Serbia Slams UN Court After Croatian Generals Freed

The UN war crimes court has lost “all credibility” after it acquitted Croatian generals Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markac on appeal, Serbian minister Rasim Ljajic, responsible for the country’s cooperation with the tribunal, said on Friday.
“The UN war crimes court has lost all credibility”, Ljajic told Beta news agency, adding that “today’s decision is proof of selective justice which is worse than any injustice”, AFP reported.
“The appeals decision is a move backwards and the public opinion of the tribunal (in Serbia) will be worse than it already is,” Ljajic said.
“We are a long way from reconciliation and there is no justice for the victims,” he added.
Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor also dismissed the “scandalous decision” of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Vladimir Vukcevic said it was “incomprehensible from a legal standpoint” how the UN court could arrive at two “completely opposed” verdicts examining the same evidence.
Gotovina and Markac, considered heros in Croatia, were last year jailed for 24 and 18 years respectively for the murder of Croatian Serbs during their country’s struggle for independence and the bloody, ethnically driven break-up of Yugoslavia.
But Friday the appeals court found that the initial convictions had been based on the false premise that any artillery that landed on Serb-inhabited towns and was more than 200 meters (yards) from a military target was an unlawful attack on civilians.
The events listed in the charges against Gotvina and Markac “are some of the worst war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia: murders, deportations and threats against hundreds of thousands of people”, the Serbian prosecutor said.
Gotovina led a key military operation in which Croatia regained the Krajina territory held by rebel Serbs. That action effectively ended the 1991-95 war sparked by Zagreb’s proclamation of independence from the former Yugoslavia.
UN prosecutors said 324 people were killed during the operation which sparked an exodus of some 90,000 Croatian Serbs from the Krajina.

Japan PM Dissolves Parliament

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda dissolved the lower house of parliament on Friday, paving the way for elections in which his ruling party will likely give way to a weak coalition government divided over how to solve Japan’s myriad problems.
Elections were set for Dec. 16. If Noda’s center-left party loses, the economically sputtering country will get its seventh prime minister in seven years, AP reported.
“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!” shouted the 480-some lawmakers in the lower house, raising their arms each time in celebration, after the house speaker read a proclamation approved by Emperor Akihito, delivered wrapped in a cloth of imperial violet.
The opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which led Japan for most of the post-World War II era, is in the best position to take over. The timing of the election likely pre-empts moves by more conservative challengers, including former Tokyo Mayor Shintaro Ishihara, to build up electoral support.
Campaigning is set to begin Dec. 4, but leaders were already switching into campaign mode.
“What’s at stake in the upcoming elections is whether Japan’s future is going to move forward or backward,” Noda declared to fellow leaders of the Democratic Party of Japan.
“It is going to be a crucial election to determine the fate of Japan.”
The DPJ, in power for three years, has grown unpopular thanks largely to its handling of the Fukushima nuclear crisis and especially its recent doubling of the sales tax.
Noda’s most likely successor is LDP head and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He resigned as Japan’s leader in 2007 after a year in office, citing health problems he says are no longer an issue.
“I will do my utmost to end the political chaos and stalled economy,” Abe told reporters Friday. “I will take the lead to make that happen.”
The path to elections was laid suddenly on Wednesday during a debate between Abe and Noda. Noda abruptly said he would dissolve parliament if the opposition would agree to key reforms, including a deficit financing bill and electoral reforms, and Abe jumped at the chance.

China Unveils New Leadership With Xi at Helm

China’s all-powerful Communist Party on Thursday unveiled a new seven-man leadership council steered by Xi Jinping to take command of the world’s number two economy for the next decade.
After striding out in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People as the party’s new general-secretary, succeeding President Hu Jintao, Xi vowed to fight official corruption and build a “better life” for the nation’s 1.3 billion people, AFP reported.
Xi’s long-expected ascent to the apex of national politics was confirmed when he emerged onto the stage in front of the other six members of the elite Politburo Standing Committee, after a week-long party congress.
Xi, 59, has an impeccable political pedigree as the son of a lieutenant to revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. He will formally replace Hu as state president when the rubber-stamp legislature confirms the appointment in March.
“We are not complacent, and we will never rest on our laurels,” Xi said in his first address to the nation, standing in front of his colleagues on the new committee--all men, who all bar one wore red ties.
The new committee has been slimmed from nine members to seven, a change analysts said would ease decision-making at the consensus-driven heights of the Communist Party as China faces rapid change on a host of fronts.
“Under the new conditions, our party faces many severe challenges, and there are also many pressing problems within the party that need to be resolved,” Xi said, highlighting graft and alienation from citizens.
“We must make every effort to solve these problems. The whole party must stay on full alert.”
Xi appeared confident and far more relaxed than his stiff predecessor Hu, starting out with a disarming apology for the speech’s late start and then talking about ordinary people in plain language.
Some users of the nation’s popular Twitter-like micro blogs welcomed the speech, with its lack of Communist jargon or mention of socialist heroes, as a refreshing departure.
“I hope the new crop of leaders will not disappoint the people’s hopes, will innovate and reform, and courageously strive to create a democratic and constitutional new nation,” wrote one user.
Xi’s standing at the top of China’s opaque power structure was consolidated with his appointment as chief of the nation’s vast military as head of the Central Military Commission.
Hu’s predecessor Jiang Zemin had clung on to that job for two years after relinquishing the presidency, preventing him from taking full control of China.
In second place in the new Politburo Standing Committee was current Vice Premier Li Keqiang, whose promotion puts him in line to be appointed premier in charge of the nation’s day-to-day economic administration in March.
The spectacle marked the climax of years of jockeying within the secretive party, which brooks little dissent to its monopoly on political power but which has had to take new account of the public’s demands in the age of social media.
The process was essentially finalized on Wednesday when the party ended its week-long congress by announcing a new 200-strong Central Committee.
The seven men who hold innermost power are tasked with addressing a rare deceleration of economic growth that threatens the party’s key claim to legitimacy--continually improving the livelihoods of the country’s people.

