Jugoinfo
After the Rain - How the West Lost the East -
http://www.geocities.com/vaksam/after.html
Courtesy Bill
Late Yugoslav Ruler Tito Enjoys Comeback
ZAGREB, May 7, 2000 -- (Reuters) Twenty years after his death,
Yugoslavia's communist ruler Marshal Josip Broz Tito is enjoying a
public
comeback.
Tito, a flamboyant and often controversial figure, who ruled the
multi-ethnic federation from the end of World War Two until 1980, is the
subject of a new film by young director Vinko Bresan called "The
Marshal".
Bresan's surreal film poses the question: what would happen if Tito came
back from the dead to his native Croatia, where a few of his die-hard
followers, aging communists and anti-fascists, now live?
The film is making many in Croatia, now an independent state, look again
at the historic role of the wartime partisan leader turned world
statesman.
This year Croatia marked the death of Tito for the first time since
gaining independence in 1991.
Several thousand people gathered on May 4 in Kumrovec, his birthplace in
northern Croatia, where sirens wailed at 3:05 p.m., the exact time of
his
death.
The mourners, mostly elderly, laid flowers and sang patriotic songs.
Many
filed through the wooden cottage where Tito was born.
A pub called "The Old Man" recently opened in Kumrovec and local leaders
have restored the entire village in the hope of reviving once-thriving
tourism.
Tito's Yugoslav federation outlived him by 10 years before it crumbled
amid rising nationalism in its six constituent republics and the end of
communism.
TITO MOVIES CROSS HOSTILE BORDERS On April 15, "The Marshal" had its
opening night in Belgrade, capital of the rump Yugoslavia, and Bresan
received a long ovation from the audience. The movie is now being shown
throughout Yugoslavia and is being promoted with the slogan: "The movie
we
have waited for 20 years."
"One cannot avoid Tito. He is the only common ground we (the people of
former Yugoslavia) have left now," Bresan told Reuters, explaining why
the
film was being received with enthusiasm in Serbia.
Earlier this year, a Serbian film called "Tito and I", a parody of the
Tito years as seen through the eyes of a young boy, showed in Zagreb and
for days drew roars of laughter from the packed house of a small art
house
cinema.
"This is a natural reaction of people who have realized after 10 years
that they lived better before,"
said sociologist Slaven Letica, commenting on the blooming "Tito trade".
"There is also a kind of nostalgia as people come to terms with their
history," he said.
This cultural exchange would not have taken place when Croatia was ruled
by the nationalist Franjo Tudjman, who held power from independence to
his
death last December.
Tudjman's HDZ party lost a general election in January to a reformist
coalition, led by former communists.
TITO'S MIXED LEGACY Tito remains a controversial figure in the successor
states to the former Yugoslav federation. For some he was a great
statesman, for others a tyrant who tried to eradicate Croatian national
sentiment. Some Serbs feel the same.
Many still blame him for allowing the slaughter of thousands of Croatian
troops who had collaborated with the Nazis after they surrendered to the
allies in
1945.
According to one recent survey, some 45.8 percent of those interviewed
said they considered Tito a dictator while 55.6 percent said the same of
Tudjman.
In another poll, 60 percent of those questioned said Tito's remains
should
be returned home from his stately tomb in Belgrade.
The son of peasants, Tito led the Yugoslav Communist party in the 1930s
and organized resistance against Nazi Germany, Italian fascists and
their
local collaborators in World War Two.
He ruled post-war Yugoslavia with an iron fist but maneuvered Yugoslavia
away from eastern European Stalinism and preserved the country's
multi-ethnic society.
Although ruthless with political opponents, Tito was enormously popular
with his people, projecting an image of a bon viveur who enjoyed smoking
king-size cigars, malt whisky and the company of Hollywood celebrities.
During Tito's lifetime, mass rallies were held each year to celebrate
his
birthday. Thousands of Yugoslav children, dressed in white and blue
with
red scarves, would be bussed into Kumrovec to be sworn in as "Tito's
Pioneers"
each May.
Mile-long cordons of "workers and peasants" would throw flowers at his
Mercedes wherever he passed.
The republic that rose from the ashes of the old Yugoslavia quickly
dismantled the symbols of communism and undertook to privatize state
assets - a process which some say produced some dubious results in
Croatia.
"The Marshal" alludes to this when the main character, a policeman sent
to
investigate reports on the appearance of Tito's ghost on a remote
Adriatic
island, talks to a local tycoon in front of a decrepit Museum of the
Anti-Fascist Struggle and the Socialist Revolution.
"We had no funds to maintain the museum so we had to privatize it," the
tycoon says.
"And who bought it?"
"Ah, well, I did, for two kuna (30 U.S. cents)," the tycoon replies.
(C)2000 Copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are
expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters
Limited.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.geocities.com/vaksam/after.html
Courtesy Bill
Late Yugoslav Ruler Tito Enjoys Comeback
ZAGREB, May 7, 2000 -- (Reuters) Twenty years after his death,
Yugoslavia's communist ruler Marshal Josip Broz Tito is enjoying a
public
comeback.
Tito, a flamboyant and often controversial figure, who ruled the
multi-ethnic federation from the end of World War Two until 1980, is the
subject of a new film by young director Vinko Bresan called "The
Marshal".
Bresan's surreal film poses the question: what would happen if Tito came
back from the dead to his native Croatia, where a few of his die-hard
followers, aging communists and anti-fascists, now live?
The film is making many in Croatia, now an independent state, look again
at the historic role of the wartime partisan leader turned world
statesman.
This year Croatia marked the death of Tito for the first time since
gaining independence in 1991.
Several thousand people gathered on May 4 in Kumrovec, his birthplace in
northern Croatia, where sirens wailed at 3:05 p.m., the exact time of
his
death.
The mourners, mostly elderly, laid flowers and sang patriotic songs.
Many
filed through the wooden cottage where Tito was born.
A pub called "The Old Man" recently opened in Kumrovec and local leaders
have restored the entire village in the hope of reviving once-thriving
tourism.
Tito's Yugoslav federation outlived him by 10 years before it crumbled
amid rising nationalism in its six constituent republics and the end of
communism.
TITO MOVIES CROSS HOSTILE BORDERS On April 15, "The Marshal" had its
opening night in Belgrade, capital of the rump Yugoslavia, and Bresan
received a long ovation from the audience. The movie is now being shown
throughout Yugoslavia and is being promoted with the slogan: "The movie
we
have waited for 20 years."
"One cannot avoid Tito. He is the only common ground we (the people of
former Yugoslavia) have left now," Bresan told Reuters, explaining why
the
film was being received with enthusiasm in Serbia.
Earlier this year, a Serbian film called "Tito and I", a parody of the
Tito years as seen through the eyes of a young boy, showed in Zagreb and
for days drew roars of laughter from the packed house of a small art
house
cinema.
"This is a natural reaction of people who have realized after 10 years
that they lived better before,"
said sociologist Slaven Letica, commenting on the blooming "Tito trade".
"There is also a kind of nostalgia as people come to terms with their
history," he said.
This cultural exchange would not have taken place when Croatia was ruled
by the nationalist Franjo Tudjman, who held power from independence to
his
death last December.
Tudjman's HDZ party lost a general election in January to a reformist
coalition, led by former communists.
TITO'S MIXED LEGACY Tito remains a controversial figure in the successor
states to the former Yugoslav federation. For some he was a great
statesman, for others a tyrant who tried to eradicate Croatian national
sentiment. Some Serbs feel the same.
Many still blame him for allowing the slaughter of thousands of Croatian
troops who had collaborated with the Nazis after they surrendered to the
allies in
1945.
According to one recent survey, some 45.8 percent of those interviewed
said they considered Tito a dictator while 55.6 percent said the same of
Tudjman.
In another poll, 60 percent of those questioned said Tito's remains
should
be returned home from his stately tomb in Belgrade.
The son of peasants, Tito led the Yugoslav Communist party in the 1930s
and organized resistance against Nazi Germany, Italian fascists and
their
local collaborators in World War Two.
He ruled post-war Yugoslavia with an iron fist but maneuvered Yugoslavia
away from eastern European Stalinism and preserved the country's
multi-ethnic society.
Although ruthless with political opponents, Tito was enormously popular
with his people, projecting an image of a bon viveur who enjoyed smoking
king-size cigars, malt whisky and the company of Hollywood celebrities.
During Tito's lifetime, mass rallies were held each year to celebrate
his
birthday. Thousands of Yugoslav children, dressed in white and blue
with
red scarves, would be bussed into Kumrovec to be sworn in as "Tito's
Pioneers"
each May.
Mile-long cordons of "workers and peasants" would throw flowers at his
Mercedes wherever he passed.
The republic that rose from the ashes of the old Yugoslavia quickly
dismantled the symbols of communism and undertook to privatize state
assets - a process which some say produced some dubious results in
Croatia.
"The Marshal" alludes to this when the main character, a policeman sent
to
investigate reports on the appearance of Tito's ghost on a remote
Adriatic
island, talks to a local tycoon in front of a decrepit Museum of the
Anti-Fascist Struggle and the Socialist Revolution.
"We had no funds to maintain the museum so we had to privatize it," the
tycoon says.
"And who bought it?"
"Ah, well, I did, for two kuna (30 U.S. cents)," the tycoon replies.
(C)2000 Copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are
expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters
Limited.
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Tribunale Clark - ADESIONI
Quello che segue e' l'appello-convocazione per la iniziativa che
conclude il ciclo di udienze della sezione italiana del tribunale
internazionale contro i crimini di guerra della NATO in Jugoslavia che
si terra' a Roma il 3 giugno. Le adesioni vanno
comunque mandate a uno di questi indirizzi:
ponac@...
sdeangelis@...
===
ROMA 3 GIUGNO 2000
VIA PIETRO COSSA 40 – SALA UNIVERSITA’ VALDESE
DALLE ORE 9.00
PROIEZIONE VIDEO, MOSTRE FOTOGRAFICHE
TRIBUNA APERTA TRA I COMITATI E LE ASSOCIAZIONI
ORE 15.00
SESSIONE FINALE DELLA SEZIONE ITALIANA DEL TRIBUNALE INDIPENDENTE CONTRO
I CRIMINI DELLA NATO IN JUGOSLAVIA
Il 31 luglio 1999 hanno avuto inizio a New York le attivita' del
"TRIBUNALE INTERNAZIONALE INDIPENDENTE CONTRO I CRIMINI DELLA NATO IN
JUGOSLAVIA", promosso da Ramsey Clark, con la stesura di 19 punti di
accusa contro la NATO ed i governi occidentali.
Le attivita' del "Tribunale" hanno trovato seguito in molti altri paesi
del mondo. In Italia il primo
novembre 1999 alla presenza di Ramsey Clark ha preso il via la sezione
italiana del Tribunale. Nel corso di questi mesi, confortati dal
crescente interesse suscitato e dalle numerose iniziative di
presentazione del "Tribunale Italiano" in molte citta', abbiamo potuto
verificare con dati oggettivi la veridicita' delle nostre accuse.
A completamento del lavoro svolto in questi mesi, noi sottoscritti
firmatari di questo appello accusiamo le massime autorità della
Repubblica in carica nel marzo 1999 - in particolare il presidente del
Consiglio dei Ministri Massimo D'Alema e i ministri del governo per la
partecipazione alla guerra illegale e il Presidente della Repubblica
Oscar Luigi Scalfaro per non aver difeso la Costituzione - nonchè i loro
successori per quanto attiene ai crimini in continuità con l'aggressione
armata, ciascuno secondo la personale responsabilità scaturente dalle
diverse competenze, azioni e omissioni:
per avere collaborato attivamente all'aggressione contro la Repubblica
Federale Jugoslava, paese
sovrano da cui non era venuta nessuna minaccia nè all'Italia nè ai suoi
alleati;
per avere violato tutti i principi del diritto internazionale e in
particolare la Carta delle Nazioni
Unite, i principi del Tribunale di Norimberga, le Convenzioni di Ginevra
e i protocolli aggiuntivi
sulla tutela delle popolazioni civili nonchè lo stesso trattato
istitutivo della NATO;
per aver consentito che dal proprio territorio partissero attacchi
contro istallazioni e popolazioni
civili, condotti su obiettivi e con armi appositamente studiate per
infliggere il massimo danno, anche
protratto nel tempo, alle persone e alle loro condizioni di vita
(attacchi deliberati contro strutture
civili, bombe a grappolo);
per aver danneggiato l’economia della costa adriatica con la chiusura
degli aeroporti civili;
per aver consentito lo smaltimento nelle acque territoriali italiane di
ordigni bellici non utilizzati
causando danni alle persone, all’ambiente all’economia;
per aver consentito l'utilizzo in maniera massiccia di proiettili e
missili all'uranio impoverito causando danni incalcolabili e per un
tempo indeterminato contro le popolazioni della Federazione Jugoslava e
dei paesi limitrofi, con enormi rischi attuali anche per i volontari
civili e per i militari italiani impegnati nel Kosovo.
per aver partecipato al bombardamento di impianti chimici e farmaceutici
causando deliberatamente danni ambientali di enorme rilevanza tali da
configurare una vera e propria guerra batteriologica, chimica e
nucleare;
per aver violato la Costituzione italiana e aggirato le procedure che
essa impone in caso di guerra
(concepibile solo come difesa da attacchi contro il nostro paese e i
suoi alleati);
per aver collaborato alla politica della forza di occupazione della NATO
che obiettivamente ha
portato alla instaurazione di un potere criminale nella provincia
jugoslava del Kosmet e alla
persecuzione ed espulsione della popolazione di etnia serba e di altre
etnie non albanesi, nonchè
degli albanesi considerati indesiderabili dal nuovo potere;
per avere obiettivamente tollerato l'emergere e il consolidarsi di un
potente centro di attività
criminali a ridosso del nostro paese nel triangolo
Albania-Kosovo-Montenegro;
per avere attivamente collaborato ad affamare e sacrificare la
popolazione della Jugoslavia con
l'imposizione di misure di embargo internazionalmente illeggittime;
per avere attivamente collaborato a esercitare pressioni e ingerenze
contro un paese sovrano e le
sue legittime istituzioni;
per avere inviato truppe e personale civile a governare territori
ridotti di fatto a nuovi protettorati e
colonie in violazione della stessa risoluzione ONU 1244;
per aver messo in piedi al fine di giustificare l'intervento militare
la scandalosa campagna della
MISSIONE ARCOBALENO e per avere mentito al popolo italiano al fine di
convincere
l'opinione pubblica della necessità di partecipare alla guerra;
per avere rinunciato all'esercizio della sovranità del nostro paese e al
diritto-dovere di controllo di
tutte le attività che vi svolgono comandi, strutture e mezzi militari
stranieri;
per avere acconsentito a modificare, senza nessuna decisione del
Parlamento, lo statuto della NATO.
Queste accuse, saranno esposte e ampiamente documentate il 3 giugno a
Roma nella sessione
plenaria del Tribunale Indipendente contro i crimini NATO costituitosi
in Italia che si terrà presso
l'Università Valdese (via Pietro Cossa 40) e saranno quindi portate a
New York, dove il 10
giugno si riunirà il Tribunale Internazionale Indipendente promosso
dall'ex Ministro della Giustizia
USA Ramsey Clark.
Invitiamo tutti i cittadini, le associazioni, le personalità consapevoli
della necessità di impedire che
tali crimini siano perpetuati e diventino anzi la norma delle relazioni
internazionali, a sostenere
l'iniziativa della sezione italiana del Tribunale Clark e la raccolta di
testimonianze e documenti e
partecipare attivamente all'assemblea del 3 giugno a Roma.
---
AN INVITATION TO ATTEND THE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL ON U.S.-NATO WAR
CRIMES IN YUGOSLAVIA
Saturday, June 10, 2000 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Martin
Luther King Auditorium (Ninth Avenue and 64th Street, New York City)
BUILDING RESISTANCE TO NATO OCCUPATION
On Saturday, June 10, a gathering of renowned
international judges will
hear expert and eyewitness testimony before hundreds
of participants
from 11 am to 7 pm.
Testimony on: -Targeting civilians and environmental
destruction
-Violations of international laws and conventions; a
crime against peace
-Similar crimes against Iraq, Cuba, Korea, Puerto Rico
-War propaganda
and media lies -U.S. occupation: One year later -U.S.
geopolitical
strategy for Eastern Europe and the former USSR
-Results of other
hearings: Italy, Germany, Russia, Greece
The judges and the tribunal will review testimony and
examine
photographs slides, and videos. Special exhibits used
in many hearings
will be displayed.
A full listing of the 19-point indictment of NATO
crimes, the specific
international conventions, treaties and accords that
NATO violated,
along with documented research, can be found at the
IAC web site at
www.iacenter.org under Balkans: No to NATO
expansion.
THE WAR IS NOT OVER
Don't miss attending this historic gathering on the
one-year anniversary
of NATO's occupation of Kosovo. Play a role in ending
the ongoing
sanctions against Yugoslavia.
The International Action Center initiated a Commission
of Inquiry into
U.S./NATO War Crimes in Yugoslavia last July 31.
Former Attorney General
Ramsey Clark brought 19 counts of war crimes, crimes
against humanity
and crimes against peace against the leaders of the
U.S. and NATO
countries. We intended this effort to serve as a tool
to stop wars
before they start and prevent future violations of
human rights.
Most of all, we want to hold the most powerful
criminals accountable for
their acts.
Many have joined to build this international movement.
This June 10,
former Canadian foreign minister James Bisset, Spanish
member of
parliament Angeles Maestro Martin, president of the
African Association
of Writers Charles Pascal Tolno, Italian peace leader
Raniero LaValle,
Millions for Mumia national coordinator Monica
Moorehead, Native
American Movement leader Dennis Banks, former German
Admiral Elmar
Schmaehling, former first lady of Greece Margarite
Papandreau, former
Haitian Ambassador to the UN Ben Dupuy,
representatives of the movement
to end U.S. bombing of Vieques in Puerto Rico and
others who have
spoken, written and acted against the U.S.-led NATO
war of aggression
will be there.
The IAC initiated a movement that has encouraged or
inspired thousands
to expose NATO crimes and show solidarity with
Yugoslavia. From Oslo to
Berlin to Belgrade to Kiev to Athens to Sydney, in 24
cities in 14
countries there have been tribunal hearings. Lawyers
from Canada, Greece
and Russia have tried to bring similar charges against
NATO before the
Hague Tribunal. Lawyers from Britain, Italy, Greece,
Germany and others
have sued their own governments.
The June 10 International War Crimes Tribunal will
build upon the
evidence presented at the Inquiry hearings on
U.S./NATO war crimes held
since throughout the world. It will have slides,
videos and documented
testimony of these crimes.
Because of the dominant U.S. role in the Balkan
conflict and especially
in the air war against Yugoslavia, the tribunal will
focus primarily on
U.S. criminal conduct, aided and abetted by other NATO
members.
While we are not now holding the named criminals under
lock and key, we
see the tribunal process as a challenge to arrogant
and arbitrary power.
We are confident that it is the first step in a
process that will
continue to resonate throughout the NATO countries and
among all the
peoples targeted by the New World Order.
Show with your presence, your solidarity and your
contributions that you
stand shoulder to shoulder with us in this
undertaking.
LOCATION & LOGISTICS FOR TRIBUNAL WEEKEND
The Martin Luther King Auditorium is located in a
school at 9th Avenue
and 64th Street, near Lincoln Center, Columbus Circle
and Fordham
University. It can be reached by the No. 1 and No. 9,
A, D, C, or B
subway lines and by many buses.
For those traveling from out of New York, the IAC web
site at
www.iacenter.org will begin posting choices of
locations where others
will be staying, or call the IAC office at
212-633-6646 after May 10.
REGISTRATION
We recommend advance registration to assure seating.
To cover our
expenses, we request a $10 to $20 donation (not
required)
Name _____________________
Address ___________________
City, State, Zip _____________
Telephone _________________
Email _____________________
Enclosed is my donation of __$1,000 __ $500 __ $250 __
$100 __ $50 other__________
___ I want to be listed in the Tribunal Journal
Tax deductable donations can be written to:People's
Rights
Fund/Tribunal.
Online contributions: Credit card donations and
reservations for
tribunal seats can be made online at
www.peoplesrightsfund.org
(beginning in mid-May).
International Action Center
39 West 14 St., #206
New York, NY 10011
(212) 633-6646
fax: (212) 633-2889
web: http://www.iacenter.org
email: iacenter@i...
Back to: NO to NATO war crimes
---
TRIBUNALE TEDESCO ED EUROPEO:
IL 2 E 3 GIUGNO A BERLINO
http://nato-tribunal.de
Vom 1. - 3. Juni 2000 findet in Berlin der 51. Deutsche Anwaltstag
statt. Den
Festvortrag auf der Zentralveranstaltung in der Hochschule der Künste am
02.06.2000
(09.00 bis 12.15 Uhr) wird Ms. Carla del Ponte, Chefanklägerin des ICTY,
zum Thema
"Die Arbeit des Internationalen Strafgerichtshofes für das ehemalige
Jugoslawien:
Herausforderungen für die Anklage im internationalen Umfeld" halten.
In der gleichen Zeit wird auch das Europäische Tribunal über den
NATO-Krieg gegen
Jugoslawien stattfinden.
The 51. German Lawyers Congress will be held June 1-3, 2000 in Berlin.
Ms Carla
del Ponte will held the speech of the day on the central event in the
morning of June 2,
2000 about "The work of ICTY: challenges for the indictment in the
international
ambient".
The European Tribunal concerning the NATO War against Yugoslavia will
take place
in Berlin during that time too.
