| BALKANIA.NET | Premier Balkan Source for Investigative Journalism Resources |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dr Rajko Dolecek
I ACCUSE!
PRAGUE, March 1999
Published in QUESTIONS AND OPINIONS Library, Volume 3
CONTENTS
Introduction
Critical Comments on the Myths about the European Union, NATO and the USA
The European Community Fomented The War In Bosnia
Serbia Must Be Brought To Its Knees (Klaus Kinkel. May 24th, 1992)
How Was The Destruction Of Yugoslavia Financed - A Contribution To The Problem
A Crime Against Humanity
The Anti-Serb Attitudes Of President Vaclav Havel
The Child As A Victim Of Pharisaism
Hypocrisy And Refugees
Nato Destroys The Infrastructure Of The Republika Srpska
Three Explosions In Sarajevo - An Orgy Of Disinformation
Western Secret Services And Markale II
PR Agencies As Factories For Disinformation In The Usa
"Death Camps" As An American And European Media Hit
"Rape Camps" - Where The Incredible Number Of Rape Victims Came From
Propaganda And Death Tolls
The Lies And Disinformations Are Being Repeated
The Vance-Owen Plan - Ignorance And Deceptions At That Time
Fundamental Disinformation
Safe Areas In Bosnia-Herzegovina And Their Misuse
The Tuzla And Bihac Safe Areas, USA And EU Hypocrisy, Nato Misuse
The American Political War Crimes Tribunal In The Hague
Selective Justice In The Hague - The German Involvement In The Malpractices Of The Hague Tribunal
About Hypocrisy And Double Standards
Who Is Spreading Disinformation, Who Is Telling All The Lies
Disinformations And France
The European Union And The Serb Pensioners
The Bankruptcy of the Western Democracy in Bosnia-Herzegovina - SFOR Becomes an Army of Occupation
Inventory Of Hypocrisy
General Michael Rose Was Bugged By Americans In Bosnia
Kosovo And Two Dirty Doctrines - The Brezhnev And The Albright Doctrines
Kosovo: Too Many Cooks, Too Many Disinformations, Too Much Arrogance, Ignorance, And Even Stupidity
The End Of August 1998 In Kosovo
The Arrogance And Disinformation Fair In Kosovo
Autumn 1998 In Kosovo
New Horrible Crimes Against The Civilian Population
A Few Examples Of Double Standards In Kosovo
The Official Germany As The Enemy Number One
The Czech President Mr. Vaclav Havel Did Not Disappoint His Mentors
What Is Chucpe
How Many Albanian Police Forces Will Exist In Kosovo?
The World Can't Afford The Existence Of Another Albania
Is There A Way Out - Who Is Prolonging The Tragedy Of Kosovo?
Will The New World Order Corrupt The Competent Western Judiciary?
The Kingdom Of Disinformations In Kosovo: The Racak Affair
Here Speaks Mr. Jenkins - He Is Not A Partisan Journalist
Finale Of The Yugoslav (Serb) Tragedy
The Conference At Rambouillet (February 6-16,1999)
Henry Kissinger's Misgivings About The American Policy In Kosovo
Final Words
Introduction
One hundred years ago, at the beginning of 1898, the classical text by Emil Zola I ACCUSE appeared in France, in connection with the unfair trial and sentence by the corrupt French judiciary of captain Alfred Dreyfus who was later rehabilitated.
I ACCUSE appears now in 1998 to demonstrate the dirty role of the West played in Yugoslavia, against the Serbian nation, during the civil-ethnic-religious war, where nobody was innocent, during the present tragic events in Kosovo and Metohia. They were provoked by an unprecedented and criminal interference and meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign state Yugoslavia by the West, where disinformations, ignorance, venality and arrogance were temporarily victorious over justice, historical experiences and old, trusted friendships.
Rajko DOLECEK, M.D., DSc,
University Professor of Medicine
Critical Comments on the Myths about the European Union, NATO and the USA
For several years now domestic statesmen, politicians and commentators and the media in general have, apart from isolated exceptions, been falling over themselves to outline the merits of the European Union, (the EU, formerly known as the European Community, the EC) and NATO, stressing the advantages and necessity of our entry into these Euro-Atlantic structures. Hardly anyone, however, has mentioned their gross errors, the criminal conduct and acts of selfishness which they have committed over recent years. A shining example of this is their intervention and interference in events in the former Yugoslavia. The media, too, played an important role in the negative conduct of these structures, particularly its too frequent lack of professionalism and its complete one-sidedness; this was the result of a fundamental ignorance of history and the facts, sometimes to a degree that was almost embarrassing, of a reliance on the prevailing rumours, of financial interest, of a frequently intentional effort to spread disinformation and to disseminate downright lies and of an unconditional support for the trends of their own governments even to the point of forcing their ideas on governments and the public. Here it is appropriate to mention the substantial Arab interests in the media of the West (e.g. CNN, a number of British magazines). Our acceptance of propaganda and disinformation as the truth was partly caused by the fact that the disinformation was brought to us by sources of information which we had believed for decades: BBC, Voice of America, Free Europe, Deutsche Welle, RFI etc. Far too often the Czech media refused to publish reports and ideas which did not conform to the established clichés about events in former Yugoslavia. In the middle of April 1993 the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs reported bloody man-to-man battles in the streets of Srebrenica. Influenced by this the headlines of the London-based Sunday Times on 18th April exclaimed "Hand-to-hand street fighting in Srebrenica as UN rescue blocked". Yet this was not the case, as no Bosnian Serb units had even entered Srebrenica at that time. The American State Department was keen on big numbers and regarded itself as all-powerful. At the end of 1992 and again in January 1993 it was declaring that up to 70,000 people were being held in various Serb camps (often described as "extermination" and "concentration" camps). At that time the International Red Cross placed the total number of prisoners in Croatian, Muslim and Serb camps at around 10,000. As the American commentator P. Block stated in the prestigious American magazine "Foreign Policy" (Dateline Yugoslavia: The partisan Press. Winter 1993-94, number 93, pp. 153-173), at the end of January State Department staff quietly admitted that this was a technical error, that one naught had been added "by mistake": it should have been 7,000 and not 70,000. And in January 1993 those 70,000 garnished the descriptions of the wrongs committed by the Serbs in the eminent New York Times, Associated Press etc. Who to believe then?!
The fundamental criminal act of the West and its media in relation to events in former Yugoslavia was the utter one-sidedness, the double standard and the heaping of guilt on the Serb side alone, when nobody was guiltless in that civil-ethnic-religious war. The official West and its press, which formally fights all forms of racism, did not hesitate to use even vulgar forms of anti-Serb racist propaganda to demonise the Serb nation - this included unintelligent, insulting caricatures in such renowned magazines as Le Monde, Independent, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor etc, etc. If these respected magazines and their reporters, CNN and many statesmen had said Jew or Black instead of Serb, the entire world would have certainly accused them of racism. The wise precept that it is necessary to hear both sides (audiatur et altera pars) was entirely ignored by the West's attitude to events in Yugoslavia. When the author visited Dr. Radovan Karadzic (1996) and discussed with him this shameful approach of the West, he told him laconically:
"It is unbelievable how the western media described us in their absolutely one-sided, tendentious reports: out of ignorance and for money."
THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY FOMENTED THE WAR IN BOSNIA
Many examples can be found of immoral and selfish conduct by the EU, NATO and the United States in the Yugoslav tragedy. We have chosen a few. To start with we shall take as a motto the words of A. M. Rosenthal, one of the few American journalists who were not afraid to tell the truth (A Solution for Bosnia. New York Times, 26th September 1997):
"By sending its troops into Bosnia, America accepted and became the only prop of a Western European policy that ignited the Bosnian war and helped keep it going for six hideous years."
For many, many years now there have existed fundamental criteria for recognising the government of a (new) state, e.g. control over its entire territory. Rights of minorities guaranteed by the constitution etc. Treaties on non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states and on the inviolability and unchangeability (by violence) of their borders were signed in Helsinki and Paris. Even earlier this was guaranteed by the UN Charter. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) also guaranteed this. And in Yugoslavia the European Community (EC) rode roughshod over all of this, under unprecedented pressure from its richest member, Germany, which accounted for roughly 30% of its budget. Not only did Germany support by every possible means and over many years secessionist circles in Croatia and Slovenia, to a considerable degree it even enabled them illegally to aim themselves, along with Austria, Italy, Hungary, and with the financial and moral support of the Vatican. The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) worked closely with the Ustasha emigration. A major part in this was played by the now foreign minister Klaus Kinkel, as director of BND during the four critical years around Tito's death (1979-1982). The activity of BND during those years is described by former Bundeswehr officer E. Schmidt Eenboom in his book "Warrior in the Shadows: Klaus Kinkel and BND" (ECON, Dusseldorf, 1995, pp. 211-237). That is why Klaus Kinkel's present day speeches on preserving peace and the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BH) have an extremely hypocritical ring to them.
The European Union's unforgivable transgression was to agree to give premature recognition to Croatia and Slovenia in Maastricht (17th December 1991), under pressure from Germany and the Vatican. Although a large majority of EC was originally against it, German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's tough line and threat of the consequences of disunity and limitation of financial resources compelled the other members of EC to agree to premature recognition on 15th January 1992. This resulted in the later premature recognition, contrary to all previously acknowledged criteria, of BH on 6th April 1992. Europe and the USA thereby gave an unprecedented boost to the spread of war in the former Yugoslavia and thus indirectly caused the suffering of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of BH, Croats, Muslims and Serbs. Europe bought its "unity" dishonestly, selfishly, at the cost of the suffering of thousands of others. Hans-Dietrich Genscher should therefore be awarded the title of enemy of peace number 1 - or criminal against peace number 1. Few people were then (1991-92) aware of the impact of this artfully forced premature recognition. As soon as they were recognised as independent states by the EC, Croatia, Slovenia and BH were speedily recognised. under pressure from the USA, by the United Nations, whereby they gained the right to international aid that is to say, not only to the "covert" aid from their original sponsors, Germany, Austria etc. And those who, though entirely legitimately, spoke out against this in order to prevent a repetition of the genocide of their nation after the bad experiences of the Second World War were branded as criminals, aggressors, fascists. This all took place with substantial assistance from the western media. The subsequent admission of this criminal error and apportioning of the blame for this by eminent statesmen (P. Carrington, B. B. Ghali, P. de Cuellar, C. Vance, R Dumas, H. Kissinger, W. Christopher etc.) came too late to help. Yugoslavia had been made the victim of a crime equal to that of the Munich Agreement and the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Only fools and hypocrites can claim that the world committed a new Munich against BH, which was created out of the unlawful break-up of multiethnic Yugoslavia. It is ironic that Yugoslavia was broken up in 1991-92 by the same states which disrupted it in 1941, i.e. Nazi Germany + Austria, fascist Italy and Hungary, but now operating as formally democratic states, however.
Mr. Warren Zimmermann, the last American ambassador in Belgrade before Yugoslavia was dismembered, did not like the Serbs and, with his activities, he helped a lot to disintegrate that county - and thus contributed very much to the tragedy of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially when in spring 1992, surely on the orders from Washington, he persuaded president Izetbegovic to cancel his signature on the agreement about the peaceful settlement of crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) (in Brussels and Lisbon). In spite of his firm support to Slovenia, he nevertheless wrote about the Slovenes in his article "Origins of a Catastrophe" (Foreign Affairs, March/April 1995): "Their virtue was democracy and their vice was selfishness. In their drive to separate from Yugoslavia, they simply ignored the 22 million of Yugoslavs who were not Slovenes... Contrary to the general view, it was the Slovenes who started the war. (The data about the losses during "the war in Slovenia" in June 91). They do not bear the generally held assumption that the Yugoslav army waged an extermination campaign in Slovenia..."
And what to say now about all those incredible lies and disinformations at the end of June '91, spread so "successfully" by the Slovenes and the western media? Otherwise, the Zimmermann's article is full of inaccuracies and fabrications, good for those whose knowledge about Yugoslavia is utterly superficial.
SERBIA MUST BE BROUGHT TO ITS KNEES (Klaus Kinkel. 24th May, 1992)
It was this sentence that Klaus Kinkel let slip on 24th May 92 in the presence of journalists. Later, a German journalist Mr. M. Thumann wrote about this sentence in the German newspaper die ZEIT: The War Reporters' War (2nd September 94):
"It was probably not until later that he (Klaus Kinkel) realized how fatally he had recalled the notorious comments by emperor Wilhelm II (of Germany) on the report of the German ambassador to Vienna in 1914: "The Serbs must be dealt with as soon as possible!" At the beginning of Mr. Thumann's article, the following is to be remembered: -"In the Balkan conflict there are many truths, and it is hard to find the right one. Not all Western media take this effort, some of them reporting according to the motto: -'To hell with facts, as long as the myth of the enemy works." (from the book: Serbia must die, page 196 97- see later).
