ON HATE-MONGERING AND THE GUILTY SERBS
A Case of non-Justifiable Retribution
R.K.Kent
Emeritus Professor of History
University of California at Berkeley
27 March 2001
If there is a dominant feature of the Clinton era involvement in the
Balkans it can be summed-up with the saying that "the enemy of my
enemy is my friend." Science has abandoned "Reasoning by Analogy" for
at least two centuries but, than, there was nothing remotely
"scientific" involved in the Clintonite foreign "policy."despite the
pretensions of a Magister Dixit Dr. Seceratry of State. For a number
of complex reasons, the Serbs became the selected "enemy" of the
"West" as a whole through NATO, and even of Civilization itself. Ipso
facto, all other ethno-religious groups within the ex-Yugoslav space
became our "allies." The Croats, the Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo’s
ethnic Albanians ---all three were also transformed into "victims."
It was a "status" condition for which the Serbs were not allowed to
qualify. The "victims" had all the rights and deserved all the external
support. The "aggressors" had no rights. The Serbs were gradually
dehumanized through the Western media and governmental propaganda. They
were subjected to crippling and long-lasting economic sanctions.
NATO bombed the Serbs twice, once in Bosnia for three weeks and the
second time for eleven weeks in Serbia proper and Kosovo.
A Bogus Enemy and a War without Precedent
The 78-day attack had several unique features. First and foremost it
had no popular support at home. None of the "explanations" for it
seemed convincing enough. . Inter alia, it was regularly served to
the American People as a "humanitarian intervention." Few continued to
see it as such as the war went on and on. Anti-war activists began to
organize as it became clear that the American People had been simply
by-passed. Demonstrations were slated for 5th June 1999. It may be a
coincidence but the actual bombings stopped the day before while the
war’s "official end" was announced a week later.
Although it was presented as a joint Euro-American endeavor the U.S.
was the driving force and an 80 percent contributor to the total war
effort. It was the largest military undertaking in Europe since World
War II. It was launched without a declaration of war which the U.S.
Congress, for example, would not grant the President even 26 days into
the bombing campaign. For the first time, through control of NATO, the
U.S. bombed a state inside Europe and not in Asia, Africa
or Latin America. Yet, the United States was under no attack. The Serbs
had even been its allies in two World Wars. It had no economic
positions to defend in the Balkans. It was physically absent from the
Balkans in both World Wars, although it did bomb Roumania’s Ploesti
Oil Fields in 1944 as well as Belgrade, eleven times, at the request of
the Communist Tito, then trying to conquer Serbia. As others would do
more recently in ex-Yugoslavia, Tito "borrowed" the USAF to "soften"
Serbia. .
In a language reminiscent of Orwell, the "Air War" over Serbia
and Kosovo suggested air combat but it was nothing of the kind. .
Basically, the USAF, within NATO dropped bombs, Tomahawk and Cruise
missiles (and cluster bombs) firing shells dipped in depleted uranium
on a virtually defenseless nation. Another first, no single U.S. soldier
was lost in the Air War.
In the media drive to impose cerebral terror on "the Serbs," few
bona fide reporters made serious attempts to verify and fine- tune
into all the charges and horrors swirling about, in gore, on TV
screens, in articles dripping with blood, in pious postures of the
we-must-do-something hawks. The parlor-room Moral Giants, who own
and dominate most of the scribal and audio-visual media in the U.S.,
set up a political agenda. It was hardly advertised but it came into
view anyway. .The Serbs must not only be punished. They must be
humiliated, brought down on their knees. They must be "taught a
lesson." They are "collectively sick." They suffer from "pernicious
nationalism" and need to be "cured." They are the harbingers of another
Holocaust.. They should even be "hit in the genes" to induce collective
remorse through physical mutations in their yet-to-be-born children.
As that might take some time, a faster lane in which the Guardians of
Civilization could come to travel in their "justifiable retribution" was
to create a "special" Tribunal with another unstated but clear-cut
mission. By indicting and trying mainly and constantly "the Serbs,"
with a few cosmetic exceptions of several low and mid-ranking Croats
plus a Bosnian Muslim or two, "the Serbs" would continue to be "roasted"
on the spit of public opinion even long after the fratricidal wars had
stopped in ex-Yugoslavia. Needless to stress, this "Tribunal" is the
greatest violator of civilized laws, one step removed from a Kangaroo
Court and is even in constant violation of its own mandate’s provision
that it cannot accept funds from individuals (like George Soros) or be
supported by considerable aid from a single country, like the Unietd
States. In practice, if not widely known or understood, the Tribunal has
been basically a political arm of the State Department.
While all sorts of "indignant" hawks lambasted "the Serbs" for being
the "prisoners of their past," others accused them of failure to "face
their own past." Few could ask such a "sophisticated" question as
"where does one start or cut-off the Serb past?" To give an example, had
the "International Community" taken a long and hard look at Kosovo
between, say, 1974 and 1984 it would have iscovered that the Serb
minority was actually being victimized by the ethnic Albanian majority.
This happened because in 1974 the Federal Constitution of Yugoslavia was
changed radically to give virtually all powers to majorities in all the
Republics and Autonomous Regions. A decade later, the Serb minority got
the upper hand. To put it another way, why should the Serbs have to
accept and even favor external "explanations" of "Serb History," much
of it hardly a product of serious scholarship. Much of it has also been
"constructed" in haste, suffering from what professional historians
call "backward projection." This is an all-too prevalent habit to look,
usually with a strong partisan bias, at a given present and THEN
"explain it" by forcing the past to "fit" into it. The stronger
Victors are usually ‘VIRTUOUS" and apt to demand that only their
versions of History be perceived and accepted as valid.
The fall of "Milosevic" who was used as a substitute for the real
target, namely the Serb people and their Nationalism as defined
externally (but no one else’s in ex-Yugoslavia) did not eliminate the
political agenda. The entire Serb leadership from both Pale and
Belgrade has been on top of the Tribunal’s list of indicted war
criminals. The new Serb Government and its President Kostunica are now
being blackmailed. Unless they deliver Milosevic and his Cabinet to
the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) a Serbia that was bombed back into the
Nineteenth Century will not get the aid it needs to pull its people out
of economic and social misery. Why is an "international" trial of
alleged top Serb "war criminals" relative to Kosovo in 1998-1999, a
matter of such priority and urgency since there is no statute of
limitations for war crimes.?
What did the Serbs really do to deserve all the punishments? .Their
first "sin" was to attempt to preserve a Federal Yugoslavia threatened
at the same time from within and without by hardly new enemies. Strange
as it may seem today , the foreign-policy team of George Bush Senior
initially agreed with the Serb position. They were afraid of what could
happen if, by contagion, a dissolutioin of the USSR became too
violent. But, they all yielded to powerful and well-financed pressures
to crack-up Yugoslavia for good. These pressures came first from an
aggressive Croatian Lobby in Washington. It was reported to have spent
as much as $55 million to literally buy certain targeted U.S.
legislators, especially those considered to be "conservative." Germany’s
Chancellor Kohl also persuaded President Bush, Sr. to abandon any
defense of Federal Yugoslavia.
An American Public Relations firm (Ruder Finn) was hired to smear the
Serbs politically. Its CEO later bragged that his work turned the
Jewish organizations in the U.S .against the Serbs. He simply passed
on to them propaganda emanating from extreme Croat nationalist sources
in Zagreb and in the North American diaspora. In fact, Ruder Finn was
able to GLOBALIZE the pathological hate of the Serbs which had united
and is still the only sure-fire glue holding together the otherwise
disunited Croat nationalists everywhere..
The Earliest Victims in Disintegrating
Yugoslavia
Hardly anyone in the West knew that between August 1991 and February
1992 the new Croat Army and the para-military carried out the first
"ethnic cleansing" campaign in ex-Yugoslavia since WWII. It took place
in Western Slavonia as some 40,000 Serb civilians fled in panic, as all
of the elderly who remained behind were killed, as all of the Serb
Orthodox Churches were systematically destroyed. Hardly anyone knew in
the West that "human rights" of the Serbs in Krajina and Croatia in
general were being grossly violated in the newly Independent Croat
State under Franjo Tudjman. He had been a Communist General in Tito’s
Yugoslavia. His main job, at least until he went into opposition as a
Croat Nationalist, was to indoctrinate troops in the Yugoslav Federal
Army.
As that Army lost its non-Serb officers and tried to prevent Croatia’s
violent exit from the Yugoslav Federation, two YFA helicopters were shot
down by small arms ground fire from the Croat side. All of the two
dozen low-ranking YFA officers were wounded in the crashes. None died
from the impact but all of their heads were simply cut-off. The
"incident" never "reached" the Western media either. Similarly, as the
YFA was losing its Bosnian Muslim components, one of its Serb units,
600-men strong, negotiated a safe passage in exchange for not fighting
its way out of the Muslim -controlled area in Bosnia. Instead, half were
simply slaughtered and the few survivors from the other half stated that
the dead soldiers had a better deal in comparison what was done to the
survivors.
In short, the Serbs were the EARLIEST VICTIMS of post-WWII ethnic
cleansing and atrocities but the Western Governments and media did not
want to know or hear or report. The new "ethos" in the West was to smear
and keep smearing the Serbs and the Serbs only. Let us now review the
war crimes with which "the Serbs" have been charged in public and let
us try to provide some idea of context.
Arkan.
These fall into several categories. There are "war crimes" (actually
civil war crimes despite the international rhetoric to the contrary) of
which individual Serbs
and/or a specific Serb para- military group were actually guilty.
Here, the Serb warlord, Zeljko Raznjatovic or Arkan, and his "Tigers,"
mostly men released from jails in Serbia, top the list as the worst of
Serb wartime criminals. They committed initial atrocities in Eastern
Bosnia and later in parts of Croatia. To borrow Bernard Kouchner’s
twisted phrase at Kosovo, they saw their bloody work as "justifiable
retribution." This was not only for what was happening to
contemnporary Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. It was also in memory of
what was done to hundreds of thousands of Serbs between 1941-1944 in
the "Independent State of Croatia" run by local Nazis, the Ustashe.
Bosnia was at the time under their rule as well. It was a gift from
Adolf Hitler for joining Nazi Germany in WWII. That is how it was. All
justifications aside, a crime is a crime, collective or individual. Two
Wrongs do not make a single Right, something that will be recalled in
connection with NATO’s "Humanitarian Intervention."
The First and Second Market-Place Massacres at
Sarajevo
Another category consists of crimes alleged to have been committed by
the Serbs without any real evidence. Such are the first and second
market-place "massacres at Sarajevo". After the first one, President
George Bush Senior was quoted as having said at a social gathering that
"the Serbs didn’t do it." Yet, no one supplied any solid evidence one
way or another. The Western media, parroting the Sarajevo
Government, accused the Serbs anyway. It is hard to believe, however,
that an American President, who had also been Director of the CIA,
would be uninformed about realities on the ground. .
Still, the Media optics were, in the case of Sarajevo, doubly skewed
against the Serbs. This is so because the Bosnian Serb Army attained no
victories at Sarajevo while shelling a very particular city from
adjacent hills. Even a part of Sarajevo inhabited mostly by the Serbs
was shelled from time to time. The hill gunners did not grasp the fact
that Sarajevo had endeared itself to the outside world because of
recently held Olympics. It had become everyone’s town. It was
constantly filmed by TV crews as the shelling went on.
