Posted on 12/18/2006 10:58:24 AM PST by kronos77
New York, 18 Dec. (AKI) - Serbs living in the United States are reported to be deeply disturbed and worried by recent arrests of fellow Serbs in connection with the 1990s Balkan wars, community leaders have said. In a six-state swoop, American agents arrested 13 Serb immigrants last week and are looking for another three who are still at large. One of those arrested, Nedjo Ikonic, is being investigated for allegedly having taken part in the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica when it was overrun by Serb forces in July 1995.
If convicted, Ikonic and other suspects face up to ten years in jail and deportation from the US. "These cases demonstrate our resolve to identify and prosecute those who enter the US under false pretences," said deputy attorney general Paul McNulty. "Especially those who hide their military past," he added.
Those arrested were poor immigrants who had no money for lawyers of bail to defend themselves from freedom, the Serbian consul in Chicago, Desko Nikitovic, told Vesti daily. He said Serbia could not help them because most were Bosnian citizens.
"Unfortunately, this is a huge operation in which only Bosnia-Herzegovina can intervene with Washington. No-one needs to spoil the relations between our two countries, which have been improving," said Nikitovic.
Milwaukee lawyer, Nikola Kostic, said he was trying to organise a team to offer legal help to the arrested and their families, because neither Serbia nor Serb organisations in America have shown much interest in helping the suspects.
"Serbs are being hunted throughout America, but no one is checking Bosnian Muslims and Croats who have immigrated to the United States in the past 10-15 years," Zika Petrovic of Denver, Colorado, told Vesti. "No one asks them whether they have concealed what they did in the wars, what army they served and whether they committed crimes against Serbs," Petrovic said. "All this is creating an unfortunate impression that the war against Bosnian Serbs has now shifted to US soil," he concluded.
Vesti, distributed throughout Serbian emigre community - which numbers a million in the US - said that there is a list of over 300 people, submitted to the United States by Bosnian authorities and the United Nations' Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, who are suspected of having committed crimes during the 1992-1995 Bosnian civil war.
Officially, the suspects are being charged for failing to report to immigration authorities that they served in the Bosnian Serb army, which fought against local Muslims. (Vpr/Aki)
Dec-18-06 15:00
Obviously.
Which explains why you allow yourself to be played for a sucker by the Serbs.
My conclusion is that your tag line was very well chosen.
You also failed to know that Yugoslavia was very competitive in the defense and construction industries.
Yugoslavia built much of the infrastructure for countries like Pakistan, they built in Kuwait, they built Iraq's undergroud bunkers which couldn't be dented by U.S. and British bunker-buster bombs. They outbid and won contracts against NATO countries like Germany.
You fail to address the CENSUS counts after the war which show no genocide of the allegedly genocided.
HOW COME THE MUSLIM POPULATIONS ARE A GREATER PERCENTAGE AFTER THE WAR THAN BEFORE??
You have never listed an U.S. soldiers you claim were witnesses during the war.
The U.S. only sent soldiers mainly AFTER the wars were over and they STOOD BY while SERBS WERE MURDERED BY ALBANIAN MUSLLIMS.
YOU FAIL TO REALIZE THAT SERBS HAVE BEEN IDENTIFIED IN MASS GRAVES.
You fail to give autospy reports, along with identifications proving execution versus battle deaths or civilian versus military.
You seem ignorant of the Croat-Muslim war during the Bosnian war, and you don't seem to be aware of where it was fought and the destruction in wrought. Nor the fact that both sides were using heavy weapons against each other.
Atrocities took place on both sides of the Eastern front in WWII. That may be the case here. Are you saying the mulims are poor innocent victims of the vicious Serbs? The Koran commands muslims to play everyone else as suckers, so are you sure it's not you getting played? Everywhere else in the world, it's the Muslims commiting the mass murder, not the Serbs. I'm just giving them the benefit of the doubt, based on global events.
Really?
I was unaware - the things you learn around here.
Are you saying the mulims are poor innocent victims of the vicious Serbs?
In Bosnia that was certainly the larger picture in the 1990's war - and of that there is no doubt for you to give the Serbs the benefit of.
Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?
Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born … a Festivus for the rest of us!
Cosmo Kramer: That must've been some kind of doll.
Frank Costanza: She was.
That was very touching. Do you happen to have a picture of the doll?