Maybe that Mr. Kinkel, Mr. Genscher, Mr. Reissmuller, et consortes are still obsessed with an inferiority complex as the Germans, because the Serbian army, regardless of its huge losses, helped substantially its allies to defeat Germany twice in the recent history, during the two big wars. That army was repeatedly praised, glorified for its courage, self-sacrifice and endurance. The American foreign secretary Robert Lansing expressed it with the following words (1918):
"When the history of this war will be written, its most glorious chapter will be called Serbia. The Serbian army with its courage made miracles, and the Serbian nation suffered incredible hardships. Such self-sacrifice and endurance cannot pass unnoticed - they must be rewarded."
And the Serbian nation was "rewarded" by its allies with whom Serbia fought in two World Wars against their enemies. This "reward" meant a lot of lies and a lot of suffering for the whole nation.
HOW WAS THE DESTRUCTION OF YUGOSLAVIA FINANCED - A CONTRIBUTION TO THE PROBLEM
During a symposium on the Balkan war (Yugoslavia:Past and present) in Chicago (31st August - 1st September 95), Mr. T. W. (Bill) Carr, associate publisher, Defence & Foreign Affairs publications, gave some very interesting details about the financing of the Croatian armed secession in 1991: "German and US involvement in the Balkans: A careful coincidence of national policies?"
Even before the armed secession of Croatia, still during the existence of the former Yugoslavia, Croatia received on 4th October 1990 a huge clandestine and interest-free loan of 2 billion US dollars, repayable in 10 years and one day. The loan was provided by the Ancient Order of Roman Catholic Knights of Saint John of Malta whose HQ is presently in Rome. From there those modern catholic knights influence the world financial system. There is a close connection between their HQ in Rome and Germany - it is gossiped that the above organization is directed by the Germans. The condition of the loan was that the money could not be used for military purposes. On the other side that huge loan enabled Croatia to transfer its own funds from various domestic projects to buy arms and all kinds of military equipment... Mr. "Bill" Carr told the audience the names of the signatories, the high ranking officials of the Croatian Republic. When the Croatian embassy in Washington in 1994 informed Mr. Carr that it had no knowledge of such a loan, he informed them that he was able to show them a complete copy of the agreement about the loan ("Object du Financement").
The Croatian bishops sent on 1st February 91 an open letter to the bishops of the world, and to the whole catholic church. They stated that the orthodox church was trying to preserve socialism of the communist type in Yugoslavia, that the Serb controlled Yugoslav army is centralist, that they were opposing the western cultural and political traditions, that the Croats were anti-communist democrats aligned with western values, culture and free-market economy, etc. The above outrageous calumnies became the driving force behind the US and European Community policy in Yugoslavia... At the end of 1997 a shocking scandal appeared about the funds of the ustasha (about 150 million Swiss franks) concealed by Vatican at the end of war (1945). A part of it was allegedly later gradually distributed to various ustasha centres around the world. The "rat channels" must be remembered here with the help of which a part of the catholic clergy helped to bring into safety the most notorious ustasha and nazi criminals to the Latin America, Australia, Spain...
Pope John Paul II met the Croatian president Mr. F. Tudjman in an official audience on 25th May 91, just one month before the Croatian armed secession. In the same way, just 50 years ago, Pope Pius XII met the fascist ustasha leader Ante Pavelic (on 18th May 1941), after occupation of Yugoslavia by Germany and Italy, when the ustasha of Pavelic, with the help of a part of catholic clergy, were slaughtering thousands of Serbs in the so called "Independent State of Croatia."
A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
The major crime against humanity and against the people of the Yugoslav Federal Republic (Serbia + Montenegro, FRY), against the Serbs from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Krajina was the suspension, i.e. expulsion, of the Yugoslav Republic from the World Health Organisation at the start of May 1993. This move was initiated by Denmark who then chaired the European Council. The WHO thus became an instrument of extortion and punishment. As a result of this thousands of babies, children, old people, chronically ill people, diabetics died in the Yugoslav Republic and in the Serb Republic (the Serb part of BH). Denmark, which always presented itself and presents itself as a defender of human rights and the rights of the child thus formally became, on the instruction of the masters of the New World Order, the initiator of the death of thousands of human beings, of genocide almost. The thoughtlessness of expelling the Yugoslav Republic from the WHO was aggravated further by the draconian sanctions against the Yugoslav Republic imposed by the Security Council on 30th May 1992 (resolution 757) as a result of the provocation of the Muslim authorities in Sarajevo on 27th May 1992 (the stage-managed explosion in the bread queue in Vase Miskina street). All supplies of raw materials to the well-developed pharmaceutical industry of the Yugoslav Republic for production of medicines were immediately suspended.
THE ANTI-SERB ATTITUDES OF PRESIDENT VACLAV HAVEL
The traditional friendship between the Czechs and the Serbs was seriously damaged during the recent (1991-96) tragic events in Yugoslavia. The official Czech authorities, a substantial part of them, and a big part of the Czech media, must be blamed for it. Both the politicians and the media parroted the informations and comments from the West: Most of the Czech press is, oddly enough, owned by the Germans, even the well sold Mlada fronta DNES. Practically all the regional papers are in the German hands as well. In many newspapers exist "instant experts on the Yugoslav affairs" whose comments are full of disinformations about the Serbs. Their vocabulary suggests a similarity with the Newspeak in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by G. Orwell, quite often.
A part of the responsibility for the deterioration of the Serb-Czech relations is undoubtedly connected with the name of Mr. Václav Havel, president of the Czech Republic. His anti-Serb statements were often corrected by the Czech former Prime minister Mr. Václav Klaus.
Czechs were astonished by the words of their President in Washington at the end of April 93, when the Memorial of holocaust was opened there. He said that it would be necessary to bomb (the Serbian positions, added the AP) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to end the war there. Why did he tell it? Whom wished he to please? Mr. Klaus, the Prime minister tried to correct him already the next day: "It is a too simplified evaluation of the events in Yugoslavia, because the situation is much more complicated there and it is not so easy to determine the culprit." Since that time on, Mr. Havel referred repeatedly to the army of Serbs from Bosnia-Herzegovina as "the wild army of Karadzic", he called them "the thugs", "the bandits", "the criminals". During the fighting in Srebrenica his words about the Serbs and their army were very rude. But he insulted the Serbs very much during the anti-Serb spectacle in September-October 95 called "The month of Bosnia and Herzegovina" in Prague. There were no Serbs from Republika Srpska there, and the very few Serbs who were present did not represent anybody. The old arch-enemy of the Serbs, Mr. Otto von Habsburg made caustic remarks about them. Mr. Izetbegovic was received by Mr. Havel with an utter pomp and ceremony, who spoke again about the thugs, bandits, criminals of Karadzic and Mladic. At that time Mr. Klaus, the Prime minister, refused to meet Mr. Izetbegovic and left Prague. He declared then: "My attitude is the attitude of an analyst who likes to know all the facts including those not chosen, because of an one-sided way... It seems to me terribly simplified to proclaim that the Serbs are post-communists, while the others were democrats..."
When the Croatian army attacked in spite of all the agreements and regardless of the presence of the UNPROFOR, the territory of the Republic Srpska Krajina, killing many civilians (e.g., 22nd of January 93 its southern part, on 9th September 93 the villages Divoselo, Medak, Citluk near Gospic - where the French troops of UNPROFOR behaved in an utterly cowardly way), our president had nothing to say. When the Croatian troops invaded the western Slavonia killing hundreds of civilians, burning and looting their property, during the operation Storm which ended in expulsion of 200.000 Serbs and in massacres of those who stayed at home, our president had no words of compassion. He just said that he is not happy with those events, but that Croatia just managed to reintegrate its lost territory and that it was not "the wild army of Karadzic". Our president never spoke about the atrocities made by the Croats and Muslims, he strictly adhered to the view of the West. But, nevertheless he used to say that he had nothing against the Serbs as a nation. He even said (12th January 97) that he had appreciated a lot the help of the Serbs when he had been a dissident - in 1966 a Serbian theatre (Studio 212) performed in Belgrade his play "The Garden Party", among the first in the world. But, regardless of this, he had nothing to say about the punishment of the whole Serb nation by the draconic sanctions from 1992, during which and because of which thousands died, he did not comment the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the WHO in 1993, he never tried to help the Czech trusted friends, the Serbs, by e.g., a peace initiative of his own, by words of compassion. A humane man who feels so much about injusticies, who invites Dalai Lama, who cares for the dissidents in Burma and China, who speaks so often about the ethics and the suffering of the innocent, whose slogan used to be in those revolutionary days of 1989 "With justice and love against lies and hatred", such a man had to say something about unjusticies against the Serbian people. Such a man had to look for the truth, because nobody was innocent in the civil-ethnic-religious war in the former Yugoslavia. But Mr. Havel did not speak, did not help. He missed his big opportunity to prove that he was really a humane man for all those who need it.
THE CHILD AS A VICTIM OF PHARISAISM
The unbelievable hypocrisy of the European Union, the USA and their media was evident in news reports about casualties and in their presentation of the fates of those most innocent victims of war, wounded children. This was marked by the absurd phenomenon of the western media (and the Czech media too for the most part) only showing the forlorn, wounded children of Muslims and Croats, mainly from Sarajevo, without turning to look for a moment at the forlorn, wounded Serb children, also from Sarajevo, but from its Serb parts, from Doboj, Brcko etc. It is sad and awful how the tragedies of children were one-sidedly exploited for propaganda purposes. In 1992 the western part of the Republika Srpska (the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina) was cut off from its eastern part, from the source of medicines, medical supplies and food from the FRY. The hospital ran out of oxygen. The local authorities' urgent request for permission to supply essential oxygen cylinders by air from Serbia was turned down by western functionaries (EC, USA). As a result 12 prematurely born babies died within a short period of time. Oxygen did not arrive in Banja Luka until several weeks later, when a corps of Krajina soldiers managed, during bloody battles and with the help of a Drina corps from the east, to break through the encirclement of the Serb part of western Bosnia and to form a corridor at Brcko.
At the end of 1993 a four member private group of British MPs (Conservatives, one Labourite, one Liberal Democrat) visited FRY and the Republika Srpska (RS) in connection with the medical problems of the local inhabitants. In addition to the terrible situation with supplies of drugs, diabetics dying without insulin, the lack of surgical dressings, anaesthetics etc. (particularly bad in the Republika Srpska) the group members' report in September 1993 included the case of two Serb boys from Doboj, seriously wounded by a Muslim grenade. Sinisa G. (9 years old) had suffered serious abdominal wounds (stomach and intestines), serious burns and injuries to his limbs, Dejan (10 years old) had had both legs blown off and gangrene had set in. The local hospital was not able to save them. Doctors requested to the western authorities that the boys be air-lifted to expert care in Italy, France, England or such like, as happened in the case of seriously injured Muslim or Croat children, for example the seriously injured Muslim girl called Irma. Permission was not given for Sinisa and Dejan to be air-lifted, however, and both soon died. They received neither treatment, nor television limelight, nor mentions on CNN or the BBC or in the newspapers.
HYPOCRISY AND REFUGEES
Anyone receiving information about refugees during the civil-ethnic-religious war in the former Yugoslavia from the majority of western politicians or media would have thought that up to 1995 almost all the refugees were Muslims or Croats, but certainly not Serbs. One of the first to draw attention to the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Croatia was the famous Nazi war criminal "hunter" S. Wiesenthal, who talked about the expulsion of 40,000 Serbs from Croatia in as early as 1991. At the time of the cruellest sanctions against FRY in 1993 there were almost 600,000 refugees registered in - and provided for by Serbia; they had been driven out of Croatia and from the Muslim and Croat controlled parts of BH. The refugees also included thousands of Muslims and Croats who preferred to flee to FRY than to Croatia or somewhere else in Europe. According to information from the Serbian Red Cross, over 90% of the refugees found refuge in families, for the most part not their own, but in families which took them in "out of compassion". After the Croatian aggression, planned and in all manner of ways supported by NATO, the USA and Germany, against the Serb Krajina Republic, i.e. against Western Slavonia and then against Knin Krajina, over 200,000 Serbs were driven out or fled from their homes, bombed as they escaped by Croatian and Muslim artillery and planes - all supplied from Germany, the USA, Argentina and Islamic states during the embargo on weapons supplies to the warring parties in BH. When NATO, instigated by the USA, Germany and others, started to bomb Serb military and mainly civilian targets in the Republika Srpska after an act of Muslim provocation which left many dead (Markale II, 28th August 1995), a joint Croatian and Muslim offensive also started in western Bosnia after prior agreement with NATO. This offensive forced a further 100,000 Serbs from their homes, mainly in September 1995. The culmination of the ethnic cleansing of Serbs was the consequence of the Dayton diktat, which awarded all of Sarajevo to the Muslims, or formally to the Muslim-Croat federation. The number of Serb refugees rose by another 70,000-100,000. Until 1991 Sarajevo had been the second largest Serbian city in Yugoslavia. A total of one million Serbs were expelled or forced to flee from their homes between 1991 and 1996. This fact was largely ignored by the western media and western politicians (EU, USA, NATO)
International aid for the flood of Serb refugees was minimal in comparison with the aid given to Muslims and Croats who fled or were driven from their homes. Although Mrs. Sadako Ogata from UNHCR and the International Red Cross tried to help, it was nowhere near sufficient. Here it is necessary to recall FRY's expulsion from the World Health Organisation, the cruel sanctions against FRY, the more than 50% unemployment and 300,000,000% inflation at the end of 1993. The situation for refugees who were in the impoverished Serb part of BH was even worse, utterly desperate. No one received wages or pensions The author visited FRY in 1992, 1993 (twice), 1994 and 1995 with humanitarian aid under the Czech Foundation of Friends of Serbs and Montenegrins, mostly for the Republika Srpska, and saw it all with his own eyes. At that cruel time Czech official aid for the Serb Republic and its wretched refugees was practically non-existent. Various Czech organisations or foundations (e.g. SOS Sarajevo, SOS Children, People in Stress etc.) gave aid almost exclusively to Muslims or Croats A large part of this aid, particularly in 1993 during the very bloody Muslim-Croat war, ended up in the hands of the Muslim army and on the black market, which was linked to the army. At that time even the BBC reported that the civilian population was directly receiving around just 30% of the consignments.
