Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yugoslaviainfo/message/5925
1. Genocide or propaganda?
by Christopher James (Morning Star - UK)
2. Remember Srebrenica — a.k.a. `So what if we globalized al Qaeda!'
by Julia Gorin (Jewish World Review)
--- In This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., "Darkita" wrote:
Genocide or propaganda?
Christopher James questions the one-sided portrayal of the fall of
Srebrenica 10 years on.
Morning Star (UK) Monday 11 July 2005
DOESN'T everybody know the Srebrenica story all too well by now? One
week of
bloody slaughter in and around the war-torn Bosnian town, sparked by its
fall to Serb forces exactly 10 years ago today.
Throughout the past decade, our media and politicians have never tired of
informing us that up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered there in
cold blood - an act of genocide unsurpassed in Europe since World War II.
The crime was all the more appalling, it is said, because Srebrenica was a
demilitarised UN safe-haven for Bosnian Muslims surrounded on all
sides by a
sea of Serb hostility.
Furthermore, last month's presentation of a video, at the war crimes and
genocide trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic,
purportedly
showing the brutal execution of six Bosnian Muslim prisoners by Serb
paramilitaries, is widely hailed as ultimate and final proof in the
matter.
If any lingering doubts remain, these can now be safely dispatched,
courtesy
of the US Congress which has, with impeccable timing, just declared the
incident to be genocide. So there you go, it's official.
Under such circumstances, who would deny the official Srebrenica narrative
of Serb evil and Muslim victimhood? Holocaust revisionists perhaps? How
about conspiracy theorists or war crimes apologists? Diehard
Stalinists? Why
not diehard Satanists for that matter?
Well, here is what Phillip Corwin, the senior UN civilian official in
Bosnia
during 1995, had to say on the subject: "What happened at Srebrenica
was not
a single large massacre of Muslims by Serbs but a series of very bloody
attacks and counter-attacks over a three-year period, which reached a
crescendo in July of 1995."
The official version of events, recalled Corwin in his book Dubious
Mandate,
has been a "campaign of disinformation that has all but buried the facts
along with the bodies."
Corwin's appraisal tallies with the following analysis of Muslim
tactics in
the 1992-95 Bosnian war from UN General Francis Briquemont.
"The Bosnian [Muslim] Army attacks the Serbs from a safe area. The Serbs
retaliate and the Bosnian presidency accuses UN forces of not protecting
them against Serb aggression and appeals for air strikes against the Serb
gun positions."
Muslim forces using "safe areas" to attack Serbs? How could this possibly
refer to Srebrenica which, as we are told ad infinitum, was a
demilitarised
civilian haven?
In truth only a very small, central part of Srebrenica remained
demilitarised, giving free rein for Muslim fighters to operate out of
suburban and other outlying areas, from where they launched murderous
raids
on surrounding Serb villages.
Forces under the infamous Muslim commander Naser Oric caused mass carnage
between 1992-95 with their attacks out of Srebrenica, leaving at least
1,300
Serb civilians butchered and thousands wounded.
Oric was "as bloodthirsty a warrior who ever crossed a battlefield,"
commented Toronto Star reporter Bill Schiller, who visited the Muslim
warlord's home in 1994.
"I sat in his room, watching a shocking video version of what might have
been called Naser Oric's Greatest Hits. There were burning buildings,
severed heads and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout, admiring his
handiwork."
Schiller continues: "When a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any
visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: 'We killed 114 Serbs there'."
His final raid out of Srebrenica came on June 26, 1995 with an attack
on the
village of Visnjica where 40 perished. It was one atrocity too far for the
Bosnian Serbs, who began preparations to take the town.
But, when they rolled into Srebrenica on July 11 1995 there was no Naser
Oric or any other senior Muslim officers.
They had been pulled out, in an apparent tactical move by Bosnian
president
Alija Izetbegovic, whom both Muslims and Serbs later accused of
deliberately
sacrificing the town in order to undermine the UN and give NATO
justification for air strikes against the Bosnian Serb army.
Izetbegovic, an enthusiastic collaborator with nazi occupiers during World
War II, had been imprisoned under Tito for his crimes. He served a further
jail term in socialist Yugoslavia during the 1980s for seeking to turn
Bosnia into "an ethnically pure Islamic state."
Seizing the Bosnian presidency in a mysterious power grab, despite losing
the election to a moderate Muslim rival, it was Izetbegovic who imported
4,000 foreign Mojahedin, fresh from their battles with Soviet troops in
Afghanistan, to fight holy war in Bosnia.
In her book, Fools Crusade, US academic Diana Johnstone, the outstanding
left analyst of the 1990s Balkan wars, notes that chaotic scenes
greeted the
Serb troops on their arrival at Srebrenica as terrified, leaderless Muslim
combatants clashed violently among themselves over what to do.
"Some wanted to surrender, but most decided to break through Serb
lines and
flee. By all accounts, this chaos deepened during the long retreat. Wild
scenes occurred as confused soldiers fell into Serb ambushes, sometimes
fighting back, sometimes shooting each other or even committing suicide."
All the above testimonies comprise part of a body of evidence compiled by
the Srebrenica Research Group - an international team of academics and
Balkan analysts under the leadership of University of Pennsylvania
professor
Edward S Herman. Its report, which aims to bring some balance to this
highly
charged subject, is due for publication this month.
Herman, who is perhaps best known for co-authoring the seminal tome
Manufacturing Consent - his collaborative study alongside Noam Chomsky
into
media complicity with imperial Washington policy - insists that
misinformation and myth surrounding Srebrenica has proved a handy
smokescreen to obscure Western intrigue in the Balkans throughout the
1990s.
He contrasts the fixation of Western governments and media on
Srebrenica to
their complete lack of interest in Operation Storm, the 1995 ethnic
cleansing of 200,000 Krajina Serbs from their ancestral lands
including the
murder - unlike at Srebrenica - of women, children and the elderly at the
hands of US-backed Croat forces.
In a manner that is reminiscent of the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes,
glaringly obvious questions regarding the "Srebrenica genocide" remain
unasked by Western politicians and mainstream media alike.
Why, if the Serbs were so intent on genocidal murder, were the victims all
males of combat age? The nazis, of course, made no allowances for women or
the elderly while slaughtering their Jewish, Roma and Serb victims.
The Srebrenica myth was born at the UN security council in August
1995, when
US representative Madeleine Albright, in a theatrical display that was
repeated eight years later by her successor Colin Powell and his infamous
phial of "anthrax," produced satellite photos showing "disturbed earth"
where Muslim victims of genocide were supposedly buried. These
pictures have
never been made public.
No matter that only about 4,000 bodies have to date been recovered. No
matter that the vast majority are unidentified and certainly include
victims
from all sides of a vicious, internecine three-year civil war.
No matter that the figure includes combatants who failed to surrender
- many
of whom were themselves guilty of heinous crimes against civilians.
No matter that the Serbs have always acknowledged that crimes were
committed
- that civilians accompanying Muslim regular and irregular troops had been
killed in the fighting.
No matter that Naser Oric's grisly snuff movies have never been shown
at the
West's bogus Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at The Hague, whereas last
month's
video evidence allegedly showing the summary execution of six Muslims - a
sickening, though not unusual, crime in wartime - is aired and declared
proof positive of genocide.
No matter that Slobodan Milosevic, the man charged with orchestrating that
genocide, had no authority over the Bosnian Serbs from 1993 and who was
cleared of any involvement in whatever happened at Srebrenica by a Dutch
government report in 2002.
"The Srebrenica massacre is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge
from the Balkan wars," concludes Herman. "It reigns supreme for symbolic
power. It is the symbol of Serb evil and Bosnian Muslim victimhood and the
justice of the Western dismantling of Yugoslavia and intervention there at
many levels."
. Christopher James edits the website www.free-slobo-uk.org
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http://www.jewishworldreview.com/julia/gorin_2005_07_11.php3?printer_friendl
y
Jewish World Review July 11, 2005 / 4 Tamuz, 5765
Remember Srebrenica — a.k.a. `So what if we globalized al Qaeda!'
By Julia Gorin
http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Recently, "Hannity & Colmes", of the
usually less-easily-fooled-than-other-networks Fox News Channel,
treated us
masses to a "genocide" video that's been handed over to the Hague's
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Pouring
even more fuel onto the carefully cultivated and long accepted
caricature of
the evil Serb, Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes were of one mind when Hannity
called the actions of the Bosnian Serb soldiers in the video "pure
evil" and
"evil incarnate."
Without being wrong about evil on display in the video, the network
had been
had. The circulation of, and the outrage surrounding, this tape —
especially high right now in guilt-ridden Serbia itself — is a sign that
things have gone from bad to worse in the prosecution of Slobodan
Milosevic.
Especially in anticipation of today's 10-year commemoration of the
Srebrenica massacre, the Hague desperately required a new wave of shocking
images to win in the court of public emotion the case that's being lost in
the court of foregone conclusion.
Tsk, tsk, Fox. Somebody hasn't been following the Milosevic trial. But
since
that somebody will look silly only to the six or so Americans who have
been
following it, there's no risk in spouting the tribunal's PR. PR
because this
trial is supposed to justify the new International Criminal Court's (ICC)
existence and convince the Bush administration of its utility, not its
futility.
