The monster was hiding in plain sight–working as a holistic healer, a health guru. I am talking about Dr. Radovan Karadzic of course who has finally been captured by his own people, not because his crimes repulsed them, (he was viewed as a hero), but rather in the hope that his capture and extradition to the Hague might soften their image as a rogue nation and lead to an economically profitable membership in the European Union.
The man, nay the fiend, is a psychiatrist and as luck would have it, I actually knew a woman who once was his patient. She was an educated Muslim woman, married to a Christian man, in a time when Belgrade prided itself on its sophistication and tolerance.
How could Karadzic turn on Muslims who were once his patients? (How could Nazi doctors turn on their Jewish patients and teachers? How could Mengele do what he did? How could the British-based Muslim doctors try to blow up the Glasgow airport?)
It is not unusual for ideologically and militarily empowered people who were once your employees, employers, neighbors, and friends, to be the first to turn you in to the police, participate in beating you up, plunder and occupy your home, kill you to eliminate the possibility that you might one day return to claim what is rightfully yours. Sometimes, more rarely, your former neighbors and friends might save you.
Karadzic enjoyed sixteen years of power and safety. His genocidally massacred victims did not. Those girls and women who survived his (and Radko Mladic’s) “gender cleansing” policies of repeated, public gang-rapes have been tormented every day since then. One such woman, “Jasmina,” says that under Karadzic’s rule, “we were raped every day.”
She lived in Bijeljina and in 1992, Karadzic’s soldiers took over her largely Muslim city and began to torture and kill the population.
Jasmina never saw her mother again. The men in her family were beaten. She and ten other women were gang-raped in front of their children. When she begged the soldiers to kill her, they laughed and said “We don’t need you dead.”
However, in Jasmina’s case, after one year as a sexual slave, a Serbian soldier who had known her parents rescued her (he purchased her as a “private prostitute”). You may read about Jasmina Here.
Many of the raped Muslim women became pregnant. Many were rejected by their families because they had been dishonored. Depression and suicide were real risks. In Jasmina’s case, she felt that her husband should have rejected her but they got around that by never discussing what had happened to either of them during the war.
But, she has attempted suicide three times and to this day, “cannot look her husband in the eye.” The “ethnically cleansed” Muslims do not wish to return to the region where their tormentors live and have been peacefully re-located elsewhere.
I was once on tap to testify about Rape Trauma Syndrome in the matter of the former Yugoslavia. Although rape is now considered a war crime, the international criminal tribunals (in the matter of Rwanda and Bosnia) remains pitifully under funded.
Do not expect Dr. Karadzic to be any more apologetic than his pal, Slobodan Milosovic, was. Eichmann in the Jerusalem dock was unashamed, unruffled, even proud of his “efficiency.” Expect that Karadzic will justify what he did as “self defense,” as a Serbian Bosnian nationalist equivalent of a political honor murder.
Those who commit evil on a grand scale are the kinds of people who do not think it is wrong. Dinko Sakic commanded a notorious death camp in Croatia where 2,000 Serbs, Jews, and gypsies were murdered. Sakic fled at the end of World War Two and lived openly for half a century in Argentina. He even gave interviews boasting about what he had done. Sakic said that he would gladly do it all over again. When he was finally caught and tried, he laughed at the verdict.
Sakic just died at age 86. I hope there is a special circle in Hell for the likes of Sakic, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Milosevic, Karadzic and for all those, world-wide who committed similar crimes against humanity. On the other hand–maybe it would be more instructive, more punitive, to condemn them to the company of angels and saints.
Thnaks, Phyllis, for what is once again not just a brilliant essay and dxpose, but for a potent reminder to any who may have forgotten or represswed the notion that EVIL is truly part of our world.
No use trying to excuse it, find post-modernist rationalizations or left-wing legitimations. Evil is pure and simple. Those whose meaning, pleasure and satisfaction in life comes from hurting others, the more familiar the better, as you point out. These cannot be redeemed or reformed.
But what about the others, the fellow-travellers, the rationalizers, the second-string and third-string band who are swept up in the moment, in the excess of rhetoric, or blinded in the eye by the sparkle of half-truths and false-hopes?
If the International Court can try these evil men and somehow hold their pernicious lies to a minimum when they defend themselves, then do we have justice? Vengeance perhaps in a way for the most immediate victims, if that is comfort in their life-long grief, but no way to prevent the outbreaks from ever happening again.
Thank you again.
Norman
How could Karadzic turn on Muslims who were once his patients? (How could Nazi doctors turn on their Jewish patients and teachers? How could Mengele do what he did? How could the British-based Muslim doctors try to blow up the Glasgow airport?)
There is a series on Karadzic in the London Times which gives insight into his life under an assumed identity as well as some common psychological connections in wiring among mass murderers. See this article (link) and others articles linked at that story.
LINK: New Age ideas and mass murder go hand in hand
If the International Court can try these evil men and somehow hold their pernicious lies to a minimum when they defend themselves, then do we have justice?
Milosevic was arrested in 2001 and died in jail at the Hague in 2006. In 5 years in their War Criminal Prison, living in reasonably comfortable conditions while his legal team introduced obfuscation after obfuscation, no verdict was rendered nor “justice” achieved.
As an arm of the United Nations, one wonders if the ICC isn’t as inept as its parent body.
Do you know what Irks me? The international court dismisses ALL war crimes charges brought against Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians. Because, you know, they were entirely innocent victims during the conflict and didn’t commit any ethnic cleansing, genocide, or other atrocities.
The ICC is a joke.
BS
So much of the “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia is a media creation that one is left to question any story that comes out of there. The Christian Serbs were subjected to years of attacks and harassment before they struck back, then, finally, gaining the support of Belgrade. The same standard applies to the actions of media in their orgasmic acceptance of the terrorist narco-state, Kosovo, and the abuse of Orthodox Christian monastics and their holy ground that goes on as we speak. Haven’t heard of it? Course not. It’s the Obama media. Did war crimes occur in the 90s? Probably. But the narrative of the poor, downtrodden native muslims peacefully riding unicorns to the mosque on Friday only to be beaten and raped by the nasty Christians at every turn is utter crap.
Ms Chesler,
As Norman Simms points out and you yourself suggest, Karadzic’s “monstruosity” could not have happened without popular, mass support.
One must be very naive to think he hid in plain sight for all these years without the knowledge and support of thousands of people, from top to bottom. Those who met K. in his new persona and pretend, in news stories, to be surprised are lying thru their teeth. K. was an actor on a big stage; he loved to be in ront of audiences and cameras; he loved his voice–quite distinctive–on which he relied to sing epic Serb ballads and recite poetry, and he had oratorical skills he must have kept in his other incarnation. Besides, his face is remarkable as well. K. is not one to melt into the crowd, with or without beard and long hair.
The Hague tribunal is a pitiful show for the delight of fools. Having lost his freedom, this is the best outcome K. could have wished for, among many other possibilities: another stage for his resounding voice and acting skills.
86,312 – 94,174
Iraq Body Count is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 invasion. The count encompasses non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion.
Who else is a war criminal.
When did commentators first start using the formulation, the catch phrase, “The Srebrenica Massacre [of x-thousands of Muslim men and boys]”?
When did the “Srebrenica Massacre” story break?
No reports from 10 July 1995 and the immediately ensuing days and weeks ever refer to “the massacre of 8000 (or 7000 etc) Muslim men and boys”.
FROM Iran, no mention of a massacre having taken place:
“Iranian foreign minister [Velayati], in a message to the UN secretary-general, has asked for immediate action to prevent a massacre of the defenceless people of Srebrenica by the Serb rebels. SOURCE: Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1, Tehran, in Persian 0930 gmt 11 Jul 95; Source: Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1, Tehran, in Persian 0930 gmt 11 Jul 95; SECTION: Part 4 Middle East; THE MIDDLE EAST; IRAN; ME/2353/MED. Message to UN secretary-general. Text of report by Iranian TV on 11th July.
From the front, no meniton of a massacre having taken place:
Reports from the front in mid-July 1995, e.g. Chris Hedges in the New York Times of 18 July 1995, reported that thousands of armed Muslim fighters “slipped” through Serb lines under fire and arriving safe in Tuzla, held by Muslim forces (and a US garrison).
The lag time between as yet unbaptized “Srebrenica Massacre” on 10-11 July 1995 and the first press reports is over a month. David Rohde, who spearheaded the story that became known as “the Srebrenica Massacre”, did not himself use any such phrase or make such a claim. In his story, in the Guardian of 19 August 19 1995 we find “…I saw what appeared to be a decomposing human leg protruding from freshly turned dirt…” He repeated Albright’s fabrication about a massacre in a soccer stadium in a nearby town, [where] human faeces, blood, and other evidence indicated large numbers of people were confined, and perhaps shot.” Also: “United Nations official estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 Muslim men are still missing in the wake of the Srebrenica and Zepa assaults.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
The news would have still been hot when Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote an Op-Ed piece in “The New Republic” of 7 August 1995, under the headline: AFTER SREBRENICA. Zbig Brzezinski says only that something awful “might” happen.
Nowhere does Brzezinski mention a “Srebrenica massacre”. That catch phrase does not appear until weeks after the alleged event. It will not be found in the press until the American-sponsored Croatian “Storm” (Oluja) on Serb Krajina in August-September 1995.
(In)Consistency: Madeleine Korbel Albright, whose “Albright Group” now has the franchise for the cell phone business in Kosovo, brought the earliest allegation of a Serb massacre of Muslims on August 11, 1995. The chief United States delegate to the United Nations told a closed session of the Security Council that 2,000 to 2,700 missing Bosnians from the Srebrenica enclave might have been shot by the Bosnian Serbs.– She did not use the formulation “Srebrenica massacre.”
So, the numbers in Albright’s document and subsequent tellings and re-tellings are not consistent. What this implies we know from the Book of Daniel, chapter 13, where Susanna is denounced by corrupt Elders. Since their testimonies were inconsistent, as Daniel showed by “debriefing” the corrupt judges separately, the judges were condemned for bearing false witness.
LEXIS-NEXIS searches now permit us to track down press reports on whatever story. Readers can see for themselves what results turn up in searches dated between 10 July 1995 and the beginning of October 1995, using parameters such as
(Srebrenica AND massacre)
(Srebrenica AND missing)
Srebrenica AND 7000 OR 8000)
(7000-8000 men and boys) …
(Koranically, once boys attain the age of fifteen, they are “warriors” for Islam.)Remeber boy bombers in Israel.
Did the Srebrenica Massacre” happen. Draw your own conclusions.
Remember the the “Jenin Massacre” in the world press’ satanization of Israel
Srebrenica re-visited
Multiple Choice question: there are
Those who say it didn’t happen, and it did.
Those who say it didn’t happen and it didn’t.
Those who didn’t say it happened, and it did.
Those who didn’t say it it happened, and it didn’t.
http://www.yugofile.co.uk/mp3s/
The Islamic martyrs-to-be were armed and retreating towards northern Bosnia to (Tuzla, under US control).
In Serb Sarajevo April 1994 I met Karadzic and Prof Nikola Koljevic, Shakespeare scholar. A British harrier jet had just been shot down by Bosnian Serb anti-aircraft artillery at the time.– In Iraq so was a USAF Chinook helicopter, mistaken by AWACS target spotters for a Soviet-built Hind gunship. A US pilot, after bagging his own people with “friendly fire” gloated: “you can stick a fork in him; he’s done”.
Koljevic showed me a copy of a glossy Muslim youth magazine VOX from 1990. This was two years before the “bomb the Serbs” PR began. The cover showed a caricature of Bosnian Serb leaders as they would be treated in a Muslim victory: severed heads under the boot of a fez-wearing mujahid were the images on the cover, of Koljevic and Karadzic, dripping wth blood.
Koljevic had a drinking problem and much grief in his family and national life. He committed suicide. Aleksandar Hemon, recipient of a MacArthur “genius award”, safe in Chicago, wrote in The New Yorker Magazine that Koljevic’s trigger finger was so unsteady from guilt that to finish the job he had to shoot himself twice in the head.
“…2,000 Serbs, Jews, and gypsies killed in Croatian camp? — Jasenovac in the “Independent State of Croatia” was Nazidom’s biggest death camp after Auschwitz/Oswiecim. The methods were not so “clinical” as at Auschwitz: axes, mallets, eye-gouges, furnaces to incinerate the living (not crematoria for the murdered). Germany’s famous Solingen cutlery factory produced an efficient strap-on knife called “Serb-cutter), in Croatian language “srbo-sjek”. Croatias’s killers dumped so many bodies, before or after murder, that an enormous number of bodies floated down the Sava to its confluence with the Danube at German-occupied Belgrade; that the Germans had to use dynamite to unplug the “log jam”. There were times that EVEN the SS stopped the Croats’ butchery of Serbs. The number murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, but also Jews and Gypsies, was three quarters of a million. The million mark was achieved by fascist Croatia (then including Muslim Bosnia) in countless slaughters (n figure of speech) in Serba lands held by Croatia. The head rabbi of Serbia has published his memoire of survival and battle in “The Smell of Human Flesh”, available from Amazon.com and reviewd by Mr. Jan Peczkis, who notes that West Wkrainian Catholics also perpetrated the same kind of slaughter on Polish fellow Catholics, the Ukrainian priests blessing the knives before the cuttting began. Nie wieder!
PR companies, e.g. Ruder finn, Hill & Knowlton, have reaped fortunes in the Balkan wars of 1991 ff. Many well-meaning people, revolted by heinous crimes, have been mis-informed about the true scope of these. Towards a remedy, see:
John Schindler. Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qa’ida, and the Rise of Global Jihad. Points in his book are:
• how the Bosnian conflict has been misrepresented by the mainstream media, covering up the large role played by radical Islam and al-Qa’ida;
• how Osama bin Laden used Bosnia as a base for terrorist operations worldwide—including attacks on the United States from the Millennium Plot to 9/11;
• how veterans of the Bosnian jihad have murdered thousands of Americans and conducted terrorist attacks around the world;
• how the Clinton administration, in collaboration with Iran, secretly supplied Bosnia’s mujahidin, including al-Qa’ida, with millions of dollars of weapons and supplies;
• how America’s Bosnian allies have been in covert alliances with radical anti-American regimes in several countries;
• why Bosnia and its secret jihad matter to America and our War on Terrorism today.
