Posted on 10/23/2002 9:16:26 AM PDT by Destro
I would say you are a Croat who falls into this category - except on this issue. Just because the Krajina Serbs feared and prepared for the worst, that does not absolve the perpetrators of their responsibility.
The Croats of Ovcara, Vukovar, Skabrnja and Vocin that you mention - I guess you should blame each local/community/household leader who decided to leave, right, because they "gave the order" to leave, right? I'm sorry my friend, but Kate said it best - that's BULLSH*T, and you know it.
The media is simply a tool to control perception and you are very right it is used to control public opinion. Any time their is a coup why is the radio and TV media one of the first objectives? Public perception is what wins a war and gains allies. The KLA know what I am talking about because the biggest deception was at Racak. Their are a lot of former Nato troops and UN people out their that left the Balkan conflict with a different point of view that was being televised by the media. The Serbs are good people and Joan I believe that is why you are posting so passionately on FR. I believe their are others like you posting for the same reason.
doesn't the Clinton Administration bear some significant amount of responsibility for selecting as its agents (meaning allies) some of the most extreme zenophobes around ?
and also doesn't the Clinton administration bear responsibility for always promoting the most extremist solutions ?
and finally doesn't the Clinton administration bear direct responsibility for the thousands killed when Clintonites took over responsibility via international agreements for the safety and well being of some of the population ?
There you go again, Wraith.
Doesn't matter how many times you, or anyone else around here says it - Racak was Serb Paramilitaries and Police murdering civilians.
What Serb paramilitaries where known to have been in Racak the day of the so called massacre?
As for your so called support I seem not to recall you having any, so who are they Hoplite?
I'm starting to develop a feel for your supposed expertise, Wraith.
I require no supporters, Wraith - though maybe if I cultivated a super-secret-squirrel persona I could fool some suckers.
Right?
Whatever - here we are again with you deriding any source not in compliance with your views, while having nothing but your word to back up your position.
I can live with that, and apparently you can too.
You are not free, however, to foist it onto the world and declare it to be a fact in the absence of supporting and in the face of contrary evidence.
Which is exactly what's going on here, again.
P.s., viable and your Racak assertions are, like black and white, antonyms. The facts have spoken, and nobody, which includes you, have it within their power to deny them any longer outside of an ever shrinking circle of deniers, revisionists, and post-communist pond scum.
I suppose if a queer walked up to you and told you that all of your notions and hang-ups about he gay lifestyle were wrong, being as you've never been 'there', you'd be willing to turn around, drop trou and...
Ouch! There's an analogy for you.
The Serbs are good for Racak, Wraith, and I'll wager that every last damn one of the men who went through that village would love to try your line of, uh, reasoning.
Racak was the town in which the KLA gang pressed some 60 villagers many of them elderly and threw them in the middle of a firefight according to the KLA commander's ICTY testimony last Spring...
" gospodin Lazarevic are you sure you don't work for the British Secret services?" Mr. Milosevic asked as his last question for this witness today.
"Oh, your honours, what a preposterous idea, of course not, that is impossible . ." Lazarevic answered.
Later amici curiae Tapuskovic asked him: "Can you explain to this court Mr. Lazarevic why are you wearing a British military uniform on theses two differents occasions as shown in two photographs part of prosecution's documents?"
"Well, I . . .I have at home a collection of uniforms, of military uniforms, nothing wrong with that . . ." Mr. Lazarevic said.
ROTFLMAO !!!!!!!
No wonder, there is ZERO coverage of the Tribunal, it is too embarassing even for the most cycnical HumWarrior. For a good laugh spend a half hour reading any cross examination from the last week or so. Nice and May are simply buffons straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan
It's the same one I'd make with Fusion, given the chance.
He's been to the Balkans as well, you know - so I guess he's an unimpeachable source of info just like you.
This is what I'm saying, Wraith: Your information contradicts all the information gathered by those seriously investigating the incident at Racak. That those people are from the ICTY, OSCE, or HRW and don't enjoy the highest reputations around here is irrelevant to me. That their accounts were arrived at independently, square with, and complement each other, does.
Do you remember the story about the dead being KLA fighters who were changed into civilian clothes so as to look like massacre victims? Who am I supposed to believe - the Serb government of the time, who had representatives on site and should know what they're talking about, or investigators who arrived days, weeks, or even months later?