The Sarajevo Government understood the context. It deliberately
provoked much of the shelling to gain more international support. In a
single move, it was able to gain the political loyalty of an entire
foreign press corps, residing in the local Hilton. A Bosnian Muslim
battery was positioned behind the Hotel and repeatedly drew ripostes
from the hills. Thereafter, no reporter in residence could adhere to
any effort that would resemble the craft of journalism. It all became
pure advocacy. .Like their bosses at home they WANTED to accept the
fare which came from the old hands of Tito’s Yugoslavia. They now
specialized
in disinformation working for the new Bosnian Ministries of Interior
and Information.
The Massacre at Srebrenica
Another category of war crimes and crimes against humanity leads into
those which are either deliberately severed from conext to remove
serious provocation or else exaggerated to gain international support..
The most poignant example of this kind, repeatedly brought-up in the
media, even six years later, is Srebrenica. It did not "surface" when
it was evolving but later, or more precisely at a particular moment in
time. It was in August 1995 that Madeleine Albright , then U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations, unveiled at the meeting of its
General Assembly an enlarged and dated CIA aereal photograph. . In it
was a freshly ploughed field that could have been anywhere but she
placed it at Srebrenica, a silver-mining town in Eastern Bosnia
inhabited mostly by Muslims. With a hint of a CIA in possession of
photographic evidence, she claimed that the field contained the buried
bodies of some 4,000 Muslim men, massacred in cold blood by the Bosnian
Serb Army. No such evidence ever surfaced.
Later, with the "help" of the Sarajevo Government, the figure
"escalated" to 7,000 and even 8,000, with added claims of "genocide."
It became by convention the worst blood-bath of the war in Bosnia.
Strictly speaking, this is not true. The entire Elite 5th Corps of the
Bosnian Muslim Army, trained by a retired U.S. General, was trapped by
the Bosnian Serbs and lost about 10,000 men to enfilade machine-gun,
tank and cannon fire, in a single encounter. For the record, this
happened inside the part of Bosnia under Serb control, now in Republika
Srpaska. The significance of the event and its location will be brought
out further below. At this point, it must be stressed that none of the
Western media involved in the heavy coverage of events in Bosnia
reported several aspects that would make the "Srebrenica Story"
considerably less one-sided with the local Muslims as the usual
"victims" and the Serbs as the perennial neo-Nazi "butchers."
Srebrenica had been declared a "Safe Zone," protected by U.N. Dutch
contingent, and containing presumably no armed Bosnian Muslim men. They
had been theoretically "disarmed." In fact, a local warlord, Nasir Oric
(a huge man and one-time Milosevic’s bodyguard) and his para-military
raided routinely the local countryside inhabited by the Serbs. This was
done over a period of months and it resulted in the looting and torching
of 42 Serb villages. Estimates vary for the civilians killed by Oric
and his men but the minimal one is 1,800 and the largest is 3,000. Oric
went even as far as to show to two Western reporters ( from Canada and
from Boston) a video tape of his own mayhem, bragging openly about his
"exploits."
The two top Generals of the Serb Bosnian Army that took Srebrenica manu
militare are now indicted war criminals at the Hague’s Tribunal for
Yugoslavia. Oric is running a disco for American G.I.s.in Tuzla. The
main General, Ratko Mladic, is accused even of "genocide" despite the
fact that he had ordered the busing out of Srebrenica all of the
Bosnian Muslim women and children. A rather sharp contrast in
comparison with what Oric did to the Serb women and children.
A tragic-comic story illustrates just how exclusively anti-Serb the
Tribunal has been. Two Serb university professors approached an
American who had gained some notoriety in "reporting" the miseries of
Bosnia. With simulated confidentiality, they revealed to him the
existence of a horrible Serb war criminal who had escaped attention.
They gave him a name. Within weeks, it appeared on the list of war
criminals wanted at the Tribunal. The only problem was that the man
never existed. It was a deliberate hoax to test "the channels." This was
still at the time when the Tribunal issued open indictments. Later,
these became secret.
Using an educated Mulsim intermediary, General Mladic demanded that
the Bosnian Muslim men hidden in the woods around Srebrenica surrender.
Instead, they made a run for Tuzla, a Bosnian Muslim stronghold. This is
when the Serb tanks began to shell and machinegun the woods
indiscriminately, killing in the view of its low-ranking commanders men
of a fleeing enemy army. It did not matter that most of hose in flight
did not carry any weapons. This is because, in civil wars, a man with a
rifle is a fighter. One without it is a civilian and they are and have
been entirely interchangeable. Suffice it to say that, at the end of the
Gulf War, USAF jets strafed the fleeing Iraqi soldiers much in the
same way. There was however one major difference.
At Srebernica, many of those in flight who had been caught were executed
in a summary fashion. This is where the real war crime comes in. Only
here Oric, by association, and as yet undesignated Bosnian Serb Army
soldiers, are the dual culprits in this the tragedy. The fleeing men
were afraid of reprisals for what Oric had done to the Serbs. The Serb
soldiers did not look only for the men that Oric used to exterminate
Srebrenica’s rural Serbs. All men of fighting age were automatically
regarded as Oric’s men. There remains the question of figures.
One needs to bring in some new elements up. Nasir Oric and his "elite
army" left Srebrenica a few days before the Bosnian Serbs went into
attack. They were incorporated into the Bosnian Muslim Army with the
request that it be kept a secret. There was even a Pentagon "angle"
here in that its strategists had concluded that Bosnian Muslim enclaves
like Srebrenica and Zepa were
indefensible and should be abandoned to the Serbs. Nasir Oric and his
para-military were almost certainly tipped-off about the impending Serb
Army invasion. Next, in the first municipal elections for Srebrenica,
after the Serbs took over, the names of 3003 Bosnian Muslim men listed
as "killed" showed up on the electoral rolls.
This writer was present at the University of California panel recently
on which a Bosnian Muslim politician without scholarly credentials
claimed, with a poker face, that no one from Srebrenica did any harm to
the rural Serbs because all were disarmed. He went further, all the
bodies found in the Serb part of Bosnia were those of Muslim men
"slaughtered in cold blood," within Serb territory, forgetting that
there were about 10,000 Muslim combatants’ bodies in there, from the 5th
Corps’ military disaster. He even claimed that 4,000 bodies had their
hands "tied" behind their backs. One was tempted to ask if they might
not have been tied after the excavations, even without imagining the
logistics involved in tying 8,000 hands for executions. Se non e
vero.
So, how many Bosnian Muslim men from Srebrenica were killed while
fleeing as against those killed execution style? It may take a
decade plus a Truth- and- Reconcilliation Commission to arrive at an
accurate number. At this time, if pre-departures and flights that
succeded are taken into account, the global figure of 4,000 dead, if
accepted by convention, needs to be sub-divided , with probably
one-third for the executed men. This is not very far from the Serb
victims of Oric to be found nowhere in the annals constructed by the
Moral Giants and their often breathless . "reporters." . The
"unreconstructed" Serb haters who read the present text will almost
certainly attempt to smear this writer for "trying to whitewash Serb
crimes." Nothing could be farther from such an endeavor. . It is an
attempt to confront the hysteria which blocks all serious inquiry into
the nitty-gritty of it all. One does get tired of having to read the
uninformed human parrots who keep repeating the same bogus "verdict"
in which the Bosnian Muslims are the innocent "lambs" " slaughtered" by
Bosnian Serb "Nazis" at Srebrenica.
One more item on Srebrenica. The reason why Madeleine Albright decided
to produce the CIA aereal fotograph that proved nothing visually by
itself, is that t the Croat Army "cleansed" out of Krajina some 250,000
Serbs, killing over 5,000 who could not flee and systematically looting
and torching their properties. Madeleine Albright and the National
Security Adviser, Anthony Lake, had given the green light to the Croat
Army knowing full-well what the result would be. After the NATO troops
occupied Bosnia without a shot, no bodies were found in the field made
famous by "Dr." Albright, as the New York
Times tried to boost her dubious "expertise" regarding the Balkans as
a whole. There is yet another and last category to be dealt with.
There are distinct war crimes for which the Serbs had been accused but
which they almost certainly did not commit. This is not the reference
to "minor" accusations. Among them, the sending of a bus full of
children through Sarajevo’s "Sniper Alley" and claiming that the Serbs
shoot children because a Bosnian Muslim girl was killed by an
apparently stray bullet. It mattered little that the victim was a Serb.
Or, a TV picture of a graveyard with tomb stones while the commentator
stated with assurance that it was the burial place of Bosnian Muslims
killed by the Serbs. The only problem was that the inscriptions were in
the Cyrillic alphabet and the tombs had crosses over them. It was, with
no chance of error, a Serb graveyard. No, reference here is to two
PIVOTAL "massacres." One led, in a few hours, to a three-week
bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs by the USAF within NATO. The
other was actually the triggering mechanism for eleven weeks of
U.S./NATO destruction of Serbia (and Kosovo).
The Massacre at Markale
The reference is to the Markale market- place massacre at Sarajevo
(sometimes called the Third Market-place massacre) and to the "massacre
at Racak.," Kosovo.It so happened that an ABC –TV crew was in place to
film the Markale massacre. It so happened also that a detailed U.N.
Report exculpated the Serbs, attributing this massacre to the Muslim
side. Enter again Madeleine Albright. She demanded that the U.N. Report
be kept under wraps. It remains secret to this day but the gist of its
findings leaked out through a respected Japanese U.N. official, Mr.
Akashi. Ambassador Albright had once told him arrogantly "to mind his
own business." Her Czech Jewish family was twice given shelter and
warm reception by the Serbs. Yet, she became the foremost Serb
hate-monger of the Clinton Administration. A case worth the extended
sessions that Sigmund Freud had with Frau Lou. After the Serb Army
took the town of Vukovar through intense fighting with the Croat
forces, she visited Vukovar to PUBLICIZE "yet another Serb atrocity."
It was the killing of some 300 wounded Croats, yanked out of the local
hospital and shot by "the Serbs." The killing was real but it was Arkan
and his Tigers who did the killings again, not the Serb Army and not
"the Serbs" collectively. She "neglected" to "tell the World" two other
very pertinent aspects. One was that an entire Serb population of
Vukovar under Croat control had disappeared without a trace but signs
of torture and killings were found by the Serb Army in the old Austrian
catacombs under Vukovar. Moreover, it would
appear that the 300 or so hospital "patients" turned out to have been
the extreme nationalist defenders of Vukovar who had kicked out the real
patients in
order to avoid being executed. But, that was Arkan’s claim. It may have
been true or not is the only rational assessment, the kind that has
been a rarity in the psychological bashing of "the Serbs" in the Western
and especially U.S. and German media.
The Massacre at Racak
.
The "massacre" at Racak differed significantly from the Markale
antecedent. Racak was a stronghold of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation
Army. It was attacked by the Serb police units on November 15 1999. The
next day , a special U.S. Envoy , Richard Walker, former U.S.
Ambassador to el-Salvador led a group of journalists and a TV crew to
a would-be "mass" grave filled with 47 bodies, all men, but left
completely open. It "was a massacre ," said Walker. Within hours, the
media across the globe had repeated his words. As Madeleine Albright
would say after the "air war," this ‘Serb atrocity’ did "galvanize the
International Community." It led to the talks at Rambouillet, France,
where the Serbs were set-up to take a fall big enough to justify the air
war itself. No one bothered to ask if there really was a mass execution
and whether the Serbs were really guilty. The verdict was carved in
stone before a jury of experts could convene. It still repeated from
time to time.