There's a reason for the conspicuous three-year near silence by all major
media on this oh-so-momentous Second Nuremberg, as it was billed — a
silence broken only one or two days a year, when they're finally able to
offer up a damning piece of evidence that will perpetuate the version of
events we've been sold from the beginning.
What even the most sporadic trial observer would know is that the
Court has
spent the last three years discovering what many of us knew in 1999:
Milosevic was "a thug whose brutality played into the terrorists'
hands," as
former Boston Herald and JWR columnist Don Feder has repeatedly explained,
but he was no exterminator. Working backwards to make the crime fit the
punishment, however, the ICTY has had to redefine "genocide." Thus,
Milosevic faces charges of genocide even while the extermination of more
than 100,000 black Muslim and Christian men, women and children by Arabic
Muslims in Sudan still hasn't been granted the label. But then, the
exterminators there aren't white Christian Serbs.
The 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,000 Muslim males was inexcusable, but it
wasn't genocide. If you would, imagine a scenario in which a single
event is
manipulated to lend credence to an ocean of lies. Imagine Srebrenica. Here
it is in April 1993, from someone who was there. Haris Nezirovic was a
Bosnian journalist writing for the weekly "Slobodna Bosna" ("Free
Bosnia"),
and this for the UK Independent:
"The UN hopes to evacuate 15,000 people over the next few days. The
Muslim
command defending Srebrenica claims the UN operations amount to complicity
in Serbian 'ethnic cleansing'. Privately, the commanders add, they believe
that the Serbs will not launch an all-out attack as long as refugees are
there. More importantly, they say that without the civilians the
defense of
the town would crumble. They believe that Muslim fighters are better
motivated when their families are there behind them. …
"What this means in practice is thousands of civilians will have to
remain
in full range of Serbian guns: children with scabies who cannot be treated
because of a lack of medicine; the elderly who are so weak from hunger
that
they cannot fight for air-dropped scraps of food; and mothers who feed
their
babies with warm water because nothing else is available. …
"When the first UN trucks came last month, they were supposed to
evacuate
only a few wounded, but hundreds rushed on board. When the next convoy
came
on 28 March, thousands stampeded towards the vehicles.
"'We'll screw up those convoys,' said Naser Oric, the local Muslim
commander....When another convoy came on 30 March, masses of civilians
surrounded the trucks but were kept back by the commanders' personal
uard — a group of 30 foul-mouthed soldiers suspected of robberies and
other crimes. During the night, the guards accepted bribes in German marks
to let people on board. Many refugees on the UN list for evacuation were
beaten up. Witnesses said the deputy commander slapped and kicked
women and
pushed children from the trucks.
"On 4 April the local [Muslim] police used fire hoses to keep people
away
from the UN vehicles. Jets of water knocked down anyone who approached.
Soldiers climbed on trucks and fired into the air. …
"Ever more frequently, you hear civilians say, 'Our soldiers are worse
than Chetniks, the Serbs.'"
Sarajevo, meanwhile, "never seemed very interested in the fate
of…Srebrenica," says Radio Netherlands editor James Kliphuis, "except to
list it as [a] supreme example of the outside world's lack of interest in
what happened to the Bosnian Muslims." A statement entered into
testimony at
the ICTY in Feb. 2004, by UN Commander in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993
Philippe
Morillon, read: "The aim of the [Bosnian] presidency from the very outset
was to ensure the intervention of the international forces for their own
benefit, and this is one of the reasons why they never were inclined to
engage in talks."
That presidency refers to Alijah Izetbegovic, who was being
investigated by
the ICTY for war crimes (which the Court revealed only upon his death in
2003), and who was part of the Nazi SS Handzar division during WWII, which
butchered Serbs and the ethnic minorities of Yugoslavia. He also authored
"The Islamic Declaration", in which he stated: "The shortest definition of
the Islamic order defines it as unity of faith and law, upbringing and
force, ideals and interests, spiritual community and State…a Muslim
generally does not exist as an individual… […] There can be no peace or
coexistence between 'the Islamic faith' and non-Islamic social and
political
institutions."
Pursuant to Izetbegovic's end game, writes Michigan-based Balkans
writer and
historian Carl Savich, "the Bosnian Muslim faction engaged in propaganda,
staged massacres, killed Bosnian Muslim civilians to garner sympathy and
used civilian hostages or shields to further its propaganda of
victimization." For example, the 1992 Breadline Massacre and the Markale
Marketplace bombings of 1994 and 95 resulted in U.S. economic
sanctions and
a bombing campaign, respectively, of the Serbs — despite European
headlines like the Sunday Times of London's "Serbs 'not guilty' of
massacre,
Experts warned US that mortar was Bosnian" (Oct. 1, 1995).
The widely cited 2002 official Dutch report on Srebrenica seems to confirm
the use of such tactics. As BBC.com reported that year, the Dutch
Government
"pins part of the blame on the Bosnian Muslims themselves, saying the
Bosnian army had provoked attacks."
Srebrenica Muslims "ravaged and ransacked neighbouring ethnic Serb
villages," continues Kliphuis, "killing and maiming the residents, who
were
often too old to offer any resistance….The Serb villages were then set on
fire." After his role in killing up to 2,000 Serbs, Oric himself fled
Srebrenica just before it was stormed by the Bosnian Serb army.
The Serbs evacuated women, children and elderly before the males were
killed
without being distinguished as civilians or POWs, making Srebrenica a
massacre, something the Serbs admit.
By deeming Srebrenica a genocide, however, the court at the Hague has
expanded the term's legal definition, so that now, not only do 7,000
bodies
qualify (regardless of how many belong to armed fighters), not only does
there not have to be genocidal intent, but it doesn't even have to involve
eliminating the child-bearing sex or the offspring of the ethnic group in
question. As a BBC.com report concluded, "the definition may now be
applied
to conflict in a small community, where local atrocities can be labeled as
genocide."
The 2002 Dutch report, meanwhile, goes on to state that no evidence
"suggests the involvement of the Serbian authorities in Belgrade," with
principal responsibility attributed to fugitive Bosnian Serb general Ratko
Mladic.
Which brings us back to the Milosevic trial. Like a Moliere farce, within
months of 19 Muslim hijackers (some of whom fought in Bosnia)
attacking the
United States, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic began at the Hague in the
Netherlands, today a country where artists and members of parliament are
hunted down for practicing freedom of speech (e.g. Theo van Gogh, Geert
Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali) — by the co-religionists of those on whose
behalf Milosevic is being prosecuted.
If one wonders why, 364 days out of 365, our media organs send us no word
from this "Nuremberg II" — incidentally a laughing stock among legal
experts (deputy prosecutor Geoffrey Nice had to reprimand reporters for
knocking the prosecution's performance and flimsy evidence) — the
following trial developments, easily gleaned from a casual perusal of wire
copy or European press, may help explain:
The first week of the trial in particular was marked by one embarrassment
after another for the prosecution, starting with the testimony of Ratomir
Tanic, who was supposedly present when the genocide order was given
but who
under cross-examination couldn't even say where in the presidential palace
Milosevic's office was located — and eventually turned out to have been
paid by British intelligence to testify. Then there was a witness named
Halit Barani, whom Milosevic asked if he knew that KLA commanders were to
assassinate all Albanians loyal to Serbia. Barani revealed that he was
sympathetic to the KLA, had met with numerous commanders, then
indicted the
entire Albanian population of Kosovo: "The KLA was born from within the
people, to protect parents, brothers and sisters."
A 2002 BBC wire report related Albanian "farmer" Agim Zeqiri's
testimonythat
Serb forces burned down his village and killed members of his family. Upon
cross-examination, when the proceedings brought to light that his
village of
Celina was harboring and supporting Albanian rebels, Zeqiri claimed to
feel
too ill to continue, but "did acknowledge that the KLA had used the
village
as a source of provisions and that at least 300 members of the KLA were
based there."
Another witness, Fehim Elshani, was actually rebuked by the now deceased
presiding judge Richard May, when he refused to answer Milosevic's
questions
at all. In the end, he testified that he did not know of any KLA crimes,
while admitting that his son was KLA. Elshani, Zeqiri and another
"farmer",
Halil Morina — who claimed to have no knowledge of any KLA presence
in his
village of Landovica (where after the war a monument was erected to the
town's fallen KLA soldiers) — frequently avoided eye contact with
Milosevic as he cross-examined them.
The three-judge panel actually ruled in favor of Milosevic's objections to
admitting testimony from chief Kosovo war crimes investigator Kevin Curtis
because of the irrelevance of "evidence" composed entirely of "repeating
stories he had heard from others," the AP reported. When the prosecution's
intelligence analyst Stephen Spargo detailed through maps the routes taken
by 800,000 or so deported or fleeing Albanians in 1999, Milosevic asked
whether he knew that 100,000 Serbs left Kosovo along with everyone
else once
NATO started bombing. Spargo answered that he "hadn't been assigned to
document Serb displacements." Naturally. In Kosovo, Milosevic continued,
since there were 10 Albanians to every Serb, proportionally speaking, more
Serbs than Albanians fled Kosovo — casting doubt on the
forced-deportation
argument that the Clinton government helped craft for our consumption.