Georgia Detains Interior Ministry Officials

Georgia has detained 11 senior interior ministry officials and Tbilisi’s deputy mayor for alleged cyber spying on opposition leaders ahead of parliamentary polls, prosecutors said on Friday.
Former deputy interior minister and current vice mayor of Tbilisi Shota Khizanishvili, an ally of President Mikheil Saakashvili, and 11 serving police officials are suspected of the illegal surveillance of opposition leaders using computer malware, chief prosecutor Archil Kbilashvili told journalists, AFP reported.
The arrests follow the prosecutions on abuse of power charges of former defense minister Bacho Akhalaia and army chief of staff Giorgi Kalandadze, the first major cases against top officials from the Saakashvili government.
Kbilashvili said the officials used the malware to access the computers of political parties opposed to Saakashvili, whose long dominant party was defeated in the October elections by a coalition led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili.
The suspects are also accused of recording the telephone conversations of leaders of Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition and releasing them through the Internet in a move aimed at “exciting popular distrust” towards the billionaire’s bloc before the polls, Kbilashvili said.
The recordings of the Georgian Dream leaders insulting each other were initially said to have been uploaded to YouTube by Ivanishvili’s bodyguard in September.
But Kbilashvili said the bodyguard was blackmailed and bribed by police to state that the recordings were made and released by him.
Saakashvili’s allies have dismissed the allegations as politically motivated.
“A fierce campaign of political persecution is ongoing,” said a senior lawmaker from Saakashvili’s party, Giorgi Baramidze.

Ukrainian Opposition Leader Ends Hunger Strike

Jailed Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko on Thursday agreed to end her hunger strike, her doctors said, more than two weeks after she began her protest over alleged fraud in polls won by the country’s ruling party.
The ex-premier and 2004 Orange revolution leader has been refusing food since October 29 as she serves out a seven-year sentence for abuse of power while in office which she says is part of a political vendetta by her arch-foe President Victor Yanukovych, AFP reported.
“From tomorrow (Friday), she will stop her hunger strike,” her German doctor Lutz Harms said, according to an Interfax news agency report.
“She is very weak,” added Harms’ colleague Annette Reischauer. Shortly after, Tymoshenko’s Ukrainian doctor Irina Foursa said the opposition leader has finally begun eating on Thursday.
Ukraine’s deputy health minister Raissa Moisseenko said Tymoshenko had made her decision after seeing her German doctors.
Ukrainian doctors also have been urging Tymoshenko to end the hunger strike which she began on October 29, and in recent days, she began showing signs that she was ready to begin taking food again, said the minister.
Tymoshenko has been in hospital for a bad back she developed shortly after being sentenced in October. Harms said the hunger strike was not helping her recovery.
“This hunger strike is certainly a step backwards,” he said.
The German physician also urged Ukraine to improve hospital conditions for Tymoshenko, including ending a video surveillance of the opposition leader. “An important condition for treatment is confidence between the doctor and his patient,” he said.
The United States and observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a global body that monitors voting around the world, have expressed concern that the elections were a step backwards for democracy in the ex-Soviet country. A Ukrainian court on Tuesday again delayed Tymoshenko’s new trial on embezzlement and tax evasion charges, setting a new date of November 23.

Third Eviction-Linked Suicide Reported in Spain

A desperate 50-year-old Spanish man facing eviction committed suicide on Friday, police said, the third such death in less than a month.
The man in Cordoba, southern Spain, threw himself from a window just one day after the government announced an emergency halt to mortgage-related expulsions.
There was no immediate confirmation, however, as to whether the man was a home owner or a tenant or as to whether his eviction was related to financial or other problems.
“At 11 o’clock this morning a person jumped from a window to the road,” a police spokeswoman said. The man was facing eviction and he died just after the arrival of an ambulance, she said.
On Thursday the government announced a two-year halt to evictions of the most vulnerable homeowners following an outcry over suicides linked to a surge in mortgage-related expulsions.
On November 9, 53-year-old former Socialist politician Amaia Egana jumped out of her apartment window to her death in the northern Basque municipality of Barakaldo as bailiffs were set to evict her.
Her suicide came 15 days after 53-year-old Jose Luis Domingo hanged himself shortly before bailiffs came to turn him out of his home in the southern city of Granada.

Violence in Kenya

Gunmen shot dead two police officers in the north eastern Kenyan town of Garissa on Friday, police said, just days after an ambush in a different part of the country in which 42 policemen were killed.