Serbia – past and present

by Mirjana Andjelkovic Lukic

You cannot talk about Serbia without mentioning the recent bombings, which are the cause of all our current problems.
Exactly 13 years ago, on 24 March 1999 at 8:45 pm the bombing of Serbia began. The first return of the NATO aircraft to Aviano in Italy was accompanied by a festive mood in Europe. The pilots were praised for having hit their targets with surgical precision. Pictures of villages and towns full of smoke, destroyed homes and crying people as the first victims of war were shown.

Germany’s role

In the twentieth century, the Serbs have been attacked 3 times. Enormous human suffering and material damage was inflicted to them. As in 1941, when on 6 April Germany bombed Belgrade without any declaration of war very early in the morning, the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization attacked Serbia again without prior notice. This time there were Germans among the ranks of NATO forces. Once again they flew over the land, which they knew well from two previous world wars. Belgrade is the only capital that has been bombed more than 40 times since it came into existence.
The reason for the war was worked out under the government of Schröder, Fischer and Scharping in Germany. Lacking the real reasons for an attack, they made use of big lies, such as a massacre of civilians in Racak. Another one was the supposedly massive expulsion of the Albanian population, which was actually on the run, because they had been informed by the Western countries about the attack on our country.
In order to justify the longed-for war, Scharping claimed the Serbs had turned the soccer stadium in Pristina into a concentration camp. This allegation has never proven right.
Apart from these lies, they also spoke about the alleged plan of the Serbs to torture the Albanian population and expulse them. Scharping was handed out this plan in Serbian language. He ignored, however, that this document with the name “Horseshoe Plan” was written in the Croatian language. In Serbia, the document was known to nobody. Moreover, a Serb never writes in Croatian. The reports of German officers, and many witnesses who tried to tell that this was a lie, were also ignored.
Helena Ranta, the Finnish member of the commission investigating the events in Racak, was also involved in the network of lies. In her biography she later admitted to having worked under great pressure from the Finnish foreign ministry and the then head of the Kosovo mission, William Walker. They searched and ordered hard-hitting facts about Serbian crimes. Since Walker was not satisfied with her coverage, he broke a pencil and threw it at Mrs Ranta, from whom he demanded a more convincing account of the Serbian crimes which they needed to be able to start the war.

“It started with a lie”

Only a few years later, German media revealed that story about the alleged crimes was false. “It started with a lie” was the title of the TV program in which Scharping was confronted with his lies. He played the innocent ignorant.
Another one who has also spoken, but too late, was Carla del Ponte in her book “The Hunt” in which she revealed the awful truth that during the KFOR occupation organs of kidnapped Serbs and other non-Albanians were harvested and sold in Europe. There are indications that this is still being carried out today. The Italian journalist Marilina Veca also wrote about these facts. The entire Italian public was therefore in a state of turmoil.
Dick Marty, politician in Switzerland, member of the Council of Europe and member of the Commission on Human Rights in the OSCE, also reported on this issue.
On 14 December 2010, he published a report for the Council of Europe in which he confirmed that Hashim Taci and other leaders of the UÇK were involved in the sale of organs of Serb prisoners, in many contract killings as well as in various other crimes.

Everything was too late for the Serbian people

None of the people responsible for this manipulation and war propaganda was made liable for the crimes that have cost thousands of lives. For all this, a culprit was needed. They found it in Miloševic, the democratically elected president of Serbia, who had been the only serious interlocutor for the West for a long time. With the change of Western targets, he became the worst dictator in Europe overnight. These methods were also used for other statesmen.
The fruitful fantasy of the West reached its peak in denouncing this personality. He was compared to Hitler – it was even claimed that he was worse than this and that he had created a new Auschwitz. So the Germans succeeded in removing their Auschwitz to Serbia. In the Western media we could only hear the respective country’s own comments, not the original words of Miloševic, by which all people would have been able to make their own judgment.
The trial in The Hague was to bring the truth to light. But even there all the news came from only one direction. The indictment was presented by Carla del Ponte, who had collected a lot of evidence. What really happened in court was not shown – not in the Western media – for example, that she could not prove one single charge. Usually, the Serbian politicians and generals lost their lives in this situation. However, nobody cared about this.