And to celebrate this thread--here's an oldie, but goodie:
A WHOLE NATION GOES MAD
Steve Crawshaw
Monday 31st May 1999
Winning the war is the easy bit. It will be harder to restore sanity to the Serbs, argues Steve Crawshaw
You can spend years refusing to face up to the obvious. You can find endless justifications and search for ifs and buts. Eventually, however, there comes a moment when the visitor to the Balkans must simply put his head in his hands and cry: "Enough!" One nagging question returns to haunt you: why have so many millions of Serbs become liars on a grand scale or gone mad, or both?
Everybody feels that their own point of view is sometimes misunderstood. Many feel that their country is right, even when it is wrong. But none except the Serbs have managed in recent years to take this reversal of reality to such a high art form. According to a view held widely in Serbia today, anybody who accuses the Serbs of anything (yes, anything) either has been duped by or is part of an international conspiracy - an a la carte mixture of Bill Clinton (trying to distract from cigars and moral decay in the Oval Office), Germany (with its well-known ambitions for a Fourth Reich) and international Islam (seeking a fundamentalist takeover). When western news reports show Serbs in a bad light, it is only because the reporters are too stupid or venal to tell the shining, shaming truth.
The Serb grasp on reality can make The X Files seem down to earth. Take the extraordinary (and typical) conversation I had recently with Darko, a well-educated resident of Pale, a little town half an hour's drive from Sarajevo that used to be the capital of Radovan Karadzic's Bosnian Serb republic. "Why does Tony Blair blame the Serbs for everything?" Darko asked. "What have Serbs done wrong?"
Well, there's a question and a half. I take a deep breath as I flash through the mental index of the past eight years. Camps, cleansing, rapes, massacres - where shall we start? Finally I cautiously toss out one word: Srebrenica, the little Bosnian town where thousands of civilians were notoriously slaughtered in cold blood in 1995. Every detail of the massacre has been analysed and re-analysed. I expect my new acquaintance to sound defensive when the name is mentioned. Not a bit of it. He leaps upon the name of Srebrenica like a hungry piranha on a bleeding hunk of flesh: "It was war. We tried to relieve our country. There was no massacre." So that's that.
In a Serb Orthodox monastery, I have an equally baffling encounter. Father Luke, the abbot, wistfully notes that international attitudes towards Serbs have changed in recent years. "Before, all doors were open for me as a Serb. Now all of them are closed. What happened?" Another humdinger of a question. My explanation is promptly rejected: "No, it's not to do with what we Serbs have done." In his view Serbs are being crucified for the sins of mankind. "There was a need for one nation to take all the sins on its back."
You can find isolated instances of lunacy in any country. But nowhere more than in Serbia. Take the question of Albanians fleeing Kosovo - Serb TV blames the exodus on Nato raids. Ask Albanian refugees if that is indeed the reason, and they'll tell you that power comes out of the barrel of a Serb gun. The standard, shared experience is of a small group of armed men telling everybody in the village to clear out within the next half an hour, on pain of death.
Ask Serbs why the Albanians are leaving, however, and they will repeat with a straight face the line about Nato bombings. You get the impression that most of them could pass a lie-detector test on the matter. You can blame this in part on the Serb government's powerful propaganda machine. Milosevic's iron control of TV - with its poisonous messages of hate and paranoia - has played an important role in recent years. But even those who have access to alternative sources of news still subscribe enthusiastically to the view of unsullied Serb innocence.
Back in the winter of 1996, things seemed very different. The streets were filled with the deafening sound of thousands of whistles calling time on the Serb leader. The banging of pots and pans every night at 7.30pm was supposed to drown out the lies of TV news. Milosevic briefly seemed doomed, and a healthy Serbia seemed to be emerging. It was all an illusion. Nowadays many of the pot-bangers sit nodding in agreement in front of the TV news.
In recent weeks Nato has sought to highlight the demonstrations against conscription in Serb towns, as a way of proving that support for the regime is less solid than it was. Up to a point. But an unwillingness to allow your sons to be killed is rather different from understanding why your country is under attack in the first place. This far more important change is yet to come.
For the moment, most Serbs have a clear rule of thumb for assessing the accuracy of a news report. If the report shows others in a bad light, it is accurate; if it shows Serbs in a bad light, it is a malicious invention.
As the experience of modern Germany shows, there is nothing pre-programmed about lunacy. Germany was a normal country before 1933 and is a normal country again today. Just as a sane country can turn mad, a mad country can eventually become sane once more. But the change cannot happen overnight. A deep-seated sense of victimhood has helped to reinforce the sense of being misunderstood. In effect the Serbs ask: "How can we be guilty, we who have historically suffered so much? My forefathers fought bravely for a just cause. My country is less rich than many of the nations who accuse us. Therefore my country is free of sin." This conclusion leaves something to be desired in the logic department. But it accurately reflects the Serbs' guiding philosophy of life: once a victim, always a victim.