Wolfgang Schulz
>Zur Vorbereitung des Europäischen Tribunals über den NATO-Krieg am
>2./3. Juni 2000
>in Berlin fand am 16. April d.J. in Hamburg ein Zweites Internationales
>Hearing statt. Die zahlreichen hervorragenden Beiträge sollen in
>Buchform erscheinen. Vorab hier die beiden einleitenden Stellungnahmen:
>
> DEUTSCHLAND UND DER NATO-KRIEG GEGEN JUGOSLAWIEN
> von Ralph Hartmann
> (Anlage 1)
>
>und
>
> DIE ROLLE DER BUNDESREPUBLIK BEI DER VORBEREITUNG DES KRIEGES
> von Matthias Küntzel
> (Anlage 2)
>
>Im übrigen freue ich mich, darauf hinweisen zu können, daß ebenso wie
>Ralph Hartmann (Ex-Botschafter in Jugoslawien) nun auch Matthias Küntzel
für Vortrags- und
>Diskussionveranstaltungen zur Verfügung steht. Er ist per Telefon/ Fax
>zu erreichen unter:
>
> 04533 - 204531
>
>Matthias Küntzel ist der Autor des demnächst in zweiter Auflage
>erscheinenen Buches
>DER WEG IN DEN KRIEG - DEUTSCHLAND, DIE NATO UND DAS KOSOVO
>Berlin (Elefantenpress) 2000; 256 Seiten Paperback ISBN 3-88520-771-0
>DM 34,90 / öS 255 / sFr 33,90
>Er ist Politikwissenschaftler und Publizist, lebt in Hamburg als
>Gewerbeschullehrer, war bis 1988 Referent der Bundestagsfraktion der
>Grünen, veröffentlichte u.a. "Bonn und die Bombe. Deutsche Atompolitik
>von Adenauer bis Brandt, Frankfurt/M 19992
>
> (...)
Unsere Webseite http://nato-tribunal.de wird immer leichter im Internet
zu finden: Z.B. mit dem Stichwort NATO
TRIBUNAL durch die "Such Maschinen":
http://www.altavista.de
http://www.fireball.de
http://www.google.com
Ein "völkerrechtswidriger Krieg" / Juristisches
Quelle: http://www.tobias-pflueger.de/archiv/antikrieg/urteil.html
Endlich hat ein Richter am Amtgereicht Tiergarten den Mut besessen, das
was offensichtlich ist auch in einem Urteil deutlich zu sagen: Der
NATO-Krieg gegen Jugoslawien war völkerrechtswidrig und verstieß gegen
weitere Rechtsnormen.
Richter a. D. Dr. Helmut Kramer und die Zeitschrift
"antimilitarismusinformation" (ami) haben Tobias Pflüger unabhängig
voneinander das Urteil jetzt zukommen lassen. Dafür herzlichen Dank.
Das Urteil findet sich auch unter:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ami/extra/prozesse/begruendung.htm
-----------------------------------------------------------------
L'ANCIEN CHANCELIER ALLEMAND HELMUT KOHL ACCUSE DE CRIMES CONTRE
L'HUMANITE :
----- Original Message -----
From: "MR JAVIER BERNAL" <988005350@...>
To: <STOPNATO@...>; <nettime-l@...>
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 5:21 PM
Subject: Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl charged for crimes against
humanity
Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl charged for crimes against humanity
:
http://www.rath.nl/mr-publishing-internet/books/old_version/usa/politics/kohlcharged.htm
Dr. Matthias Rath, M.D. files a complaint against ex-chancellor Helmut
Kohl in the court
of Bonn, Germany, for crimes against humanity and other felonies.
http://www.rath.nl/mr-publishing-internet/books/old_version/usa/most-wanted/against_kohl.htm
Deutsche Bank Linked To Auschwitz Funding :
http://www.rath.nl/mr-publishing-internet/books/old_version/usa/most-wanted/ht05-02-99.htm
---
[il manifesto]
02 Aprile 2000
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MADE IN GERMANY
La guerra jugoslava ora in tribunale
GUIDO AMBROSINO
L a guerra per il Kosovo, condotta un anno fa dalla Nato, era illegale?
Il
pretore berlinese Lickleder crede di si'. Il 2 marzo ha assolto Aris
Christidis, firmatario di un appello alla diserzione rivolto ai soldati
della Bundeswehr, con la seguente motivazione orale: "L'esortazione a
non
partecipare alla guerra in Jugoslavia non e' perseguibile, perche'
quell'intervento armato era illegittimo".
La pubblica accusa ha impugnato l'assoluzione. Al termine delle istanze
di
revisione, lo spinoso dilemma potrebbe tornare alla corte
costituzionale,
che si e' finora sottratta a un pronunciamento di merito. L'anno scorso
ha
rifiutato di esaminare un ricorso del partito del socialismo
democratico,
visto che il suo gruppo parlamentare aveva avuto modo di esprimere al
Bundestag i suoi dubbi sulla guerra, e quindi i suoi diritti non
sarebbero
stati coartati dall'esecutivo.
Materia del contendere e' un appello pubblicato il 21 aprile 1999 dal
quotidiano Die Tageszeitung: "La partecipazione a questa guerra non puo'
essere giustificata. Percio' rifiutate di eseguire gli ordini!
Allontanatevi
dai vostri reparti! Ribellatevi contro questa guerra".
L'appello e' rimasto senza conseguenze pratiche. Non si conosce nessun
episodio di renitenza o di insubordinazione tra i militari tedeschi. Ma
il
ministero della difesa, guidato dal socialdemocratico Rudolf Scharping,
ha
ugualmente denunciato i 28 primi firmatari - tra loro autorevoli
giuristi e
politologi come Ekkehart Krippendorff e Wolf-Dieter Narr - e altri 38
pacifisti che hanno aggiunto le loro firme in un secondo tempo.
Quasi tutti sono stati rinviati singolarmente a giudizio (in qualche
caso le
citazioni non sono state ancora recapitate, forse per incertezze
sull'indirizzo dei destinatari) davanti all'Amtsgericht di Tiergarten, a
Berlino, la citta' dove viene pubblicata la Tageszeitung. Questo
tribunale
distrettuale ha competenze paragonabili alle nostre preture. Ma mentre
in
Italia il pretore e' insieme giudice e titolare dell'azione penale,
negli
Amtsgerichte questa e' affidata alla procura della repubblica.
Istigazione a delinquere
I firmatari sono imputati, secondo l'art. 111 del codice penale, di
"esortazione a commettere un reato". Molti devono risponderne in piu'
occasioni, perche' la distribuzione dell'appello come volantino, o
l'invio
per posta a istituzioni militari, vengono addebitati come ulteriore
infrazioni. L'accusa chiede pene pecuniarie tra 2000 e 7500 marchi.
I processi sono cominciati il 4 novembre scorso. A tutt'oggi se ne sono
tenuti 30, di fronte a magistrati diversi, a seconda dell'iniziale del
cognome degli imputati. Si sono conclusi con 6 condanne e ben 24
assoluzioni. Un trionfo per i pacifisti?
No, perche' solo il pretore Lickleder ha accolto in pieno la loro
argomentazione: i bombardamenti della Nato, non autorizzati dalle
Nazioni
unite, infrangevano il diritto internazionale; la partecipazione della
Bundeswehr ha violato la costituzione tedesca, che all'art. 26 mette al
bando "guerre
d'aggressione"; i soldati avevano il diritto di disubbidire per non
incorrere nei rigori dell'articolo 80 del codice penale, che punisce con
sanzioni dai 10 anni all'ergastolo la "partecipazione a preparativi per
una
guerra d'aggressione".
Gli altri giudici dell'Amtsgericht hanno evitato di impelagarsi nella
questione della legittimita' della guerra jugoslava. Le loro 23
assoluzioni -
anch'esse impugnate dalla pubblica accusa - sono costruite sul diritto
alla
liberta' d'espressione, che in presenza di conflitti "inconsueti" puo'
anche
manifestarsi in forme drastiche, e sulla presunzione di assenza di dolo
tra
i firmatari, soggettivamente convinti - anche se erroneamente - di non
contravvenire al codice.
Qualche magistrato ha tutt'al piu' lasciato intendere di non ritenere
"palesemente infondati" i dubbi degli imputati sulla compatibilita'
della
guerra col diritto internazionale e costituzionale.
Questo scoglio viene aggirato dalla pubblica accusa, che argomenta
esclusivamente in base alle norme sulla disciplina militare: in modo
invero
assai debole, se solo un quarto delle sentenze l'ha seguita. Rimossa la
problematica costituzionale, l'efficienza dell'esercito appare l'unico
bene
da tutelare.
Secondo le leggi sulle forze armate un soldato deve rifiutare un ordine,
"qualora la sua esecuzione configuri un reato" (art. 11 del
Soldatengesetz).
Se i promotori dell'appello avessero soltanto esortato a non dar seguito
a
singoli ordini illegittimi, la procura della repubblica non sarebbe
intervenuta, a stare alle assicurazioni dei suoi rappresentanti.
Si e' vista "costretta" a farlo perche' il testo incriminato contiene un
appello all'insubordinazione o alla diserzione, che non sarebbe mai
ammissibile.
La difesa obietta che le norme sulla diserzione non si possono applicare
a
impieghi anticostituzionali. E che soltanto abbandonando uffici e
caserme si
puo' evitare di contribuire, magari indirettamente, al funzionamento di
un
apparato anonimo e complesso come quello che ha consentito i
bombardamenti
sulla Jugoslavia. Alle prossime istanze l'ardua sentenza.
---
NATO AGGRESSION - INTERNATIONAL REACTIONS
'HEARING' ON CRIMES COMMITTED BY NATO IN YUGOSLAVIA HELD IN HAMBURG
BERLIN, April 17 (Tanjug) - German officials as well as all M.P.s who
voted for war are guilty under international law of war crimes that NATO
committed during its aggression on Yugoslavia last year, according to
Wolfgang Richter, president of Germany's Society for the Protection of
Civil Rights and Human Dignity.
Speaking in an interview published on Monday by the Berlin daily "Junge
Welt", Richter said that about 350 participants in the second 'hearing'
on
the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia and its consequences had been
unanimous
in this conclusion.
The hearing, held in Hamburg, Germany, on Sunday dealt with the German
government and parliament's responsibility for the crime.
The first hearing, held in Berlin on October 30, 1999, was attended also
by representatives of 13 countries in Europe and America. The
conclusions
made at both hearings will be submitted to the European tribunal for
NATO's
war crimes that will hold a session in Berlin on June 2-3.
Representatives of 25 countries have so far pledged to attend the
session.
Junge Welt, which alone reported in Germany on the Hamburg hearing, said
that the participants had also unanimously concluded that Germany had
taken
part in the aggression in violation of international law, the German
constitution as well as the Two Plus Four agreement under which East and
West Germany had united ten years ago.
---
STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.HOME-PAGE.ORG
--- Kalle Svensson <kmotk@...> wrote:
From: "Kalle Svensson" <kmotk@...>
To: reclaimthestreets@...
Subject: Nato War Criminals!
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 16:34:01 SAST
Reclaim the Streets NYC -
http://reclaimthestreetsnyc.tao.ca
23 MARCH 1999, JAVIER SOLANO, NATO SECRETARY
GENERAL,GAVE ORDERS TO BOMB THE
FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA.
There are now a number of legal documents on the
internet relating to NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia.
They orginate from some of the finest legal minds in
the world. They are attempts to bring about the
indictment of NATO's military and political leaders at
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia. They are extensive but extremely
interesting documents. Print them out and take time to
read them. Show them to your friends and family. Write
letters to newspapers about them...spread the
word...NATO's leaders are War Criminals.
http://www.jurist.law.pitt.edu/icty.htm
http://www.nato-warcrimes.gr
http://ban.joh.cam.ac.uk/~maicl
http://www.balkan.cc "English Text"
It is practically unknown that the attorneys and
law professors responsible for the above documents met
the War Crimes Tribunal Prosecutor on 9 June 1999 to
discuss the indictment of NATO. The following day, she
was made a judge of the Canadian Supreme Court
and resigned as the Tribunal's prosecutor!
Professor of Law, Michael Mandel, wants 64 of NATO's
leaders indicted for War Crimes as a result of NATO's
bombing. On 11 June 1999, Mandel gave a devastating
press conference in Toronto. You can read it at:
http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~vukosavic/case2.txt
A possible activity for the future are open-air
"mock trials" of NATO leaders, perhaps based on the
above documents.
Clinton, Albright, Cohen, Blair, Chirac, Schröder
are War Criminals! Make sure they know you know!
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Quello che segue e' l'appello-convocazione per la iniziativa che
conclude il ciclo di udienze della sezione italiana del tribunale
internazionale contro i crimini di guerra della NATO in Jugoslavia che
si terra' a Roma il 3 giugno. Le adesioni vanno
comunque mandate a uno di questi indirizzi:
ponac@...
sdeangelis@...
===
ROMA 3 GIUGNO 2000
VIA PIETRO COSSA 40 – SALA UNIVERSITA’ VALDESE
DALLE ORE 9.00
PROIEZIONE VIDEO, MOSTRE FOTOGRAFICHE
TRIBUNA APERTA TRA I COMITATI E LE ASSOCIAZIONI
ORE 15.00
SESSIONE FINALE DELLA SEZIONE ITALIANA DEL TRIBUNALE INDIPENDENTE CONTRO
I CRIMINI DELLA NATO IN JUGOSLAVIA
Il 31 luglio 1999 hanno avuto inizio a New York le attivita' del
"TRIBUNALE INTERNAZIONALE INDIPENDENTE CONTRO I CRIMINI DELLA NATO IN
JUGOSLAVIA", promosso da Ramsey Clark, con la stesura di 19 punti di
accusa contro la NATO ed i governi occidentali.
Le attivita' del "Tribunale" hanno trovato seguito in molti altri paesi
del mondo. In Italia il primo
novembre 1999 alla presenza di Ramsey Clark ha preso il via la sezione
italiana del Tribunale. Nel corso di questi mesi, confortati dal
crescente interesse suscitato e dalle numerose iniziative di
presentazione del "Tribunale Italiano" in molte citta', abbiamo potuto
verificare con dati oggettivi la veridicita' delle nostre accuse.
A completamento del lavoro svolto in questi mesi, noi sottoscritti
firmatari di questo appello accusiamo le massime autorità della
Repubblica in carica nel marzo 1999 - in particolare il presidente del
Consiglio dei Ministri Massimo D'Alema e i ministri del governo per la
partecipazione alla guerra illegale e il Presidente della Repubblica
Oscar Luigi Scalfaro per non aver difeso la Costituzione - nonchè i loro
successori per quanto attiene ai crimini in continuità con l'aggressione
armata, ciascuno secondo la personale responsabilità scaturente dalle
diverse competenze, azioni e omissioni:
per avere collaborato attivamente all'aggressione contro la Repubblica
Federale Jugoslava, paese
sovrano da cui non era venuta nessuna minaccia nè all'Italia nè ai suoi
alleati;
per avere violato tutti i principi del diritto internazionale e in
particolare la Carta delle Nazioni
Unite, i principi del Tribunale di Norimberga, le Convenzioni di Ginevra
e i protocolli aggiuntivi
sulla tutela delle popolazioni civili nonchè lo stesso trattato
istitutivo della NATO;
per aver consentito che dal proprio territorio partissero attacchi
contro istallazioni e popolazioni
civili, condotti su obiettivi e con armi appositamente studiate per
infliggere il massimo danno, anche
protratto nel tempo, alle persone e alle loro condizioni di vita
(attacchi deliberati contro strutture
civili, bombe a grappolo);
per aver danneggiato l’economia della costa adriatica con la chiusura
degli aeroporti civili;
per aver consentito lo smaltimento nelle acque territoriali italiane di
ordigni bellici non utilizzati
causando danni alle persone, all’ambiente all’economia;
per aver consentito l'utilizzo in maniera massiccia di proiettili e
missili all'uranio impoverito causando danni incalcolabili e per un
tempo indeterminato contro le popolazioni della Federazione Jugoslava e
dei paesi limitrofi, con enormi rischi attuali anche per i volontari
civili e per i militari italiani impegnati nel Kosovo.
per aver partecipato al bombardamento di impianti chimici e farmaceutici
causando deliberatamente danni ambientali di enorme rilevanza tali da
configurare una vera e propria guerra batteriologica, chimica e
nucleare;
per aver violato la Costituzione italiana e aggirato le procedure che
essa impone in caso di guerra
(concepibile solo come difesa da attacchi contro il nostro paese e i
suoi alleati);
per aver collaborato alla politica della forza di occupazione della NATO
che obiettivamente ha
portato alla instaurazione di un potere criminale nella provincia
jugoslava del Kosmet e alla
persecuzione ed espulsione della popolazione di etnia serba e di altre
etnie non albanesi, nonchè
degli albanesi considerati indesiderabili dal nuovo potere;
per avere obiettivamente tollerato l'emergere e il consolidarsi di un
potente centro di attività
criminali a ridosso del nostro paese nel triangolo
Albania-Kosovo-Montenegro;
per avere attivamente collaborato ad affamare e sacrificare la
popolazione della Jugoslavia con
l'imposizione di misure di embargo internazionalmente illeggittime;
per avere attivamente collaborato a esercitare pressioni e ingerenze
contro un paese sovrano e le
sue legittime istituzioni;
per avere inviato truppe e personale civile a governare territori
ridotti di fatto a nuovi protettorati e
colonie in violazione della stessa risoluzione ONU 1244;
per aver messo in piedi al fine di giustificare l'intervento militare
la scandalosa campagna della
MISSIONE ARCOBALENO e per avere mentito al popolo italiano al fine di
convincere
l'opinione pubblica della necessità di partecipare alla guerra;
per avere rinunciato all'esercizio della sovranità del nostro paese e al
diritto-dovere di controllo di
tutte le attività che vi svolgono comandi, strutture e mezzi militari
stranieri;
per avere acconsentito a modificare, senza nessuna decisione del
Parlamento, lo statuto della NATO.
Queste accuse, saranno esposte e ampiamente documentate il 3 giugno a
Roma nella sessione
plenaria del Tribunale Indipendente contro i crimini NATO costituitosi
in Italia che si terrà presso
l'Università Valdese (via Pietro Cossa 40) e saranno quindi portate a
New York, dove il 10
giugno si riunirà il Tribunale Internazionale Indipendente promosso
dall'ex Ministro della Giustizia
USA Ramsey Clark.
Invitiamo tutti i cittadini, le associazioni, le personalità consapevoli
della necessità di impedire che
tali crimini siano perpetuati e diventino anzi la norma delle relazioni
internazionali, a sostenere
l'iniziativa della sezione italiana del Tribunale Clark e la raccolta di
testimonianze e documenti e
partecipare attivamente all'assemblea del 3 giugno a Roma.
---
AN INVITATION TO ATTEND THE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL ON U.S.-NATO WAR
CRIMES IN YUGOSLAVIA
Saturday, June 10, 2000 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Martin
Luther King Auditorium (Ninth Avenue and 64th Street, New York City)
BUILDING RESISTANCE TO NATO OCCUPATION
On Saturday, June 10, a gathering of renowned
international judges will
hear expert and eyewitness testimony before hundreds
of participants
from 11 am to 7 pm.
Testimony on: -Targeting civilians and environmental
destruction
-Violations of international laws and conventions; a
crime against peace
-Similar crimes against Iraq, Cuba, Korea, Puerto Rico
-War propaganda
and media lies -U.S. occupation: One year later -U.S.
geopolitical
strategy for Eastern Europe and the former USSR
-Results of other
hearings: Italy, Germany, Russia, Greece
The judges and the tribunal will review testimony and
examine
photographs slides, and videos. Special exhibits used
in many hearings
will be displayed.
A full listing of the 19-point indictment of NATO
crimes, the specific
international conventions, treaties and accords that
NATO violated,
along with documented research, can be found at the
IAC web site at
www.iacenter.org under Balkans: No to NATO
expansion.
THE WAR IS NOT OVER
Don't miss attending this historic gathering on the
one-year anniversary
of NATO's occupation of Kosovo. Play a role in ending
the ongoing
sanctions against Yugoslavia.
The International Action Center initiated a Commission
of Inquiry into
U.S./NATO War Crimes in Yugoslavia last July 31.
Former Attorney General
Ramsey Clark brought 19 counts of war crimes, crimes
against humanity
and crimes against peace against the leaders of the
U.S. and NATO
countries. We intended this effort to serve as a tool
to stop wars
before they start and prevent future violations of
human rights.
Most of all, we want to hold the most powerful
criminals accountable for
their acts.
Many have joined to build this international movement.
This June 10,
former Canadian foreign minister James Bisset, Spanish
member of
parliament Angeles Maestro Martin, president of the
African Association
of Writers Charles Pascal Tolno, Italian peace leader
Raniero LaValle,
Millions for Mumia national coordinator Monica
Moorehead, Native
American Movement leader Dennis Banks, former German
Admiral Elmar
Schmaehling, former first lady of Greece Margarite
Papandreau, former
Haitian Ambassador to the UN Ben Dupuy,
representatives of the movement
to end U.S. bombing of Vieques in Puerto Rico and
others who have
spoken, written and acted against the U.S.-led NATO
war of aggression
will be there.
The IAC initiated a movement that has encouraged or
inspired thousands
to expose NATO crimes and show solidarity with
Yugoslavia. From Oslo to
Berlin to Belgrade to Kiev to Athens to Sydney, in 24
cities in 14
countries there have been tribunal hearings. Lawyers
from Canada, Greece
and Russia have tried to bring similar charges against
NATO before the
Hague Tribunal. Lawyers from Britain, Italy, Greece,
Germany and others
have sued their own governments.
The June 10 International War Crimes Tribunal will
build upon the
evidence presented at the Inquiry hearings on
U.S./NATO war crimes held
since throughout the world. It will have slides,
videos and documented
testimony of these crimes.
Because of the dominant U.S. role in the Balkan
conflict and especially
in the air war against Yugoslavia, the tribunal will
focus primarily on
U.S. criminal conduct, aided and abetted by other NATO
members.
