Blog:

MYTH ABOUT SERB VICTIMS AROUND SREBRENICA

2006-07-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

SERBIAN NAZI FASCISTS MASSACRED OVER 8,000 BOSNIAKS IN SREBRENICA & THEN JUSTIFIED GENOCIDE BY FALSIFICATIONS OF FACTS

State-sponsored Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo, which includes joint Bosniak, Serb and Croat investigators, recently investigated number of alleged Serb casualties around Srebrenica and concluded that the alleged number of 3,287 Serb casualties in Central Podrinje is actually incorrect and nine to ten times lower than reported by the Serbian media.

The allegations that Serb casualties in Bratunac, between April 1992 and December 1995 amount to over three thousand is an evident falsification of facts. The RDC research of the actual number of Serb victims in Bratunac has been the most extensive carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina and proves that the overall number of victims is three to nine times smaller than indicated by Serbia and Montenegro. Perhaps the clearest illustration of gross exaggeration is that of Kravica, a Serb village near Bratunac attacked by the Bosnian Army on the morning of Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1993 . The allegations that the attack resulted in hundreds of civilian victims have been shown to be false. Insight into the original documentation of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) clearly shows that in fact military victims highly outnumber the civilian ones. The document entitled “Warpath of the Bratunac brigade”, puts the military victims at 35 killed and 36 wounded; the number of civilian victims of the attack is eleven.

Around 2,000 Serb civilians died in all of Bosnia as concluded by RDC (data, as of Dec 15, 2005). But that does not stop Serbian propaganda to falsely claim that thousands of Serbs died around Srebrenica; they spread this propaganda of lies to justify genocide of over 8,000 Bosniak men and children in Srebrenica.

THE MYTH OF BRATUNAC: A BLATANT NUMBERS GAME

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Republished from Documentation and Research Center! ==========================================

The allegations that Serb casualties in Bratunac, between April 1992 and December 1995 amount to over three thousand is an evident falsification of facts. The RDC research of the actual number of Serb victims in Bratunac has been the most extensive carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina and proves that the overall number of victims is three to nine times smaller than indicated by Serbia and Montenegro .

Perhaps the clearest illustration of gross exaggeration is that of Kravica, a Serb village near Bratunac attacked by the Bosnian Army on the morning of Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1993 . The allegations that the attack resulted in hundreds of civilian victims have been shown to be false. Insight into the original documentation of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) clearly shows that in fact military victims highly outnumber the civilian ones. The document entitled “Warpath of the Bratunac brigade”, puts the military victims at 35 killed and 36 wounded; the number of civilian victims of the attack is eleven.

In addition to information received from relatives and family members of the victims and inspection of cemeteries, RDC has collected all existing primary sources, official documents and documentation of RS Ministry of Defense and Bratunac brigade of VRS, as well as research by the Serb authors. The victims have been categorized on the basis of two time-related criteria: the first was the municipality of residence at the time of the beginning of war; the second was the municipality of premature and violent death.

After all the sources have been processed, cross-referenced and reviewed, the results showed that 119 civilians and 424 soldiers classified in the first group died in Batunac during the war. Under the second category the number of civilians is somewhat higher (119) whereas the number of soldiers is 448. The result demonstrates that 26 members of other VRS units other than Bratunac brigade of VRS fought and died in combat in the municipality of Bratunac .
RDC inspection of the military cemetery in Bratunac showed that of 383 victims buried it is impossible to ascertain the exact cause of death for 63 victims, even though they may have died during the war. In addition, 139 victims who have lived elsewhere at the time of the outbreak of war and died in fighting either in their places of residence or elsewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina, are now buried in Bratunac military cemetery. 48 victims buried in Bratunac fought and died in Hadžići; 36 fought and died in Srebrenica; 34 and died in Vogošća; 3 in Konjic and 3 more in Ilijaš; 2 fought and died in Sarajevo, two more in Ilidža; one in Trnovo, Pale and Tuzla each.

Of the remaining victims from outside Bratunac one lived in Kiseljak, but died in Hadžići; one lived in Srebrenica and died in Jajce; three lived in Travnik and died in Hadžići, three lived in Ilidža and died in Hadžići, nine lived in Sarajevo and died in Hadžići, one lived in Hadžići and died in Vogošća, one lived in Zenica and died in Vogošća, one lived in Zenica and died in Srebrenica. Furthermore, one victim lived and died in Tuzla , one lived in Bosanski Brod and died in Olovo, one lived in Srebrenica and died in Bihać. Lastly, two individuals who lived in Kakanj and died in Hadžići are buried in the military cemetery in Bratunac, one who lived in Hadžići and died in Ilidža, two who lived in Vitez and died in Hadžići; four residents of Konjic who died in Hadžići, two residents of Pale who died in Hadžići, seven residents of Zenica who died in Hadžići, one resident of Vareš and one resident of Kakanj, who both died in Ilijaš.

The number of victims from Central Bosnia buried in Bratunac is consistent with the population movements after the war, especially the Serb population from the suburbs of Sarajevo . Under the Dayton Peace Accords, the suburbs of Sarajevo held by the VRS were to be re-integrated into the city of Sarajevo . The then leadership of the RS called on the local Serb population to leave Sarajevo and even take the graves of their loved ones with them. In fact, such a large majority followed the instructions that parts of the city of Sarajevo remained deserted for months. The remnants of their loved ones have been buried in Bratunac after the war, but their deaths are presented as the result of actions taken by the Bosnian Army units from Srebrenica.

As importantly, a number of foreign nationals (mainly from Serbia and Montenegro and Croatia) are included in the overall figure of Serb victims in Bratunac. At least 15 such individuals lost their lives in Bratunac as a result of fighting; it may be of some significance that all of them were members of a paramilitary group that arrived to Bratunac in April 1992, upon invitation of Bratunac Serb Democratic Party and in coordination with the State Security Service of Republic of Serbia (see testimony of Miroslav Deronjić, President of Municipal Board of SDS Bratunac, at International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia). Some of those individuals are Vesna Krdžalić, Dragica Mastikosa, Aleksandar Grahovac and Sreto Suzić who all died in combat on May 29, 1992 . Subsequently, they were all classified as “victims of Muslim terror” by the RS authorities. However, individuals from Serbia continued arriving to Bratunac throughout the year 1992, if the death records of the Bratunac brigade are to be trusted: one such individual died in fighting in August (Žarko Komnenski) and one more in November (Đuro Vujaklija). Furthermore, death records show that “volunteers” arrived from Serbia to Bratunac even in 1993, such as Dragan Milićev, who died in combat in January 1993 and Dragoslav Stanković who died in February 1993.

BEHEADINGS OF MUSLIMS IN BOSNIA

2006-06-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

SERBIAN PROPAGANDA & BEHEADINGS OF BOSNIAKS

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Republished from Srebrenica Genocide Blog
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Serbian propaganda of lies and deception can be objectivelly rulled as nothing more, but a complete success! They operate under simple, yet effective formula: (repeat lie) x (1000 times) = and it will become truth!

Three days ago I received an e-mail from Husnija Hadzipasic. She asked me to publish a story about her son who was beheaded by Serbian military forces in Bosnia. The video of her son's beheading is still freely available all over the internet, only under a different name (Serbian name). This video is freely used solely for Serb-propaganda purposes portraying her son as a "Serb soldier" who got "decapitated by Muslims."

Following the release of a video by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal (on June 1, 2005) showing Serbian paramilitary unit the "Scorpions" brutally executing 6 defenceless Bosniak men and underage boys (read here), Serbian propaganda oriented website (Serbianna, url: www.serbianna.com/features/srebrenica/) published the so called "Srebrenica Massacre: Photo Story" portaying Bosniaks as blood-hungry monsters killing and beheading Serbs.

The website features alleged video beheading of a "Serb soldier Rade Rogic" and other propaganda videos that came from "uncomfirmed sources". The International Criminal Court for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) refused to admit this video as evidence. To put things into perspective, these types of Serbian propaganda videos have nothing to do with Srebrenica genocide or Srebrenica region - they are just used as propaganda material to trick average internet user into thinking that Srebrenica massacre was only a revenge for alleged earlier "Bosnian Muslim crimes" (as Serbs like to put it). What an insult to intelligence!

What do they mean by "earlier" is debatable, because they were the ones who attacked predominantly Muslim Eastern part of Bosnia in order to grab territory for "enlarged Serbia". The bottom line is that Serbian thugs had no business of being there and terrorizing Muslim population in the first place.

The alleged beheading of alleged "Serb soldier Rade Rogic" allegedly took place around Sanski Most. If you are familiar with basic Bosnian geography, you will notice that Srebrenica is in the Eastern part of Bosnia, while Sanski Most is in the Western part of Bosnia. I'll get back to "Rade Rogic" later.

The website also alleges that thousands of Serbs were killed by Naser Oric's forces around Srebrenica; and as a result, Serbianna seems to suggest that Srebrenica massacre was justified, because Bosniaks put up a defence against Serbian thugs who brutally attacked predominantly Muslim part of Bosnia. According to Serbian logic, Bosnian forces were naturally guilty for provoking Srebrenica massacre. What a sick logic! Serbianna however, does not mention that in fact, long before Naser Oric defensively counter-attacked Bosnian Serb and Serbian forces around Srebrenica, close to 90% of Bosniak population of Eastern Bosnia was ethnically cleansed by Bosnian Serb and Serbian (para)-military forces and tens of thousands of Bosniaks died at the hands of Christian Serbian extremist fascists, also known as Chetniks. The rest of population was starving in Srebrenica, subjected to constant Serb artillery; no humanitarian convoys were allowed to bring food or medical supplies into the enclave.

So, naturally the question pops out - what did these Serbian and Bosnian Serb military forces doing in predominanly Muslim inhabitted Eastern Bosnia? They had no business of being there in the first place! They were brutally raping, killing, torturing, and ethnically cleansing Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) population, grabbing predominantly Bosniak territory for a planned and enlarged "Great Serbia". Tens of thousands of Bosniaks were slaughtered in Eastern Bosnia long before Naser Oric took up defensive fight in and around Srebrenica.

Serb forces around Srebrenica had never demilitarized! And yet, Serbian propaganda and Srebrenica massacre revisionists constantly blamed Bosnian side for not fully demilitarizing. In fact, Bosnian side was the only one who satisfactorily demilitarized by UN standards as already stated by the United Nations Report (read here). Serbs never honored their part of agreement and never handed down their weapons, because they did not want Srebrenica demilitarized. They wanted Srebrenica ethnically cleansed and in their hands as part of "Great Serbia". Instead of handing down weapons to the U.N. and thus demilitarizing, they used the weapons to slaughter over 8,000 Srebrenica civilians! And yet, Serbians and their friends - Srebrenica massacre revisionists (also known as Srebrenica Genocide deniers) - continue to deny that 8,000 Bosniaks died during Srebrenica genocide. Their denial of over 8,000 dead Srebrenica massacre victims is nothing, but a complete nonsense (read here and here).

Now, back to the Serbian argument that Naser Oric allegedly killed thousands of Serb civilians around Srebrenica. What a nonsense! In fact, (respectively) less than 2,000 Serb civilians died in all of Bosnia (or 1,978 to be exact) - many of them from Bosnian Serb shells hitting besieged government-controlled cities. (Source: The Research and Documentation Centre, as of December 15, 2005). It is also notable to mention that many Serbs served (and died) in the Bosnian Army while defending values of Bosnian multi-culturalism, freedom and democracy. Former president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mr. Alija Izetbegovic, once said that as many as 15% of all Bosnian Army soldiers were in fact Bosnian Serbs.

Serbianna also does not mention that according to the ICTY Indictment, former Chief of Intelligence of the Serb Army - Ljubisa Beara - personally participated in the decapitation of 80 to 100 Muslims in Srebrenica. Instead, Serbian propagandists and their friends promote alleged beheading video of "Serb soldier Rade Rogic" in Western Bosnia as an excuse for Srebrenica massacre in Eastern Bosnia. What a circus!

The problem is that imaginary "Serb soldier: Rade Rogic" was not even there, let alone "beheaded by Muslims" - as claimed by Serbianna. The person beheaded was Mustafa Hadzipasic, Bosnian soldier ambushed by Serbian (para) military thugs during operation Sanski Most in 1995. Mustafa Hadzipasic was native of Buzim (close to Velika Kladusa in the Western tip of Bosnia). He served in the 5th corps of Bosnian Army, 505th Buzim brigade during operation Sanski Most. Upon retreat (and defeat) of Serb forces in that area, he was captured by Serb military forces who shot propaganda video posing as "mujahedeens". Serbian paramilitary thugs in the video (posing as mujahedeens) have distinct Serbian accent that is easily recognizable by any native speaker of the area.

Husnija Hadzipasic, mother of Mustafa Hadzipasic, wrote to me 3 days ago. Here is a translation of her e-mail:

Ess-selamu-alaykum,

My name is Husnija Hadzipasic. I need to tell this truth to the world. Serbs circulate video of my son being slaughtered. They say his name is Rade Rogic. That is not true. I have viewed the video hundred times and every time I cried. People who knew my son also viewed video over and over again. We are absolutely certain that the person beheaded in this video is Mustafa Hadzipasic. Now that we know what Serbs did to our son, we will go to Bosnia next month to look for his grave. Please publish this information on your site.

Mustafa was born in Buzim on July 2, 1968.
His father is Ismet
Hadzipasic, who died of heart attack last year
Both Mustafa and Ismet served in the 5th corps of Bosnian Army, 505th Buzim brigade.
Mustafa was survived by two daughters, Alma and Emina.

We give you permission to publish this information. If you want more information, you can call us at (phone # edited).

Allahumanet (Peace be with you)

Husnija Hadzipasic
(Netherlands)

I edited Husnija's phone # for privacy issues, but if you want to contact her, you can e-mail her at hhadzipasic@yahoo.com .