Audiatur et altera pars – listen to the other side as well

In every conflict there are at least two sides. To get to know the truth – which would be essential with damage of such magnitude – you must listen to both sides. This is the only prerequisite for the understanding among the peoples, and the only way to peace.
A source of Serbian crimes was created from many constructed lies. These lies shook the whole world. NATO had long been ready for action. The aircraft engines were already running. The war had to be started.
With their aggression on Serbia, all NATO countries violated many international conventions, protocols and resolutions of the UN, among others against:
•    the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 1997 [Kyoto Protocol],
•    the “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” from 1972 (World Heritage Convention),
•    the “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977”
•    the “Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons” from 1980 (UN weapons ban convention)
•    the UN Human Rights Commission’s resolutions for the prevention of discrimination and the protection of minorities from 1996 to 1997 and many others.
By ignoring many international conventions, the NATO alliance has committed the greatest crime against peace in the area of Europe. The bombing of Serbia with depleted uranium, but also with newly developed weapons, has contaminated the areas on Serbian territory forever, because the half life of DU [depleted uranium] is 4.5 billion years. The increasingly larger number of people with cancer nowadays bears witness to this fact.
Despite all these findings, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently said on television that she was happy that there have been no more wars in Europe since the Second World War. The processes in Serbia used to be called a “humanitarian intervention” by the mainstream.
Whatever the future of Serbia will be, no one will ever be able to justify NATO’s war against this small country and the participation of Germany, Ralph Hartmann wrote.
Alastair Campbell on the other hand, the second most powerful man in the UK and the first press secretary to Tony Blair, stated the following in an interview for the newspaper “Novosti” in Belgrade: He did not feel sorry that NATO had bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Without batting an eyelid, he admitted to having been one of the strategists of the propaganda war against Serbia. (Source: “Vecernje novosti” dated 01/21/2011)

Gifts of the Good Angel

As they “have endowed us from a humanitarian point of view with bombs, I called my book in which all aspects of the bombing and its aftermath are published, “Gifts of the Good Angel”.
In the US, this operation was known as “Operation Noble Anvil” whereas in Serbia it was called “Merciful Angel”.
The bombing of Serbia lasted for 78 days, from 24 March to 10 June 1999. In this act of aggression 1,031 soldiers were killed, 5,173 soldiers and policemen were wounded, 2,500 civilians were killed, including 78 children, and more than 6,000 civilians were wounded. Particularly memorable is the tragic fate of the three year old Milica Rakic from Batajnica. She was hit by a NATO bomb on 14 April 1999 at 21:45 in the bathroom while she was sitting on her potty.
At the beginning of the bombings 370 planes flew over Serbia daily. In the end, the number rose to 1,200 a day.
Apart from the projectiles with depleted uranium on the territory of Serbia, other explosive combinations and rocket fuels with certain chemical compounds have been used in the bombings, whose explosive effects are very toxic and cause cancer.

NATO has admitted 30,000 bullets; the military of Serbia speaks of 50,000, the Russians of 90,000. About 200 targets were hit, mainly in Kosovo. Against us a very special chemical and radiological war was waged with the aim of destroying both the people and their property.
Although no chemical weapons were used, the NATO war against Serbia has also chemical aspects. They refer to the bombing of transformer stations, electric power plants, chemical factories, oil refineries and their oil depot. This way the combustion products, various cyclic compounds, cancerous dioxins, but also phosgenes were blown into the atmosphere.
The transformer station that had been hit released the toxic Pyralene [French trade name for polychlorinated biphenyls]. The Pyralen oils are genotoxic and should not come into contact with the environment. They are highly carcinogenic and mutagenic. Since 2001, these oils have been prohibited in Europe.
My husband and his team visited the destroyed objects during the war to study the effect of explosive projectiles in laboratories. He has also studied the effect of the electrically conductive fibers, which were thrown on electrical systems, substations and transmission lines. These fibers have caused a short circuit that led to power failure in all districts and knocked them out. These systems were applied in our country for the first time ever.
They are commonly called “soft” or “graphite bombs”, although they are not. They were part of the so-called CBUs, i.e. cluster bombs produced in the US. A CBU contains 202 clusters with a mass of electro-permeable fibers of 1 kg each. During the fall, these fibers wound on bobbins unfold like a spider’s web, cover power lines and cause short circuits making them useless.
The fibers are very light and the wind blows them in all directions. If they fall off the lines, they often rise up and cause damage once again. The professionals in my husband’s team managed to neutralize them, so they stuck to the ground and could not rise again. Therefore, our transformer stations were later attacked with real bombs, which was much more difficult to repair. My husband paid for such actions and the desire to help his people with his life. 36 young people paid with their lives in similar actions.
In addition to these objects, hospitals, TV stations, bridges, children’s nursery homes and many neighborhoods were attacked, in which innocent civilians lived. Even travelers were not spared: trains were bombed, in which not a single soldier but only civilians were traveling. The entire war damage was estimated at 120 billion dollars.