While we are not now holding the named criminals under
lock and key, we
see the tribunal process as a challenge to arrogant
and arbitrary power.
We are confident that it is the first step in a
process that will
continue to resonate throughout the NATO countries and
among all the
peoples targeted by the New World Order.
Show with your presence, your solidarity and your
contributions that you
stand shoulder to shoulder with us in this
undertaking.
LOCATION & LOGISTICS FOR TRIBUNAL WEEKEND
The Martin Luther King Auditorium is located in a
school at 9th Avenue
and 64th Street, near Lincoln Center, Columbus Circle
and Fordham
University. It can be reached by the No. 1 and No. 9,
A, D, C, or B
subway lines and by many buses.
For those traveling from out of New York, the IAC web
site at
www.iacenter.org will begin posting choices of
locations where others
will be staying, or call the IAC office at
212-633-6646 after May 10.
REGISTRATION
We recommend advance registration to assure seating.
To cover our
expenses, we request a $10 to $20 donation (not
required)
Name _____________________
Address ___________________
City, State, Zip _____________
Telephone _________________
Email _____________________
Enclosed is my donation of __$1,000 __ $500 __ $250 __
$100 __ $50 other__________
___ I want to be listed in the Tribunal Journal
Tax deductable donations can be written to:People's
Rights
Fund/Tribunal.
Online contributions: Credit card donations and
reservations for
tribunal seats can be made online at
www.peoplesrightsfund.org
(beginning in mid-May).
International Action Center
39 West 14 St., #206
New York, NY 10011
(212) 633-6646
fax: (212) 633-2889
web: http://www.iacenter.org
email: iacenter@i...
Back to: NO to NATO war crimes
---
TRIBUNALE TEDESCO ED EUROPEO:
IL 2 E 3 GIUGNO A BERLINO
http://nato-tribunal.de
Vom 1. - 3. Juni 2000 findet in Berlin der 51. Deutsche Anwaltstag
statt. Den
Festvortrag auf der Zentralveranstaltung in der Hochschule der Künste am
02.06.2000
(09.00 bis 12.15 Uhr) wird Ms. Carla del Ponte, Chefanklägerin des ICTY,
zum Thema
"Die Arbeit des Internationalen Strafgerichtshofes für das ehemalige
Jugoslawien:
Herausforderungen für die Anklage im internationalen Umfeld" halten.
In der gleichen Zeit wird auch das Europäische Tribunal über den
NATO-Krieg gegen
Jugoslawien stattfinden.
The 51. German Lawyers Congress will be held June 1-3, 2000 in Berlin.
Ms Carla
del Ponte will held the speech of the day on the central event in the
morning of June 2,
2000 about "The work of ICTY: challenges for the indictment in the
international
ambient".
The European Tribunal concerning the NATO War against Yugoslavia will
take place
in Berlin during that time too.
Wolfgang Schulz
>Zur Vorbereitung des Europäischen Tribunals über den NATO-Krieg am
>2./3. Juni 2000
>in Berlin fand am 16. April d.J. in Hamburg ein Zweites Internationales
>Hearing statt. Die zahlreichen hervorragenden Beiträge sollen in
>Buchform erscheinen. Vorab hier die beiden einleitenden Stellungnahmen:
>
> DEUTSCHLAND UND DER NATO-KRIEG GEGEN JUGOSLAWIEN
> von Ralph Hartmann
> (Anlage 1)
>
>und
>
> DIE ROLLE DER BUNDESREPUBLIK BEI DER VORBEREITUNG DES KRIEGES
> von Matthias Küntzel
> (Anlage 2)
>
>Im übrigen freue ich mich, darauf hinweisen zu können, daß ebenso wie
>Ralph Hartmann (Ex-Botschafter in Jugoslawien) nun auch Matthias Küntzel
für Vortrags- und
>Diskussionveranstaltungen zur Verfügung steht. Er ist per Telefon/ Fax
>zu erreichen unter:
>
> 04533 - 204531
>
>Matthias Küntzel ist der Autor des demnächst in zweiter Auflage
>erscheinenen Buches
>DER WEG IN DEN KRIEG - DEUTSCHLAND, DIE NATO UND DAS KOSOVO
>Berlin (Elefantenpress) 2000; 256 Seiten Paperback ISBN 3-88520-771-0
>DM 34,90 / öS 255 / sFr 33,90
>Er ist Politikwissenschaftler und Publizist, lebt in Hamburg als
>Gewerbeschullehrer, war bis 1988 Referent der Bundestagsfraktion der
>Grünen, veröffentlichte u.a. "Bonn und die Bombe. Deutsche Atompolitik
>von Adenauer bis Brandt, Frankfurt/M 19992
>
> (...)
Unsere Webseite http://nato-tribunal.de wird immer leichter im Internet
zu finden: Z.B. mit dem Stichwort NATO
TRIBUNAL durch die "Such Maschinen":
http://www.altavista.de
http://www.fireball.de
http://www.google.com
Ein "völkerrechtswidriger Krieg" / Juristisches
Quelle: http://www.tobias-pflueger.de/archiv/antikrieg/urteil.html
Endlich hat ein Richter am Amtgereicht Tiergarten den Mut besessen, das
was offensichtlich ist auch in einem Urteil deutlich zu sagen: Der
NATO-Krieg gegen Jugoslawien war völkerrechtswidrig und verstieß gegen
weitere Rechtsnormen.
Richter a. D. Dr. Helmut Kramer und die Zeitschrift
"antimilitarismusinformation" (ami) haben Tobias Pflüger unabhängig
voneinander das Urteil jetzt zukommen lassen. Dafür herzlichen Dank.
Das Urteil findet sich auch unter:
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ami/extra/prozesse/begruendung.htm
-----------------------------------------------------------------
L'ANCIEN CHANCELIER ALLEMAND HELMUT KOHL ACCUSE DE CRIMES CONTRE
L'HUMANITE :
----- Original Message -----
From: "MR JAVIER BERNAL" <988005350@...>
To: <STOPNATO@...>; <nettime-l@...>
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 5:21 PM
Subject: Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl charged for crimes against
humanity
Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl charged for crimes against humanity
:
http://www.rath.nl/mr-publishing-internet/books/old_version/usa/politics/kohlcharged.htm
Dr. Matthias Rath, M.D. files a complaint against ex-chancellor Helmut
Kohl in the court
of Bonn, Germany, for crimes against humanity and other felonies.
http://www.rath.nl/mr-publishing-internet/books/old_version/usa/most-wanted/against_kohl.htm
Deutsche Bank Linked To Auschwitz Funding :
http://www.rath.nl/mr-publishing-internet/books/old_version/usa/most-wanted/ht05-02-99.htm
---
[il manifesto]
02 Aprile 2000
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Articolo Precedente] [Prima Pagina] [Articolo Successivo]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
MADE IN GERMANY
La guerra jugoslava ora in tribunale
GUIDO AMBROSINO
L a guerra per il Kosovo, condotta un anno fa dalla Nato, era illegale?
Il
pretore berlinese Lickleder crede di si'. Il 2 marzo ha assolto Aris
Christidis, firmatario di un appello alla diserzione rivolto ai soldati
della Bundeswehr, con la seguente motivazione orale: "L'esortazione a
non
partecipare alla guerra in Jugoslavia non e' perseguibile, perche'
quell'intervento armato era illegittimo".
La pubblica accusa ha impugnato l'assoluzione. Al termine delle istanze
di
revisione, lo spinoso dilemma potrebbe tornare alla corte
costituzionale,
che si e' finora sottratta a un pronunciamento di merito. L'anno scorso
ha
rifiutato di esaminare un ricorso del partito del socialismo
democratico,
visto che il suo gruppo parlamentare aveva avuto modo di esprimere al
Bundestag i suoi dubbi sulla guerra, e quindi i suoi diritti non
sarebbero
stati coartati dall'esecutivo.
Materia del contendere e' un appello pubblicato il 21 aprile 1999 dal
quotidiano Die Tageszeitung: "La partecipazione a questa guerra non puo'
essere giustificata. Percio' rifiutate di eseguire gli ordini!
Allontanatevi
dai vostri reparti! Ribellatevi contro questa guerra".
L'appello e' rimasto senza conseguenze pratiche. Non si conosce nessun
episodio di renitenza o di insubordinazione tra i militari tedeschi. Ma
il
ministero della difesa, guidato dal socialdemocratico Rudolf Scharping,
ha
ugualmente denunciato i 28 primi firmatari - tra loro autorevoli
giuristi e
politologi come Ekkehart Krippendorff e Wolf-Dieter Narr - e altri 38
pacifisti che hanno aggiunto le loro firme in un secondo tempo.
Quasi tutti sono stati rinviati singolarmente a giudizio (in qualche
caso le
citazioni non sono state ancora recapitate, forse per incertezze
sull'indirizzo dei destinatari) davanti all'Amtsgericht di Tiergarten, a
Berlino, la citta' dove viene pubblicata la Tageszeitung. Questo
tribunale
distrettuale ha competenze paragonabili alle nostre preture. Ma mentre
in
Italia il pretore e' insieme giudice e titolare dell'azione penale,
negli
Amtsgerichte questa e' affidata alla procura della repubblica.
Istigazione a delinquere
I firmatari sono imputati, secondo l'art. 111 del codice penale, di
"esortazione a commettere un reato". Molti devono risponderne in piu'
occasioni, perche' la distribuzione dell'appello come volantino, o
l'invio
per posta a istituzioni militari, vengono addebitati come ulteriore
infrazioni. L'accusa chiede pene pecuniarie tra 2000 e 7500 marchi.
I processi sono cominciati il 4 novembre scorso. A tutt'oggi se ne sono
tenuti 30, di fronte a magistrati diversi, a seconda dell'iniziale del
cognome degli imputati. Si sono conclusi con 6 condanne e ben 24
assoluzioni. Un trionfo per i pacifisti?
No, perche' solo il pretore Lickleder ha accolto in pieno la loro
argomentazione: i bombardamenti della Nato, non autorizzati dalle
Nazioni
unite, infrangevano il diritto internazionale; la partecipazione della
Bundeswehr ha violato la costituzione tedesca, che all'art. 26 mette al
bando "guerre
d'aggressione"; i soldati avevano il diritto di disubbidire per non
incorrere nei rigori dell'articolo 80 del codice penale, che punisce con
sanzioni dai 10 anni all'ergastolo la "partecipazione a preparativi per
una
guerra d'aggressione".
Gli altri giudici dell'Amtsgericht hanno evitato di impelagarsi nella
questione della legittimita' della guerra jugoslava. Le loro 23
assoluzioni -
anch'esse impugnate dalla pubblica accusa - sono costruite sul diritto
alla
liberta' d'espressione, che in presenza di conflitti "inconsueti" puo'
anche
manifestarsi in forme drastiche, e sulla presunzione di assenza di dolo
tra
i firmatari, soggettivamente convinti - anche se erroneamente - di non
contravvenire al codice.
Qualche magistrato ha tutt'al piu' lasciato intendere di non ritenere
"palesemente infondati" i dubbi degli imputati sulla compatibilita'
della
guerra col diritto internazionale e costituzionale.
Questo scoglio viene aggirato dalla pubblica accusa, che argomenta
esclusivamente in base alle norme sulla disciplina militare: in modo
invero
assai debole, se solo un quarto delle sentenze l'ha seguita. Rimossa la
problematica costituzionale, l'efficienza dell'esercito appare l'unico
bene
da tutelare.
Secondo le leggi sulle forze armate un soldato deve rifiutare un ordine,
"qualora la sua esecuzione configuri un reato" (art. 11 del
Soldatengesetz).
Se i promotori dell'appello avessero soltanto esortato a non dar seguito
a
singoli ordini illegittimi, la procura della repubblica non sarebbe
intervenuta, a stare alle assicurazioni dei suoi rappresentanti.
Si e' vista "costretta" a farlo perche' il testo incriminato contiene un
appello all'insubordinazione o alla diserzione, che non sarebbe mai
ammissibile.
La difesa obietta che le norme sulla diserzione non si possono applicare
a
impieghi anticostituzionali. E che soltanto abbandonando uffici e
caserme si
puo' evitare di contribuire, magari indirettamente, al funzionamento di
un
apparato anonimo e complesso come quello che ha consentito i
bombardamenti
sulla Jugoslavia. Alle prossime istanze l'ardua sentenza.
---
NATO AGGRESSION - INTERNATIONAL REACTIONS
'HEARING' ON CRIMES COMMITTED BY NATO IN YUGOSLAVIA HELD IN HAMBURG
BERLIN, April 17 (Tanjug) - German officials as well as all M.P.s who
voted for war are guilty under international law of war crimes that NATO
committed during its aggression on Yugoslavia last year, according to
Wolfgang Richter, president of Germany's Society for the Protection of
Civil Rights and Human Dignity.
Speaking in an interview published on Monday by the Berlin daily "Junge
Welt", Richter said that about 350 participants in the second 'hearing'
on
the NATO aggression on Yugoslavia and its consequences had been
unanimous
in this conclusion.
The hearing, held in Hamburg, Germany, on Sunday dealt with the German
government and parliament's responsibility for the crime.
The first hearing, held in Berlin on October 30, 1999, was attended also
by representatives of 13 countries in Europe and America. The
conclusions
made at both hearings will be submitted to the European tribunal for
NATO's
war crimes that will hold a session in Berlin on June 2-3.
Representatives of 25 countries have so far pledged to attend the
session.
Junge Welt, which alone reported in Germany on the Hamburg hearing, said
that the participants had also unanimously concluded that Germany had
taken
part in the aggression in violation of international law, the German
constitution as well as the Two Plus Four agreement under which East and
West Germany had united ten years ago.
---
STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.HOME-PAGE.ORG
--- Kalle Svensson <kmotk@...> wrote:
From: "Kalle Svensson" <kmotk@...>
To: reclaimthestreets@...
Subject: Nato War Criminals!
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 16:34:01 SAST
Reclaim the Streets NYC -
http://reclaimthestreetsnyc.tao.ca
23 MARCH 1999, JAVIER SOLANO, NATO SECRETARY
GENERAL,GAVE ORDERS TO BOMB THE
FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA.
There are now a number of legal documents on the
internet relating to NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia.
They orginate from some of the finest legal minds in
the world. They are attempts to bring about the
indictment of NATO's military and political leaders at
the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia. They are extensive but extremely
interesting documents. Print them out and take time to
read them. Show them to your friends and family. Write
letters to newspapers about them...spread the
word...NATO's leaders are War Criminals.
http://www.jurist.law.pitt.edu/icty.htm
http://www.nato-warcrimes.gr
http://ban.joh.cam.ac.uk/~maicl
http://www.balkan.cc "English Text"
It is practically unknown that the attorneys and
law professors responsible for the above documents met
the War Crimes Tribunal Prosecutor on 9 June 1999 to
discuss the indictment of NATO. The following day, she
was made a judge of the Canadian Supreme Court
and resigned as the Tribunal's prosecutor!
Professor of Law, Michael Mandel, wants 64 of NATO's
leaders indicted for War Crimes as a result of NATO's
bombing. On 11 June 1999, Mandel gave a devastating
press conference in Toronto. You can read it at:
http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/~vukosavic/case2.txt
A possible activity for the future are open-air
"mock trials" of NATO leaders, perhaps based on the
above documents.
Clinton, Albright, Cohen, Blair, Chirac, Schröder
are War Criminals! Make sure they know you know!
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Still More Evidence - Was the Srebrenica Massacre a Hoax?
Introduction & editing by Jared Israel and Nebojsa Malic (4-28-00)
www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes]
a.. "Everybody is parroting everybody, but nobody shows hard evidence. I
notice that in the Netherlands people want to prove at all costs that
genocide has been committed. (...) If executions have taken place, the
Serbs have been hiding it damn well. Thus, I don’t believe any of it.
The day after the collapse of Srebrenica, July 13, I arrived in Bratunac
and stayed there for eight days. I was able to go wherever I wanted to.
I was granted all possible assistance; nowhere was I stopped." (Captain
Schouten quoted in Het Parool of July 27, 1995. Captain Schouten was the
only UN military officer in Bratunac at the time the alleged bloodbath
called Srebrenica was supposed to have taken place.)
Srebrenica. The name accuses: massacre. 8000 dead.
But did it happen?
General R. Krstic, commandeer of the Bosnian Serb troops who took
Srebrenica in July 1995 has been seized by NATO, put on trail for war
crimes.
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Commanding General Mladic are
indicted, hunted, trashed as criminals in the media. Virtually the
entire Bosnian Serb leadership is under threat of arrest for Srebrenica.
But did it happen?
Srebrenica is NATO's remedy; it compensates all sins. Did the Croatian
Army drive 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina section of Yugoslavia? Were
they trained, led and given air cover by US forces? Perhaps, but what
about Srebrenica?
Didn't the Serbs deserve it?
By telling and retelling the story of Srebrenica over the past four and
a half years the media has been able to portray the Bosnian Islamist
fighters as victims and therefore humane.
Naser Oric was the Islamist Commander at Srebrenica. This gentleman met
with Western journalists, showed them videos of the bodies of Serbian
civilians decapitated by his troops during raids on nearby villages.
Oric did not boast without purpose: during World War II, pro-Nazi
Islamist and Croatian forces slaughtered Serbian peasants and every
Serbian family remembers. By carrying out such terror in the '90s, and
boasting of it, Commander Oric waged psychological war. The message to
Serbs was, 'We're back. Flee or die.'
But what about the Serbs? Did they respond in kind?
The following article, though very definitely not 'pro-Serb' (as you
shall see, the writers assume there must be some truth to the charges)
nevertheless presents strong evidence that:
1) The Islamist forces in Srebrenica employed vicious terror against
Serbian civilians;
2) Eye witness reports of Serbian revenge killings are thoroughly
contradictory. Not only do different witnesses give contradictory
accounts but each witness tells different stories to different
reporters;
3) There is no hard evidence a massacre took place;
4) The western media has reported inconsistent and contradictory
anti-Serb rumors as if they are gospel truth;
5) Serbian observers have been falsely quoted as admitting the massacre
took place;
6) And perhaps most important, Dutch military officers - that is, the UN
officers who were on the scene when the Serbs took Srebrenica in 1995 -
report there was no massacre.
In our opinion, the article below sometimes errs by seeming to accept
the Western media line that a massacre definitely happened at
Srebrenica. The authors do this in small ways, sometimes in the way they
phrase things, sometimes in actual statements. It is a minor blemish,
for the facts presented overhwelmingly contradict official massacre
claims. Yet these little blemishes have an affect; on a few occasions we
have taken the liberty of commenting. Our comments appear in brackets
{like this}.
Here's the article:
The Construction of a trauma
>From the 'De Groene Amsterdammer'. Originally published 3-13-66
Translated by Targets, the Dutch independent monthly (See end for
subscription information)
a.. "Horrible slaughter and large numbers of missing people. That is
what we think about in the Netherlands when Srebrenica is mentioned....
But were the Muslims really victims of the Serbs on such a large scale?
And more important: were they so innocent themselves?"
By René Grémaux and Abe de Vries
LIEUTENANT COLONEL Karremans, the man who terribly irritated Dutch
politicians, has been promoted to the rank of colonel.
a.. "The Muslims burned 192 villages in Eastern Bosnia," he declared
guilelessly at a poorly prepared press-conference in Zagreb. "Therefore
I am saying that in this war there are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’."
(Dutch UN officer Karremans)
Pure Serb propaganda, was the verdict of the press as well as The
Hague establishment. Karremans’ admiration of the military genius of
Ratko Mladic – the Bosnian-Serb commander indicted for war crimes – was
also objected to, not to mention their alcoholic encounter, cleverly
filmed and broadcast by TV Pale [in Bosnia].
If we are to believe Secretaries of State Pronk and Voorhoeve, genocide
took place. Supposedly as the Serbs drove into the city, DUTCHBAT [the
Dutch Battalion] couldn’t do much more than watch impotently...
Thus Srebrenica became the symbol of our national shame. "Our boys" had
given in to Mladic’s cut-throats and thus became accomplice to the
cruelest European bloodbath since the Second World War.
This is the dominant picture. But it is not the only view, nor is it
complete. This becomes clear when examining conversations with experts
and Serbian refugees, as well as making a detailed comparison of various
reports and newspaper articles. All claims considered, how many Muslims
really are missing? How reliable are eyewitness reports of mass
executions? What is true about the rumors that some Muslim factions
fought each other? And did Muslims destroy all those Serb villages and
kill the inhabitants [before Serb troops retook the city] or did they
not?
A Serbian Cameraman Denies Seeing Any Crime
BELGRADE, A CHILLY evening in January.
Serb cameraman and journalist Zoran Petrovic-Pirocanac is angry. He is
considering legal measures now that his work is regarded as a piece of
evidence concerning mass murder. The German weekly magazine Stern of 16
November 1995, placed the following caption under a picture taken from
his videotape:
a.. "Seconds before the murder: Armed Serbs contain a group of Muslims
near Konjevic Polje. A Serb cameraman shot the scene until the first
rounds were fired."
But Petrovic says he spent plenty of time at the scene, before as
well as after he filmed. And – he did not notice any crime.
Besides, he does not recognize the words Frank Westerman and Harm van
den Berg of the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad put in his mouth: "In total,
our forces have massacred two thousand Muslims." According to Petrovic,
the Muslims were not massacred, though many did die.
IN THE AREA of Konjevic Polje, a long column of Muslims (soldiers,
militia, armed and unarmed civilians) tried to break out to [the city
of] Tuzla and on July 12 and 13, 1995 attempted to cross the
strategically important road that connects Pale to Belgrade, via
Zvornik. Despite being ambushed by the Serbs, the operation was a big
success, as General Rasim Delic, supreme commander of the Bosnian
[Islamist] Army later told the Parliament in Sarajevo. What happened to
the unfortunate few that did not make it, however, remains a mystery.