Milosevic scored points early on when he showed the court an Albanian map
depicting Greater Albania, which included southeast Montenegro, southern
Serbia, western Macedonia and parts of northern Greece in addition to
osovo — a long-harbored dream of many in Albania and Kosovo. It goes
without saying that the American people were not shown this map of Greater
Albania as they were being sold a story of Milosevic's push for a "Greater
Serbia."
Meanwhile, the forensic evidence at the Racak "massacre", our final-straw
pretext for bombing our historical ally whose people saved 500 downed U.S.
pilots in WWII, disproved that a massacre had taken place. And virtually
every Albanian-rumored "mass grave" in Kosovo turned up empty, as Wall St.
Journal's Daniel Pearl was finding a few years before Muslims decapitated
him in Pakistan.
The first Western leader to appear at the trial was Lord Paddy Ashdown,
former head of England's Liberal Democrat Party and current UN High
Representative in Bosnia. Ashdown was also the first witness to admit that
the KLA fighters were a terrorist organization which Yugoslavia was
fighting.
Eastern European and Balkan affairs writer Neil Clark summed up the
trial in
a UK Guardian article of Feb. 2004 (the month the prosecution wrapped
up its
two-year case): "Not only has the prosecution signally failed to prove
Milosevic's personal responsibility for atrocities committed on the
ground,
the nature and extent of the atrocities themselves has also been
called into
question."
Without a smoking gun linking Milosevic to crimes in Kosovo (widely
anticipated to be an easier indictment to make stick than Croatia and
Bosnia, where local Serbian leaders were in command), the Tribunal gave
prosecutors the green light to tack on charges related to Croatia and
Bosnia. It was a move that chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte initially said
the prosecution wouldn't pursue, given that that conflict was closed with
the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which the Clinton administration hosted and
for which the administration hailed Milosevic as a force for peace and
stability in the Balkans.
Going ahead with the Bosnia charges, then, the prosecution brought in
the UN
Commander Philipe Morillon in February of last year, his testimony
meant to
tie Milosevic to Srebrenica. Giving instead unwelcome testimony that
Milosevic had headed off an initial attack on Srebrenica's Muslims,
Morillon
said he had asked Milosevic in 1993 to intervene with the Bosnian Serb
government to prevent a potential massacre in Srebrenica, which Milosevic
did, convincing the Serbs to halt their offensive so the UN could set up a
safe haven. Morillon, whose residence was shelled by Bosnian Muslims
during
the war, was the one to set up the safe haven — but he failed to
demilitarize it, enabling the Bosnian Muslim commander Naser Oric to turn
the enclave into his military base of operations, from which he launched
attacks on Serbs.
Morillon saw the exhumed remains of tortured, mutilated, and executed
Bosnian Serb civilians and soldiers, and testified that Oric's forces
engaged in "attacks during Orthodox holidays [including Christmas Eve] and
destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a
degree of
hatred that was quite extraordinary…."
If there was a clear guilty party, and a clear victim on behalf of whom
support, and later war, by the United States was warranted, logic
demands an
explanation as to how it can be that more than a year into the
proceedings,
the Court haltingly, quietly decided it had to issue warrants for, and
try,
Croats and Albanian and Bosnian Muslims for war crimes as well, making the
"victims" guilty too. Nasir Oric, who didn't take prisoners, was
ultimately
indicted — though his indictment was not made public. There are
videotapes
of Oric's atrocities; as well, images of Albanians and mujahedeen in
Bosnia
victoriously holding up or stepping on disembodied Serb heads are
viewable.
And yet even in those once- or twice-a-year "updates" on the Hague
Tribunal
by our major newspapers and networks, the only graphic details we're
permitted to know of and judge are of Serbian crimes. Tapes showing the
slaughter of Serbs by Bosnians and Albanians have been conspicuously
absent
from our airwaves, leaving the American public with only Serb crimes to
speak of. It's a silence that should be deafening to any American patriot.
When, for the sake of context, mentioning Bosnian Muslim acts becomes
unavoidable, such acts are referred to as "attacks", but not "slaughters",
"massacres", "atrocities", "crimes against humanity" or, perish the
thought,
"genocide" or "ethnic cleansing", even if in this case intent was present.
Such inflammatory language, after all, is reserved for Serbs. "Revenge
killings", the term that continues to be used to describe Albanian murders
of Serbs in Kosovo (including octogenarians) and that could easily
describe
what the Serbs did in Srebrenica, remains the exclusive privilege of the
Balkans' Muslims.
Americans don't hear about the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Srebrenica,
just as they didn't hear much about the ethnic cleansing by Croatia of
up to
half a million Serbs. Anyone looking for the truth about the Balkans is
labeled "pro-Serb", "anti-Muslim", or a victim of "Serbian propaganda"
(try
and find that in this country). Meanwhile, even the truest Bosnian Muslim
victims, genuinely "believing themselves the virtuous victims of
'aggression' and 'genocide'," writes Washington-based blogger and Balkans
observer Nebojsa Malic, are "blinded to Izetbegovic's hateful ideology of
domination that tore Bosnia apart."
Serbia has been experiencing a uniquely weird national phenomenon of late.
Tired of being a pariah nation, whether that status is deserved or
not, the
Serbs are putting themselves through a sort of self-punishment. Wanting to
be allowed back into the international fold of "decent" nations, they
desperately want their government to just fall in line with any Western
demands, and they want Milosevic convicted, so they can finally put
the 90s
behind them. To that end, many Serbs alternate between practicing
self-censorship (it's politically incorrect in Serbia today to defend or
explain Serb actions of the 90s), and self-deception, wherein Serbs manage
to convince themselves that the world is right and they were the bad
guy of
the 1990s, themselves chiefly to blame for the civil wars that destroyed
their country. In other words, the Serbs are betraying their own history.
Perhaps the first intimation that this would come was a NY Times op-ed in
1999, written by a Serbian woman who said that although the numbers in
Kosovo aren't panning out, even if a single Albanian was killed
excessively,
her country deserved what it got.
It's gotten so that in January 2004, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo
(UNMIK) had to issue a statement disputing a self-blaming Belgrade
report on
mass graves in Kosovo: "Some media reports have quoted a senior Belgrade
official as stating that there are 198 mass graves in Kosovo. The
Office on
Missing Persons and Forensics (OMPF) would like to categorically state
that
no evidence has been provided to OMPF regarding existence of any mass
graves
in Kosovo. Such unfounded statements reflect a lack of sensitivity to an
issue that is extremely emotive and causes considerable anguish for all
affected families."
In the meantime, the authentic mass graves that are being found
contain Serb
bodies — presumed to be those of civilians missing since 1998 and
thought
to be kidnapped by the KLA, as BBC.com reported in March. "If confirmed,
this would be the second such find in a month after 24 bodies were
found in
a cave" in February, with wrecked cars thrown on top of them, according to
local media.
The "Hannity & Colmes" hosts said that it seemed whoever the Serb was that
offered up the Srebrenica tape to the Court apparently had a "bout of
conscience." But if one knows anything about the way things work in the
Balkans today, the more likely story is that someone was just looking
to get
paid (or to get amnesty and a new life), and the easiest way to do that
today is to help push the old story.
Last December, when some wayward media in Serbia published graphic
photos of
crimes committed by Ramush Haradinaj — who recently stepped down as
Kosovo's prime minister to face war crimes charges — the
Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and other members of the
international community were critical, saying that "by publishing such
vivid
reminders of crimes committed against the Serbs, the media was guilty for
perpetrating hate and intolerance, whereas its task is to look ahead
towards
peace and reconciliation," reports Serge Trifkovic, author of "The
Sword of
the Prophet" and director of the Institute for International Affairs in
Rockford, IL.
Offering a glimpse into the Serbian state of mind, along with a hope for
reconciliation with America, is a letter from Aleksandar Kis, of Vrsac,
Serbia:
"In my country today it is almost illegal to say that we are right.
Sometimes when I wake up, I believe that I live in Albania or Croatia.
Even
our own media are anti-Serbic! Only few media are free to comment
anything,
others are under democratic censorship. ...
"You see, there are less than 2-3% Serbs in Kosovo comparing to pre-war
numbers, but there are 100,000 Albanians in Belgrade. In my hometown, I go
to Albanian-held bakery. ...
"In Serbia, we have few free media, of which one is 'Srpski Nacional'
newspaper that was supporting Bush campaign last year, calling for
Serbs to
influence their relatives in USA to vote for Bush. This paper is trying to
tell Serbs that USA is no longer foe and aggressor. [I hope] to
achieve that
Star Spangled Banner isn't a symbol of oppression for us anymore…We never
considered USA as evil. Strangely for Europeans, we more liked Nixon and
Reagan than Kennedy. I want to say, we considered USA a country
'across the
lake'. We don't understand what happened with our relationship."
Trying to improve that relationship, Serbia has offered a battalion to
assist U.S. troops in Kabul. But who will assist Serbia with the terror
haven that is Kosovo? Certainly not those pushing for the province's
independence, something that would be a key nail in the free world's
coffin
once peacekeepers, now acting as our eyes and ears there, have to leave.
