The attempt to forge a Serb state within Croatia left a tragic human legacy

The independent / The Bosnian Institute ^ | 25 October 2005 | Marcus Tanner

[Hunden]

Marcus Tanner is a well-known witness of the recent Balkan wars. This article is unique in the way it conveys the whole spirit of the Serb wars of conquest and extermination.

This could be a useful reminder of who started those wars and against whom, and what their political purpose was, to those who could be tempted to believe the Serb propagandists' opportunistic claim to be "Christians", and victims of "Islamist aggression" as negotiations begin on the independence of Kosovo.

[muawiyah]

Aren't the Croats now being held for trial as War Criminals the guys who used genocidal tactics against the Serbs in Krajina?

[oilfieldtrash]

Serb wars of conquest my arse. The Krajina serbs whom happen to be my descendants had lived there for centuries and the RSK came about because of fears for their survival.

The infamous Jasenovac concentration camp that the croats ran during WW II embarassed even the nazis wrt their brutality. Jasenovac was located in the Krajina and approximately 1/3 of Krajina Serbs were exterminated in the camp.

Try to look at things in a historical perspective instead of just making conclusions.

[Whitebread]

Serbians, persecuted for 15 hundred years, have the fight for survival in their genes, God bless them. The fight still remains as the Muslim invaders remain. Maybe someday the Christian Serbs & Croatians can put their bloody past behind them and face the real ememy. The enemy since about he year 600.

[Hunden]

They had no sovereign rights on that land, and never had any. They tried to wrest those territories, where they were but an unassimilated minority of immigrants, from the thousand-year-old state to which they belonged.

It was also a war of extermination, since they expelled the majority Croats — a quarter million of them — from their homes, which they plundered and defiled. They also killed 13,000 in the process.

Of course Jasenovac is irrelevant. The Ustashe were just a handful of assassins from Herzegovina and Bosnia, and never represented either political opinion in Croatia or even a significant political tradition there, and in 1990 the Croatian government was led by a number of the former Partisans who had defeated them.

So no one really threatened the Croatian Serbs, and since a majority of them lived outside the territories some of them were trying to steal, that war of conquest launched from Belgrade under the guise of a local "revolt" and the massacres they committed could only put all of them in jeopardy, and that is what happened, with the killings in Glina and other places — like the Zec family in Zagreb.

As President Mesic, whose mother was a Serb and who really cared for them said early on, they stood no chance against the four and a half million Croats. Milosevic's answer, as he testified, was that he didn't give a damn about them.

Babic's reference to Pribicevic, and indeed the remaining Serbs' representatives' parliamentary support for a HDZ government show that the Serbs could have gotten along with the other citizens of an independent Croatia if it hadn't been for Belgrade's Communist leadership.

[edcoil]

Why any Christian would want to be in a muslim state is simply beyond me. It has never worked in the history of the world.

[Hunden]

Only a Serb, General Radislav Krstic, has been convicted so far for "aiding and abetting genocide" in Srebrenica.

Of course, since the Serbs started the wars and the atrocities, and committed an overwhelming majority of them — four fifths of them in Bosnia-Herzegovina, according to the Bassouini Report of 1995, they are a majority of the indictees at the International Tribunal.

Yet there has been an effort on its part of to indict Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians as well as Serbs. This has often led to acquittals, particularly of Bosniaks.

And if it had been established as a tool of international law rather than as an alibi for Western unwillingness to enforce it, the International Tribunal should only have been competent to judge the proxies of the aggressor states: of the Serbian state against Croatia, and of the Serbian and Croatian states against Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Former Croatian generals have been prosecuted for killings in the Medak pocket, Pakrac and Knin.

130,000 Serbs left the so-called "Krajina" in August 1995 upon orders from their political leaders;
the only attempted "genocide" wich took place in the region concerned some 700 elderly people who had remained there, who were killed in the following months and whose murderers have not been identified.

[Hunden]

The Muslim invaders, i. e. the Turks, left most of the region almost a century ago. The Serbs haven't fought them since 1912.

The ancestors of the Muslim Bosniaks came to the Balkans, at the same time as the Serbs, in the 7th century.

The Albanians are the native inhabitants of Kosovo, and the biggest Christian community there are the Albanian Catholics.