SERBIA KILLED JEWS BY POISON GASSES & PLAYED NUMBERS GAME WITH JASENOVAC VICTIMS

2006-06-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

JASENOVAC VICTIMS, SERBIA CLAIMS 100,000 DEAD, BUT IN FACT SECRET YUGOSLAV DOCUMENT REVEALS 26,000 DEAD SERBS = CAN SOMEBODY TELL ME WHY IS SERBIA EXAGGERATING NUMBERS OF DEAD?

By Ariel Nehora (Tel Aviv, Israel)

Read this FIRST - SERBIA WAS THE FIRST ONE TO EXPERIMENT MASS EXECUTIONS OF JEWS IN GAS CHAMBERS!: Serbia wants to be seen as a victim, but in fact, it carried out Holocaust against Jewish People!

=> Jasenovac: victims of war according to data from the Yugoslav Institute of Statistics(1964), Bosniak Institute, Zurich, Sarajevo, 1998.

This study - published for the first time after so many years - provides the name by name list of victims of the Jasenovac Camp, compiled by the Yugoslav government in 1964. It is the first and only official state list of victims of Jasenovac between 1941-1945. The list contains a total of 49,602 names of Jasenovac victims. Of these, 5,900 were Croats, 26,170 Serbs, 8,121 Jewish, 1,471 Roma, 789 Muslim, 174 Slovenian, 59 Hungarian, 35 Montenegrin, 7 Macedonian, others 84, and those not identified by nationality 6,792. From the Stara Gradiska camp: 9,586 victims, of which were: 646 Croats, 7,774 Serbs, 923 Jewish, 20 Slovenian, 3 Montenegrin, 1 Hungarian, not identified by nationality 58 and other 1. The total from both camps was registered as 59,188. The book can be purchased in book stores and from the Croatian News and Information Service, HINA.

=> Serbia’s Secret War: Propaganda and the Deceit of History, by Dr. Philip Cohen, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, 1996. (Croatian edition: Tajni rat Srbije: Propaganda i manipuliranje povijescu, Ceres, Zagreb, 1997. Note: Sarajevo edition also in print)

The major part of this book concerns the systematic cover-up of Serbian anti-Semitism and the fate of Jews in other areas of former Yugoslavia, and not just within the Independent State of Croatia. On several occasions, Cohen touches upon the issue of Jasenovac, providing new data on the camp. The book is available in larger bookstores. Cohen’s book has garnered numerous positive reviews from Western critics and press.

=> The World War and Contemporary Chetniks: Historical-Political Continuity and Implications for Stability in the Balkans, by Dr. Philip J. Cohen, Ceres, Zagreb, 1997.

The basic intention of this book is to educate readers (in particular foreign readers) of the historical-political continuity of the Serbian Chetnik movement from the time of the Second World War until the present day, where Chetniks continue to play a significant role in contemporary society, in the military and political institutions of Serbia, Yugoslavia, the so-called Republika Srpska and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The book is available (in Croatian and English) in most Croatian bookstores

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Republished from: http://public.srce.hr/sakic/jasenovac/readinglist.html
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GEN. LEWIS MACKENZIE = SARAJEVO RAPIST

2006-06-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

GEN. LEWIS MACKENZIE CANADIAN UN 'PEACEKEEPER' WHO RAPED FOUR TEENAGE BOSNIAN GIRLS IN SERB-RUN CONCENTRATION CAMP

Introduction:

Gen. Lewis MacKenzie was openly pro-Serbian with strong anti-Muslim sentiments. When 68 civilians were killed in the Sarajevo marketplace by a Serbian shell (markale massacre) he took the Serbs' laughable position that the Bosniaks set it up. Whenevera child was killed by Serbian sniper fire in Sarajevo, his UN command was as likely to blame Bosnians and Serbs.

During the siege of Sarajevo, he partied with Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the two most wanted war criminals stillat large. Mackenzie was paid $15,000 from a pro-Serb lobby group to make a speaking tour in America speaking out against intervention.

"We'd be foolishto intervene. Those people are animals..." - he told the National Press Club and the White House. Mackenzie had a poor grasp of the scale of the carnage taking place across the country and failed to understand that it was a war of aggression orchestrated by Serbia against an unarmed and unthreatening civilian population in Bosnia.

Even though he was thrown out of Sarajevo by the UN, he remained a media darling, lecturing and appearing on the news saying that both sides were evil, which created the vacuum that led to the genocide of Bosniak population in Bosnia-Herzegovina - before the outside world woke up to the truth three years later. This is the legacy of General Lewis Mackenzie and the UN's version of impartiality.

"When the Serbs kill me" Bosnian President Izetbegovic said, "the UN will say I committed suicide".

...but the real story of Gen. Lewis MacKenzie starts next!

- arhived article -

COPYRIGHT PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
450 Mission Street, Room 506
San Francisco, CA
94105
415-243-4364

ANSWERS NEEDED TO CHARGES OF UN MISCONDUCT IN BOSNIA

EDITOR'S NOTE:

For half a year charges of sexual misconduct filed by a Sarajevo prosecutor against a high UN official have been circulating widely in Arab, European and Canadian media, and in UN and human rights circles in New York. While the official named denied the charges, to date there has been no formal acknowledgement let alone inquiry into them, raising troubling questions for some about who polices the peacekeepers. PNS associate editor Dennis Bernstein is an award-winning investigative reporter. Bernstein's research was funded in part by the Washington, D.C. based Fund for Investigative Journalism.

BY DENNIS BERNSTEIN, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE

Last November the chief Bosnian military prosecutor in Sarajevo charged a high UN official with sexual misconduct against civilians while on duty in Bosnia. The prosecutor publicly demanded that the Bosnian president press the United Nations to remove the official's diplomatic immunity.

Although reports of the alleged war crimes have appeared in the Arab, European and Canadian press, have been circulating in UN circles and even surfaced in a briefing for U.S. Congressional aides by a human rights group, there has as yet been no formal response from the UN. While the official has denied the charges, those attempting to investigate them -- journalists, human rights advocates, foreign policyanalysts, and at least one U.S. legislator, not to mention Bosnian officials and Sarajevans themselves -- believe they raise troubling questions about the overall accountability of the UN: just who is policing the peacekeepers?

Some months after he unexpectedly stepped down from his assignment last August, General Lewis MacKenzie, Canadian head of the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia Herzegovina, was charged in a bill of indictment by chief military prosecutor Mustafa Bisic with sexually molesting four Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) women held by Serbian forces in a prison camp in a Sarajevo suburb.

In a letter to the Bosnian president dated Dec. 3, 1992, Bisic cited the eyewitness testimony of a Serbian guard who had worked at the camp, known as Kod Sonje. The guard claimed he saw MacKenzie and several escorts arrive in a military transport vehicle with the UN insignia. The eyewitness claimed guards were then ordered to release four Bosniak women prisoners to MacKenzie. According to the prosecutor's complaint, the women were later murdered by camp guards under orders to "erase evidence" of this "unusual gift."

The prosecutor's charges, aired over Sarajevo television, were denounced by MacKenzie in several interviews with European and Canadian media as a propaganda tactic by one side in the three-sidedcivil war to gain international sympathy. "I can understand why they (Bosnian officials) would do something like that," the former UN peacekeeper told the Vancouver Sun in an interview published Feb. 13. "If I had been in their position and found that the peace-keeping force was not what I wanted, I can envision my devious mind working out a story to discredit them."

Nevertheless, in February new information about the possible existence of a videotape placing MacKenzie at the Kod Sonje camp helped refocus attention to the charges. In an interview with Pacific News Service, U.S. Congresswoman Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) says she is "very concerned" about the charges and has informed U.S. ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright that her office "is trying to ferret them out as best we can."

Slaughter learned about the videotape from Safeta Ovcina, a Bosnian nurse who testified at a special briefing conducted by Helsinki Watch for Congressional staffers. The briefing was held February 23 amid growing concern in the West over media accounts of mass rapes of Bosniak women by Serbian soldiers.

Ovcina, who spent ten months tending war victims at a frontline hospital before fleeing Sarajevo for the United States, testified she had been shown the videotape by her neighbors whom she described as members of the Bosnian military.

"I looked at the tape and saw General MacKenzie, whom we always saw on TV news, with Serb chetniks. There were three or four girls on both sides of him...MacKenzie was hugging them."
In a telephone interview with Pacific News Service at her home in St. Louis, Ovcina says she recognized some of the young women as formerly involved in a hair cutting business. "They didn't laugh, theydidn't cry, they just sat there...The feeling I had is that they were surrounded by a bunch of drunken people, and they were very unhappy," she recalled.

Ovcina says her neighbors told her the women were later killed and buried in a grave on the outskirts of Sarajevo. In her testimony at the Helsinki Watch briefing, she also described witnessing other abuses and indiscretions by UN personnel, including the selling of protection, food, cigarettes.

Bosnian officials in the United States interviewed by Pacific News Service say they do not know the whereabouts of the videotape nor do they have any verification that it exists. Although the allegations are now widely accepted as truth in Sarajevo, according to Bosnian Ambassador to the UN Muhamed Sacirbey, at this point "there is no proof to justify them." Interviewed by phone from New York, Sacirbeysaid his government had not formally challenged General MacKenzie's diplomatic immunity at the UN.

Another eyewitness to the alleged Kod Sonje incident is Borislav Herak, a Serbian soldier captured by Bosnian forces in early November and now awaiting execution for war crimes. Herak was interviewed on film by award winning Bosnian film maker and TV producer Ademir Kenovic several days after his arrest.

According to a transcript of the interview provided by Kenovic, Herak said he was at the camp when MacKenzie arrived in a white UN vehicle and met with the camp warden Miro Vukovic. He was then taken to a room "for big shots" where he was served whiskey and food.

Later, Herak said he saw MacKenzie and several other UN soldiers "taking four or five girls in this vehicle to have fun." Asked if he were certain it was General MacKenzie, Herak replied, "Yes, I am sure. I saw him on television."

To date, General MacKenzie has not been questioned by U.S. media about the charges and repeated phone calls to him by Pacific News Service in Washington DC were not returned.

Congresswoman Slaughter says while she doesn't want to spread "what could be a smear campaign," she considers the allegations serious enough to warrant investigation. If proven true, they couldundermine the UN's entire peacekeeping mandate. "But I don't know who is authorized to handle such an investigation," she added. Slaughter was especially troubled to learn that twice when he visited Washington last May, General MacKenzie was represented by the public relations firm of Craig Shirley and Associates which is closely identified with the Serbian government. The firm also represents Serb-Net Inc., a Chicago-based association of Serbian American organizations which a spokesperson says "works to counter the negative press images about Serbia."

(06041993) **** END **** COPYRIGHT PNS

Related reading material suggested by our readers: I Begged Them to Kill Me - published by the Center for Investigation and Documentation of the Association of Former Prison Camp Inmates of Bosnia-Herzegovina; pages 183-189. Chapter: An Officer with a Rose.Related reading material suggested by our readers: I Begged Them to Kill Me - published by the Center for Investigation and Documentation of the Association of Former Prison Camp Inmates of Bosnia-Herzegovina; pages 183-189. Chapter: An Officer with a Rose.Related reading material suggested by our readers: I Begged Them to Kill Me - published by the Center for Investigation and Documentation of the Association of Former Prison Camp Inmates of Bosnia-Herzegovina; pages 183-189. Chapter: An Officer with a Rose.Related reading material suggested by our readers: I Begged Them to Kill Me - published by the Center for Investigation and Documentation of the Association of Former Prison Camp Inmates of Bosnia-Herzegovina; pages 183-189. Chapter: An Officer with a Rose.

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SERBIA CARRIED HOLOCAUST AGAINST JEWS

2006-06-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

SERBIA WANTS TO BE SEEN AS A VICTIM, BUT IN FACT, IT CARRIED HOLOCAUST AGAINST JEWS

The first experiments in mass executions of camp inmates by poison gas were carried out in Serbia. Serbia was the first country to proudly declare itself "Judenfrei" ("cleansed" of Jews).

In August 1942, Dr. Harald Turner (the chief of the German civil administration in Serbia) announced that Serbia was the only country in which the "Jewish question" was solved and that Belgrade was the "first city of a New Europe to be Judenfrei." Turner himself attributed this success to Serbian help.

The fight against the Jewish influence had actually started six months before the German invasion when the government of Serbia issued legislation restricting Jewish participation in the economy and university enrolment.

"The Serbian chetniks of Draza Mihailovic were represented as fighters against the occupier, while in fact they were the allies of the Nazi fascists in Yugoslavia....The documents in this collection indicate clearly and unequivocally that the Chetniks collaborated with the occupiers, both in the military and political sphere, as well as in the domain of economic activity, intelligence and propaganda... (source: the Serbian scholars, Dr. Jovan Marjanovic & Mihail Stanisic, The collaboration of Draza Mihailovic's Chetniks with the enemy forces of occupation, 1976.)

To see Gallery of the Serbian Anti-Masonic (Anti-Jewish) Exhibition of 1941-1942, click here.

In the late 1980s, with the blessing of Slobodan Milosevic, a group of Serbs organized the Serbian Jewish Friendship Society, which has propagandized endlessly about Serbia's 'Holocaust decency.'

In conjunction with the war in former Yugoslavia, Serbia has undertaken a campaign to persuade the Jewish community of Serbian friendship for Jews (the Serbian Jewish Friendship Society). This same campaign portrays Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats as a common threat to both Jews and Serbs, in an attempt to gain Jewish sympathy and support at a time when most nations have isolated Serbia as a Balkan pariah. However, even as Serbia courts Jewish public opinion, their propagandists conceal a history of well-ingrained antisemitism, which continues unabated in 1992. To make their case, Serbs portray themselves as victims in the Second World War, but conceal the systematic genocide that Serbs had committed against several peoples including the Jews. Thus Serbs have usurped as propaganda the Holocaust that occurred in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia, but do not give an honest accounting of the Holocaust as it occurred in Serbia.