When the autopsies were concluded, not even the Serb and Byelorussian forensics teams could support that lie any longer - and Racak has been one long string of Serb Nationalist lies, to which you are merely latching onto the tail end of, serving to lengthen that sordid mess. Why you'd do this, I don't know, nor do I care to speculate - it is ultimately irrelevant. The only thing I care about is getting to the bottom of things, Wraith, because good decisions require good information.
I'm just sad to say that I find you no longer useful towards that end.
How nice it must be to still blindly believe in these people. Of course their accounts 'tally' - they come from the same word farm.
"Those seriously investigating the incident at Racak"?? Like Walker, who turned up, made a statement based on nothing which helped to justify the bombing of Serbia? Or ICTY which is funded by Nato? We are supposed to unquestioningly believe the likes of the 'experts' from HRW, whose 'research' was briefed by Nato members and didn't include speaking to any Serbian people or even taking the situation with the bombing into consideration? Everyone knows that 'charities' and human rights bodies are politicised to a great degree.
Hoplite, you have made yourself look ridiculous by stooping to insulting everyone here and going into some sort of rant about homosexuality. Wraith has run circles around you because his info is based on fact and yours is based on CNN and the media. The media not only lies, but it also complies with the government line and is used as part of any 'war'. That is what you rely upon - biased media-fed propaganda. You clearly haven't even watched, read or thought about anything from alternative sources which presents the other side of events.
Even during the prosecution phase at the Hague, William Walker and the various Racak 'witnesses' were totally debunked. Did you even see any of that? There was one photo which showed blood around a victim and a Muslim skull cap nearby, and an identical photo taken earlier which had neither the cap or the blood. The evidence had been tampered with.
The facts about Racak will come out in detail during the Defence stage (I suggest you watch this for yourself). It's a shame that the truth about these matters will only come out during the defence of Milosevic. I have no time for Milosevic and I know what he put all of his people through in Yugoslavia. This farce of a trial has succeeded in only one thing: to turn him into an anti-hero both at home and abroad. He is undoubtedly intelligent and articulate and he is the only real hope (for now) for the truth about Racak, the bombing of Serbia and the demonisation of the Serbian people to come out.
Read the transcripts from the Hague about the wealth of evidence to the contrary of what you're saying (aka the CNN version). One of the teams of Spanish forensic experts (real experts with skills) actually stated that there was no evidence of any massacre at Racak. Their report never even appeared in the sources which you read.
Therefore I would like to enlighten you with some media reports which you obviously didn't read. In El Pais (Sept 23 99), a national newspaper in Spain, there was a report which can be translated and summarised thus:
According to the New York Times, the "turning point" in NATO's decision to wage war on Yugoslavia occurred on January 20, 1999, when U.S. diplomat William Walker led a group of news reporters to discover a so-called Serb massacre of some 45 Albanians in Racak, Kosovo. This story made international headlines and was later used to justify the NATO bombings. The day before the "massacre," Serb police had a firefight with KLA rebels that was covered by an AP film crew. At the end of day, the village was deserted. William Walker arrived at noon with additional journalists, and expressed his outrage at a "genocidal massacre" to the world press. Walker's story remains shrouded with doubt. "What is disturbing," remarks war correspondent Renaud Girard, "is that the pictures filmed by the AP journalists radically contradict Walker's accusations." Belarussian and Finnish forensic experts were later unable to verify that a massacre had actually occurred at Racak.
Some more background which I hope may be of interest. This time it's from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) in New York and is a very useful round-up and update of various reports which have come out around the world about Racak (it doesn't matter if you try and dismiss FAIR - if you even know about it - this is posted for reference purposes):
July 18, 2001
Despite the U.S. media's lack of interest, the question of what really happened at the Kosovo village of Racak is still unresolved. Although the Finnish investigators' autopsy findings discussed in the Berliner Zeitung (1/16/01) did not represent, in themselves, compelling evidence of a massacre of civilians, that neither proves nor disproves the official account of the incident. But new information about the Racak incident has since come to light.
Several weeks after FAIR's February 1, 2001 media advisory was released, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an interview (3/10/01) with Dr. Helena Ranta, the Finnish pathologist who led the European Union's team of investigators. She said she wanted to dispell some of the "nonsense" that had been published about the Racak investigation.
She emphasized that her investigation into the Racak incident comprised not just the autopsies discussed in the Berliner Zeitung but also a forensic inspection of the crime scene--a small gully in the village of Racak--which was carried out by her team of investigators several months afterward.
"If we had found nothing in the ditch, the Finnish investigator Helena Ranta now says, then it would have been entirely a set-up by the Albanians," the Handelsblad reporter wrote. "But lying there were bullets, bullet shells, and even still a body part of one of the victims. That this was lying here was important, and how it was lying even more important." According to Ranta, the physical evidence was consistent with a massacre--not a set-up.