A forensic team led by a Finnish Doctor examined the bodies and the
site and produced 20 kilograms of research plus 3,000 photographs. The
lengthy report was never released but a summary did reach the media.
There were no spent cartridges at the site. The bodies had to be brought
from somewhere else. Only a single person in the all-male grave had been
shot at close range. Since the Serbs had been accused of hiding bodies
in Bosnia, why would they leave a "mass grave" open and deliberately
provoke an even more unfavorable opinion abroad that could lead to
military reprisals? But the clincher for an obvious "montage" was in the
record of Mr. Walker. He had close ties with both the CIA and the
Central American right-wing death squads. A French journal stated even
that he was "running them," all in character with his reputation as an
ardent anti-Communist warrior of long standing. Given that the day
before the "mass" grave was "discovered" there was heavy fighting at
Racak between the KLA and the Serb police, it would appear that the 47
bodies were those of the KLA soldiers fallen in battle. There was no
reason why they could not serve the KLA cause again even in death,
especially with Mr. Walker around So much for the "Racak massacre." One
thing is undeniable. Both the Markale and Racak massacres, one real and
the other unreal, provided the U.S.- led and dominated NATO with enough
"legitimacy" to respond with "justifiable retributions."
It would be claimed later that NATO’s intervention in Bosnia forced the
Serbs to come to the negotiating table at Dayton. Wrong again. Bosnian
Serbs in authority, both military and civilian, had been asking for
negotiations for almost a year before being bombed by NATO. But, the
Izetbegovic Government kept refusing until it secured the deadly
services of the USAF. It was the Bosnian Muslm Army Commander Rasim
Delic who selected its targets. With the U.S. air might behind them, a
brigade composed of grandmothers could beat "the Serbs." This was
essentially true at Kosovo as well.
Back in 1998, at Geneva, a U.S. diplomat met with members of the Kosovo
Liberation Army. For some time, the Clinton Administration wanted to
go to war against "Milosevic" but without using the American ground
troops. A "deal" was struck at Geneva. What had been an essentially
localized and containable guerrilla activity by a shadowy KLA, once
defined as "terrorists," would soon escalate. At home in the U.S, the
KLA was laundered away from its ties with the drug traffic and
transformed into a Freedom Fighting but under-armed outfit. The Pentagon
and the CIA had been in Albania itself for almost a decade, training and
supplying its army with weapons. It was never clear why? But, Albania
even became a "Cooperating Associate of NATO" and gave the U.S. its
first military base in the Balkans. It was thus hardly difficult to
extend this "alliance" to the KLA.within a Kosovo dominated by the
Albanian demographic majority. This alliance has not broken down to this
very day while the media are serving "splinter groups" of the KLA in the
"neutral zone" of southern Serbia and inside Macedonia. At the same
time, the Albanian Lobby in the U.S. has an unbreakable lock-in on
Congress. There is even an "Albanian Caucus" within it. But, the
American People have no voice in such matters.
By the time 1999 rolled-in, the KLA had killed, mostly from ambush, some
300 Serb policemen. Its tactic was "hit-and-run- and- melt" into their
clans thereafter. When Serb police managed to pinpoint and surround
the KLA fighters in a clan compound, the result would invariably be the
same. Some women and children would be killed along with the men with
guns. Such events only served to boost the level of international
indignation about the Serb atrocities against the ethnic Albanian
civilians. The KLA was almost never even mentioned, let alone the
right of every state to defend itself against insurgency. All civil
and guerrilla wars are particularly nasty but this perception was lost
entirely in the plethora of one-way accusations against the "guilty
Serbs." This would have ensued, most likely, even if the Serb police
had fought the KLA with sling-shots.
Psychological Warfare against the Serbs
Part I – Croatia and Bosnia
When all the dust had settled from various battles, massacres and
interventions in the ex-Yugoslav space the Serbs were left with a
wrecked economy and a bunch of toxins and mutants in their air, water
and soil. They had "become" the neo-Nazis of the Fin du Siecle, unable
to live with other ethnicities by virtue of the "fact" that they were
the "greatest" of "ethnic cleansers" within old Yugoslavia Yet, the
simple willingness to take a somewhat closer look would show a couple of
STARTLING revelations to those who cultivate their gnorance in order to
remain perpetually "indignant." At the height of shootings in
Croatia, some 60,000 Croats lived in Belgrade unmolested. No one ever
booted them out of Serbia. At the height of the Serb-KLA fighting, some
200,000 Albanians lived unmolested in Serbia, 80,000 of them inhabit
TODAY the Greater Belgrade. Not a few pro-Yugoslav Albanians, as yet
"unradicalized" by the KLA, had fled Kosovo into SERBIA and into the
hands of the Serb Red Cross. Serbia alone incorporates 26 different
ethnicities and is the only multi-ethnic state left in ex-Yugoslavia. As
such, Serbia should receive all the support possible, including war
reparations, from the champion of plural societies, the United States of
America. Instead, pure Croatia, pure Slovenia and pure Kosovo are today
the "good guys."
The second "surprise" comes from another set of figures. Ethnic Serbs
made up about 14% of Croatia’s total population. About 40,000 Serbs
were "cleansed" out of Western Slavonia and another 250,000 from
Krajina. Bosnia produced about 400,000 Serb refugees. Most recently,
after the "air war," some 150,000-200,000 Serb were cleansed out by a
supposedly "disarmed" KLA Today, there are almost a million Serbs in
Serbia proper that had been "cleansed" out of the rest of
ex-Yugoslavia.The Western media have conveniently covered this fact by
omission (it is hardly ever mentioned) and by psychological ploy found
in the following and endlessly repeated statement: "Milosevic lost four
wars." When the actually HEAVIEST "ethnic cleansing" affected the
Serbs who became refugees that is because they "lost wars." The
"winners," of course did not do anything so there are no Serb "victims"
only casualties of wars "the Serbs themselves had started." Really?
When the Yugoslav Army attempted to prevent Slovenia from orbiting out
of the Federation, there was relatively little fighting. In fact, YFA
troops and tanks were blocked in urban settings, going nowhere. There
was, however, no bad blood between the Serbs and the Slovenes deriving
from World War II. In fact, busloads of Serb mothers came to Slovenia
to take their sons back into Serbia, Neither the Serbs nor the Slovenes
were looking for a war. There were hardly any large numbers of Serbs in
Slovenia to be "cleansed out" either.
The case of Croatia was different entirely because the Croat Nazis
killed hundreds of thousands of Serb civilians (between 1941-1944),
many in the most bestial manner that offended even some of the German
officers. The Serbs of Krajina attempted simply to escape a Croat
State in the process of becoming independent from the Federal
Yugoslavia. Bad memories were a major factor but both the Western
media and the Croat Nationalists "helped" to revive them. Instead of
reporting the on-going and constantly escalating violations of Human
Rights of the Serb minority in Croatia, the Western media served another
psychological "canard." The Serbs wanted to create a "Greater Serbia."
In that way, no one needed to worry about what was being done to the
Serbs in the New Croatia. The Croats became the "certified" "victims"
of "the Serbs" collectively again.
Krajina was on its way to become a Croat Kosovo when local Serbs
refused to accept Croat over-rule. Only here, the Clinton Administration
helped the newly sovereign State of Croatia against the rebelling Serbs.
It saw to it that a U.S. General and other officers trained the new army
and modernized it. Electronic intelligence was given to Croatia’s Army
as well. When it launched Operation Storm in August 1995, U.S. jets
strafed the Serb radar positions around Knin, Krajina’s capital. This
was direct intervention without naming it. The U.S. General who trained
the new Army feigned utter surprise that it would come to expel by
terror and war a quarter of a million people, killing several thousand
in the process, with all the properties looted and torched. Given the
"American factor," Milosevic’s Yugoslav Army did not interfere and
Croatia became, at long last, ethnically pure one more time.It was
assisted in a major way by the Clinton Administration. In fact, the
Green Light for the Operation Storm was given by none other than
Madeleine Albright and Anthony Lake, then National Security Adviser.
Serbia itself did not lose this war because it did not enter it. But,
the Krajina Serbs lost a home which their ancestors began to settle
some three centuries earlier.
The situation in Bosnia, at end-game, left the local Serbs in
possession of about 40 percent of the real estate, having lost about 20
percent . They had legally owned about 62 percent of Bosnia, mostly
rural for a historical reason. Under the occupation of Ottoman Turks,
local Muslim overlords occupied the towns and the Christian raja got
the countryside. What ended the war in Bosnia was
Nothing that resembled anyone’s decisive military victory or defeat.
But, the war in Bosnia provided the Western media and some "publicity
scavengers" and "hogs" with a gold mine for sensationalism and
hate-mongering against the Serbs. There was the famous picture of an
emasciated Bosnian Muslim man in a Serb camp immediately "diagnosed"
as a "death camp." He was ostensibly behind the wire and he had a
gentle look in his face. The picture brough back immediately the
Holocaust and went Around the World. Newsweek had it as its
frontispiece. Beind all of this was a hoax. The Serbs allowed a British
TV crew and the producer to film the camp because they had nothing to
hide. It was a detention camp, noting more sinister. A closer look
inside the picture reveals a whole group of men who appeared well-fed
and well-dressed. A Serb TV crew was also filming their British guests
and it turned out that the emasciated man was in front of the wire, not
behind it. It also came out that he was suffering from Tuberculosis. The
producer saw the possibilities of a major media coup with which to pay
back the Serb hospitality and openness by a blow aiming to incite
forever against the Serb People men and women of Jewish faith in the
U.S. and Western Europe.
When fatigue was setting in among the Western publics about the war
crimes in Bosnia, there came out of Sarajevo the story of systematic
mass rapes of Muslim Women by Serb soldiers and para-military. Figures
of 20,000 to 40,000 were cited with assurances that can only accompany
the lack of any accuracy. A French TV reporter went to Tuzla,
Bosniuan Muslim stronghold, to verify the claim that some 4,000 of the
raped Bosnian women were in a large soccer field and vicinity.Half way
to Tuzla the numbers came down to 400. Near Tuzla they went down to 40.
In Tuzla, he found just 4. While the "mass rapes" of Muslim women were
circulated even in Muslim countries for an obvious reason, the
Yugoslav Government presented to the United Nations a formal dossier and
evidence. It revealed that hundreds of Serbian girls and women were
being abducted, brought into Sarajevo and put into brothels called"
troop entertainment centers." No one took notice. To get the "flavor "
also of non-Serb cruelty to alien women, herewith is briefly a story
that never reached the U.S. media. A young and idealistic woman from
Milan, Italy, went to Sarajevo to "help Bosnia." She was persuaded to go
with a man to Srebrenica where her help was "even more needed." Once
there, she was gang raped several times, sold and re-sold for a pack of
cigarettes. When the Serb Bosnian Army took Srebrenica its soldiers
found her in a dark cellar, in rags, chained to a wall and so
traumatized that she lost the power to speak. It took a week of hospital
care and a female social
worker to get her to talk and reveal what had happened. Some of the
reports from Kosovo reveal even more harrowing tales of cruelty to women
and girls "imported" by the Albanian freedom fighters and Mafiosi from
Albania, But, they are U.S. allies and who wants to diminish the great
achievement of NATO by revealing just how really out of hand the
situation inside Kosovo has gotten under the benevolent Gaulaiter
Bernard Kouchner and 40,000 NATO troops.