During four centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, the Jewish communities of Serbia enjoyed religious tolerance, internal autonomy, and equality before the law, that ended with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Serbian state. Soon after a Serbian insurrection against Turkish rule in 1804, Jews were expelled from the interior of Serbia and prohibited from residing outside of Belgrade. In 1856 and 1861, Jews were further prohibited from travel for the purpose of trade. In official correspondence from the late 19th century, British diplomats detailed the cruel treatment of the Jews of Serbia, which they attributed to religious fanaticism, commercial rivalries, and the belief that Jews were the secret agents of the Turks. Article 23 of the Serbian constitution granted equality to every citizen but Article 132 forbade Jews the right of domicile. The Treaty of Berlin 1878, which formally established the Serbian state, accorded political and civil equality to the Jews of Serbia, but the Serbian Parliament resisted abolishing restrictive decrees for another 11 years. Although the legal status of the Jewish community subsequently improved, the view of Jews as an alien presence persisted.

Although Serbian historians contend that the persecution of the Jews of Serbia was entirely the responsibility of Germans and began only with the German occupation, this is self- serving fiction. Fully six months before the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, Serbia had issued legislation restricting Jewish participation in the economy and university enrolment. One year later on 22 October 1941, the rabidly antisemitic "Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibit" opened in occupied Belgrade, funded by the city of Belgrade. The central theme was an alleged Jewish-Communist-Masonic plot for world domination. Newspapers such as Obnova (Renewal) and Nasa Borba (Our Struggle) praised this exhibit, proclaiming that Jews were the ancient enemies of the Serbian people and that Serbs should not wait for the Germans to begin the extermination of the Jews. A few months later, Serbian authorities issued postage stamps (see picture bellow) commemorating the opening of this popular exhibit. These stamps, which juxtaposed Jewish and Serbian symbols, portrayed Judaism as the source of world evil and advocated the humiliation and violent subjugation of Jews.

Serbia as well as neighboring Croatia was under Axis occupation during the Second World War. Although the efficient destruction of Serbian Jewry in the first two years of German occupation has been well documented by respected sources, the extent to which Serbia actively collaborated in that destruction has been less recognized. The Serbian government under General Milan Nedic worked closely with local Nazi officials in making Belgrade the first "Judenfrei" city of Europe. As late as 19 September 1943, Nedic made an official visit to Adolf Hitler (see picture bellow), Serbs in Berlin advanced the idea that the Serbs were the "Ubermenchen" (master race) of the Slavs.

Although the Serbian version of history portrays wartime Serbia as a helpless, occupied territory, Serbian newspapers of the period offer a portrait of intensive collaboration. In November 1941, Mihajlo Olcan, a minister in Nedic's government boasted that "Serbia has been allowed what no other occupied country has been allowed and that is to establish law and order with its own armed forces". Indeed, with Nazi blessings, Nedic established the Serbian State Guard, numbering about 20,000, compared to the 3,400 German police in Serbia. Recruiting advertisements for the Serb police force specified that "applicants must have no Jewish or Gypsy blood". Nedic's second in command was Dimitrije Ljotic, founder of the Serbian Fascist Party and the principal Fascist ideologist of Serbia. Ljotic organized the Serbian Volunteers Corps, whose primary function was rounding up Jews, Bosniaks, Gypsies, and partisans for execution. Serbian citizens and police received cash bounties for the capture and delivery of Jews.

Jews are, according to Serbian Chetnik Dimitrije Ljotic, a cursed people. In his views, there are 4 methods the Jews have of ruling over other nations and the whole world, which include: Capitalism, Democracy, Freemasonry, and Marxism. He openly called for action against Jews because they were, in his opinion, the most cynical and dangerous opponents of Christian values.

The Serbian Orthodox Church openly collaborated with the Nazis, and many priests publicly defended the persecution of the Jews. On 13 August 1941, approximately 500 distinguished Serbs signed "An Appeal to the Serbian Nation", which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis. The first three signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church. On 30 January 1942, Metropolitan Josif, the acting head of the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church, officially prohibited conversions of Jews to Serbian Orthodoxy, thereby blocking a means of saving Jewish lives. At a public rally, after the government Minister Olcan "thanked God that the enormously powerful fist of Germany had not come down upon the head of the Serbian nation" but instead "upon the heads of the Jews in our midst", the speaker of these words was then blessed by a high-ranking Serbian Orthodox priest.

A most striking example of Serbian antisemitism combined with historical revisionism is the case of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1880-1956), revered as one of the most influential church leaders and ideologists after Saint Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church. To Serbs, Bishop Velimirovic was a martyr who survived torture in the Dachau prison camp. In truth he was brought to Dachau (as were other prominent European clergy), because the Nazis believed he could be useful for propaganda. There he spent approximately two months as an "Ehrenhaftling" (honour prisoner) in a special section, dining on the same food as the German officers, living in private quarters, and making excursions into town under German escort. From Dachau, this venerated Serbian priest endorsed the Holocaust:

Europe is presently the main battlefield of the Jew and his father, the devil, against the heavenly Father and his only begotten Son... (Jews) first need to become legally equal with Christians in order to repress Christianity next, turn Christians into atheist, and step on their necks. All the modern European slogans have been made up by Jews, the crucifiers of Christ: democracy, strikes, socialism atheism, tolerance of all religions, pacifism, universal revolution, capitalism and communism... All this has been done with the intention to eliminate Christ... You should think about this, my Serbian brethren, and correspondingly correct your thoughts, desires and acts. (Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic: Addresses to the Serbian People--Through the Prison Window. Himmelsthur, Germany: Serbian Orthodox Eparchy for Western Europe, 1985, pp. 161-162).

Despite Serbian claims to the contrary, Germans were not alone in killing the Jews of Serbia. The long concealed Historical Archives in Belgrade reveal that Banjica, a concentration camp located in Belgrade, was primarily staffed by Serbs. Funding for the conversion of the former barracks of the Serbian 18th infantry division to a concentration, came from the municipal budget of Belgrade. The camp was divided into German and Serbian sections. From Banjica there survive death lists written entirely in Serbian in the Cyrillic alphabet. At least 23,697 victims passed through the Serbian section of this camp. Many were Jews, including at least 798 children, of whom at least 120 were shot by Serbian guards. The use of mobile gassing vans by Nazis in Serbia for the extermination of Jewish women and children has been well documented. It is less appreciated, however, that a Serbian business firm had contracted with the Gestapo to purchase these same victims cloths, which sometimes contained hidden money or jewelry in the linings. In August 1942, following the virtual liquidation of Serbia's Jews, Nedic's government attempted to claim all Jewish property for the Serbian state. In the same month, Dr. Harald Turner; the chief of the Nazi civil administration of Serbia, boasted that Serbia was the only country in which the "Jewish question" was solved. Turner himself attributed this "success" to Serbian help. Thus, 94 percent of Serbia's 16,000 Jews were exterminated, with the considerable cooperation of the Serbian government, the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Serbian State Guard, the Serbian police and the Serbian public.

Today, many Serbs proudly cite the Chetniks as a resistance force and even claim that the Chetniks were somehow allied with the United States during the Second World War, but this is simply historical revisionism. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Chetnik resistance against the Nazis came to a complete stop as early as the end of 1941. Thereafter, the Chetnik resistance actively collaborated with the both Nazis and Fascists, and for this reason Jewish fighters found it necessary to abandon the Chetniks, in favour of Tito's Partisans. In reality, the Chetniks, dedicated primarily to the restoration of the Serbian throne and territorial expansion of the Serbian state, were the moral counterpart of Croatia's Ustatsha. Both were quintessentially genocidal; the Chetniks committed systematic genocide against Bosniaks, who, for nearly all of 500 years had lived peacefully with the Sephardic Jewish community. Under explicit orders from their leader Draze Mihajlovic, the Chetniks attempted to depopulate Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia of all non-Serbs and in the process, massacred most of the 103,000 Bosniaks who perished during the war.

The main force of Serbian Chetniks rallied around Draza Mihailovic, a 48 year-old Army officer who had been court-martialed by Nedic and who had close ties to Britain. Early in the war, Mihailovic offered some resistance to the German forces while collaborating with the Italians. By July 22, 1941, the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile in Britain announced that continued resistance was impossible. Although Mihailovic and his exiled government would maintain a fierce propaganda campaign to convince the Allies that his Chetniks were inflicting great damage to the Axis, they did little for the war effort and often openly collaborated with the Germans and Italians while fighting the Partizans. At its peak, Mihailovic's Chetniks claimed to have 300,000 troops. In fact they never numbered over 31,000.

Meanwhile, Josip Broz Tito, organized multi-ethnic resistance group, which took up the fight against the Nazis, as well as against the Ustasha's and Chetniks. The overwhelming bulk of resistance activity against German nazis occurred in Bosnia and Croatia. According to Yugoslav statistics, at the height of the war in late 1943, there were 122,000 partisans active in Croatia, 108,000 in Bosnia, and only 22,000 in Serbia. The largest proportion of Bosnian partisans were Bosniaks, who were being slaughtered by all sides.

Attempts to form a pro-Axis Bosniak division failed when the Bosniak conscripts revolted against the Germans at a training base south of Le Puy, France in September 1943. It was the only large-scale mutiny within the German army during the War.

The Bosniak-Muslim clergy in 1941 issued resolutions condemning atrocities being carried out by Ustashe and Chetniks, and condemned persecution of Jews and Serbs. Bosniaks suffered the highest per capita losses of any nationality in Yugoslavia.

Serbian Chetnik forces initially fought against the Ustashe regime, as its goal of a “Greater Serbia” was in conflict with the Ustashe's “Greater Croatia”. But the Chetniks' main enemy was the partisans, so Chetniks eventually became full-scale collaborators of the Nazis.

By February 1943 the Western Allies condemned the Chetniks as collaborators, threw their support to the Partisans and began to airdrop supplies to the Partisans. Mihailovic was executed in 1946 for treason. Ironically, his son and daughter Branko and Gordana went over to the Partisans in 1943 and both publicly supported their father's execution after the war.

While it is true that during the War, both the Partisans and pro-German Serbian-Nazi Chetniks aided Allied pilots in escaping, they did so because they were paid in gold for each one.

For years, the Serbian dominated Belgrade government has supported and trained PLO terrorists. Immediately after the murder of Leon Klinghoffer aboard the Achille Lauro in 1985, the terrorist mastermind Abu Abbas was welcomed in Belgrade. Since the late 1980's, Abu-Nidal has maintained a large terrorist infrastructure in Yugoslavia, in coordination with Libyan, Iraqi, and Yugoslav intelligence services. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, as Iraqi missiles landed in Israel, Belgrade supported its ally Iraq.

Although the Jewish community of Serbia is not currently experiencing persecution, overt expressions of Serbian antisemitism do surface in such mainstream institutions as the Serbian Orthodox Church and the official news media. The 15 January 1992 issue of the official publication of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Pravoslavlje (Orthodoxy), carried an article entitled, "Jews Crucify Christ Again." In this polemic, "treacherous" and "surreptitious" Israeli politicians were said to be constrained from expressing their "pathological" hatred of Christians openly because "they know that Christian countries gave them the state." Allegedly, nuns are so frequently beaten in Israel, that one nun was actually "happy, because they only spit in her face." Only weeks later, when Russia extended diplomatic recognition to the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia, the official Yugoslav (Serbian perspective) news agency Tanjug blamed "a Jewish conspiracy" against Serbia, hauntingly reminiscent of the theme of the 1941 anti-Masonic exhibit.

The essential strategy of Serbian propaganda is to portray the spiritual kinship between Jews and Serbs as victims of the Holocaust and endangered by Croats. This concept is disseminated through the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society, founded in Belgrade in 1988 and supported by the Serbian government. In January and February 1992, Dr. Klara Mandic, the secretary-general and principal voice of this organization, syndicated a chilling article in the North American Jewish press. This article alleged that Ankica Konjuh, an elderly Jewish woman, was tortured and murdered by "Croat extremists" in September 1991. However, even as she released this story to the press, Dr. Mandic knew that Ankica Konjuh was neither a Jew nor could have been killed by Croats. Bona-fide witnesses have testified that Ankica Konjuh, a 67 year-old Croat, was one of 240 civilians massacred by Serbian forces after the last Croat defenders were driven from the region. Moreover on 23 December 1991, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia met in Belgrade and demanded in writing that Dr. Mandic cease and desist misrepresenting Ankica Konjuh as the first Jewish victim of the war. Nevertheless, in late February 1992, when Dr. Mandic lectured at the Hillel House of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., she provided the rabbi with a copy of that misleading article, delivered without further comment. It is noteworthy that this speaking engagement was part of a tour arranged by Wise Communications, a Washington-based public relations firm representing the Serbian oil company Jugopetrol, a thinly veiled proxy for the Communist Belgrade government. Beginning with the proposition that antisemitism has never existed in Serbia, Dr. Mandic portrayed Croatia as preparing to repeat the Holocaust. She claimed to be a "Jewish leader," although Jews are distinctly absent from her constituency. Less than half a dozen Jews are actual members of her society of several thousand. She introduced herself as an "eyewitness" speaking on behalf of Croatian Jews, although since the war began, she has had no contact with any of the nine Jewish communities of Croatia. When Dr. Mandic was asked to comment on Serbian (Yugoslav Army) shelling of the synagogue of Dubrovnik, the second oldest surviving synagogue in Europe, she denied that the synagogue had ever been damaged at all. Meanwhile, the attack has been well documented by the Jewish community of Dubrovnik and the World Monument Fund.