As the world adeptly looks the other way, not only is cultural
genocide and
defamation taking place and history being perverted, but the international
meddlers are capitalizing precisely on the public's disinterest in the
Balkans, officially establishing an Islamic gangster state in Europe
as our
exit strategy.
The meddlers include the Council on Foreign Relations, the International
Crisis Group, a number of Congressmen, most of the Clinton-era State
Department — now working for quasi-governmental institutes — and
Wesley
Clark. Clark warned in a February Wall St. Journal op-ed that "a violent
collision may occur by year-end" if we don't give the Albanians what they
want — and this four-star general advocated doing just that. After
all, a
violent collision would shine an unwelcome spotlight on his "successful
war", as he spent all of election year billing it in contrast to Iraq. So
Clark wants to close the book as soon as possible on Kosovo, where there
were four more explosions over the July 4th weekend — ongoing
attempts to
persuade the international community that only one final status is
acceptable: complete independence, without border compromises. Besides, he
already promised his erstwhile campaign donors, the National Albanian
American Council, that "Kosova" would be independent, using the purposeful
Albanian mispronunciation of the Serbian word as his old boss had. In the
Journal piece, Clark even suggested pummeling the Serbs again if Belgrade
got in the way (since it's easier than fighting Albanian terrorists).
So that Americans don't start connecting any obvious dots, two things must
remain obscured as the Milosevic verdict nears and as the push for Kosovo
independence goes full throttle this year: the al Qaeda connection to
Bosnia
and Kosovo, and the ever-present atrocities against Serbs.
The broadcasting of the Srebrenica video was actually an opening salvo in
this campaign, whether the Fox News Channel is aware of it or not (the
hosts
certainly are not, but if the network is, it's an ominous sign). The
channel
that's supposed to function as a deprogrammer for the public's
media-produced minds has itself become part of the machine. A couple weeks
ago, Fox News announced Wesley Clark, whose Albanian friends are promising
war against NATO and UN forces if there is no independence for Kosovo, as
its newest military and foreign affairs analyst. (On July 19th, PBS
will be
broadcasting a Dutch documentary about one Albanian-America making
precisely
this promise: Brooklyn roofer Florin Krasniqi, who has been smuggling arms
into Kosovo for years and helping resettle KLA fighters here.)
Understandably, for Sean Hannity the broadcast offered a rare chance to
throw a bone to the Muslim world — precisely the purpose the Serbs have
been serving for the rest of the globe all along. (Because somehow, even
while atrocities across the planet are indeed brought to us by
Muslims, in a
bizarre twist from the trend, we found a singular, exceptional case not of
Muslims waging a jihad, but of secular Europe's religious misfits
doing so,
the Orthodox Christian Serbs.)
Serbs are the universal punching bag; there are no repercussions for
anything one might say about them. Initial reports in 1993 even attributed
the World Trade Center bombing to "Serbian terrorists." Serb concerns are
routinely trivialized, their perspectives dismissed as whining or
self-serving. When, in the midst of our 1999 offensive on Yugoslavia, a
friend calling in to a talk radio show dared imply that Serbs weren't
responsible for the Markale Marketplace bombings, she was instantly
reprimanded by the incredulous hostess: "Are you defending the SERBS?!"
"Serbs perfectly meet all the PC-villain criteria," explains political
satirist Oleg Atabashian, who runs PeoplesCube.com (the site will be
operational again tomorrow). "They're another white, Christian, European
minority supposedly guilty of oppressing the most popular 'minority', the
Muslims. A whole new nation of Serbs is getting sacrificed right
before our
eyes on the altar of the self-hating cult that western society has
become."
The Serbs have been "targeted by propaganda of unprecedented proportions
accusing them of Nazi-like evil," writes Malic (recall former CNN reporter
Christiane Amanpour showing us a funeral she said was for two Muslim
babies
killed by a Serb sniper but who turned out to be Serbian babies killed
by a
Muslim sniper). If there has been hesitation from Serbian authorities,
whether in handing over war criminals or officially admitting that
Srebrenica was a massacre, it's because they are "rightly afraid it
would be
considered an admission of the fabrications as well," Malic explains.
He is
echoed by Trifkovic: "Serbia needs to come to terms with all that came to
pass under Milosevic, but not at the cost of losing its soul."
With the current media blitz surrounding the Srebrenica video, which was
seized on by every major news organization and news site, there is a
renewed
rehashing of Serb wickedness, its pitch highest in Serbia itself
where, Mr.
Kis reports, all media are pointing an accusing finger at Milosevic, the
country and the Serbian people in general. One law professor on
national TV
said the execution showed the "collective guilt" of the Serbian people. No
connections are made about the disparity that while Muslims returning
to the
now Serb-dominated Srebrenica do so without incident or danger, Serbs
daring
to return to Kosovo face pogroms (which reached a crescendo in March
of last
year).
As the July 11th mark has neared, we've seen a sensational flurry of Serb
vilification — again. On July 4th, the New York Times ran a Srebrenica
article that devoted a single paragraph to the trial of Muslim forces at
Srebrenica. To corral any potentially wayward readers, the writer
paraphrased the prosecution's take that "while war crimes were
committed by
Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the wars, evidence is overwhelming that
most were committed by Serbs." Indeed, that was the only evidence being
sought.
In contrast to the current anti-Serb orgy, we haven't heard much about all
the Bosnian charities being monitored or raided for funding terrorism, or
about the Bosnian who was one of the masterminds behind the Madrid
bombing,
or about the six Algerian-born Bosnian citizens held at Guantanamo for
planning to blow up the American and British embassies in Sarajevo (NY
Times, 10/21/04), or about Bosnia issuing passports to Osama bin Laden and
his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has operated camps and WMD
factories throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and
Bosnia. Nor will we hear that the terrorists who carried out a spate of
suicide attacks in Iraq last August, including one at the UN headquarters
that killed 22, were trained in Bosnia, or that al Qaeda's top Balkans
operative, al-Zawahiri's brother Mohammed, had a high position in the KLA.
We'll never know that Bosnia today is the "one-stop shop close to Europe"
for all the terrorism needs — weapons, money, documents — of
Chechen and
Afghani fighters passing through Europe before heading to Iraq. Little
wonder, then, that when SFOR (the UN Stabilization Force in Bosnia)
intercepts weapons shipments to Iraq, we don't hear about that either.
Three weeks into our 78-day bombing of Belgrade, an Indian UN commander in
Bosnia, General Satish Nambiar, gave a speech in New Delhi saying,
"Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only
counter-productive but also dishonest. According to my experience, all
sides
were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels, while
the others would insist that they were. With 28,000 forces under me
and with
constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we
did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides."
Yet when former Kosovo Verification Mission observer Roland Keith
testified
earlier this year that he had seen no evidence of genocide in Kosovo,
Canada's New Democratic Party forced him to withdraw his candidacy in
British Columbia's provincial elections.
Starting with the elder President Bush and escalating under Clinton, we
consistently abetted nationalism and xenophobia in the Balkans, and today
our media and government continue trying to make a square peg fit into a
round hole. With the decision on Kosovo's status looming, the
administration
of George W. Bush has an opportunity to right a historic wrong and chart a
straight course in the Balkans, one that will finally be in line with his
defining vision, the War on Terror.
Great nations admit their mistakes. They don't reinforce them. But in the
past weeks, as this country has fallen way short of its potential for
greatness and Americans have been treated to a rare, genuine propaganda
campaign reinforcing our Balkans mischief, it is up to the American people
to demand that the record be set straight.
If a commission was set up to determine whether a presidential
administration did or didn't do all it could to prevent kamikaze
attacks on
9/11, good G-d, what of an administration that committed the might of the
U.S. Air Force to bomb Europe for a legacy beyond sexual harassment —
lying about genocide to achieve it?
Anyone looking for evidence of a "treasonous war", of being "misled into
war", "rushed to war" or being "lied to", look no farther than 1999.
Recovered at an Afghanistan al Qaeda training camp was an Albanian
Kosovar's
application reading, "I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience
against Serb and American forces. ...I recommend (suicide) operations
against (amusement) parks like Disney." If the protests reserved for a
Republican war had also been mounted against the Democrats' war in Kosovo,
had we known our friends from our enemies and not allowed the Balkans to
become a terror gateway into the Western world, it's just possible we may
never have had 9/11.
It was Lee Hamilton, the man who would become co-chairman of the 9/11
Commission, whom President-elect Bill Clinton patted on the shoulder
in 1992
and assured, "I've been traveling around our country for a year and no one
cares about foreign policy other than about six journalists."
Hamilton responded by reminding Clinton that the last two presidents had
built their legacies on foreign policy. It would appear that ultimately,
President Clinton fell back on Hamilton's suggestion.
Testifying at the Milosevic trial at the Hague last September, former
policy
analyst James Jatras, who worked for the Senate Republican Policy
Committee
from 1985 to 2000, quoted the 9/11 Commission's finding that it was in
1990s
Bosnia that the "groundwork for a true terrorist network was being laid."
That network is today known as al Qaeda.
The Balkans were the early, key prize that Iran and Osama bin Laden sought
as a terror corridor to the West. We delivered it to them. Why?
Senator Hamilton, your commission's work is unfinished.