Ranta declined to say definitively whether or not she thought it was a massacre, explaining that she wanted to avoid prejudicing the international war crimes tribunal at the Hague that is working on the case.
All of the evidence will presumably be debated and disputed at the Hague tribunal if the accused perpetrators of the Racak killings are brought to trial. Defense lawyers faced with Ranta's crime-scene evidence would likely point to the fact that her team's November 1999 inspection of the scene took place several months after the area came under the control of NATO troops. (Since June 1999, Racak has been patrolled by British soldiers.)
The tribunal might also hear the observations of the French journalists who were among the first to arrive at the scene of the killings. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary "The Road to Racak," (The World at Six, 5/29/00), when reporter Renaud Girard of the French daily Le Figaro arrived in the village, he was surprised to find that William Walker, the American head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observer mission in Kosovo, had not sealed off the crime scene for war crimes investigators.
Girard was equally puzzled to find almost no bullet casings on the ground. "It was weird," he told the CBC. "Maybe somebody had picked them up." Back in Pristina that day, he told his colleague Christophe Chatelot of Le Monde about the apparent absence of bullet casings. Chatelot asked one of Walker's observers, an American army captain, why there were none on the ground. The captain replied, "That's because I took them, I collected them." The captain "confided to Chatelot that he'd picked up all the bullet casings once he'd arrived at the scene."
Intrigued, Chatelot went to Racak the next day to investigate. When he tried to find the American army captain again, he was "suddenly nowhere to be found." "We don't know him. He's never been here," Chatelot says he was told by the OSCE mission. When he asked to talk to the four monitors who had been in and around Racak the day of the killings, he was told that their names had suddenly been made "a classified secret." "It's very strange," Chatelot told the CBC.
Later, it emerged that Walker's team of American observers had been largely composed of undercover CIA operatives who, European diplomats asserted, were carrying out "an American policy that made [NATO] airstrikes inevitable" (London Sunday Times, 3/12/00). International outrage over the Racak killings was instrumental in pushing NATO to threaten Yugoslavia with airstrikes.
The German magazine Der Spiegel (3/19/01) recently obtained a secret dossier of evidence on the Racak killings compiled by prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. According to Spiegel's report, tribunal investigators found that the victims in Racak were probably unarmed at the time they were killed; but the dossier "also reveals manipulations, deceptions and cover-ups-- on all sides."
"U.N. investigators concede that perhaps half the victims were aides to or sympathizers with the KLA," the report says. Though "defenseless civilians at the time of their deaths," these victims had also "carried out attacks and assassinations of Serbian officials and establishments or had approved of them." Just "a few days before the massacre," the report says, some of these victims "fought against the advancing Serbs" near Racak. (According to the Geneva conventions, it is a crime to deliberately kill unarmed enemy sympathizers or prisoners of war.)
The Spiegel report adds that the French intelligence services in Kosovo monitored all KLA radio traffic and possess detailed logs of these communications. According to Spiegel, these radio logs "compromise" the KLA with regard to its role in Racak. (According to Albanian witnesses, KLA fighters were present in the hills surrounding Racak at the time of the killings.)
But the French (who were more sympathetic to the Serbian side in the Kosovo war than the United States) have released only a fraction of these logs to anxious war crimes prosecutors trying to build a criminal case. "Now," the Spiegel report concludes, "the controversy over the radio logs begins: Washington, Berlin and above all Belgrade are trying to gain possession of the explosive material."
As FAIR argued at the time, it is striking how little interest the U.S. media has shown in this controversy. Mainstream journalists working for British, French, Canadian, German and Dutch news outlets have unearthed new information while U.S. media outlets have been passive. Neither Helena Ranta's interview with the Handelsblad, Der Spiegel's report on the Hague tribunal investigation nor the CBC's award-winning "Road to Racak" documentary have received mention in any major U.S. paper in the Nexis database.
In President Bill Clinton's March 19, 1999 address to the nation announcing NATO's determination to launch airstrikes against Yugoslavia, he said:
As we prepare to act we need to remember the lessons we have learned in the Balkans.... We should remember what happened in the village of Racak back in January -- innocent men, women and children taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire -- not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were.
It is the responsibility of U.S. journalists to try to find out whether or not this official account is true.
Just one last point - you are comparing someone who was in Kosovo with Nato with Fusion, who is pro KLA? Shame on you.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, eh?
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