Environmental and health effects of war

It is hard to describe what we have witnessed during these 78 days. Only after several years we have become aware of the environmental, health and political consequences. The use of uranium 238 and other weapons tells us that a radioactive and nuclear war has been waged with terrible aftermaths for people and nature.
In Kosovo the watershed of three river sources was also bombed – although there were neither soldiers nor civilians:
•  Sitnica – Ibar – Morava – Danube – Black Sea
•  Pinja – Vardar – Aegean Sea
•  Crni and Beli Drim – Skadarsko Jezero [Lake Skadar] – Bojana – Adriatic Sea.
The goal was the contamination of rivers and the people on their banks.
The Geneva Convention has also been obviously violated by the use of cluster bombs. They were dropped twice on Nis – on the market and the hospital – on Valjevo, Kraljevo, on the oil refineries in Novi Sad and other cities such as Pancevo, Pe and Prizren in Kosovo and Metohija and many more areas. 93 targets on the territory of Serbia were hit by cluster bombs where they have caused great damage among the population. Besides many deaths there is an even greater number of wounded with dilacerated body parts who are now invalids. People are still dying today from leftover bombs.
Before the bombing Serbia was a green oasis in Europe, famous for the production of organic products that were exported to large parts of Europe. Many places were protected, the mountains of Fruska Gora, Tara, Zlatibor, as well as the Deliblatska Pescara [Banat Sand Desert], a rare example of a dry landscape in Europe. Large areas around industrial zones such as Pancevo, Novi Sad and Kragujevac, Nis, Belgrade and other cities are contaminated.
In the south of Serbia, alongside Kosovo and Metohija, where yet no decontamination has taken place, mainly the areas around Vranje, Bujanovac and Presevo were attacked. In his film “Deadly Dust”, Frieder Wagner described similar situations, with precise explanations by Dr Günther. The number of cancer patients is growing from year to year.
The aftermath of the bombing is best seen in the newborn. According to doctors from the hospital in Vranje, 21 children were brought there with deformities in 1998. With a constant birth rate of between 800 and 1,000 births per year, the number rose to 73 children in 2008 [an increase of 248%].
The physician Dr. Nebojsa Srbljak from Kosovska Mitrovica stated that by 1998 one out of 1,000 children suffered from leukemia. By 2008 this number had risen to 10 to 15 children. In Vranje, it is impossible to buy the expensive equipment needed for the blood test to identify the traces of uranium. The doctors from Vranje hope to be able to use the experience of Japanese experts after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In addition to the increase of cancer patients, the number of malformed newborns is also growing. The father of one child was involved in the decontamination of DU near Vranje. It is not only in children but also in animals that an increase in deformities is being observed.
The tragic aftermath of this war is clearly visible in Nikola Jovi, a 10-year boy from Kosovska Mitrovica. As a baby he had cancer of the eyes. The eyes were then removed and replaced with artificial eyes. For a time he attended the school for the blind in the Belgrade suburb of Zemun. Since his parents live in Kosovska Mitrovica, Nikola was very unhappy. Later he was in a normal fourth grade class in Kosovska Mitrovica and was greatly helped by his school friends. He uses Braille.