John R. Schindler is a professor of strategy at the Naval War College and a former National Security Agency intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
After evading capture for thirteen years, former Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic made his first appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Thursday.
Western journalists and politicians have portrayed his arrest and extradition to the Tribunal as a great triumph. They have spent the last sixteen years promoting the thesis of Serbian guilt and Muslim victimization in the Bosnian war and in their minds Karadzic’s arrest validates their politics.
Ever since Karadzic’s arrest was announced early last week our political establishment has engaged in an orgy of childish name-calling. Karadzic has been portrayed as evil incarnate; various journalists and political figures have called him a “monster”, a “demon”, and a “butcher”. Former Assistant Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke called him “Europe’s Bin Laden”. While this kind of name-calling might give self-important journalists and politicians the opportunity to portray themselves as virtuous crusaders for international justice, it does very little to shed light on what actually happened in Bosnia.
The people who cheer Karadzic’s capture today might regret it tomorrow. These people built their professional careers on the premise of saving “innocent” Bosnian-Muslims from Karadzic’s “genocidal Serb aggression”. Their credibility and professional reputation depend on his guilt. Until now, they’ve been able to accuse him with impunity because he was in hiding and couldn’t defend himself. Now that he’s in the Tribunal’s custody, he will be given a high-profile public trial where he will have the opportunity to challenge their accusations and present his own evidence. The odds of him getting a fair trial are slim to none, but the spectacle of a trial, even a show trial, will make it harder to silence him.
One of the most famous “crimes” that Karadzic is accused of is the Siege of Sarajevo. Most of us can remember the scenes of pockmarked apartment blocks in Sarajevo and the images of Muslim civilians maimed and killed by Serbian artillery fire. Karadzic’s trial promises to give much-needed context to that imagery.
Without a doubt the Serbs laid siege on Sarajevo, what the Karadzic trial will reveal is why they did it. The evidence has already been presented during other trials at the Tribunal, but the Karadzic trial will be the highest profile presentation of that evidence.
The Serbs laid siege on Sarajevo because the Muslims were in the city shooting at them. The siege began as an operation to rescue soldiers that the Muslims were holding hostage and threatening to kill in the Marshal Tito Barracks. It continued because the Muslims wouldn’t agree to a cease-fire and they wouldn’t stop shooting at the Serbs.
Muslim troops in Sarajevo deliberately attacked the Serbs from built-up civilian areas of the city in order to increase the likelihood that civilians would be hit when the Serbs returned fire. UN military observers stationed in Sarajevo have already testified at the Tribunal that they witnessed this practice many times.
David Harland, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping in Bosnia, is on record testifying at the Tribunal. He said, “The Muslims certainly understood that when they fired out of the city that [it] would provoke incoming Serb fire, which would make normal life in the city impossible.” According to his testimony the Muslims violated 514 attempts by the UN to implement a cease-fire.
Philippe Morillion, the French general who commanded the UN force in Bosnia from 1992 to 1993, is on record testifying that the Muslims “very frequently used mortars at Kosevo (the main hospital in Sarajevo) for provocation purposes”.
Morillion’s protest letters to the Bosnian-Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic are already exhibits on file at the Tribunal. One letter dated January 11, 1993 says: “[an] 82-milimeter mortar had been set up on the western side of the Kosevo Hospital within the hospital grounds. This mortar and its crew then proceeded to fire nine rounds using the hospital as a screen. The direct consequence of this disreputable and cowardly act was that shortly afterward the hospital came under fire from anti-aircraft gunfire, artillery fire, and mortar fire … You will, I’m sure, be aware that the firing of weapons from the hospital is against the Geneva Convention.”
The siege of Sarajevo wasn’t a genocidal Serb attack on defenseless peace loving Muslims like our news media led us to believe. The Muslims deliberately put their civilian population in the crossfire so that NATO would intervene against the Serbs on “humanitarian” grounds.
NATO took the bait because the news media shamelessly shilled for the Islamic cause. Our journalists dutifully reported that Muslim civilians were killed in Sarajevo by Serb artillery fire, but they deliberately failed to report that the Serbs were provoked by Muslim artillery fire emanating from the city.
The story of Srebrenica is similar. We’ve been told the half-truth that the Serbs over-ran a UN safe area and killed thousands of Muslims, but we weren’t told that the Muslims of Nasir Oric’s 28th Infantry Division used that safe area as a base to launch attacks from. They massacred the Serbian villages surrounding Srebrenica and they fled back into the warm bosom of the UN Safe Area when they were done – safely behind the UN’s skirts and out of reach of Serb retaliation.
In July 1995, when a column of 15,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica ventured out of the safe area to attack the Bosnian-Serb frontlines and break-through to Tuzla, the Serbs got even. The Serbs shot and managed to kill about half of their Muslim attackers and now we’re being told that they committed genocide.
One has to wonder what kind of “genocide” it was when most of the bodies being pulled from the mass graves around Srebrenica are military aged men. Thousands of bodies have been exhumed and there isn’t a single woman among them. Can you think of any other “genocide” that spared women and children? If exterminating the Muslims was their goal, why didn’t the Serbs kill the women and children? The story of Srebrenica doesn’t make sense until you realize that it is a lie. Srebrenica wasn’t genocide at all. What happened in Srebrenica is simple: the Muslims attacked the Serbs so the Serbs shot them. That’s how war works: attack and counter-attack.
Only a fool would believe that the Bosnian-Muslims were striving for a multi-ethnic democratic Bosnia. Alija Izetbegovic, the leader of the Bosnian Muslims, was seen in the company of Osama bin Laden by Der Spiegel’s Balkan correspondent Renate Flottau and by London Time’s war correspondent Eve-Ann Prentice in 1994. According to the 9/11 Commission report, four of the 9/11 hijackers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were veterans of the Bosnian jihad against Radovan Karadzic and the Serbs.
A report published in 1996 by the US House Committee on International Relations says, “Iran ordered senior members of its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (“IRGC”), the elite force used to advance militant Islam, to travel to Bosnia to survey the military needs of the [Izetbegovic] government. IRGC trainers taught the Muslims how to use anti-tank missiles and helped with troop logistics and weapons factories. The IRGC also incorporated religious indoctrination into military training. Iran used this leverage to urge Hizballah to send foreign fighters to the region as members of the Mujahideen. The effort was successful and a force of thousands drawn from several pro-Iranian groups and other Islamic Opposition movements assembled in Bosnia.”
Radovan Karadzic was fighting the good fight in Bosnia. He was fighting to keep his people free from the rule of an Islamic regime in Sarajevo that had ties to Osama bin Laden and the Iranian government. Anybody who believes that the Muslims invited Osama bin Laden and the Iranians to Bosnia for the sake of multi-ethnic democracy is hopelessly delusional.
The Bosnian-Serbs had every right to break away from Bosnia and re-join what was left of Yugoslavia. To call the Serbian war effort an aggression for “Greater Serbia” is grossly dishonest. The Bosnian-Serbs had the same right to leave Bosnia and re-join Yugoslavia that West Virginia had to break away from Confederate Virginia and re-join the Union during the civil war.
Just for fun, let’s use “Bosnia talk” to describe the American civil war: “In 1861 Abraham Lincoln committed an aggression against the Confederate States of America. Over the course of the war, Lincoln’s thugs systematically seized Confederate territory in a genocidal quest for ‘Greater America’. Lincoln’s war killed more than 600,000 people and left millions homeless. Lincoln, better known as ‘the butcher of Gettysburg’, was not brought to justice for his crimes until he was slain by a Confederate loyalist named John Wilkes Booth in 1865.”
The tendentious description of the American civil war that you just read is one of the most intellectually dishonest things ever written. Unfortunately, our news media and our politicians describe what happened in Bosnia in precisely that fashion. It is time to call these people out, the next bleeding hart that bemoans “Karadzic’s genocide in Bosnia” and smugly applauds his capture as “a victory for international justice” needs to be put in their place.
No matter what you’ve been told, there was nothing especially evil about the 1992-95 war in Bosnia compared to other wars. The war killed about 100,000 people including the civilians and soldiers from each side. That’s a lot of people, but it’s not a remarkable death toll for a war. It certainly isn’t indicative of genocide or anything even close.
When the United States firebombed Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945 we killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in that one night of bombing alone. Does that mean Franklin Roosevelt was a genocidal monster? Coalition forces estimate that they killed 100,000 Iraqi troops during Operation Desert Storm in 1990-91. Does that make George H.W. Bush guilty of genocide? If it’s absurd to accuse Bush and Roosevelt of genocide, then it’s equally absurd to accuse Radovan Karadzic.
Radovan Karadzic’s fight to keep his people from being subjugated by Islamic extremists is no less valid than the U.S. war against Imperial Japan or the U.S. campaign to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. If anything, Karadzic had more of a right to stand and fight on the territory where his people lived than the United States had to take the fight halfway around the world to Japan and Iraq.
If Radovan Karadzic marshals the evidence already on record at the Tribunal, and if he supplements it with the documents and evidence that undoubtedly came into his possession as the President of the Bosnian Serbs he will burry his opposition. The people who are pointing their smug, self-righteous, fingers at him today could very well regret the day they ever put him on trial. Then again, his accusers have been dishonest from day one they will probably keep repeating their story no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. They’ve been lying to us for sixteen years and there’s no reason to believe they’ll stop now. It is time to call these people out and start applying some common sense to our understanding of the Bosnian war.
Andy
“In July 1995, when a column of 15,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica ventured out of the safe area to attack the Bosnian-Serb frontlines and break-through to Tuzla, the Serbs got even. The Serbs shot and managed to kill about half of their Muslim attackers and now we’re being told that they committed genocide.”
Clinton and Izetbegovic plotted the idea of a Massacre of Muslims by the Serbs in order that the US could intervene on behalf of the Islamists and thus create an Islamist state in the Balkans and in Europe. US Imperialism is very fond of creating Islamist states in many parts of the world.
(The source for this is the Muslims in Srebrenica itself after they had felt betrayed by Izetbegovic)
Everything flows from that.
I think your information above is not correct. I have never seen it reported that 15,000 Muslim soldiers broke out and that the Serbs killed half of those in battle. Can you cite sources (unbiassed) for this claim?
Read the entire article of Brendan O’Neill, It will open your eyes,about how Western imperialist and the jihadists worked together during the Bosnian War, both seeking a new purpose in a changed world, and finding a shared enemy in the Serbs. Their relationship was almost symbiotic: mujahedeen would be Empire’s proxies on the ground, fighting the war, while the Empire recruited fighters for the jihad by making outlandish propaganda claims about “genocide”, “rape camps” and Muslim suffering. That is, if you don’t have them wide shut already..
Western imperialists manufactured the myth of Bosnia
“Since he was arrested in Belgrade last week, there have been miles and miles of newspaper commentary on Radovan Karadzic: on his bloody past; his role in Srebrenica; his bouffant; his limp handshake; his transformation from war leader to bearded hippy therapist. Yet perhaps the most interesting article – or at least the most unwittingly revealing – was a 374-word piece that appeared on the website of the UK Guardian on 25 July.
It was written by Inayat Bunglawala, Assistant Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and bête noire of Britain’s left-leaning “humanitarian militarists.” Pro-war commentators despise Bunglawala because he supports Hamas, sympathizes with Iraqi suicide bombers, and, just prior to 9/11, he was disseminating the writings of Osama bin Laden, whom he described as a “freedom fighter.”
In the ever-shrinking world of British dinner-party spats between humanitarian militarism on one hand and Islamism on the other, Bunglawala is considered the arch enemy of Britain’s laptop bombardiers, who believe you can liberate Third World countries by writing a few outraged newspaper columns and dropping a few hundred bombs.
Yet in his Guardian comment on Karadzic, Bunglawala found himself siding with one of his staunchest critics amongst Britain’s “muscular left.” Under the headline “Lessons from the past,” Bunglawala wrote: “I [have] finally managed to find something written by Martin Bright that I wholeheartedly agree with.” Bright is the political editor of the New Statesman and is associated with Britain’s liberal interventionist writers; he is also the author of a pamphlet titled “When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries,” which attacked the British government for having links with Bunglawala’s apparently “extreme” organization, the MCB.
What could Bunglawala and Bright possibly agree on? In Bunglawala’s words, they agree that British schoolchildren should be taught about Srebrenica “in the same way that they are taught about Auschwitz,” that Karadzic is evil, and that the Bosnian war was a lethal explosion of the Bosnian Serbs’ “deadly hatred” which followed their “relentless vilification of entire communities” (presumably the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats).
In short? Both Bunglawala, the anti-Western political Islamist, and Bright, the leftish sympathizer with Western military intervention, see the Bosnian conflict in precisely the same way: not as a bloody civil war in which all sides committed atrocities, but as an episode of Nazi-style Serbian rampaging against vilified communities, which was comparable in its horror to Auschwitz.
Bunglawala’s article was a fleeting but powerful reminder of a truth that is too often brushed under the carpet these days: namely, that both contemporary Western interventionism and contemporary radical Islamism have their origins in the Bosnian war. But back then, the “arch enemies” of the interventionism-vs-Islamism debate were allies. They took the same side (that of the Bosnian Muslims), propagandized wildly against the Serbs (whom they denounced as thugs, gangsters, dogs and even monkeys), demanded Western military assaults on Serb positions, and described the actions of the Serbs as uniquely barbaric, even Nazi-esque.
And both the Western militarists and radical Islamists were re-energized and moralized by their joint crusade against the Serbs in Bosnia. One might even argue that both of the major curses in international affairs today – the militaristic meddling of Western governments that pose as humanitarian and the occasional bloody attacks launched by al-Qaeda and others – spring from the anti-Serb hysteria of 1992-1995.