Out of the propaganda mill at Sarajevo came yet another set of figures
widely circulated. It concerned some 250,000 to 500,000 Bosnian Muslims
killed by the Serbs (this was BEFORE Srebrenica). A State Departmenbt
official who resigned his post reduced the figure down to about
40,000, a more realistic one. A few media sources did pick this up
because of his correct political pedigree but it was hardly enough to
prevent endless parroting of the higher mortality figures, for effect.
Psychological War Against the Serbs
Part II – Kosovo
For Kosovo, most of the fellow-Americans are still unaware of the
extent to which they had been savagely manipulated by the Clinton
Administration and the corporate media trying to "outrun" the White
House, the CIA and the Pentagon. After the bogus "massacre" at Racak,
there came the Rambouillet Conference in February 1999. The Big Lie that
came out of it was that the Serbs walked out and refused to sign the
"Peace Plan." There was "no alternative" but to "let" NATO bomb
Serbia. Facts tell otherwise. The Serbs were willing to restore Kosovo’s
autonomy, the original main provision of the "Peace Plan," and even
allow foreign troops to be stationed there under U.N. authority without
a fight. In return, the KLA was to be disarmed. The KLA’s political
head would not sign without the promise of formal independence for
Kosovo. Than came the con-game switch that hardly renders honor to the
American People or American professional Diplomacy. An Appendix (B) was
added in the last minute. Stripped of its meandering language, it simply
meant that the Serbs must accept the NATO occupation of Serbia,
including Belgrade. As Madeleine Albright would quip after the eleven
weeks of destruction and killing from the air, "we raised the bar so
Milosevic could not jump over it. Yugoslavia needed a little bombing."
Once assured by General Wesley Clark that it would de facto "borrow" the
USAF services over Serbia and the Serb Army positions at Kosovo, the
KLA signed the "Peace Plan" for war against Serbia. On 24 March 1999,
the U.S. (inside of NATO) went into action after having pre-planned
aerial attacks against Serbia since at least 1997. Now the propaganda
and the hate-mongering in full bloom.
A "humanitarian disaster" was being worked out in Belgrade to affect
ethnic Albanians. In a TV discussion, Senator Joseph Biden, was almost
foaming at the mouth while stressing the claim. The Serbs had beefed-up
their Third Army in order to carry this plan out..Shortly after the NATO
bombs and missiles began to fall on Serbia and Kosovo and the "Kosovars"
started to come out in large numbers, the German secret services came up
with the "discovery" of a would-be top secret Serb Plan to empty Kosovo
out of its Albanian majority. This was an ex-post-facto hoax as
documented in Germany itself. There never was such a plan. The reality
of it was that the Serb Third Army had been pulled out of Kosovo as a
resul of direct negotiations between Milosevic and Richard Holbrooke.
But, Holbrooke did not lift a finger to prevent the KLA from moving into
the power vacuum created by the Third Army’s removal from Kosovo. It was
now moving to retake the territories and put an end to the KLA. It did
not need anyone’s "permission" to so do.
Ah, but the Kosovars were fleeing Kosovo en masse. Proof positive of
"Operation Horseshoe," as the hoax was called.The difficulty was
obvious. No such flights occurred before 24th March 1999, the day of
NATO’s "humanitarian intervention" to "save the Kosovars." They were
leaving Kosovo for the first time in huge numbers to escape from
escalated fighting between Serb units and the KLA as well as from the
NATO bombs At that point Jewish Organizations in the U.S. ran a huge
picture in the New York Times of trainloads of European Jews being taken
to death camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, with Kosovo on the point and the
highlight of "Never Again." The analogy was pure emotional anti-Serb
hate-mongering because the fleeing Kosovars were going into the safety
of refugee camps across the borders. They were not going into the gas
chambers. Moreover, they were actually helped to do so by the Serb
military and were urged to leave Kosovo in big numbers by the KLA
itself.
Ah, but the Serbs had killed 100,000 Albanian men assured Secretary
of Defense Cohen. This was later scaled down to 10,000 but still with
"mass graves" populating the countryside at Kosovo. After the NATO
occupation a total of 2008 bodies had been excavated by forensic teams.
There was one particular
grave containing 150 bodies. They were quickly re-buried under the eyes
of NATO commanders when it was found that the bodies were those of
Serbs. The very near- crime of re-burial was committed to again deny the
Serbs even the right to be the victims of someone else in death. With
all the outcries about "mass graves" at Kosovo, the Spanish forensic
team walked out in frustration since the claim had outpaced the reality
by an unbearable distance. The desire to unearth a real mass grave
containing Albanian ethnic bodies was intense in June 1999 that a TV
crew offered a reward of $250,000 for such a bona fide find. The Medium
is the Message and no one did more to uphold this simulated reality than
CNN. It was the first TV outfit to second and surpass the propaganda
emanating
from the Clinton team and its lower-ranking associates. It even allowed
the Government’s psychological warfare personnel to be at the Network,
ostensibly for "training purposes," another canard served to the public.
Even after twenty-one months of NATO and U.N. presence at Kosovo, after
the expulsion of not only the Serbs from most of it but also all the
other minorities,after the kidnappings and murders of over 1,000 Serb
civilians, the "psy-ops" are "publicizing" the would-be gruesome
incinerations of 1,500 ethnic Albanian men in the smelter furnace of
the Trepca mine during the air war. This has been refuted by foreign
experts who went into the mine and examined the furnace. It is further
documented as another attempt to keep smearing the Serbs –now
"inconvenient" because Milosevic has been replaced by a democratic
Government—by the fact that the Serbs had shut the smelter furnace and
the mine during the whole period of NATO’s air war. But, no matter what
evidence is presented to the contrary by real experts who are neither
Serbs nor pro-Serb, the human parrots are constantly at work.
. As a result of a decade of hate-mongering against the Serbs the
Clinton Administration and the corporate media have spawned several
hundred clerks whose career advances are inter-linked with continued
cerebral bashing of "the Serbs." They are to be found on newspaper
staffs, in editorial rooms, in various NGOs and Governmental agencies
and nothing apparently delights many of them more than to "develop"
same new "variant" of the same bashing endeavor. But that is only one
duct into protracted smearing of a single ethnicity.. There are two
others with far greater influence in the corridors of power. One can be
called the "anti-Serb brigade." It populates various think tanks,
peace institutes, human rights centers, Congressional staffs and the
like. Time and time again, these are the same people who are called upon
by Congressional Committees to "testify" and "inform" what policies
should be pursued in respect to ex-Yugoslavia as a whole. It is a
replica of Catch-22.
The Serbs invariably get the short end of the stick without much by
way of real carrots. We had real wars with the Japanese and the Germans
and we rebuilt their economies. Even an unreal war of our own making
has not produced anything close as yet. Just three months after the new
Government was elected in Belgrade, the same coterie of real
intellectual pygmies and a few phoney Moral Giants is shedding
crocodile tears about the slow pace into Democracy and capitalist
underpinnings within Serbia They keep insisting that Belgrade MUST
deliver Milosevic and his Cabinet to the Hague in order to "prove" that
"real" reforms are taking place. Against the background of NATO
destruction and a million refugees, the Serbs are not even allowed to
set their own priorities, a given in any valid concept of Democracy. It
cannot be IMPOSED from outside. In an unguarded moment, even Morton
Abramowitz conceded that the Serbs are the pivotal people of
ex-Yugoslavia. Negotiating and siding with the KLA insurgents against
the Serbs sets a most destabilizing example of reckless risk- taking.
There are some 5,000 ethnicities in about 150 countries. If their
sovereignty is downgraded and even non-existent there will be no end to
an imploding and un-manageable international chaos but it is a sure
bet that neither the U.S. nor NATO will wish to attain another
Kosovo-like "victory." Had they not internationalized a local and minor
guerrilla it would have been eliminated by now and foreign troops would
not have been necessary along with a U.N. Trusteeship. To say nothing of
pouring billions of dollars don the drain. Some 1300 European (OSCE)
Observers at Kosovo just beore the air war had concluded that the Serb
units at Kosovo did NOT TARGET ethnic Albanians as a people but the KLA
instead. The Clinton Administration would not listen. It did not even
wish to make the massive report of OSCE Observers available to the
public. As a prominent ethnic Albanian in Macedonia said aptly, foreign
intervention at Kosovo allowed the Genie to "get out of the bottle."
The coterie does not see it that way.
Some in it are "Senior Fellows," like Morton Abramowitz who had been a
Political Adviser to the KLA at Rambouillet and has a long anti-Serb and
anti-Armenian record. He is now the most vocal and influential
point-man for the Kosovo Albanians in demands that Kosovo be given
independence from Yugoslavia. He argues that there is "no other way."
But, someone should remind him that, in the Balkans, the unspoken rule
of politics is that hardly anybody gets everything they would wish to
have. An internationally backed partition of Kosovo, with the northern
and much smaller area remaining Serb and the rest free to be independent
or unite with Albania could be a possible resolution of the "Kosovo
Problem" that would allow our troops to come home instead of staying
there for a generation.
But, this cannot happen as long as the "ex-KLA" "factions" are not
disarmed completely by a NATO able and willing to show its teeth. This
goal was one of the three main provisions in the "Peace Plan" at
Rambouillet. The KLA even signed it. . It cannot happen as long as the
same people keep "testifying" and "informing " repeatedly a Congress
that is already "captured" by the Albanian Lobby. It cannot happen
while NATO looks the other way. The political head of the "e-KLA," the
main general of the KLA{who is an attested war crimnal for what he did
in Croatia to the Serbs) and the ONCE-MODERATE leader of most Kosovo
Albanians are all in accord that ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia,
western Macedonia and eastern Montenegro "deserve" self-determination.
There is a third level at home in the U.S., the one that really counts
because it is composed of the actual decision makers who command the
military, political, and economic resources of the United States. They
define strategic objectives without communicating with the American
People that ultimately pays the bills and will come to benefit or to
harm for what they do or not do abroad. Until the change in Presidency,
many in this group defined themselves through the Holocaust. It is a
powerful influence, just like the World War II, which impacted an
entire generation in Europe and the U.S. But, as was pointed earlier,
the analogy with what happened at Kosovo does not work. It may even be
extremely counter-productive to the U.S. National Interest.
The preceding "determinators" have been replaced by what one could call
the "oil men," a practical, hard-ball bunch ready to be real tough only
when clear and widely discernible aspects of the National Interest are
at stake. It is too early to tell what this group, now in-charge, will
come up with but whatever it does come up with it will fail ultimately
unless it develops a real respect for facts and contexts in which these
devolve. In short, until they avoid the tendency to dupe the American
People in pursuit of "geo-political strategies" and "higher goals" that
only they grasp and for which they are ultimately not accountable even
in cases of egregious errors. They can learn a most profitable lesson by
a close and real look at what has been done to "the Serbs." It should
ring the bell on how NOT to deal with peoples out there and avoid, at
the same time, a Balkanization of America in the belief that they can
promote Democracy abroad while losing it at home.