NATO DESTROYS THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE REPUBLIKA SRPSKA
The extensive destruction of the Serb Republic's infrastructure by NATO airforce, instigated chiefly by the USA and Germany, under a very dubious UN mandate, was not compensated for by a cent of aid after the end of the war. In Srbinje alone (formerly Foca) the author saw three destroyed bridges (over the Drina and Bistrica); luckily, a fourth had not been hit. Of the hundreds of millions of US dollars which Bosnia-Herzegovina received after Dayton, the Serb Republic received only 1.7% - this information was given to the author in June 1997 by the deputy premier of the Republika Srpska government Velibor Ostojic.
THREE EXPLOSIONS IN SARAJEVO - AN ORGY OF DISINFORMATION
Three tragic incidents during the civil-ethnic-religious war in BH had a significant impact on the course of events and clearly highlighted the hypocritical, embarrassingly maladroit position of the governments of the European Community (Union), USA, UN and NATO, as well as the incredible readiness of the western media to spread disinformation. These incidents were three explosions in Sarajevo which left many dead and a spate of wounded, allegedly caused by Serb mortars; the massacre in the bread queue in Vase Miskina street (27th May 1992), the massacre in the Markale marketplace (5th February 1994) and the Markale II massacre (28th August 1995). All these incidents had some common features:
1. all were immediately attributed to the Serbs (here too CNN played an important role) - no one bothered about the Serb protests and requests for a joint investigative commission to be set up;
2. all were used against Bosnian Serbs, and at the start against FRY as well;
3. all evoked a downright orgy of anti-Serb rhetoric from the majority of western politicians and an unprecedented wave of disinformation from the western media;
4. all had the same aim: to spur on western intervention against the Serbs in BH (they finally succeeded in 1995);
5. all were, as was demonstrated soon afterwards, earned out by the Muslims themselves and were probably executed by well-trained terrorists from the ranks of the several thousand Mujahedeen from Afghanistan, Iran etc., who had been involved in the conflict in BH from the start;
6. no one was indicted for the cynical murder of his fellow citizens in The Hague Tribunal (A. Izetbegovic, E. Ganic etc.);
7. western politicians and media mostly hushed up the facts about the real cause of the massacres of the three Sarajevo explosions and exploited them entirely for their own ends (USA, NATO, Germany).
The American government, the European Community, the Islamic states and the UN Security Council which they controlled immediately exploited the hasty conclusion, the disinformation about Serbian guilt for the massacre in the bread queue (27th May 1992), and declared draconian sanctions (30th May, Security Council resolution 757) against FRY, allegedly for the Yugoslav People's Army's (YPA) aggression against the territory of the "sovereign state" of BH, even though at this time there were only a few YPA units in BH and these definitively left BH on 6th June 1992. How transparent this makes the endeavour for speedy recognition of BH's sovereignty (6th April), contrary to all accepted international practice. While the Soviet Army had over a year in which to vacate its bases in the former German Democratic Republic, where they were merely stationed under the Warsaw Pact, the YPA, i.e. the federal army, had to vacate BH, where it belonged, in a few short weeks. The arrogance of the United States reached a peak on 16th April 1992 (i.e. 10 days after the "recognition" of BH), when the State Department condemned YPA for military interference in the internal affairs of BH as an "independent state with internationally recognised boundaries". Just before resolution 757 B. B. Ghali sent the Security Council his report on the presence of large formations of the Croatian army and their activity in BH. This report was somehow delayed by several days, so that YPA could be condemned as the sole aggressor. Croatia's sponsors, USA and Germany, defended their client on all sides to ward off the threat of sanctions.
Western governments and media were soon after shocked by an article by L. Doyle in the London based Independent newspaper (22nd August 1992): "Muslims 'slaughter their own people' - subheaded - "Bosnia bread queue massacre was propaganda ploy, UN Told". The facts were obtained from confidential information from UNPROFOR and UN officials. They stated that it was not the Serbs but Muslims who had prepared the explosion, maybe even from a mine planted in a trashcan. Doyle's article revealed the Muslims as the evident perpetrators of the murder of an American TV producer D. Kaplan (13th August) and of the explosion at the funeral of two Serb orphans (4th August) who had earlier been shot by snipers. Originally the Serbs had been blamed for everything, as they also were for the shooting down of an Italian aircraft carrying humanitarian aid (2nd September 1992). That evoked an immediate anti-Serb reaction: it soon became clear, however, that it was either Muslims or Croats - yet no one apologised to the Serbs. The tendency for disinformation and denigrating the Serbs was preserved in the USA, however. The first part of the popular American TV serial "JAG" starts with a vile-looking Serb soldier shooting down a humanitarian aid plane carrying 50 people on board with a Stinger missile. This is reminiscent of the times of Nazi and Stalinist propaganda. It is also worth noting that the explosion took place shortly before a meeting of European Community ambassadors, who were to discuss possible sanctions against FRY. Some statements by Canadian general L. Mackenzie, commander of UNPROFOR in Bosnia at the time also provide indirect evidence that the Muslims were responsible for the explosion of 27th May 1992 (see his book: "Peacekeeper: The Road to Sarajevo", Douglas McIntyre, Vancouver/Toronto. 1993).
The Markale I explosion (5th February 1994) left 68 dead and 200 wounded. There were many "strange" aspects to this incident (so many wounded by one mortar bomb, the behaviour of the local authorities they did not want to allow immediately after the explosion anyone from UNPROFOR onto the site of the carnage etc.), but CNN immediately reported that the Serbs had done it and the entire world saw the smashed human bodies and the sea of blood "caused by a Serb mortar bomb". President Clinton said that it is "highly likely" that the Serbs were responsible for it, and this was echoed by W. Christopher's "inner conviction". No one took any notice of the vehement Serbian denials. Mrs. M. Albright (US ambassador to the UN) and Anthony Lake (presidential security advisor) immediately called for air strikes against the Serbs. Yet it soon became clear that it was evidently not a Serb mortar bomb. It was strictly forbidden to publish this information, but nevertheless it was disclosed by the French TV journalist B. Volker (TV TF1): "The mortar bomb which killed 68 people in the Sarajevo marketplace and evoked a NATO ultimatum against the Bosnian Serbs was fired from Muslim positions, according to a UN report." The ban on releasing this information is also mentioned by D. Owen in his book (Balkan Odyssey, Victor Gollanz, London, 1995): "People around General Rose never tried to hide the fact that at his meeting with Bosnian Muslim leaders (Izetbegovic, General Delic) he said that he had just received some information which shows that the mortar bomb did not come from the area under Serb control but from the Muslim part of the city (8th February 94)..." The ultimate proof that the Serbs were falsely accused and rebuff to the host of liars and spreaders of disinformation in the West was the declaration by Yasushi Akashi, UN special envoy for Bosnia, on 6th June 1996 to the German DPA corespondent in New York that there was a secret UN report accusing the Bosnian Muslims of the massacre of the civilians in the Markale market in February 1994. The aforementioned B. Volker explains that the report on the Muslim origin of the missile was passed on to B. B. Ghali, UN Secretary General, who did not publish it in the interest of "higher politics". B. Volker also cites the words of President Mitterrand: "A few days ago Mr. Butros Ghali informed me that the projectile which hit the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo was an act of Muslim provocation".
On 28th August 1995 there was a further massacre: Markale II left 37 dead and 90 wounded. Even though British and French experts did not find any proof that it was done by the Serbs, but stated that it was probably carried out by the Muslims, their statement was lost by a senior American officer and the UN issued a declaration blaming the Serbs, signed by General R. Smith, who had evidently ignored the report of the British and French experts as well as the assessment of the UN's artillery expert for the Sarajevo sector, the Russian colonel A. Demurenko. And less than 40 hours later extensive NATO air strikes against Serbian military and civilian targets started; these had been prepared long before and were coordinated with an extensive joint Croat and Muslim offensive against the forces of the Republika Srpska, mainly in western Bosnia. Another orgy of anti-Serb speeches by a number of western statesmen and the western media began. Yet not all spread disinformation. The Sunday Times (1st October 1995) published an article by Hugh McManners "Serbs 'not guilty' of massacre - Experts warned US that mortar was Bosnian." The renowned journalist D. Binder reached similar conclusions in the American magazine The Nation (2nd October 1995) and so did lieutenant-colonel of US military intelligence J. R. Sray ("Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware!" in the Foreign Military Studies Office, October 1995). So this was another act of provocation, but this time it brought due consequences for the Republika Srpska, as the military equilibrium was completely overturned because the mighty NATO entirely took sides with the Muslim and Croat army and NATO aircraft mercilessly destroyed both military and civilian targets.
WESTERN SECRET SERVICES AND MARKALE II
Yet it turned out that this provocation had evidently been prepared in advance over many months by certain western secret services and that people under the commander of the Muslim army General R. Delic had been charged with carrying it out.
It was meant to discredit the Bosnian Serbs, which would then justify heavy air strikes on them to destroy their military potential. It is worth noting that J. Solana, who was not yet General Secretary of NATO, was among those who argued the case for extensive bombing. The Russian intelligence service had known about the preparation of the plan since February 1995, the detailed plan (allegedly called Cyclone 2) was related to a secret memorandum, signed on 10th August 1995 at the Pleso airport in Zagreb. The memorandum was signed for the UN by the commander of UNPROFOR in former Yugoslavia General B. Janvier and by Admiral L. Smith for NATO. This secret memorandum was only passed on, as "secret", on 13th September 1995 to the UN Security Council, when the main destruction of Serb targets had already taken place. According to article 7 of the memorandum UNPROFOR agreed to provide all information necessary for the NATO strikes against Serb targets to achieve the maximum success. The Russian media found out about the content of the secret memorandum. B. B. Ghali's spokesman Joe Sills confirmed the existence of the secret memorandum on 12th September, declaring that the "memorandum is an internal document which the secretariat is not obliged to inform the Security Council about" (!!). So the New World Order could do whatever it wanted, NATO planes could destroy and kill as they wished. German pilots in Tornadoes also took part in the bombing of the Republika Srpska - once again they were successfully killing in the same region where they had done it half a century ago. On Wednesday 6th September B. Yeltsin declared that NATO, under the guise of a peace mission, had assumed the role of judge and executioner, far beyond the boundary of the mandate defined for it by the Security Council resolution. According to the Russian intelligence service the mortar was fired from the roof of a building near the market. This was evidently not a standard mortar bomb. In connection with the Markale I explosion an Israeli expert stated that it was probably a "indirect smart device" of special construction, which had earlier been used by the HizbAllah organisation and the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan. In this regard it is worth reading the key work of Y. Bodansky, director of the Republican parliamentary task force studying terrorism and unconventional warfare (Target America, Terrorism in the US Today, S.P.I. Books, Shapolsky Publishers, New York, 1993), as well as his more recent publications relating to the explosions in Sarajevo. The author of this book believed that the Serb intelligence service knew that "something was being planned" in Sarajevo. On 26th August 1995 (two days before the Markale II massacre) he had the opportunity of talking by telephone to a senior official of the Republika Srpska in Belgrade, who told him anxiously that once again "something terrible is being planned against the Serbs" in Sarajevo. The words of the White House spokesman Mike McCurry (18th September 1995) can be regarded as the ultimate hypocrisy: President Clinton warns the Muslims and Croats to put an immediate stop to their military activity in Bosnia, which had been planned together with them so carefully beforehand.
The three explosions in Sarajevo, their preparation, exploitation and the cover-up surrounding them demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of the European Union, the United States government and the NATO command and the grave damage done to the values which they hypocritically ascribe to themselves. Mrs. M. Albright tried to calm the situation by saying "that no government would kill its own people". But one only has to look at the conduct of Islamic fundamentalists in Algeria, who brutally murder thousands of their entirely innocent fellow citizens, all to achieve the introduction of an Islamic state.