This goes way beyond a rare and polite agreement between Bunglawala and Bright. The capture of Karadzic is something that everyone from Bush to bin Laden will celebrate. Pretty much the only consensus that exists between the American military machine and the al-Qaeda network is that the Serbs are evil and deserving of punishment.
Following Karadzic’s arrest, Richard Holbrooke, the US diplomat who negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, described him as “one of the worst men in the world, the Osama bin Laden of Europe.” This is darkly ironic, since in the early and mid-1990s Holbrooke and bin Laden were on the same side, united in a violent campaign against Karadzic and the rest of the Bosnian Serbs. Holbrooke must remember this; in an interview in 2001 he said the Bosnian Muslims “wouldn’t have survived” without the help of al-Qaeda militants.
Today’s humanitarian militarists and Islamic radicals are cut from the same cloth. In Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, they were close allies – propagandistic, moralistic and militaristic allies. During the Bosnian war, anywhere between 1,200 and 3,000 Arab Mujahideen, many of them veterans of the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s, descended on Bosnia to fight alongside the Bosnian Muslims. And their movement into Bosnia was facilitated by the new “humanitarians” in Washington.
In 1993 and 1994, the Clinton administration gave a green light to Iran, Saudi Arabia and various highly dubious radical Islamic charities to arm the Bosnian Muslims. Despite having denounced Iran as “the worst sponsor of terrorism in the world,” the Clinton administration told both Croat and Bosnian Muslim leaders that they should accept shipments of weapons, ammunition, antitank rockets, communications equipment and uniforms and helmets from Iran.
Washington also allowed “Islamic charities,” which really were radical Mujahideen-based organizations, to supply money and arms to the Bosnian Muslims. As the Washington Post reported in September 1996, US officials on the ground in Bosnia, who were motivated by “sympathy for the Muslim government and ambivalence about maintaining the arms embargo,” instructed other Western officials to “back off” and “not interfere” with these shipments from radical Islamists. One of the “charities” whose provision of funds and arms to the Bosnian Muslims was protected by American diplomats was run by Osama bin Laden.
The US-protected supply line between the Middle East and Bosnia, through which both Iranian elements and radicals sent money and guns, also encouraged Mujahideen to make their way into the Balkans. Along with the flow of radical Islamist weaponry, there followed the movement of radical Islamist warriors.
Once inside Bosnia, these Mujahideen, many of them fresh from the bloody battlefields of Afghanistan, fought with the Bosnian Muslim Army at a time when it was being supported politically and militarily by Washington and vast numbers of Western liberal commentators. In 1994 and 1995, Washington surreptitiously supplied the Bosnian Muslim Army with weapons and training, even though it had hundreds of Mujahideen in its ranks. The Mujahideen formed a battalion of holy warriors which was, according to Evan Kohlmann, author of Al-Qaeda’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network, directly answerable to then Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic.
In other words, America armed and trained a military machine that was using Mujahideen as “shock troops.” As the United Nations said in a communiqué in 1995, the period of America’s secretive arming, the Mujahideen were “directly dependent on [the Bosnian Muslim Army] for supplies.” Washington helped to create the gateway between the Middle East and Bosnia, protected the supply of funds to Bosnia by bin Laden and others, and secretly armed a Bosnian army that kept the Mujahideen in paid employment (otherwise knowing as warmongering) after the Afghan-Soviet war came to an end.
If the radical Islamists who flooded Bosnia were militarily backed by Washington, they were propagandistically inspired by the Western liberal media.
The similarities between the positions of the liberal hawks in newsrooms across America and Europe and the line taken by al-Qaeda militants were striking. As the British author Philip Hammond argues, hawkish journalists in the Western press depicted the war as “a simple tale of good versus evil.” Likewise, Kohlmann describes how Mujahideen who fought in Bosnia believed there was a “clear divergence between good and evil” and understood the conflict “in terms of an apocalyptic, one-dimensional religious confrontation between Muslims and non-Muslims.” Western journalists labeled the Serbs “thugs” and “gangsters”; the Independent newspaper in Britain even published a cartoon showing them as monkeys. The Mujahideen labeled them “dogs” and “infidels.”
Indeed, many of the Mujahideen who fought in Bosnia were inspired to do so by simplistic media coverage of the sort written by liberal-left journalists in the West. Many of the testimonies made by Arab fighters reveal that they first ventured to Bosnia because they “saw US media reports on rape camps” or read about the “genocide” in Bosnia and the “camps used by Serb soldiers systematically to rape thousands of Muslim women.” Holy warriors seem to have been moved to action by some of the more shrill and unsubstantiated coverage of the war in Bosnia.
In his book Landscapes of the Jihad, Faisal Devji argues that contemporary jihad “is more a product of the media than it is of any local tradition or situation and school or lineage of Muslim authority… [The] jihad itself can be seen as an offspring of the media, composed as it is almost completely of preexisting media themes, images and stereotypes.” The jihad in Bosnia was in many ways a “product of the media” – many Mujahideen were inspired to fight by media “images”, and they executed their violent attacks against media “stereotypes”: wicked Serbs.
Most strikingly, perhaps, both Western liberals and the Eastern Mujahideen ventured to Bosnia in response to their own crises of legitimacy, and in search of a sense of purpose. As Adam Burgess says of sections of the Western left in his book Divided Europe: “Deprived of the traditional staples of left-wing politics, the search for an alternative became increasingly pronounced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The left embraced new causes such as environmentalism, which were traditionally associated with a more conservative orientation. It is in this context that sense can be made of the readiness of the left to embrace the anti-Serbian ’cause’ with less restraint and qualification than even the rest of society.”
Similarly, the Mujahideen embraced the anti-Serbian “cause” because they too had lost direction. In the early 1990s, Afghanistan was becoming bogged down in civil war after the withdrawal of the Soviets, and governments in the Middle East and north Africa were persecuting veteran Mujahideen returning from Afghanistan and wiping out radical Islamic groups. For both Western liberals (governments and thinkers) and the Mujahideen, Bosnia became a refuge from these harsh realities, a place where they could fight fantasy battles against evil to make themselves feel dynamic and heroic instead of having to face up to the real problems in their movements and in politics more broadly.
Bosnia had a key transformative effect on both the Western liberal establishment and the Arab Mujahideen. It was the conflict that made many in the West pro-interventionist, convincing them that the “international community” must ignore sovereign norms and intervene around the world to save people from tyranny. And it transformed the Mujahideen from religious nationalists – who during the Afghan-Soviet war possessed “no global blueprint transcending their individual countries” – into global warriors against “evil,” who also, like their humanitarian paymasters, began to care little for old-fashioned ideas about sovereignty. It is after Bosnia that we see the emergence of international networks of Islamic militants.
In Bosnia, both Western elements and radical Islamists became super-moralized, militarized, internationalized. As a result of their joint war against the “evil” of the Serbs, they began to conceive of themselves as warriors for “good” who did not have to play by the old rules of the international order. Post-Bosnia, Western governments, backed by numerous commentators, launched “humanitarian” wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq – and Islamic militants who trained in Bosnia were involved in the African Embassy bombings of 1998, the 9/11 attacks and the Madrid train bombings of 2004.
There is nothing so bitter as a conflict between former allies. We should remind ourselves that much of today’s bloody moral posturing between Western interventionists and Islamic militants – which has caused so much destruction around the world – springs from the hysterical politics of “good and evil” that was created during the Bosnian war. No doubt Karadzic has a great deal to answer for. But the West/East, liberal/Mujahideen demonization of Karadzic and the Serbs, and through it the rehabilitation of both Western militarism and Islamic radicalism, has also done a great deal to destabilize international affairs and destroy entire communities. “
Felix Quigley,I say it’s easy to see how after arrest of Dr. Radovan Karadic the Western world joined in a chorus of self-flagellation . The dominant theme was “nostra culpa”: “we” let it happen, “we” didn’t want to know about it, and “we” mustn’t let it happen again.
Who who are “we” in this case? How in the world could “we” (you and I) have known or done anything about this at the time? And in fact, how much do “we” really know about it now? We know what we read in the newspapers or see on television. But how precise and accurate is that information? How do we know now that we are much better informed than we were before the event?
Such questions are virtually taboo. Srebrenica has become a sacred symbol of collective guilt, and to raise the slightest question is to be instantly condemned as an apologist for frightful crimes , or as a “holocaust denier”.
A left that retains any capacity for critical thinking should regard the lavish public breast-beating over “Srebrenica” (the quotation marks indicate the symbol rather than the actual event) with a certain skepticism. If mainstream media commentators and politicians are so extraordinarily moved by “Srebrenica”, this is because it has become an incantation to justify whatever future foreign war the U.S. government and media decide to sell under the label of “humanitarian intervention”.
Aside from the probable future use of “Srebrenica”, there is the way it has already been used. Indeed, it was perhaps being used even before it happened.
From the the U.N. Secretary General’s 1999 Report on Srebrenica, it emerges that the idea of a “Srebrenica massacre” was already in the air at a September 1993 meeting in Sarajevo between Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic and members of his Muslim party from Srebrenica. On the agenda was a Serb proposal to exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for some territories around Sarajevo as part of a peace settlement.
“The delegation opposed the idea, and the subject was not discussed further. Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people.” (1)
Izetbegovic later denied this, but he is outnumbered by witnesses. It is clear that Izetbegovic’s constant strategy was to portray his Muslim side in the bloody civil war as pure helpless victims, in order to bring U.S. military power in on his side. On his death bed, he readily admitted as much to his ardent admirer Bernard Kouchner, in the presence of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Kouchner reminded Izetbegovic of a conversation he had had with French President Mitterrand in which he “spoke of the existence of ‘extermination camps’ in Bosnia.”
You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked considerable emotion throughout the world. [...] They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?
Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. I saw the reaction of the French and the others-I was mistaken. [...] Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps whatever the horror of those places. (2)
Like the Bosnian Serbs, the Muslims also herded their adversaries into “horrible” camps at the start of the civil war, on the way to expulsion. Unlike the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims enjoyed the services of high-powered U.S. public relations experts in the Washington-based Ruder Finn agency who knew how to “spin” the Bosnian conflict in order to equate the Serbs with the Nazis-the quickest and easiest way to win public opinion over to the Muslim side. The news media and political figures were showered with press releases and other materials exaggerating Serb atrocities, whereas Muslim atrocities (such as the decapitations of Serb prisoners, fully documented) remained confidential. To the public, this was a one-sided conflict between a Serbian “fascist aggressor” and innocent victims, all unarmed civilians.
The general public did not know that Srebrenica, described as a “safe area”, was not in fact simply a haven for refugees, but also a Muslim military base. The general public did not know what Lord Owen knew and recounted in his important 1995 book, Balkan Odyssey (p.143), namely that in April 1993, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was extremely anxious to prevent Bosnian Serb forces from overrunning Srebrenica. “On 16 April I spoke on the telephone to President Milosevic about my anxiety that, despite repeated assurances from Dr. Karadzic that he had no intention of taking Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb army was now proceeding to do just that. The pocket was greatly reduced in size. I had rarely heard Milosevic so exasperated, but also so worried: he feared that if the Bosnian Serb troops entered Srebrenica there would be a bloodbath because of the tremendous bad blood that existed between the two armies. The Bosnian Serbs held the young Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, responsible for a massacre near Bratunac in December 1992 in which many Serb civilians had been killed. Milosevic believed it would be a great mistake for the Bosnian Serbs to take Srebrenica and promised to tell Karadzic so.”
Thus, many months before the July 1995 “Srebrenica massacre”, both Izetbegovic and Milosevic were aware of the possibility and of its potential impact-favorable to the Muslim cause, and disastrous for the Serbs.
A few other indisputable facts should not be overlooked:
Shortly before the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim troops stationed in that enclave carried out murderous attacks on nearby Serb villages. These attacks were certain to incite Serb commanders to retaliate against the Srebrenica garrison.
Meanwhile, the Muslim high command in Sarajevo ordered the Srebrenica commanders, Oric and his lieutenants, to withdraw from Srebrenica, leaving thousands of his soldiers without commanders, without orders, and in total confusion when the foreseeable Serb attack occurred. Surviving Srebrenica Muslim officials have bitterly accused the Izetbegovic government of deliberately sacrificing them to the interests of his State.
According to the most thorough study of Srebrenica events, by Cees Wiebes for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation report, the Bosnian Serb forces set out in July 1995 to reduce the area held by Bosnian Muslim forces on the outskirts of Srebrenica, and only decided to capture the town itself when they unexpectedly found it undefended.
“The VRS [Republika Srpska Army] advance went so well that the evening of July 9 saw an important ‘turning point’ [...] The Bosnian Serbs decided that they would no longer confine themselves to the southern part of the enclave, but would extend the operation and take the town of Srebrenica itself. Karadzic was informed that the results achieved now put the Drina Corps in a position to take the town; he had expressed his satisfaction with this and had agreed to a continuation of the operation to disarm the ‘Muslim terrorist gangs’ and to achieve a full demilitarization of the enclave. In this order, issued by Major General Zdravko Tolimir, it was also stated that Karadzic had determined that the safety of UNPROFOR soldiers and of the population should be ensured. Orders to this effect were to be provided to all participating units. [...] The orders made no mention of a forced relocation of the population. [...] A final instruction, also of significance, was that the population and prisoners of war should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. On July 11 all of Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Bosnian Serbs.”
In testimony to a French parliamentary commission inquiry into Srebrenica, General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR officer who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, stated his belief that Bosnian Serb forces had fallen into a “trap” when they decided to capture Srebrenica.
Subsequently, on February 12, 2004, testifying at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, General Morillon stressed that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region, and this prompted the region of Bratunac in particular—that is the entire Serb population—to rebel against the very idea that through humanitarian aid one might help the population that was present there.”
Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that “Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself. I think that he realized that these were the rules of this horrific war, that he could not allow himself to take prisoners. According to my recollection, he didn’t even look for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can’t be bothered with prisoners.”
