hague Tribunal version of Milosevic’s death states that the rifampicin had nothing to do with it; and if it was in his blood, it was because he had taken it himself rather than as part of his treatment. The toxicologist was quoted on the BBC website as saying that he believed Mr Milosevic took the drugs himself, to try and prove his medical care in The Hague was inadequate and thus to secure a “oneway ticket to Moscow”.

This is a conspiracy theory, and there is one obvious difficulty with it: why would Milosevic believe that the Hague Tribunal would allow him to go to Moscow for medical treatment? The conspiracy theory from Milosevic’s sympathisers is that he was poisoned – that the Hague trial wasn’t going very well; the prosecution was having trouble proving any of its charges; and that big political embarrassment was ahead.

So, was Milosevic’s death a convenient result for the Hague Tribunal?

Yes.

Is there any evidence?

No.

This one’s got legs, I think.

You can read the pro-Milosevic side of the story at www.slobodan-milosevic.org. Now, I’m no expert on the break-up of Yugoslavia, and have little idea of what really happened there. I can’t read Serbo-Croat – and who would rely on the Western media for the full facts about a complex historical/political series of events like the Yugoslav wars? I certainly have an inkling from reading post-war American history that the people bombed by the USA aren’t always the bad guys. Ergo, there must be a chance that whatever happened, it was more complex than the simplistic Evil Nationalist Serbs story which now dominates the English-language media and which provided the stage scenery for Milosevic’s court appearances.

The most striking item on the site when I looked at it was a piece about the witness testimony of British journalist and Yugoslav expert Eve-Anne Prentice. Her impact was due to her claim to have seen Osama Bin Laden meeting Croatian leader Izetbegovic in November 1994. (Google produces over 300,000 hits for the simple request “Croatia + jihad”, but we’re not going there.) But the real meat is her account of being in Kosovo during and after the NATO bombing. She says the Albanians fl ed Kosovo, providing all those images of ethnic cleansing, for three reasons: firstly, they were afraid of being bombed by NATO; secondly, some were afraid of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and were driven out; and thirdly, some were responding to the KLA’s call that patriotic Albanians should leave Kosovo in order to make it look as though ethnic cleansing was going on. If this last is true it really is a stunning example of a quite brilliant psy-ops operation aimed at manipulating perception on a huge scale. Moving hundreds of thousands of people about to create a false picture for broadcast to the watching world dwarfs any of the disinformation projects we know of from the previous half century; it might even be bigger than the disinformation projects organised by the Allies in the run-up to the D-Day landings in World War II (see FT185: 38–45)

Of course, there are many who believe the single biggest disinformation project since WWII was the 9/11 attacks. On March 28, the day that Zacarias Moussaoui stood up in court in Washington and boasted of his role in Al Qaeda’s plane assault on America, I received emails from 9/11 dissidents in America advertising two new videos which would convince me that Al Qaeda didn’t do it, and the news that the actor Charlie Sheen had spoken in public of his suspicions about the official version. Well, what is Moussaoui’s testimony compared to a movie star joining the cause? The 9/11 sceptics will rationalise that away. But there is something distinctly fishy about the collapse of WTC building 7, the one that wasn’t hit by the planes but caught fire and collapsed. Or was demolished. And what did the owner of WTC 7 mean when he said, on tape, that they might as well ‘pull’ the burning building?