Even the number of people involved is not known. Some died, some were
taken prisoner and possibly executed on the spot, and others are
supposed to have been moved to Bratunac.
Mevlkudin Oric - a credible witness?
A small number of witnesses say that this group was taken by lorry and
bus to one or two execution spots on July 14, in the vicinity of the
village of Karakaj, close to Zvornik. They talk about mass murders with
two thousand or more victims.
How credible is their charge? One of them is 25-year-old soldier
Mevludin Oric, born in a town not far from Srebrenica. Though asked by
The Hague tribunal to refrain from public appearances, he gave an
exclusive interview last October to the Croatian magazine Nedjeljna
Dalmacija'...
a.. Oric, who said "My father has disappeared, my four brothers-in-law
and many of my cousins have been murdered," has turned out to be a
relative of Naser Oric, Commander of [Islamist forces in] Srebrenica and
accused by Serbs of war crimes ("the Beast of Bosnia") and against whom
the tribunal is preparing an indictment.
b.. Mevludin Oric left as a volunteer to Croatia in January 1992,
getting military training there. He...ended up as a member of the
infamous Croatian volunteer brigade "King Tomislav" in Herzegovina,
where he helped with the occupation of the barracks at Capljina (which
later became a POW camp for Serbs). After a short holiday in Croatia,
Oric crossed the Sava River, together with other volunteers, to fight
the "Chetniks" [name used for Serb soldiers by the Muslims and Croats,
meant to be derogatory] in the town of Orasje. It is in this area, the
Posavina, that the first mass murder took place – and the war hadn’t
even started. Its victims were not Croats or Muslims, but Serbs
(Sijekovac, March 27, 1992).
Volunteers like Oric formed the core of the military police of the
HVO [the paramilitary Croatian Council of Defence]and took care of
"supplies" for the elaborate system of Muslim-Croat prison camps that
was created in this area.
When Oric learned about the fighting around Srebrenica, he decided to
return to his native soil. In the interview, he claims to have served as
a "commander of a sabotage unit." He knew the area around the town like
no one else and the night before the exodus of the Muslims he already
knew that "no more than half of us would make it."
Oric left in the rearguard of the column that stretched for miles. He
was captured near Kravica and claims the Serbs took him via Bratunac to
a school gymnasium in the town of Glumina, west of Zvornik. From there,
the men were supposedly transported in lorries to the site of execution.
And yet Oric can still talk about it, just like 55-year-old Hurem
Suljic, 63-year-old Smail Hodzic and a seventeen-year-old boy named
Nedzad Avdic.
Oric’s personal history is reason enough for doubt, but the
inconsistencies in the accounts of Smail Hodzic and Hurem Suljic are
obvious as well.
Smail Hodzic: A basketball stadium becomes a soccer stadium becomes a
school
Hodzic Story 1: Hodzic first said he witnessed ambushes by the Serbs on
the road to Zvornik. He was captured and then moved to a "basketball
stadium near Bratunac" and subsequently taken to the execution spot, "a
large field not far from a forest," he declared to Alexandra Stiglmayer
in Die Woche of July 28.
Hodzic Story 2: Soon thereafter, Hodzic told Roy Gutman (in Die
Tageszeitung of August 11), that he was held at the "soccer stadium in
Nova Kasaba," from where he and others were moved to be killed,
"probably in a town called Grbavce."
Hodzic Story 3: In the third version, told on October 4 to Aida Cerkez
of Associated Press, Hodzic went through the same experience as Oric,
Suljic and Avdic. Now he was taken to "a school in Krizevci" and the
executions now took place not far from Karakaj.
Hurem Suljic: Murder in a school becomes beatings in a department store
Murders were committed at this school according to Suljic as well. On
February 16 of that year, he spoke on BBC Newsnight. Footage of a not
specified "school near Karakaj" indeed showed bullet holes, one in the
ceiling and one at the toilet. But in the elaborate coverage of Suljic
in The Washington Post of 6 November 1995, there isn't a word about
executions in a school; there is mention of beatings in a department
store near Bratunac, a location where Suljic supposedly was kept
prisoner.
Serbian woman: A school becomes a sports complex
Woman's Story# 1: Bratunac is the location of another school where
massacres supposedly took place, according to Robert Block in The
Independent, July, 1995 . A woman is quoted. She is supposedly an
inhabitant of Serbia who recently visited her brother-in-law, a soldier
in the Bosnian Serb Army: "He and his friends are quite open-hearted
about what happened over there," she said. "They are killing Muslim
soldiers. They said that only yesterday (note: Monday, July 17) they
killed one thousand six hundred, and they estimate to have killed about
four thousand in total. They said to be in great hurry, and therefore
shot most of them."
Woman's Story# 2: A few days later, Block’s colleague Louise Branson of
The Sunday Times brought the Serbian woman into the spotlight. Her
{supposed!- our note, ed.} husband, also fighting in the Bosnian Serb
Army, mentioned mass shootings with more than three thousand dead. But
not in a school in Bratunac. In a sports complex.
Up to this moment, human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have
not been able to trace survivors of this crime. "There has to be a more
detailed investigation, in order to establish the scale of violation of
human rights that have taken place in the area of Bratunac," says their
respective report.
{Editor's note: The authors say Human Rights Watch has not been "able to
trace survivors of this crime." Thus they assume there was indeed a
crime. Likewise, Human Rights Watch, whom many accuse of being a
humanitarian arm of US covert services, speaks of establishing the
"scale of violation" which again assumes there have been violations.
Since the first question is "Did a massacre actually take place" and
since so far we have seen only that a) the Dutch UN military officers
don't believe it and b) the eye witnesses are
mutually-and-self-contradictory, given all that, why make this
assumption of guilt? Could it be that the authors are themselves
affected by the climate of anti-Serb propaganda even while honorably
reporting evidence that contradicts their preconceptions?}
Dutch military officer: "I don't believe it."
IT IS NOTICEABLE, however, that there has been little attention to the
account of Captain Schouten, although this Dutchman was the only UN
military officer in Bratunac, where he stayed for several days, at the
time the alleged bloodbath took place. Schouten, quoted in Het Parool of
July 27, 1995:
a.. "Everybody is parroting everybody, but nobody shows hard evidence. I
notice that in the Netherlands people want to proof at all costs that
genocide has been committed. (...) If executions have taken place, the
Serbs have been hiding it damn well. Thus, I don’t believe any of it.
The day after the collapse of Srebrenica, July 13, I arrived in Bratunac
and stayed there for eight days. I was able to go wherever I wanted to.
I was granted all possible assistance; nowhere was I stopped."
Milivoje Ivanisevic, a Serbian publicist who has described the events in
and around Srebrenica since 1992 in minute detail, confirms Schouten’s
story. From 6th until 16th of July, he was on the spot.
a.. "No mass executions have taken place between Srebrenica and
Bratunac," he said during a meeting with one of us in January in
Belgrade. "During the liberation of Srebrenica, five hundred Muslims
have been killed in the direct vicinity. I don’t know what happened
elsewhere. I wasn’t there and therefore couldn’t see what was going on."
Ivanisevic calls it highly unlikely that large numbers of Muslim
soldiers were deliberately killed after surrender or being captured.
Maybe excesses have taken place, due to the large size of the groups
that were taken prisoner and the sometimes small number of Serb guards,
but according to him the intention was to keep as many men alive as
possible, so they could be exchanged for Serbs that were held somewhere
else.
In his view the Muslims were even lucky to be treated the way they
were. "You should have seen the women, with all those children on their
laps, that we have provided transport for. They would have treated us
very differently." He shows pictures of an Orthodox church that was
turned into a goat pen, of destroyed Serb tombstones and of "granny Iva"
(Ivanka Mirkovic), the only Serb who remained in Srebrenica, who was
found on July 12 with her throat cut.
NO MATTER IF a few hundred were killed, as is whispered in some places
in Serbia, or seven thousand, as is feared elsewhere. If people were
executed without a trial, it is a war crime for which the guilty must be
punished.
On the other hand, the enormous distinction between the search for mass
graves of Muslims by the Western media, human rights organizations and
government officials and the lack of interest in the over one thousand
deaths of Serbs – mainly civilians – in and around Srebrenica since the
war started is appalling. In order to understand how this could happen,
we must take a look at the social and geographic factors and the recent
regional history.
The background
In 1991 the municipality of Srebrenica had 37,211 inhabitants, of which
27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent).
Bratunac had 33,575 inhabitants: 21,564 Muslims (64.2 percent) and
11,479 Serbs (34.2 percent). As farmers, the Serbs on average owned more
land than Muslims. "Ethnic mixing" only existed in the eyes of a
superficial observer; most villages and townships had distinct
ethnic-religious majorities, being either Serb or Muslim. This became a
problem just prior to the war, when tension rose and both groups started
to feel vulnerable.
Muslims no longer responded to draft into the JNA, the Yugoslav Federal
Army. Serbs were no longer called for service in the local Territorial
Defence and police reserves. As Serbs relied on protection by the JNA,
Croatian militia trained Muslim groups. SDA, the Muslim party of
[Islamist leader] Alija Izetbegovic, provided the weapons.
One of the reasons for the mounting Serb suspicion was the SDA Congress
held in December 1991. This party...decided to implement a radical
ethnic policy. The ultimate goal was the dzamahirija or Islamist State.
Muslims had to settle Eastern Bosnia in large numbers. A cordon
sanitaire took shape between Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs in the north,
while in the south a demographic and territorial connection with Sandzak
[north of Kosovo in Serbia] and Kosovo was desirable. Thousands of
Muslims from Sandzak migrated to Bosnia, and descendants of Bosnian
Muslims who had settled over a period of time in Turkey received an
appeal to return.
IN THE BEGINNING OF 1992, Serbs were shocked again as invitations were
distributed throughout the republic for a mass meeting of Muslims at
Bratunac, to be held at the first day of the Bajram, the celebratory end
of the Ramadan. The initiative for this event at the "geographic centre
of Muslims from entire Yugoslavia" came from the National Muslim Council
which openly advocated arming people and establishing a Muslim state
within the Bosnian boundaries. Armed Muslim gangs, some of them factions
of the Patriotic League – which was formed in the neighboring Vlascenica
– started to intimidate Serb inhabitants of smaller towns with Muslim
majorities on April 12, 1992. But let there be no misunderstanding, the
Muslims themselves were scared of militia from outside the region. In
this context, Ivanisevic speaks about a "balance of fear." Mutual
deterrence, whereby militia and armed civilians spy on their neighbors
or keep them hostage, quickly led to a drama.
On 20 April 1992, the day before Serbs took Vlasenica and drove the
Muslims out of the city, five Serbs died in the area of Srebrenica. They
were probably members of the Jovic militia, a group of non-local Serbs.
On May 6 (the Orthodox holiday of Saint George – Djurdjevdan), Muslims
from Potocari and Srebrenica carried out an attack on the villages of
Gniona and Bljeceva. Serbian houses were looted and burned, and part of
the population did not survive the ordeal. Leading the attack on Gniona
was Naser Oric. The following day, seven Serbs died in an ambush at
Osmace.
On May 8, judge Goran Zekic, Member of Parliament and leader of the
Srebrenica SDS (the Serb nationalist party), was lured into an ambush
and killed. Almost all of sixteen hundred Serbs living in the city
decided to leave after this incident. In the night of May 8, they left
in large numbers towards Bratunac, where they were called "kukavice"
(cowards). Cerska, Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde became a refuge for
thousands of Muslims who were chased away by Serb offensives, but Serbs
were also victims of ethnic cleansing.
At first, between May 1992 and April 1993, all towns with a Serbian
majority were attacked. Then towns with a Serbian minority were
surrounded by Muslim towns, and eventually whole areas with a dense Serb
population – Podravanja, Kravica and Skelani – were targeted. The
Bosnian Serb weekly Javnost reported on 23 December 1995, that in the
entire Podrinje – the area on Bosnia’s side of the Drina River between
Zvornik in the north and Visegrad in the south – 192 villages were
burned, 2800 Serbs were killed and six thousand injured. According to
Ivanisevic, more than a hundred towns, villages and hamlets in the area
of Milici-Srebrenica-Bratunac-Skelani alone were affected.
These crimes [against Serbian civilians] are still waiting for
independent investigation, although they have been confirmed by
returning Dutch-UN military personnel.
a.. "Naser Oric gained control over large parts of Bosnia through
scorched-earth tactics. Because of this, Karremans is right about it,
large massacres of the Serb population were committed. The Netherlands
in return is asking for proof. It is asking for evidence because, of
course, there are no ‘funniest home videotapes’ showing raped women and
murdered men. But these things did happen!" ( Lieutenant Jasper
Verplanke of the Korps Commandotroepen [the Dutch equivalent of the
Green Berets] writing in the Dutch daily Nieuwsblad van het Noorden of
17 August 1995)
AFTER THE UN declared Srebrenica a ‘safe haven’ in April 1993, the
attacks continued. Speaking about funniest home videos: in February
1994, Naser Oric proudly showed a videotape of a burned town and
decapitated bodies of Serbs to John Pomfret of The Washington Post. The
fact that first the Canadian, and later the Dutch UN contingents could
not prevent these kind of actions because they failed to implement the
agreed-on disarmament of Muslim forces, testifies in itself to the
failure of the "safe area" concept.
"The systematic attacks of Muslim fighters against Bosnian Serb targets
around the enclave raised the tension in the area of Srebrenica and were
used by the Serbs as a justification for their offensive against the
enclave," Secretary of State Voorhoeve reported to the Dutch parliament.
The "safe areas" depended too much on cooperation of the warring
factions – something that was widely recognized after the collapse of
Srebrenica but ignored before this event.
There are various explanations for the attack on the enclave. Serbian
bloodthirstiness and desire for ethnic purity is among one of them, but
not the most probable. The Pentagon considered it to be an act of
revenge for the failed spring offensive by Muslims around Sarajevo. The
Podrinje Brigade of the [Muslim] Second Corps was ordered to break out
to the Han Pijesak-Vlasenica road and from there march to Srebrenica;
the military over there was attempting to connect itself to Zepa. The
Serbs on their part pointed out the fact that since the coming of the UN
peace force, more than a hundred of their civilians and soldiers had
been killed in raids by Muslim commandos. In May and June 1995 alone,
the Muslims had supposedly organized ten of these missions, even
penetrating the area close to Bratunac.
a.. "The goal of this action is to eliminate terrorists and is not
focussed on civilians, or UN-troops," Mladic wrote to the British UN
commander, General Rupert Smith, during the attack on Srebrenica. Serb
soldiers, most of them living in this area, carried lists with hundreds
of Muslims suspected to have committed war crimes. The arrests of Muslim
men partly were of a selective character. "The Serbs knew the men,"
according to a Dutch UN driver. "They had complete lists and photos.
They pointed them amidst a crowd."
The attack was, according to Mladic, not primarily designed to take
the entire enclave. That decision was made after a large number of
Muslim fighters decided to give up the Defence and to attempt an
extremely risky outbreak in the night of July 10 to Tuzla. "Muslims fled
in large numbers the night before the attack," said the Dutch Army
representative in Washington, Colonel G. van Oppen, in the Fries Dagblad
of 13 October 1995: "The question of why this happened was never asked
in the Netherlands."
But Michael Evans of The Times already knew this on July 13 when he
reported, referring to "Western intelligence sources," that Muslim
commanders had left the city after a provocation from their side, the
night before the first Serb tanks entered the scene. "Prior to the Serb
advance the Muslims had fired upon Serb units along the main road to the
South. (...) The apparent decision made by the Muslims to leave the city
gave the Serbs an unexpected opportunity to seize Srebrenica."
THE ORDER OF EVENTS brings to mind the situation of Gorazde in April
1994. A study made by US Colonel John Sray, former head of UNPROFOR’s
intelligence service in Sarajevo, reveals what happened:
a.. "Two British observers were located at an observation post behind
Muslim lines. Various attacks by the Serbs were effectively stopped and
the position could be defended for a long period. Then the Muslims
realized that the British observers were positioned right behind them.
During the next Serb attack the Muslims retreated unexpectedly and for
no reason. Their only objective was to expose the observers to an attack
of the confused Serbs. Serb bullets killed one British soldier and
wounded the other, but responsibility for this lies in the hands of the
Bosnian Muslims, who hoped to provoke a revenge strike by NATO as a
punishment for the killing of a neutral observer."
(John Sray in Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware)
The trap failed in Gorazde, but in Srebrenica no half-measures were
taken.
Apart from the flight of the Muslim troops in the night prior to the
attack, there are many more indications that the Muslim leadership
abandoned the enclave on purpose. The Defence was already weakened
because of the fact that best troops had been moved out to Tuzla,
Sarajevo and Mt. Treskavica, long before the month of July, according to
a commander of a Bosnian Serb special unit. Naser Oric himself, who had
sworn never to allow Srebrenica to become Serb as long as he was in
charge, was no longer present. "His whereabouts during the months prior
to the collapse of Srebrenica are quite a mystery," according to Charles
Lane in De Volkskrant of 12 August 1995. But Ivanisevic argues that
Oric, together with 2500 of his best troops, was called on duty in April
and May of 1995 to an area south of Sarajevo in order to take part in
the planned Muslim offensive. Estimates of the number of armed personnel
that stayed behind mention six to ten thousand, comprising 3000-4000
regular Army recruits. The Serbs were able to counter this with 3,500
men, all from this region, far better equipped but only accompanied by
four outdated tanks. Besides, not more than a few hundred men took part
in the attack on the city itself. The difference in capabilities of the
two sides seems to underline the opportunistic nature of the Serb
offensive. It is also important to take into consideration that the
Muslims had suffered heavy losses during supply runs between Srebrenica
and Zepa in April, May and June, which could have cast doubts on chances
to defend the city in the long run. The area hardly has any natural
resources, and is strategically of far less significance than Gorazde,
for example.
Eventually, while the "Dayton" agreement was in preparation, the Bosnian
government [Izetbegovic] accepted the concept of exchanging territory:
Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde for the Serb Sarajevo. Bosnian Minister of
foreign affairs Muhammad Sacirbey had already informed Secretary of
State Voorhoeve about this option during talks held in May (see De
Volkskrant of 1 November 1995). The deal came as a blessing for the
Americans, so close to the start of an election campaign. The fiercely
criticized UN peace force very much wanted to abandon the "safe havens"
as well. Srebrenica became the turning point from a military, political
and publicity perspective. Only the retreat of the peacekeepers made it
possible for NATO to start with the air strikes in September. The wave
of horror stories about mass executions overshadowed the Croatian terror
in the Krajina and no word got out about the Muslim-Croatian crimes in
cities like Glamoc, Grahovo and Sanski Most... "
WHAT REMAINS unanswered is the amount of Muslim men missing, who
possibly died [in action] or were possibly killed. According to Miroslav
Deronjic, official of the new municipality Srebrenica-Skelani, that
number is two thousand; according to Amnesty International – four
thousand; according to the International Red Cross, between seven and
eight thousand; and Muslim sources state eight to twelve thousand. Each
number represents an enormous tragedy in itself, but the results are
also the product of a hypothetical calculation method. The size of the
population before the fall of Srebrenica cannot be known beyond
reasonable doubt.
Manipulation with numbers was turned into an art during the Bosnian war,
and it is fair to assume that this also happened in Srebrenica....
On July 14, the ICRC [Red Cross] counted 23,000 refugees who were taken
by bus to Tuzla, more than half of them children. This group was later
joined by thousands of Muslim men who arrived on foot. In total the
World Health Organization and the Bosnian government have registered
35,632 refugees from Srebrenica up to this moment. An unknown number of
men have not had themselves registered and have been absorbed, as
announced by the Bosnian Army, in the 28th division. Others (1,000?
2,000?) have fled to Zepa and Serbia.
MORE THAN TEN THOUSAND persons were registered as missing. "Conclusions
about the number of missing people based on this figure has to be done
with caution," UN inspector Tadeusz Mazowiecki wrote, "because there may
have been double counts in the missing person notices and because
resolved cases are not always reported to the Red Cross." It is also
possible that names have been forged in an attempt to increase the
number of missing people, or in an attempt to escape prosecution for war
crimes. Mazowiecki’s successor, Elisabeth Rehn, came to the number of
8,000 people whose fate was unknown: five thousand men of military age
who left the enclave before the fall, and three thousand men who were
separated from their families. Rehn agreed with Mazowiecki, who
suspected on the basis of "strong indications" that the missing Muslims
had been murdered. During her visit of locations near Srebrenica in
January of this year, she seemed to tone down her initial comments a
little bit. She was still looking for evidence.
{Editor's Note: The UN bureaucrat accuses the Serbian forces of murder
despite the denials of UN military officers on the scene during the
fighting. Having made the accusation, the accuser goes "looking for
evidence!}
Miroslav Deronjic also gave his version in a report about the events:
"According to intelligence of the Army of Republika Srpska, around six
thousand Muslim conscripts have not joined the convoys for evacuation,
but instead continued armed resistance, or tried to force an outbreak
through the Serb lines of Defence in the direction of Srebrenica –
Kravica – Konjevic Polje – Cerska – Crni Vrh – Tuzla. Skirmishes with
this group (...) have continued for the next twenty days in the district
of Konjevic Polje – Cerska – Udrica. A large number of Muslim fighters
were killed during the attempt to break through the lines of Defence of
Bratunac and Zvornik, or during clashes between their own competing
factions. Part of the fighters surrendered – a small number, two hundred
– and they have been transferred as prisoners of war to the military
prison of Bjeljina. The larger part, around four thousand, reached the
territory of the municipality of Tuzla. It is impossible to give exact
estimates of the number of Muslim soldiers that died, because the
fighting took place over a large area and in different directions."
That Muslims fought each other, as Deronjic argues, cannot be found in
the reports of Mazowiecki, Rehn and Human Rights Watch, but is known
from statements made by the Dutch UN military personnel.