PR AGENCIES AS FACTORIES FOR DISINFORMATION IN THE USA
The role of widely popular PR agencies in the USA is to promote someone or something, to shape public opinion, to enhance - or damage - someone's image; naturally all for money. A lot of money. Just before the start of the Gulf War the PR agency Hill & Knowlton put on, in return for Kuwaiti money, a show for tens of millions of American TV viewers, which dramatically helped turn American public opinion against Iraq as the aggressor. A fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, with tears in her eyes, testified before the US congress that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers disconnecting the oxygen from incubators, thus killing dozens of new from Kuwaiti babies. It later turned out that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the UN and that she had not been in Kuwait at that time at all.
This was fantastical disinformation which successfully achieved its goal. But it was the PR agency Ruder & Finn Global Public Affairs from Washington which played the most important part in the Yugoslav drama, getting very rich in the process. It was hired in good time by the Croats and Muslims, and partly by Kosovo Albanians. It is said to have made 20 million US dollars, some say as much as 50 million, from the Croatian diaspora, Arab states and the rich Albanian mafia. The Serbs committed a grave error in believing that it was enough to be in the right, and so they did not hire a PR agency.
Here I will give a few facts from an interview by the French TV journalist J. Merlino (taken from his book "It Is Not Good To Tell the Truth About Yugoslavia", A. Michel, Paris, 1993) with the director of Ruder & Finn Mr. J. Harff. According to him it is enough to have a fax, telephone and address book containing several hundred journalists, politicians, humanitarian organisation representatives, university staff etc. As soon as any report arrives which can be used in the client's favour - and to the detriment of his enemies - it is sent out to all of them, interviews on radio and TV are organised and articles by prominent figures in leading newspapers are arranged. The truth of the reports is not verified, that is not the agency's job; the reports must be put into circulation quickly, they must be the first so that they sway public opinion. Later denials have no value. It is necessary to concentrate on reports "about good guys and bad guys", to use expressions with a strong emotional charge, to exploit anything and to prepare suitable situations. When J. Merlino mentioned that this is a colossal (ir)responsibility, J Haiti replied: "We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it. We are not paid to preach". Finally J. Merlino remarks that PR agencies are interested in politics in the same way as others sell washing powder. The proverbial American naivete becomes a cliché which can be dangerously manipulated. J. Harff sees his greatest achievement in bluffing the American Jewish lobby into taking sides against the Serbs: the Serbs were equated with the Nazis. He was helped in this by the disinformation article by R. Gutman in Newsday about "death camps". Perhaps some American Jews believed the analogy with the holocaust from unsupported articles full of hearsay, backed up by estimates and full of bias, or perhaps the Jewish lobby itself wanted to believe it: after all, they need to do business with the protectors of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina and with rich Arab states. Similarly, the Croats' main sponsor. Germany, is the most important trading partner in Europe. The work of the Ruder & Finn PR agency can be described by the words of the American journalist J. Newmann: "The fax and dollars - the weapons of war of public relations agencies".
"DEATH CAMPS" AS AN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN MEDIA HIT
Roy Gutman, a member of the editorial board of the not so well-known New York tabloid magazine NEWSDAY, visited Banja Luka in July 1992, whilst the majority of western journalists were huddled behind Muslim lines in Sarajevo. As an American reporter he was cordially welcomed by the Serb authorities and he was immediately given permission to visit, along with the International Red Cross delegation, the nearby Manjaca "interrogation" prison camp for Muslims and Croats. On 19th July 1992 Gutman wrote an article about it: "Manjaca is one of a chain of detention facilities which one American embassy official in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, commonly calls 'concentration camps'. This is a further example of the abuse of human rights which is currently growing to a scale unseen in Europe since the times of the Nazi Third Reich." In the same article Gutman wrote about the Omarska prison camp (also not far from Banja Luka), where he had not been but which had been visited by the International Red Cross delegation. Nevertheless, Gutman wrote here that he was convinced (!) that this was a "death camp". His reports of mass executions and torture had come from a Muslim named Meho, who had been released from the camp, allegedly because of his age (63 years old) (!). The truthfulness of Meho's words was later allegedly confirmed by the Muslim charity Merhamet (= mercy). Hujca, his second source of information about mass murders, had not witnessed the killing, however, he had just heard about them. Gutman admits, quietly and at the end of the text, that it was not possible to verity his reports from an independent source. Without even having visited Omarska at the time Gutman published another article in Newsday on 2nd August 1992 on the horrors of Omarska, of the nearby Trnopolje refugee camp and the Brcko camp. The Red Cross did not describe Omarska as a "death camp", although it certainly cannot have been a pleasant place. Omarska was shut down at the end of August. Gutman's source Alija Lujinovic, a Muslim, was from Brcko and according to Gutman his testimony was supported by the Muslim Commission for War Crimes. Lujinovic mentioned mass executions, gang rapes, the annihilation of 90% of the 1500 prisoners. The remaining prisoners were allegedly burnt and processed into cattle feed. Again, there were no facts from independent sources. The overwhelming majority of Gutman's reports were based on hearsay from first or second hand, but they were confirmed by the surely not impartial Muslim authorities of course.
R. Gutman's second article on Serbian "death camps" had exploded like a bomb and over 300 journalists joined search for a sensation, the search for those camps. Even President Bush ordered the CIA to immediately ascertain the details about their existence. In spite of all their efforts the CIA failed, because such camps did not exist. Ingrid Badurina, for example, wrote about this in La Stampa (Turin, 24th August 1992). It is extremely interesting that practically no one at that time was writing about or took any interest in a number of camps where Muslims and Croats were imprisoning the Serb population (e.g., Bradina. Bugojno, Celebici, Dretelj, Livno, Ljubuski, Odzak etc.) Joining the hunt for scoops and "extermination camps" an ITN television news crew, led by Penny Marshall, came to Bosnia at the start of August 1992 and filmed in the Trnopolje refugee camp near Prijedor. Trnopolje was lot a prison camp, the people in it could move around more or less freely and here was no high barbed wire around it. Under pressure from her editors Penny Marshall succeeded in acquiring a world sensation: the famous picture of the emaciated Muslim Fikret Alic behind barbed wire (not everyone there was as emaciated as he was), which raced around the world. It came out in the American Time Weekly Magazine on 17th August 1992, for example. And so a huge propaganda hit about concentration camps run by the Serbs was born, which helped Mr. R. Gutman win the eminent Pulitzer Prize for Journalism. And he made fascists and mass murderers out of the Serbs. Penny Marshall later exonerated herself on television, saying that Trnopolje was not a concentration camp. The British Guardian newspaper quoted her as follows (9th August 1992): "I used the word "concentration camp" just once, when I stated that the Serbs said that it was not one. In point of fact I think that it was technically a concentration camp in the sense of a space in which a lot of people were concentrated, as opposed to a death camp. I used the words of one woman who described it as a detention centre."
From the peace and quiet of their hotels and offices in Zagreb, Vienna and Washington editors describe terrible things, almost as if they were eye-witnesses. They quote Muslim reports of at least 105 camps run by the Serbs (including the Yugoslav Republic) which 260,000 people (!) were meant to have gone through in 4 months, with 17,000 deaths. At least 130,000 are said to remain imprisoned. Understandably nobody wanted to publish the fact that international investigations in the localities of the vast majority of the alleged camps came up with nothing or that nobody wanted to publish the realistic figures issued by the International Red Cross, which gave the total number of captives in the various camps of all warring parties at 10,000-11,000.
And these utterly unreal hundreds of thousands were swallowed by the "naive" and freedom loving American readers and readers in European Community countries, supported in that to a large degree by their governments (e. g. the American State Department). Even Margaret Thatcher spoke out strongly against the Serbs - after all, her son used to do such good business with Arab states.
No one can deny that these various "camps" of all the warring parties were bad. Human rights were trampled underfoot in them. But it was equally bad to associate them all with one side. The British journalist Joan Phillips gave a realistic description of the situation (20 Things You Know About The Serbs and Which Are Not True, The Campaign Against Militarism, London, February 1994, number 4).
"The fact is that Serb detention camps are like those which journalists could find in any war zone on earth. Usually they are not particularly nice places, where prisoners go hungry, where they are beaten and even killed. But they cannot be compared to the Nazi-style death camps where literally millions were killed during the Second World War. All three sides in Bosnia have detention camps today. At the start of 1993 the Croats and Muslims held more prisoners than the Serbs."
But almost nothing was written about Serb prisoners.
At a conference in London (6th March 1997) it came to light what a deception the world-famous picture of the emaciated Muslim behind the barbed wire of the refugee camp in Trnopolje was. The German journalist T. Deichmann (NOVO magazine in Frankfurt), the American G. Kenney and the British journalist M. Hume clearly showed that it was not the "prisoners" who were behind the high barbed wire, but P. Marshall's TV crew, who were filming from inside a small area around a warehouse which was closed off behind barbed wire. Penny Marshall thus stage-managed the "prisoners" (who had come from a free area) so that it looked as drastic as possible. In Belgrade the author met a TV worker from Prijedor, R. Mutic, who has detailed him footage (1992) of Penny Marshall arranging the positions of in which inhabitants of the Trnopolje camp are standing.
In 1994 the Czech translation appeared of a book by the English journalist E. Vulliamy called "Time of Hell", subtitled "Understanding The Bosnian War" (Nase vojsko, Prague, 1994). In his review of the book the Czech historian Dr. Jan Pelikan called it "Not Understanding the Bosnian War". The book is astonishingly one-sided: the Muslims, with whom Vulliamy spent more than one year, are always good and suffering, as are some Croats, provided they are fighting on the Muslims' side. The Serbs are always bad. But what is "remarkable" about this book, which has often been cited around the world and has even won prizes, is the astounding ignorance of history the author writes unbelievable rubbish with sovereign authority. One has to wonder about the ignorance of those who accepted all the (dis)information given in the book seriously and uncritically. Was it Ed Vulliamy's intention intentionally to spread disinformation or did he indeed write down everything which his, usually Muslim, informers told him without bothering to check the facts? With his description of real horrors of war and the suffering of the Muslim population it therefore has to be asked, what was truth and what was invention, quoted disinformation. No one's hands are free from blood in the tragic civil ethnic religious war in former Yugoslavia, so successfully spurred on from abroad. In September, October and November 1997 there were three men in Croatia and Serbia who told terrible things about the murder of their kith and kin, Serbs, Croats, Muslims. Were they troubled by their conscience or did they want publicity? Were they some of the psychopathic 5-6% of every nation whose "time" came during the destruction of Yugoslavia, during the breaking of fraternal bonds between the peoples living there? Or did this confession have some "higher purpose"? Will Hans-Dietrich Genscher ever confess his crime against peace? What will Klaus Kinkel one day say about his role in the destruction of Yugoslavia?
"RAPE CAMPS" - WHERE THE INCREDIBLE NUMBER OF RAPE VICTIMS CAME FROM
When the journalistic sensation of the alleged "death camps" started to lose its "appeal", when it was finally realised that the unbelievable figures quoted by Muslims and Croats and by sensation-hungry journalists for the numbers of Muslims and Croats imprisoned by Serbs did not correspond to the truth, when even the CIA were unable to find any extermination camps, a new news sensation turned up. The Serbs were accused of systematically raping Muslim women as part of their war strategy. Politicians from the European Community (later European Union) and the USA used the fantastical disinformation spread by Muslims and Croats and the western media which supported them, some knowingly, others out of ignorance, about planned mass rapes. Several times the commissioner of the European Community Hans van den Broek spoke out almost hysterically about the Bosnian Serbs. The raping of women is one of the horrendous crimes of war, but it is sad when it becomes a significant and exploited element of propaganda and disinformation.
The hysteria broke out in full after the war in BH had been going on for halt a year, in November 1992, although reports of rapes had appeared earlier (the BBC was citing Muslim sources in September 1992). At peace talks in Geneva in autumn 1992 the foreign minister of the Sarajevo government Hans Silajdzic caused a shock when he stated that 30,000 Muslim women had been raped. Then the world media, and mainly the western media, raised the numbers of rape victims to fantastical dimensions. In the first few months of the war in BH "nothing happened" in this sense and then Muslim and Croat government sources and various organisations started to spew out ever increasing numbers of rape victims and the western media started to write about "rape camps". In the Czech Republic the record for the number of rape victims was achieved by the Czech reporter from BH Jitka Obzinova, who as early as on 5th December 1992 told us in the TV programme "Don't Divide Up Bosnia" that 100,000 Muslim women had been raped; and to cap it all she said that the Serbs had admitted to raping 30,000 Muslim women, which was absolutely untrue. And so the tragedy of the rape victim started to become a propaganda hit.