--- End forwarded message ---
1. Genocide or propaganda?
by Christopher James (Morning Star - UK)
2. Remember Srebrenica — a.k.a. `So what if we globalized al Qaeda!'
by Julia Gorin (Jewish World Review)
--- In This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., "Darkita" wrote:
Genocide or propaganda?
Christopher James questions the one-sided portrayal of the fall of
Srebrenica 10 years on.
Morning Star (UK) Monday 11 July 2005
DOESN'T everybody know the Srebrenica story all too well by now? One
week of
bloody slaughter in and around the war-torn Bosnian town, sparked by its
fall to Serb forces exactly 10 years ago today.
Throughout the past decade, our media and politicians have never tired of
informing us that up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered there in
cold blood - an act of genocide unsurpassed in Europe since World War II.
The crime was all the more appalling, it is said, because Srebrenica was a
demilitarised UN safe-haven for Bosnian Muslims surrounded on all
sides by a
sea of Serb hostility.
Furthermore, last month's presentation of a video, at the war crimes and
genocide trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic,
purportedly
showing the brutal execution of six Bosnian Muslim prisoners by Serb
paramilitaries, is widely hailed as ultimate and final proof in the
matter.
If any lingering doubts remain, these can now be safely dispatched,
courtesy
of the US Congress which has, with impeccable timing, just declared the
incident to be genocide. So there you go, it's official.
Under such circumstances, who would deny the official Srebrenica narrative
of Serb evil and Muslim victimhood? Holocaust revisionists perhaps? How
about conspiracy theorists or war crimes apologists? Diehard
Stalinists? Why
not diehard Satanists for that matter?
Well, here is what Phillip Corwin, the senior UN civilian official in
Bosnia
during 1995, had to say on the subject: "What happened at Srebrenica
was not
a single large massacre of Muslims by Serbs but a series of very bloody
attacks and counter-attacks over a three-year period, which reached a
crescendo in July of 1995."
The official version of events, recalled Corwin in his book Dubious
Mandate,
has been a "campaign of disinformation that has all but buried the facts
along with the bodies."
Corwin's appraisal tallies with the following analysis of Muslim
tactics in
the 1992-95 Bosnian war from UN General Francis Briquemont.
"The Bosnian [Muslim] Army attacks the Serbs from a safe area. The Serbs
retaliate and the Bosnian presidency accuses UN forces of not protecting
them against Serb aggression and appeals for air strikes against the Serb
gun positions."
Muslim forces using "safe areas" to attack Serbs? How could this possibly
refer to Srebrenica which, as we are told ad infinitum, was a
demilitarised
civilian haven?
In truth only a very small, central part of Srebrenica remained
demilitarised, giving free rein for Muslim fighters to operate out of
suburban and other outlying areas, from where they launched murderous
raids
on surrounding Serb villages.
Forces under the infamous Muslim commander Naser Oric caused mass carnage
between 1992-95 with their attacks out of Srebrenica, leaving at least
1,300
Serb civilians butchered and thousands wounded.
Oric was "as bloodthirsty a warrior who ever crossed a battlefield,"
commented Toronto Star reporter Bill Schiller, who visited the Muslim
warlord's home in 1994.
"I sat in his room, watching a shocking video version of what might have
been called Naser Oric's Greatest Hits. There were burning buildings,
severed heads and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout, admiring his
handiwork."
Schiller continues: "When a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any
visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: 'We killed 114 Serbs there'."
His final raid out of Srebrenica came on June 26, 1995 with an attack
on the
village of Visnjica where 40 perished. It was one atrocity too far for the
Bosnian Serbs, who began preparations to take the town.
But, when they rolled into Srebrenica on July 11 1995 there was no Naser
Oric or any other senior Muslim officers.
They had been pulled out, in an apparent tactical move by Bosnian
president
Alija Izetbegovic, whom both Muslims and Serbs later accused of
deliberately
sacrificing the town in order to undermine the UN and give NATO
justification for air strikes against the Bosnian Serb army.
Izetbegovic, an enthusiastic collaborator with nazi occupiers during World
War II, had been imprisoned under Tito for his crimes. He served a further
jail term in socialist Yugoslavia during the 1980s for seeking to turn
Bosnia into "an ethnically pure Islamic state."
Seizing the Bosnian presidency in a mysterious power grab, despite losing
the election to a moderate Muslim rival, it was Izetbegovic who imported
4,000 foreign Mojahedin, fresh from their battles with Soviet troops in
Afghanistan, to fight holy war in Bosnia.
In her book, Fools Crusade, US academic Diana Johnstone, the outstanding
left analyst of the 1990s Balkan wars, notes that chaotic scenes
greeted the
Serb troops on their arrival at Srebrenica as terrified, leaderless Muslim
combatants clashed violently among themselves over what to do.
"Some wanted to surrender, but most decided to break through Serb
lines and
flee. By all accounts, this chaos deepened during the long retreat. Wild
scenes occurred as confused soldiers fell into Serb ambushes, sometimes
fighting back, sometimes shooting each other or even committing suicide."
All the above testimonies comprise part of a body of evidence compiled by
the Srebrenica Research Group - an international team of academics and
Balkan analysts under the leadership of University of Pennsylvania
professor
Edward S Herman. Its report, which aims to bring some balance to this
highly
charged subject, is due for publication this month.
Herman, who is perhaps best known for co-authoring the seminal tome
Manufacturing Consent - his collaborative study alongside Noam Chomsky
into
media complicity with imperial Washington policy - insists that
misinformation and myth surrounding Srebrenica has proved a handy
smokescreen to obscure Western intrigue in the Balkans throughout the
1990s.
He contrasts the fixation of Western governments and media on
Srebrenica to
their complete lack of interest in Operation Storm, the 1995 ethnic
cleansing of 200,000 Krajina Serbs from their ancestral lands
including the
murder - unlike at Srebrenica - of women, children and the elderly at the
hands of US-backed Croat forces.
In a manner that is reminiscent of the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes,
glaringly obvious questions regarding the "Srebrenica genocide" remain
unasked by Western politicians and mainstream media alike.
Why, if the Serbs were so intent on genocidal murder, were the victims all
males of combat age? The nazis, of course, made no allowances for women or
the elderly while slaughtering their Jewish, Roma and Serb victims.
The Srebrenica myth was born at the UN security council in August
1995, when
US representative Madeleine Albright, in a theatrical display that was
repeated eight years later by her successor Colin Powell and his infamous
phial of "anthrax," produced satellite photos showing "disturbed earth"
where Muslim victims of genocide were supposedly buried. These
pictures have
never been made public.
No matter that only about 4,000 bodies have to date been recovered. No
matter that the vast majority are unidentified and certainly include
victims
from all sides of a vicious, internecine three-year civil war.
No matter that the figure includes combatants who failed to surrender
- many
of whom were themselves guilty of heinous crimes against civilians.
No matter that the Serbs have always acknowledged that crimes were
committed
- that civilians accompanying Muslim regular and irregular troops had been
killed in the fighting.
No matter that Naser Oric's grisly snuff movies have never been shown
at the
West's bogus Yugoslav war crimes tribunal at The Hague, whereas last
month's
video evidence allegedly showing the summary execution of six Muslims - a
sickening, though not unusual, crime in wartime - is aired and declared
proof positive of genocide.
No matter that Slobodan Milosevic, the man charged with orchestrating that
genocide, had no authority over the Bosnian Serbs from 1993 and who was
cleared of any involvement in whatever happened at Srebrenica by a Dutch
government report in 2002.
"The Srebrenica massacre is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge
from the Balkan wars," concludes Herman. "It reigns supreme for symbolic
power. It is the symbol of Serb evil and Bosnian Muslim victimhood and the
justice of the Western dismantling of Yugoslavia and intervention there at
many levels."
. Christopher James edits the website www.free-slobo-uk.org
#######
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/julia/gorin_2005_07_11.php3?printer_friendl
y
Jewish World Review July 11, 2005 / 4 Tamuz, 5765
Remember Srebrenica — a.k.a. `So what if we globalized al Qaeda!'
By Julia Gorin
http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Recently, "Hannity & Colmes", of the
usually less-easily-fooled-than-other-networks Fox News Channel,
treated us
masses to a "genocide" video that's been handed over to the Hague's
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Pouring
even more fuel onto the carefully cultivated and long accepted
caricature of
the evil Serb, Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes were of one mind when Hannity
called the actions of the Bosnian Serb soldiers in the video "pure
evil" and
"evil incarnate."
Without being wrong about evil on display in the video, the network
had been
had. The circulation of, and the outrage surrounding, this tape —
especially high right now in guilt-ridden Serbia itself — is a sign that
things have gone from bad to worse in the prosecution of Slobodan
Milosevic.
Especially in anticipation of today's 10-year commemoration of the
Srebrenica massacre, the Hague desperately required a new wave of shocking
images to win in the court of public emotion the case that's being lost in
the court of foregone conclusion.
Tsk, tsk, Fox. Somebody hasn't been following the Milosevic trial. But
since
that somebody will look silly only to the six or so Americans who have
been
following it, there's no risk in spouting the tribunal's PR. PR
because this
trial is supposed to justify the new International Criminal Court's (ICC)
existence and convince the Bush administration of its utility, not its
futility.