{This is another indication of the anti-Serb bias of the UN bureaucracy
and Human Rights Watch, as opposed to the UN troops!}
At least on two occasions Muslims have clashed with each other.
According to general Couzy, the issue was a dispute about the question
if the enclave should be defended or abandoned. Yugoslav agency Tanjug
already reported in February last year about a "heavy conflict and
fighting" in the vicinity of the town called Slap, between Muslims who
wanted to leave to Macedonia via Serbia and Oric’s men, who controlled
the Drina crossings in the hamlet of Luka. Later, unconfirmed reports
mentioned a rivaling "modest" military unit under command of Osman
Suljic. In July, Muslims from Srebrenica who wanted to surrender
apparently received a harsh treatment by hard-liners under command of
Zulfo Tursun, Ejub Golic and Nezir Mandzic. Such a fight, according to
Deronjic, had taken place just after the fall of the enclave at Bokcin
Potok. A team of the Dutch NOS-news discovered the corpses of tens of
victims on 3 February.
NOW, CAN WE, looking at everything, say anything about the number of
missing people with certainty? The latest number of 7,000, picked by the
American State Department, seems to be far too high for the time being,
but that the fate of many Muslims who fled is uncertain is a fact. Have
they been killed on orders given from the top, or in acts of individual
revenge? Are hundreds, maybe thousands of Muslims being held by the
Bosnian Serbs and assigned to forced labor, as some refugees in Tuzla
assume or at least hope? It is about time that an independent
institution investigates suspected mass graves, and interrogates
witnesses who might have been accomplices to mass murder (like the
Bosnian Serb soldier Drazen Erdemovic, arrested last week). Only then
there will be clarity about the real events and the actual magnitude of
the tragedy in Srebrenica.
{Editor's note: even after all the evidence they have provided, the
authors still use language that assumes the credibility of the charges
against the Bosnian Serbs. Thus they speak of the need to look for
"suspected mass graves." In fact, as George Pumphrey shows in
Srebrenica: Three years later and still waiting , the NATO forces have
been looking for "suspected mass graves" since 1995 with no result.
Perhaps more damning, The US claimed to have satellite photos of mass
graves around Srebrenica, but the photos somehow got lost.}
René Grémaux is anthropologist; Abe de Vries was at the time this
article was written a history student at the University of Groningen,
Netherlands. He is now a reporter for the Dutch paper, 'Trouw'.
Translated for Emperors-Clothes by 'TARGETS' , the Independent
International Monthly Newspaper (Printed on paper, in Dutch).
For subscription or sample copy e-mail: redactie@...
Further reading...
Srebrenica: Three years later and still waiting at
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/pumphrey/Srebrenica.html
www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes]
------------------------------------------------------------------
Srebrenica: 3 Years Later, And Still Searching
By George Pumphrey
www.emperors-clothes.com
a.. [Note: this article argues that the Srebrenica massacre was a
fiction told to isolate the the Bosnian Serb Army and justify NATO
attacks. At the end you'll find links to other articles which expose
NATO genocide stories used to justify the recent bombing of Yugoslavia.]
The third anniversary of the takeover of Srebrenica by Bosnian-Serb
troops on July 11, 1995 has come and gone. The significance of this
takeover determined not only the outcome of the Bosnian civil war, but
reached far beyond the Balkans.
It was the events around Srebrenica, and the subsequent indictments
against the Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic and the
Bosnian Serb military Commander, Radko Mladic on charges of genocide and
crimes against humanity, that changed the political constellation at the
negotiation table at Dayton. With its leadership under indictment, the
Bosnian Serb side had to content itself with being represented by
Slobodan Milosevic, president of a, by then, foreign state.
The fact alone of an international tribunal being given jurisdiction
over people and events taking place thousands of miles from the contexts
of those sitting in judgement, without an existing set of legal norms
creates already a new basis for the concept of "justice." Srebrenica has
been the main source of this tribunal's credibility and its raison
d'être.
As in the past two years, this year also the war crimes tribunal has
sent out teams to search for mass graves containing the remains of the
8,000 Muslim soldiers that are widely believed to have been massacred in
the aftermath of the takeover. But a closer look at the background of
the Tribunal’s search sheds a bit of light on the shadowy side of the
Tribunal's work.
The New York Times published an article written by one of its
correspondents, Mike O’Connor, (republished in the International Herald
Tribune May 14, 1998) entitled "Mass Graves in Bosnia Bolster War-Crimes
Cases." This article is very helpful in examining the work of the
Tribunal in The Hague, which is why it will be extensively quoted.
a.. Deep in a remote rural stretch of Bosnia, war-crimes investigators
have found a tangle of buried bodies that they say is the remains of
some of the 7,500 Muslim men that were hidden to try to thwart the
prosecution of Bosnian Serb leaders for genocide. (...)
Exhumations in 1996 recovered 460 bodies, but 7,500 others were still
missing from the town of Srebrenica. Finding the others has been the
goal of war-crimes investigators for more than two years.
(...) The discovery Tuesday - and the thousands of bodies that
investigators expect to find nearby - will bolster the cases against 2
Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the
investigators say. Both have been indicted for genocide by the tribunal
in The Hague.
Investigators for the tribunal spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
Satellites that can locate bodies decomposing underground, according to
foreign military officers working with the tribunal, aided the search.
Witnesses to the reburial also offered testimony, tribunal officials
said.
The first remains were uncovered Tuesday morning. Investigators unfurled
a thin silvery sheet to protect their find from the sun. Next to it,
small orange flags had been stuck in the ground to mark pieces of
evidence such as bits of clothing or shell casings.
Tuesday evening, according to a tribunal official, a layer of tangled
bodies across an areas of 200 ft² (18 m²) had been exposed. The bones
were so intertwined, the official said, that it was not possible to
exhume any of them Tuesday.
Proving that the soil around the bodies came from the original mass
graves, or that shell casings found here match those found at execution
sites, will establish the connection they are looking for, investigators
said.
When the original sites were inspected in 1996, investigators suspected
most of the bodies had been moved. Doubts were cast on American
military's satellite surveillance, with some investigators charging at
the time that slipshod monitoring had allowed Bosnian Serb authorities
to move the bodies undetected.
Now, however, tribunal officials say the bodies were moved in October
1995, before the pinpoint satellite surveillance was requested by the
tribunal. Once the original sites were discovered to have been tampered
with, American satellite photographs of the region were reviewed and
were found to show trucks and earth-moving equipment at the original
burial sites, according to tribunal officials.
Anonymous investigators say that the find "will bolster the cases
against [the] two Bosnian Serb leaders." The question should be raised:
on what basis did the tribunal make its charges of no less than
"genocide," if they now have to frantically run around to scrape up
enough bodies to make their indictment plausible? If they now have to
try to "prove that the soil around the bodies came from the original
mass graves," does it mean that what they had considered to be "the
original mass graves" were either empty or with too few bodies to
justify the indictments? Were Karadzic and Mladic charged according to
the principle: "Indict now. Look for evidence of a crime later"? "Charge
the Serbs! If you don't know what for, they do" seems to be the modus
operandi in The Hague.
But it was this widely publicized "genocide" indictment that has caused
irreparable damage to the political and social constellation in this
region of Europe, creating also a new set of political factors in the
world. Some of them are:
a.. the discrediting of the United Nations for having supposedly allowed
a "genocide" to take place on territory under its authority;
a.. promoting NATO as the new "peace keeping" force;
a.. making great strides to create public acceptance for
inquisitorial, McCarthyist standards both in "justice" and "journalism"
on both national and international levels;
a.. the definition of a new "moral" standard based on "human"
rights, determined by membership in particular "ethnic" groups with
rights to be respected and all others without rights worthy of respect;
a.. growing international acceptance of the concept of a people
being classified per se as "evil."
This has all been made possible through a massive propaganda
campaign colporteuring a - yet to be proven - "genocide," as if it were
a certitude. Politicians have justified and based momentous decisions
upon the supposition that the massacre is fact, decisions determining
the welfare of the peoples of this region and beyond.
The media bases each succeeding generation of falsification on preceding
generations of unproven factors. Both are so often repeated as a
certainty, that the public does not even demand substantiating evidence.
O'Conner writes that "7,500 Muslim men were hidden to try to thwart the
prosecution of Bosnian Serb leaders for genocide. ‘Their’ bodies were
moved in October 1995, before the pinpoint satellite surveillance was
requested by the tribunal." These and other allegations are in gross
contradiction to other information published in the press.
1) The Numbers game:
First of all, the number 8,000 most often and most consistently given in
the press is itself the first falsification. The prosecution has never
proven that 8,000 Muslims were killed. It is indicative to note how the
number 8,000 came into circulation.
The International Committee of the Red Cross published a press statement
Sept. 13, 1995 in which it was stated:
a.. "The ICRC's head of operations for Western Europe, Angelo
Gnaedinger, visited Pale and Belgrade from 2 to 7 September to obtain
information from the Bosnian Serb authorities about the 3,000 persons
from Srebrenica whom witnesses say were arrested by Bosnian Serb forces.
The ICRC has asked for access as soon as possible to all those arrested
(so far it has been able to visit only about 200 detainees), and for
details of any deaths. The ICRC has also approached the
Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities seeking information on some 5,000
individuals who fled Srebrenica, some of whom reached central Bosnia."
Sept. 15, 1995 in the New York Times these numbers were juggled to make:
a.. About 8,000 Muslims are missing from Srebrenica, the first of two
United Nations-designated 'safe areas' overrun by Bosnian Serb troops in
July, the Red Cross said today. (...) Among the missing were 3,000,
mostly men, who were seen being arrested by Serbs. After the collapse of
Srebrenica, the Red Cross collected 10,000 names of missing people, said
Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman. In addition to those arrested, about 5,000
'have simply disappeared,' she said.
Aside from simply adding the 3,000 Muslim men found still in Srebrenica
(that the Serbs then took as prisoners of war) and the 5,000 Muslim men,
(reported by the International Red Cross to have left Srebrenica before
the arrival of Bosnian Serb forces) to inflate the figures - and
therefore the gravity of the accusation - they make no mention of the
fact that by mid-September 1995 a sizable portion of the group of 5,000
had already reached Muslim territory and safety. The fact that the Red
Cross was asking the Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities for information
about the number of the 5,000 (the original figure) - "some of whom [had
already] reached central Bosnia" - has completely disappeared from the
news. The entire 5,000 are still today - 3 years later - being counted
as "missing."
The Red Cross report was lacking the objectivity that one would hope for
from a non-partisan organization. Its very off-hand "some of whom
reached central Bosnia" gives the impression of only a handful could be
accounted for by mid-September. But again the press gave another
picture:
a.. "Some 3,000 to 4,000 Bosnian Muslims who were considered by UN
officials to be missing after the fall of Srebrenica have made their way
through enemy lines to Bosnian government territory. The group, which
included wounded refugees, sneaked past Serb lines under fire and
crossed some 30 miles through forests to safety."
O'Connor's NY Times colleague Chris Hedges published this information in
the journal within a week of the takeover of Srebrenica (July 18, 1995).
Similar news appeared in other journals at the time. August 2, 1995 the
Times of London published the following:
a.. Thousands of the "missing" Bosnian Muslim soldiers from Srebrenica
who have been at the centre of reports of possible mass executions by
the Serbs, are believed to be safe to the northeast of Tuzla.
Monitoring the safe escape of Muslim soldiers and civilians from the
captured enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa has proved a nightmare for the
United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. For the
first time yesterday, however, the Red Cross in Geneva said it had heard
from sources in Bosnia that up to 2,000 Bosnian Government troops were
in an area north of Tuzla.
They had made their way there from Srebrenica "without their families
being informed," a spokesman said, adding that it had not been possible
to verify the reports because the Bosnian Government refused to allow
the Red Cross into the area.
According to the Washington Post, "The men set off at dawn on Tuesday,
July 11, in two columns that stretched back seven or eight miles." Even
if the Red Cross did not know that they left Srebrenica in 2 columns,
they at least knew that 2,000 were safe. And UN officials knew of the 3,
- 4,000 that had arrived earlier. Yet the communiqué given in September
failed to report that the 5,000 that "simply disappeared," simply
disappeared back into the ranks of the Bosnian military.
The Red Cross must have been aware that a "Big Lie" campaign was
launched around the issue of Srebrenica. By withholding and understating
important information, the Red Cross was, in effect, a party to the
conflict. It is unlikely that correspondents, such as Mike O'Connor, and
their editors are unaware of the fallacious content of the reports they
publish. The pattern of conformity in this disinformation campaign is,
to say the least, astonishing.
A little more than a week after Srebrenica, Zepa, a second Moslem
enclave (and UN Safe Area) was taken by Bosnian Serb forces. Hundreds of
the "missing" soldiers from Srebrenica were among the defenders of Zepa
in the last days of fighting. As the New York Times recounts:
a.. "The wounded troops were left behind, and when the Bosnian Serbs
overran the town on Tuesday, the wounded were taken to Sarajevo for
treatment at Kosevo Hospital. Many of them had begun their journey in
Srebrenica, and fled into the hills when that 'safe area' fell to the
Bosnian Serbs on July 11. These men did not make it to Tuzla, where most
of the refugees ended up, but became the defenders of Zepa instead.
'Some 350 of us managed to fight our way out of Srebrenica and make it
into Zepa,' said Sadik Ahmetovic, one of 151 people evacuated to
Sarajevo for treatment today. (...) They said they had not been
mistreated by their Serb captors."
(The Muslim defenders of Zepa left their wounded behind as they ran into
the hills. It is also well known that the 5,000 Muslim soldiers, who
left Srebrenica before Serbian troops took over, left their women and
children behind. Obviously the Muslim soldiers must not have been too
worried about their women, children and wounded comrades falling into
the hands of their Serbian countrymen. The Serbian forces, generally
portrayed as comparable to Nazis, had the wounded members of the Muslim
forces evacuated to their Muslim hospital.)
The London Times article, quoted above mentions that 2,000 Srebrenica
soldiers made their way to the north of Tuzla "without their families
being informed". The question is, when, if ever, were the families
informed. Other than the few articles that took notice of their
resurrection from the dead, the public at large was never informed that
they, in fact were never massacred. On the contrary.
To maintain the myth of a gigantic massacre, is not only necessary to
create the illusion of having proof that it did happen – thus the
frantic searches for mass graves - but also to suppress the proof that
it did not take place - which means prohibit that too many of the
prisoners of war return "from the dead."
The figure of 3,000, given by the Red Cross, listed as having been
arrested by Bosnian Serb forces, which is counted into the media's 8,000
"massacred," should also be taken with a grain of salt. One learns -
again through isolated articles - that they too not only were not
massacred, but that the Red Cross, the United Nations, and a host of
"western" governments around the world all were well aware of this fact.
January 17, 1996, the Manchester "Guardian" published an article
concerning one group of the former Muslim prisoners of war from
Srebrenica and Zepa, who, liberated from the prison camp at Sljivovica -
in Serbia, were flown directly abroad to Dublin:
a.. "Hundreds of Bosnian Muslim prisoners are still being held at two
secret camps within neighboring Serbia, according to a group of men
evacuated by the Red Cross to a Dublin hospital from one camp - at
Sljivovica. (...) A group of 24 men was flown to Ireland just before
Christmas (...). But some 800 others remain incarcerated in Sljivovica
and at another camp near Mitrovo Polje, just three days before the
agreed date for the release of all detainees under the Dayton peace
agreement on Bosnia (...). The Red Cross in Belgrade has been
negotiating for several weeks to have the men released and given
sanctuary in third countries. A spokeswoman said most were bound for the
United States or Australia, with others due to be sent to Italy,
Belgium, Sweden, France and Ireland. (...) Since late August, the Red
Cross has made fortnightly visits from its Belgrade field office. (...)
Teams from the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague have been in Dublin to
question and take evidence from the men."
Why would war prisoners, whose normal first wish would be to reunite
with their families and restart their interrupted lives in peace, be
rushed off to Dublin, with "papers to remain in Ireland?" And this at a
time where most industrialized countries are closing their borders to
refugees! Were their families informed? Could it be that they too - in a
large enough group - could become living proof of the fallacy of a huge
Srebrenica "massacre" before the 1996 fall elections?
US decided to accept two hundred and fourteen Bosniaks who, after the
fall of Srebrenica and Zepa, had been detained in Serbian camps and give
them refugee status. "It is horrible that those people besides being
captured during the bloodshed in Srebrenica had to spend at least
another two months in Serbian detention camps under dreadful
conditions," said State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. Burns
emphasized that at least 800 men out of 80,000 people who have been
expelled from their homes after the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa had been
taken to Serbia.
This is how the US government justified their aid in secretly skirting
the men out of the country. What is known is that neither the Red Cross
(which has been visiting the prisoners since August), the Tribunal, (in
its frantic search for evidence for the "genocide" in Srebrenica and to
have someone arrest the Bosnian Serb leaders) nor the American
government have made mention since August 95 of these men being in
custody, as war prisoners. Why? Are they trying to conceal evidence
exonerating the Bosnian Serbian forces of the charge of "genocide" in
connection with alleged mass executions?
2) The vanishing corpses:
Like the juggling of the numbers of "missing" and their whereabouts,
excuses had to be found for the lack of corpses.
In August 1995, during a Security Council meeting, the US delegation to
the United Nations accused the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs of having
committed wide-scale atrocities against Muslim civilians. With what
amounts to a satellite photo "peep show," Madeleine Albright had an
excuse already prepared for the lack of evidence to support her charges.
The NY Times in referring back to that session of the UN Security
Council wrote:
a.. "On Aug. 10, [1995] the chief United States delegate to the United
Nations, Madeleine K. Albright, showed selected photos of the two sites
to a closed session of the United Nations Security Council. She then
said, 'We will keep watching to see if the Bosnian Serbs try to erase
the evidence of what they have done.'"
One of the earlier versions was the vanishing corpses through a
corrosive agent. In the same article, the NY Times adds:
a.. "American officials said today that they suspect Bosnian Serb
soldiers may have tried to destroy evidence that they killed thousands
of Muslim men seized in and around the town of Srebrenica in July. The
Serbs are suspected of pouring corrosive chemicals on the bodies and
scattering corpses that had been buried in mass graves, the officials
said. The suspicions first arose in early August, after Central
Intelligence Agency experts analyzed pictures of the area taken in July
by reconnaissance satellites and U-2 planes."
With the absence of traces of a corrosive substance, when it comes time
to dig up the "evidence," the entire legend falls flat. Another
explanation had to be found: the bodies were simply dug up and moved
someplace else. This excuse has its advantages: With the needle in the
haystack search for "mass graves," the tribunal could keep the public at
bay for quite a while. But also disadvantages: How do you remove
thousands of buried, decomposing bodies without being seen by the
"watchful eye" of Madeleine Albright's satellites? Undismayed by this
factual detail, the Tribunal and media continue their course.
In Nov. 1995 the Dutch Minister of Defense, Joris Voorhove, accused the
Serbs of "trying hastily to destroy the evidence of the massacre they
committed against thousands of Bosniaks around Srebrenica." Citing
"intelligence services" as his source, he claimed in a TV interview,
that "these days Serbs have been exhuming the corpses from the mass
graves in order to remove the evidence of their crimes."
Approaching the day of reckoning and desperate for more concrete
evidence of the massacre, Richard Goldstone, the tribunal's chief
prosecutor, wrote a letter to the US Embassy in the Hague in Nov. 95, to
pressure the US government to come forward with the evidence it
evidently had promised. The letter was quoted in the Washington Post:
a.. "Judge [Goldstone] called the 'quality and timeliness' of
intelligence provided by the United States 'disappointing.' He
complained about the failure to hand over spy photos that he said could
help the United Nations-sponsored tribunal identify mass graves that
appeared after the fall of Srebrenica in July. The judge also complained
that much of the information provided by the United States so far was
based on 'open-source material' not relevant to the original requests.
He submitted an additional 25 questions to Washington, including a
request for information about a transcript of a conversation between
General Mladic and Yugoslav Army commanders who report directly to
President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia."
[The reference to "open-source material," that the US government
furnished the tribunal as "evidence," simply means that the CIA uses
media reports, some of which are obviously its own propaganda plants.]
The Clinton Administration made public 3 of the 8 photos shown the
Security Council. One of these 3 showed "disturbed soil." "According to
one American official who has seen the photographs, one shows hundreds
and perhaps thousands of Muslim men and boys in a field near a soccer
stadium about 5 miles north of Srebrenica. Another photo taken several
days later shows a large area of freshly dug earth, consistent with the
appearance of known mass graves, near the stadium, which is empty."
One of the three photos reproduced in several newspapers showed two
buildings, a main and subordinate road. Two light colored patches
(indicated with arrows) in the middle of what could be a field with a
parallel double-lined path (tire tracks?) leading from the main road to
each of the light areas. The photo is entitled: "Possible Mass Graves;
Kasaba/Konjevic Polje Area, Bosnia; unclassified Jul. 95." In the lower
left corner the explanation of the arrows: "Recently disturbed earth."