The terrible numbers of raped Muslims cited also reached the European Community summit in Edinburgh in December 1992. Without verifying the truth behind the flood of horrendous media reports the European Parliament declared on 17th December 1992 that "In the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina itself there are several thousand women and girls being detained who are systematically raped and many of them are already pregnant. These camps are outright rape camps and death camps, where rape is used as a tactic of war." The Dutch professor of state law at the University of Leiden, Fric Kalshoven, declared: "Look what happened in Edinburgh. First they vehemently condemn the atrocities committed and only then do they send their people to investigate whether the things have even happened. People tell horrible stories because someone has told them to tell it for propaganda objectives - or because everyone else is telling horrible stories". Professor Kalshoven wanted proof, not propaganda.
And so the European Community sent off the former English ambassador to Denmark Ann Warburton to former Yugoslavia with a commission to investigate the matter. During two visits she spent several days in Zagreb and Sarajevo, had countless interviews with the local authorities there and interviewed four victims. Somehow, using a method that is completely unknown and was never published, the commission made a calculation and on 8th January 1993 stated that 20,000 (Muslim) women had been raped. A few weeks later Ann Warburton admitted that it would have been better to give a figure of 10,000-20,000 women, or maybe not to put a figure on it at all. A member of her commission, Mrs. Simone Veil, a former minister of the French government and former president of the European Parliament, left the commission because she disagreed with its conclusions - she was shocked by the paltry number of victims who had been heard (4) and that the main information was simply obtained from the Muslim and Croat authorities. The commission later said that Serb and Croat women were also being raped. At that time the European Community prevented a delegation of Serb women from going to Brussels, where they intended to talk about being raped.
In January 1993 Tadeusz Mazowiecki investigated the rape phenomenon for a UN commission. He spoke to 30 rape victims and 19 women who were pregnant as a result of alleged rape. Through some calculation his report gave a figure of 12,000 rape victims. Nevertheless, Newsweek was happy to give a figure of up to 50,000 raped Muslims on 4th January 1993. Tom Post, who was involved in giving these figures, based this 50,000 on information from 28 (!) interviewed women. Newsweek's "advisor" was a German journalist Alexandra Stiglmayer, who wrote, for example, about the north Bosnian town of Doboj as a "town of rape", without checking this information from anything other than hearsay. There, in a camp in the Djuro Pucar school, a Muslim women called Besina was allegedly being held, who spoke about her horrible experiences from the rape camp in the school during interviews with A. Stiglmayer in the magazines Stem, Weltwoche and others. But journalist Martin Lettmayer did not believe it and went to look at the other side of the story - and he found nothing resembling a camp in the school (Weltwoche, number 10 - 17. 3. 1994). His article also discloses other pieces of disinformation about Doboj and its non-existent brothels, as they were publicised by E. Rathfelder in Tageszeitung (Berlin) on 2nd December 1992. Mrs. Stiglmayer was almost a "bible" for the rape question in BH; she even received some journalistic prize for this. It is clear that her articles influenced German politicians (it was evidently what they wanted?) and EC politicians.
As two Danish journalists, N. Krause and M. Hartz, stated (Jyllands Posten, 28th February 1993), 117 various groups interviewed a total of just 20 rape victims, the same ones every time.
In October 1993 the UN commission for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia gave a total figure of 330 (!) documented cases of rape by all three warring sides. In a discussion of the results of A. Warburton's commission on 17th and 18th February 1993 Professor F. Kalshoven said that her proofs to date would not stand up in court as evidence. The aforementioned bandying about of figures, invented, from hearsay, without conclusive materials, sometimes for money, was well illustrated by the French TV journalist Jerome Bony in the programme "Special Envoy" (4th February 1993): "When I was 50 km from Tuzla I was told: Go to the grammar school in Tuzla, where you will find 4000 rape victims. 20 km away the figure shrank to 400. 10 km away it was only 40. When I was there, I found only four women who wanted to give an account".
If the reports of mass rapes were true, a mass occurrence of pregnancies and births could have been expected. Anglo-Saxons call the children of raped mothers "diabolic children". In various countries in Europe, including the Czech Republic, preparations were made for this inundation of these wretched children - but nothing happened, there was no inundation of "diabolic children". What nonsense made its way into prestigious western newspapers is shown by the case of Judy Darnell, allegedly a nurse from New Jersey, who presented herself as an "instant expert on Bosnia" On 13th January 1993 she told the American Today magazine the convincing story of a five-month-old baby, the fruit of the systematic rape of Muslim women by Serb soldiers (chetniks).
Immediately afterwards the prestigious New York Times (15th January 1993) published a photograph of a two-month-old girl called Emma who was born to a very young Muslim girl, raped in one Serb detention camp. The editors-in-chief failed to realise that pregnancy lasts 9 months and that the war in Bosnia started in April 1992, so the first baby would have been born in the fourth month of pregnancy and the second in the seventh month. Everything is possible for the western media. (Are they badly informed? Stupid? Do they do it for money? Or out of hatred?) And the media informed the public, politicians, in America and in Europe. Almost nobody tried to put the unbelievable disinformation onto the right scale. What can less deeply thinking people think when they read the German Stern, or the British Mail on Sunday or French Elle and see there a poor baby whose father is "...one of the countless drunk, coarse Serb chetniks" and his mother was "...a virgin when the chetniks took her captive on 20th April 1992" and so on. Except that the baby, not born prematurely, was born in November 1992 and was conceived in February or at the end of January .
The tireless Judy Darnell continued with her invented stories in February 1993, when on CBS (5th February 1993) she responsibly stated that 47 Serb rape camps are known of in BH. Nevertheless, the Red Cross declared at this time that it had no information about the existence of this kind of camp in BH, neither in the present (1993) nor in the past. No one from UNPROFOR found one, not even the CIA itself. But, somehow, around this time someone discovered some even more ridiculous disinformation. It was a member of the German Bundestag, Mr. Stephen Schwarz, who brought a report from Croatia that mad Serb doctors were implanting dog embryos in Muslim women. The "intelligent" Schwarz obtained this report from Croatian doctors in Bosanski Brod, or at least that is what he said. The unbelievable thing about this, as a demonstration of anti-Serb hysteria, was that this report came out in serious newspapers (e.g. in the English Daily Mirror on 4th January 1993). The Dutch journalist Gert van Wijland visited Croatia and Slavonski Brod and spoke to doctors who were all astounded by this nonsense. Van Wijland then published this in De Gelderlander (16th January 1993). Where did this propaganda for the mentally inferior came from - from a PR agency? Schwarz's story was not recognised, even by a society numbed by disinformation, and it disappeared soon after. One has to hope that the Bundestag does not contain more of these Schwarzes. But what to think of the newspapers which printed this terrible canard (Daily Mirror, Bild am Sonntag etc.)? Here it is worth quoting one Italian journalist, Remo Urbini (Epoca, Milan, 30th March 1993), who was in turn quoting one BBC journalist: "The editors-in-chief of some newspapers should be condemned as war criminals."
PROPAGANDA AND DEATH TOLLS
The fantastical nature of the disinformation about events in the former Yugoslavia and in particular about the civil-ethnic-religious war in BH is graphically shown by the information about the numbers of the dead. It is horrible to deal with human beings in this way - even one death is too much - but this is the only way to show how many lies were born out of the human tragedy. The Muslim and Croat propaganda, supported in all manner of ways by various PR agencies, by the western media and politicians, created a horrific image of the "Bosnian holocaust". Every war is terrible, but it is not right simply to bandy the word holocaust about.
In December 1992 Izetbegovic's government in Sarajevo reported over 128,000 losses; then it was explained that there were over 17,000 deaths and the rest were missing. But a US senate commission stated in a report (18th August 1992) that 35,000 Muslims had demonstrably been killed in eastern Bosnia. The commission also gave the number of detainees, mainly Muslims, in Serb camps at 170,000 (Ed Vulliamy: Time of Hell, 1994 - see above). In June 1993 Senada Krezo, spokeswoman for the Muslim Ministry of Information in Sarajevo, claimed that 200,000 people had died so far (G. Kenney - see below), and this figure was adopted by the western media and a number of politicians without anyone taking any interest in how Senada arrived at this figure. Ed Vulliamy wrote that she said 300,000. Czech reporter Jitka Obzinova held the record again: on a TV programme at 19:30 on 11th July 1993 she placed the number of dead at 500,000 (the author heard it himself!). Up to 1995 the figure of 250,000 dead given by the Sarajevo government was commonly cited throughout the entire world. Yet at the start of 1995 Sarajevo modified this figure to 145,000 (C. Boyd, 1995 - see below). Former State Department employee in the Yugoslavia Section, G. Kenney surprised everyone, however, when, after detailed analysis, he placed the total number of all victims in BH (1992 - spring 1995) at 25,000-60,000 (New York Times Magazine, 23rd April 1995). Kenney declared: "Bosnia is not a holocaust or a Rwanda, Bosnia is a Lebanon". The International Red Cross was extremely austere, giving a figure for the categorically proven number of dead at around 20,000. Not all stories of mass murders or estimates of the death toll according to aerial photographs can be relied on (aerial photos were the source of M. Albright's disinformation in summer 1995 concerning 5,000-10,000 alleged missing and evidently murdered around Srebrenica).
Other cases were evident disinformation and lies: the premier of the government in Sarajevo H. Silajdzic said on Czech television (25th September 1995) at 19.30 that at Kljuc, in western Bosnia, a mass grave of 540 (!!) Muslims had been discovered, murdered by the Serbs. But the UN commission sent there straight away found only one dead body, of unclear nationality, as the UN spokesman Chris Gunness announced 3 days later.
The British intelligence service (1994) assessed that a total of 50,000-60,000 people were killed, and CIA analyses also placed the number of dead on the level of tens of thousands (S. Trifkovic, Chronicles, August 1996). If you add to this the Serb civilians killed during NATO bombardments (1995) and during the Croat and then Muslim-Croat offensive (August to September 1995), the total losses suffered by all cannot exceed 100,000. The deputy commander of the US Army in Europe (1992 - June 1995) General C. Boyd estimates total losses at 70,000-100,000 (Making Peace with the guilty. Foreign Affairs, September/October 1995) and asks whether this death toll after 38 months of war can make the accusation of genocide a useful contribution to political debate. Nevertheless, on 27th November 1995 President Clinton, speaking to the Americans, told his audience about the 250,000 dead. American Defence Secretary W. Perry, at a hearing before the senate military committee (7th June 1995) reported that in 1992 "according to our best estimates" losses were around 130,000, in 1993 12,000 and in 1994 around 2,500. On 18th October 1995 W. Perry declared before the House International Relations committee that over 200,000 people died during 3 years of war. So who should we believe? Lies and deception, sometimes from ignorance, mostly from malicious intent, became the basic means of achieving the goals of those whom we had until recently trusted so much. The good that they bring us is no longer so clean when there are so many tawdry lies and deceptions around.
THE LIES AND DISINFORMATIONS ARE BEING REPEATED
Just before the downfall of N. Ceausescu in Romania, there were major riots in Temisoara. Media reported about horrible massacres, putting the number of dead at tens of thousands. Finally, it was just about one hundred. Horrible, how the lies can be spread.
After the World War II most of the German inhabitants of the Sudetenland had to leave Czechoslovakia, they were moved to Germany, because of their collaboration with the Nazi. Not all of them, but most of them. They enabled Hitler to incorporate Sudetenland into Germany and later to occupy the remnants of Czechoslovakia. The Big Four agreed with the removal of the Germans from the Sudetenland. During this operation (1945-46) some atrocities by some Czechs against the Germans were done. It is said that about 15-20.000 Germans died. It surely was a very shameful event. But some German politicians who had to leave their homes (1945-46) put now the number of dead at 250.000. This number is an absolute nonsense.
Aren't the incredibly inflated figures of the rape victims (1992-93) the same lie? Especially it they are attributed to a single "guilty" who denies them categorically and it the accusations are absolutely illogical.