Jewish sensitivity to the Holocaust is similarly exploited by the Jewish-Serbian Friendship Society of America (Granada Hills, California), an offshoot of Dr. Mandic's organization. Its newsletter equates the Jewish and Serbian positions during World War II, both as victims of Croats, but fails to mention Serbian complicity in the Holocaust, Serbian collaboration with the Nazis, and Serbian genocide against Croats, Gypsies, and Bosniaks. It warns of an imminent Holocaust being initiated in Croatia. A contrasting portrayal of Croatia, however, emerges from a spectrum of Croatian Jews, American Jews who have visited Croatia, and international Jewish agencies monitoring events on site. All concur that there is no state-sponsored antisemitism in Croatia; the rights of the Jewish minority are respected; and antisemitic incidents are virtually unknown. Thus, only a few dozen of the 2,000 Jews of Croatia have chosen to emigrate to Israel since the war began.

Serbia of today and Germany in World War II offer striking parallels. In 1991, Vojislav Seselj, a member of the Serbian Parliament and leader of the Serbian irregulars who call themselves Chetniks, declared, "We want no one else on our territory and we will fight for our true borders." Croats and Bosniaks in Serbian conquered regions are forced to wear red-and-white armbands, analogous to the yellow armbands worn by Jews in Serbia during the Holocaust. The stated purpose of the expulsion of Bosniaks and Croats from captured regions is "ethnic cleansing." The indigenous non-Serbian populations of the invaded territories are being driven from their homes, exterminated, or imprisoned in concentration camps, to create regions of Serbian ethnic purity. Jewish community centres, synagogues, and cemeteries have been damaged and destroyed by characteristically indiscriminate Serbian artillery attacks. To all of this, the Jewish-Serbian Friendship Society has remained conspicuously silent.

Belgrade has promoted the myth of Serbian kinship with the Jews as fellow victims of Nazi oppression, while concealing the true extent of Serbian collaboration with the Nazis. It is ironic that Serbia is now seeking Jewish support for a war in which both the idealogy and methodology so tragically echo nazism. The European Community, the Helsinki Commission, the United Nations, and the United States have all condemned Serbia as the aggressor. Western diplomats have characterized the current Serbian regime as "a lying, terrorist criminal organization." Serbia, however, claims to be the victim and campaigns for Jewish sympathy and support, exploiting the powerful symbolism of the Holocaust. Serbia's professed solicitude for the Jewish people must be reexamined.

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Republished from http://www.geocities.com/famous_bosniaks/english/jewish_holocaust_serbia.html
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CONCENTRATION CAMP TRNOPOLJE, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

2006-06-16T16:39:00.000-07:00

(LM) LIVING MARXISM COMMUNISTS TRIED TO FOOL THE WORLD, BUT THE TRUTH LIVES ON

The picture you are looking at was taken at the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp, one of many places where Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians were systematically tortured and killed. Just days after the picture's publication, Serbian soldiers killed seven men in the camp whom they had recognised.

Living Marxism (Communists) claimed this picture was "fake". Their allegationwas proved to be false.

The Living Marxism magazine was launched in 1988 as an outlet for the Revolutionary Communist Party, a bizarre controversialist sect which split from the "International Socialists" in the 1970s. Soon the Revolutionary Communist Party was collapsed into Living Marxism, which, hovering between three different parent companies, later changed its name to LM.

In February 1997, Living Marxism (LM) magazine recruited the investigative journalist Thomas Deichmann to tell the (so called) 'real' story behind the Bosnian enclosures. Deichmann was an engineer by training, not a journalist. His writing was largely confined to an obscure German magazine called Novo, which he used repeatedly to defend the Bosnian Serb leadership against charges of murder, torture, rape and ethnic cleansing. He presented himself as a witness for the defence at the trial of the Bosnian Serb war criminal Dusko Tadic who in 1997 became the first man to be convicted in The Hague for crimes against humanity - many of those crimes having been committed in Trnopolje and Omarska (Serb-run concentration camps).

In February 1997, Living Marxism published Thomas Deichmann's article - "The Picture That Fooled the World" - claiming that the broadcasting company ITN had fabricated its dramatic discovery in 1992 of Bosniak prisoners held in Serb-run concentration camps. LM's article "The picture that fooled the world" argued that ITN's footage, in which emaciated Bosniak men clung to barbed wire, showed not a detention centre, as ITN maintained, but a 'safe' haven for refugees. Living Marxism claimed the Bosnian Serb soldiers at the camp were not detaining the Bosniaks but defending them. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

The following article The Poison in the Well of History (Ed Vulliamy) was published March.15.2000 by The Guardian:

Living Marxism accused ITN of distorting the truth about Bosnia. Now, it faces ruin after losing the ensuing libel battle. Ed Vulliamy , who filed the first reports on the horrors of the Trnopolje concentration camp, explains why an unholy alliance of Serb apologists and misguided intellectuals had to be defeated in court

Some will say that Living Marxism won the "public relations battle", whatever that is. Others will cling to the puerile melodrama that ITN's victory in the high court yesterday was that of Goliath over some plucky little David who only wanted to challenge the media establishment. But history - the history of genocide in particular - is thankfully built not upon public relations or melodrama but upon truth; if necessary, truth established by law. And history will record this: that ITN reported the truth when, in August 1992, it revealed the gulag of horrific concentration camps run by the Serbs for their Bosniak and Croatian quarry in Bosnia.

The law now records that Penny Marshall and Ian Williams (and myself, for that matter) did not lie but told the truth when they exposed this crime to the world, and that the lie was that of Living Marxism and its dilettante supporters who sought, in the time-honoured traditions of revisionism, to deny those camps existed.

Of course Living Marxism was unable to offer a single witness who had been at Trnopolje, the camp they claimed to be a fake, on that putrid afternoon of August 5, 1992. Indeed, they were unable to produce any witnesses at all. Unlike any member of Living Marxism or their sympathisers, I was there with ITN's cameras that day. We went to two camps: Omarska and Trnopolje.

Living Marxism does not like to mention Omarska: there, we saw little, but enough: skeletal men drilled across a yard and devouring watery stew like famished dogs before being bundled out. One man said: "I do not want to tell any lies, but I cannot tell the truth."

The truth emerged with time. Omarska turned out to be the kind of place where one prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off another, who had a live pigeon stuffed into his mouth to stifle the screams as he died in agony. The yard at Omarska was a killing field, prisoners obliged to load the mutilated corpses of their friends on to trucks by bulldozer.

Trnopolje was a marginally less satanic place, some of whose prisoners were transferred from other hideous camps to await forced deportation. Others were rounded up and herded there like cattle, or had even fled there to avoid the systematic shelling and burning of their homes. Unknown to us when we pulled up on the road, in disbelief at the sight before us, it was the former group that was held captive behind the now celebrated barbed wire fence.

At the time I paid little attention to what would become Living Marxism's myopic obsessions: such as which side of which pole the old barbed wire or fresh barbed wire was fixed. There were more important matters, such as the emaciated Fikret Alic's (accurate and vindicated) recollections of the night he had been assigned to load the bodies of 250 men killed in one night at yet another camp.

If it is still of any remote interest, I will say this: I now know the compound in which these terrified men were held captive to have been surrounded on one side by recently reinforced barbed wire, on two sides by a chain-link fence patrolled by menacing armed thugs and on a fourth side by a wall. But so what? This was a camp - I would say a concentration camp - and they were its inmates.

What does it take to convince people? The war ground on, the British foreign office and Living Marxism in perfect synergy over their appeasement of the Serbs while other, worse camps were revealed. The bench in The Hague issued its judgment on Trnopolje in 1997: a verdict that described the camp as infinitely worse than anything we reported - an infernal place of rape, murder and torture. Witness after witness confirmed this. The Financial Times enthusiastically re-iterated Living Marxism's claims of a fabrication, but published a hasty and grovelling retraction when it looked at LM's non-evidence.

It was dispiriting to have to report that in the first year of what was proclaimed as the new united, democratic Europe such places as Trnopolje and Omarska existed. It was worse still to return to London and find an obscure group of supposed intellectuals putting such effort into trying to convince society that the camps had been a fabrication and that I had committed perjury when testifying to their existence and horrors at the war crimes tribunal at The Hague My friends and colleagues Marshall and Williams - brave reporters of the highest calibre - were being branded as liars. I suffered a whole lot less but there was a steady stream of hate mail. "You piece of shit," read one letter from an LM supporter revelling in the destruction of Vukovar, "probably a nasty little Jew.'"

Those most horribly insulted, of course, were the disbelieving camp survivors and relatives of the dead. I happen to believe that those who survive and are left bereaved by such monstrous crimes are owed at least one thing. They should be given back their lives by an admission that what happened happened. Their sanity requires that history records and acknowledges the truth of the atrocities that were committed against them and those they lost.

Richard Tait, editor of ITN, realised that three things had to be reclaimed. One, the reputation of his correspondents and his programme. Two, the trustworthiness of front-line, on-site reporting in general. And three, the need to etch the truth about those camps into history. Tait was the man who in private and in his affronted, righteous anger used the words "revisionism" and "fascism" without blushing.

When ITN sued in pursuit of these aims, the company of course ran the risk that such action would draw attention to LM's revisionism. But no one could have predicted the degree to which, rather than be dismissed as a foul revisionist trick, Living Marxism's claims would become a matter for voguish tittle-tattle among bored intellectuals on the sofas of the Groucho Club.
LM played its hand well but the rot in the British intelligentsia made it easy for them to do so.

LM succeeded in entwining the two issues of the libel writ and denial of the camps. Some of their supporters argued that they accepted the truth of the genocide but nevertheless felt compelled by ITN's supposedly heavy-handed use of the libel laws to speak out in favour of those who denied the carnage. But such distinctions were utterly unconvincing. Those who helped LM cannot fail to recognise that by doing so they also stirred the poison LM had dropped into the well of history, playing their own role in denying a genocide.

By this entwinement, genocide was devalued into a "media debate", something to chitter-chatter about over grilled sea bass and pale Belgian beer.

Hungry for controversy, a sizeable portion of London's intelligentsia lined up to support Living Marxism. They rallied round those who had named me and others as liars in the name of free speech - so why not name them too, the great, the good and the up-and-coming? Fay Weldon, Doris Lessing, Harold Evans, Toby Young, and even a handful of contributors to this newspaper. A diverse coterie, eager to sip Living Marxism's apparently excellent claret at the ICA, to eat their canapés and run alongside the rotten bandwagon of revisionism. But how, and why?

One could argue about post-modern ennui and the paucity of values in a society obsessed by packaging. One could argue very cogently about the complete inability to understand fascism, about "victim-hatred" and the strong historical strand of British appeasement of Europe's tyrants, from Franco and Hitler to Milosevic. There was also a mutated strand of anti-Semitism in a lot of this, the Muslims being, in their way, the Jews of Bosnia. But the most tangible answer lies, I think, in the way revisionism works in a bored society, whether you are David Irving or Living Marxism. For just as the Serbs were the tinpot Nazis of the Balkans, so Living Marxism is the tinpot Holocaust denier, appealing to the same cheap slogans.

There is at the moment a remarkable convergence of trials: ITN vs Living Marxism wraps up in the high court; in The Hague, four guards at the Omarska camp go on trial. And also in London, Irving's case against Deborah Lipstadt, for her book Denying the Holocaust, approaches its denouement.

Like Irving, Living Marxism tried - and to a degree succeeded - in couching its argument on the reality of Trnopolje as a matter of free speech. This was LM's most grotesque deceit. Free speech has nothing whatsoever to do with LM's agenda. Although it denied it in court, Living Marxism - on this issue at least - is first and foremost an apologist for the genocide orchestrated by Belgrade. Thomas Deichmann, the author of the original LM piece on Trnopolje, was a defence witness for the camp-roving thug Dusko Tadic, who in 1997 became the first man to be convicted in The Hague for crimes against humanity - many of those crimes having been committed in Trnopolje and Omarska. One of Tadic's attorneys, Mikhail Wladimiroff, has since published his own revisionist views of Trnopolje in LM.

Deichmann has also been a regular contributor since his original article: one of his less subtle efforts was a grovelling interview with the man at the apex of the Serb's genocidal command structure, Radovan Karadzic, on whose authority we went to the camps in the first place. Karadzic is now wanted in The Hague for genocide, but Deichmann's article was entitled "War Criminal or Whipping Boy?" No prizes for guessing which thinly-veiled conclusion Deichmann came to. LM's continuous flagellation, in successive articles, of us "bloody liberals" and "cosmopolitan types" who contested the genocide became almost tedious - while the views of the authors were more interesting.

As is by now well-known, Living Marxism has become adept at finding or placing supporters in what it regards as influential positions in the media. This is all perfectly above board: the Times was desperate enough to offer LM's editor, Mick Hume, his own column. The signatories of LM's letters are familiar bylines across Fleet Street. But the pivot of Living Marxism's activities in the mainstream is, for some reason, the Economist Intelligence Unit, which has at times, backstage, been torn asunder by arguments over key positions held by the group's leading members.

Two of these are a Serb called Laza Kekic, the author of some of the most virulent attacks on the "bloody liberals", and Joan Phillips, who also works under the name Joan Hoey. This is the text of an email that came my way from Kekic to Hoey, written after the Nato bombardment of 1995 that produced the Dayton agreement:

"The Serbs have come back from far more difficult moments in the past. In the meantime, should accept and swallow a lot and consolidate what's left. Can even do Eurospeak and fluff on about the Balkan peace and co-operation in the meantime. Then, at some future date, the obliteration of the Bosniaks, the Albanians, and last of all the Croats. That's my perspective. And there's little else left to say."

Indeed there isn't. The message was sent from Kekic's electronic address at the Economist Intelligence Unit on September 14, 1995, at 10.11am. Others in the series of emails involve chatter about gainful contact with David Owen and friendly journalists at the BBC and Observer.
At one point during the trial, LM produced video footage shot by what it called Bosnian-Serb Television, which did indeed have a crew there that day. But these particular images, it emerges, came from a third camera, a camcorder held by a man in military fatigues I remember well; LM was serviced in that instance by Serbian military intelligence.