Morillon recounted how “the Serbs took me to a village to show me the evacuation of the bodies of the inhabitants that had been thrown into a hole, a village close to Bratunac. And this made me understand the degree to which this infernal situation of blood and vengeance [...] led to a situation when I personally feared that the worst would happen if the Serbs of Bosnia managed to enter the enclaves and Srebrenica.”
“I feared that the Serbs, the local Serbs, the Serbs of Bratunac, these militiamen, they wanted to take their revenge for everything that they attributed to Naser Oric. It wasn’t just Naser Oric that they wanted to revenge, take their revenge on, they wanted to revenge their dead on Orthodox Christmas.”
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In short, Srebrenica, whose Serb population had been chased out by Muslim troops at the start of the civil war in 1992, was both a gathering point for civilian Muslim refugees and a Muslim army base. The enclave lived from international humanitarian aid. The Muslim military did not allow civilians to leave, since their presence was what ensured the arrival of humanitarian aid provisions which the military controlled.
When the Bosnian Serb forces captured the town on July 11, 2005, civilians were clamoring to leave the enclave, understandably enough, since there was virtually no normal economic life there. Much has been made of the fact that Serb forces separated the population, providing buses for women, children and the infirm to take them to Tuzla, while detaining the men. In light of all that preceded, the reason for this separation is obvious: the Bosnian Serbs were looking for the perpetrators of raids on Serb villages, in order to take revenge.
However, only a relatively small number of Muslim men were detained at that point, and some of them are known to have survived and eventually been released in exchange for Serb prisoners. When the Serb forces entered the town from the south, thousands of Muslim soldiers, in disarray because of the absence of commanding officers, fled northwards, through wild wooded hills toward Tuzla. It is clear enough that they fled because they feared exactly what everyone aware of the situation dreaded: that Serb soldiers would take vengeance on the men they considered guilty of murdering Serb civilians and prisoners.
Thousands of those men did in fact reach Tuzla, and were quietly redeployed. This was confirmed by international observers. However, Muslim authorities never provided information about these men, preferring to let them be counted among the missing, that is, among the massacred. Another large, unspecified number of these men were ambushed and killed as they fled in scenes of terrible panic. This was, then, a “massacre”, such as occurs in war when fleeing troops are ambushed by superior forces.
Counting the victims
So we come to the question of numbers. The question is difficult, both because of the uncertainty that surrounds it, and because merely pointing to this uncertainty is instantly denounced as “revisionism” and lack of respect for the victims. This reproach is not logical. Victims are victims, whether few or many, and respect is not in proportion to their numbers.
The question of numbers is complex and has been dealt with in detail by others, recently by an independent international Srebrenica research group which will soon publish its findings in book form. (3)
Suffice it here to note the following:
1. The sacralization of the estimated number of victims. In many if not most disasters, initial estimates of casualties tend to be inflated, for various reasons, such as multiple reports of the same missing person, and are subsequently corrected downwards. This was the case for the World Trade Center disaster, where initial estimates of up to 10,000 victims were finally brought down to less than 3000, and there are many other examples. In the case of Srebrenica, the figure of 8,000 originated with September 1995 announcements by the International Committee of the Red Cross that it was seeking information about some 3,000 men reportedly detained as well as about some 5,000 who had fled to central Bosnia. Neither the Bosnian Serbs nor the Muslims were ever forthcoming with whatever information they had, and the “8,000″ figure has tended ever since to be repeated as an established total of “Muslim men and boys executed by Serb forces”. It can be noted that this was always an estimate, the sum of two separate groups, the smaller one of prisoners (whose execution would be a clear war crime) and the larger one of retreating troops (whose “massacre” as they fled would be the usual tragic consequence of bitter civil war). Anyone familiar with the workings of journalism knows that there is a sort of professional inertia which leads reporters to repeat whatever figure they find in previous reports, without verification, and with a marked preference for big numbers. This inertia is all the greater when no truly authoritative figures ever emerge.
The number of bodies exhumed.
Despite unprecedented efforts over the past ten years to recover bodies from the area around Srebrenica, less than 3,000 have been exhumed, and these include soldiers and others-Serb as well as Muslim-who died in the vicious combats that took place during three years of war. Only a fraction have been identified.
2. The political desire for the largest possible number. Aside from the journalistic inertia mentioned above, the retention of the unproven high figure of massacre victims in the case of Srebrenica is clearly the result of political will on the part of two governments: the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic and, more importantly, the government of the United States. From the moment that Madeleine Albright brandished satellite photos of what she claimed was evidence of Serb massacres committed at Srebrenica (evidence that was both secret, as the photos were shown in closed session to the Security Council, and circumstantial, as they showed changes in terrain which might indicate massacres, not the alleged massacres themselves), the U.S. used “Srebrenica” for two clear purposes:
to draw attention away from the U.S.-backed Croatian offensive which drove the Serb population out of the Krajina which, as much as Srebrenica, was supposed to be protected by the United Nations;
to implicate Bosnian Serb leaders in “genocide” in order to disqualify them from negotiating the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina. (The U.S. preferred to replace them at Dayton by Milosevic, whose eagerness to end the war could be exploited to get concessions the Bosnian Serbs might refuse.)
Exploitation of “Srebrenica” then helped set the stage for the Kosovo war of 1999:
by blaming the United Nations (whose failure to defend Srebrenica was in reality the inevitable result of the unwillingness of the United States to give full support to U.N. ground forces), NATO emerged as the only agent capable of effective “humanitarian intervention”.
by falsely identifying Milosevic with the Bosnian Serb leadership and by exploiting the notion that Srebrenica killings were part of a vast Serb plan of “genocide” carried out against non-Serbs for purely racist reasons, Madeleine Albright was able to advocate the NATO war against Yugoslavia as necessary to prevent “another Srebrenica” in Kosovo, where the situation was altogether different.
To use “Srebrenica” as an effective instrument in the restructuring of former Yugoslavia, notably by replacing recalcitrant Serb leaders by more pliable politicians, the crime needed to be as big as possible: not a mere war crime (such as the United States itself commits on a serial basis, from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq), but “genocide”: “the worst atrocity in Europe since the Holocaust”. That arouses the Hitler image, which is always good for the image of the United States as saviour from across the seas, and implies a plan decided at the highest levels, rather than the brutal behavior of enraged soldiers (or paramilitaries, the probable culprits in this case) out of control.
But what plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about all the Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Zepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an “expert” opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. This amounts to shrinking the concept of “genocide” to fit the circumstances.
It was on basis of this definition that in August 2001 the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of “complicity in genocide”. Although he neither ordered, participated in or was even aware of any executions, the judges ruled that he took part in what the ICTY calls a “joint criminal enterprise” simply by capturing Srebrenica, since he must have been aware that genocide was “a natural and foreseeable consequence”. This is the ruling that established “genocide” as the official description of events at Srebrenica.
Why such relentless determination to establish Srebrenica as “genocide”? A December 27, 2003, Associated Press dispatch provided an explanation by U.S. jurist Michael Scharf, one of the designers of the ICTY who has also coached the judges for the trial of Saddam Hussein: On a practical level, if the court determines Srebrenica does not fit the legal definition of genocide, it would be very difficult to make the charge stick against Milosevic, said Michael Scharf, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
“And it is crucial that he be convicted of genocide,” Scharf said. If Milosevic can’t be convicted, “then who can you convict of genocide in the modern age?” he asked.
The legal definition of genocide could also come into play in an Iraqi war-crimes tribunal, which has vowed to follow international legal precedent.
It is striking that from the very start, the effort of the United States and of the Tribunal in The Hague-which it mainly finances, staffs and controls-has been to establish what it calls “command responsibility” for Serb crimes rather than individual guilt of actual perpetrators. The aim is not to identify and punish men who violated the Geneva conventions by executing prisoners, but rather to pin the supreme crime on the top Serb leadership.
The office of the ICTY prosecutor has chosen to rely heavily on a single confessed participant in the Srebrenica massacre. This person is one Drazen Erdemovic, a petty criminal of Croatian nationality who was hospitalized in Serbia in March 1996 after a near-fatal brawl in a bar in Novi Sad. Quite possibly in order to escape further threats from his personal enemies, Erdemovic confessed to Western news media to having taken part in mass murder in Bosnia. He was arrested by Serb authorites who then, at his request, turned him over to the Hague Tribunal.
From then on, the prosecution has used Erdemovic repeatedly as its star witness, using the U.S. procedure of “plea bargaining” by which a confessed criminal gets off lightly by incriminating somebody else the prosecution wants to convict. He has told his story to the judges at his own brief trial, where he was exempted from cross examination thanks to his guilty plea, as well as at a hearing incriminating Karadzic and Mladic (in the absence of any legal defense) and at various trials whenever “Srebrenica” comes up.
His story goes like this: after briefly serving in the Bosnian Muslim army, Erdemovic joined an international mercenary militia unit that seems to have been employed by the Bosnian Serb command for sabotage operations on enemy territory. On July 16, 1995, his unit of eight men executed between 1,000 and 1,200 Muslim men near the village of Pilice, some 40 kilometers north of Srebrenica. From around 10:30 in the morning to 3 o’clock in the afternoon, these eight mercenaries emptied bus load after bus load of prisoners and lined them up to be shot by groups of ten.
Now in fact, it seems that a serious crime was indeed committed in Pilice. Subsequent forensic investigators exhumed 153 bodies. One hundred and fifty-three executions of prisoners of war is a serious crime, and there is material evidence that this crime was committed. But 1,200? According to the manner of execution described by Erdemovic, it would have taken 20 hours to murder so many victims. Yet the judges have never questioned this elementary arithmetical discrepancy, and Erdemovic’s word has consistently been accepted as gospel truth by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. (4)
Why this insistence on an implausibly higher number than can be supported by material evidence? Obviously, the Tribunal wants to keep the figures as high as possible in order to sustain the charge of “genocide”. The charge of “genocide” is what sharply distinguishes the indictment of Serbs from indictments of Croats or Muslims for similar crimes committed during the Yugoslav disintegration wars.
In August 2000 after not quite four and a half years in jail, the self-confessed mass murderer Erdemovic was freed, given a new identity, residence in an unspecified Western country and a “job”, so to speak, as occasional paid and “protected” witness for the ICTY.
In contrast, General Krstic was sentenced to 35 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 20 years.
Clearly, the purpose of the “genocide” charge is not to punish the perpetrators but to incriminate the Bosnian Serb, and the Yugoslav Serb, chain of command right up to the top.
Srebrenica As Myth
The transformation of Srebrenica into myth was illustrated last July by an article in the Italian leftist daily Liberazione (close to the “Communist Refoundation” party) reporting on a semi-documentary film entitled “Srebrenica, luci dall’oblio” (“Srebrenica, lights from oblivion”). The title suggests that the film-makers have rescued from oblivion a tragically neglected event, when in fact, rarely in the history of warfare has a massacre been the focus of so much attention.
Here we have the usual self-flagellation: “…what happened in Srebrenica: the massacre of 9,000 civilians, in the most total silence/absence on the part of the world institutions [responsible for] peace…” The author accepts without question the term “genocide” and raises the figure of victims to new heights. “Around 9,000 men between the ages of 14 and 70 were transported by truck to nearby centers where they were massacred and buried in mass graves…” This was “the greatest mass genocide committed since the days of Nazism until today”… What is the point of this exaggeration, this dramatization? Why is Srebrenica so much more terrible than the war that ravaged Vietnam, with countless massacres and devastation of the countryside by deadly chemicals, or the cold-blooded massacre of surrendering Iraqis at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991? But that is a genuinely forgotten massacre-not only forgotten, but never even recognized in the first place, and the “international community” has not sent teams of forensic scientists to find and identify the victims of U.S. weapons.
In all probability the film-makers, aspiring artists and “genocide experts” who consider “Srebrenica” suitable material for touching the emotions of the public believe that they are serving the interests of peace and humanity. But I would suggest quite the contrary. The misrepresentation of “Bosnia” as scene of a deliberate “genocide” against Muslims, rather than a civil war with atrocities on all sides, contributes to a spirit of “conflict of civilizations”. It has helped recruit volunteers for Islamic terrorist groups.
The political exploitation of Srebrenica has turned the Bosnian war into a morality pantomimew between pure good and pure evil, a version of events which the Serbs can never really accept and the Muslims have no desire to give up. This stands in the way of unbiased investigation and serious historical analysis. Reconciliation is in fact ruled out by the moralistic insistence that a stark distinction must be made between “aggressor” and “victim”. This stark difference exists between NATO and Yugoslavia, or between the U.S. and Iraq, where an overwhelmingly superior military power deliberately launched an aggressive war against a sovereign country that neither attacked nor threatened it.
But the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not of that nature. The war there was the result of an extraordinarily complex legal situation (an unsettled small Federal Republic constitutionally composed of three “nationalities”: Serb, Muslim and Croat, itself part of a disintegrating larger Federal Republic) exacerbated by myriad local power plays and the incoherent intervention of Great Powers. Moreover, this occurred in a region where memories of extremely bloody civil war during World War II were still very much alive. To a large extent, the fighting that broke loose in 1992 was a resumption of the vicious cycle of massacres and vengeance that devastated Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1941-44, when the Nazi occupation broke up Yugoslavia and attached Bosnia-Herzegovina to Greater Croatia, which proceeded to eliminate Serbs.
Today it is an unquestioned dogma that recalling atrocies is a “duty of memory” to the victims, something that must be endlessly repeated, lest we forget. But is this really so obvious? The insistence on past atrocities may simply prepare the next wave, which is what has already happened in the Balkans, and more than once. Because in reality, the dead victims cannot profit from such memories. But the memory of victimhood is a moral and political capital of great value for the heirs of victimhood and especially for their self-appointed champions.
* * *
The obsessive reference to “Srebrenica” has a negative effect far beyond the Balkans.
The “Srebrenica massacre” is part of a dominant culture discourse that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our “values” when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit “genocide”. It is remarkable how “genocide” has become fashionable, with more and more “genocide experts” in universities, as if studying genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline. What would all these people do without genocide? I wonder what is behind the contemporary fascination with genocide and serial killers, and I doubt that it is a sign of a healthy social psychology.