THE VANCE-OWEN PLAN - IGNORANCE AND DECEPTIONS AT THAT TIME
BH, as part of the Otoman (Turkish) Empire, had been occupied by Turkish armies until 1878, when the Berlin Congress handed it to the Austro-Hungarian Empire "so that it might impose order there". For centuries (Bosnia had been occupied in 1463, Herzegovina in 1482) it was ruled by its original Slav inhabitants who accepted Islam. In view of the more comfortable life in the towns Muslims represented the majority of their inhabitants. The Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats were mostly COUNTRY dwellers. The majority of BH belonged in the Serb sphere. That is why in the land registers before World War II Serbs had over 64% of all land in BH - and a considerable part of this was mountain land, pastures, partly forests. According to the Vance-Owen plan (start of 1993) Serbs were meant to have, in three cantons and two enclaves, just under 43% of the territory of BH. At the time the American foreign minister W. Christopher declared, how was it possible that Serbs, who represent one-third of the population of BH, are to obtain 43% of the land. If he meant it seriously it was an ugly blot on the minister's knowledge and sense of fair play, if he was not aware of the distribution of land determined by history and if he did not differentiate between one kind of land and another. By an American comparison, land in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona does not have the same value as the land in Manhattan. As if he did not know that the Vance-Owen plan was leaving 450,000 Serbs under the Muslims and 160,000 under the Croats; that from a total of 31.4 billion US dollars of definable property in BH the Muslims would have received 18, the Croats 7.3 and the Serbs just 6.1 billion, that from a total output of 3,900 megawatts of electricity the Muslims would have got 1,765, the Croats 1,220 and the Serbs just 915; that for railways the total 920 km would have been divided up 500 - 260 - 160 km. The overwhelming majority of industry would have stayed in Muslim and Croat hands (P. Block. 1994 - see above). The original Vance-Owen plan overlooked all interconnection between Serb cantons and enclaves, whilst the Croat cantons lay on the border with Croatia and the Muslims were linked with the exception of the distant Bihac canton. Due to considerable protests by the Serbs D. Owen promised that Serb cantons would be interconnected by some kind of narrow corridors. Somehow the foreign minister of the USA took little regard of this.
Even though the government of FRY in Belgrade was putting enormous pressure on the Bosnian Serbs to accept the plan, they rejected it by a huge majority in the May referendum. Even earlier on 18th April 1993, under strong pressure from the USA, the UN Security Council passed resolution 820 on even more inordinate sanctions against FRY, which turned it "literally into a concentration camp" The sanctions were to be implemented if the Bosnian Serbs did not accept the Vance-Owen plan within 8 days. The sanctions were intended to bring FRY speedily to its knees. In spite of all the malicious expectations this did not happen, but the people suffered greatly.
A further provocation which enabled the United States and its underling NATO to make unrestricted control flights to BH, as part of the preservation of the no-fly zone, took place on 13th March 1993, when according to UN staff three propeller planes flew from Serbia across the Drina and dropped several bombs 8 km south-east of Srebrenica. The first reports of this came out in the Times and then in the Daily Telegraph, but not until 16th March surprisingly. Soon afterwards, however, secret reports from UN aerial observers at Serbian airport seeped out, saying that no airplane crossed the border from Serbia over the Drina. In other words, the UN senior officials must have known that it was a lie. It is startling that the information about this being untrue did not manage to reach the UN Security Council before resolution 816 was passed, which permitted the use of NATO ah craft to enforce the no-fly zone above BH, so that 14 days later (31st March 1993) NATO aircraft were patrolling above BH, which enabled them to monitor all Bosnian Serb troop movements. In 1994-95 NATO passed this information on to both the Croat forces and the Muslims. The media did not publish the UN airport monitors' confidential report that no aircraft had crossed the Drina on 13th March. Two British Members of Parliament (the Conservative H. Elleston and the Labourite) demanded an investigation into whole affair, but without success. Washington had already made use of the provocation and NATO aircraft were legally flying over Bosnia. Warren Christopher and the leading politicians from the European Union must have known all about it. And once again the deception became the means for achieving the goals of the EU, NATO and USA.
FUNDAMENTAL DISINFORMATION
Descriptions of the events of World War II in Yugoslavia often throw up the claim, either from ignorance or evil intention, that everyone was killing each other (Croats, Muslims and Serbs) and that in this sense they can all be equated. To a certain degree this was true during the course of the war, but no one should forget that the murdering was not started by the Serbs, but by the Croat Ustasha and their allies, part of the Bosnian Muslims. Neither should it be forgotten that it was the Serbs who suffered the greatest losses: 700,000-800,000, were murdered in Ustasha-run Croatia, if not more, so that the ethnic balance was altered in a number of regions. Nevertheless it must be said that numerous anti-Ustasha Croats died at the hands of the Ustasha and that a number of Muslims protected their Serb neighbours and friends. The tragedy of the recent civil-ethnic-religious war in former Yugoslavia is that such people unwillingly found themselves on the other side of the barricades.
SAFE AREAS IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA AND THEIR MISUSE
On 6th May 1993 the Security Council of the United Nations declared Bihac, Gorazde, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Tuzla and Zepa as safe areas under its control. Srebrenica had already been a safe area since 16th April. Security Council resolution 836 (4th June) allowed the use of military force to protect safe areas. Mostar was not chosen as a safe area, in spite of all the murdering and destruction, worse than in Sarajevo, in fighting between Croats and Muslims, when local Croat HVO (Croatian Defence Council) units and the regular Croat army used heavy bombardment and besieged the Muslim eastern part of the town. A few months later on 8th November 1993 a Croatian tank destroyed the famous Old Bridge across the river Neretva, which was built in the 16th century. Mostar was not made into a safe area because the protectors of the Croats and Muslims - the Germans and Americans - would have to have intervened against their proteges, and that was something they did not want to do.
The safe zones were created after a year of bloodshed in BH. They had to be demilitarised without any offensive actions from them. The exception was Sarajevo. On 28th February 1993 American, and later French and German aircraft started to parachute-drop supplies in order to provide food and medicines for the surrounded Muslim enclaves of Srebrenica, Gorazde, Zepa and Bihac. This was because lorry deliveries had been interrupted, detained and checked by the army and police of The Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia), because a large quantity of guns and ammunition was being smuggled into the enclaves with the humanitarian aid. The Muslim charitable organisation Merhamet, the Catholic Caritas, UNHCR vehicles, a number of UNPROFOR units, e.g. from Bangladesh, France, Malaysia, Turkey etc., were all involved in the smuggling. Arms continued to be smuggled successfully as part of the parachute drops
The basic agreement on demilitarising the enclaves was not upheld, however. Muslim units carried out numerous destructive forays into the surrounding Serb areas, violated agreed ceasefires and tried to provoke the Serb army to retaliate so that the West and NATO would intervene militarily. Thousands of refugees were crammed into the enclaves in difficult conditions. There was fighting all around and on several occasions mortar bombs fell into the besieged area. We shall give a few examples of events around Srebrenica and Gorazde demonstrating how the human tragedy was exploited for the sake of propaganda and how the western media and certain governments hypocritically spread unbelievable disinformation. Before World War II half the population of Srebrenica was Serb; before 1991 the town and the surrounding district was 28% Serb, mainly in consequence of the Ustasha killings (1941-45). In 1993 practically none of the 12,000 Serbs in Srebrenica remained. Until 1991 around 10,000 Serbs lived in Gorazde (25% of the population), who disappeared (died, driven out).
The three surrounded enclaves of Gorazde, Srebrenica and Zepa were created gradually during 1992-1993, when Republika Srpska troops took the initiative in eastern Bosnia and pressed the Muslim units (militias; so-called green berets; groups which called themselves HANDZAR divisions, after the SS division of the same name in the Second World War) back into the enclaves. Before that these units had carried out extensive massacres of the Serb civilian population, which is demonstrated by a number of mass graves at the settlements of Kamenica, Kravica, Bratunac, Milici, Skelany, Cerska and so on. The burial of victims from a mass grave in Kravica on 22nd March 1993 was attended by General P. Morillon, commander of UNPROFOR for Bosnia. The Srebrenica garrison (commanded by Naser Oric, later a general of the Muslim army) destroyed around 30 Serb villages in the nearby countryside and further afield. The number of Serb villages destroyed in the eastern Bosnia as a whole is estimated at 100. Thousands of Muslim civilians also fled with the Muslim units, in fear of revenge and Serb paramilitary units who treated the Muslim population harshly. Nevertheless these units prevented the liquidation of the Serb population of Bijeljina by a large concentration of mujahedeen (from Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc.) in their vicinity (see, for example, C. G. Jacobsen, Mediterranean Quarterly, August 1994). The mujahedeen were smashed.
In order to arouse the sympathy of the West, the Sarajevo government's ambassador to the UN Muhamed Sacirbey declared in February 1993 that starvation had caused cannibalism in Muslim enclaves (e.g. in Zepa). This was immediately denied by the UNHCR and UNPROFOR. At the end of winter 1993 the commander of the Muslim forces Sefer Halilovic broke the n-th ceasefire and launched a large-scale offensive on several fronts (Tuzla, Srebrenica etc.). After initial successes the offensive was broken and the forces of the Republika Srpska entirely surrounded Srebrenica; before that it occupied the small settlements of Cerska and Konjevica Polje, which were full of refugees. On 3rd March 1993 large headlines in the prestigious Financial Times newspaper announced "Hundreds die as Serbs overrun Muslim Enclave". From the warmth of her Belgrade hotel Laura Silber reported hundreds of dead in the streets (that was how Muslim amateur radio enthusiasts were reporting it). Immediately afterwards General P. Morillon visited both settlements and did not find anything of the sort there, which antagonised both Muslim authorities and western journalists - it put a stop to further horrific stories. At around the same time the Muslim-Croat war was raging in central Bosnia, where Croatian HVO units killed around 100 Muslims in Ahmici. Bloody battles also broke out in Mostar. The Croatian HVO and authorities filled the Dretelj concentration camp with Muslim men and women. This was even reported by the western media, but that Serbs had been there before was not reported.
In the middle of May fighting broke out again around Srebrenica. Serb artillery bombarded the town where thousands of refugees were concentrated, and 50 people died. "Serbs Break Ceasefire Again" reported western sources and officials. Nevertheless the Swedish general Lars-Eric Wahlgren, commander of UNPROFOR for the former Yugoslavia, reported to UN headquarters that Muslim firing had broken the ceasefire and that this had provoked retaliatory fire by the Serbs. This made the general unpopular with both the Muslims and certain circles in the West, because he did not want to say things which were untrue and which they wanted to hear. He soon resigned and left the UN. In June 1997 the author discussed Srebrenica with General Ratko Mladic. The blue-eyed general highly respected General Wahlgren for his honesty, as well as General F. Briquemont, who quickly resigned as UNPROFOR commander in BH - he, too, was sickened by the media disinformation and by CNN's sensationalism. He, too, fell out with the powers when he "took the liberty" of criticising Muslim conduct. One friend of General Mladic was the first UNPROFOR commander for Yugoslavia, the Indian general Satish Nambiar, who also resigned before the end of his term due to his opposition to interference in UNPROFOR's work. Another general who left early was the Canadian L. MacKenzie, who badly antagonised the Muslim government in Sarajevo by repeatedly disclosing their acts of provocation (e.g. placing artillery in the grounds of the Kosevo hospital, near schools and public buildings, suspicion of involvement in the bread queue massacre etc.). The Muslim authorities avenged themselves by issuing a story that he was involved in the rape of Muslim girls.
Regardless of the numerous ceasefires, Naser Oric's units repeatedly carried out marauding forays into Serb villages, which left many dead. The last such act took place in June 1995. Whilst the Croats were preparing a huge offensive in the Krajina region, prepared by "hired" retired American mercenary-generals, well armed despite the embargo (Germany, USA, Argentina, Islamic states etc.), RS forces launched an attack on Srebrenica and Zepa at the start of July 1995. After several days' fighting both enclaves fell. The western media and Muslim sources immediately reported massacres of thousands of the local population and captured soldiers. M. Albright, as part of a disinformation strategy to divert attention from the crimes of the Croat army just after the conquest of the Serb Krajina Republic at the start of August 1995, showed aerial photographs to the UN, allegedly of mass graves of Muslims around Srebrenica. She gave the number of missing, and thus evidently dead, at 5,000-10,000. She totally failed to mention the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs from Krajina. This disinformation was elegantly refuted by the International Red Cross on 11th August 1995, which announced that no proof of mass graves had been found (see J. Sray, lieutenant-colonel of US military intelligence, 1995), but this information was ignored by the western media and governments. The teams which looked for these graves found the remains of less than 500 bodies. As General Mladic told the author, during the fighting around Srebrenica something like 1.200 Serbs and 2,000 Muslims were killed. And these casualties had to be buried somewhere. "Our forces had strict orders to treat prisoners according to international law. There were no mass executions, as the media reported. We used buses (even though we did not have much petrol) to move a lot more than 20,000 civilians towards the Muslim lines in the direction of Kladanj and Tuzla. At our two check points the civilians and refugees could choose, possibly even to stay in Srebrenica. The soldiers who did not surrender and were not transported with the civilians tried to break though our encirclement, suffering heavy losses in the mine fields. Hundreds, maybe even a lot more than a thousand civilians and soldiers escaped across the Drina into Yugoslavia. The distorted reports of the numbers missing originate from the fact that many men were pressed into the Muslim army on other fronts immediately after they had fled, and also from the fact that during the siege several thousand non-existent people had been entered onto the lists for UNHCR and Red Cross supplies, so that aid supplies were bigger. It was a civil-ethnic-religious war, which was forced on us - we didn't want to destroy Yugoslavia. We were not the aggressors, it had always been our country where we had lived for many centuries together with Croats and Muslims. I am proud that forces under my command prevented a repetition of the massacres of Serbs by the Ustasha Croatia. Our people suffered a great deal, unfortunately at the hands of its former friends, who we fought with against the enemy in two world wars, but almost nobody understood the suffering of our people and its legitimate struggle."