There's a reason for the conspicuous three-year near silence by all major
media on this oh-so-momentous Second Nuremberg, as it was billed — a
silence broken only one or two days a year, when they're finally able to
offer up a damning piece of evidence that will perpetuate the version of
events we've been sold from the beginning.
What even the most sporadic trial observer would know is that the
Court has
spent the last three years discovering what many of us knew in 1999:
Milosevic was "a thug whose brutality played into the terrorists'
hands," as
former Boston Herald and JWR columnist Don Feder has repeatedly explained,
but he was no exterminator. Working backwards to make the crime fit the
punishment, however, the ICTY has had to redefine "genocide." Thus,
Milosevic faces charges of genocide even while the extermination of more
than 100,000 black Muslim and Christian men, women and children by Arabic
Muslims in Sudan still hasn't been granted the label. But then, the
exterminators there aren't white Christian Serbs.
The 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,000 Muslim males was inexcusable, but it
wasn't genocide. If you would, imagine a scenario in which a single
event is
manipulated to lend credence to an ocean of lies. Imagine Srebrenica. Here
it is in April 1993, from someone who was there. Haris Nezirovic was a
Bosnian journalist writing for the weekly "Slobodna Bosna" ("Free
Bosnia"),
and this for the UK Independent:
"The UN hopes to evacuate 15,000 people over the next few days. The
Muslim
command defending Srebrenica claims the UN operations amount to complicity
in Serbian 'ethnic cleansing'. Privately, the commanders add, they believe
that the Serbs will not launch an all-out attack as long as refugees are
there. More importantly, they say that without the civilians the
defense of
the town would crumble. They believe that Muslim fighters are better
motivated when their families are there behind them. …
"What this means in practice is thousands of civilians will have to
remain
in full range of Serbian guns: children with scabies who cannot be treated
because of a lack of medicine; the elderly who are so weak from hunger
that
they cannot fight for air-dropped scraps of food; and mothers who feed
their
babies with warm water because nothing else is available. …
"When the first UN trucks came last month, they were supposed to
evacuate
only a few wounded, but hundreds rushed on board. When the next convoy
came
on 28 March, thousands stampeded towards the vehicles.
"'We'll screw up those convoys,' said Naser Oric, the local Muslim
commander....When another convoy came on 30 March, masses of civilians
surrounded the trucks but were kept back by the commanders' personal
uard — a group of 30 foul-mouthed soldiers suspected of robberies and
other crimes. During the night, the guards accepted bribes in German marks
to let people on board. Many refugees on the UN list for evacuation were
beaten up. Witnesses said the deputy commander slapped and kicked
women and
pushed children from the trucks.
"On 4 April the local [Muslim] police used fire hoses to keep people
away
from the UN vehicles. Jets of water knocked down anyone who approached.
Soldiers climbed on trucks and fired into the air. …
"Ever more frequently, you hear civilians say, 'Our soldiers are worse
than Chetniks, the Serbs.'"
Sarajevo, meanwhile, "never seemed very interested in the fate
of…Srebrenica," says Radio Netherlands editor James Kliphuis, "except to
list it as [a] supreme example of the outside world's lack of interest in
what happened to the Bosnian Muslims." A statement entered into
testimony at
the ICTY in Feb. 2004, by UN Commander in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993
Philippe
Morillon, read: "The aim of the [Bosnian] presidency from the very outset
was to ensure the intervention of the international forces for their own
benefit, and this is one of the reasons why they never were inclined to
engage in talks."
That presidency refers to Alijah Izetbegovic, who was being
investigated by
the ICTY for war crimes (which the Court revealed only upon his death in
2003), and who was part of the Nazi SS Handzar division during WWII, which
butchered Serbs and the ethnic minorities of Yugoslavia. He also authored
"The Islamic Declaration", in which he stated: "The shortest definition of
the Islamic order defines it as unity of faith and law, upbringing and
force, ideals and interests, spiritual community and State…a Muslim
generally does not exist as an individual… […] There can be no peace or
coexistence between 'the Islamic faith' and non-Islamic social and
political
institutions."
Pursuant to Izetbegovic's end game, writes Michigan-based Balkans
writer and
historian Carl Savich, "the Bosnian Muslim faction engaged in propaganda,
staged massacres, killed Bosnian Muslim civilians to garner sympathy and
used civilian hostages or shields to further its propaganda of
victimization." For example, the 1992 Breadline Massacre and the Markale
Marketplace bombings of 1994 and 95 resulted in U.S. economic
sanctions and
a bombing campaign, respectively, of the Serbs — despite European
headlines like the Sunday Times of London's "Serbs 'not guilty' of
massacre,
Experts warned US that mortar was Bosnian" (Oct. 1, 1995).
The widely cited 2002 official Dutch report on Srebrenica seems to confirm
the use of such tactics. As BBC.com reported that year, the Dutch
Government
"pins part of the blame on the Bosnian Muslims themselves, saying the
Bosnian army had provoked attacks."
Srebrenica Muslims "ravaged and ransacked neighbouring ethnic Serb
villages," continues Kliphuis, "killing and maiming the residents, who
were
often too old to offer any resistance….The Serb villages were then set on
fire." After his role in killing up to 2,000 Serbs, Oric himself fled
Srebrenica just before it was stormed by the Bosnian Serb army.
The Serbs evacuated women, children and elderly before the males were
killed
without being distinguished as civilians or POWs, making Srebrenica a
massacre, something the Serbs admit.
By deeming Srebrenica a genocide, however, the court at the Hague has
expanded the term's legal definition, so that now, not only do 7,000
bodies
qualify (regardless of how many belong to armed fighters), not only does
there not have to be genocidal intent, but it doesn't even have to involve
eliminating the child-bearing sex or the offspring of the ethnic group in
question. As a BBC.com report concluded, "the definition may now be
applied
to conflict in a small community, where local atrocities can be labeled as
genocide."
The 2002 Dutch report, meanwhile, goes on to state that no evidence
"suggests the involvement of the Serbian authorities in Belgrade," with
principal responsibility attributed to fugitive Bosnian Serb general Ratko
Mladic.
Which brings us back to the Milosevic trial. Like a Moliere farce, within
months of 19 Muslim hijackers (some of whom fought in Bosnia)
attacking the
United States, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic began at the Hague in the
Netherlands, today a country where artists and members of parliament are
hunted down for practicing freedom of speech (e.g. Theo van Gogh, Geert
Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali) — by the co-religionists of those on whose
behalf Milosevic is being prosecuted.
If one wonders why, 364 days out of 365, our media organs send us no word
from this "Nuremberg II" — incidentally a laughing stock among legal
experts (deputy prosecutor Geoffrey Nice had to reprimand reporters for
knocking the prosecution's performance and flimsy evidence) — the
following trial developments, easily gleaned from a casual perusal of wire
copy or European press, may help explain:
The first week of the trial in particular was marked by one embarrassment
after another for the prosecution, starting with the testimony of Ratomir
Tanic, who was supposedly present when the genocide order was given
but who
under cross-examination couldn't even say where in the presidential palace
Milosevic's office was located — and eventually turned out to have been
paid by British intelligence to testify. Then there was a witness named
Halit Barani, whom Milosevic asked if he knew that KLA commanders were to
assassinate all Albanians loyal to Serbia. Barani revealed that he was
sympathetic to the KLA, had met with numerous commanders, then
indicted the
entire Albanian population of Kosovo: "The KLA was born from within the
people, to protect parents, brothers and sisters."
A 2002 BBC wire report related Albanian "farmer" Agim Zeqiri's
testimonythat
Serb forces burned down his village and killed members of his family. Upon
cross-examination, when the proceedings brought to light that his
village of
Celina was harboring and supporting Albanian rebels, Zeqiri claimed to
feel
too ill to continue, but "did acknowledge that the KLA had used the
village
as a source of provisions and that at least 300 members of the KLA were
based there."
Another witness, Fehim Elshani, was actually rebuked by the now deceased
presiding judge Richard May, when he refused to answer Milosevic's
questions
at all. In the end, he testified that he did not know of any KLA crimes,
while admitting that his son was KLA. Elshani, Zeqiri and another
"farmer",
Halil Morina — who claimed to have no knowledge of any KLA presence
in his
village of Landovica (where after the war a monument was erected to the
town's fallen KLA soldiers) — frequently avoided eye contact with
Milosevic as he cross-examined them.
The three-judge panel actually ruled in favor of Milosevic's objections to
admitting testimony from chief Kosovo war crimes investigator Kevin Curtis
because of the irrelevance of "evidence" composed entirely of "repeating
stories he had heard from others," the AP reported. When the prosecution's
intelligence analyst Stephen Spargo detailed through maps the routes taken
by 800,000 or so deported or fleeing Albanians in 1999, Milosevic asked
whether he knew that 100,000 Serbs left Kosovo along with everyone
else once
NATO started bombing. Spargo answered that he "hadn't been assigned to
document Serb displacements." Naturally. In Kosovo, Milosevic continued,
since there were 10 Albanians to every Serb, proportionally speaking, more
Serbs than Albanians fled Kosovo — casting doubt on the
forced-deportation
argument that the Clinton government helped craft for our consumption.