In the world today, few people, including Bosnian Muslims, are threatened by “genocide” in the sense of a deliberate Hitler-style project to exterminate a population-which is how most people understand the term. But millions of people are threatened, not by genocidal maniacs, but by genocidal conditions of life: poverty, disease, inadequate water, global climate change. The Srebrenica mourning cult offers nothing positive in regard to these genocidal conditions. Worse, it is instrumentalized openly to justify what is perhaps the worst of all the genocidal conditions: war.
The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because “we” let that happen, “we” mustn’t let “it” happen again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of “genocide”. Whatever happened in Srebrenica could have best been prevented, not by U.S. or NATO bombing, but by preventing civil war from breaking out in Bosnia Herzegovina to begin with. This prevention was possible if the “international community”, meaning the NATO powers, Europe and the United States, had firmly insisted that the Yugoslav crisis of 1990 should be settled by negotiations. But first of all, Germany opposed this, by bullying the European Union into immediate recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia, without negotiation. All informed persons knew that this threatened the existence of Bosnia Herzegovina. The European Union proposed a cantonization plan for Bosnia Herzegovina, not very different from the present arrangement, which was accepted by leaders of the Bosnian Muslim, Serb and Croat communities. But shortly thereafter, Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic reneged, after the U.S. ambassador encouraged him to hold out for more. Throughout the subsequent fighting, the U.S. put obstacles in the way of every European peace plan. [6] These years of obstruction enabled the United States to take control of the eventual peace settlement in Dayton, in November 1995.
This rejection of compromise, which plunged Bosnia-Herzegovina into fratricidal war, was supported at the time by a chorus of humanitarians- not least politicians safely ensconced in the European Parliament who voted for “urgent resolutions” about situations of which they were totally ignorant-claiming that Bosnia must be a centralized State for the sake of “multiculturalism”. These were the same humanitarians who applauded the breakup of multicultural Yugoslavia-which in fact created the crisis in Bosnia.
Clearly, whoever executes unarmed prisoners commits a very serious crime whether in Bosnia or anywhere else. But when all is said and done, it is an illusion to think that condemning perpetrators of a massacre in Bosnia will ensure that the next civil war somewhere in the world will be carried out in a more chivalrous manner. War is a life and death matter, and inevitably leads people to commit acts they would never commit in peacetime.
The notion that war can be made “clean”, played according to rules, should not be the main focus of international law or of peace movements. War first of all needs to be prevented, not policed.
The false interpretation of “Srebrenica” as part of an ongoing Serb project of “genocide” was used to incite the NATO war against Yugoslavia, which devastated a country and left behind a cauldron of hatred and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The United States is currently engaged in a far more murderous and destructive war in Iraq. In this context, the Western lamentations that inflate the Srebrenic massacre into “the greatest mass genocide since Nazi times” are a diversion from the real existing genocide, which is not the work of some racist maniac, but the ongoing imposition of a radically unjust socio-economic world order euphemistically called “globalization”.
NOTES
1. Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35 (1998), Section IV, paragraph C.115.
2. Bernard Kouchner, “Les Guerriers de la Paix”, Grasset, Paris, 2004, pp. 372-375.
3. “Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes”, by George Bogdanich, Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman, Michael Mandel, Jonathan Rooper and George Szamuely. See http://www.srebrenica-report.com/politics.htm.
4. Germinal Civikov, “Kalaschnikow und Einzelfeuer: Der Fall Drazen Erdemovic”, Freitag, 16 September 2005.
5. Davide Turrini “Il genocidio jugoslavo rivive sullo schermo”, Liberazione, 12 July 2005.
6. See David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, Victor Gollancz, London, 1995. Lord Owen, who, as co-chairman of the steering committee of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, attempted from August 1992 to June 1995 to negotiate a peace settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, concludes (Indigo paperback, p.400): “From the spring of 1993 to the summer of 1995, in my judgement, the effect of US policy, despite its being called ‘containment’, was to prolong the war of the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
I agree with Andy.First, the Serbs were no more the aggressors in the Bosnian civil war than Abraham Lincoln was an aggressor in the American Civil War. The Yugoslav army was in place all over Bosnia-Herzegovina because that republic was part of Yugoslavia. Bosnian Muslims (like Croats) left the army in droves and set up their own militia instead, as part of their drive for independence from Belgrade. This meant that the Yugoslav army lost its previous strongly multiethnic character and became largely Serb. It did not mean that Serb forces entered the territory of Bosnia, or even that the Serbs attacked the hapless Bosnian Muslims.
The accusation of aggression is intended to introduce by the back door an allegation which in fact has vanished from modern international criminal justice. Although the crime of waging an aggressive war was pronounced to be the supreme international crime at Nuremberg, it has been dropped from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia which will presumably try Karadzic once he is extradited to The Hague, and even the new International Criminal Court (also in The Hague) does not for the time being have jurisdiction over it.
The accusation has the effect of condemning the Bosnian Serb war effort at its very origins (in terms of ius ad bellum) independently of any condemnation for the way the war was fought (ius in bello). In fact, the Bosnian Serb war effort was no more or less legitimate than the Bosnian Muslim war effort. The Muslims wanted to secede from Yugoslavia (and were egged on to do this by the Americans and the Europeans) while the Bosnian Serbs wanted to stay in Yugoslavia. It was as simple as that.
In my view, it is not possible to adjudicate such matters using the criminal law since, as political questions, they transcend it. But the fact that the Muslims blatantly cheated by holding the vote on an independence referendum at 3 a.m. after the Bosnian Serb deputies in the Bosnian parliament had all been told to go home, and the fact that the Bosnian Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, remained in office throughout 1992 long after his term had expired and long after he should have handed over to a Serb, meant that the Bosnian Serbs had excellent grounds for believing that the Bosnian Muslim secession was quite simply a coup d’état.
In any case, once the Muslims had seized power in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serbs sought not to conquer the whole republic but instead simply to fight for the secession of their territories from Muslim control. Of course atrocities were committed against civilians during this period, especially ethnic cleansing. But the same phenomenon is observed, I believe, and by definition, in every single war in which a new state is created, whether it is the creation of Pakistan in 1947 or the creation in 1974 of what later became the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. If the Muslims had the right unilaterally to secede from Yugoslavia, why should the Bosnian Serbs not have had the right unilaterally to secede from the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina which had never before existed and a state, and to which the Bosnian Serbs had no loyalty whatever?
Second, the Bosnian Serbs are accused (and two have been convicted) of committing genocide against the Bosnian Muslims in the massacre perpetrated at Srebrenica. Let us leave aside for a moment the Serb claims that the numbers of people killed in that summer of 1995 has been artificially inflated for propaganda purposes; let us also leave aside the undoubted fact that the Bosnian Muslims were using the UN safe haven of Srebrenica as a safe haven from which to conduct constant attacks against the Serb villages surrounding the town, during which many atrocities were committed against Serb civilians. (The commander of the Muslim forces, Nasir Oric, was released by the ICTY in February.)
What is clear is that the Srebrenica massacre cannot possibly be described as genocide. Even the most ardent pro-Muslim propagandists agree that the victims of the massacre there were all men. The Bosnian Serbs claim that they were combatants (although that is certainly not an excuse for killing them) but the point is that an army bent on genocide would precisely not have singled out men for execution but would have killed women too. The Srebrenica massacre may well have been a crime against humanity but it is impossible to see how it can be categorised as genocide.
Unfortunately, there is a very clear political reason why it has been so categorised. The Muslim president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silaijdzic, said carefully on CNN the day Karadzic was captured that Karadzic’s trial was only the beginning of the process by which justice would be done in Bosnia. He said that there were hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had been ethnically cleansed by “Karadzic and Milosevic” and that their project therefore remained in force. The clear implication of what he was saying was this: if the very existence of the Bosnian Serb republic (the autonomous region within Bosnia carved out from the republic during the civil war) is found, in a court of law, to have been had as its president a man, Karadzic, who is convicted of genocide in the process of creating it, then its status would be illegitimate and it should be abolished. The Muslims continue to claim control over the whole of the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, while the Serbs merely want the preservation of their considerable autonomy within it.
In other words, far from bringing peace to the Balkans, it is quite possible that a conviction of Karadzic for genocide will reopen the Dayton settlement and egg the Muslims on to claim control over the Serb republic too. Under such circumstances, it is inevitable that the Bosnian Serbs would try to proclaim formal secession from Bosnia, just as the Kosovo Albanians did from Serbia.
Andy
Where is the answer of Phyllis Chesler to all of this?
Obviously you raise useful points above and I am glad that they are raised. But you did not answer my query above re numbers of Muslims setting out for Tuzla and your assertion that the Serbs killed half of them. I asked you for sources but you did not give. These numbers in this Srebrenica story are vital.
Also you write
“When the Bosnian Serb forces captured the town on July 11, 2005, civilians were clamoring to leave the enclave, understandably enough, since there was virtually no normal economic life there. Much has been made of the fact that Serb forces separated the population, providing buses for women, children and the infirm to take them to Tuzla, while detaining the men. In light of all that preceded, the reason for this separation is obvious: the Bosnian Serbs were looking for the perpetrators of raids on Serb villages, in order to take revenge.”
“In order to take revenge” this is not correct. To find out who the killers were and to bring them to justice is a fairer way of putting it.
You seem to be here anyway creating an equivalence between Serb Forces and Islamofascists of Izetbegovic who are backed by British and US Imperialism.
The Serbs are the people who lined up with the Jews to fight the Nazis and they ended up being slaughtered by the Nazis and by these same Islamist thugs under the control then of Hajj Amin el Husseini and Izetbegovic (both joint members at that time and ever since of the Nazi Muslim Brotherhood) and of course in the period of the 1990s under the control and direction of Izetbegovic. That is the key point. Nazi Hajj Amin el Husseini had died but Izetbegovic remained alive to carry on the Jihad, essentially the Holocaust, against the Serbs.
This same Izetbegovic being backed to the hilt by US imperialism!
What has happened is that US Imperialism has taken the place of the German Nazis in this key alliance with Islam.
I dispute therefore that the Serbs took Srebrenica with revenge on their minds. Why should the Serbs, following that history, be motivated by “revenge”. Seeking after justice for the crimes of Oric is a far different proposition.
You are right on one thing. Srebrenica has become the centre of the Imperialist World Outlook and this has got a bearing on how Karadzic must be defended.
This is the same issue that is involved in the defence of Israel from the Islamist Jihad there. This is why Chesler’s article is so utterly disgraceful from someone who claims to be a supporter of Israel.
http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=232
The real Srebrenica Genocide
The Serbs are the good guys.
These defenders of Milosevic’s “good guy” Serbs focus on the Serb vs. Muslim conflict. What about Serb attacks against Christian Croatians?
From the original UN indictment of the head Lincolnesque ‘good guy’, Milosevic:
26. Slobodan MILOSEVIC, acting alone and in concert with other members of the joint criminal enterprise, participated in the joint criminal enterprise in the following ways:
a) provided direction and assistance to the political leadership of the SAO SBWS, the SAO Western Slavonia, the SAO Krajina and RSK on the take-over of these areas and the subsequent forcible removal of the Croat and other non-Serb population.
b) provided financial, material and logistical support for the regular and irregular military forces necessary for the take-over of these areas and the subsequent forcible removal of the Croat and other non-Serb population.
c) directed organs of the government of the Republic of Serbia to create armed forces separate from the federal armed forces to engage in combat activities outside the Republic of Serbia, in particular in the said areas in Croatia and the subsequent forcible removal of the Croat and other non-Serb population.
d) participated in the formation, financing, supply, support and direction of special forces of the Republic of Serbia Ministry of Internal Affairs. These special forces were created and supported to assist in the execution of the purpose of the joint criminal enterprise through the commission of crimes which are in violation of Articles 2, 3 and 5 of the Statute of the Tribunal.
e) participated in providing financial, logistical and political support and direction to Serbian irregular forces and paramilitaries. Such support was given in furtherance of the joint criminal enterprise through the commission of crimes which are in violation of Articles 2, 3 and 5 of the Statute of the Tribunal.
f) participated in the planning and preparation of the take-over of the SAO SBWS, the SAO Western Slavonia, the SAO Krajina and the Dubrovnik Republic and the subsequent forcible removal of the Croat and other non-Serb population.
g) exerted effective control or substantial influence over the JNA which participated in the planning, preparation and execution of the forcible removal of the Croat and other non-Serb population from the SAO SBWS, the SAO Western Slavonia, the SAO Krajina and the Dubrovnik Republic.
h) provided financial, logistical and political support to TO units and Serb volunteer units acting in the SAO SBWS, the SAO Western Slavonia, the SAO Krajina and the Dubrovnik Republic, which assisted in the execution of the purpose of the joint criminal enterprise through the commission of crimes which are in violation of Articles 2, 3 and 5 of the Statute of the Tribunal.
i) effectively ordered the passage of laws and regulations relative to the involvement of the JNA, the TO and Serb volunteer units in Croatia.
j) directed, commanded, controlled, or otherwise provided substantial assistance or support to the JNA, the Serb-run TO staff, and volunteer forces deployed in the SAO SBWS, the SAO Western Slavonia, the SAO Krajina and the Dubrovnik Republic engaged in the execution of the purpose of the joint criminal enterprise through the commission of crimes which are in violation of Articles 2, 3 and 5 of the Statute of the Tribunal.
k) directed, commanded, controlled, or otherwise provided substantial assistance or support to the police forces within the MUP of the Republic of Serbia, including the DB, whose members assisted in the execution of the purpose of the joint criminal enterprise in the SAO SBWS, the SAO Western Slavonia, the SAO Krajina and the Dubrovnik Republic.
l) financed Serb military, police, and irregular soldiers in Croatia who perpetrated crimes as specified in this indictment.
m) controlled, contributed to, or otherwise utilised Serbian state-run media outlets to manipulate Serbian public opinion by spreading exaggerated and false messages of ethnically based attacks by Croats against Serb people in order to create an atmosphere of fear and hatred among Serbs living in Serbia and Croatia. The propaganda generated by the Serbian media was an important tool in contributing to the perpetration of crimes in Croatia.