Raymond K. Kent
History Department,
University of California,
Berkeley, Ca. 97720
(510/642-1971)
A Case of non-Justifiable Retribution
R.K.Kent
Emeritus Professor of History
University of California at Berkeley
27 March 2001
If there is a dominant feature of the Clinton era involvement in the
Balkans it can be summed-up with the saying that "the enemy of my
enemy is my friend." Science has abandoned "Reasoning by Analogy" for
at least two centuries but, than, there was nothing remotely
"scientific" involved in the Clintonite foreign "policy."despite the
pretensions of a Magister Dixit Dr. Seceratry of State. For a number
of complex reasons, the Serbs became the selected "enemy" of the
"West" as a whole through NATO, and even of Civilization itself. Ipso
facto, all other ethno-religious groups within the ex-Yugoslav space
became our "allies." The Croats, the Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo’s
ethnic Albanians ---all three were also transformed into "victims."
It was a "status" condition for which the Serbs were not allowed to
qualify. The "victims" had all the rights and deserved all the external
support. The "aggressors" had no rights. The Serbs were gradually
dehumanized through the Western media and governmental propaganda. They
were subjected to crippling and long-lasting economic sanctions.
NATO bombed the Serbs twice, once in Bosnia for three weeks and the
second time for eleven weeks in Serbia proper and Kosovo.
A Bogus Enemy and a War without Precedent
The 78-day attack had several unique features. First and foremost it
had no popular support at home. None of the "explanations" for it
seemed convincing enough. . Inter alia, it was regularly served to
the American People as a "humanitarian intervention." Few continued to
see it as such as the war went on and on. Anti-war activists began to
organize as it became clear that the American People had been simply
by-passed. Demonstrations were slated for 5th June 1999. It may be a
coincidence but the actual bombings stopped the day before while the
war’s "official end" was announced a week later.
Although it was presented as a joint Euro-American endeavor the U.S.
was the driving force and an 80 percent contributor to the total war
effort. It was the largest military undertaking in Europe since World
War II. It was launched without a declaration of war which the U.S.
Congress, for example, would not grant the President even 26 days into
the bombing campaign. For the first time, through control of NATO, the
U.S. bombed a state inside Europe and not in Asia, Africa
or Latin America. Yet, the United States was under no attack. The Serbs
had even been its allies in two World Wars. It had no economic
positions to defend in the Balkans. It was physically absent from the
Balkans in both World Wars, although it did bomb Roumania’s Ploesti
Oil Fields in 1944 as well as Belgrade, eleven times, at the request of
the Communist Tito, then trying to conquer Serbia. As others would do
more recently in ex-Yugoslavia, Tito "borrowed" the USAF to "soften"
Serbia. .
In a language reminiscent of Orwell, the "Air War" over Serbia
and Kosovo suggested air combat but it was nothing of the kind. .
Basically, the USAF, within NATO dropped bombs, Tomahawk and Cruise
missiles (and cluster bombs) firing shells dipped in depleted uranium
on a virtually defenseless nation. Another first, no single U.S. soldier
was lost in the Air War.
In the media drive to impose cerebral terror on "the Serbs," few
bona fide reporters made serious attempts to verify and fine- tune
into all the charges and horrors swirling about, in gore, on TV
screens, in articles dripping with blood, in pious postures of the
we-must-do-something hawks. The parlor-room Moral Giants, who own
and dominate most of the scribal and audio-visual media in the U.S.,
set up a political agenda. It was hardly advertised but it came into
view anyway. .The Serbs must not only be punished. They must be
humiliated, brought down on their knees. They must be "taught a
lesson." They are "collectively sick." They suffer from "pernicious
nationalism" and need to be "cured." They are the harbingers of another
Holocaust.. They should even be "hit in the genes" to induce collective
remorse through physical mutations in their yet-to-be-born children.
As that might take some time, a faster lane in which the Guardians of
Civilization could come to travel in their "justifiable retribution" was
to create a "special" Tribunal with another unstated but clear-cut
mission. By indicting and trying mainly and constantly "the Serbs,"
with a few cosmetic exceptions of several low and mid-ranking Croats
plus a Bosnian Muslim or two, "the Serbs" would continue to be "roasted"
on the spit of public opinion even long after the fratricidal wars had
stopped in ex-Yugoslavia. Needless to stress, this "Tribunal" is the
greatest violator of civilized laws, one step removed from a Kangaroo
Court and is even in constant violation of its own mandate’s provision
that it cannot accept funds from individuals (like George Soros) or be
supported by considerable aid from a single country, like the Unietd
States. In practice, if not widely known or understood, the Tribunal has
been basically a political arm of the State Department.
While all sorts of "indignant" hawks lambasted "the Serbs" for being
the "prisoners of their past," others accused them of failure to "face
their own past." Few could ask such a "sophisticated" question as
"where does one start or cut-off the Serb past?" To give an example, had
the "International Community" taken a long and hard look at Kosovo
between, say, 1974 and 1984 it would have iscovered that the Serb
minority was actually being victimized by the ethnic Albanian majority.
This happened because in 1974 the Federal Constitution of Yugoslavia was
changed radically to give virtually all powers to majorities in all the
Republics and Autonomous Regions. A decade later, the Serb minority got
the upper hand. To put it another way, why should the Serbs have to
accept and even favor external "explanations" of "Serb History," much
of it hardly a product of serious scholarship. Much of it has also been
"constructed" in haste, suffering from what professional historians
call "backward projection." This is an all-too prevalent habit to look,
usually with a strong partisan bias, at a given present and THEN
"explain it" by forcing the past to "fit" into it. The stronger
Victors are usually ‘VIRTUOUS" and apt to demand that only their
versions of History be perceived and accepted as valid.
The fall of "Milosevic" who was used as a substitute for the real
target, namely the Serb people and their Nationalism as defined
externally (but no one else’s in ex-Yugoslavia) did not eliminate the
political agenda. The entire Serb leadership from both Pale and
Belgrade has been on top of the Tribunal’s list of indicted war
criminals. The new Serb Government and its President Kostunica are now
being blackmailed. Unless they deliver Milosevic and his Cabinet to
the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) a Serbia that was bombed back into the
Nineteenth Century will not get the aid it needs to pull its people out
of economic and social misery. Why is an "international" trial of
alleged top Serb "war criminals" relative to Kosovo in 1998-1999, a
matter of such priority and urgency since there is no statute of
limitations for war crimes.?
What did the Serbs really do to deserve all the punishments? .Their
first "sin" was to attempt to preserve a Federal Yugoslavia threatened
at the same time from within and without by hardly new enemies. Strange
as it may seem today , the foreign-policy team of George Bush Senior
initially agreed with the Serb position. They were afraid of what could
happen if, by contagion, a dissolutioin of the USSR became too
violent. But, they all yielded to powerful and well-financed pressures
to crack-up Yugoslavia for good. These pressures came first from an
aggressive Croatian Lobby in Washington. It was reported to have spent
as much as $55 million to literally buy certain targeted U.S.
legislators, especially those considered to be "conservative." Germany’s
Chancellor Kohl also persuaded President Bush, Sr. to abandon any
defense of Federal Yugoslavia.
An American Public Relations firm (Ruder Finn) was hired to smear the
Serbs politically. Its CEO later bragged that his work turned the
Jewish organizations in the U.S .against the Serbs. He simply passed
on to them propaganda emanating from extreme Croat nationalist sources
in Zagreb and in the North American diaspora. In fact, Ruder Finn was
able to GLOBALIZE the pathological hate of the Serbs which had united
and is still the only sure-fire glue holding together the otherwise
disunited Croat nationalists everywhere..
The Earliest Victims in Disintegrating
Yugoslavia
Hardly anyone in the West knew that between August 1991 and February
1992 the new Croat Army and the para-military carried out the first
"ethnic cleansing" campaign in ex-Yugoslavia since WWII. It took place
in Western Slavonia as some 40,000 Serb civilians fled in panic, as all
of the elderly who remained behind were killed, as all of the Serb
Orthodox Churches were systematically destroyed. Hardly anyone knew in
the West that "human rights" of the Serbs in Krajina and Croatia in
general were being grossly violated in the newly Independent Croat
State under Franjo Tudjman. He had been a Communist General in Tito’s
Yugoslavia. His main job, at least until he went into opposition as a
Croat Nationalist, was to indoctrinate troops in the Yugoslav Federal
Army.
As that Army lost its non-Serb officers and tried to prevent Croatia’s
violent exit from the Yugoslav Federation, two YFA helicopters were shot
down by small arms ground fire from the Croat side. All of the two
dozen low-ranking YFA officers were wounded in the crashes. None died
from the impact but all of their heads were simply cut-off. The
"incident" never "reached" the Western media either. Similarly, as the
YFA was losing its Bosnian Muslim components, one of its Serb units,
600-men strong, negotiated a safe passage in exchange for not fighting
its way out of the Muslim -controlled area in Bosnia. Instead, half were
simply slaughtered and the few survivors from the other half stated that
the dead soldiers had a better deal in comparison what was done to the
survivors.
In short, the Serbs were the EARLIEST VICTIMS of post-WWII ethnic
cleansing and atrocities but the Western Governments and media did not
want to know or hear or report. The new "ethos" in the West was to smear
and keep smearing the Serbs and the Serbs only. Let us now review the
war crimes with which "the Serbs" have been charged in public and let
us try to provide some idea of context.
Arkan.
These fall into several categories. There are "war crimes" (actually
civil war crimes despite the international rhetoric to the contrary) of
which individual Serbs
and/or a specific Serb para- military group were actually guilty.
Here, the Serb warlord, Zeljko Raznjatovic or Arkan, and his "Tigers,"
mostly men released from jails in Serbia, top the list as the worst of
Serb wartime criminals. They committed initial atrocities in Eastern
Bosnia and later in parts of Croatia. To borrow Bernard Kouchner’s
twisted phrase at Kosovo, they saw their bloody work as "justifiable
retribution." This was not only for what was happening to
contemnporary Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. It was also in memory of
what was done to hundreds of thousands of Serbs between 1941-1944 in
the "Independent State of Croatia" run by local Nazis, the Ustashe.
Bosnia was at the time under their rule as well. It was a gift from
Adolf Hitler for joining Nazi Germany in WWII. That is how it was. All
justifications aside, a crime is a crime, collective or individual. Two
Wrongs do not make a single Right, something that will be recalled in
connection with NATO’s "Humanitarian Intervention."
The First and Second Market-Place Massacres at
Sarajevo
Another category consists of crimes alleged to have been committed by
the Serbs without any real evidence. Such are the first and second
market-place "massacres at Sarajevo". After the first one, President
George Bush Senior was quoted as having said at a social gathering that
"the Serbs didn’t do it." Yet, no one supplied any solid evidence one
way or another. The Western media, parroting the Sarajevo
Government, accused the Serbs anyway. It is hard to believe, however,
that an American President, who had also been Director of the CIA,
would be uninformed about realities on the ground. .
Still, the Media optics were, in the case of Sarajevo, doubly skewed
against the Serbs. This is so because the Bosnian Serb Army attained no
victories at Sarajevo while shelling a very particular city from
adjacent hills. Even a part of Sarajevo inhabited mostly by the Serbs
was shelled from time to time. The hill gunners did not grasp the fact
that Sarajevo had endeared itself to the outside world because of
recently held Olympics. It had become everyone’s town. It was
constantly filmed by TV crews as the shelling went on.