As a NY Times journalist complained, the US government refused "to let
reporters see the satellite photographs (...) which were said to include
pictures of people crowded into a soccer field. American officials said
the satellite photographs were classified, although Ms. Albright showed
them to the other 14 members of the Security Council." This striptease
sort of procedure, in itself, should provoke questions concerning the
credibility of these photos portraying what we are told that they are
supposed to show.
a.. Where are other more conclusive photos showing people in the process
of being shot, dead bodies being removed, open pits being - or already -
filled with bodies or being covered,...?
a.. How closely were diplomats of the Security Council able to
examine (for authenticity, manipulation, falsification) the photos? Were
they forced to appraise the photos quickly, or were they allowed to keep
copies of the photos?
a.. Why are photos purported to be the most important - those
showing "Muslim men and boys," - hidden from the public? Do they
actually show what the US administration claim that they show?
a.. How does the US secret service discern the difference between
"hundreds and perhaps thousands of Muslim men and boys" from the same
number of Serb or Croatian males - and that from outer space? The
Security Council members apparently saw something different on these
photos: A NY Times journalist following the presentation to the Security
Council reports: "The photographs showed a stretch of fields at Novo
Kasaba, near Srebrenica, where Bosnian Muslim families were apparently
herded together." A mere detail? Which is the true story? The version
"Muslim men and boys" given by the CIA official the day before? Or the
one of "Bosnian Muslim families" the day after members of the Security
Council viewed the pictures? Had they realized that they were viewing
mainly women and children, (perhaps being "herded together" to prepare
to be taken by bus to Tuzla)? Is this not a first indication that
perhaps the satellite photos will not stand up under independent
appraisal? Could this embarrassing discrepancy be the main reason why
the satellite photos were made inaccessible to the public?
a.. Where is the original photo taken by the reconnaissance
aircraft? Why was the original photo not shown to the Security Council?
The labeling that accompanied the published photo: "Possible Mass
Graves" was added after the photo was taken, meaning that the built-in
time and geographical settings from reconnaissance cameras, were edited
out of the picture and arrows and other written interpretations of what
one is supposed to see edited onto the photo. Left to make ones' own
interpretations the same photo could have been interpreted to show
something having nothing to do with warfare in the Balkans. How does one
know that the photo was taken near Srebrenica, or at the time that it is
claimed to have been taken - and not at some other time in some other
part of the world?
a.. Could it be that the US government knows that the origin of this
"disturbed soil" has nothing to do with "Mass Graves"? Could this be the
reason why the photo is entitled: "Possible Mass Graves"? Would this not
also explain why the State Department and CIA found it necessary to
launch rumors that Serbs had allegedly removed the thousands of bodies
that were supposed to have been buried under this "disturbed soil" -
albeit without any satellite photos to back up this new rumor?
a.. The assumption that several days after having seen a full soccer
field, an empty one would signify that those formerly seen there had
been executed, is so farfetched, that it could be dismissed as crazy.
How many soccer stadiums remain filled overnight, or days at a time? If
those seen had in fact been Muslims captured, why would the first
assumption not have been that they had been taken to a prisoner of war
camp? This type of explanation says more about the ethnic prejudices of
the author than it does about those of Bosnian Serb armed forces.
In the Bible, faith is defined as "the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen." This seems a very appropriate
description of the Tribunal's handling of the US satellite and U-2
"evidence." It was on the basis of these photos that the Security
Council and tribunal accused the Serbian leadership of having committed
a massacre. The Tribunal's indictments against Karadzic and Mladic were
primarily based on faith in the journalists' faith in the Security
Council's faith in the CIA and its spy photos. Neither the press nor the
tribunal were given access to all of the photos, yet both take it for
granted that the Bosnian leaders are "guilty as charged."
But once the indictment handed down, the Bosnian Serb leaders shut out
of negotiations and the Serbian President Milosevic under effective
threat (that he too could suffer the fate of his Bosnian Serb Brethren),
the Clinton Administration showed little interest in helping "further
the cause of justice."
The White House spokesman, Michael D. McCurry, and other US officials
responded to Goldstone's complaints by saying:
a.. "There are certain types of intelligence information that our
Government cannot share with the international community." The NY Times
article continues: "Mr. McCurry cited 'national security reasons' as the
reason the United States would withhold some evidence, and criticized
the complaints by the prosecutor, Judge Richard Goldstone, as
'unfortunate.' (...) In defending their level of cooperation with the
tribunal, Administration officials insisted that Judge Goldstone is
getting most of his data from the United States and there would be no
war crimes tribunal if not for the United States."
With this statement these "administration officials" confirmed what
Serbs and independent observers have suspected from the beginning: that
the tribunal is simply being manipulated by the US to serve its own
foreign policy interests, and that its procedures have really as little
to do with "rule of law" standards as its goals, with doing "justice."
It has been reported that in the New York central headquarters of the
UN, all files relevant to Srebrenica have been classified "secret" for
the next 30 - 50 years and are not even available for the tribunal. This
decision was taken at the demand of the permanent members of the
Security Council, the USA, France and Great Britain, in reference to
their protection of the secrecy of government documents.
With what right does the US classify evidence that it claims to have,
concerning what is often referred to as "the worst atrocities committed
in Europe since WW-II?" One could understand the US government
withholding evidence of war crimes committed by US troops. But what
justification does the US have for classifying a "national security
secret," crimes committed by those designated as "enemy forces?" Is the
US administration hiding the proof of a crime or proof that it has no
proof of a crime? Most disturbing of all is that hardly a<br/><br/>(Message over 64 KB, truncated)
Introduction & editing by Jared Israel and Nebojsa Malic (4-28-00)
www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes]
a.. "Everybody is parroting everybody, but nobody shows hard evidence. I
notice that in the Netherlands people want to prove at all costs that
genocide has been committed. (...) If executions have taken place, the
Serbs have been hiding it damn well. Thus, I don’t believe any of it.
The day after the collapse of Srebrenica, July 13, I arrived in Bratunac
and stayed there for eight days. I was able to go wherever I wanted to.
I was granted all possible assistance; nowhere was I stopped." (Captain
Schouten quoted in Het Parool of July 27, 1995. Captain Schouten was the
only UN military officer in Bratunac at the time the alleged bloodbath
called Srebrenica was supposed to have taken place.)
Srebrenica. The name accuses: massacre. 8000 dead.
But did it happen?
General R. Krstic, commandeer of the Bosnian Serb troops who took
Srebrenica in July 1995 has been seized by NATO, put on trail for war
crimes.
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and Commanding General Mladic are
indicted, hunted, trashed as criminals in the media. Virtually the
entire Bosnian Serb leadership is under threat of arrest for Srebrenica.
But did it happen?
Srebrenica is NATO's remedy; it compensates all sins. Did the Croatian
Army drive 200,000 Serbs from the Krajina section of Yugoslavia? Were
they trained, led and given air cover by US forces? Perhaps, but what
about Srebrenica?
Didn't the Serbs deserve it?
By telling and retelling the story of Srebrenica over the past four and
a half years the media has been able to portray the Bosnian Islamist
fighters as victims and therefore humane.
Naser Oric was the Islamist Commander at Srebrenica. This gentleman met
with Western journalists, showed them videos of the bodies of Serbian
civilians decapitated by his troops during raids on nearby villages.
Oric did not boast without purpose: during World War II, pro-Nazi
Islamist and Croatian forces slaughtered Serbian peasants and every
Serbian family remembers. By carrying out such terror in the '90s, and
boasting of it, Commander Oric waged psychological war. The message to
Serbs was, 'We're back. Flee or die.'
But what about the Serbs? Did they respond in kind?
The following article, though very definitely not 'pro-Serb' (as you
shall see, the writers assume there must be some truth to the charges)
nevertheless presents strong evidence that:
1) The Islamist forces in Srebrenica employed vicious terror against
Serbian civilians;
2) Eye witness reports of Serbian revenge killings are thoroughly
contradictory. Not only do different witnesses give contradictory
accounts but each witness tells different stories to different
reporters;
3) There is no hard evidence a massacre took place;
4) The western media has reported inconsistent and contradictory
anti-Serb rumors as if they are gospel truth;
5) Serbian observers have been falsely quoted as admitting the massacre
took place;
6) And perhaps most important, Dutch military officers - that is, the UN
officers who were on the scene when the Serbs took Srebrenica in 1995 -
report there was no massacre.
In our opinion, the article below sometimes errs by seeming to accept
the Western media line that a massacre definitely happened at
Srebrenica. The authors do this in small ways, sometimes in the way they
phrase things, sometimes in actual statements. It is a minor blemish,
for the facts presented overhwelmingly contradict official massacre
claims. Yet these little blemishes have an affect; on a few occasions we
have taken the liberty of commenting. Our comments appear in brackets
{like this}.
Here's the article:
The Construction of a trauma
>From the 'De Groene Amsterdammer'. Originally published 3-13-66
Translated by Targets, the Dutch independent monthly (See end for
subscription information)
a.. "Horrible slaughter and large numbers of missing people. That is
what we think about in the Netherlands when Srebrenica is mentioned....
But were the Muslims really victims of the Serbs on such a large scale?
And more important: were they so innocent themselves?"
By René Grémaux and Abe de Vries
LIEUTENANT COLONEL Karremans, the man who terribly irritated Dutch
politicians, has been promoted to the rank of colonel.
a.. "The Muslims burned 192 villages in Eastern Bosnia," he declared
guilelessly at a poorly prepared press-conference in Zagreb. "Therefore
I am saying that in this war there are no ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’."
(Dutch UN officer Karremans)
Pure Serb propaganda, was the verdict of the press as well as The
Hague establishment. Karremans’ admiration of the military genius of
Ratko Mladic – the Bosnian-Serb commander indicted for war crimes – was
also objected to, not to mention their alcoholic encounter, cleverly
filmed and broadcast by TV Pale [in Bosnia].
If we are to believe Secretaries of State Pronk and Voorhoeve, genocide
took place. Supposedly as the Serbs drove into the city, DUTCHBAT [the
Dutch Battalion] couldn’t do much more than watch impotently...
Thus Srebrenica became the symbol of our national shame. "Our boys" had
given in to Mladic’s cut-throats and thus became accomplice to the
cruelest European bloodbath since the Second World War.
This is the dominant picture. But it is not the only view, nor is it
complete. This becomes clear when examining conversations with experts
and Serbian refugees, as well as making a detailed comparison of various
reports and newspaper articles. All claims considered, how many Muslims
really are missing? How reliable are eyewitness reports of mass
executions? What is true about the rumors that some Muslim factions
fought each other? And did Muslims destroy all those Serb villages and
kill the inhabitants [before Serb troops retook the city] or did they
not?
A Serbian Cameraman Denies Seeing Any Crime
BELGRADE, A CHILLY evening in January.
Serb cameraman and journalist Zoran Petrovic-Pirocanac is angry. He is
considering legal measures now that his work is regarded as a piece of
evidence concerning mass murder. The German weekly magazine Stern of 16
November 1995, placed the following caption under a picture taken from
his videotape:
a.. "Seconds before the murder: Armed Serbs contain a group of Muslims
near Konjevic Polje. A Serb cameraman shot the scene until the first
rounds were fired."
But Petrovic says he spent plenty of time at the scene, before as
well as after he filmed. And – he did not notice any crime.
Besides, he does not recognize the words Frank Westerman and Harm van
den Berg of the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad put in his mouth: "In total,
our forces have massacred two thousand Muslims." According to Petrovic,
the Muslims were not massacred, though many did die.
IN THE AREA of Konjevic Polje, a long column of Muslims (soldiers,
militia, armed and unarmed civilians) tried to break out to [the city
of] Tuzla and on July 12 and 13, 1995 attempted to cross the
strategically important road that connects Pale to Belgrade, via
Zvornik. Despite being ambushed by the Serbs, the operation was a big
success, as General Rasim Delic, supreme commander of the Bosnian
[Islamist] Army later told the Parliament in Sarajevo. What happened to
the unfortunate few that did not make it, however, remains a mystery.
Even the number of people involved is not known. Some died, some were
taken prisoner and possibly executed on the spot, and others are
supposed to have been moved to Bratunac.
Mevlkudin Oric - a credible witness?
A small number of witnesses say that this group was taken by lorry and
bus to one or two execution spots on July 14, in the vicinity of the
village of Karakaj, close to Zvornik. They talk about mass murders with
two thousand or more victims.
How credible is their charge? One of them is 25-year-old soldier
Mevludin Oric, born in a town not far from Srebrenica. Though asked by
The Hague tribunal to refrain from public appearances, he gave an
exclusive interview last October to the Croatian magazine Nedjeljna
Dalmacija'...
a.. Oric, who said "My father has disappeared, my four brothers-in-law
and many of my cousins have been murdered," has turned out to be a
relative of Naser Oric, Commander of [Islamist forces in] Srebrenica and
accused by Serbs of war crimes ("the Beast of Bosnia") and against whom
the tribunal is preparing an indictment.
b.. Mevludin Oric left as a volunteer to Croatia in January 1992,
getting military training there. He...ended up as a member of the
infamous Croatian volunteer brigade "King Tomislav" in Herzegovina,
where he helped with the occupation of the barracks at Capljina (which
later became a POW camp for Serbs). After a short holiday in Croatia,
Oric crossed the Sava River, together with other volunteers, to fight
the "Chetniks" [name used for Serb soldiers by the Muslims and Croats,
meant to be derogatory] in the town of Orasje. It is in this area, the
Posavina, that the first mass murder took place – and the war hadn’t
even started. Its victims were not Croats or Muslims, but Serbs
(Sijekovac, March 27, 1992).
Volunteers like Oric formed the core of the military police of the
HVO [the paramilitary Croatian Council of Defence]and took care of
"supplies" for the elaborate system of Muslim-Croat prison camps that
was created in this area.
When Oric learned about the fighting around Srebrenica, he decided to
return to his native soil. In the interview, he claims to have served as
a "commander of a sabotage unit." He knew the area around the town like
no one else and the night before the exodus of the Muslims he already
knew that "no more than half of us would make it."
Oric left in the rearguard of the column that stretched for miles. He
was captured near Kravica and claims the Serbs took him via Bratunac to
a school gymnasium in the town of Glumina, west of Zvornik. From there,
the men were supposedly transported in lorries to the site of execution.
And yet Oric can still talk about it, just like 55-year-old Hurem
Suljic, 63-year-old Smail Hodzic and a seventeen-year-old boy named
Nedzad Avdic.
Oric’s personal history is reason enough for doubt, but the
inconsistencies in the accounts of Smail Hodzic and Hurem Suljic are
obvious as well.
Smail Hodzic: A basketball stadium becomes a soccer stadium becomes a
school
Hodzic Story 1: Hodzic first said he witnessed ambushes by the Serbs on
the road to Zvornik. He was captured and then moved to a "basketball
stadium near Bratunac" and subsequently taken to the execution spot, "a
large field not far from a forest," he declared to Alexandra Stiglmayer
in Die Woche of July 28.
Hodzic Story 2: Soon thereafter, Hodzic told Roy Gutman (in Die
Tageszeitung of August 11), that he was held at the "soccer stadium in
Nova Kasaba," from where he and others were moved to be killed,
"probably in a town called Grbavce."
Hodzic Story 3: In the third version, told on October 4 to Aida Cerkez
of Associated Press, Hodzic went through the same experience as Oric,
Suljic and Avdic. Now he was taken to "a school in Krizevci" and the
executions now took place not far from Karakaj.
Hurem Suljic: Murder in a school becomes beatings in a department store
Murders were committed at this school according to Suljic as well. On
February 16 of that year, he spoke on BBC Newsnight. Footage of a not
specified "school near Karakaj" indeed showed bullet holes, one in the
ceiling and one at the toilet. But in the elaborate coverage of Suljic
in The Washington Post of 6 November 1995, there isn't a word about
executions in a school; there is mention of beatings in a department
store near Bratunac, a location where Suljic supposedly was kept
prisoner.
Serbian woman: A school becomes a sports complex
Woman's Story# 1: Bratunac is the location of another school where
massacres supposedly took place, according to Robert Block in The
Independent, July, 1995 . A woman is quoted. She is supposedly an
inhabitant of Serbia who recently visited her brother-in-law, a soldier
in the Bosnian Serb Army: "He and his friends are quite open-hearted
about what happened over there," she said. "They are killing Muslim
soldiers. They said that only yesterday (note: Monday, July 17) they
killed one thousand six hundred, and they estimate to have killed about
four thousand in total. They said to be in great hurry, and therefore
shot most of them."
Woman's Story# 2: A few days later, Block’s colleague Louise Branson of
The Sunday Times brought the Serbian woman into the spotlight. Her
{supposed!- our note, ed.} husband, also fighting in the Bosnian Serb
Army, mentioned mass shootings with more than three thousand dead. But
not in a school in Bratunac. In a sports complex.
Up to this moment, human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch have
not been able to trace survivors of this crime. "There has to be a more
detailed investigation, in order to establish the scale of violation of
human rights that have taken place in the area of Bratunac," says their
respective report.
{Editor's note: The authors say Human Rights Watch has not been "able to
trace survivors of this crime." Thus they assume there was indeed a
crime. Likewise, Human Rights Watch, whom many accuse of being a
humanitarian arm of US covert services, speaks of establishing the
"scale of violation" which again assumes there have been violations.
Since the first question is "Did a massacre actually take place" and
since so far we have seen only that a) the Dutch UN military officers
don't believe it and b) the eye witnesses are
mutually-and-self-contradictory, given all that, why make this
assumption of guilt? Could it be that the authors are themselves
affected by the climate of anti-Serb propaganda even while honorably
reporting evidence that contradicts their preconceptions?}
Dutch military officer: "I don't believe it."
IT IS NOTICEABLE, however, that there has been little attention to the
account of Captain Schouten, although this Dutchman was the only UN
military officer in Bratunac, where he stayed for several days, at the
time the alleged bloodbath took place. Schouten, quoted in Het Parool of
July 27, 1995:
a.. "Everybody is parroting everybody, but nobody shows hard evidence. I
notice that in the Netherlands people want to proof at all costs that
genocide has been committed. (...) If executions have taken place, the
Serbs have been hiding it damn well. Thus, I don’t believe any of it.
The day after the collapse of Srebrenica, July 13, I arrived in Bratunac
and stayed there for eight days. I was able to go wherever I wanted to.
I was granted all possible assistance; nowhere was I stopped."
Milivoje Ivanisevic, a Serbian publicist who has described the events in
and around Srebrenica since 1992 in minute detail, confirms Schouten’s
story. From 6th until 16th of July, he was on the spot.
a.. "No mass executions have taken place between Srebrenica and
Bratunac," he said during a meeting with one of us in January in
Belgrade. "During the liberation of Srebrenica, five hundred Muslims
have been killed in the direct vicinity. I don’t know what happened
elsewhere. I wasn’t there and therefore couldn’t see what was going on."
Ivanisevic calls it highly unlikely that large numbers of Muslim
soldiers were deliberately killed after surrender or being captured.
Maybe excesses have taken place, due to the large size of the groups
that were taken prisoner and the sometimes small number of Serb guards,
but according to him the intention was to keep as many men alive as
possible, so they could be exchanged for Serbs that were held somewhere
else.
In his view the Muslims were even lucky to be treated the way they
were. "You should have seen the women, with all those children on their
laps, that we have provided transport for. They would have treated us
very differently." He shows pictures of an Orthodox church that was
turned into a goat pen, of destroyed Serb tombstones and of "granny Iva"
(Ivanka Mirkovic), the only Serb who remained in Srebrenica, who was
found on July 12 with her throat cut.
NO MATTER IF a few hundred were killed, as is whispered in some places
in Serbia, or seven thousand, as is feared elsewhere. If people were
executed without a trial, it is a war crime for which the guilty must be
punished.
On the other hand, the enormous distinction between the search for mass
graves of Muslims by the Western media, human rights organizations and
government officials and the lack of interest in the over one thousand
deaths of Serbs – mainly civilians – in and around Srebrenica since the
war started is appalling. In order to understand how this could happen,
we must take a look at the social and geographic factors and the recent
regional history.
The background
In 1991 the municipality of Srebrenica had 37,211 inhabitants, of which
27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent).
Bratunac had 33,575 inhabitants: 21,564 Muslims (64.2 percent) and
11,479 Serbs (34.2 percent). As farmers, the Serbs on average owned more
land than Muslims. "Ethnic mixing" only existed in the eyes of a
superficial observer; most villages and townships had distinct
ethnic-religious majorities, being either Serb or Muslim. This became a
problem just prior to the war, when tension rose and both groups started
to feel vulnerable.
Muslims no longer responded to draft into the JNA, the Yugoslav Federal
Army. Serbs were no longer called for service in the local Territorial
Defence and police reserves. As Serbs relied on protection by the JNA,
Croatian militia trained Muslim groups. SDA, the Muslim party of
[Islamist leader] Alija Izetbegovic, provided the weapons.
One of the reasons for the mounting Serb suspicion was the SDA Congress
held in December 1991. This party...decided to implement a radical
ethnic policy. The ultimate goal was the dzamahirija or Islamist State.
Muslims had to settle Eastern Bosnia in large numbers. A cordon
sanitaire took shape between Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs in the north,
while in the south a demographic and territorial connection with Sandzak
[north of Kosovo in Serbia] and Kosovo was desirable. Thousands of
Muslims from Sandzak migrated to Bosnia, and descendants of Bosnian
Muslims who had settled over a period of time in Turkey received an
appeal to return.
IN THE BEGINNING OF 1992, Serbs were shocked again as invitations were
distributed throughout the republic for a mass meeting of Muslims at
Bratunac, to be held at the first day of the Bajram, the celebratory end
of the Ramadan. The initiative for this event at the "geographic centre
of Muslims from entire Yugoslavia" came from the National Muslim Council
which openly advocated arming people and establishing a Muslim state
within the Bosnian boundaries. Armed Muslim gangs, some of them factions
of the Patriotic League – which was formed in the neighboring Vlascenica
– started to intimidate Serb inhabitants of smaller towns with Muslim
majorities on April 12, 1992. But let there be no misunderstanding, the
Muslims themselves were scared of militia from outside the region. In
this context, Ivanisevic speaks about a "balance of fear." Mutual
deterrence, whereby militia and armed civilians spy on their neighbors
or keep them hostage, quickly led to a drama.
On 20 April 1992, the day before Serbs took Vlasenica and drove the
Muslims out of the city, five Serbs died in the area of Srebrenica. They
were probably members of the Jovic militia, a group of non-local Serbs.