The point is this: "free speech" has nothing to do with what is going on. Living Marxism's attempts to re-write the history of the camps was motivated by the fact that in their heart of hearts, these people applauded those camps and sympathised with their cause and wished to see it triumph. That was the central and - in the final hour, the only - issue. Shame, then, on those fools, supporters of the pogrom, cynics and dilettantes who supported them, gave them credence and endorsed their vile enterprise.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ITN, Penny Marshall and Ian Williams sued LM magazine (formerly Living Marxism) over a claim that they misrepresented an image of an emaciated Bosniak, Fikret Alic, at the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp in August 1992.

They said an article, editorial and press release, headed "The picture that fooled the world", published in February 1997, amounted to a highly damaging attack upon their reputations and professional integrity.

ITN and two of its reporters have won £375,000 in High Court libel damages from a communist LM magazine. Reporters Penny Marshall and Ian Williams were each awarded £150,000 in damages. The left-wing magazine was also ordered to pay £75,000 to ITN for libelling them in a February 1997 article headlined "The Picture That Fooled the World."

ITN said it would pay its damages to the International Committee of the Red Cross to continue its humanitarian work with the victims of conflict on all sides.

Outside the court, Ms. Marshall said: "Today's decision is important for ITN in that it vindicated its journalists and cameramen."

Mr. Williams added: "This case was about what happened in those concentration camps in northern Bosnia. What we have seen is a sordid attempt to rewrite history."

Ms Marshall and Mr Williams also issued a joint statement which said: "There was never any doubt whatsoever that the allegations made against us were both untrue and unfounded.
"The reports in question were filmed and presented with the professionalism and integrity that would be expected of us."

"LM was given every opportunity to retract the article and its allegations."

"There is absolutely no doubt that freedom of speech is essential to society."

"But the freedom to print lies masquerading as the truth, as LM did, is not."

- - - - -
Update: As of March 31, 2000: LM, the magazine formerly known as Living Marxism, has closed after losing a libel action brought by ITN over an article in which it falsely accused the broadcaster of misrepresenting one of the most enduring images of the Bosnian war.
- - - - -

Fikret Alic - He Was the Face of Bosnia's War - What Happened Next?

Kate Connolly in Berlin
Sunday August 4, 2002The Observer

His emaciated, terrified face became an icon of the Bosnian war. When Fikret Alic was filmed at a Serb-controlled prison camp 10 years ago this week, the world watched in horror.
As he stared at the ITN cameras through the barbed wire fence at Trnopolje, Alic prayed that the pictures would prompt Western governments to act and end the bloodshed.

The horrific images went round the globe and led to renewed diplomatic manoeuvres, culminating in the 1995 Dayton peace accord which ended the four-year conflict started by the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Ten years after he was filmed in the concentration camp, Alic is married to Aida, and they have a two-year-old son, Amir. The couple live in a modest three-room flat in Hjorring, Denmark, and work at an abattoir. They dream of returning to a more peaceful Bosnia. Alic says: 'We'd like Amir to be able to start school there, at the very least.'

Alic only escaped death in Trnopolje by securing female clothing and mingling with women bussed out of the camp. 'During the journey we were stopped several times,' he said. 'Once I was almost discovered as Serbian soldiers dragged the women off the bus to rape them.'
With the help of human smugglers who secured forged identity papers, Alic fled to Denmark, where he was granted asylum.

Danish doctors found him in a terrible state. His weight had fallen from 13.5 stone to 7 stone. Six of his ribs were broken, as was his lower jaw.

All his teeth had been kicked out or had fallen out owing to malnutrition; his nose was broken; he had a fractured skull and more than 100 scars from stabs, cuts and burns.

Last week Alic, unrecognisable as the 22-year Bosniak prisoner of the Serbs 10 years ago, said that time would heal, but the scars remain.

In an interview with the German news magazine Stern, he recalled how each day at least 10 people died in the barracks where he and thousands of others were held. Their bodies 'were simply piled up in a corner and stayed there, until the smell of decay was bearable no more'.
'We were beaten with chains and clubs, and tortured with electric shocks or burning cigarettes,' he said. 'Some prisoners had their throats cut before our eyes, while others were shot.

'That was when the Serbs threw tear-gas grenades through the windows and if we wanted to save ourselves from the smoke-filled barracks through the windows and doors, they opened machine-gun fire on us.'

He said that 'death would have been a welcome friend to me at that time. I even tried to provoke the henchmen by laughing at them when they tortured us. When that didn't help, I begged them several times to shoot me. But they only said it wasn't worth them wasting a bullet on me.'

Alic had been at the concentration camp for nine days when journalists stumbled upon him. Just days after the picture's publication, Serbian soldiers killed seven men in the camp whom they had recognised.

The picture of Alic and his fellow prisoners was used as evidence in war crimes tribunals in The Hague. But it also sparked a debate, which divided intellectuals across the political spectrum, over the claims that the Serbs were running Nazi-style concentration camps.

Five years after its publication on 7 August, 1992, the image led to a high-profile libel case between ITN, which had taken the pictures, and the monthly periodical LM (formerly Living Marxist ) which, in an article entitled 'The Picture that Fooled the World', claimed the report was construed to give the impression the camp was a concentration camp run by Serbs for Bosnians and Croats rather than just a collection centre for refugees. It claimed that Alic was emaciated because of a childhood bout of tuberculosis.

The Observer's Ed Vulliamy, who had accompanied the ITN team and helped break the story of the horrors of the camp, gave evidence in the trial, arguing that those who had died in Trnopolje and Omarska concentration camps were those 'most horribly insulted' by the LM report.The case was won by ITN, and the magazine later declared itself bankrupt.

In 1998, six years after his escape, a largely physically healed but still mentally scarred Alic returned to his homeland. 'I wanted to see for myself exactly what had happened,' he told the magazine. There it was that his life took a turn for the better, when he met and fell in love with Aida. They married soon afterwards. 'She's the best thing that has ever happened in my life,' he said of his 24-year old wife. 'She has helped me immensely to start to enjoy life again.'

Two years ago Amir was born. The couple are bringing up the boy to speak their mother tongue of Bosnian. 'When he was born, I cried with happiness,' Alic added.

Alic's lack of bitterness is astounding. His initial anger towards his perpetrators, he said, has been damped down as war crimes tribunals have got under way.

'First, I wanted to kill our torturers with my own hands, but then the arrest and conviction of the 'Butcher', (Bosnian Serb) Dusan Tadic - who came from the same area as me - helped me to get a grip.'

'But I still have nightmares,' he added. 'I wake up in the night dripping with sweat and I still have a lot of physical pain.'

Fikret Alic in Serb-run Concentration Camp (1992)

Bosnian Prisoner Praises ITN Crew

March. 14. 2000.
BBC News

The emaciated Bosnian man whose image was at the centre of a libel dispute between ITN and Living Marxism has praised the TV crew for their coverage.

Bosniak Fikret Alic paid tribute to ITN reporter Penny Marshall. He also expressed his gratitude to the TV crew who had filmed the Serb-run Trnopolje camp where he and hundreds of others were held captive in August 1992.

"Until Penny arrived, no one knew around the world what had happened and that we were all prisoners," he told ITN through an interpreter.

Ms Marshall and her colleague Ian Williams were each awarded £150,000 by the High Court on Tuesday, following a successful libel action against Living Marxism. The magazine ran a story questioning the veracity of the coverage.

But Mr Alic added that after the camera crew left, conditions at the camp deteriorated further.
"Our lives changed a lot," he said. "I would like to say that behind the cameramen there were Serb soldiers and they shouted to write everybody's names who said something in front of the camera.

He went on: "At the time they didn't know why they were saying that but the camera crew left and they started killings."

He added: "Justice is in The Hague. I wouldn't like something like that to happen anywhere in the world."

SERB NATIONALIST PARTY BRANDED "NAZI"

2006-06-15T16:37:00.000-07:00

AMERICAN DIPLOMAT RICHARD HOLBROOKE BRANDS BOSNIAN SERB NATIONALIST PARTY "NAZIS" & PRAISES FORMER DEMOCRATIC PRES. IZETBEGOVIC

* Originally published: Oct. 08. 2003.

SARAJEVO -- Friday – Richard Holbrooke, the American architect of the Dayton Peace Accord that brought to an end the war in Bosnia, has branded members of the leading Bosnian Serb party in the country "Nazis."

In comments published today in Dnevni Avaz, the former US ambassador to the United Nations called for the abolition of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), the nationalist Bosnian Serb party formerly led by indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic.

The SDS currently shares Bosnia-Hercegovina’s rotating presidency after nationalist parties scored well overall in elections in October last year.

Holbrooke, who visited Sarajevo yesterday and is due to arrive in Belgrade today, described the SDS as morally, financially and politically corrupt. They are Nazis who should disappear, he added.

He praised Bosnia’s former president Alija Izetbegovic and claimed that the country could not have existed without him.

Izetbegovic lead the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) Party of Democratic Action until he retired from politics in October 2000. Holbrooke visited Izetbegovic in hospital, where he has been since early last month after suffering a fall.

The ex-ambassador was accompanied by European Parliament member and former United Nations governor in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner.

BOSNIAKS HONOR HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

2006-06-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

THE STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON HOLOCAUST

The Statement by Dr. Haris Silajdzic, Co-Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 27 January 2000

* A Conference on Education, Remembrance and Research. 26 - 28 January, 2000.

It is an honour for me to be invited to attend this important meeting, and to be able to pay tribute to the memory of those who suffered and died in the HoIocaust and to the courage of those who survived this monstrous injustice and cruelty. Anyone with normal human sympathy feels for the victims of the Holocaust, and we in Bosnia and Herzgovina are perhaps more able than most to feel that sympathy, for we have also suffered, in the war that ended little more than four years ago.

The Allies did not bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz, because they feared it would arouse the wrath of the Nazis; six million people died. In our case, an arms embargo led to "only" a quarter of a million deaths - an embargo that penalized only the victims, for the aggressors already had more arms than they could handle. How many will die in Chechnya remains to be seen; it will depend on who counts the dead.

The majority of our quarter of a million victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina were Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims. They are the descendants of those who, at the beginning of the 16th century, welcomed the Jews expelled from Spain after the end of Muslim rule in 1492. There was no UN in those days, no EU, no NATO, no human rights conventions; only the human feeling of the Bosniaks towards the innocent victims.

During the Second World War their descendants signed petitions calling for the Jews and other minorities to be protected. Incidentally, though Croatia's role in the Hitler war is well known, it is not widely known outside the Balkans that during the Second World War a collaborationist government ruled in Belgrade, a government that in August 1941 was the first to acclaim the "final solution".

And during our recent war, it was the Bosniaks who did most during the siege of Sarajevo to preserve Sarajevo as a multiethnic, civilized city. They were helped by people of other faiths - Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Jews - and of none, all motivated by the same commitment to plurality.

All the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are victims of this war, in one way or another; the Bosniaks most of all. Adomo said: If I am a victim, I have the right to cry out! And yet our victims are now being asked not to speak of genocide, and even are being equated in guilt with the perpetrators. Indecisiveness, passivity or indifference in the face of genocide is bad enough; but to try to deprive the victims of their victimhood, and thereby to equate good and evil, is a perversion of all that our civilization stands for.

Not only were we in Bosnia and Herzgovina subjected to genocide, not only are we now asked to keep silent: we are still suffering the consequences, more than four years after the end of the war. In addition to our quarter of a million dead, half the total population of the country - more than two million people, mainly Bosniaks - were forced to flee their homes. And even now, one and a half million of them are still living as refugees in third countries or as displaced persons within Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The origins of this horrific human tragedy lay not in Bosnia itself, but in the policies conducted by demagogues in her neighbouring countries, especially the Milosevic regime in Belgrade - policies that led to the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the near-destruction of Bosnia and Herzegovina, its most plural republic.

The consequences of such policies is not only the human suffering that will last throughout the lives of the survivors of this war, those who lost their loved ones, or who suffered terrible injuries defending their country or simply, as civilians, attempting to survive siege, expulsions, rape, incarceration in concentration camps and death camps. I speak also of the consequences to the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina itself, and its resulting inability to provide adequately for the existential needs of its citizens.

The only way we can begin to do this is to rebuild our economy as a market economy that will attract foreign investment and provide employment; to create democratic institutions and the habits of democracy; to establish the rule of law; to encourage civil society to play its proper role; to foster a culture of respect for human rights. Our constitution guarantees a fine range of human rights; but we lack the mechanisms to enforce them.

The constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina is an integral part of the General Framework Agreement for Peace, the Dayton Accord. With mililtary backing from NATO, the Dayton Accord achieved what no previous peace plan did: it ended the fighting. But it did so at the price of compromises with nationalist politicians in neighbouring countries and their surrogates in Bosnia and Herzegovina itself. Those compromises were necessary at the time, to silence the guns. But they are not a good foundation for our future.

The Dayton Accord includes both integrative and disintegrative elements; unfortunately, over the past four years we have seen too little energy put into implementing the integrative, and too much apathy allowing nationalist forces to exploit the disintegrative. To create a true democracy, a thriving civil society, a healthy economy, we must revise the Dayton Accord. It must meet as a whole, and not just in some of its elements, the highest international standards. A revised Dayton Accord will also permit us to play a full and constructive role in the regional process of stabilization and integration initiated by the Stability Pact, held in Sarajevo last summer.