In short, winning the war against Slobodan Milosevic will be the easy part. Turning Serbs back into sane citizens of the world will be more difficult. If a Serb tells you that this is an unwarranted slur on a brave nation, just ask him or her why Albanians are fleeing Kosovo. Ask what happened at Srebrenica. And get ready for a depressing reply.
Or why don't we look at the last few days news from Britain and see what your precious Albanians are up to - reports of them stabbing, murdering, violently robbing, rapist trafficking gangs - violence and crime in spades and in a NATO country. It's how they show their gratefulness for NATO bombing for 'saving' them. Doesn't seem the human rightsters are pressuring Britain for oppressing them and to have them released from jails as they did to Serbia for jailing Albanian criminals. It's interesting that Britain is a big pusher of the Bad Serbs/Good innocent Albanians when Albanians are so often in the violent crime reports within Britain and essential no Serbs committing any violence in Britain the last decade...or two...or three...or ever!
Murder suspect 'could be near'Dec 20 2006
By Robert DexTHE prime suspect in the Aaron Stokes murder investigation could be living a few miles from the victim's home,police believe.
Aaron, 24, was killed in a communal room at a homeless hostel in Queens Road, New Cross.
He had been having sex with Renata Mitre when her illegal immigrant brother, Gerald, 20, walked in on them.
Renata, originally from Albania, is said to have covered up for her brother -telling police a mystery intruder murdered Aaron.
This story gave him enough time to go into hiding.
Two violent robbers fail to have sentences cutDec 20 2006
THE husband of a woman violently robbed by her own brother-in-law says he is relieved the thug has failed to win a cut in his sentence.
Eddie Niyazi welcomed the judge's refusal last week to reduce Okan Gench's prison term for orchestrating the raid on his house in Shirley where his wife, Sevgul, was attacked.
The 32-year-old mum was gagged, thrown to the floor, punched in the face and stomach and had her hair chopped off.
Two other gang members entered the house posing as postal workers, put scissors to her neck and said they would cut up her baby boy if she did not tell them where the couple kept their money.
Gench, 38, from north London, had admitted his part in the crime as ringleader and getaway driver, but argued his guilty plea had not been taken into account at sentencing.
He was appealing at London's Criminal Appeal Court alongside another gang member, Panagiotis Giannopoulas, 22, of no fixed address, but both were ordered to serve their full sentences.
At Croydon Crown Court on May 25 both had admitted robbery and false imprisonment. Gench, married to Mrs Niyazi's sister, was given 12-and-a-half years in jail and Giannopoulas was given 10 years.
After being told that the appeals had been thrown out, Mr Niyazi, 32, said: "Now I know they have been refused, that's fantastic. I feel like they should have got even longer, most definitely.
"This man who I loved so much has ruined my life.My wife is mentally scarred. When the doorbell rings she starts panicking. The damage done can never be repaired."
He said the family had since sold their house in Wickham Road, but have had three house purchases fall through and are now living in one room of his mum's house in Croydon.
In sentencing the pair,the judge at Croydon Crown Court described the offence as "horrific, calculated, ruthless and cold-bloodedly executed".
The gang-of-four had gone to the house on October 5 last year where two of them, Giannopoulas and Robert Nezha, 23, tricked their way in with Nezha wearing a Parcel Force jacket and carrying a package.
Gench waited in the car while Kosovan Altin Ibrahim waited out-side. Mrs Niyazi was inside with her two-year-old son having just taken his five-year-old brother to school.
The gang fled with £8,500 in cash and a large amount of jewellery. Their car was stopped by police minutes later. Nezha received 11 years in jail and Ibrahim seven after both admitted their part in the crime.
Lord Justice Moses, Mr Justice Elias and Judge Martin Stephens rejected Gench and Giannopoulas's appeal.
Lord Justice Moses said: "Whether full credit was given or not was, in our view, immaterial. The sentence of 12-and-a-half years imprisonment for Gench for setting up this offence was fully justified.
"The sentence on Giannopoulas for entering the house and taking part in the violence visited upon the victim was fully merited. This was the most serious type of robbery in a private house one could imagine."
Sex slave gang jailed for 50 yearsAN Albanian crime gang who trafficked women into this country to work as sex slaves has been jailed for more than 50 years today.
The gang of six men and one woman were found guilty by a jury at Manchester Crown Court.