The Sarajevo Government understood the context. It deliberately
provoked much of the shelling to gain more international support. In a
single move, it was able to gain the political loyalty of an entire
foreign press corps, residing in the local Hilton. A Bosnian Muslim
battery was positioned behind the Hotel and repeatedly drew ripostes
from the hills. Thereafter, no reporter in residence could adhere to
any effort that would resemble the craft of journalism. It all became
pure advocacy. .Like their bosses at home they WANTED to accept the
fare which came from the old hands of Tito’s Yugoslavia. They now
specialized
in disinformation working for the new Bosnian Ministries of Interior
and Information.
The Massacre at Srebrenica
Another category of war crimes and crimes against humanity leads into
those which are either deliberately severed from conext to remove
serious provocation or else exaggerated to gain international support..
The most poignant example of this kind, repeatedly brought-up in the
media, even six years later, is Srebrenica. It did not "surface" when
it was evolving but later, or more precisely at a particular moment in
time. It was in August 1995 that Madeleine Albright , then U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations, unveiled at the meeting of its
General Assembly an enlarged and dated CIA aereal photograph. . In it
was a freshly ploughed field that could have been anywhere but she
placed it at Srebrenica, a silver-mining town in Eastern Bosnia
inhabited mostly by Muslims. With a hint of a CIA in possession of
photographic evidence, she claimed that the field contained the buried
bodies of some 4,000 Muslim men, massacred in cold blood by the Bosnian
Serb Army. No such evidence ever surfaced.
Later, with the "help" of the Sarajevo Government, the figure
"escalated" to 7,000 and even 8,000, with added claims of "genocide."
It became by convention the worst blood-bath of the war in Bosnia.
Strictly speaking, this is not true. The entire Elite 5th Corps of the
Bosnian Muslim Army, trained by a retired U.S. General, was trapped by
the Bosnian Serbs and lost about 10,000 men to enfilade machine-gun,
tank and cannon fire, in a single encounter. For the record, this
happened inside the part of Bosnia under Serb control, now in Republika
Srpaska. The significance of the event and its location will be brought
out further below. At this point, it must be stressed that none of the
Western media involved in the heavy coverage of events in Bosnia
reported several aspects that would make the "Srebrenica Story"
considerably less one-sided with the local Muslims as the usual
"victims" and the Serbs as the perennial neo-Nazi "butchers."
Srebrenica had been declared a "Safe Zone," protected by U.N. Dutch
contingent, and containing presumably no armed Bosnian Muslim men. They
had been theoretically "disarmed." In fact, a local warlord, Nasir Oric
(a huge man and one-time Milosevic’s bodyguard) and his para-military
raided routinely the local countryside inhabited by the Serbs. This was
done over a period of months and it resulted in the looting and torching
of 42 Serb villages. Estimates vary for the civilians killed by Oric
and his men but the minimal one is 1,800 and the largest is 3,000. Oric
went even as far as to show to two Western reporters ( from Canada and
from Boston) a video tape of his own mayhem, bragging openly about his
"exploits."
The two top Generals of the Serb Bosnian Army that took Srebrenica manu
militare are now indicted war criminals at the Hague’s Tribunal for
Yugoslavia. Oric is running a disco for American G.I.s.in Tuzla. The
main General, Ratko Mladic, is accused even of "genocide" despite the
fact that he had ordered the busing out of Srebrenica all of the
Bosnian Muslim women and children. A rather sharp contrast in
comparison with what Oric did to the Serb women and children.
A tragic-comic story illustrates just how exclusively anti-Serb the
Tribunal has been. Two Serb university professors approached an
American who had gained some notoriety in "reporting" the miseries of
Bosnia. With simulated confidentiality, they revealed to him the
existence of a horrible Serb war criminal who had escaped attention.
They gave him a name. Within weeks, it appeared on the list of war
criminals wanted at the Tribunal. The only problem was that the man
never existed. It was a deliberate hoax to test "the channels." This was
still at the time when the Tribunal issued open indictments. Later,
these became secret.
Using an educated Mulsim intermediary, General Mladic demanded that
the Bosnian Muslim men hidden in the woods around Srebrenica surrender.
Instead, they made a run for Tuzla, a Bosnian Muslim stronghold. This is
when the Serb tanks began to shell and machinegun the woods
indiscriminately, killing in the view of its low-ranking commanders men
of a fleeing enemy army. It did not matter that most of hose in flight
did not carry any weapons. This is because, in civil wars, a man with a
rifle is a fighter. One without it is a civilian and they are and have
been entirely interchangeable. Suffice it to say that, at the end of the
Gulf War, USAF jets strafed the fleeing Iraqi soldiers much in the
same way. There was however one major difference.
At Srebernica, many of those in flight who had been caught were executed
in a summary fashion. This is where the real war crime comes in. Only
here Oric, by association, and as yet undesignated Bosnian Serb Army
soldiers, are the dual culprits in this the tragedy. The fleeing men
were afraid of reprisals for what Oric had done to the Serbs. The Serb
soldiers did not look only for the men that Oric used to exterminate
Srebrenica’s rural Serbs. All men of fighting age were automatically
regarded as Oric’s men. There remains the question of figures.
One needs to bring in some new elements up. Nasir Oric and his "elite
army" left Srebrenica a few days before the Bosnian Serbs went into
attack. They were incorporated into the Bosnian Muslim Army with the
request that it be kept a secret. There was even a Pentagon "angle"
here in that its strategists had concluded that Bosnian Muslim enclaves
like Srebrenica and Zepa were
indefensible and should be abandoned to the Serbs. Nasir Oric and his
para-military were almost certainly tipped-off about the impending Serb
Army invasion. Next, in the first municipal elections for Srebrenica,
after the Serbs took over, the names of 3003 Bosnian Muslim men listed
as "killed" showed up on the electoral rolls.
This writer was present at the University of California panel recently
on which a Bosnian Muslim politician without scholarly credentials
claimed, with a poker face, that no one from Srebrenica did any harm to
the rural Serbs because all were disarmed. He went further, all the
bodies found in the Serb part of Bosnia were those of Muslim men
"slaughtered in cold blood," within Serb territory, forgetting that
there were about 10,000 Muslim combatants’ bodies in there, from the 5th
Corps’ military disaster. He even claimed that 4,000 bodies had their
hands "tied" behind their backs. One was tempted to ask if they might
not have been tied after the excavations, even without imagining the
logistics involved in tying 8,000 hands for executions. Se non e
vero.
So, how many Bosnian Muslim men from Srebrenica were killed while
fleeing as against those killed execution style? It may take a
decade plus a Truth- and- Reconcilliation Commission to arrive at an
accurate number. At this time, if pre-departures and flights that
succeded are taken into account, the global figure of 4,000 dead, if
accepted by convention, needs to be sub-divided , with probably
one-third for the executed men. This is not very far from the Serb
victims of Oric to be found nowhere in the annals constructed by the
Moral Giants and their often breathless . "reporters." . The
"unreconstructed" Serb haters who read the present text will almost
certainly attempt to smear this writer for "trying to whitewash Serb
crimes." Nothing could be farther from such an endeavor. . It is an
attempt to confront the hysteria which blocks all serious inquiry into
the nitty-gritty of it all. One does get tired of having to read the
uninformed human parrots who keep repeating the same bogus "verdict"
in which the Bosnian Muslims are the innocent "lambs" " slaughtered" by
Bosnian Serb "Nazis" at Srebrenica.
One more item on Srebrenica. The reason why Madeleine Albright decided
to produce the CIA aereal fotograph that proved nothing visually by
itself, is that t the Croat Army "cleansed" out of Krajina some 250,000
Serbs, killing over 5,000 who could not flee and systematically looting
and torching their properties. Madeleine Albright and the National
Security Adviser, Anthony Lake, had given the green light to the Croat
Army knowing full-well what the result would be. After the NATO troops
occupied Bosnia without a shot, no bodies were found in the field made
famous by "Dr." Albright, as the New York
Times tried to boost her dubious "expertise" regarding the Balkans as
a whole. There is yet another and last category to be dealt with.
There are distinct war crimes for which the Serbs had been accused but
which they almost certainly did not commit. This is not the reference
to "minor" accusations. Among them, the sending of a bus full of
children through Sarajevo’s "Sniper Alley" and claiming that the Serbs
shoot children because a Bosnian Muslim girl was killed by an
apparently stray bullet. It mattered little that the victim was a Serb.
Or, a TV picture of a graveyard with tomb stones while the commentator
stated with assurance that it was the burial place of Bosnian Muslims
killed by the Serbs. The only problem was that the inscriptions were in
the Cyrillic alphabet and the tombs had crosses over them. It was, with
no chance of error, a Serb graveyard. No, reference here is to two
PIVOTAL "massacres." One led, in a few hours, to a three-week
bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs by the USAF within NATO. The
other was actually the triggering mechanism for eleven weeks of
U.S./NATO destruction of Serbia (and Kosovo).
The Massacre at Markale
The reference is to the Markale market- place massacre at Sarajevo
(sometimes called the Third Market-place massacre) and to the "massacre
at Racak.," Kosovo.It so happened that an ABC –TV crew was in place to
film the Markale massacre. It so happened also that a detailed U.N.
Report exculpated the Serbs, attributing this massacre to the Muslim
side. Enter again Madeleine Albright. She demanded that the U.N. Report
be kept under wraps. It remains secret to this day but the gist of its
findings leaked out through a respected Japanese U.N. official, Mr.
Akashi. Ambassador Albright had once told him arrogantly "to mind his
own business." Her Czech Jewish family was twice given shelter and
warm reception by the Serbs. Yet, she became the foremost Serb
hate-monger of the Clinton Administration. A case worth the extended
sessions that Sigmund Freud had with Frau Lou. After the Serb Army
took the town of Vukovar through intense fighting with the Croat
forces, she visited Vukovar to PUBLICIZE "yet another Serb atrocity."
It was the killing of some 300 wounded Croats, yanked out of the local
hospital and shot by "the Serbs." The killing was real but it was Arkan
and his Tigers who did the killings again, not the Serb Army and not
"the Serbs" collectively. She "neglected" to "tell the World" two other
very pertinent aspects. One was that an entire Serb population of
Vukovar under Croat control had disappeared without a trace but signs
of torture and killings were found by the Serb Army in the old Austrian
catacombs under Vukovar. Moreover, it would
appear that the 300 or so hospital "patients" turned out to have been
the extreme nationalist defenders of Vukovar who had kicked out the real
patients in
order to avoid being executed. But, that was Arkan’s claim. It may have
been true or not is the only rational assessment, the kind that has
been a rarity in the psychological bashing of "the Serbs" in the Western
and especially U.S. and German media.
The Massacre at Racak
.
The "massacre" at Racak differed significantly from the Markale
antecedent. Racak was a stronghold of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation
Army. It was attacked by the Serb police units on November 15 1999. The
next day , a special U.S. Envoy , Richard Walker, former U.S.
Ambassador to el-Salvador led a group of journalists and a TV crew to
a would-be "mass" grave filled with 47 bodies, all men, but left
completely open. It "was a massacre ," said Walker. Within hours, the
media across the globe had repeated his words. As Madeleine Albright
would say after the "air war," this ‘Serb atrocity’ did "galvanize the
International Community." It led to the talks at Rambouillet, France,
where the Serbs were set-up to take a fall big enough to justify the air
war itself. No one bothered to ask if there really was a mass execution
and whether the Serbs were really guilty. The verdict was carved in
stone before a jury of experts could convene. It still repeated from
time to time.