Serbs attacked Croatians, Muslims and other because non-Serbs resisted Serbian ethnic cleansing efforts. You know it, everyone, even the elite-supporting UN knew it.
Mary Madigan what about it? You are full of it?! Let’s discuss Croats… you asked for it.Serbs today commemorate 13 years since the massive ethnic cleansing of more than 250,000 Serbs from Krajina in Croatia. Memorial service for the victims of Croat military operation, a pogrom meticulously planned and organized at the very top of Croat state and military leadership, will be held at the Church of St. Mark in Belgrade.
Thirteen years ago, on August 4 1995, 200,000 Croat army and police troops from Croatia and the Croat Defense Council from Bosnia-Herzegovina, under the command of Franjo Tudjman, attacked the United Nations protected zones (safe havens) with Serbian population in northern Dalmatia, Lika, Kordun and Banija. They were helped on the Bosnian side by the Bosnian Muslim fighters and had the operation backed, coordinated and logistically supported by the leading Western powers.
A day later, on August 5, Croat troops have entered the ethnically cleansed town of Knin which was under the heavy missile barrage earlier where, prior to the “Storm”, more than 90 percent of the population were Serbs.
In a few days, the complete Serbian population from Krajina in Croatia was forced to flee towards Serbia and Republic of Srpska. Columns with over 250,000 expelled Croatia Serbs were under constant assault of Croat artillery and under fire from the fighter jets which followed them on their collective exodus from Croatia.
Serbs who refused to leave, mostly elderly and weak, were subjected to terror and killed after the official end of the “Operation Storm”, on August 7. Serbian houses were plundered and razed to the ground. Most of the livestock that belonged to Serbian families was also savagely killed by the Croat troops in an orgy of death Croat leadership had plunged Serbian Krajina in.
According to the data of the Documentation-Information Center Veritas, in the pogrom by the Croat army close to 2,000 people were killed, while the Croat Helsinki board claims that during the “Operation Storm” 670 Serbian civilians were killed.
Then-Commander of the UN peacekeepers for the territory of the town of Knin, General Allan Goran, wrote in his report that the UN police had found 128 killed Knin Serbs after Croat army had stormed the town, and 73 percent of the houses razed down.
Tudjman: Croatia Serbs Must Disappear!
The so-called “Brioni Transcripts” from the meetings of the Croat war president Tudjman with the military and state leadership ahead of the “Storm”, reveal the details of the attack plan in the territory of Serbian Krajina. The most memorable is Tudjman’s order that “Serbs must be hit so hard that they disappear”.
Concept of the ‘final solution’ for the Serb population in Croatia, Franjo Tudjman has described long time ago, in his book “The Wasteland of Historical Reality”, where he offered his views on why is genocide justified, saying that “forceful, even genocidal transformations lead to ethnic homogenization of the certain nations, to a greater harmony of the national composition of the population and the state borders of the individual countries. Therefore this can have positive effects for future developments, in the sense of reducing causes for the new violence and instigation of the new confrontations and the international upheavals.”
After the “Storm” which, according to Croat president, successfully finalized the ethnic cleansing of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, Tudjman cynically described the pogrom of Croatia Serbs at the opening of the Military school Ban Josip Jelacic in Zagreb, on December 14 1998: “We have, therefore, resolved the Serbian question! There will no longer be 12 percent of Serbs, nor 9 percent of Yugoslavs [mostly Serbs who were declaring themselves as "Yugoslavs" during the censuses], as before. And, if there gets to be 3 or 5 percent, that does not pose a danger to the Croat state”.
The main culprits for the ethnic cleansing of Serbian population in Croatia, Franjo Tudjman and the rest of Croat political leadership have never been indicted for the planning and execution of a state crime against non-Croat population. Hague tribunal indicted three of the Croat military and police leaders for the war crimes committed during “Storm”: Ante Gotovina, Mladen Markac and Ivan Cermak.
Day on which the operation Storm had begun Croatia celebrates as a state holiday. The expelled Serbs who survived the pogrom are dedicating the same day to commemorating their family members and those who perished in Croat “Storm”.
From one of the Balkan War Criminal Trials you’re NOT Hearing Anything About
UN official tells court of Gotovina death threat (July 21)
” THE HAGUE — The killing and looting of Serb property after Croatia’s Op Storm was organized, a former UN spokesman says.
Alun Roberts on Monday testified at the Hague Tribunal trial of three former Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina, Ivan Čermak and Mladen Markač, indicted for war crimes committed against ethnic Serbs during and after Croatian Army’s 1995 Operation Storm.
Roberts accused Croatian military forces of shelling Knin and crimes committed in the vicinity of that town after the operation, and said that 200 civilian facilities were damaged in the shelling of August 4 and 5, 1995, “which had not been limited to the locations used by the self-proclaimed local military and civilian Serb authorities”.
He said that Croatian authorities, specifically General Čermak, had limited the movement of UN members to the center of Knin “in order to conceal the extent of the shelling”.
Roberts said he had seen wide-scale torching, looting and killing of civilians, most frequently elderly people, during a tour of UN’s Sector South. The witness added that UN members “always saw Croatian Army and Special Police members in the torched villages”.
For this reason, he concluded that there was a tendency of ethnic cleansing, rather than isolated incidents and individual crimes.
In Grubori, six villagers who survived told Roberts that some members of their families had been burned alive in their houses, and then took him to the locations where he took photographs of some of the victims.
The former UN official concluded that they had been shot point blank and that one elderly man was killed in his bed.
Roberts also testified that Gotovina had threatened to kill him, accusing him of “protecting Serb war criminals hidden among the civilians”. ”
http://www.sense-agency.com/en/stream.php?sta=3&pid=11167&kat=3
Oh, the Croatian forces also drove tanks over the bodies of the people they killed
You want know hear more about Croatian ‘glorious” past?
Commander of the second-largest concentration camp complex of World War II, Croatia’s Jasenovac, passed away last week and received a burial in his homeland — in full Nazi uniform, with full honors, and with a Catholic priest officiating. No media attention and therefore no public outrage is being devoted to the funeral of Dinko Sakic, a gruesome but not atypical occurrence in Croatia, a country that’s been put on the fast track for EU membership
Hitler’s most eager butchers were the Croatians — whose uniquely sadistic methods the German Nazis had to put a stop to because the situation was causing rebellions in occupied Yugoslavia. Croatia’s fuehrer, Ante Pavelic — who kept a bowl of Serbian eyes on his desk — is revered to this day by mainstream Croatians, still proud of their one and only true identity — as Ustasha (alternately spelled “Ustasa”). That is the name of the Nazi regime of the Hitler-bestowed Independent State of Croatia (known as “NDH” in the region). Only a couple news organizations had the story of the pro-Nazi burial with the Catholic bishop.
Dinko Sakic was commander of both concentration camps. Sakic’s wife, Nada, was half sister of a notorious Croat murderer [named] Maks Luburic. After WWII, Sakic fled to Argentina where he opened a textile factory.
Sakic was extradited to Croatia in 1998 where he was sentence[d] only 20 years for his crimes.
Video of Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOMSV6Y2rXI&feature=related
Father Lasic who led the Catholic burial for Sakic held numerous masses in the past for the leader of the Ustasa Ante Pavelic.
“[E]very honorable Croat is proud of the name of Dinko Sakic,” said Lasic at the funeral.
So far, the only outrage has come from the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
Wiesenthal Center Urges Croatian President Mesić to Condemn Display of Ustashe Symbols and Praise for Convicted Mass Murder at Recent Funeral of Former Jasenovac Commandant Dinko Sakić (July 28):
Jerusalem – The Simon Wiesenthal Center today called upon Croatian President Stjepan Mesić to condemn the organizers of the recent funeral of convicted Croatian mass murderer Dinko Sakić, the former commandant of the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp, for turning the event into a celebration of his Ustasha crimes. In a letter sent today by its chief Nazi-hunter, Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff to the Croatian president, the Center stressed the affront to all Ustasha victims and people of conscience the world over when a mass murderer is buried in his Ustasha uniform and praised by a priest as being “a model for all Croatians.”
According to Zuroff:
“To the best of my knowledge, no public official of any significant stature has spoken out against this outrageous display of unrepentant racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. I therefore urge you, in your capacity as president of the republic and knowing full well your unqualified and unequivocal opposition to the crimes of the Ustasha, to publically [sic] condemn the organizers of the funeral and the priests who conducted it.
“Under these circumstances what Croatian society needs is a clear and unequivocal reminder that Dinko Sakic was a mass murderer and brought shame to the Croatian people, that one of democratic Croatia’s greatest achievements was his prosecution and punishment, and that only by totally repudiating the legacy of the NDH [Independent State of Croatia 1941-1945] and its fanatic Ustasha extremists will Croatia become a welcome member of NATO and the European Union.”
Thanks to a fax from the Wiesenthal Center about this, the AP reported on the Center’s reaction to the funeral:
Jewish group condemns Nazi funeral
ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) — The funeral of a former Nazi concentration camp commander was used to celebrate his crimes, a Jewish human rights group said Tuesday and urged Croatia’s president to investigate.
Dinko Sakic’s funeral was an “outrageous display of unrepentant racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israeli branch director, Efraim Zuroff, said in a letter addressed to President Stipe Mesic and faxed to The Associated Press.
Sakic died at age 87 on July 20 while serving 20 years in prison for war crimes he committed as head of the notorious Jasenovac camp, the worst of about 40 camps run by the then Nazi puppet regime of Croatia.
Mesic said in a statement that he has repeatedly condemned Nazi crimes, including Sakic’s…Sakic was buried wearing the uniform of the Ustasha, the local pro-Nazi movement, according to the Croatian daily Vecernji. It said a priest called Sakic a “model for all Croatians.”
The funeral was private, attended by family and several minor right-wing politicians…Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats were killed in Jasenovac.
The Catholic priest’s blessing of a Nazi is not unique to very recent history. The Vatican has a distinct problem acknowledging its Nazi affiliations, particularly in Croatia. Even the late Pope John Paul II blasphemed history in 1998 when he beatified Cardinal Alojzije (Aloysius) Stepinac, the Croatian Fuehrer’s cardinal who led the Croatian Catholic Church in WWII:
The funeral occurred the same week that a Croatian who killed a New York police officer and hijacked a TWA flight in 1976 was released from a U.S. prison after serving 32 years. He returned a hero, and to the singing embrace of Croatia’s most popular rocker, profiled last year in the Herald Tribunal ( http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/01/europe/croatia.php ) “Thompson” Perkovic:
Croat ‘independence fighter’ home after 32 years in US jail
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/221472,croat-independence-fighter-home-after-32-years-in-us%C2%A0jail.html
Croatia gave a hero’s welcome to “independence fighter” Zvonko Busic, who returned home after serving 32 years in a US prison for a 1976 plane hijacking and a bombing that killed a New York policeman. Some 500 people with banners and flags sang songs as they greeted Busic at the airport in Zagreb, the Croatian capital.
“This is the happiest day of my life. If each of you could feel one per cent of the joy I feel, Croats would be the happiest nation in the world,” he said after arriving in Croatia on Thursday night.
Busic, 62, was greeted by rock singer and Croatian ultra-nationalist icon Marko Perkovic, aka Thompson, and the crowd broke into songs associated with the Ustasha, Croatia’s Nazi puppet government during World War II.
“Please behave, don’t act like a mob. Don’t let me be ashamed of you,” Busic said.
Busic was granted parole last week on a life sentence.
In the fall of 1976, Busic and a group of compatriots hijacked a US airliner to promote the independence for Croatia, then part of communist Yugoslavia.
Busic and the crew had only fake explosives strapped to their bodies, but they left a bomb at New York’s Grand Central train station.
Busic surrendered to police in Paris after the plane landed, but the bomb in New York exploded while police were trying to disarm it. Yugoslavia extradited Busic to the United States for trial.
Croatia proclaimed independence in 1991, helping cause Yugoslavia’s bloody breakup.
The Croatian daily Jutarnji List warned ecstatic Croats that Busic is not “an ideal man,” but a terrorist.
“Because of his past, Busic should spend the rest of his life privately, out of any political or public context,” commentator Davor Butkovic said in Friday’s edition.
Apart from three former politicians who greeted Busic upon his arrival, Croatian officials didn’t comment on his return.
Busi[c] planned to visit his hometown of Imotski, near the Adriatic port city of Split, whose citizens were organizing a celebration.
Instead of even noticing real, current-day Nazism — not “neo-Nazism” but the original thing, seeded in the hearts of the very Nazis’ progeny — the world reserves its unequivocal condemnation for those who refused to live, yet again, under the Croatian Nazis that once killed their entire families, and therefore reacted to an act of war with war.
So this month we’ve had the conviction of a Bosnian-Muslim butcher overturned; we’ve had a Croatian terrorist released and a Croatian Nazi buried with honors; we’ve also had a historic and warm meeting at the White House between the American president and unprosecuted Albanian terrorists, mafia bosses and war criminals who were receiving help from bin Laden while receiving help from us in the 90s. But fear not: the Karadzic trial — while revealing reprehensible war crimes that nonetheless pale in comparison to the ignored war crimes against Serbs — will renew yet again the world’s contempt for everything Serbian.
Stop projecting and look closer to the home.
I think all this hysterical propaganda about Bosnia fueled the jihad. Today I present the following video as an exhibit.
Egyptian preacher Amr Khaled’s argument is simple. There are 20-30 million Muslims in Europe, and they are having babies. Europeans are not. So Muslims will become a majority “within 20 years”. In order to prevent this (natural and desirable, by implication) course of events, the evil, ignorant infidels of Europe are out to “provoke” the Muslims, so they could have a pretext for ethnically cleansing them.
“…like they had in Bosnia.”
See the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSWLLc6uikE
He almost made me forget why I’m with those who wish to halt immigration. But then, terror bombings aren’t really “mistakes” “provoked” by anti-Islamic Europeans, are they?