On May 6 (the Orthodox holiday of Saint George – Djurdjevdan), Muslims
from Potocari and Srebrenica carried out an attack on the villages of
Gniona and Bljeceva. Serbian houses were looted and burned, and part of
the population did not survive the ordeal. Leading the attack on Gniona
was Naser Oric. The following day, seven Serbs died in an ambush at
Osmace.
On May 8, judge Goran Zekic, Member of Parliament and leader of the
Srebrenica SDS (the Serb nationalist party), was lured into an ambush
and killed. Almost all of sixteen hundred Serbs living in the city
decided to leave after this incident. In the night of May 8, they left
in large numbers towards Bratunac, where they were called "kukavice"
(cowards). Cerska, Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde became a refuge for
thousands of Muslims who were chased away by Serb offensives, but Serbs
were also victims of ethnic cleansing.
At first, between May 1992 and April 1993, all towns with a Serbian
majority were attacked. Then towns with a Serbian minority were
surrounded by Muslim towns, and eventually whole areas with a dense Serb
population – Podravanja, Kravica and Skelani – were targeted. The
Bosnian Serb weekly Javnost reported on 23 December 1995, that in the
entire Podrinje – the area on Bosnia’s side of the Drina River between
Zvornik in the north and Visegrad in the south – 192 villages were
burned, 2800 Serbs were killed and six thousand injured. According to
Ivanisevic, more than a hundred towns, villages and hamlets in the area
of Milici-Srebrenica-Bratunac-Skelani alone were affected.
These crimes [against Serbian civilians] are still waiting for
independent investigation, although they have been confirmed by
returning Dutch-UN military personnel.
a.. "Naser Oric gained control over large parts of Bosnia through
scorched-earth tactics. Because of this, Karremans is right about it,
large massacres of the Serb population were committed. The Netherlands
in return is asking for proof. It is asking for evidence because, of
course, there are no ‘funniest home videotapes’ showing raped women and
murdered men. But these things did happen!" ( Lieutenant Jasper
Verplanke of the Korps Commandotroepen [the Dutch equivalent of the
Green Berets] writing in the Dutch daily Nieuwsblad van het Noorden of
17 August 1995)
AFTER THE UN declared Srebrenica a ‘safe haven’ in April 1993, the
attacks continued. Speaking about funniest home videos: in February
1994, Naser Oric proudly showed a videotape of a burned town and
decapitated bodies of Serbs to John Pomfret of The Washington Post. The
fact that first the Canadian, and later the Dutch UN contingents could
not prevent these kind of actions because they failed to implement the
agreed-on disarmament of Muslim forces, testifies in itself to the
failure of the "safe area" concept.
"The systematic attacks of Muslim fighters against Bosnian Serb targets
around the enclave raised the tension in the area of Srebrenica and were
used by the Serbs as a justification for their offensive against the
enclave," Secretary of State Voorhoeve reported to the Dutch parliament.
The "safe areas" depended too much on cooperation of the warring
factions – something that was widely recognized after the collapse of
Srebrenica but ignored before this event.
There are various explanations for the attack on the enclave. Serbian
bloodthirstiness and desire for ethnic purity is among one of them, but
not the most probable. The Pentagon considered it to be an act of
revenge for the failed spring offensive by Muslims around Sarajevo. The
Podrinje Brigade of the [Muslim] Second Corps was ordered to break out
to the Han Pijesak-Vlasenica road and from there march to Srebrenica;
the military over there was attempting to connect itself to Zepa. The
Serbs on their part pointed out the fact that since the coming of the UN
peace force, more than a hundred of their civilians and soldiers had
been killed in raids by Muslim commandos. In May and June 1995 alone,
the Muslims had supposedly organized ten of these missions, even
penetrating the area close to Bratunac.
a.. "The goal of this action is to eliminate terrorists and is not
focussed on civilians, or UN-troops," Mladic wrote to the British UN
commander, General Rupert Smith, during the attack on Srebrenica. Serb
soldiers, most of them living in this area, carried lists with hundreds
of Muslims suspected to have committed war crimes. The arrests of Muslim
men partly were of a selective character. "The Serbs knew the men,"
according to a Dutch UN driver. "They had complete lists and photos.
They pointed them amidst a crowd."
The attack was, according to Mladic, not primarily designed to take
the entire enclave. That decision was made after a large number of
Muslim fighters decided to give up the Defence and to attempt an
extremely risky outbreak in the night of July 10 to Tuzla. "Muslims fled
in large numbers the night before the attack," said the Dutch Army
representative in Washington, Colonel G. van Oppen, in the Fries Dagblad
of 13 October 1995: "The question of why this happened was never asked
in the Netherlands."
But Michael Evans of The Times already knew this on July 13 when he
reported, referring to "Western intelligence sources," that Muslim
commanders had left the city after a provocation from their side, the
night before the first Serb tanks entered the scene. "Prior to the Serb
advance the Muslims had fired upon Serb units along the main road to the
South. (...) The apparent decision made by the Muslims to leave the city
gave the Serbs an unexpected opportunity to seize Srebrenica."
THE ORDER OF EVENTS brings to mind the situation of Gorazde in April
1994. A study made by US Colonel John Sray, former head of UNPROFOR’s
intelligence service in Sarajevo, reveals what happened:
a.. "Two British observers were located at an observation post behind
Muslim lines. Various attacks by the Serbs were effectively stopped and
the position could be defended for a long period. Then the Muslims
realized that the British observers were positioned right behind them.
During the next Serb attack the Muslims retreated unexpectedly and for
no reason. Their only objective was to expose the observers to an attack
of the confused Serbs. Serb bullets killed one British soldier and
wounded the other, but responsibility for this lies in the hands of the
Bosnian Muslims, who hoped to provoke a revenge strike by NATO as a
punishment for the killing of a neutral observer."
(John Sray in Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware)
The trap failed in Gorazde, but in Srebrenica no half-measures were
taken.
Apart from the flight of the Muslim troops in the night prior to the
attack, there are many more indications that the Muslim leadership
abandoned the enclave on purpose. The Defence was already weakened
because of the fact that best troops had been moved out to Tuzla,
Sarajevo and Mt. Treskavica, long before the month of July, according to
a commander of a Bosnian Serb special unit. Naser Oric himself, who had
sworn never to allow Srebrenica to become Serb as long as he was in
charge, was no longer present. "His whereabouts during the months prior
to the collapse of Srebrenica are quite a mystery," according to Charles
Lane in De Volkskrant of 12 August 1995. But Ivanisevic argues that
Oric, together with 2500 of his best troops, was called on duty in April
and May of 1995 to an area south of Sarajevo in order to take part in
the planned Muslim offensive. Estimates of the number of armed personnel
that stayed behind mention six to ten thousand, comprising 3000-4000
regular Army recruits. The Serbs were able to counter this with 3,500
men, all from this region, far better equipped but only accompanied by
four outdated tanks. Besides, not more than a few hundred men took part
in the attack on the city itself. The difference in capabilities of the
two sides seems to underline the opportunistic nature of the Serb
offensive. It is also important to take into consideration that the
Muslims had suffered heavy losses during supply runs between Srebrenica
and Zepa in April, May and June, which could have cast doubts on chances
to defend the city in the long run. The area hardly has any natural
resources, and is strategically of far less significance than Gorazde,
for example.
Eventually, while the "Dayton" agreement was in preparation, the Bosnian
government [Izetbegovic] accepted the concept of exchanging territory:
Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde for the Serb Sarajevo. Bosnian Minister of
foreign affairs Muhammad Sacirbey had already informed Secretary of
State Voorhoeve about this option during talks held in May (see De
Volkskrant of 1 November 1995). The deal came as a blessing for the
Americans, so close to the start of an election campaign. The fiercely
criticized UN peace force very much wanted to abandon the "safe havens"
as well. Srebrenica became the turning point from a military, political
and publicity perspective. Only the retreat of the peacekeepers made it
possible for NATO to start with the air strikes in September. The wave
of horror stories about mass executions overshadowed the Croatian terror
in the Krajina and no word got out about the Muslim-Croatian crimes in
cities like Glamoc, Grahovo and Sanski Most... "
WHAT REMAINS unanswered is the amount of Muslim men missing, who
possibly died [in action] or were possibly killed. According to Miroslav
Deronjic, official of the new municipality Srebrenica-Skelani, that
number is two thousand; according to Amnesty International – four
thousand; according to the International Red Cross, between seven and
eight thousand; and Muslim sources state eight to twelve thousand. Each
number represents an enormous tragedy in itself, but the results are
also the product of a hypothetical calculation method. The size of the
population before the fall of Srebrenica cannot be known beyond
reasonable doubt.
Manipulation with numbers was turned into an art during the Bosnian war,
and it is fair to assume that this also happened in Srebrenica....
On July 14, the ICRC [Red Cross] counted 23,000 refugees who were taken
by bus to Tuzla, more than half of them children. This group was later
joined by thousands of Muslim men who arrived on foot. In total the
World Health Organization and the Bosnian government have registered
35,632 refugees from Srebrenica up to this moment. An unknown number of
men have not had themselves registered and have been absorbed, as
announced by the Bosnian Army, in the 28th division. Others (1,000?
2,000?) have fled to Zepa and Serbia.
MORE THAN TEN THOUSAND persons were registered as missing. "Conclusions
about the number of missing people based on this figure has to be done
with caution," UN inspector Tadeusz Mazowiecki wrote, "because there may
have been double counts in the missing person notices and because
resolved cases are not always reported to the Red Cross." It is also
possible that names have been forged in an attempt to increase the
number of missing people, or in an attempt to escape prosecution for war
crimes. Mazowiecki’s successor, Elisabeth Rehn, came to the number of
8,000 people whose fate was unknown: five thousand men of military age
who left the enclave before the fall, and three thousand men who were
separated from their families. Rehn agreed with Mazowiecki, who
suspected on the basis of "strong indications" that the missing Muslims
had been murdered. During her visit of locations near Srebrenica in
January of this year, she seemed to tone down her initial comments a
little bit. She was still looking for evidence.
{Editor's Note: The UN bureaucrat accuses the Serbian forces of murder
despite the denials of UN military officers on the scene during the
fighting. Having made the accusation, the accuser goes "looking for
evidence!}
Miroslav Deronjic also gave his version in a report about the events:
"According to intelligence of the Army of Republika Srpska, around six
thousand Muslim conscripts have not joined the convoys for evacuation,
but instead continued armed resistance, or tried to force an outbreak
through the Serb lines of Defence in the direction of Srebrenica –
Kravica – Konjevic Polje – Cerska – Crni Vrh – Tuzla. Skirmishes with
this group (...) have continued for the next twenty days in the district
of Konjevic Polje – Cerska – Udrica. A large number of Muslim fighters
were killed during the attempt to break through the lines of Defence of
Bratunac and Zvornik, or during clashes between their own competing
factions. Part of the fighters surrendered – a small number, two hundred
– and they have been transferred as prisoners of war to the military
prison of Bjeljina. The larger part, around four thousand, reached the
territory of the municipality of Tuzla. It is impossible to give exact
estimates of the number of Muslim soldiers that died, because the
fighting took place over a large area and in different directions."
That Muslims fought each other, as Deronjic argues, cannot be found in
the reports of Mazowiecki, Rehn and Human Rights Watch, but is known
from statements made by the Dutch UN military personnel.
{This is another indication of the anti-Serb bias of the UN bureaucracy
and Human Rights Watch, as opposed to the UN troops!}
At least on two occasions Muslims have clashed with each other.
According to general Couzy, the issue was a dispute about the question
if the enclave should be defended or abandoned. Yugoslav agency Tanjug
already reported in February last year about a "heavy conflict and
fighting" in the vicinity of the town called Slap, between Muslims who
wanted to leave to Macedonia via Serbia and Oric’s men, who controlled
the Drina crossings in the hamlet of Luka. Later, unconfirmed reports
mentioned a rivaling "modest" military unit under command of Osman
Suljic. In July, Muslims from Srebrenica who wanted to surrender
apparently received a harsh treatment by hard-liners under command of
Zulfo Tursun, Ejub Golic and Nezir Mandzic. Such a fight, according to
Deronjic, had taken place just after the fall of the enclave at Bokcin
Potok. A team of the Dutch NOS-news discovered the corpses of tens of
victims on 3 February.
NOW, CAN WE, looking at everything, say anything about the number of
missing people with certainty? The latest number of 7,000, picked by the
American State Department, seems to be far too high for the time being,
but that the fate of many Muslims who fled is uncertain is a fact. Have
they been killed on orders given from the top, or in acts of individual
revenge? Are hundreds, maybe thousands of Muslims being held by the
Bosnian Serbs and assigned to forced labor, as some refugees in Tuzla
assume or at least hope? It is about time that an independent
institution investigates suspected mass graves, and interrogates
witnesses who might have been accomplices to mass murder (like the
Bosnian Serb soldier Drazen Erdemovic, arrested last week). Only then
there will be clarity about the real events and the actual magnitude of
the tragedy in Srebrenica.
{Editor's note: even after all the evidence they have provided, the
authors still use language that assumes the credibility of the charges
against the Bosnian Serbs. Thus they speak of the need to look for
"suspected mass graves." In fact, as George Pumphrey shows in
Srebrenica: Three years later and still waiting , the NATO forces have
been looking for "suspected mass graves" since 1995 with no result.
Perhaps more damning, The US claimed to have satellite photos of mass
graves around Srebrenica, but the photos somehow got lost.}
René Grémaux is anthropologist; Abe de Vries was at the time this
article was written a history student at the University of Groningen,
Netherlands. He is now a reporter for the Dutch paper, 'Trouw'.
Translated for Emperors-Clothes by 'TARGETS' , the Independent
International Monthly Newspaper (Printed on paper, in Dutch).
For subscription or sample copy e-mail: redactie@...
Further reading...
Srebrenica: Three years later and still waiting at
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/pumphrey/Srebrenica.html
www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes]
------------------------------------------------------------------
Srebrenica: 3 Years Later, And Still Searching
By George Pumphrey
www.emperors-clothes.com
a.. [Note: this article argues that the Srebrenica massacre was a
fiction told to isolate the the Bosnian Serb Army and justify NATO
attacks. At the end you'll find links to other articles which expose
NATO genocide stories used to justify the recent bombing of Yugoslavia.]
The third anniversary of the takeover of Srebrenica by Bosnian-Serb
troops on July 11, 1995 has come and gone. The significance of this
takeover determined not only the outcome of the Bosnian civil war, but
reached far beyond the Balkans.
It was the events around Srebrenica, and the subsequent indictments
against the Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic and the
Bosnian Serb military Commander, Radko Mladic on charges of genocide and
crimes against humanity, that changed the political constellation at the
negotiation table at Dayton. With its leadership under indictment, the
Bosnian Serb side had to content itself with being represented by
Slobodan Milosevic, president of a, by then, foreign state.
The fact alone of an international tribunal being given jurisdiction
over people and events taking place thousands of miles from the contexts
of those sitting in judgement, without an existing set of legal norms
creates already a new basis for the concept of "justice." Srebrenica has
been the main source of this tribunal's credibility and its raison
d'être.
As in the past two years, this year also the war crimes tribunal has
sent out teams to search for mass graves containing the remains of the
8,000 Muslim soldiers that are widely believed to have been massacred in
the aftermath of the takeover. But a closer look at the background of
the Tribunal’s search sheds a bit of light on the shadowy side of the
Tribunal's work.
The New York Times published an article written by one of its
correspondents, Mike O’Connor, (republished in the International Herald
Tribune May 14, 1998) entitled "Mass Graves in Bosnia Bolster War-Crimes
Cases." This article is very helpful in examining the work of the
Tribunal in The Hague, which is why it will be extensively quoted.
a.. Deep in a remote rural stretch of Bosnia, war-crimes investigators
have found a tangle of buried bodies that they say is the remains of
some of the 7,500 Muslim men that were hidden to try to thwart the
prosecution of Bosnian Serb leaders for genocide. (...)
Exhumations in 1996 recovered 460 bodies, but 7,500 others were still
missing from the town of Srebrenica. Finding the others has been the
goal of war-crimes investigators for more than two years.
(...) The discovery Tuesday - and the thousands of bodies that
investigators expect to find nearby - will bolster the cases against 2
Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the
investigators say. Both have been indicted for genocide by the tribunal
in The Hague.
Investigators for the tribunal spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
Satellites that can locate bodies decomposing underground, according to
foreign military officers working with the tribunal, aided the search.
Witnesses to the reburial also offered testimony, tribunal officials
said.
The first remains were uncovered Tuesday morning. Investigators unfurled
a thin silvery sheet to protect their find from the sun. Next to it,
small orange flags had been stuck in the ground to mark pieces of
evidence such as bits of clothing or shell casings.
Tuesday evening, according to a tribunal official, a layer of tangled
bodies across an areas of 200 ft² (18 m²) had been exposed. The bones
were so intertwined, the official said, that it was not possible to
exhume any of them Tuesday.
Proving that the soil around the bodies came from the original mass
graves, or that shell casings found here match those found at execution
sites, will establish the connection they are looking for, investigators
said.
When the original sites were inspected in 1996, investigators suspected
most of the bodies had been moved. Doubts were cast on American
military's satellite surveillance, with some investigators charging at
the time that slipshod monitoring had allowed Bosnian Serb authorities
to move the bodies undetected.
Now, however, tribunal officials say the bodies were moved in October
1995, before the pinpoint satellite surveillance was requested by the
tribunal. Once the original sites were discovered to have been tampered
with, American satellite photographs of the region were reviewed and
were found to show trucks and earth-moving equipment at the original
burial sites, according to tribunal officials.
Anonymous investigators say that the find "will bolster the cases
against [the] two Bosnian Serb leaders." The question should be raised:
on what basis did the tribunal make its charges of no less than
"genocide," if they now have to frantically run around to scrape up
enough bodies to make their indictment plausible? If they now have to
try to "prove that the soil around the bodies came from the original
mass graves," does it mean that what they had considered to be "the
original mass graves" were either empty or with too few bodies to
justify the indictments? Were Karadzic and Mladic charged according to
the principle: "Indict now. Look for evidence of a crime later"? "Charge
the Serbs! If you don't know what for, they do" seems to be the modus
operandi in The Hague.
But it was this widely publicized "genocide" indictment that has caused
irreparable damage to the political and social constellation in this
region of Europe, creating also a new set of political factors in the
world. Some of them are:
a.. the discrediting of the United Nations for having supposedly allowed
a "genocide" to take place on territory under its authority;
a.. promoting NATO as the new "peace keeping" force;
a.. making great strides to create public acceptance for
inquisitorial, McCarthyist standards both in "justice" and "journalism"
on both national and international levels;
a.. the definition of a new "moral" standard based on "human"
rights, determined by membership in particular "ethnic" groups with
rights to be respected and all others without rights worthy of respect;
a.. growing international acceptance of the concept of a people
being classified per se as "evil."
This has all been made possible through a massive propaganda
campaign colporteuring a - yet to be proven - "genocide," as if it were
a certitude. Politicians have justified and based momentous decisions
upon the supposition that the massacre is fact, decisions determining
the welfare of the peoples of this region and beyond.
The media bases each succeeding generation of falsification on preceding
generations of unproven factors. Both are so often repeated as a
certainty, that the public does not even demand substantiating evidence.
O'Conner writes that "7,500 Muslim men were hidden to try to thwart the
prosecution of Bosnian Serb leaders for genocide. ‘Their’ bodies were
moved in October 1995, before the pinpoint satellite surveillance was
requested by the tribunal." These and other allegations are in gross
contradiction to other information published in the press.
1) The Numbers game:
First of all, the number 8,000 most often and most consistently given in
the press is itself the first falsification. The prosecution has never
proven that 8,000 Muslims were killed. It is indicative to note how the
number 8,000 came into circulation.
The International Committee of the Red Cross published a press statement
Sept. 13, 1995 in which it was stated:
a.. "The ICRC's head of operations for Western Europe, Angelo
Gnaedinger, visited Pale and Belgrade from 2 to 7 September to obtain
information from the Bosnian Serb authorities about the 3,000 persons
from Srebrenica whom witnesses say were arrested by Bosnian Serb forces.
The ICRC has asked for access as soon as possible to all those arrested
(so far it has been able to visit only about 200 detainees), and for
details of any deaths. The ICRC has also approached the
Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities seeking information on some 5,000
individuals who fled Srebrenica, some of whom reached central Bosnia."
Sept. 15, 1995 in the New York Times these numbers were juggled to make:
a.. About 8,000 Muslims are missing from Srebrenica, the first of two
United Nations-designated 'safe areas' overrun by Bosnian Serb troops in
July, the Red Cross said today. (...) Among the missing were 3,000,
mostly men, who were seen being arrested by Serbs. After the collapse of
Srebrenica, the Red Cross collected 10,000 names of missing people, said
Jessica Barry, a spokeswoman. In addition to those arrested, about 5,000
'have simply disappeared,' she said.
Aside from simply adding the 3,000 Muslim men found still in Srebrenica
(that the Serbs then took as prisoners of war) and the 5,000 Muslim men,
(reported by the International Red Cross to have left Srebrenica before
the arrival of Bosnian Serb forces) to inflate the figures - and
therefore the gravity of the accusation - they make no mention of the
fact that by mid-September 1995 a sizable portion of the group of 5,000
had already reached Muslim territory and safety. The fact that the Red
Cross was asking the Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities for information
about the number of the 5,000 (the original figure) - "some of whom [had
already] reached central Bosnia" - has completely disappeared from the
news. The entire 5,000 are still today - 3 years later - being counted
as "missing."
The Red Cross report was lacking the objectivity that one would hope for
from a non-partisan organization. Its very off-hand "some of whom
reached central Bosnia" gives the impression of only a handful could be
accounted for by mid-September. But again the press gave another
picture:
a.. "Some 3,000 to 4,000 Bosnian Muslims who were considered by UN
officials to be missing after the fall of Srebrenica have made their way
through enemy lines to Bosnian government territory. The group, which
included wounded refugees, sneaked past Serb lines under fire and
crossed some 30 miles through forests to safety."