A forensic team led by a Finnish Doctor examined the bodies and the
site and produced 20 kilograms of research plus 3,000 photographs. The
lengthy report was never released but a summary did reach the media.
There were no spent cartridges at the site. The bodies had to be brought
from somewhere else. Only a single person in the all-male grave had been
shot at close range. Since the Serbs had been accused of hiding bodies
in Bosnia, why would they leave a "mass grave" open and deliberately
provoke an even more unfavorable opinion abroad that could lead to
military reprisals? But the clincher for an obvious "montage" was in the
record of Mr. Walker. He had close ties with both the CIA and the
Central American right-wing death squads. A French journal stated even
that he was "running them," all in character with his reputation as an
ardent anti-Communist warrior of long standing. Given that the day
before the "mass" grave was "discovered" there was heavy fighting at
Racak between the KLA and the Serb police, it would appear that the 47
bodies were those of the KLA soldiers fallen in battle. There was no
reason why they could not serve the KLA cause again even in death,
especially with Mr. Walker around So much for the "Racak massacre." One
thing is undeniable. Both the Markale and Racak massacres, one real and
the other unreal, provided the U.S.- led and dominated NATO with enough
"legitimacy" to respond with "justifiable retributions."
It would be claimed later that NATO’s intervention in Bosnia forced the
Serbs to come to the negotiating table at Dayton. Wrong again. Bosnian
Serbs in authority, both military and civilian, had been asking for
negotiations for almost a year before being bombed by NATO. But, the
Izetbegovic Government kept refusing until it secured the deadly
services of the USAF. It was the Bosnian Muslm Army Commander Rasim
Delic who selected its targets. With the U.S. air might behind them, a
brigade composed of grandmothers could beat "the Serbs." This was
essentially true at Kosovo as well.
Back in 1998, at Geneva, a U.S. diplomat met with members of the Kosovo
Liberation Army. For some time, the Clinton Administration wanted to
go to war against "Milosevic" but without using the American ground
troops. A "deal" was struck at Geneva. What had been an essentially
localized and containable guerrilla activity by a shadowy KLA, once
defined as "terrorists," would soon escalate. At home in the U.S, the
KLA was laundered away from its ties with the drug traffic and
transformed into a Freedom Fighting but under-armed outfit. The Pentagon
and the CIA had been in Albania itself for almost a decade, training and
supplying its army with weapons. It was never clear why? But, Albania
even became a "Cooperating Associate of NATO" and gave the U.S. its
first military base in the Balkans. It was thus hardly difficult to
extend this "alliance" to the KLA.within a Kosovo dominated by the
Albanian demographic majority. This alliance has not broken down to this
very day while the media are serving "splinter groups" of the KLA in the
"neutral zone" of southern Serbia and inside Macedonia. At the same
time, the Albanian Lobby in the U.S. has an unbreakable lock-in on
Congress. There is even an "Albanian Caucus" within it. But, the
American People have no voice in such matters.
By the time 1999 rolled-in, the KLA had killed, mostly from ambush, some
300 Serb policemen. Its tactic was "hit-and-run- and- melt" into their
clans thereafter. When Serb police managed to pinpoint and surround
the KLA fighters in a clan compound, the result would invariably be the
same. Some women and children would be killed along with the men with
guns. Such events only served to boost the level of international
indignation about the Serb atrocities against the ethnic Albanian
civilians. The KLA was almost never even mentioned, let alone the
right of every state to defend itself against insurgency. All civil
and guerrilla wars are particularly nasty but this perception was lost
entirely in the plethora of one-way accusations against the "guilty
Serbs." This would have ensued, most likely, even if the Serb police
had fought the KLA with sling-shots.
Psychological Warfare against the Serbs
Part I – Croatia and Bosnia
When all the dust had settled from various battles, massacres and
interventions in the ex-Yugoslav space the Serbs were left with a
wrecked economy and a bunch of toxins and mutants in their air, water
and soil. They had "become" the neo-Nazis of the Fin du Siecle, unable
to live with other ethnicities by virtue of the "fact" that they were
the "greatest" of "ethnic cleansers" within old Yugoslavia Yet, the
simple willingness to take a somewhat closer look would show a couple of
STARTLING revelations to those who cultivate their gnorance in order to
remain perpetually "indignant." At the height of shootings in
Croatia, some 60,000 Croats lived in Belgrade unmolested. No one ever
booted them out of Serbia. At the height of the Serb-KLA fighting, some
200,000 Albanians lived unmolested in Serbia, 80,000 of them inhabit
TODAY the Greater Belgrade. Not a few pro-Yugoslav Albanians, as yet
"unradicalized" by the KLA, had fled Kosovo into SERBIA and into the
hands of the Serb Red Cross. Serbia alone incorporates 26 different
ethnicities and is the only multi-ethnic state left in ex-Yugoslavia. As
such, Serbia should receive all the support possible, including war
reparations, from the champion of plural societies, the United States of
America. Instead, pure Croatia, pure Slovenia and pure Kosovo are today
the "good guys."
The second "surprise" comes from another set of figures. Ethnic Serbs
made up about 14% of Croatia’s total population. About 40,000 Serbs
were "cleansed" out of Western Slavonia and another 250,000 from
Krajina. Bosnia produced about 400,000 Serb refugees. Most recently,
after the "air war," some 150,000-200,000 Serb were cleansed out by a
supposedly "disarmed" KLA Today, there are almost a million Serbs in
Serbia proper that had been "cleansed" out of the rest of
ex-Yugoslavia.The Western media have conveniently covered this fact by
omission (it is hardly ever mentioned) and by psychological ploy found
in the following and endlessly repeated statement: "Milosevic lost four
wars." When the actually HEAVIEST "ethnic cleansing" affected the
Serbs who became refugees that is because they "lost wars." The
"winners," of course did not do anything so there are no Serb "victims"
only casualties of wars "the Serbs themselves had started." Really?
When the Yugoslav Army attempted to prevent Slovenia from orbiting out
of the Federation, there was relatively little fighting. In fact, YFA
troops and tanks were blocked in urban settings, going nowhere. There
was, however, no bad blood between the Serbs and the Slovenes deriving
from World War II. In fact, busloads of Serb mothers came to Slovenia
to take their sons back into Serbia, Neither the Serbs nor the Slovenes
were looking for a war. There were hardly any large numbers of Serbs in
Slovenia to be "cleansed out" either.
The case of Croatia was different entirely because the Croat Nazis
killed hundreds of thousands of Serb civilians (between 1941-1944),
many in the most bestial manner that offended even some of the German
officers. The Serbs of Krajina attempted simply to escape a Croat
State in the process of becoming independent from the Federal
Yugoslavia. Bad memories were a major factor but both the Western
media and the Croat Nationalists "helped" to revive them. Instead of
reporting the on-going and constantly escalating violations of Human
Rights of the Serb minority in Croatia, the Western media served another
psychological "canard." The Serbs wanted to create a "Greater Serbia."
In that way, no one needed to worry about what was being done to the
Serbs in the New Croatia. The Croats became the "certified" "victims"
of "the Serbs" collectively again.
Krajina was on its way to become a Croat Kosovo when local Serbs
refused to accept Croat over-rule. Only here, the Clinton Administration
helped the newly sovereign State of Croatia against the rebelling Serbs.
It saw to it that a U.S. General and other officers trained the new army
and modernized it. Electronic intelligence was given to Croatia’s Army
as well. When it launched Operation Storm in August 1995, U.S. jets
strafed the Serb radar positions around Knin, Krajina’s capital. This
was direct intervention without naming it. The U.S. General who trained
the new Army feigned utter surprise that it would come to expel by
terror and war a quarter of a million people, killing several thousand
in the process, with all the properties looted and torched. Given the
"American factor," Milosevic’s Yugoslav Army did not interfere and
Croatia became, at long last, ethnically pure one more time.It was
assisted in a major way by the Clinton Administration. In fact, the
Green Light for the Operation Storm was given by none other than
Madeleine Albright and Anthony Lake, then National Security Adviser.
Serbia itself did not lose this war because it did not enter it. But,
the Krajina Serbs lost a home which their ancestors began to settle
some three centuries earlier.
The situation in Bosnia, at end-game, left the local Serbs in
possession of about 40 percent of the real estate, having lost about 20
percent . They had legally owned about 62 percent of Bosnia, mostly
rural for a historical reason. Under the occupation of Ottoman Turks,
local Muslim overlords occupied the towns and the Christian raja got
the countryside. What ended the war in Bosnia was
Nothing that resembled anyone’s decisive military victory or defeat.
But, the war in Bosnia provided the Western media and some "publicity
scavengers" and "hogs" with a gold mine for sensationalism and
hate-mongering against the Serbs. There was the famous picture of an
emasciated Bosnian Muslim man in a Serb camp immediately "diagnosed"
as a "death camp." He was ostensibly behind the wire and he had a
gentle look in his face. The picture brough back immediately the
Holocaust and went Around the World. Newsweek had it as its
frontispiece. Beind all of this was a hoax. The Serbs allowed a British
TV crew and the producer to film the camp because they had nothing to
hide. It was a detention camp, noting more sinister. A closer look
inside the picture reveals a whole group of men who appeared well-fed
and well-dressed. A Serb TV crew was also filming their British guests
and it turned out that the emasciated man was in front of the wire, not
behind it. It also came out that he was suffering from Tuberculosis. The
producer saw the possibilities of a major media coup with which to pay
back the Serb hospitality and openness by a blow aiming to incite
forever against the Serb People men and women of Jewish faith in the
U.S. and Western Europe.
When fatigue was setting in among the Western publics about the war
crimes in Bosnia, there came out of Sarajevo the story of systematic
mass rapes of Muslim Women by Serb soldiers and para-military. Figures
of 20,000 to 40,000 were cited with assurances that can only accompany
the lack of any accuracy. A French TV reporter went to Tuzla,
Bosniuan Muslim stronghold, to verify the claim that some 4,000 of the
raped Bosnian women were in a large soccer field and vicinity.Half way
to Tuzla the numbers came down to 400. Near Tuzla they went down to 40.
In Tuzla, he found just 4. While the "mass rapes" of Muslim women were
circulated even in Muslim countries for an obvious reason, the
Yugoslav Government presented to the United Nations a formal dossier and
evidence. It revealed that hundreds of Serbian girls and women were
being abducted, brought into Sarajevo and put into brothels called"
troop entertainment centers." No one took notice. To get the "flavor "
also of non-Serb cruelty to alien women, herewith is briefly a story
that never reached the U.S. media. A young and idealistic woman from
Milan, Italy, went to Sarajevo to "help Bosnia." She was persuaded to go
with a man to Srebrenica where her help was "even more needed." Once
there, she was gang raped several times, sold and re-sold for a pack of
cigarettes. When the Serb Bosnian Army took Srebrenica its soldiers
found her in a dark cellar, in rags, chained to a wall and so
traumatized that she lost the power to speak. It took a week of hospital
care and a female social
worker to get her to talk and reveal what had happened. Some of the
reports from Kosovo reveal even more harrowing tales of cruelty to women
and girls "imported" by the Albanian freedom fighters and Mafiosi from
Albania, But, they are U.S. allies and who wants to diminish the great
achievement of NATO by revealing just how really out of hand the
situation inside Kosovo has gotten under the benevolent Gaulaiter
Bernard Kouchner and 40,000 NATO troops.