Milosevic scored points early on when he showed the court an Albanian map
depicting Greater Albania, which included southeast Montenegro, southern
Serbia, western Macedonia and parts of northern Greece in addition to
osovo — a long-harbored dream of many in Albania and Kosovo. It goes
without saying that the American people were not shown this map of Greater
Albania as they were being sold a story of Milosevic's push for a "Greater
Serbia."
Meanwhile, the forensic evidence at the Racak "massacre", our final-straw
pretext for bombing our historical ally whose people saved 500 downed U.S.
pilots in WWII, disproved that a massacre had taken place. And virtually
every Albanian-rumored "mass grave" in Kosovo turned up empty, as Wall St.
Journal's Daniel Pearl was finding a few years before Muslims decapitated
him in Pakistan.
The first Western leader to appear at the trial was Lord Paddy Ashdown,
former head of England's Liberal Democrat Party and current UN High
Representative in Bosnia. Ashdown was also the first witness to admit that
the KLA fighters were a terrorist organization which Yugoslavia was
fighting.
Eastern European and Balkan affairs writer Neil Clark summed up the
trial in
a UK Guardian article of Feb. 2004 (the month the prosecution wrapped
up its
two-year case): "Not only has the prosecution signally failed to prove
Milosevic's personal responsibility for atrocities committed on the
ground,
the nature and extent of the atrocities themselves has also been
called into
question."
Without a smoking gun linking Milosevic to crimes in Kosovo (widely
anticipated to be an easier indictment to make stick than Croatia and
Bosnia, where local Serbian leaders were in command), the Tribunal gave
prosecutors the green light to tack on charges related to Croatia and
Bosnia. It was a move that chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte initially said
the prosecution wouldn't pursue, given that that conflict was closed with
the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, which the Clinton administration hosted and
for which the administration hailed Milosevic as a force for peace and
stability in the Balkans.
Going ahead with the Bosnia charges, then, the prosecution brought in
the UN
Commander Philipe Morillon in February of last year, his testimony
meant to
tie Milosevic to Srebrenica. Giving instead unwelcome testimony that
Milosevic had headed off an initial attack on Srebrenica's Muslims,
Morillon
said he had asked Milosevic in 1993 to intervene with the Bosnian Serb
government to prevent a potential massacre in Srebrenica, which Milosevic
did, convincing the Serbs to halt their offensive so the UN could set up a
safe haven. Morillon, whose residence was shelled by Bosnian Muslims
during
the war, was the one to set up the safe haven — but he failed to
demilitarize it, enabling the Bosnian Muslim commander Naser Oric to turn
the enclave into his military base of operations, from which he launched
attacks on Serbs.
Morillon saw the exhumed remains of tortured, mutilated, and executed
Bosnian Serb civilians and soldiers, and testified that Oric's forces
engaged in "attacks during Orthodox holidays [including Christmas Eve] and
destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a
degree of
hatred that was quite extraordinary…."
If there was a clear guilty party, and a clear victim on behalf of whom
support, and later war, by the United States was warranted, logic
demands an
explanation as to how it can be that more than a year into the
proceedings,
the Court haltingly, quietly decided it had to issue warrants for, and
try,
Croats and Albanian and Bosnian Muslims for war crimes as well, making the
"victims" guilty too. Nasir Oric, who didn't take prisoners, was
ultimately
indicted — though his indictment was not made public. There are
videotapes
of Oric's atrocities; as well, images of Albanians and mujahedeen in
Bosnia
victoriously holding up or stepping on disembodied Serb heads are
viewable.
And yet even in those once- or twice-a-year "updates" on the Hague
Tribunal
by our major newspapers and networks, the only graphic details we're
permitted to know of and judge are of Serbian crimes. Tapes showing the
slaughter of Serbs by Bosnians and Albanians have been conspicuously
absent
from our airwaves, leaving the American public with only Serb crimes to
speak of. It's a silence that should be deafening to any American patriot.
When, for the sake of context, mentioning Bosnian Muslim acts becomes
unavoidable, such acts are referred to as "attacks", but not "slaughters",
"massacres", "atrocities", "crimes against humanity" or, perish the
thought,
"genocide" or "ethnic cleansing", even if in this case intent was present.
Such inflammatory language, after all, is reserved for Serbs. "Revenge
killings", the term that continues to be used to describe Albanian murders
of Serbs in Kosovo (including octogenarians) and that could easily
describe
what the Serbs did in Srebrenica, remains the exclusive privilege of the
Balkans' Muslims.
Americans don't hear about the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Srebrenica,
just as they didn't hear much about the ethnic cleansing by Croatia of
up to
half a million Serbs. Anyone looking for the truth about the Balkans is
labeled "pro-Serb", "anti-Muslim", or a victim of "Serbian propaganda"
(try
and find that in this country). Meanwhile, even the truest Bosnian Muslim
victims, genuinely "believing themselves the virtuous victims of
'aggression' and 'genocide'," writes Washington-based blogger and Balkans
observer Nebojsa Malic, are "blinded to Izetbegovic's hateful ideology of
domination that tore Bosnia apart."
Serbia has been experiencing a uniquely weird national phenomenon of late.
Tired of being a pariah nation, whether that status is deserved or
not, the
Serbs are putting themselves through a sort of self-punishment. Wanting to
be allowed back into the international fold of "decent" nations, they
desperately want their government to just fall in line with any Western
demands, and they want Milosevic convicted, so they can finally put
the 90s
behind them. To that end, many Serbs alternate between practicing
self-censorship (it's politically incorrect in Serbia today to defend or
explain Serb actions of the 90s), and self-deception, wherein Serbs manage
to convince themselves that the world is right and they were the bad
guy of
the 1990s, themselves chiefly to blame for the civil wars that destroyed
their country. In other words, the Serbs are betraying their own history.
Perhaps the first intimation that this would come was a NY Times op-ed in
1999, written by a Serbian woman who said that although the numbers in
Kosovo aren't panning out, even if a single Albanian was killed
excessively,
her country deserved what it got.
It's gotten so that in January 2004, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo
(UNMIK) had to issue a statement disputing a self-blaming Belgrade
report on
mass graves in Kosovo: "Some media reports have quoted a senior Belgrade
official as stating that there are 198 mass graves in Kosovo. The
Office on
Missing Persons and Forensics (OMPF) would like to categorically state
that
no evidence has been provided to OMPF regarding existence of any mass
graves
in Kosovo. Such unfounded statements reflect a lack of sensitivity to an
issue that is extremely emotive and causes considerable anguish for all
affected families."
In the meantime, the authentic mass graves that are being found
contain Serb
bodies — presumed to be those of civilians missing since 1998 and
thought
to be kidnapped by the KLA, as BBC.com reported in March. "If confirmed,
this would be the second such find in a month after 24 bodies were
found in
a cave" in February, with wrecked cars thrown on top of them, according to
local media.
The "Hannity & Colmes" hosts said that it seemed whoever the Serb was that
offered up the Srebrenica tape to the Court apparently had a "bout of
conscience." But if one knows anything about the way things work in the
Balkans today, the more likely story is that someone was just looking
to get
paid (or to get amnesty and a new life), and the easiest way to do that
today is to help push the old story.
Last December, when some wayward media in Serbia published graphic
photos of
crimes committed by Ramush Haradinaj — who recently stepped down as
Kosovo's prime minister to face war crimes charges — the
Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and other members of the
international community were critical, saying that "by publishing such
vivid
reminders of crimes committed against the Serbs, the media was guilty for
perpetrating hate and intolerance, whereas its task is to look ahead
towards
peace and reconciliation," reports Serge Trifkovic, author of "The
Sword of
the Prophet" and director of the Institute for International Affairs in
Rockford, IL.
Offering a glimpse into the Serbian state of mind, along with a hope for
reconciliation with America, is a letter from Aleksandar Kis, of Vrsac,
Serbia:
"In my country today it is almost illegal to say that we are right.
Sometimes when I wake up, I believe that I live in Albania or Croatia.
Even
our own media are anti-Serbic! Only few media are free to comment
anything,
others are under democratic censorship. ...
"You see, there are less than 2-3% Serbs in Kosovo comparing to pre-war
numbers, but there are 100,000 Albanians in Belgrade. In my hometown, I go
to Albanian-held bakery. ...
"In Serbia, we have few free media, of which one is 'Srpski Nacional'
newspaper that was supporting Bush campaign last year, calling for
Serbs to
influence their relatives in USA to vote for Bush. This paper is trying to
tell Serbs that USA is no longer foe and aggressor. [I hope] to
achieve that
Star Spangled Banner isn't a symbol of oppression for us anymore…We never
considered USA as evil. Strangely for Europeans, we more liked Nixon and
Reagan than Kennedy. I want to say, we considered USA a country
'across the
lake'. We don't understand what happened with our relationship."
Trying to improve that relationship, Serbia has offered a battalion to
assist U.S. troops in Kabul. But who will assist Serbia with the terror
haven that is Kosovo? Certainly not those pushing for the province's
independence, something that would be a key nail in the free world's
coffin
once peacekeepers, now acting as our eyes and ears there, have to leave.