THE UNITED STATES CLINTON ADMINISTRATION TRIED TO DIVERT ATTENTION AWAY FROM FROM THE HORRIFIC US DIRECTED – AND CROAT PERPETRATED -KRAJINA GENOCIDE OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN SERBS FROM EARLY AUGUST 1995 TO LATE SEPTEMBER 1995 – BY FABRICATING A PHONY MASSACRE OF 8,000 BOSNIAN MUSLIMS IN SREBRENICA IN MID-JULY 1995.
The so-called Hague ICTY “court” is NOT a legal UN body at all.
The ICTY is an ILLEGAL institution set up and paid for by the United States Clinton administration and NATO – acting illegally via their dominant positions in the UN Security Council – in total contravention of the UN Charter – which stipulates that such “tribunals” can only be set up via the UN General Assembly.
This illegal NATO bought and paid for Kangaroo “court” known as the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) is NOT the same body as the PROPOSED ICC (International Criminal Court) which incidentally the US has refused to ratify since US officials and armed forces personnel would be subject to prosecution) nor is the illegal ICTY the same body known as the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in The Hague, Netherlands.
It is not widely known – thanks to the US and British media coverup – that Croatia resurrected the brutal World War 2 Ustasha Nazi genocidal policies against the Serbs beginning in late 1990.
The reason for this unspeakable event happening is that tens of thousands of emigre Croatian Ustasha Nazis – guilty of the Holocaust of over 1 Million Serbs, Jews and Romanies – Croatian Nazis who escaped after the end of World War 2 thanks to the help of US and British intelligence services working in close cooperation with the Vatican -largely funded Franjo Tudjman’s rise to power in Croatia.
[Franjo Tudjman was Croatia's Holocaust denying, antisemitic, Hitler-admiring,genocide-admiring, pro-Nazi president from 1990 to 1999.]
The events which took place from early May to late September 1995 in the Serbian province of Krajina adjoining Croatia proper – the Nazi-like ethnic cleansing operations dubbed “Operation Flash” and Operation “Storm” by the Croats – perpetrated by Tudjman’s racist pro-Ustasha Nazi government – was the largest act of ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust.
At least 250,000 to 300,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from their homelands in Krajina and thousands murdered in a brutal Nazi-like expulsion campaign reminiscent of Ustasha operations against the Serbs and the Jews from 1941 to 1945.
The Krajina – or “Vojna Krajina” ["Military Frontier"] – is the Orthodox Christian Serbian province adjoining Croatia proper which was established by the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late 1400s.
Since the Serbs proved themselves over many centuries to be exeptional warriors against attempted Ottoman Islamic invasions of Europe, the emperors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted the Krajina Serbs to act as a bulwark for Christian Europe against the invading Ottoman Turkish Muslim Empire.
A very good patriotic friend of ours in Israel wrote the following:
[begin quote]
The Holocaust of over a Million human beings -Serbs, Jews, Romanies in the Independent State of Croatia (“Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska” in Croat) from 1941 to 1945 – perpetrated mainly in the massive Jasenovac death camp complex by the Croat version of Hitler’s SS and dubbed the “Ustasha” by the Croats – is a crime of unparalleled brutality and horror, exceeeding even the satanic crimes of the German Nazis in Auschwitz.
The Ustashe also worked very closely and were allied with the Arab Muslim antisemite, Hajj Amin al Husseini (the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) who in cooperation with Heinrich Himmler – the leader of Hiter’s SS – created the two Waffen SS divisions known as “Handschar” and “Kama”, consisting of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim volunteers.
Many mainstream Croats – certainly NOT the lunatic fringe of Croat society by any means -to this very day celebrate and glorify the criminal Croat Ustasha Nazi regime and revere its leader – Ante Pavelic -as a Croat “hero” and “patriot”.
[end quote]
Here is an excerpt from the superb pro-Israel blog – “4International” – shedding light on the horrific events which took place between early May and late September 1995 in Krajina:
The late Croatian pro-Ustashe Nazi and Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying antisemitic president, Franjo Tudjman, wrote in his 1988 Croatian version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, entitled: “Wastelands of Historical Truth”(aka “Wastelands of Historical Reality”) the following:
“The establishment of Hitler’s New Order could be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews, as well as to correct the French-British sin of the (post WW1) Versailles setup” and… “Genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon in harmony with the societal and mythologically Divine nature. Genocide is not only permitted it is also recommended, even commanded by the Word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the earthly kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith”.
The prestigious US-based publication “Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy” in its January 1993 edition, wrote the following:
[start quote]
Tudjman, at the first convention of the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica: HDZ), on February 26, 1990, said, in the presence of more than 100 Ustashi war criminals who had escaped the law courts and fled to international havens after World War II: “The Independent State of Croatia [ie: the World War II Croatian Ustashe Nazi state] was not only a mere Quisling creation, but also an expression of the historical aspirations of the Croatian people for an independent state of their own and recognition of international factors–the Government of Hitler’s Germany in this case.”
Tudjman delivered a speech to the Croatian Sabor (parliament) on the occasion of the proclamation of the Republic of Croatia on December 22, 1990. In the Constitution he proposed, and which was adopted, the Serbs lost their nation status within Croatia, and were relegated to the status of a national minority. The official war against the Serbs had been resumed.
Even before Croatia became independent, the Croatian Minister of Internal Affairs, Martin Spegelj, advised his colleagues: “We are in the war with [ie: against] the Army [Yugoslav Army:JNA] Should anything happen, kill them all in the streets, in their homes, through hand grenades, fire pistols into their bellies, women, children …We will deal with [the Croatian Serb Krajina town of] Knin by butchering.”
[end quote]
And here is [photographic]proof that Martin Spegelj’s verbal threats against the Serbs were not merely bluster or sabre rattling[photos courtesy of Julia Gorin's blog]:
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-part-2/
Here is a quote from the editorial in “Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy” magazine Volume 23, No.4 (May 5,1995), concerning the article entitled “Croatia Hits UN, Serb areas” ["Operation Flash"] by ISSA president, Gregory Copley:
[Quote]: “It was clear that Croatia wanted all foreign observers out of the way so that it could undertake a further campaign of ethnic cleansing against their own countrymen of Serbian origin. We use the words “ethnic cleansing” because the phrase and the policy was invented by the Croatians themselves.
“In any event, the war resumed in April in Croatia [Krajina]. The Croats, we know from independent UN and other testimony, took men, women and children from the Serb area which they conquered [Western Slavonija] and executed about 1,000 of them. Croatian troops were seen holding the severed heads of women and children”.
[End Quote]
I also encourage all of my fellow Jews to please read the following articles:
(WARNING – THE PHOTOS OF MURDERED SERBS ARE VERY GRAPHIC]
Tudjman & the Croatian Ustashe Nazi genocide of Krajina Serbs: Part 2
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-part-2/
“Tudjman & the Croatian Ustashe Nazi genocide of Krajina Serbs in 1991″
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-in-1991/
See the article of John Laughland (an English Catholic), which can be found at http://www.brusselsjournal.com. Also see his book “Travesty” on the show trial of Slobodan Milsevic in the Hague.
Surprisingly to many people, Ireland has connections with the late Yugoslavia. I refer readers to Church of Ireland layman Hubert Butler (and his book ‘Escape from the Anthill’), who taught in Croatia in 1938 and returned there to document the massacre of a million humans, mostly Orthodox Serbs, then Jews and Gypsies, by fascist Catholic Croatia. The biggest death camp in Europe, after Auschwitz, was in the Nazi puppet “Independent State of Croatia”, close to Zagreb.
All this was known to the Vatican. The forced conversion of 700,000 Orthodox Christian Sebs, 20,000 Jews and god knows how many Gypsies by the clero-fascist Catholic statelet of Croatia was never rescinded by the Holy See, although all communists were excommunicated.
In the garb of a Catholic priest, the Himmler of Croatia, Andrija Artukovic (“Father Anic”), arrived in Ireland after WWII. His escape via Austria and Switzerland and concealment in Ireland was arranged by the Order of Friars Minor, with the collusion of the Irish hierarchy. It’s doubtful if the government or the local Franciscans knew who or what “Father Anic” was. He subsequently found refuge in California and was returned to communist Yugoslavia in 1986, where he was tried for crimes he did not commit and not tried for crimes he did commit.
The troubles there are not the fruit of Serb nationalism. “Greater Serbia” was the WMD war cry of Austro-Hungary up to 1914 and from 1991 of the West and the so-called international community.
Ireland has not only permitted CIA “rendition flights”, but in 1999 lent her airports to the Pentagon in violation of Ireland’s constitutionally mandated neutrality for logistic support against the Christian Serbs and in support of creating new German puppet states (Croatia and Slovenia), as well as Islamic states in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Targets in the 78-day Blitzkrieg of 1999 included empty government buildings across the street from the US Embassy in Belgrade, Danube bridges, markets, civilian trains, Serb TV, the Chinese embassy, schools and hospitals. Serb mothers delivered babies under NATO/US bombing, with doctors working by the light of torches.
Over a quarter of a million Serbs have expelled from lands which had been theirs since the time of the Battle of the Boyne. Not “Connacht [the infertile, rocky West] or hell”, but Serbia or hell.
Dubrovnik in summer 1990, a whole year before the NYT snd other “presstitutes” (credits to Ilona Mercer) was EMPTY of tourists, but swarming with three different Croatian fascist factions. Cars with Belgrade license plates, including one carrying the Canadian ambassador James Bissett, were attacked. A Croatian student of mine told me the same; her parents warned her to stay in the USA and not return to Yugoslavia. They live safe and sound in Serbia. (Aganin, this was in 1990.)Fscist Croatians were throwing hand grenades in houses belong to Serbs; I saw near Dubrovnik a settlement with 19 substantial houses all destroyed — not in battle — with explosives set by Croatian Nazis. A young man told me on 25 March 1992 in Dubrovnik that his neighbor’s car was set on fire, but neighbors — Croat, Serb and Muslim — rushed out to extinguish the blaze. Next night the terrorists finished the job.”Why?” I asked. “Because he’s a Serb; and I’m a Muslim.”
Milosevic, by the way, barred the Serb refugees of May 1995, from West Slavonis, from entering Serbia while he held a May Day parade in Belgrade in 1995. Some nationalist. The refugees were for the most part put up in Serb Bosnia. — Indian General Satish Nambiar has a videotape of Croatian tankers used to hose down with water and disinfectant the roads after the anti-Serb pogrom.
Half Jew/half Croat Professor Emil Vlajki led the bus convoy of Sarajevo Jews out of Sarajevo — to Serbia.
Taking a page ut of the Protocols or the Life of Maria Monk, an nnocent little girl was transmogrified in to the fake “Anne Frank of Sarajevo”, Zlata Filipovic. Her family moved to Ireland in 1995. Her “creatively” edited and translated “diary” was touted in the world press. Zlata’s family were guests in Bill Clintn’s White House. Now grown up, Zlata was awarded an MA in “Peace Studies” at Dublin’s Trinity College in 2004.
Last but not least, the goal of the US/NATO humanitarian bombing — RAF and Luftwaffe flying wingtip to wingtip — was the creation, at the sacrifice of Christians, of Islamic states in the heart of Europe.
That’s why we got cheap oil.
JP Maher PH D
Professor Emeritus,
Citizen of Ireland and USA,
Veteran US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps,
Yugoslav Desk 430th MI BN,
Serb-Croat Linguist,
Northern Italy 1959-61
Chicago IL 60630
USA
THE UNITED STATES CLINTON ADMINISTRATION TRIED TO DIVERT ATTENTION AWAY FROM FROM THE HORRIFIC US DIRECTED – AND CROAT PERPETRATED -KRAJINA GENOCIDE OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN SERBS FROM EARLY AUGUST 1995 TO LATE SEPTEMBER 1995 – BY FABRICATING A PHONY MASSACRE OF 8,000 BOSNIAN MUSLIMS IN SREBRENICA IN MID-JULY 1995.
The so-called Hague ICTY “court” is NOT a legal UN body at all.
The ICTY is an ILLEGAL institution set up and paid for by the United States Clinton administration and NATO – acting illegally via their dominant positions in the UN Security Council – in total contravention of the UN Charter – which stipulates that such “tribunals” can only be set up via the UN General Assembly.
This illegal NATO bought and paid for Kangaroo “court” known as the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) is NOT the same body as the PROPOSED ICC (International Criminal Court) which incidentally the US has refused to ratify since US officials and armed forces personnel would be subject to prosecution) nor is the illegal ICTY the same body known as the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in The Hague, Netherlands.
It is not widely known – thanks to the US and British media coverup – that Croatia resurrected the brutal World War 2 Ustasha Nazi genocidal policies against the Serbs beginning in late 1990.
The reason for this unspeakable event happening is that tens of thousands of emigre Croatian Ustasha Nazis – guilty of the Holocaust of over 1 Million Serbs, Jews and Romanies – Croatian Nazis who escaped after the end of World War 2 thanks to the help of US and British intelligence services working in close cooperation with the Vatican -largely funded Franjo Tudjman’s rise to power in Croatia.
[Franjo Tudjman was Croatia's Holocaust denying, antisemitic, Hitler-admiring,genocide-admiring, pro-Nazi president from 1990 to 1999.]
The events which took place from early May to late September 1995 in the Serbian province of Krajina adjoining Croatia proper – the Nazi-like ethnic cleansing operations dubbed “Operation Flash” and Operation “Storm” by the Croats – perpetrated by Tudjman’s racist pro-Ustasha Nazi government – was the largest act of ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust.
At least 250,000 to 300,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from their homelands in Krajina and thousands murdered in a brutal Nazi-like expulsion campaign reminiscent of Ustasha operations against the Serbs and the Jews from 1941 to 1945.
The Krajina – or “Vojna Krajina” ["Military Frontier"] – is the Orthodox Christian Serbian province adjoining Croatia proper which was established by the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late 1400s.
Since the Serbs proved themselves over many centuries to be exeptional warriors against attempted Ottoman Islamic invasions of Europe, the emperors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted the Krajina Serbs to act as a bulwark for Christian Europe against the invading Ottoman Turkish Muslim Empire.