In connection with the events around Srebrenica the American general Charles Boyd wrote (see above): "Croat operations (i e. aggression against Krajina) seem to differ from Serb activities around the UN safe areas of Srebrenica and Zepa only in the degree of wringing of hands in the West and the amount of footage from CNN which caused it. Ethnic cleansing only evokes condemnation if it is done by the Serbs, but not if they are at the receiving end."
The Berlin-based magazine Junge Welt (27th/28th July 1996) published a translation of an interview with Ibran Mustafic (Slobodna Bosna, Sarajevo, 14th July 1996), co-founder and member of the Bosnian parliament for Izetbegovic's SDA. Mustafic describes the mafia in Srebrenica, which between 1992 and 1995 had complete control over the political and economic life of the town and spread terror in the town and the surrounding Serb areas.
He criticises the incursions ordered into the surrounding Serb areas before the occupation of Srebrenica ("if they had not happened many lives would have been saved") and accuses the president's office and army headquarters for this misuse of Srebrenica. Two assassination attempts were made on Mustafic and he was badly wounded. He talks about how many people unexpectedly turn up when it was thought that they had disappeared forever. He himself was a prisoner of the Serbs and nothing happened to him. He describes the large-scale pilfering of humanitarian aid, the black-marketeering during the war and the timely escape of the ruling mafia. Anything could be bought on the market. Mustafic debated strongly on all these points in parliament.
The Dutchbat (the Dutch battalion) of UNPROFOR, which ensured the security of Srebrenica, suffered one casualty, private R. Renssen, who was shot by Muslims in a tank. An unnamed Dutch general said on a TV programme at the time of the fall of Srebrenica that from what he knew of General Mladic he did not believe that any intentional terrorising of the civilian population would have taken place there (report from Utrecht, Rude Právo, 15th July 1995). Dutch UNPROFOR soldiers came to an agreement with Serb forces whereby they escorted buses taking away Muslims as protection for them.
To end these remarks about Srebrenica it is worth quoting a letter from a British interpreter in Bosnia, G. R. Thornton, to Time magazine (23rd June 1993): "We have forgotten to ask and find out what happened to the Serbs, who represented 30% of the Srebrenica population. At the time when war broke out (i.e. spring 1992) they were driven out of their homes with hand baggage and, as they fled, Muslim barbarically fired at the men, women and children running away."
Gorazde, a UN safe area on the Drina river, is around 60 km south-west of Srebrenica and is situated on the only route from the Republika Srpska to the eastern, Serbian Herzegovina. At the end of summer and the start of autumn 1992, after Gorazde had been occupied by local Muslims with substantial assistance from the mujahedeen (mainly Afghans), the large majority of the Serb population (25% of the 40,000 inhabitants) were driven out; some died. The town was badly damaged during this fighting. Since 1993 the large Pobjeda explosives and munitions factory beneath the town had been working again, thanks to smuggled tools, spare parts, raw materials and experts. The Sarajevo government could rely on active help from the UN (influenced by the USA and the European Union) in its military operations against the Serbs. The strong Muslim garrison in Gorazde had between 8,000 and 12,000 men (some say as many as 15,000), who were well armed (parachute-drops, lorries with "humanitarian" aid, munitions from Pobjeda) and organised into three brigades (Y. Bodansky, Defence & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, 31st May 1994). Only liars can claim that the town and surrounding area was demilitarised.
At the end of March 1994 the Muslim garrison launched a large-scale offensive, accompanied by massive mortar and light artillery bombardment, towards Cajnice and Foca (now Srbinje) in an attempt to break into Sandzak (the region between Serbia and Montenegro with 52% Muslim population) and to rouse up a rebellion there, and later in neighbouring Kosovo. The western media and governments made no protest against the large-scale offensive from what was officially a demilitarised zone. The advancing troops made a 10 km breakthrough, occupying 6 Serb villages and killing most of villagers who did not flee. Before they could bring up reinforcements the Serb command started artillery bombardments against the attacking troops; mortar bombs also fell on some parts of the town from where the Serb positions were being fired at. In the course of a few days the attackers were forced back into Gorazde, suffering heavy losses. After the offensive had failed, the world media, the UN, the Sarajevo government, the USA and the EU suddenly woke up and started to churn out reports about the horrors in Gorazde. Amateur radio enthusiasts and the world media reported 2.000 dead and an inundation of wounded and the destruction of the hospital A famous and well-paid CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour reprehended the British General M. Rose, commander of UNPROFOR in Bosnia, for not preventing the Serbs from "attacking Gorazde". The world was indignant and several NATO planes attacked Serb positions (the Security Council was against the American proposal for large-scale bombing), with one British Sea Harrier being shot down. Then a ceasefire was called and the Serbs had to pull back their units (Gorazde was about to fall). No one apologised to the Serbs for the 6 destroyed villages.
General Rose visited Gorazde: "The situation was a lot better than I had been convinced. The town was clearly damaged, but you can't have fighting around a city without it being damaged." The huge bubble burst. Although every human life lost is a waste, it is immoral to trade on human tragedy for propaganda purposes. The number of people killed in the fighting (not including the murdered Serbs in the 6 villages) was 200 and not 2,000 (70% of them were soldiers) and there were 200 seriously wounded. The hospital was not destroyed at all: only one mortar bomb fell on its roof but operation continued. As the journalist Lars-Erik Nelson said "Truth was the victim in the Gorazde hospital". In Sarajevo the expected inundation of seriously wounded did not materialize. A number of helicopters came back half empty and many of them carried lots of slightly wounded Muslim soldiers (only transportation of the seriously wounded had been agreed with the Serbs); the government in Sarajevo needed to relocate them elsewhere . As one visitor remarked, the so-called "destroyed hospital" just needed tidying up. The Dutch general G. J. M. Bastiaans, commander of the UN observers in the former Yugoslavia declared at the time, "It was the Muslims who provoked the Serb attack. It was ultimately the Muslims who forced the Bosnian Serb army into the bloodshed in Gorazde by constant acts of provocation."
The operations of Muslim units were carried out by trained men, not counting the mujahedeen who had already been highly trained for terrorist activities. During 1991 (!) several thousand young men in BH were sent to special Interior Ministry training centres in Croatia as part of their preparation for armed secession. The vast majority were Muslims, with some Croats. There were 914 of them between 4th June to 31st July.
THE TUZLA AND BIHAC SAFE AREAS, USA AND EUROPEAN UNION HYPOCRISY, NATO MISUSE
In 1993 Tuzla and Bihac were declared safe areas by the UN, which implied that they were demilitarised and that there were no offensive operations from them. In December 1994 former US president J. Carter secured the signing of a ceasefire of the warring parties for 4 months, starting on 1st January 1995. At the time Carter declared that the American public was insufficiently aware of the problems faced by the Bosnian Serbs. The agreed ceasefire did nothing to stop a large number of big transport planes with American crews, full of guns and ammunition, landing secretly, at night, at the airport in Tuzla. Early in the morning of the 20th March 1995 the Muslim army, massively armed and informed about Serb positions from the NATO planes, launched a huge offensive from the Tuzla safe area towards the east (Majevica) and the west (Vlasic). The ceasefire was violated. After several Serb settlements had been destroyed the Muslim army was forced back This flagrant violation of the ceasefire was not criticised by any UN resolutions or by any official declarations by the European Union or the USA (indeed, it was organised by the USA).
In September 1994 several active American generals performed an inspection of the Muslim army (e.g. General Mike Hayden, head of the US military intelligence service in Europe), whilst "hired" retired American mercenary-generals started preparing the Croat army (e.g. E. Vulliamy, Observer, 20th November 1994). Guns flowed into the newly established Muslim-Croat federation. There was fierce fighting around Doboj, bombarded by the Croats (HVO) and Muslims. In August 1994 the 5th army corps from the safe (and therefore formally demilitarised) Bihac region attacked and annihilated the autonomous Muslim region of Fikret Abdic, taking Velika Kladusa. 60,000 inhabitants, almost entirely Muslim, fled from the Muslim army into the Serb Krajina Republic. Based on information from patrolling NATO aircraft about the small Serb troop presence, the 5th corps invaded Serbian western Bosnia from Bihac in October 1994. There they occupied several hundred square kilometres of territory, destroyed many Serb settlements and drove out around 20,000 Serbs from their homes. Once again no one in the West made an official protest, since after all the entire operation was prepared with the West's lavish support. At this time NATO aircraft repeatedly attacked Serb positions, especially when the Serb army's counterattack drove the 5th corps back. Fikret Abdic returned with refugees to Velika Kladusa. The destroyed Serb villages received no aid, however. The Serb army released several American special unit members captured along with the Muslim troops.
THE AMERICAN POLITICAL WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL IN THE HAGUE
According to Webster's Dictionary the English expression "kangaroo court" means a court characterised by irresponsible and unjustified procedures, which has no legal status; it is a mockery of a court, where the foundations of the law and justice are abused. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) in The Hague somewhat resembles such a court, as more and more its activity reveals its political objective, its double standards and a priori determination of guilt. When defining what is meant by CEKA, A. Solzhenitsyn said, "It is the one criminal organ in human history which placed all the functions of investigation, arrest, interrogation, criminal proceedings, court and carrying out sentence in the same hands." These fundamental principles of Solzhenitsyn's CEKA are to a certain degree shared by The Hague tribunal - but without the executions. The model for this tribunal is not Nurnberg 1946, but Moscow 1938: trials arranged for political purposes. The professor of political science Raju Thomas (Marquette University, USA) wrote of the court being prepared: "The investigators who are investigating war crimes are basically working for the prosecution, for the court indictment, they are simply looking for evidence how to convict and not how to acquit. So the prosecutors are also the judges."
It is certainly necessary to have a tribunal for war crimes, for the sake of the law itself and to deter future atrocities and crimes. It is strange that the tribunal was set up by those who might also come before a similar tribunal. In his extensive book "Blood of Petroleum - Bosnia" (L'Age d'Homme, Lausanne, 1996) the French general Pierre M, Gallois quotes General Mladic, with whom he has maintained friendly relations: "I will come to The Hague as soon as the American generals from Vietnam and the English generals from the Falklands appear there." Laws which do not apply to everyone means a farce, not justice. In the civil-ethnic-religious war in the former Yugoslavia Serb facts should have been verified with the same resources (including financial) as were provided for the Muslims' and Croatians'. C. G. Jacobsen, the eminent Canadian professor of political science from Carleton University in Ottawa, wrote (Mediterranean Quarterly, August 1994): "Crimes must be judged generically (i.e. applied to an entire group of the similar things) and not be defined by nationality or religion. To allow claims of guilt a priori and thus dictate and limit the investigation, as Albright and Fenrik (a Canadian colonel, UN war crimes supervision) are striving to do; this in fact creates a kangaroo court, which is nothing better than the court in Salem, which is nothing better than the courts that presided over Stalin's monster trials". Someone compared R. Goldstone to Stalin's prosecutor Wyshinsky. An example of the a priori procedure is the declaration by American foreign secretary L. Eagleburger (end of 1992) that S. Milosevic, R. Karadzic, General Mladic etc. are war criminals - without a court, without an official charge, just like that.
1. The Hague tribunal for war crimes was set up in 1993 by UN Security Council resolution 827, based on chapter VII of the UN Charter, and was intended for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia after 1st January 1991. The tribunal was created AD HOC (only for this occasion). What went on in Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1991 and 1995 is certainly terrible: violence, murder, destruction of property, break-ups of friendships between the nations of Yugoslavia, the crime of raping women. Sober estimates put the number of deaths on all sides at 100,000 (see the section Propaganda and Death Tolls) and all the participants in the war suffered losses. Many hundreds of thousands of people were driven out of their homes (around one million Serbs). These are terrible figures, but what is this compared to the alleged 3,000,000 dead in Vietnam (this year's official Vietnamese figures), including bombing, napalm and defoliants; 1,000,000 dead during the war in Algeria; 3,000,000 in the war of Bangladeshi secession (1971); 500,000 in the massacres in Indonesia (1965-66); not to mention the maybe 2,000,000 dead Cambodians under Pol Pot's reign of terror; the 1,000,000 dead in Biafra, hundreds of thousands of dead in the Iran-Iraq war, and in Angola; the 150,000 murdered in East Timor; the estimated 150,000 dead in Central America, mostly wiped out by special units trained at American bases; further hundreds of thousands in Mozambique, which was economically destroyed (Klaus Kinkel, as head of the German intelligence service BND between 1979-1982 was involved in supporting the formally anti-communist terrorist organisation RENAMO, which wiped out entire regions) etc. Who supplied the weapons for those people killing each other, the enormous quantity of weapons? At least a tribunal was established for the real genocide in Rwanda (1,000,000 dead). We can remind ourselves of the words of G. Kenney (1995): "Bosnia is not a holocaust or a Rwanda, Bosnia is a Lebanon" According to the available reports the people of the current president of Democratic Congo L. Kabila have the death of around 150,000 Hutu refugees on his hands - but Kabila has signed fat contracts with businesses in the USA and received arms from there. It is strange to hear the words of Mrs. Albright in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (12th April 1994), that "there is no more suitable place for discussing the tribunal for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia". Mrs. Albright was somewhat exaggerating when she suggested a similarity with Auschwitz, Jasenovac, Majdanek and Belsen.