If this is not done, we shall find ourselves, despite the high promises of the Dayton Accord, implementing something contrary to its aims. Instead of reversing the consequences of ethnic cleansing, we shall be reinforcing and legitimating them, under the pretext of implementation. We shall find ourselves, in short, completing the projects of those whose ideology and politics have been condemned by the whole world. Is this really what the world wants? Should we really let the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina continue to suffer the consequences of the crimes of those whom the world community has declared outcast from the political scene? This is not what the citizens of Sarajevo fought for, defending their besieged city; not what the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina fought for, defending their country. They fought for what they still want now - the right to live in a European-style democracy where freedom of religion, freedom of opinion, freedom of expression is guaranteed to all.

The people of Serbia, too, will only be able to free themselves of the disasters that have befallen their country if the powerholders in Belgrade recognize that the 'Greater Serbia' has failed and accept responsibility for the genocides in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. Only then will Serbia be able to choose another path, a path that will lead them, like the other countries of the region, towards democracy.

Allow me in closing to refer again to the theme of this conference - the Holocaust. I need not remind anyone here of the brave words that were spoken after the Second World War, when the full horrors of the Holocaust became known - the words "Never Again!". Yet these words were not properly heeded as former Yugoslavia began to disintegrate; and we in Bosnia and Herzegovina paid a heavy price for the failure to learn from the Holocaust. And yet it seems that we are still failing to learn from the Bosnian experience. How loud must the cry of the victims be before the world will hear us? Can we, Jewish and other victims of the Holocaust, Bosniak and other victims of the genocide in Bosnia, together raise our voices in protest loudly enough to be heard over the screams of the victims?

GREEKS SLAUGHTERED BOSNIAN CIVILIANS

2006-06-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

GREEK COMPLICITY IN BOSNIAN WAR CRIMES UNHOLY ALLIANCE: GREECE AND MILOSEVIC'S SERBIA

By: Takis Michas

(Takis Michas is a journalist living in Athens. His book Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia has been released by Texas A&M University Press)

Perhaps the most shocking part of the multi-volume, seven-thousand-page long Dutch report of the Srebrenica massacre - which led to the recent resignation of the Dutch government - is contained in the third volume.

Entitled 'Intelligence en de oorlog in Bosnie,' this volume deals with the involvement of foreign secret agencies and foreign powers in the war in Bosnia. Its author, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University, has had for five years unrestricted access to the Netherlands intelligence community and to various foreign archives and the archives of the United Nations. Moreover, more than 90 foreign intelligence officials were interviewed for the project.
Aficionados of Greece's Balkan politics will find lots of interesting new material in the Dutch report, although it deals only with the years 1994-5. This was the period, however, when some of the worst atrocities were committed in eastern Bosnia, including the massacre of 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) at Srebrenica in July 1995.

Greece's support for Milosevic's Serbia under the Mitsotakis government which ruled Greece in the early 1990's was restricted - notwithstanding the occasional breaking of the UN-imposed oil embargo - mostly to the symbolic level. However it seems that under the subsequent PASOK government of Andreas Papandreou, Athens' pro-Milosevic policies took a more sinister turn. As the report indicates, during that period Greece was not content with simply providing humanitarian assistance or even encouraging its oil tycoons to break the UN-imposed fuel embargo on Serbia. It also provided military assistance to the Bosnian Serbs and to indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic.

'There were lots of weapons transferred from Greece,' Professor Wiebes told me in the course of a telephone interview, 'to the port of Bar in Montenegro; from there they would find their way to the Bosnian Serb Army.' The weapons consisted mostly of light arms and ammunition. Another aspect of Greek military assistance took the form of leaking NATO's military secrets to the Bosnian Serbs. 'NATO officials were very reluctant to share intelligence with either the Turks or the Greeks,' said Professor Wiebes, 'because they were afraid that intelligence would leak to either the Bosnians or the Bosnian Serbs. At some point NATO simply stopped sharing intelligence with the Greeks.'

Equally interesting were the activities of a contingent of Greek paramilitaries who were fighting in Bosnia as part of the Drina Corps under indicted war criminal General Ratko Mladic. As it was reported at the time, this group of Greek paramilitaries were in close contact with the Greek intelligence agencies, providing the latter with info concerning military developments on the various fronts of the war. According to the Dutch report, the Greek paramilitaries took part in the Srebrenica massacre and the Greek flag was hoisted in the city after it had fallen to the Serbs. The report bases its findings on telephone intercepts of the Bosnian Serb Army provided by Bosnian intelligence. 'One of the intercepted messages,' Professor Wiebes told me, 'was from General Mladic, who asked for the Greek flag to be hoisted in the city' - presumably to honor the Greek lads.

The presence of Greek paramilitaries and the hoisting of the Greek flag in defeated Srebrenica were reported at the time by some Greek and foreign media. The Greek government, however, vehemently denied the allegations. Moreover, throughout the war in former Yugoslavia the Greek authorities ignored consistently the open and public recruitment of paramilitaries in Greece, who were going to fight against the UN-recognized legal government of Bosnia.

The Dutch report comes a few months after the revelation that Slobodan Milosevic had 250 (!) accounts in various Greek banks during the years 1992-6. The money was used to secretly finance Serbian military operations in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990's. The revelations were contained in a document from the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal, asking the Greek authorities to assist in opening the accounts. Throughout the 1990's the Greek banking authorities had repeatedly denied foreign press reports concerning the existence of Milosevic's secret funds in Greece, while leading Greek judges had publicly refused to cooperate with Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the Tribunal.

Greece provided a safe heaven for members of Milosevic’s secret services accused by international organizations for serious wrongdoings. In one such case in 1996 the Greek authorities protected and helped get away a member of Belgrade’s secret services who was wanted by the Belgian government and the Interpol for murdering Kosovo Albanian activists in Europe.

The above mentioned allegations represent of course just the tip of the iceberg of the whole sad story. The time has come for the government of Costas Simitis to make public all the information it has at its disposal and to launch a parliamentary investigation into those allegations. If Mr.Simitis fails to do so, he will be perceived as continuing the policy of his predecessors, which included in covering up serious wrongdoings. The results of such an investigation would pose no threat to either Mr. Simitis or to his close associates who always maintained a healthy distance from the Balkan policies of their predecesors. Yes, the results may prove extremely embarrassing to some of the leading PASOK cadres and ministers who constitute the o guard of Andreas Papandreou diehards as well as to some "elder statesmen" from the New Democracy opposition party. But this should not deter him. Let them face the penalty they deserve for supporting in words and deeds some of the most heinous crimes committed in Europe since World War Two.

- - - - -
Greece's Balkan Ghosts
By: Matthew Kaminski

As Takis Michas relates in "Unholy Alliance ," Greece hasn't fitted into the European mainstream comfortably. His study has, overtly, a narrower aim: Greece's relations with Serbia during the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia. Far from working together with its Western allies, Greece routinely obstructed NATO and EU initiatives, starting with the independence of Macedonia in 1991 to the Kosovo war in 1999. Its political and business class as well as the Greek Orthodox Church collaborated with the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs under Radovan Karadzic.

Public opinion sympathized with the Serbs and turned a deaf ear to reports of Serb war crimes and ethnic cleansing against the Muslims and Catholics. In seeking to understand Greek behavior, Mr. Michas holds up a mirror to his nation's collective psyche. He produces a polemic about Greece's tortuous path to modernization as much as an account of the time. As history, Unholy Alliance fills a gap in the large body of work on the Balkan crises. Athens was an important side actor whose policies and motivations are well discussed here. Whether left or right, successive governments during the 1990s thought they had found a kindred spirit in Milosevic. We get a few insights into Balkan-style diplomacy. Antonis Samaras, the foreign minister in the early 1990s, evidently entertained Milosevic's grand schemes for dividing up Yugoslavia.

In the fall of 1991, the Serb dictator suggested to the Greek chief diplomat he was even willing to carve up Macedonia to create a common Serb-Greek border. Samaras, who could have used his position to dissuade the Serbs from launching a series of disastrous wars, merely demurred. The Greek political establishment was too taken with leader of this "kindred Orthodox" state to notice his deadly designs. The hard-line toward Macedonia over the use of its name and the courting of Serbia dates back to the government of Constantine Mitsotakis. But the man who most shaped Greece in these days was still Andreas Papandreou, who ruled throughout the 1980s and returned to power as prime minister in 1993.

As with Milosevic, he was a Socialist who whipped up a new sort of nationalism after the end of the Cold War. Looking back, it is a wonder the Balkan wars didn't spread beyond the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Not thanks to Greece. Papandreou helped Serbia bypass the U.N.-imposed trade embargo, feeding the Milosevic war machine. Michas says the Greeks supplied oil and guns, and its banks were safe homes for Belgrade's cash, "with the knowledge -- if not the approval -- of the Greek government." Others have uncovered stronger evidence of business collusion with Milosevic's Serbia than is presented here.

Michas gets a few scoops of his own. We learn about the Greek paramilitaries who fought alongside the Bosnian Serbs. When Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic took Srebrenica and massacred 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, a Greek flag went up over the fallen city. The government knew but did nothing. Other interesting tidbits include the lengths the Greek Orthodox Church went to host Karadzic during his visits and to stop any domestic protests.

It turns out, as well, Greece routinely denied visas to members of the Serbian democratic opposition which today rules that country. And of course during NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia -- military action that Greece signed up to in Brussels -- 95% of Greeks opposed the bombing and easily dismissed reports of atrocities against Kosovar Albanians. Greece sympathized not only with Serbia, but "with Serbia's darkest side." Why? Mr. Michas, a journalistic heretic within Greece and contributor to these pages, says "the events of the last decade have demonstrated the weakness of Greek society, its vulnerability to the sirens of intolerance and willingness to fall under. . . the 'spell' of ethno-nationalism." Greek leaders openly questioned that the collapse of Yugoslavia could yield peaceful, multiethnic successor states, implicitly saying that ethnic cleansing was not only inevitable but good. A mixed Bosnia or Kosovo would undermine Greece's own founding myth as an ethnically pure Greek nation descended directly from Pericles.If Greece is to become a truly modern European state, it must have the confidence to face up to a different reality: like its neighbors who were also carved out of the Ottoman Empire, Greece is home to large minorities, among them an estimated 200,000 Slavs whose existence Athens denies to this day. While Brussels never says so, Turkey isn't the only country which needs to treat its ethnic minorities better.

Greece's insecurity over northern frontiers, created only in the early 1990s, and self-denial of its own multi-ethnic character dates back to the Greek civil war of 1945-48 when many Slavs sided with the Communists. The failure to bury those ghosts shaped Greek foreign policy in the 1990s, and helps explain the misguided approach toward Belgrade. Papandreou promoted the idea that Greece was under threat-from tiny Macedonia, from the U.S., from Turkey -- and spun conspiracy theories to justify his policies. It continues to this day. Two years ago, a court in Athens sentenced a Greek citizen to 15 months in jail for promoting the language of the Vlachs, another small minority that lives alongside the Slavs in Greek Macedonia.

Michas's impassioned and often obsessive account deserves to be taken seriously for exposing mistakes that must not be repeated.

SERBIAN GENOCIDAL NATIONALISM & ETHNIC CLEANSING

2006-06-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

REFLECTIONS ON SERBIAN NATIONALISM AND POLICY OF ETHNIC CLEANSING

By. Enver Hasany

Is ethnic cleansing, this old phenomenon with a new name, a typical Balkan creature? What about the Serbs? Are they destined by nature to lead a forceful removal of non-Serbs from disputed lands, a phenomenon that they themselves named 'ethnic cleansing' more than hundred years ago?

To be clear from the outset, we consider that the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing of the non-Serbs in the Balkans and the destruction of their cultures cannot be explained anthropologically but rather by socio-political arguments: the birth and development of Serbian-type nationalism (an expressly popular-egalitarian type of nationalism) and the social structure of Serbian society (mainly rural) have regenerated brutal social forces from anti-feminism to ethnic cleansing. This fact, among others, has been elaborated by Sabrina P. Ramet in 'Nationalism and the 'Idiocy' of the Countryside: the Case of Serbia', published in Ethnic and Racial Studies No. 1/96, pp. 76-87. We have in the main points followed Ramet's logic since it offers the best explanation of Serbian behaviour within the Balkan context.

Another anthropological argument that fails to explain Serbian nationalism is the so-called 'Balkan mentality'. This has never existed among Serbs or among the other Balkan nationalities. Some Western circles have formulated this notion to avoid their responsibility for stopping Serbian expansionism in the Balkans. Its corollary is: Balkan wars are innate to the Balkan 'tribes' and that nothing can be done to prevent them from 'self-carnage'. The present regime in Belgrade has promoted this concept since it fits its expansionist interests. The lack of a unique 'Balkan mentality' can be explained very easily if one looks at the daily life and administration of the Balkan peoples before the nineteenth century. The Ottoman millet system made no distinctions other than religion between Muslims and Christians. The differences based on nation grew up, as in Europe, only with the birth of nationalism and its ideology.1

We will examine four aspects of the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing to give a clear picture about the two aspects of Serbian nationalism and its consequences. One aspect deals with Serbian nationalism before the creation of former Yugoslavia in 1918, while the other is mostly state-centric and was especially apparent after former Yugoslavia's formation up to its dissolution in 1992.

A BRIEF HISTORIC OVERVIEW OF THE PHENOMENON OFETHNIC CLEANSING

The phenomenon of ethnic cleansing can be viewed in two ways. First, it is comprised of all forceful population removals intended to weaken, destroy or eliminate certain segments of the subjugated population. Second, ethnic cleansing includes the same actions but directed only against certain national groupings. The first form is as ancient as humanity itself, while the second is closely connected with the birth of the nationalist movements of the seventeenth century onwards.

