Posted on 12/31/2003 7:35:46 AM PST by SJackson
Maybe because you've only been here a week or two? But seriously you need to get over your Milosevic=Hitler obsession. He's no good guy but the entire Balkans had no good guys. I suggest you read "Burn This House".
No, physical evidence establishes that there were battles between armed factions and victims on all sides. There are mass graves of Serbs killed by Croats, Bosniaks, and Albanians. One investigator, a policeman from California, who was in Bosnia in 1997 and 1998 to search for mass graves of Muslims and Croats found dead Serb soldiers, shot in the backs of their heads instead, each and every time. Yet these graves were announced, before investigation, as graves of Muslims and Croats. The truth often counters the propaganda.
Yeah, those witnesses have lied so many times. The Trepca mines were claimed by "witnesses" to be the site of mass killings and dead bodies, but investigators found absolutely no signs of any killing or bodies - not even animal bones. Serbs have been tortured into confessing in Sarajevo court of having murdered Bosnian Muslim brothers. The brothers and their families were discovered alive almost five years later by the uncle of one of the imprisoned and convicted Serbs. One of the supposedly dead brothers was buying up sheep and cattle from his former Serb neighbors when the uncle was startled to see this "dead" man alive and well. The murder trial made international headlines, yet the Bosnian Muslims were living in Sarajevo the whole time and had even joined the army. So yeah, the witnesses LIE and a mountain of false accusations has been the norm for the Balkans. Further, the families of these alive-the-whole-time men, didn't care that innocent are blamed.
One Albanian 18-year-old girl named Rajmonda, who had joined the KLA, claimed in a running documentary before and during the war that Serbs had killed her little sister. The Canadian journalist went to Rajmonda's house a few months after the war and found the supposed dead sister alive and unscathed, the home intact, and all the family uninjured in the least.
I'm sorry- I missed the volume of posts that you authored during the Rawandan massacre where you demanded intervention.
Rwanda happened in 1994 and FreeRepublic wasn't around.
We did not have large trade flows to and from the Balkans, our trade with Yugoslavia in 1990 amounted to half a Billion in exports and .7 Billion in imports - but that does not mean that we get to ignore them, only to react with shock and dismay when their neighbors, with whom we do have large trade flows or are encouraging towards market economies, get involved in their neighbor's internecine bloodfest and drag us in after them.
Our armed forces are currently deployed around the globe to try to keep lids on local disputes and insurrections in order to stop them from turning into regional conflagrations that we cannot ignore - I don't suppose the fighting along the border between Thailand and Myanmar is of too much interest to you either - but there we are. Go figure.
And if you believe Milosevic was merely dealing with an Islamic insurrection, then you should be able to come up with an amusing answer as to why the Serbians were cracking Albanian Catholic heads and even managed to destroy two Catholic churches as they were getting their silly little selves bombed out of Kosovo.
The most active KLA military commanders (Remi, Gashi, Bardhi, et. al.) have been arrested and found guilty by UNMIK/KFOR for murdering Albanians before March 23rd 1999.
2) Detailed examination of the specific body count (there was a tally posted on FR a while back) indicates that KLA/NATO action was responsible for upwards of 80% of non-combatant deaths in Kosovo and Metohija
3) One can also establish the guilt of the KLA and their allies (ie Hoplite) by careful review of the ICTY hearings and cross examination of Prosecution witnesses by President Milosevic. After 2 plus years, the Prosecution witnesses have only served to bloster the defense case.
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