O'Connor's NY Times colleague Chris Hedges published this information in
the journal within a week of the takeover of Srebrenica (July 18, 1995).
Similar news appeared in other journals at the time. August 2, 1995 the
Times of London published the following:
a.. Thousands of the "missing" Bosnian Muslim soldiers from Srebrenica
who have been at the centre of reports of possible mass executions by
the Serbs, are believed to be safe to the northeast of Tuzla.
Monitoring the safe escape of Muslim soldiers and civilians from the
captured enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa has proved a nightmare for the
United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. For the
first time yesterday, however, the Red Cross in Geneva said it had heard
from sources in Bosnia that up to 2,000 Bosnian Government troops were
in an area north of Tuzla.
They had made their way there from Srebrenica "without their families
being informed," a spokesman said, adding that it had not been possible
to verify the reports because the Bosnian Government refused to allow
the Red Cross into the area.
According to the Washington Post, "The men set off at dawn on Tuesday,
July 11, in two columns that stretched back seven or eight miles." Even
if the Red Cross did not know that they left Srebrenica in 2 columns,
they at least knew that 2,000 were safe. And UN officials knew of the 3,
- 4,000 that had arrived earlier. Yet the communiqué given in September
failed to report that the 5,000 that "simply disappeared," simply
disappeared back into the ranks of the Bosnian military.
The Red Cross must have been aware that a "Big Lie" campaign was
launched around the issue of Srebrenica. By withholding and understating
important information, the Red Cross was, in effect, a party to the
conflict. It is unlikely that correspondents, such as Mike O'Connor, and
their editors are unaware of the fallacious content of the reports they
publish. The pattern of conformity in this disinformation campaign is,
to say the least, astonishing.
A little more than a week after Srebrenica, Zepa, a second Moslem
enclave (and UN Safe Area) was taken by Bosnian Serb forces. Hundreds of
the "missing" soldiers from Srebrenica were among the defenders of Zepa
in the last days of fighting. As the New York Times recounts:
a.. "The wounded troops were left behind, and when the Bosnian Serbs
overran the town on Tuesday, the wounded were taken to Sarajevo for
treatment at Kosevo Hospital. Many of them had begun their journey in
Srebrenica, and fled into the hills when that 'safe area' fell to the
Bosnian Serbs on July 11. These men did not make it to Tuzla, where most
of the refugees ended up, but became the defenders of Zepa instead.
'Some 350 of us managed to fight our way out of Srebrenica and make it
into Zepa,' said Sadik Ahmetovic, one of 151 people evacuated to
Sarajevo for treatment today. (...) They said they had not been
mistreated by their Serb captors."
(The Muslim defenders of Zepa left their wounded behind as they ran into
the hills. It is also well known that the 5,000 Muslim soldiers, who
left Srebrenica before Serbian troops took over, left their women and
children behind. Obviously the Muslim soldiers must not have been too
worried about their women, children and wounded comrades falling into
the hands of their Serbian countrymen. The Serbian forces, generally
portrayed as comparable to Nazis, had the wounded members of the Muslim
forces evacuated to their Muslim hospital.)
The London Times article, quoted above mentions that 2,000 Srebrenica
soldiers made their way to the north of Tuzla "without their families
being informed". The question is, when, if ever, were the families
informed. Other than the few articles that took notice of their
resurrection from the dead, the public at large was never informed that
they, in fact were never massacred. On the contrary.
To maintain the myth of a gigantic massacre, is not only necessary to
create the illusion of having proof that it did happen – thus the
frantic searches for mass graves - but also to suppress the proof that
it did not take place - which means prohibit that too many of the
prisoners of war return "from the dead."
The figure of 3,000, given by the Red Cross, listed as having been
arrested by Bosnian Serb forces, which is counted into the media's 8,000
"massacred," should also be taken with a grain of salt. One learns -
again through isolated articles - that they too not only were not
massacred, but that the Red Cross, the United Nations, and a host of
"western" governments around the world all were well aware of this fact.
January 17, 1996, the Manchester "Guardian" published an article
concerning one group of the former Muslim prisoners of war from
Srebrenica and Zepa, who, liberated from the prison camp at Sljivovica -
in Serbia, were flown directly abroad to Dublin:
a.. "Hundreds of Bosnian Muslim prisoners are still being held at two
secret camps within neighboring Serbia, according to a group of men
evacuated by the Red Cross to a Dublin hospital from one camp - at
Sljivovica. (...) A group of 24 men was flown to Ireland just before
Christmas (...). But some 800 others remain incarcerated in Sljivovica
and at another camp near Mitrovo Polje, just three days before the
agreed date for the release of all detainees under the Dayton peace
agreement on Bosnia (...). The Red Cross in Belgrade has been
negotiating for several weeks to have the men released and given
sanctuary in third countries. A spokeswoman said most were bound for the
United States or Australia, with others due to be sent to Italy,
Belgium, Sweden, France and Ireland. (...) Since late August, the Red
Cross has made fortnightly visits from its Belgrade field office. (...)
Teams from the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague have been in Dublin to
question and take evidence from the men."
Why would war prisoners, whose normal first wish would be to reunite
with their families and restart their interrupted lives in peace, be
rushed off to Dublin, with "papers to remain in Ireland?" And this at a
time where most industrialized countries are closing their borders to
refugees! Were their families informed? Could it be that they too - in a
large enough group - could become living proof of the fallacy of a huge
Srebrenica "massacre" before the 1996 fall elections?
US decided to accept two hundred and fourteen Bosniaks who, after the
fall of Srebrenica and Zepa, had been detained in Serbian camps and give
them refugee status. "It is horrible that those people besides being
captured during the bloodshed in Srebrenica had to spend at least
another two months in Serbian detention camps under dreadful
conditions," said State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. Burns
emphasized that at least 800 men out of 80,000 people who have been
expelled from their homes after the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa had been
taken to Serbia.
This is how the US government justified their aid in secretly skirting
the men out of the country. What is known is that neither the Red Cross
(which has been visiting the prisoners since August), the Tribunal, (in
its frantic search for evidence for the "genocide" in Srebrenica and to
have someone arrest the Bosnian Serb leaders) nor the American
government have made mention since August 95 of these men being in
custody, as war prisoners. Why? Are they trying to conceal evidence
exonerating the Bosnian Serbian forces of the charge of "genocide" in
connection with alleged mass executions?
2) The vanishing corpses:
Like the juggling of the numbers of "missing" and their whereabouts,
excuses had to be found for the lack of corpses.
In August 1995, during a Security Council meeting, the US delegation to
the United Nations accused the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs of having
committed wide-scale atrocities against Muslim civilians. With what
amounts to a satellite photo "peep show," Madeleine Albright had an
excuse already prepared for the lack of evidence to support her charges.
The NY Times in referring back to that session of the UN Security
Council wrote:
a.. "On Aug. 10, [1995] the chief United States delegate to the United
Nations, Madeleine K. Albright, showed selected photos of the two sites
to a closed session of the United Nations Security Council. She then
said, 'We will keep watching to see if the Bosnian Serbs try to erase
the evidence of what they have done.'"
One of the earlier versions was the vanishing corpses through a
corrosive agent. In the same article, the NY Times adds:
a.. "American officials said today that they suspect Bosnian Serb
soldiers may have tried to destroy evidence that they killed thousands
of Muslim men seized in and around the town of Srebrenica in July. The
Serbs are suspected of pouring corrosive chemicals on the bodies and
scattering corpses that had been buried in mass graves, the officials
said. The suspicions first arose in early August, after Central
Intelligence Agency experts analyzed pictures of the area taken in July
by reconnaissance satellites and U-2 planes."
With the absence of traces of a corrosive substance, when it comes time
to dig up the "evidence," the entire legend falls flat. Another
explanation had to be found: the bodies were simply dug up and moved
someplace else. This excuse has its advantages: With the needle in the
haystack search for "mass graves," the tribunal could keep the public at
bay for quite a while. But also disadvantages: How do you remove
thousands of buried, decomposing bodies without being seen by the
"watchful eye" of Madeleine Albright's satellites? Undismayed by this
factual detail, the Tribunal and media continue their course.
In Nov. 1995 the Dutch Minister of Defense, Joris Voorhove, accused the
Serbs of "trying hastily to destroy the evidence of the massacre they
committed against thousands of Bosniaks around Srebrenica." Citing
"intelligence services" as his source, he claimed in a TV interview,
that "these days Serbs have been exhuming the corpses from the mass
graves in order to remove the evidence of their crimes."
Approaching the day of reckoning and desperate for more concrete
evidence of the massacre, Richard Goldstone, the tribunal's chief
prosecutor, wrote a letter to the US Embassy in the Hague in Nov. 95, to
pressure the US government to come forward with the evidence it
evidently had promised. The letter was quoted in the Washington Post:
a.. "Judge [Goldstone] called the 'quality and timeliness' of
intelligence provided by the United States 'disappointing.' He
complained about the failure to hand over spy photos that he said could
help the United Nations-sponsored tribunal identify mass graves that
appeared after the fall of Srebrenica in July. The judge also complained
that much of the information provided by the United States so far was
based on 'open-source material' not relevant to the original requests.
He submitted an additional 25 questions to Washington, including a
request for information about a transcript of a conversation between
General Mladic and Yugoslav Army commanders who report directly to
President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia."
[The reference to "open-source material," that the US government
furnished the tribunal as "evidence," simply means that the CIA uses
media reports, some of which are obviously its own propaganda plants.]
The Clinton Administration made public 3 of the 8 photos shown the
Security Council. One of these 3 showed "disturbed soil." "According to
one American official who has seen the photographs, one shows hundreds
and perhaps thousands of Muslim men and boys in a field near a soccer
stadium about 5 miles north of Srebrenica. Another photo taken several
days later shows a large area of freshly dug earth, consistent with the
appearance of known mass graves, near the stadium, which is empty."
One of the three photos reproduced in several newspapers showed two
buildings, a main and subordinate road. Two light colored patches
(indicated with arrows) in the middle of what could be a field with a
parallel double-lined path (tire tracks?) leading from the main road to
each of the light areas. The photo is entitled: "Possible Mass Graves;
Kasaba/Konjevic Polje Area, Bosnia; unclassified Jul. 95." In the lower
left corner the explanation of the arrows: "Recently disturbed earth."
As a NY Times journalist complained, the US government refused "to let
reporters see the satellite photographs (...) which were said to include
pictures of people crowded into a soccer field. American officials said
the satellite photographs were classified, although Ms. Albright showed
them to the other 14 members of the Security Council." This striptease
sort of procedure, in itself, should provoke questions concerning the
credibility of these photos portraying what we are told that they are
supposed to show.
a.. Where are other more conclusive photos showing people in the process
of being shot, dead bodies being removed, open pits being - or already -
filled with bodies or being covered,...?
a.. How closely were diplomats of the Security Council able to
examine (for authenticity, manipulation, falsification) the photos? Were
they forced to appraise the photos quickly, or were they allowed to keep
copies of the photos?
a.. Why are photos purported to be the most important - those
showing "Muslim men and boys," - hidden from the public? Do they
actually show what the US administration claim that they show?
a.. How does the US secret service discern the difference between
"hundreds and perhaps thousands of Muslim men and boys" from the same
number of Serb or Croatian males - and that from outer space? The
Security Council members apparently saw something different on these
photos: A NY Times journalist following the presentation to the Security
Council reports: "The photographs showed a stretch of fields at Novo
Kasaba, near Srebrenica, where Bosnian Muslim families were apparently
herded together." A mere detail? Which is the true story? The version
"Muslim men and boys" given by the CIA official the day before? Or the
one of "Bosnian Muslim families" the day after members of the Security
Council viewed the pictures? Had they realized that they were viewing
mainly women and children, (perhaps being "herded together" to prepare
to be taken by bus to Tuzla)? Is this not a first indication that
perhaps the satellite photos will not stand up under independent
appraisal? Could this embarrassing discrepancy be the main reason why
the satellite photos were made inaccessible to the public?
a.. Where is the original photo taken by the reconnaissance
aircraft? Why was the original photo not shown to the Security Council?
The labeling that accompanied the published photo: "Possible Mass
Graves" was added after the photo was taken, meaning that the built-in
time and geographical settings from reconnaissance cameras, were edited
out of the picture and arrows and other written interpretations of what
one is supposed to see edited onto the photo. Left to make ones' own
interpretations the same photo could have been interpreted to show
something having nothing to do with warfare in the Balkans. How does one
know that the photo was taken near Srebrenica, or at the time that it is
claimed to have been taken - and not at some other time in some other
part of the world?
a.. Could it be that the US government knows that the origin of this
"disturbed soil" has nothing to do with "Mass Graves"? Could this be the
reason why the photo is entitled: "Possible Mass Graves"? Would this not
also explain why the State Department and CIA found it necessary to
launch rumors that Serbs had allegedly removed the thousands of bodies
that were supposed to have been buried under this "disturbed soil" -
albeit without any satellite photos to back up this new rumor?
a.. The assumption that several days after having seen a full soccer
field, an empty one would signify that those formerly seen there had
been executed, is so farfetched, that it could be dismissed as crazy.
How many soccer stadiums remain filled overnight, or days at a time? If
those seen had in fact been Muslims captured, why would the first
assumption not have been that they had been taken to a prisoner of war
camp? This type of explanation says more about the ethnic prejudices of
the author than it does about those of Bosnian Serb armed forces.
In the Bible, faith is defined as "the substance of things hoped
for, the evidence of things not seen." This seems a very appropriate
description of the Tribunal's handling of the US satellite and U-2
"evidence." It was on the basis of these photos that the Security
Council and tribunal accused the Serbian leadership of having committed
a massacre. The Tribunal's indictments against Karadzic and Mladic were
primarily based on faith in the journalists' faith in the Security
Council's faith in the CIA and its spy photos. Neither the press nor the
tribunal were given access to all of the photos, yet both take it for
granted that the Bosnian leaders are "guilty as charged."
But once the indictment handed down, the Bosnian Serb leaders shut out
of negotiations and the Serbian President Milosevic under effective
threat (that he too could suffer the fate of his Bosnian Serb Brethren),
the Clinton Administration showed little interest in helping "further
the cause of justice."
The White House spokesman, Michael D. McCurry, and other US officials
responded to Goldstone's complaints by saying:
a.. "There are certain types of intelligence information that our
Government cannot share with the international community." The NY Times
article continues: "Mr. McCurry cited 'national security reasons' as the
reason the United States would withhold some evidence, and criticized
the complaints by the prosecutor, Judge Richard Goldstone, as
'unfortunate.' (...) In defending their level of cooperation with the
tribunal, Administration officials insisted that Judge Goldstone is
getting most of his data from the United States and there would be no
war crimes tribunal if not for the United States."
With this statement these "administration officials" confirmed what
Serbs and independent observers have suspected from the beginning: that
the tribunal is simply being manipulated by the US to serve its own
foreign policy interests, and that its procedures have really as little
to do with "rule of law" standards as its goals, with doing "justice."
It has been reported that in the New York central headquarters of the
UN, all files relevant to Srebrenica have been classified "secret" for
the next 30 - 50 years and are not even available for the tribunal. This
decision was taken at the demand of the permanent members of the
Security Council, the USA, France and Great Britain, in reference to
their protection of the secrecy of government documents.
With what right does the US classify evidence that it claims to have,
concerning what is often referred to as "the worst atrocities committed
in Europe since WW-II?" One could understand the US government
withholding evidence of war crimes committed by US troops. But what
justification does the US have for classifying a "national security
secret," crimes committed by those designated as "enemy forces?" Is the
US administration hiding the proof of a crime or proof that it has no
proof of a crime? Most disturbing of all is that hardly a<br/><br/>(Message over 64 KB, truncated)
Profesorici Savki Dabcevic Kucar
Bivsoj predsjednici SK u Hrvatskoj
Nekad postovana profesorice,
Iz skrinjice mojih misli, "izvadio" sam ovo pismo...
Diplomirao sam n Ekonomskom fakultetu u Zagrebu,l968. Srecom prije
tog vaseg "zagrebackog proljeca". Nisam bio doslovno "zatucan" vasim
predavanjima, ali i ja sam bio jedan od one vecine koji vas je cijenio.
Sta je ostalo od ideologije koju ste nam zdusno predavali, i nasim
idealima, koji su postali stvarnost, u onoj divnoj zemlji Jugoslaviji,
izgradjenoj u "bratsvu-jedinstvu", i dobrovoljnim radom moje i drugih
generacija ? !
Nisam imao "knjizicu", ali sam ponosan sto sam bio i ostao "tek"
jugoslaven.
Pitate li se jos kako je narodu, radniku, "sretno zivjeti u bogatoj
Hrvatskoj" . Slogan s kojim ste se i vi kandidirali za predsjednicu
drzavice Hrvatske. Vi vjerojatno dobro zivite, kao i svi bivsi salonski
komunisti. Ali, na koncu, svakome ono sto je zasluzio ! Tako i vi,
mrtvi ste, politicki, i kod vasih politickih protivnika a i svakog
postenog jugoslavena, radnika, komuniste.
Budite zbogom i zaboravljeni !
Ivan Pavicevac, Rim
Rim, 5.4.20
(Slucajnost, datum moje stecene diplome)
---
Alla Prof.ssa Savka Dapcevic Kucar
ex-Presidente della Lega dei Comunisti in Croazia
Un tempo stimata professoressa,
dal cassetto dei miei pensieri ho ripescato questa lettera...
Mi sono laureato a Zagabria, alla Facolta' di Economia e Commercio, nel
1968 - fortunatamente prima della vostra "primavera di Zagabria".
Non ero tanto "preso" dalle sue lezioni ma ero uno di quelli,
la maggioranza, che la apprezzavano.
Che cosa e' rimasto della ideologia che con tanto fervore lei ci
trasmetteva? E dei nostri ideali, che si sono materializzati in quello
straordinario paese, la Jugoslavia, costruito nella Unita' e
Fratellanza, e con il lavoro volontario della mia e di altre
generazioni ? !
Non avevo "la tessera", ma sono fiero di essere stato e rimasto
"soltanto" jugoslavo.
Lei si chiede ancora come e' la situazione per il popolo,
per l'operaio, il "vivere felice nella ricca Croazia" ?
Slogan con il quale anche lei si e' candidata a Presidente dello
staterello croato... Lei sicuramente vive bene,
come tutti gli ex comunisti da salotto. Ma alla fine ognuno ha
quello che si merita ! Cosi' anche lei e' morta, politicamente,
sia presso i suoi avversari politici, sia dinanzi agli occhi di
ogni jugoslavo onesto, operaio, comunista.
Le dico addio e le auguro di venire dimenticata.
Ivan Pavicevac
Roma, 5 aprile 2000
(per caso, l'anniversario dell'ottenimento della mia laurea)
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
Bivsoj predsjednici SK u Hrvatskoj
Nekad postovana profesorice,
Iz skrinjice mojih misli, "izvadio" sam ovo pismo...
Diplomirao sam n Ekonomskom fakultetu u Zagrebu,l968. Srecom prije
tog vaseg "zagrebackog proljeca". Nisam bio doslovno "zatucan" vasim
predavanjima, ali i ja sam bio jedan od one vecine koji vas je cijenio.
Sta je ostalo od ideologije koju ste nam zdusno predavali, i nasim
idealima, koji su postali stvarnost, u onoj divnoj zemlji Jugoslaviji,
izgradjenoj u "bratsvu-jedinstvu", i dobrovoljnim radom moje i drugih
generacija ? !
Nisam imao "knjizicu", ali sam ponosan sto sam bio i ostao "tek"
jugoslaven.
Pitate li se jos kako je narodu, radniku, "sretno zivjeti u bogatoj
Hrvatskoj" . Slogan s kojim ste se i vi kandidirali za predsjednicu
drzavice Hrvatske. Vi vjerojatno dobro zivite, kao i svi bivsi salonski
komunisti. Ali, na koncu, svakome ono sto je zasluzio ! Tako i vi,
mrtvi ste, politicki, i kod vasih politickih protivnika a i svakog
postenog jugoslavena, radnika, komuniste.
Budite zbogom i zaboravljeni !
Ivan Pavicevac, Rim
Rim, 5.4.20
(Slucajnost, datum moje stecene diplome)
---
Alla Prof.ssa Savka Dapcevic Kucar
ex-Presidente della Lega dei Comunisti in Croazia
Un tempo stimata professoressa,
dal cassetto dei miei pensieri ho ripescato questa lettera...
Mi sono laureato a Zagabria, alla Facolta' di Economia e Commercio, nel
1968 - fortunatamente prima della vostra "primavera di Zagabria".
Non ero tanto "preso" dalle sue lezioni ma ero uno di quelli,
la maggioranza, che la apprezzavano.
Che cosa e' rimasto della ideologia che con tanto fervore lei ci
trasmetteva? E dei nostri ideali, che si sono materializzati in quello
straordinario paese, la Jugoslavia, costruito nella Unita' e
Fratellanza, e con il lavoro volontario della mia e di altre
generazioni ? !
Non avevo "la tessera", ma sono fiero di essere stato e rimasto
"soltanto" jugoslavo.
Lei si chiede ancora come e' la situazione per il popolo,
per l'operaio, il "vivere felice nella ricca Croazia" ?
Slogan con il quale anche lei si e' candidata a Presidente dello
staterello croato... Lei sicuramente vive bene,
come tutti gli ex comunisti da salotto. Ma alla fine ognuno ha
quello che si merita ! Cosi' anche lei e' morta, politicamente,
sia presso i suoi avversari politici, sia dinanzi agli occhi di
ogni jugoslavo onesto, operaio, comunista.
Le dico addio e le auguro di venire dimenticata.
Ivan Pavicevac
Roma, 5 aprile 2000
(per caso, l'anniversario dell'ottenimento della mia laurea)
--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------