The Serbs were the invaders of Albanian and Bulgarian territories — Kosovo and Macedonia — in 1912, and the oppressors of their neighbours after 1918.

They were the aggressors in the recent wars.

And they are not doing such a great job at surviving now, given that their birth rate is catastrophic.

[Hunden]

What are you talking about? This article concerns Catholic Croatia.

[Jacob Kell]

Actually, the ancestors of most of Kosovo's Albanians came to Kosovo in the 16-17th Centuries when much of Kosovo's Serb community fled to Hungary and Croatia when a rebellion by them against the Ottoman Turks failed.

[Jacob Kell]

Actually, they had just as much right to be on that land as their Croat neighbors, because Austria, which ruled Croatia, invited their ancestors (and the Vlachs) to settle their to help defend Austrian territories against Turkish enroachments.

[muawiyah]

Hmmmmm. Here we have another situation where the local populace was told to "run for your life or be killed by the enemy", so they did, and now the enemy argues that since they "ran", and on the "orders of their political leaders", they've forfeited everything, including any moral standing to accuse the enemy of genocide.

BTW, when an invading enemy drives the civilian population before him, that's considered genocide irrespective of the number of people killed. Folks who justify such behavior because the victims ran rather than be killed will, of course, be dealt with in the lower regions of Hell. The perpetrators get a higher ring.

Given that this sort of behavior can be expected in just about every war of any kind at any time in history, this makes a very good case for Universal Military Training, and the parallel organization of civil society as a militia equipped with the biggest and the best of weapons.

Most political elites, unfortunately, fear their people too much to do that, e.g. the Commies who ran Yugoslavia ~ cowards to the bone.

[muawiyah]

The common concensus is that the people we today call the Albanians were most likely the FIRST Indo-European people in Europe and occupied most of the coastal areas of the Northern Mediterranean shore from Monoco to the Greek Isles.

They have been conquered, absorbed or destroyed by more advanced invaders until there are only two tribes left, mostly in Albania, but also in F.Y.R.

[zagor-te-nej]

Serbs have much more rights on those lands then Croats.

"Liudevitus Siscia civitate relicta, ad Sorabos, quae natio magnam Dalmatie partem obtinere dicitur, fugiendo se contulit", that is: "Ljudevit (prince of Lower Pannonia 822. - prim. CafeHome) having left the city of Sisak, fled to the Serbs, people inhabiting the greater part of Dalmatia).

Franjo Racki, the Croatian historian, says, that as the Roman province of Dalmatia stretched from the Adriatic to Pannonia, under those Serbs, who are mentioned by Einhard, we must look at all those lands between, and the people inhabiting them, ie: Bosnia to be considered Serbian land, inhabited by Serbs.

[zagor-te-nej]

Muslim-Croat lies:
"The ancestors of the Muslim Bosniaks came to the Balkans, at the same time as the Serbs, in the 7th century."

Truth:
Excluding some.... the rest of the population (about 98 per cent) belong to the southern Slavonic people, the Serbs. Although one in race, the people form in religious beliefs three sharply separated divisions: the Mohammedans, about 550,000 persons (35 per cent), Greek Schismatics, about 674,000 persons (43 per cent), and Catholics, about 334,000 persons (21.3 per cent).

[Grizzly Adams]

They had no sovereign rights on that land, and never had any.

You are a liar.

The Serbs there were a constituent nation and the constitution granted to them the right to self-determination.

Educate yourself before you start lying here:

http://www.arhiv.sv.gov.yu/a100008g.htm

"Socialist Republic of Croatia is a national state of Croatian people, state of the Serb people in Croatia, and the state of nationalities residing therein."

.

.

.

Paragraph 3 "The Socialist Republic of Croatia is within the composition of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia."

Article 3 of the SFRY constitution

"That the socialist republic is a state based on the sovereignty of the nations and on the rule of the working classes and all working people and the socialist self-management democratic immunity of working people and citizens and equal nations and nationalities."

[joan]

So no one really threatened the Croatian Serbs, and since a majority of them lived outside the territories some of them were trying to steal, that war of conquest launched from Belgrade under the guise of a local "revolt" and the massacres they committed could only put all of them in jeopardy, and that is what happened, with the killings in Glina and other places — like the Zec family in Zagreb.