The Petkovic family, which survived all the bombing in Kosovo, fled to Bor in northeastern Serbia. A few years later, her daughter Nikolina was born without eyes. Later, she received artificial eyes. The parents are very poor and cannot help her much. We do not have institutions that can take care of such children.
The town of Leposavi in Kosovo was also bombed heavily during the war. Kristina Milutinovic lives with her parents in Leposavi. [we reported about Kristina 6 February].
In Serbia, more than 33,000 cancer cases are registered every year, with about 21,000 people dying each year. In the last 10 years the number of patients has increased constantly (see charts below). Serbia has now the largest cancer rate in Europe.

Serbia today

Serbia has now changed from a socialist system to liberal capitalism, suffering economic, moral, cultural and every other form of damage. In Serbia today, there is poverty, and the social culture of its people is getting worse.
10,000 companies have been closed, and 60,000 are blocked or face extinction. The closed companies include mainly crafts, trades, dental and veterinary offices and agencies for various purposes. The most important companies in the country are being sold to foreign companies. Some of them work well, thanks to cheap labour from Serbia, because the products are sold at high prices abroad.
Other companies were bought and then closed to prevent competition with the buyer’s own products on the market. That was the case with the Zastava car factory in Kragujevac, which before the war employed 50,000 workers, and was bought by Fiat. Today, only a small part of the plant is working, where our politicians like to be photographed and thereby deceive the people about the productivity of this factory. Fiat cars are available on the market in Serbia, but only available to a small proportion of the population.
Sugar factories, brick plants, breweries and cement plants have been sold. Our cigarette factory in Nis was bought by Philip Morris. In five years they transferred about 10 billion euro out of Serbia, but paid hardly any taxes to the Serbian budget! A large number of workers became unemployed. All these companies have been sold to foreign investors at a price far below their value.
The number of unemployed in Serbia has reached a historic high. According to the national employment office, there are 730,000 people unemployed. According to unofficial sources in Serbia more than 1 million people are unemployed.
According to the Statistical Office, the number of people living below the poverty line in Serbia grew to 700,000, i.e. 9.2% of the population, between 2008 and 2010. In 2010 the minimum salary was 8500 dinars or 85 euro.
The number of soup kitchens has increased. Every day 30,000 people queue up for a loaf of bread and a hot meal in Serbia, which in itself represents an increase of 50% over the past year. According to alarming data from the Red Cross, 6,000 children need these meals, 2500 of them younger than 10.
For 2012, a minimum income of 19,500 dinars is predicted (195 euro), but prices have already reached the level of European countries, where salaries are much higher.
The territory of Serbia is rich in water, medicinal herbs and spas. As far as the amount of water is concerned, we are in 40th place in the world.
Today, we do not even own all the springs. The best known mineral springs are in the hands of foreign companies. The Knjaz Milos mineral water and juice factory in Arandjelovac has been bought by the Dutch company Clates Holding.
The Rosa natural mineral water spring is at 1550 meters above sea level in the pristine nature reserve of Vlasina. The water is bottled at optimum temperature while maintaining natural properties directly by the spring. Because of its low mineral content, especially sodium, it is good for daily use. It is owned entirely by Coca-Cola.
Mivela mineral water is owned by the Croatian Agrokor company. The spring is located in the village of Veluce near Trstenik. The Mivela mineral water contains about 330 mg of magnesium per litre, which covers the body’s daily requirements.

The banks

Of the Serbian banks only three are still existing, the Serbian Bank, the Komercijalna banka and the Postbank. There is talk that these banks are to be sold as well.

Kosovo – Serbia deprived of a part of his country

The greatest injustice, however, was afflicted on Serbia in Kosovo. There is talk of many aspects, here are only two of them: 
The robbery began with the greatest mine Trepca, situated in the North and the South of Kosovska Mitrovica. It had contributed to Serbian export with a major part before and had employed 23,000 workers. In late 2008 the lead  reserves alone had been estimated to b e 425,000 tons, those of cink 415,000 tons, of silver 800 tons, of nickel 185,000 tons and of cobalt 6,500 tons. In the mine Grbenik, also situated in Kosovo, there are reserves of one million and 700,000 tons of bauxite, from which about 425,000 tons of aluminum could be produced. The export of ore is growing steadily. Only in the period between 2009 and 2010 it rose to an amount worth 557 million dollar. Almost the complete Serbian area covers brown coal, the value of which has been estimated to be 1000 billion dollar. No wonder, Soros visited Kosovo several times and tried to buy all of that for just 300 million dollar.
The Hashim Taci government promised US state secretary Hilary Clinton, US companies were to be the main buyers of these riches. Bill Clinton, former US president, was the initiator of the Kosovo war. The depletion is worked with Serbian infra-structure for which we are still paying off the debts, today.