2. The very assignment of the war crimes tribunal in its current form is from the legal point of view dubious. Chapter VII of the UN Charter deals with situations where peace is threatened, where peace is broken, where there are acts of aggression. It is highly debatable whether this definition can allow people to be investigated, charged, tried, found guilty and imprisoned. Who will determine who the aggressor is in debatable cases - will it be the voting machinery of the UN, financially so dependent on the superpowers? The Security Council's conduct was in its way illegal when it gave itself a new mandate to set up the tribunal. According to Article 29 the Security Council has the right to establish auxiliary, subsidiary, dependent organs if it ascertains that they are necessary for the exercise of its function. In this way the tribunal actually stops being an independent court, but the auxiliary, subsidiary organ of its political masters. Whilst the tribunal remains in essence dependent on the Security Council, its status nevertheless places it above national courts. This is a clear violation of the UN Charter, which insists that the UN may not usurp the sovereign rights of states (S. Trifkovic, Chronicles - A Magazine of American Culture, August 1996).
3. The already established tribunal required the establishment of a corresponding database, which would record the crimes which took place in the former Yugoslavia and mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina (murders, torture, rape etc.) for which punishment was to be meted out not only to their perpetrators, but to those who were responsible for it. And this is where The Hague Tribunal started closely to resemble a kangaroo court. The original chairman of the UN committee of experts for crimes in BH, Professor F. Kalshoven, who had a realistic and honest attitude to his work (see the section Rape Camps), soon resigned from this post when he saw the whole dirty political background to the prepared tribunal. Its next chairman was an Egyptian Muslim, devoted to Islam and pious, a professor of law at DePaul University in Chicago, Sharif Bassiouni. Since then there has been an utterly selective approach to evidence gathering. A large number of details were simply sidelined. In spring 1994 the author met professor M. Bulajic in Belgrade, who had personally visited professor Bassiouni in Chicago to investigate the fate of reports of crimes against the Serbs which had been sent to professor Bassiouni three times (once by diplomatic post even) - apparently he had not received anything. Bassiouni prepared, practically ignoring Serb complaints about crimes committed against them, a huge Final Report, whose ANNEX contained 3,000 pages of facts which categorically accused Serbs of ethnic cleansing, aggression, mass rapes etc. The annex simply contained thousands of anti-Serb data, without any attempt to evaluate their credibility or truthfulness. Every normal court would have laughed at such material, regardless of its horrific nature.
Another supplier of information for the tribunal was the former premier of the Polish government, Catholic intellectual and friend of the Pope, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Unfortunately his reports, too, were selective. The author has himself checked the incorrectness of two of his statements. In 1993 it was reported that almost 70,000 Muslims were ethnically cleansed from Sandzak and that a number of Muslim homes and mosques in the town of Priboj were destroyed. The author repeatedly visited Sandzak and once Priboj as well and he did not see or hear anything of the sort.
The Hague Tribunal has always had a lot of judges from Muslim countries, from Pakistan. Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria etc., where justice does not always correspond to the ideas of the democratic defenders of the law. Islamic states, along with the USA, have given considerable support to the Hague Tribunal.
In an interview with General Mladic the general complained that it was never officially reported that the army of the Republika Srpska rescued thousands of fleeing Croats: "My soldiers saved around 40,000-50,000 Croats, who were fleeing from the Muslim forces during 1993, at Travnik, Konjice, Zavidovic, Kupres etc. We fed them and treated them in our hospitals. I am not a war criminal, as a soldier I have fought many battles and in many places I have saved my people from annihilation."
4. It is widely known today that the three murderous explosions in Sarajevo were the work of the Sarajevo government, the last of them evidently with the collaboration of certain western intelligence services (see the section on the three explosions). Articles have been written about it in a number of magazines in Europe and Canada and also several times in the USA. Nevertheless, these terrible incidents, when the government in Sarajevo allowed its own people to be murdered so as to force the West to join the war on its side (which ultimately the West even wanted, at least some of its members did), were not publicly commented on by important functionaries in the West who at the time did not spare the insults against the accused Serbs. As far as it is known CNN did not slam the government in Sarajevo for this killing, nor did the numerous journalists who painted the "Sarajevo slaughterhouse" in such horrific colours. Even the Czech cohort of anti-Serb journalists, with a very few exceptions, was silent. No one has proposed charging the actual government in Sarajevo, president Izetbegovic. vice-president E. Ganic or the senior commander of Muslim forces General Delic, for this crime of the minder of its own people at the Hague Tribunal. Nobody has charged F. Tudjman and his generals for the massacres of Serbs in Serb Krajina. Official Zagreb was indignant when Carl Bildt named president Tudjman as responsible for the crimes against the Krajina Serbs during Operation Storm (August 1995). The ultimate absurdity was the tribunal's indictment of M. Martic, leader of the Krajina Serbs, for ordering the firing of a few rockets at Zagreb (there were 5 dead), whilst dozens of Serb villages in western Slavonia burnt and the dead were counted in their hundreds, if not thousands, during the Croat forces' incursion in May 1995. And nobody has accused NATO command for the murder of several hundred Serb civilians during air-raids in August-September 1995 on the Republika Srpska; president Clinton should also account for his permission for the firing of 13 Tomahawk missiles at Banja Luka. And so on. It is not enough if the biased demands of just one side are complied with - that would be a mockery of the law, a mockery of justice. And that is the mockery of the law in The Hague.
5. The unlawful procedures of The Hague Tribunal are sometimes surprising. At the start of 1996 two senior Serb officers, General Djukic and Colonel Krsmanovic, were arrested by the Muslim authorities in Sarajevo. On the instigation of the prosecutor R. Goldstone they were almost immediately sent off to the Hague, to prison. Without any charge, with no warrant having ever been issued for their arrest. After several weeks' imprisonment and interrogations both officers were allowed to go home. Whilst in prison General Djukic, who had advanced cancer of the pancreas, did not receive a suitable diet or the treatment that was essential for his serious condition. He died a few short days after returning home. According to the Dutch professor of international law Theo van Boven, this abduction lacked any kind of legal foundation and is in conflict with the UN statute and treaties on civil rights. The tribunal's prosecutor (R. Goldstone) cannot lake the liberty of proceeding in this way. There has always been a danger that the tribunal would become an extension of American interests (Rude Právo, from Utrecht, 1st March 1996) . On 10th July 1997 near Prijedor in Bosnia whilst making an arrest, a special unit of the British elite SAS, operating under NATO (SFOR), shot a local Serb leader Sima Drljaca. No official warrant had been issued for his arrest, he had not been officially charged, nobody told him that he has been accused of anything. During the shoot-out, when he was surrounded, he was severely wounded. He was finished off by a member of the SAS with a shot to the head, in the presence of his 17-year-old son, who was also arrested, apparently in swimming trunks (he had been out fishing with his father). They flew him off to the Hague but soon let him go home. The director of a local hospital Dr M. Kovacevic was also arrested in a similar manner. The SAS men making the arrest approached him as if they were bringing humanitarian aid from the Red Cross. Here it is not even that important whether they were guilty or innocent of the crimes which were named later, after the murder and the arrest. What is important is the unlawful manner of their arrest. We believed that there was some kind of lawful procedure in the West, that certain norms were observed: accusation, indictment, court permission, arrest warrant etc., so that the arrested party might know about it and be able to prepare a defence. The new prosecutor Louise Arbour crassly attempted to defend this fundamental unlawful procedure of The Hague Tribunal. According to her there are so-called Sealed Indictments related evidently to secret arrest warrants, and apparently this course of action was permitted by an unnamed judge...
6. The war crimes tribunal at The Hague, presided by the French judge Claude Jorda, indicted on 11th July 96 for war crimes Dr. Radovan Karadzic and general Ratko Mladic, and issued an international warrant accordingly. During eight days the tribunal heard many quotations from their speeches and publications, selected according to the prosecutor's wishes. Terrible data were given about the destruction of 1.000 mosques and catholic churches, about the mass rapes, executions, ethnic cleansing, etc. All the above in accordance with the biased, one-sided reports by the Croat, Muslim and western media, by official, very often biased sources - whose truthfulness is far from perfect. All that is very sad, depressing. It shows the ugly face of the civil-ethnic-religious war, started by the armed secession of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Quite naturally, many orders of president Karadzic were not published: to the HQ of the Army of Republika Srpska, to the Ministry of Interior, to the Security Services, to the SDS (Serbian Democratic Party of Dr. Karadzic) officials - to adhere to the principles of human rights, to prevent the forced evictions (on ethnic ground), to disband all the paramilitary units, to investigate the murder of 5 Muslims in the village Bastesi, close to Celinac, and to punish the perpetrators, etc. All the above was issued by the President's office of Republika Srpska in summer 92, as official documents Nos 01-530/92, 01-32/92, 01-533/92, etc., as well as a fax to Mr. B. B. Ghali, under the fax number 99-12-12-963-4879... No information was given at The Hague tribunal about the destruction or damage to 300 orthodox churches, about the demolished orthodox monasteries, bishoprics, graveyards, chapels, church museums and libraries, with invaluable manuscripts - how they were robbed, buried, destroyed (see S. Mileusnic: The Spiritual Genocide 1991-93. Museum of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Belgrade, 1994).
Mr. C. Jorda and other judges seem not to know the history and do not know what is actually a civil-ethnic-religious war. Because of their ignorance or, maybe, even malicious intentions, they do not realize or do not wish to realize, that neither the Serbs nor their leaders started the war, that they did not want to destroy the multiethnic Yugoslavia (so aptly prepared by Germany, supported by Vatican). The Hague tribunal got a huge quantity of informations about the mass killing and ethnic cleansing of the Serbs from Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, without doing almost anything to discuss it at the tribunal. Did the tribunal charge Mr. Izetbegovic or Mr. Tudjman? The tribunal in The Hague even rejected any cooperation with the Independent Committee on War Crimes in the Balkans (ICWCB) from Ottawa in Canada, headed by professor C. G. Jacobsen. It was unacceptable to those who had been instructed to indict and sentence only one side. -"The laws that do not apply to all are a mockery of justice"-. (C. G. Jacobsen, see elsewhere).
7. Will the judges à la Jorda and the prosecutors à la Madam L. Arbour charge the Croatian authorities for a CULTURAL GENOCIDE, because they had destroyed during the last few years about 300.000 books - they were printed in the Cyrillic alphabet and with the "Serbian orthography". Out of them about 100.000 were destroyed during the Croat aggression against the Serbian Republic of Krajina in 1995. In the Croat bookstores there are now probably more books by the ustasha leaders Pavelic, Budak, Kvaternik, than by the "normal", "not criminal" Croatian authors, very popular in the former Yugoslavia, e.g., Nazor, Krleza, Kovacic, and others (Novosti, 24th December, 97).
8. When during the autumn 97 Madam Louise Arbour, the prosecutor general of The Hague tribunal visited Sarajevo, the data about the mass killing of the Serbs in Sarajevo during 1992-93 by the local Muslims started to spread. They were later published by the local independent magazine Dani (7th November 97), in connection with the mountain pit KAZANI, on the mountain Trebevic. where the Serb victims, still alive or already dead (shot, with their throats slit, beaten to death, tortured to death) were thrown into the abyss. All the above was disclosed in a Muslim military court in Sarajevo. Surprisingly enough, the western media did not report about it (1992-93), in spite of the fact that they had been repeatedly informed about it by the Serbs from Sarajevo and Pale Even an extensive list of "executioners" was made public, most of them had been from the Muslim 10th mountain brigade under command of Musan Topalovic alias Caco. He was initially praised by the Izetbegovic men as their "hero", into whose bottomless pockets arrived a big part of the humanitarian aid. But, finally, he was arrested and shot (allegedly when he tried to escape). Nevertheless, this "hero" was recently celebrated again, at his graveside. An other group, led by Ismet Bajramovic alias Celo became "famous'' for cruel murder, robberies as well. Even the International Herald Tribune (8-9th November 97) wrote about all that, calling it the Muslim slaughter house in Sarajevo. The article informs about the cruel murders by the Muslim paramilitary units - they brutally assassinated about 1.000 - 2.000 Serbs, but notwithstanding all the above "the Serbs are guilty of massacres of tens of thousands (Muslim) civilians". The article quotes unrealistic figures - quite incompatible with the realistic figures of casualties (see earlier). Will Madam L. Arbour indict any of the above 51 "executioners", some of whom are already dead, including the cruel psychopath Musan Topalovic-Caco, who again won a place in the Pantheon of Izetbegovic "heroes".<