The Zec family was killed because Tomislav Mercep gave the orders to kill Serbs in Pakracka Poljana. This same man was the one who INITIATED the killings of Serbs in Vukovar - before there was any "revolt". The Croat police were arresting prominent Serbs and also some at random, torturing them and killing them to produce fear and ethnic cleansing.

The Zec family were only 3 out of an estimated 280 Serbs killed in Pakracka Poljana. That estimate was given by Miro Bajramovic, who was part of the unit which killed them. Further he said: "It is my firm belief that if it hadn't been for the Zec family, nothing would have been known about Pakracka Poljana. It was the main key and the main reason why the unit has been looked at from this angle, and there were many Pakracka Poljanas in Croatia." (Confession of Miro Bajramovic)

For some reason the murder of the family made the news, but if it hadn't those Serbs would have been quietly snuffed out as happened in "many" places in Croatia.

The one who shot the Zec daughter, a 12-year-old, was a Munib Suljic, a MUSLIM in the Croat unit. According to Bajramovic, to enjoy harrassing the tortured and dying Serbs the Croats imprisoned. Boy could those Croats really torture!

This evil Muslim and all the other killers and those who gave the orders, such as Tomislav Mercep, are free today in Croatia.

[joan]

A Freeper, an American who was a UN official in Croatia and was there for years said she had personal knowledge of the Croats operating at least one death camp before hostilities began, and that Croats were destroying and erasing Serb villages.

This is what she told me:

As for the military serving in the Mission -- the ones I knew did sympathise with the plight of the Serbs (even if they first came to Mission thinking the Serbs were the bad guys) and were horrified and frustrated that the media twisted everything so. When they went home to England or Holland or wherever on leave and tried to tell people how things REALLY were, no one would believe them. It was truly frustrating for all of us. We had only each other to talk to, really.

…

The Croats threw bodies in the river, incinerated them, or disolved them with lime and other chemicals. After "Op Storm" they also buried them in established cemeteries on top of bodies properly buried years before, and even made two "show graveyards" containing over 100 bodies each (one in Knin, one in Dvor) which were technically not a "mass graves" as the bodies were buried so many inches apart and marked with numbers. No horrifying headline-grabbing "mass graves" to be found!

To me, such methodical attention to avoiding bad PR is indicative of high-level coordination and orders from the top, whereas "mass graves" could be the work of out-of-control paramilitaries, or even, in some cases, villagers.

…

As far as camps the Croats put Serbs in before hostilities officially began, the only one I have personal knowledge of is the ZNG-run death camp in Sisak… I'm sure there must have been others…

At that same time, Croats also began flattening Serb villages around former Sector West and erasing them from maps as though they never existed. Somehow, no one seems to know about that, either. The majority of ordinary Croats have no idea all this happened. In one happens to find out, he/she is totally shocked!

It was always so sad when a displaced family from one of the "flattened villages" came to me when I was a Return Officer in the UNTAES Mission -- how can you return someone to a village which no longer exists?

After "Op Flash," what went on in Bjelovar Prison was not pretty. Croats denied Red Cross, UN and OSCE access to the prison, which for some reason also did not make it into the press. In July 1995, I interviewed a young man (16 years old) who had no kidneys (and very little mind) left after Bjelovar. I helped him get to relatives who had already relocated in Banja Luka. I still pray for him now and then.

[joan]

A German businessman, Kurt Kepruner, married to a Croat woman, and who WAS THERE IN CROATIA before and during the war there, said Serb homes were being systematically destroyed in Zadar before the war. And Croats were telling visitors that they were Croat homes destroyed by Serbs. He was witness to a Croat in black blowing up a home, with the Croat telling him how it was done (pumping gasoline into the basement of the house). The Croat police and a mob also attacked and burned 100s of Serb homes and businesses on May 2, 1991. Croatia's media and government were encouraging hate and violence towards Serbs in the run-up to the war. The media was confoundingly and astonishingly silent on all he and others (such as "wonders"/Stephanie who were there at the time and witnessed attacks and violence against the Serbs which the Croat media and western media muted. A link to his book and some reviews:

Reisen in das Land der Kriege. Erlebnisse eines Fremden in Jugoslawien.

http://www.balkanpeace.org/rs/archive/aug04/rs234.shtml

http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/069.shtml

[FormerLib]

And you are a well-known Soros fluffer linking to websites owned and operated by him.

Americans know better than to trust Soros.