Forceful removals of populations within state borders go as far back as the eighth century BC. The Assyrian ruler, Tiglath-pileser III (745-727BC), forcibly displaced the indigenous population to replace it with his own subjects. The Babylonians, ancient Greeks and Romans also applied this practice, but not always with the same intensity or to the same degree and it was done mainly for the economic enslavement of their adversaries.2

During Medieval times, since religion was the principal basis for individual and collective identity, religion served as a pillar for forceful removal of entire populations, especially Jews and Muslims.3 In the meantime, while religion was still a reference point for the forceful removal of populations, England was the first country to commit cleansing based on nationality. In the years 1640-50, it 'cleansed' almost half of the Irish nation from their lands. This practice was later pursued against the indigenous tribes in North America.4

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Balkans would be a new European theatre for the obscure game of ethnic cleansing. An unprecedented level of brutality followed the birth of independence movements among the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire. Although non-Christian sufferings and cleansing has, until recently, been hidden in the literature on the subject, ethnic cleansing of non-Christians, committed during the last hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, overrides the figures of the forcefully relocated Christian subjects of the Empire. Justin McCarthy, in his study Death and Exile: the Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims: 1821-1922 (1995), presents detailed evidence of this. McCarthy's study, apart from the Report of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Causes of the Balkan Wars, published in 1994 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Washington DC, 1994), with a foreword by George Kennan under the title 'The Other Balkan Wars', represents a thorough analysis of the tragic phenomenon of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

The Second World War culminated in the forceful removal and extermination of a people, committed entirely on an ethnic basis. This was due to the rise of paranoiac German nationalism that saw others as a threat to 'racial purity'.

Population removal, be it forceful or through agreement, had been abandoned and forgotten for a long time in Europe after World War II. The Cold War 'froze' the borders of Europe and, consequently, the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing was being treated as something of the past. After the Cold War ended, however, a new and tragic chapter of European history opened. In this sad and separate chapter, ethnic cleansing in both former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union was a premeditated policy and the very aim of war and not its result. In the former Yugoslavia's case it has not been and is not an anti-social anomaly based on old hatreds among the Balkan nations, but a logical consequence of nationalism and a political culture cultivated for half a century.

THE PHENOMENON OF ETHNIC CLEANSING: A BASIS FOR THEPROJECT OF GREATER SERBIA

Analysis of the practice of ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs starts with their project for a Greater Serbia, which is enshrined in the Serbian national programmes starting from the Nacertanije (The Outline) of Ilija Garasanin (1844) and continuing to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986). As a mere notion, though, ethnic cleansing is a brainchild of the father of the Serbian 'enlightenment', Vuk Karadjic.5The wars the Serbs waged in recent centuries served this Greater Serbia project. When successful, like after 1870 and especially after the Balkan Wars (1912-13), it has necessarily caused the forceful removal of non-Serbs and the destruction of their culture. The international regime during those times played a special role in the success of this policy.

Serbian nationalist leaders thought that the way to establish the national will was through war. Furthermore, their focus has been on territories in which Serbs were never in the majority. Occupying territories in which they were not in the majority in recent years has determined the methods used to achieve these aims, that is, the forceful removal of non-Serbs and the destruction of their culture. This remains the dominant feature of Serbian nationalism to the present. Its perpetrators and their social structure, mainly rural, explain its brutality and consistency. Serbian nationalism has been and remains a 'popular' (egalitarian) nationalism. The Serbian egalitarian approach weakened and become partly aristocratic only when Belgrade tried to dominate Zagreb and Ljubljana, this, in turn, cultivated mainly aristocratic and bourgeois nationalism. Why has Serbian nationalism been and remained egalitarian in nature? The answer to this question is found in the history of the rise and development of Serbian nationalism itself.

The Ottoman conquest in Serbia had an equalizing effect; that is, it entirely put an end to the class of landowners (the nobility). Slav landowners existed only in Bosnia-Herzegovina and partly in Macedonia where they converted to Islam. But, their impact on the formation of Serbian nationalism was too little, as was the case in Bulgaria. This was because the position of Slav landowners differed little from that of Ottoman landowners. Also, a trader class did not exist in Serbia and the modest development of a trader-class during the nineteenth century had negligible impact on the birth of Serbian nationalism. At the same time, the hatred and contempt harbored by the Serb peasantry were directed against these landowners. On the other hand, this peasantry managed to preserve its traditional institutions and language owing to the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, an administrative system that offered a basis for future Serbian nationalism of an egalitarian nature.

The leaders and promoters of this sort of nationalism within Serbian society were the village priests and some of the traders who lived outside Serbia. The discontent and goals of the clergy were the same as that of the peasantry, from which the clergy itself originated. Within the Serbian context, dioceses claimed control over the land. Serbian intellectuals, both inside and outside Serbia, offered a theoretical and sophisticated framework for this sort of nationalism, which formulated and channeled domestic ingredients in a form of egalitarian nationalism as described above. Under these socio-economic circumstances, it was the only form of nationalism that could breed in Serbian society: neither a bourgeois nationalism (like the Czechs), nor an aristocratic one (like in Poland and Hungary), nor a bureaucratic form (as in Turkey and Greece) could have developed there.6

This social structure underpins Serbian national programmes and explains the brutality of the ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs in last hundred years. During the Balkan Wars, as well as the recent conflicts in former Yugoslavia, paramilitary units composed of ordinary rural Serbs were the main perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and the destruction of the non-Serbian cultures in the territory of former Yugoslavia.7 The drafters of the Serbian national programmes originated mostly from this social structure, a fact that renders the full democratization of Serbian society very difficult even today. Despite all the tragic events in Kosovo during the seventy eight days of NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia (March-June 1999) and the heavy damage caused to Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic's power base, the opposition in Serbia remains weak and unable to seriously challenge the regime in Belgrade.

THE DECISIVE ROLE OF SERBIAN NATIONALISM IN THEDESTRUCTION OF FORMER YUGOSLAVIA

An analysis of the role of Serbian nationalism in the dissolution of Yugoslavia must invariably answer two questions: what was the role of Serbia in the creation of Yugoslavia and was the former Yugoslavia an artificial creature or a normal one for its time, like the other states of the international community?

Yugoslavia's creation in 1918 was not at all an artificial act but in accord with the will of the South Slavs to live within one state and in the interests of the then Great Powers (France, Great Britain and the United States) to set up a barrier against German penetration.The desire to live within the same state existed among the South Slavs for almost the whole of the nineteenth century. It was evident in the national programmes of the Croat and Slovene nationalists, but the Serbs rejected it since it ran counter to the very idea of a Greater Serbia. The idea of Yugoslavia intensified by mid-World War I through the work of the Yugoslav Committee residing in London and its contacts with the Serbian King in exile on the Greek Island of Corfu.

Immediately after the War, Italian forces, although on the Allied side, landed on the Dalmatian coast so the Slovenes and Croats had little choice but to ask for help from the Serbian Army, the only regular army among the South Slavs. The Yugoslav Committee, which represented the Austro-Hungarian subjects of South Slavic origin, was aware that this was a prelude to a state totally dominated by the Serbs and that this would definitely shatter their dreams of a federal structure for the future state. On the contrary, the Great Powers' sympathies towards the Serbian concept of Yugoslavia-in fact, Greater Serbia-stemmed from their conviction that the Serbs had given a great contribution during the War and had been the victims of the Central Powers.8

Such a context, both internal and international, provided the Serbs with the opportunity for a de facto revival of the medieval empire of Tsar Dusan, totally dominated by the same political class that ruled Serbia before the war. This fact and the favourable international environment, where Woodrow Wilson himself believed that Yugoslavia represented a great solution for the South Slavs, allowed the Serbs unhindered opportunities to continue their policy of ethnic cleansing against non-Slavs. Later, the policy was pursued even against those who were not constitutionally defined as the founders of that state.9

The Serbian nation, nourishing the belief that they were the dominant nation and Serbia a center of the South Slavs, throughout Yugoslavia's existence strove to preserve the centralist structure of the state. The consequences of this Serbian stance were seen during the Second World War and again repeated in the years 1991-95 and in Kosovo during 1998-99. At a time when all former communist countries were heading towards democratization, Serbian society and its political class struggled for new legitimacy to maintain power. The political class in Serbia sought to integrate ordinary Serbs into the Project of Greater Serbia, not to defend their private property but 'the sacred lands and Serbdom'. The 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts outlined this strategy precisely. The slogan 'All Serbs in One State' excluded all possibilities for ordinary Serbs to make an individual choice.

The 1986 Memorandum marked the beginning of this discourse and of Serbian society's emotional preparation for committing ethnic cleansing and destroying other cultures. It was the first national programme in Yugoslavia that was based on the standardization of nationalistic rhetoric with a view to eliminating other cultures. The Memorandum set in motion the terminology that reflected the intentions of its drafters-phrases such as 'genocide against Serbs', the 'Serbian Holocaust', 'martyrisation' of the Serbs, the 'Serbian tragedy of Kosovo', the 'sacred land where the Serbian graves lay', 'Serbian honour', 'enemies of Serbia', 'anti-Serbian coalition', etc. With this action, the Serbian Academy opened a Pandora's box that in the years to come would prepare the terrain for the violent removal of the non-Serbs and the territorial enlargement of Serbia to the detriment of others.10

The closure of the Memorandum speaks of a "readiness to be in the service of the realization of the tasks outlined in it and for the sake of the dictates of history and future generations". This shows how the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts paved the way for a certain policy-that of territorial expansion, with agreement or manu militari, as Dobrica Cosic himself put it-and gave Serbian discourse an additional argument in the future fight for Greater Serbia.11

From then onwards, it remained only an issue of the redefinition of the identity of ordinary Serbs for the achievement of a certain social function.12 This social function for the ordinary Serbs had already been designed-the unconditional realization of the Project of Greater Serbia. The transformation of the collective identity of the Serbs in realizing this function was speedy, as it had been at other times during their modern history. The rural structure and egalitarian nature of Serbian nationalism explain this. But the Memorandum did not foresee the international environment that, by the end of the Cold War, changed rapidly to the detriment of the Serbs. It was the same world, albeit different in its content, that protected Yugoslavia during all the time of its existence and, consequently, enabled the Serbs to rule the others and commit ethnic cleansing with impunity.

THE MAIN FEATURES OF ETHNIC CLEANSING COMMITTED BY THESERBS DURING THE RECENT WARS IN YUGOSLAVIA

As can be seen from this title, we speak here only of the features of the ethnic cleansing committed by Serbs in the territory of former Yugoslavia in recent wars and not of those committed earlier. For those cases, we have already mentioned the Report of the International Commission of Inquiry, which substantiates the facts about the excesses committed earlier by the Serbs.

It is not rare to hear that all sides in the Bosnian conflict and elsewhere in Yugoslavia have committed excesses. That being said, however, it is still true that the Serbs committed most of the crimes. The planned and premeditated expulsion of the non-Serbs and the destruction of the other cultures represent the first and most basic characteristic of the excesses committed by the Serbs. That this is so, it can be seen from Serbia's preparation for war, which had military, political, propagandistic, economic and diplomatic dimensions.13

This preparation, at the same time, speaks of the fact that ethnic cleansing was not a result of war, as Serbs would like it to claim but the war's very aim. That ethnic cleansing was orchestrated by the Belgrade regime has been proven in a very competent way by former UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Yugoslavia, Tadeush Mozovietzcki.14

Another feature is that ethnic cleansing of all non-Serbs was a function of Serbia's programme of territorial expansion for the project of Greater Serbia. In this sense, the wars in Yugoslavia should be seen as typical Clauswitzian schemes pursued by Serbia only when other political attempts for hegemony over non-Serb populations failed. This means that the political project of a centralized federation, that is, of a Greater Serbia could not be achieved by political means and were pursued through violent ones.The last feature of Serbian ethnic cleansing is the short time-span allotted for its execution. Two factors determined Serbian hopes that they could achieve territorial expansion in a short period-the huge military arsenal concentrated in Serbian hands and the lack of manpower for the effective use of their military machinery. These factors determined the way military force was used for achieving of the Serbs' main strategic goals, that is, the creation of Greater Serbia through ethnic cleansing of all non-Serbs and the destruction of their culture.

CONCLUSION

Ethnic cleansing, as a means of forcefully removing a population, appeared only when nationalism became a leading idea and the driving force of the socio-political redefinition in Europe after the seventeenth century. From the beginning of this century, the Balkans witnessed most of this obscure crime and the newly formed Orthodox-majority states (Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro) have been the main locations of the crime.The Project of Greater Serbia set up by Garasanin (1844) through to the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts of 1986, prepared the ground for the Serbian crime of ethnic cleansing. It was planned and, at certain times, put into effect against those territories where Serbs were not in the majority. After the end of Cold War, though, the Project of Greater Serbia was shattered but not defeated once and forever.

The first feature of the ethnic cleansing committed by Serbs during recent wars in Yugoslavia is that it was planned long before it was carried out. The 1986 Memorandum marks the decisive turning point in the collective redefinition of Serbian identity. This time as well, it was done in conformity with the social structure of Serbian society and its elite, that is, it was a function of the Project of Greater Serbia, as was the case over last hundred years of Serbian history.
The second feature of the crime is that it was planned as a short-term campaign, a fact determined by two factors. First, the Serbs forcefully took possession of the armaments of former Yugoslavia to direct them against the other populations and achieve the creation of Greater Serbia. Second, Serbian soldiers, regular and paramilitary forces, committed the crime in the belief that the occupied nations and international community would stay by idly and watch them.

Lastly, the ethnic cleansing committed by the Serbs is a continuation of the policy of the Memorandum of 1986 but by violent means. This means that it has been and remains a typical Clausewitzian war. From this stems the fact that the ethnic cleansing is not the result of War, but its very aim. Serbian movements in Kosovo at the beginning of 1998 proved exactly this and the international community could not continue to maintain any longer that the causes of tragedy lie somewhere other than in the policy of the Belgrade regime. The international community, NATO especially, was this time determined to recall the lessons from the past. From now onwards, Serbian society has to face the bitter reality of being isolated to tackle the root causes of its own irrationality. Without the help of the international community, though, the prospects for democratization of Serbia remain very bleak indeed.