A very good patriotic friend of ours in Israel wrote the following:
[begin quote]
The Holocaust of over a Million human beings -Serbs, Jews, Romanies in the Independent State of Croatia (“Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska” in Croat) from 1941 to 1945 – perpetrated mainly in the massive Jasenovac death camp complex by the Croat version of Hitler’s SS and dubbed the “Ustasha” by the Croats – is a crime of unparalleled brutality and horror, exceeeding even the satanic crimes of the German Nazis in Auschwitz.
The Ustashe also worked very closely and were allied with the Arab Muslim antisemite, Hajj Amin al Husseini (the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) who in cooperation with Heinrich Himmler – the leader of Hiter’s SS – created the two Waffen SS divisions known as “Handschar” and “Kama”, consisting of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim volunteers.
Many mainstream Croats – certainly NOT the lunatic fringe of Croat society by any means -to this very day celebrate and glorify the criminal Croat Ustasha Nazi regime and revere its leader – Ante Pavelic -as a Croat “hero” and “patriot”.
[end quote]
Here is an excerpt from the superb pro-Israel blog – “4International” – shedding light on the horrific events which took place between early May and late September 1995 in Krajina:
The late Croatian pro-Ustashe Nazi and Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying antisemitic president, Franjo Tudjman, wrote in his 1988 Croatian version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, entitled: “Wastelands of Historical Truth”(aka “Wastelands of Historical Reality”) the following:
“The establishment of Hitler’s New Order could be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews, as well as to correct the French-British sin of the (post WW1) Versailles setup” and… “Genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon in harmony with the societal and mythologically Divine nature. Genocide is not only permitted it is also recommended, even commanded by the Word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the earthly kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith”.
The prestigious US-based publication “Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy” in its January 1993 edition, wrote the following:
[start quote]
Tudjman, at the first convention of the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica: HDZ), on February 26, 1990, said, in the presence of more than 100 Ustashi war criminals who had escaped the law courts and fled to international havens after World War II: “The Independent State of Croatia [ie: the World War II Croatian Ustashe Nazi state] was not only a mere Quisling creation, but also an expression of the historical aspirations of the Croatian people for an independent state of their own and recognition of international factors–the Government of Hitler’s Germany in this case.”
Tudjman delivered a speech to the Croatian Sabor (parliament) on the occasion of the proclamation of the Republic of Croatia on December 22, 1990. In the Constitution he proposed, and which was adopted, the Serbs lost their nation status within Croatia, and were relegated to the status of a national minority. The official war against the Serbs had been resumed.
Even before Croatia became independent, the Croatian Minister of Internal Affairs, Martin Spegelj, advised his colleagues: “We are in the war with [ie: against] the Army [Yugoslav Army:JNA] Should anything happen, kill them all in the streets, in their homes, through hand grenades, fire pistols into their bellies, women, children …We will deal with [the Croatian Serb Krajina town of] Knin by butchering.”
[end quote]
And here is [photographic]proof that Martin Spegelj’s verbal threats against the Serbs were not merely bluster or sabre rattling[photos courtesy of Julia Gorin's blog]:
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-part-2/
Here is a quote from the editorial in “Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy” magazine Volume 23, No.4 (May 5,1995), concerning the article entitled “Croatia Hits UN, Serb areas” ["Operation Flash"] by ISSA president, Gregory Copley:
[Quote]: “It was clear that Croatia wanted all foreign observers out of the way so that it could undertake a further campaign of ethnic cleansing against their own countrymen of Serbian origin. We use the words “ethnic cleansing” because the phrase and the policy was invented by the Croatians themselves.
“In any event, the war resumed in April in Croatia [Krajina]. The Croats, we know from independent UN and other testimony, took men, women and children from the Serb area which they conquered [Western Slavonija] and executed about 1,000 of them. Croatian troops were seen holding the severed heads of women and children”.
[End Quote]
I also encourage all of my fellow Jews to please read the following articles:
(WARNING – THE PHOTOS ARE VERY GRAPHIC]
Tudjman & the Croatian Ustashe Nazi genocide of Krajina Serbs: Part 2
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-part-2/
“Tudjman & the Croatian Ustashe Nazi genocide of Krajina Serbs in 1991″
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-in-1991/
THE UNITED STATES CLINTON ADMINISTRATION TRIED TO DIVERT ATTENTION AWAY FROM FROM THE HORRIFIC US DIRECTED – AND CROAT PERPETRATED -KRAJINA GENOCIDE OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN SERBS FROM EARLY AUGUST 1995 TO LATE SEPTEMBER 1995 – BY FABRICATING A PHONY MASSACRE OF 8,000 BOSNIAN MUSLIMS IN SREBRENICA IN MID-JULY 1995.
The so-called Hague ICTY “court” is NOT a legal UN body at all.
The ICTY is an ILLEGAL institution set up and paid for by the United States Clinton administration and NATO – acting illegally via their dominant positions in the UN Security Council – in total contravention of the UN Charter – which stipulates that such “tribunals” can only be set up via the UN General Assembly.
This illegal NATO bought and paid for Kangaroo “court” known as the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) is NOT the same body as the PROPOSED ICC (International Criminal Court) which incidentally the US has refused to ratify since US officials and armed forces personnel would be subject to prosecution) nor is the illegal ICTY the same body known as the ICJ (International Court of Justice) in The Hague, Netherlands.
It is not widely known – thanks to the US and British media coverup – that Croatia resurrected the brutal World War 2 Ustasha Nazi genocidal policies against the Serbs beginning in late 1990.
The reason for this unspeakable event happening is that tens of thousands of emigre Croatian Ustasha Nazis – guilty of the Holocaust of over 1 Million Serbs, Jews and Romanies – Croatian Nazis who escaped after the end of World War 2 thanks to the help of US and British intelligence services working in close cooperation with the Vatican -largely funded Franjo Tudjman’s rise to power in Croatia.
[Franjo Tudjman was Croatia's Holocaust denying, antisemitic, Hitler-admiring,genocide-admiring, pro-Nazi president from 1990 to 1999.]
The events which took place from early May to late September 1995 in the Serbian province of Krajina adjoining Croatia proper – the Nazi-like ethnic cleansing operations dubbed “Operation Flash” and Operation “Storm” by the Croats – perpetrated by Tudjman’s racist pro-Ustasha Nazi government – was the largest act of ethnic cleansing since the Holocaust.
At least 250,000 to 300,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed from their homelands in Krajina and thousands murdered in a brutal Nazi-like expulsion campaign reminiscent of Ustasha operations against the Serbs and the Jews from 1941 to 1945.
The Krajina – or “Vojna Krajina” ["Military Frontier"] – is the Orthodox Christian Serbian province adjoining Croatia proper which was established by the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late 1400s.
Since the Serbs proved themselves over many centuries to be exeptional warriors against attempted Ottoman Islamic invasions of Europe, the emperors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted the Krajina Serbs to act as a bulwark for Christian Europe against the invading Ottoman Turkish Muslim Empire.
A very good patriotic friend of ours in Israel wrote the following:
[begin quote]
The Holocaust of over a Million human beings -Serbs, Jews, Romanies in the Independent State of Croatia (“Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska” in Croat) from 1941 to 1945 – perpetrated mainly in the massive Jasenovac death camp complex by the Croat version of Hitler’s SS and dubbed the “Ustasha” by the Croats – is a crime of unparalleled brutality and horror, exceeeding even the satanic crimes of the German Nazis in Auschwitz.
The Ustashe also worked very closely and were allied with the Arab Muslim antisemite, Hajj Amin al Husseini (the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem) who in cooperation with Heinrich Himmler – the leader of Hiter’s SS – created the two Waffen SS divisions known as “Handschar” and “Kama”, consisting of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim volunteers.
Many mainstream Croats – certainly NOT the lunatic fringe of Croat society by any means -to this very day celebrate and glorify the criminal Croat Ustasha Nazi regime and revere its leader – Ante Pavelic -as a Croat “hero” and “patriot”.
[end quote]
Here is an excerpt from the superb pro-Israel blog – “4International” – shedding light on the horrific events which took place between early May and late September 1995 in Krajina:
The late Croatian pro-Ustashe Nazi and Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying antisemitic president, Franjo Tudjman, wrote in his 1988 Croatian version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, entitled: “Wastelands of Historical Truth”(aka “Wastelands of Historical Reality”) the following:
“The establishment of Hitler’s New Order could be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews, as well as to correct the French-British sin of the (post WW1) Versailles setup” and… “Genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon in harmony with the societal and mythologically Divine nature. Genocide is not only permitted it is also recommended, even commanded by the Word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the earthly kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith”.
The prestigious US-based publication “Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy” in its January 1993 edition, wrote the following:
[start quote]
Tudjman, at the first convention of the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica: HDZ), on February 26, 1990, said, in the presence of more than 100 Ustashi war criminals who had escaped the law courts and fled to international havens after World War II: “The Independent State of Croatia [ie: the World War II Croatian Ustashe Nazi state] was not only a mere Quisling creation, but also an expression of the historical aspirations of the Croatian people for an independent state of their own and recognition of international factors–the Government of Hitler’s Germany in this case.”
Tudjman delivered a speech to the Croatian Sabor (parliament) on the occasion of the proclamation of the Republic of Croatia on December 22, 1990. In the Constitution he proposed, and which was adopted, the Serbs lost their nation status within Croatia, and were relegated to the status of a national minority. The official war against the Serbs had been resumed.
Even before Croatia became independent, the Croatian Minister of Internal Affairs, Martin Spegelj, advised his colleagues: “We are in the war with [ie: against] the Army [Yugoslav Army:JNA] Should anything happen, kill them all in the streets, in their homes, through hand grenades, fire pistols into their bellies, women, children …We will deal with [the Croatian Serb Krajina town of] Knin by butchering.”
[end quote]
And here is[photographic]proof that Martin Spegelj’s verbal threats against the Serbs were not merely bluster or sabre rattling[photos courtesy of Julia Gorin's blog]:
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-part-2/
Here is a quote from the editorial in “Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy” magazine Volume 23, No.4 (May 5,1995), concerning the article entitled “Croatia Hits UN, Serb areas” ["Operation Flash"] by ISSA president, Gregory Copley:
[Quote]: “It was clear that Croatia wanted all foreign observers out of the way so that it could undertake a further campaign of ethnic cleansing against their own countrymen of Serbian origin. We use the words “ethnic cleansing” because the phrase and the policy was invented by the Croatians themselves.
“In any event, the war resumed in April in Croatia [Krajina]. The Croats, we know from independent UN and other testimony, took men, women and children from the Serb area which they conquered [Western Slavonija] and executed about 1,000 of them. Croatian troops were seen holding the severed heads of women and children”.
[End Quote]
I also encourage all of my fellow Jews to please read the following articles:
(WARNING – THE PHOTOS ARE VERY GRAPHIC]
Tudjman & the Croatian Ustashe Nazi genocide of Krajina Serbs: Part 2
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/21/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-part-2/
“Tudjman & the Croatian Ustashe Nazi genocide of Krajina Serbs in 1991″
http://4international.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/tudjman-the-croatian-ustashe-nazi-genocide-of-krajina-serbs-in-1991/
On the occasion of rock star Bono’s 1993 concert in Sarajevo, the posters read ‘NO DOGS, NO SERBS”
“The only good Serb is a live and obedient Serb or a dead Serb.” VOX, 1991
Most people who comment on the Balkans Linguistic don’t know beans about the place or itS peoples and languages. — “Turks” is the word used BY ALL in real Bosnia for ‘Muslims’; when a Bosnian Muslim speaks of “Serbs” this should be translated into English as ‘Orthodox Christians’.
If you wish to see the pre-war Sarajevo cartoon with Karadzic’ head severed and under Muslim boot, see:
What Really Happened in Srebrenica in 1992-1993? … 1991 Vox magazine cover for October, 1991 showing a Bosnian Muslim Nazi …
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/051.shtml
CNN is the source of Jasmina’s horrific story.
Can you name the “camp” in Serbia from which her husband escaped?
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/07/22/sarajevo.rape/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
http://current.com/items/89131265_bosnian_rape_victims_may_be_forced_to_return_to_scene_by_government
CNN is also a main source for the “Jenin massacre” story.
Hamas marched in Sarajevo in the 1990s. Professor John Ranz, President of Buchenwald Survivors, on Serbs, Jews and Bosnia.
Today in Bosnia hundreds of Hamas and Hetzbolah volunteers are getting special courses how to commit terror in Israel (Yediot Achronot related by the …
http://www.srpska-mreza.com/ranz/July95.html – 11k
Genocide did not occur anywhere in Bosnia, genocide is not when some of a few thousand Oric male mass murderers of Serbs do not manage to make an armed breakthrough from Srebrenica to Tuzla, genocide is when millions, men, women and children who never were armed or ever were accused of any crime are systematically murdered in concentration camps. This is an incorrect vulgarization of the term, war always has a high death toll, it is not a game for medical clerks and doctors of law.
And what is this lowering of standards did not Brennus say “Vae victis!”
Mao Tse Tung is still seen today by the peasantry of China as the “Red Sun”, he saved countless millions from death by famine and flood, he made justice among the classes, victor of the struggle of classes he raised up and built the Socialist Society.
Sakic wanted to protect those who believe in the Ressurected Christ from the intolerance of Izetbekovic which is documented, for that he was prepared to risk his life against the Bosniak mass-murderers whose crimes are for reasons of political expediency ignored, there canbe no hell for him.
Have you no place in your article for Bosniak women who perpetrated monstruous crimes against Serbs? Or do you pretend you do not know of them?
If those Bosniak women referred to in the article wanted to die, they should have physically attacked their abusers as soon as they had an opportunity.
And the other one what does she mean attempting suicide, does she not have a knife? And why does she stay with her husband if this cultured Muslim thinks for that reason the marriage should be dissolved? And why does she not write a book about what happened to her or something and send it to the Serbs to read? And there is much more one can do.