As the world adeptly looks the other way, not only is cultural
genocide and
defamation taking place and history being perverted, but the international
meddlers are capitalizing precisely on the public's disinterest in the
Balkans, officially establishing an Islamic gangster state in Europe
as our
exit strategy.
The meddlers include the Council on Foreign Relations, the International
Crisis Group, a number of Congressmen, most of the Clinton-era State
Department — now working for quasi-governmental institutes — and
Wesley
Clark. Clark warned in a February Wall St. Journal op-ed that "a violent
collision may occur by year-end" if we don't give the Albanians what they
want — and this four-star general advocated doing just that. After
all, a
violent collision would shine an unwelcome spotlight on his "successful
war", as he spent all of election year billing it in contrast to Iraq. So
Clark wants to close the book as soon as possible on Kosovo, where there
were four more explosions over the July 4th weekend — ongoing
attempts to
persuade the international community that only one final status is
acceptable: complete independence, without border compromises. Besides, he
already promised his erstwhile campaign donors, the National Albanian
American Council, that "Kosova" would be independent, using the purposeful
Albanian mispronunciation of the Serbian word as his old boss had. In the
Journal piece, Clark even suggested pummeling the Serbs again if Belgrade
got in the way (since it's easier than fighting Albanian terrorists).
So that Americans don't start connecting any obvious dots, two things must
remain obscured as the Milosevic verdict nears and as the push for Kosovo
independence goes full throttle this year: the al Qaeda connection to
Bosnia
and Kosovo, and the ever-present atrocities against Serbs.
The broadcasting of the Srebrenica video was actually an opening salvo in
this campaign, whether the Fox News Channel is aware of it or not (the
hosts
certainly are not, but if the network is, it's an ominous sign). The
channel
that's supposed to function as a deprogrammer for the public's
media-produced minds has itself become part of the machine. A couple weeks
ago, Fox News announced Wesley Clark, whose Albanian friends are promising
war against NATO and UN forces if there is no independence for Kosovo, as
its newest military and foreign affairs analyst. (On July 19th, PBS
will be
broadcasting a Dutch documentary about one Albanian-America making
precisely
this promise: Brooklyn roofer Florin Krasniqi, who has been smuggling arms
into Kosovo for years and helping resettle KLA fighters here.)
Understandably, for Sean Hannity the broadcast offered a rare chance to
throw a bone to the Muslim world — precisely the purpose the Serbs have
been serving for the rest of the globe all along. (Because somehow, even
while atrocities across the planet are indeed brought to us by
Muslims, in a
bizarre twist from the trend, we found a singular, exceptional case not of
Muslims waging a jihad, but of secular Europe's religious misfits
doing so,
the Orthodox Christian Serbs.)
Serbs are the universal punching bag; there are no repercussions for
anything one might say about them. Initial reports in 1993 even attributed
the World Trade Center bombing to "Serbian terrorists." Serb concerns are
routinely trivialized, their perspectives dismissed as whining or
self-serving. When, in the midst of our 1999 offensive on Yugoslavia, a
friend calling in to a talk radio show dared imply that Serbs weren't
responsible for the Markale Marketplace bombings, she was instantly
reprimanded by the incredulous hostess: "Are you defending the SERBS?!"
"Serbs perfectly meet all the PC-villain criteria," explains political
satirist Oleg Atabashian, who runs PeoplesCube.com (the site will be
operational again tomorrow). "They're another white, Christian, European
minority supposedly guilty of oppressing the most popular 'minority', the
Muslims. A whole new nation of Serbs is getting sacrificed right
before our
eyes on the altar of the self-hating cult that western society has
become."
The Serbs have been "targeted by propaganda of unprecedented proportions
accusing them of Nazi-like evil," writes Malic (recall former CNN reporter
Christiane Amanpour showing us a funeral she said was for two Muslim
babies
killed by a Serb sniper but who turned out to be Serbian babies killed
by a
Muslim sniper). If there has been hesitation from Serbian authorities,
whether in handing over war criminals or officially admitting that
Srebrenica was a massacre, it's because they are "rightly afraid it
would be
considered an admission of the fabrications as well," Malic explains.
He is
echoed by Trifkovic: "Serbia needs to come to terms with all that came to
pass under Milosevic, but not at the cost of losing its soul."
With the current media blitz surrounding the Srebrenica video, which was
seized on by every major news organization and news site, there is a
renewed
rehashing of Serb wickedness, its pitch highest in Serbia itself
where, Mr.
Kis reports, all media are pointing an accusing finger at Milosevic, the
country and the Serbian people in general. One law professor on
national TV
said the execution showed the "collective guilt" of the Serbian people. No
connections are made about the disparity that while Muslims returning
to the
now Serb-dominated Srebrenica do so without incident or danger, Serbs
daring
to return to Kosovo face pogroms (which reached a crescendo in March
of last
year).
As the July 11th mark has neared, we've seen a sensational flurry of Serb
vilification — again. On July 4th, the New York Times ran a Srebrenica
article that devoted a single paragraph to the trial of Muslim forces at
Srebrenica. To corral any potentially wayward readers, the writer
paraphrased the prosecution's take that "while war crimes were
committed by
Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the wars, evidence is overwhelming that
most were committed by Serbs." Indeed, that was the only evidence being
sought.
In contrast to the current anti-Serb orgy, we haven't heard much about all
the Bosnian charities being monitored or raided for funding terrorism, or
about the Bosnian who was one of the masterminds behind the Madrid
bombing,
or about the six Algerian-born Bosnian citizens held at Guantanamo for
planning to blow up the American and British embassies in Sarajevo (NY
Times, 10/21/04), or about Bosnia issuing passports to Osama bin Laden and
his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, who has operated camps and WMD
factories throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and
Bosnia. Nor will we hear that the terrorists who carried out a spate of
suicide attacks in Iraq last August, including one at the UN headquarters
that killed 22, were trained in Bosnia, or that al Qaeda's top Balkans
operative, al-Zawahiri's brother Mohammed, had a high position in the KLA.
We'll never know that Bosnia today is the "one-stop shop close to Europe"
for all the terrorism needs — weapons, money, documents — of
Chechen and
Afghani fighters passing through Europe before heading to Iraq. Little
wonder, then, that when SFOR (the UN Stabilization Force in Bosnia)
intercepts weapons shipments to Iraq, we don't hear about that either.
Three weeks into our 78-day bombing of Belgrade, an Indian UN commander in
Bosnia, General Satish Nambiar, gave a speech in New Delhi saying,
"Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only
counter-productive but also dishonest. According to my experience, all
sides
were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels, while
the others would insist that they were. With 28,000 forces under me
and with
constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we
did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides."
Yet when former Kosovo Verification Mission observer Roland Keith
testified
earlier this year that he had seen no evidence of genocide in Kosovo,
Canada's New Democratic Party forced him to withdraw his candidacy in
British Columbia's provincial elections.
Starting with the elder President Bush and escalating under Clinton, we
consistently abetted nationalism and xenophobia in the Balkans, and today
our media and government continue trying to make a square peg fit into a
round hole. With the decision on Kosovo's status looming, the
administration
of George W. Bush has an opportunity to right a historic wrong and chart a
straight course in the Balkans, one that will finally be in line with his
defining vision, the War on Terror.
Great nations admit their mistakes. They don't reinforce them. But in the
past weeks, as this country has fallen way short of its potential for
greatness and Americans have been treated to a rare, genuine propaganda
campaign reinforcing our Balkans mischief, it is up to the American people
to demand that the record be set straight.
If a commission was set up to determine whether a presidential
administration did or didn't do all it could to prevent kamikaze
attacks on
9/11, good G-d, what of an administration that committed the might of the
U.S. Air Force to bomb Europe for a legacy beyond sexual harassment —
lying about genocide to achieve it?
Anyone looking for evidence of a "treasonous war", of being "misled into
war", "rushed to war" or being "lied to", look no farther than 1999.
Recovered at an Afghanistan al Qaeda training camp was an Albanian
Kosovar's
application reading, "I have Kosovo Liberation Army combat experience
against Serb and American forces. ...I recommend (suicide) operations
against (amusement) parks like Disney." If the protests reserved for a
Republican war had also been mounted against the Democrats' war in Kosovo,
had we known our friends from our enemies and not allowed the Balkans to
become a terror gateway into the Western world, it's just possible we may
never have had 9/11.
It was Lee Hamilton, the man who would become co-chairman of the 9/11
Commission, whom President-elect Bill Clinton patted on the shoulder
in 1992
and assured, "I've been traveling around our country for a year and no one
cares about foreign policy other than about six journalists."
Hamilton responded by reminding Clinton that the last two presidents had
built their legacies on foreign policy. It would appear that ultimately,
President Clinton fell back on Hamilton's suggestion.
Testifying at the Milosevic trial at the Hague last September, former
policy
analyst James Jatras, who worked for the Senate Republican Policy
Committee
from 1985 to 2000, quoted the 9/11 Commission's finding that it was in
1990s
Bosnia that the "groundwork for a true terrorist network was being laid."
That network is today known as al Qaeda.
The Balkans were the early, key prize that Iran and Osama bin Laden sought
as a terror corridor to the West. We delivered it to them. Why?
Senator Hamilton, your commission's work is unfinished.
--- End forwarded message ---