* Perceptions, Journal of International Affairs, Foreign Ministry, Republic of Turkey, published December 1999 - January 2000.
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For more, go to Serbian Terrorism Research
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SERB TERRORISM & GENOCIDAL FASCISM

2006-06-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

WARS IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA WERE FOUGHT TO FEND OFF SERB TERRORISM AND GENOCIDAL FASCISM

Islam is Part of the West too

By: Wolfgang Petritsch - High Representative for theInternational Community in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Allegations made by some Serb extremists that the wars in the former Yugoslavia were fought to fend off Muslim fundamentalism are ridiculous — was Mr. Milosevic at war with mullahs when his forces bombarded Dubrovnik? What is truly worthy of note is that the influence of fundamentalist Islam in the Balkans has been so weak. When we step beyond the us-and-them paradigm, we might remember that Islam is part of the European tradition.

The Sept. 11 attack on America has sparked a debate about Islam that has, unfortunately, been framed in terms of us (the civilized, Western world) and them (the dangerous, suspect Muslims). Even well-intentioned statements dismissing the rhetoric of crusades have not softened an implicit skepticism among many people toward Islam. This wariness is of immediate concern to the 12 million Muslims who are citizens of European Union countries, five million of them in the Balkans.

While Europe is searching for its response to the new strain of global terrorism, it must at the same time actively reach out to Muslims in Europe with the values it stands for: democracy, individual rights, and religious and national tolerance. This must include Europe's opening itself to the idea of admitting countries to the union that have large Muslim populations or even, as in Turkey, Muslim majorities.

It also means that Europe has to stand by its political and economic engagement in the Balkans. The war against terrorism cannot be won by military means alone. There must be a corresponding effort to close the rapidly widening gap between us and them. Exclusion and alienation would only breed fundamentalist ideas.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I work as the leading representative of the international community — I am responsible for implementing the civilian provisions of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement — roughly half of the country's population, two million people, are Muslim (Bosniaks). Much has been made of the residual influence of the mujahedeen fighters who stayed on in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the 1992-95 war. But no evidence has been produced that the country has served as a base for Al Qaeda, although this cannot be excluded; after all, the organization had an active cell in Hamburg. Allegations made by some Serb extremists that the wars in the former Yugoslavia were fought to fend off Muslim fundamentalism are ridiculous — was Mr. Milosevic at war with mullahs when his forces bombarded Dubrovnik? What is truly worthy of note is that the influence of fundamentalist Islam in the Balkans has been so weak.

When we step beyond the us-and-them paradigm, we might remember that Islam is part of the European tradition. This is the larger context in which the small country of Bosnia and Herzegovina must prove that peaceful coexistence of Islam and Christianity is possible. More than ever, it needs Europe's support in doing so.

The Dayton Peace Agreement ensures that no statelets will emerge in Bosnia based on the religious divide. The challenge before the European Union is to intensify its efforts to help Bosnia develop as a self-sustaining multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural democracy.

The overarching idea that unifies all three ethnic groups in the country is Europe. Bosnian Muslims do not feel any less European than their Croatian or Serbian countrymen. Since 1995, Bosnia has made impressive progress. It has a multiethnic, reform-oriented government that has abandoned the nationalist policies of the past and is working to improve the lives of its citizens through economic reform and European integration. This government is also demonstrating, with ongoing investigations and several arrests over the past eight weeks, that it is committed to fighting global terrorism.

The best proof of Bosnia and Herzegovina's recovery is the accelerating rate at which refugees are returning to areas from which they were driven during the war, and where they now form ethnic minorities. Over the last 24 months, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees registered 144,852 so- called "minority returns." The real number is probably much higher. But even the official number is three times higher than it was in the early days of the peace process, and there is a real prospect that the remaining 700,000 refugees, abroad and inside the country, will be able to return to their homes over the next few years.

It has become a common occurrence to see communities reconstitute themselves in places like Srebrenica, Kozarac and Foca, where the worst "ethnic cleansing" campaigns took place. However, the returnees suffer from the lack of funds to rebuild their homes. Now is the time to provide support. In helping to re-create Bosnia and Herzegovina's multiethnic society, the international community, with Europe in the lead, must in particular continue reaching out to the country's Muslims, who were the main victims of the wartime "ethnic cleansing" campaigns.
In the long term, Europe must integrate Bosnia and Herzegovina into its political, social and economic structures. A first concrete step is Bosnia and Herzegovina's accession to the Council of Europe, which is expected to take place early next year. A second step is to continue toward greater formal association with the European Union.

Bosnia is the place to render the notion of a clash of civilizations null and void and to prove that democracy, freedom and human rights are universal.

SERBS RESPONSIBLE FOR MARKALE MASSACRE, SARAJEVO

2006-06-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL COURT FINDS BOSNIAN SERBS RESPONSIBLE FOR MARKALE MASSACRE

THE HAGUE - A Bosnian Serb general was convicted Friday of running a two-year terror campaign against civilians in Sarajevo, unleashing sniper fire and shells that killed and wounded thousands in the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) sector of the city.

Stanislav Galic was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the UN war crimes tribunal. The tribunal found that Galic ordered his troops to fire on civilians while they were going about their daily lives: shopping, tending gardens or fetching water from the river..Galic, 60, was the first suspect to be tried by the UN war crimes tribunal exclusively in connection with the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital in the 1992-95 war.

It also was the first time the court dealt with the charge of terror, as defined in the 1949 Geneva Convention. The judges ruled that "the international tribunal does indeed have jurisdiction over the crime of attack on civilians" and the crime of terror, which has an "additional mental element.".Serb forces dug into surrounding hills and rained sniper and shell fire down on buses, trams, gardens and funerals, killing men, women and children.

The siege of Sarajevo claimed at least 10,500 lives, mostly of Bosniaks, including almost 1,800 children. Some 50,000 people were wounded during the siege, punctuated by atrocities such as mortar bomb attacks on a market and a soccer game.

Judges found General Stanislav Galic guilty of terrorizing the city's residents through a two-year campaign of shelling and sniping. The court convicted Galic on five counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was convicted of murder, inhumane acts and violence intended to spread terror among civilians.

In reading out the court's findings, Judge Alphons Orie said it was clear to the majority that the attacks against civilians could not have occurred without the will of corps commander General Stanislav Galic.."No civilian of Sarajevo was safe anywhere." - the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said. ."The evidence as understood by the majority reveals that the campaign against civilians was intended primarily to terrorize the civilian population," the judge said. "He actually controlled the pace and scale of those crimes."

"It is clear that General Galic, through his orders and by other means acts of facilitation and encouragement, conducted the campaign of attacks," said judge Orie. "He did so with the primary aim to spread terror among the civilian population of Sarajevo."

The judge said that prosecutors proved beyond a reasonable doubt 18 of the 26 sniping incidents they charged and all five of the shellings. That includes the 1994 Sarajevo marketplace shelling (markale market massacre) in which 68 people were killed and more than 100 injured. It has been a controversial incident, with many Bosnian Serbs saying Bosniaks shelled themselves to gain world sympathy and get the Bosnian-Serb army in trouble.

But judges, who said they examined new evidence about the marketplace bombing, concluded that the mortar shell that caused the explosion was fired by the Bosnian Serbs.

Even if there were incidents where Bosniaks sometimes fired on themselves - as Bosnian Serb-General defense lawyers argued - judges found that that does not excuse the crimes committed against the city's Bosniaks.

Gen. Stanislav Galic commanded the 18,000-member Bosnian Serb army from September 1992 to August 1994 -- a period when close to 3,800 civilians were killed.

Instead of protecting the population of Sarajevo, the court found, Galic's forces brought terror and destruction on the city. In the summary of their verdict on Friday, the judges said civilians of the mostly Bosniak city had been deliberately fired on "while attending funerals, while in ambulances, trams and buses and while cycling." They were attacked while tending gardens or shopping in markets, the judges said, most of the time in daylight.

The encircled city, with more than 400,000 residents, was often short of food and other essentials.

As Bosnian Serb troops, aided by Yugoslav forces, shelled and sniped at the city from their mountaintop positions, with U.N. peacekeepers standing by powerless, the violence was broadcast on television and shocked the world. Finally, in August 1995, Western forces launched air strikes against Serb troops.

Human rights groups have said more than 11,000 people, including more than 1,700 children, were killed in Sarajevo. The siege tore up and depleted a city that long had a reputation as a civilized place where Muslims, Jews and Orthodox and Catholic Christians lived together for centuries.

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HELSINKI COMMITTE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN SERBIA (Excerpt from Dragoljub Todorovic's Burden of Crime: National Courts and Justice, dated 04/09/2002; Helsinki Chapter - No 51)

The Serb public opinion cherishes a stereotype that Bosniaks have stage-managed the Markale market massacre in Sarajevo. But at the trial of [Serb] General Stanislav Galic, the man in charge of the Sarajevo siege, the material evidence presented by the top international experts clearly showed that shelling of Markale and massacre of innocent Sarajevo denizens was committed by the Serb army in the surrounding hills. That fact was disclosed by all the international media, but the domestic ones failed to mention it.
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International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY)Milosevic Trial - The Hague - Court Room OneDay 273, 16 January 2004.

By: Judith Armatta

THE HAGUE - Berko Zecevic, an expert in designing ammunition who investigated the mortar shell that killed 68 and wounded 144 in Sarajevo's Markale Marketplace on February 5, 1994, concluded that the shell could only have come from the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) positions. His conclusion was presented in a report commissioned by the Office of the Prosecutor and introduced into evidence when he appeared in Court today. The source of the 120 millimeter mortar shell that exploded in the middle of the busy market has been a matter of serious contention since it occurred. Initially, members of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) said the shell was fired from Bosnian Government positions. From that, some concluded that the Bosnian Government was firing on its own people, to make it appear they were victims of Bosnian Serb aggression and gain international sympathy and, ultimately, international intervention on their behalf. A later, more indepth UNPROFOR report, however, noted a calculation error in the first UN report. Correcting the error led the UN to conclude that it was impossible to say which side had fired the shell.

Mr. Zecevic testified that, when he heard on television that authorities were unable to determine the source of the projectile, he offered his services as an expert to the judge investigating the incident. Working with two colleagues, their analysis revealed the direction from which the shell was fired and six possible locations from which it could have been fired (5 under VRS control and 1 under ABH (Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina) control). The site under ABH control was clearly visible to UNPROFOR personnel, who reported that no shell was fired from that position. The type of stabilizer fin (part of the projectile) found at the site was produced in one of two places, both under control of the VRS at the time. As a result of this and other technical measurements, Mr. Zecevic concluded the shell could only have come from one of the positions under VRS control.

While Mr. Zecevic's experience and expertise in ammunition design and testing was impressive, the Accused questioned his objectivity based on his having worked for the ABH until shortly before the massacre. Mr. Zecevic insisted he conducted a professional and objective analysis, which was fully supported by facts and calculations that could be checked by any expert in the field. He added that his assistance to the ABH ended in July of the previous year. Before that, he worked for 17 years in the Research and Development Section of a major munitions factory in Bosnia. The factory was part of the former federal Yugoslavia's interdependent military-industrial complex. When the JNA dissolved, the system was reorganized and Mr. Zecevic left.
An earlier witness, former UN officer David Howland, told the Court that UN investigations could not determine the source of the particular shell that exploded in the Markale Marketplace on February 5, 1994, but UN records showed that almost 100% of shells landing on the ABH side of the confrontation line were fired by the VRS. He also testified that, while the BHA sometimes provoked fire at civilian targets, it did not fire on its own people (the citizens of Sarajevo of all ethnicities).

During his cross examination, Milosevic read out a portion of the dissenting opinion in the Galic trial, where Judge Nieto-Navia concluded that the prosecution in that case had failed to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the Bosnian Serb forces were responsible for the shell that exploded in the Markale Marketplace on February 5, 1994. He found support for his conclusion in the Special UN Team's official findings communicated to the UN Security Council that "there is insufficient physical evidence to prove that one party fired the mortar bomb." As Judge May noted, that is one judge's view and nothing more. He might also have pointed out that the majority in the Galic case found beyond a reasonable doubt that the shell was deliberately fired from VRS-controlled territory, after extensively reviewing expert opinions, including Mr. Zecevic's and the UN's, as well as eye witness evidence.

The conclusions in the Galic trial are not binding on the judges in the Milosevic trial. Here, as there, the judges will have to make a thorough review and analysis of all evidence submitted -- by both the Prosecution and Defence -- before making up their own minds. The question remains whether the matter will ever be finally resolved.

Mr. Zecevic also provided expert testimony that the source of significant quantities and types of ammunition used by the VRS against the citizens of Sarajevo came from Serbia. His conclusion was based on an analysis of unexploded ordnance in Sarajevo. The Prosecution produced numerous documents, showing that Mr. Zecevic's former factory, military production enterprises in Serbia, the JNA/VJ and the VRS/RS took over and adapted the former federal Yugoslav military production network. Under it, as a number of the documents showed, Serbia and the JNA and its successor the VJ supplied weapons, ammunition and needed raw materials to the Bosnian Serbs. This practice violated the UN arms embargo. And, as Mr. Zecevic told the Court, "[I]t means that the country [Serbia/FRY - Federal Republic of Yugoslavia] was directly taking part in the killing of people who were unarmed," i.e. the citizens of Sarajevo where the unexploded ordnance was found. The documents, together with Mr. Zecevic's testimony, add yet more corroboration that Serbia was supporting the war by the RS against the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The Prosecution has long since succeeded in establishing that Serbia supplied the Bosnian Serbs with significant quantities of weapons and military equipment without which they could not have waged war. Milosevic faces a formidable task to discredit this evidence.