Out of the propaganda mill at Sarajevo came yet another set of figures
widely circulated. It concerned some 250,000 to 500,000 Bosnian Muslims
killed by the Serbs (this was BEFORE Srebrenica). A State Departmenbt
official who resigned his post reduced the figure down to about
40,000, a more realistic one. A few media sources did pick this up
because of his correct political pedigree but it was hardly enough to
prevent endless parroting of the higher mortality figures, for effect.
Psychological War Against the Serbs
Part II – Kosovo
For Kosovo, most of the fellow-Americans are still unaware of the
extent to which they had been savagely manipulated by the Clinton
Administration and the corporate media trying to "outrun" the White
House, the CIA and the Pentagon. After the bogus "massacre" at Racak,
there came the Rambouillet Conference in February 1999. The Big Lie that
came out of it was that the Serbs walked out and refused to sign the
"Peace Plan." There was "no alternative" but to "let" NATO bomb
Serbia. Facts tell otherwise. The Serbs were willing to restore Kosovo’s
autonomy, the original main provision of the "Peace Plan," and even
allow foreign troops to be stationed there under U.N. authority without
a fight. In return, the KLA was to be disarmed. The KLA’s political
head would not sign without the promise of formal independence for
Kosovo. Than came the con-game switch that hardly renders honor to the
American People or American professional Diplomacy. An Appendix (B) was
added in the last minute. Stripped of its meandering language, it simply
meant that the Serbs must accept the NATO occupation of Serbia,
including Belgrade. As Madeleine Albright would quip after the eleven
weeks of destruction and killing from the air, "we raised the bar so
Milosevic could not jump over it. Yugoslavia needed a little bombing."
Once assured by General Wesley Clark that it would de facto "borrow" the
USAF services over Serbia and the Serb Army positions at Kosovo, the
KLA signed the "Peace Plan" for war against Serbia. On 24 March 1999,
the U.S. (inside of NATO) went into action after having pre-planned
aerial attacks against Serbia since at least 1997. Now the propaganda
and the hate-mongering in full bloom.
A "humanitarian disaster" was being worked out in Belgrade to affect
ethnic Albanians. In a TV discussion, Senator Joseph Biden, was almost
foaming at the mouth while stressing the claim. The Serbs had beefed-up
their Third Army in order to carry this plan out..Shortly after the NATO
bombs and missiles began to fall on Serbia and Kosovo and the "Kosovars"
started to come out in large numbers, the German secret services came up
with the "discovery" of a would-be top secret Serb Plan to empty Kosovo
out of its Albanian majority. This was an ex-post-facto hoax as
documented in Germany itself. There never was such a plan. The reality
of it was that the Serb Third Army had been pulled out of Kosovo as a
resul of direct negotiations between Milosevic and Richard Holbrooke.
But, Holbrooke did not lift a finger to prevent the KLA from moving into
the power vacuum created by the Third Army’s removal from Kosovo. It was
now moving to retake the territories and put an end to the KLA. It did
not need anyone’s "permission" to so do.
Ah, but the Kosovars were fleeing Kosovo en masse. Proof positive of
"Operation Horseshoe," as the hoax was called.The difficulty was
obvious. No such flights occurred before 24th March 1999, the day of
NATO’s "humanitarian intervention" to "save the Kosovars." They were
leaving Kosovo for the first time in huge numbers to escape from
escalated fighting between Serb units and the KLA as well as from the
NATO bombs At that point Jewish Organizations in the U.S. ran a huge
picture in the New York Times of trainloads of European Jews being taken
to death camps in Nazi-occupied Europe, with Kosovo on the point and the
highlight of "Never Again." The analogy was pure emotional anti-Serb
hate-mongering because the fleeing Kosovars were going into the safety
of refugee camps across the borders. They were not going into the gas
chambers. Moreover, they were actually helped to do so by the Serb
military and were urged to leave Kosovo in big numbers by the KLA
itself.
Ah, but the Serbs had killed 100,000 Albanian men assured Secretary
of Defense Cohen. This was later scaled down to 10,000 but still with
"mass graves" populating the countryside at Kosovo. After the NATO
occupation a total of 2008 bodies had been excavated by forensic teams.
There was one particular
grave containing 150 bodies. They were quickly re-buried under the eyes
of NATO commanders when it was found that the bodies were those of
Serbs. The very near- crime of re-burial was committed to again deny the
Serbs even the right to be the victims of someone else in death. With
all the outcries about "mass graves" at Kosovo, the Spanish forensic
team walked out in frustration since the claim had outpaced the reality
by an unbearable distance. The desire to unearth a real mass grave
containing Albanian ethnic bodies was intense in June 1999 that a TV
crew offered a reward of $250,000 for such a bona fide find. The Medium
is the Message and no one did more to uphold this simulated reality than
CNN. It was the first TV outfit to second and surpass the propaganda
emanating
from the Clinton team and its lower-ranking associates. It even allowed
the Government’s psychological warfare personnel to be at the Network,
ostensibly for "training purposes," another canard served to the public.
Even after twenty-one months of NATO and U.N. presence at Kosovo, after
the expulsion of not only the Serbs from most of it but also all the
other minorities,after the kidnappings and murders of over 1,000 Serb
civilians, the "psy-ops" are "publicizing" the would-be gruesome
incinerations of 1,500 ethnic Albanian men in the smelter furnace of
the Trepca mine during the air war. This has been refuted by foreign
experts who went into the mine and examined the furnace. It is further
documented as another attempt to keep smearing the Serbs –now
"inconvenient" because Milosevic has been replaced by a democratic
Government—by the fact that the Serbs had shut the smelter furnace and
the mine during the whole period of NATO’s air war. But, no matter what
evidence is presented to the contrary by real experts who are neither
Serbs nor pro-Serb, the human parrots are constantly at work.
. As a result of a decade of hate-mongering against the Serbs the
Clinton Administration and the corporate media have spawned several
hundred clerks whose career advances are inter-linked with continued
cerebral bashing of "the Serbs." They are to be found on newspaper
staffs, in editorial rooms, in various NGOs and Governmental agencies
and nothing apparently delights many of them more than to "develop"
same new "variant" of the same bashing endeavor. But that is only one
duct into protracted smearing of a single ethnicity.. There are two
others with far greater influence in the corridors of power. One can be
called the "anti-Serb brigade." It populates various think tanks,
peace institutes, human rights centers, Congressional staffs and the
like. Time and time again, these are the same people who are called upon
by Congressional Committees to "testify" and "inform" what policies
should be pursued in respect to ex-Yugoslavia as a whole. It is a
replica of Catch-22.
The Serbs invariably get the short end of the stick without much by
way of real carrots. We had real wars with the Japanese and the Germans
and we rebuilt their economies. Even an unreal war of our own making
has not produced anything close as yet. Just three months after the new
Government was elected in Belgrade, the same coterie of real
intellectual pygmies and a few phoney Moral Giants is shedding
crocodile tears about the slow pace into Democracy and capitalist
underpinnings within Serbia They keep insisting that Belgrade MUST
deliver Milosevic and his Cabinet to the Hague in order to "prove" that
"real" reforms are taking place. Against the background of NATO
destruction and a million refugees, the Serbs are not even allowed to
set their own priorities, a given in any valid concept of Democracy. It
cannot be IMPOSED from outside. In an unguarded moment, even Morton
Abramowitz conceded that the Serbs are the pivotal people of
ex-Yugoslavia. Negotiating and siding with the KLA insurgents against
the Serbs sets a most destabilizing example of reckless risk- taking.
There are some 5,000 ethnicities in about 150 countries. If their
sovereignty is downgraded and even non-existent there will be no end to
an imploding and un-manageable international chaos but it is a sure
bet that neither the U.S. nor NATO will wish to attain another
Kosovo-like "victory." Had they not internationalized a local and minor
guerrilla it would have been eliminated by now and foreign troops would
not have been necessary along with a U.N. Trusteeship. To say nothing of
pouring billions of dollars don the drain. Some 1300 European (OSCE)
Observers at Kosovo just beore the air war had concluded that the Serb
units at Kosovo did NOT TARGET ethnic Albanians as a people but the KLA
instead. The Clinton Administration would not listen. It did not even
wish to make the massive report of OSCE Observers available to the
public. As a prominent ethnic Albanian in Macedonia said aptly, foreign
intervention at Kosovo allowed the Genie to "get out of the bottle."
The coterie does not see it that way.
Some in it are "Senior Fellows," like Morton Abramowitz who had been a
Political Adviser to the KLA at Rambouillet and has a long anti-Serb and
anti-Armenian record. He is now the most vocal and influential
point-man for the Kosovo Albanians in demands that Kosovo be given
independence from Yugoslavia. He argues that there is "no other way."
But, someone should remind him that, in the Balkans, the unspoken rule
of politics is that hardly anybody gets everything they would wish to
have. An internationally backed partition of Kosovo, with the northern
and much smaller area remaining Serb and the rest free to be independent
or unite with Albania could be a possible resolution of the "Kosovo
Problem" that would allow our troops to come home instead of staying
there for a generation.
But, this cannot happen as long as the "ex-KLA" "factions" are not
disarmed completely by a NATO able and willing to show its teeth. This
goal was one of the three main provisions in the "Peace Plan" at
Rambouillet. The KLA even signed it. . It cannot happen as long as the
same people keep "testifying" and "informing " repeatedly a Congress
that is already "captured" by the Albanian Lobby. It cannot happen
while NATO looks the other way. The political head of the "e-KLA," the
main general of the KLA{who is an attested war crimnal for what he did
in Croatia to the Serbs) and the ONCE-MODERATE leader of most Kosovo
Albanians are all in accord that ethnic Albanians in southern Serbia,
western Macedonia and eastern Montenegro "deserve" self-determination.
There is a third level at home in the U.S., the one that really counts
because it is composed of the actual decision makers who command the
military, political, and economic resources of the United States. They
define strategic objectives without communicating with the American
People that ultimately pays the bills and will come to benefit or to
harm for what they do or not do abroad. Until the change in Presidency,
many in this group defined themselves through the Holocaust. It is a
powerful influence, just like the World War II, which impacted an
entire generation in Europe and the U.S. But, as was pointed earlier,
the analogy with what happened at Kosovo does not work. It may even be
extremely counter-productive to the U.S. National Interest.
The preceding "determinators" have been replaced by what one could call
the "oil men," a practical, hard-ball bunch ready to be real tough only
when clear and widely discernible aspects of the National Interest are
at stake. It is too early to tell what this group, now in-charge, will
come up with but whatever it does come up with it will fail ultimately
unless it develops a real respect for facts and contexts in which these
devolve. In short, until they avoid the tendency to dupe the American
People in pursuit of "geo-political strategies" and "higher goals" that
only they grasp and for which they are ultimately not accountable even
in cases of egregious errors. They can learn a most profitable lesson by
a close and real look at what has been done to "the Serbs." It should
ring the bell on how NOT to deal with peoples out there and avoid, at
the same time, a Balkanization of America in the belief that they can
promote Democracy abroad while losing it at home.
Raymond K. Kent
History Department,
University of California,
Berkeley, Ca. 97720
(510/642-1971)