Camp Bondsteel: Little Guantánamo?

It is not by accident that Camp Bondsteel, the biggest American military base outside the USA is situated in Kosovo. That is a town of its own. The food is taken there from the USA, the water is, too, and everything that might protect the soldiers from contamination. All the same the West is pretending that the poisons that they threw onto our country are not dangerous. You need not talk about the importance of strategic aims either. They are well-known. 
Alvaro Gil-Robles, former Commissioner for Human Rights in the Council of Europe visited the prison of Camp Bondsteel in 2002, but he talked about it only in 2005. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper “El País” he said that he had seen a miniature Guantánamo there. He had found that KFOR had been authorized to arrest people without any previous judicial examination in court before. 
The Serbs would never have agreed to that, under no circumstances. Neither would they admit that their property was robbed. Therefore reasons were invented to expel them. Here is but one of them: German sources pretended that the Serbs were massively expelling Albanian people. In reality the following happened: during the Second World War 10,000 Serbs were killed in Kosovo although no essential fights against the occupying forces (Germany, Italy, who were supporting the Albanians) had taken place. Between the Second World War and 1999 in total 200,000 Serbs were expelled several times. Their houses were used to lodge Albanian people coming in from Albania. 
The biggest expulsion took place in 1999, when Kosovo became a protectorate of UNO (KFOR). Around 300,000 Serbs and inhabitants of Montenegro left their territory. So you see very well who expelled whom. The West knew all this, it is for that reason that they had to use lies. 
As in many other European countries, more people die in Serbia than are born. According to a census there were 300,000 less people living in Serbia. This amounts to the size of a town as Cacak.
Since in Serbia people cannot find any work because of the ruined economy our young people go to the USA, to Canada or to European countries after finishing their studies. 
A great number of medical students, of IT specialists, of electric engineers and other very highly qualified people are leaving Serbia after Serbia has given them education and instruction. They are in search of a better life. 
On 1st March Serbia gained the status of a candidate to EU access. The commitment of Serbia with respect to their candidate status is considerable. 
Nobody has made his people believe more seriously that Kosovo is still a part of their country, i.e. Serbia’s integrity than the present government with Boric Tadic. The Serbian leaders did not focus on the integrity of Serbia which has been destroyed just by its deprivation of Kosovo. Today both are orienting themselves towards Europe, are going in that direction, but as two separate states. Serbia is expected to maintain peaceful relations with her neighbors. It is only on this basis that they will be able to fly the blue flag with the little stars. 
The Serbs will remember President Tadic as a person who served everyone except his own people. The EU promised Serbia payments totaling 60 million euro, which need not be given back. Serbia could easily earn this amount through her own mineral resources which have been taken away from her. The amount of 60 million does not even cover part of the interests on all the treasures which have been taken away. 
After they have renounced everything so carelessly, not only me, but many Serbs are afraid that the future Serbia will look as the one shown in a commercial by the US firm Calgon on our TV channels: the Vojvodina is lacking.     •
^{(Translation Current Concerns)}

^{Mirjana Andjelkovic Lukic studied in Belgrade at the faculty of technology and metallurgy, where she met her husband Mirko Lukic. After he finished his studies at the Army High School in Paris both received their doctorate in the field of technology applied to explosives and later became research assistants at the institute of military technology for research and processing of explosives.
During the war professor Mirko Lukic visited some of the bombed areas in Belgrade and its surroundings. As a result he developed cancer and died in 2003.
Mirjana Lukic paid particular attention to the ecological affects of the bombings. After her husband had died she continued the activities she had previously shared with him which were the investigation of the bombings’ chemical and radiological effects on the citizens of Serbia. Besides numerous publications about politics and ecology she worked as judicial consultant in the field of technology applied to explosives. She also published a book which deals with her investigations into the ramifications of the Nato-war: “The presence of the merciful angle” (Serbian: Darovi milosrdnog andjela).}