The court heard the gang had worked with criminals currently being investigated by police in Lithuania to target and lure two young women living in rural villages on the false promise of work in a bar or as a cleaner in England.
But after landing on British soil, one woman was told she had been sold to Albert Rama from Enfield in Essex for £4,000 and the other that she had been sold and would be put to work in a Manchester brothel to earn him money.
Today Judge Anthony Ensor branded what they had done, an "evil trade" involving the, "degradation, exploitation and abuse" of young women who were, "naïve, unable to speak the language and without friends in an alien country."
"It is a form of 21st century slavery which is an affront to civilised society," he said.
The court heard both women managed to escape by contacting their families and police in this country.
They have now returned home to the families with the help of police and are now trying to get on with their lives.
Today police welcomed the men's sentence.
Detective Inspector Michael Fraser of Greater Manchester Police said: "Historians tell us that slavery ended 200 years ago, but these convictions highlight that slavery in the form of human trafficking for sexual exploitation is very much prevalent today.
"The suffering that the victims have had to endure is incomprehensible to the vast majority of people. I would like to extend my thanks to them.
"They have been left scarred and emotionally traumatised by their ordeals and have shown great bravery in working with the police and attending court to give evidence in a foreign Country.
"I only hope that they will now be able to rebuild their lives back in Lithuania."
Klenton Ismaili, 28, of Cross Road, Coventry was jailed for nine after being found guilty of two counts of people trafficking and inciting prostitution for gain.
He cousin Vladimir, 32, of Harnall Lane, Coventry was charged with the same offences plus blackmail and false imprisonment.
He disappeared before the trial began but was found guilty and sentenced to 14-years in his absence.
Ndricm Kaci, 27, of Park Avenue, Nuneaton was jailed for nine years for false imprisonment, causing or inciting prostitution for gain and trafficking; Sajmir Hysa, 25, is to be sentenced later today after pleading guilty to false imprisonment, controlling prostitution for gain and trafficking.
He is already in jail for a string of armed robberies.
Ilir Eezi, 35, of Wareham Street, Crumpsall was jailed for eight years After being found guilty of false imprisonment, trafficking and causing or inciting prostitution for gain.
Albert Rama, 24, of Cracknell Close, Enfield, Essex was jailed for 11 years for trafficking, inciting prostitution and two counts of rape.
The woman gang-member from Coventry was jailed for three years after being found guilty of two counts of people trafficking and causing or inciting prostitution for gain.
The judge gave her a more lenient sentence because he said she had once been a victim herself and was under pressure.
However, since you brought up the Albanians, it is true that I and most Americans are grateful for their steadfast support in the War on Terror--troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq since the beginning; here's a photo:
Albanian Commando troops participate in a ceremony at Mother Teresa Airport before leaving for Iraq. Parliament has approved increasing the number of soldiers in Iraq. [Gent Shkullaku]
A KLA commander testified last month, that the KLA did order Albanians to leave after NATO started bombing. He said just before the KLA was to pull out, after NATO started bombing, he ordered the people to leave, but sometimes they chose not too.
That's something the writer of your piece is ignorant of - the KLA ordering out the villagers.
Additionally a German journalist, of military background, who knew KLA commanders, said they had priority lists of villages to be evacuated 2 months before the bombing started. And indeed, these very villages were evacuated at the start of the bombing.
Yep, Joan--that's it all right. The Albanians ethnically cleansed themselves out of Kosovo just to make the Serbs look bad! Thank you for reinforcing the point of post # 186 above.
Why did they leave only after NATO bombing?
Because the Serbs didn't start pushing them across the border into Macedonia and Albania until NATO started bombing.
Duh.
Same stupid arguments forever.
STILL no answer , Red6
I'll repeat the question , just for you.
( You haven't answered .
When your "Serb killing" heroes , Muhammed Atta , Bin Laden , Zawahiri , et al , redesigned the NY skyline on 9 11 did you cheer ( after all , your heroes were murdering more Infidels ) or weep ( this time the Infidels weren't Serbs but U.S. citizens )?
Tough call? )
My. It really is a tough call for you .
And why are you STILL unable to condemn your SS hero ? The Germans are ashamed of what the SS did in the Balkans . Why aren't you ashamed of your hero ?
Priceless , Red6 , simply priceless .
You claim to be a US soldier yet you defend Al Qaeda . Do your buddies in the army know of this ?
I guess it explains why Bin Laden is still running round , free as a......erm......an Islamist terrorist .
Talk about bizarre .
And you can't even condemn Izetbegovich's relationship with either TWRA or Bin Laden .
Welcome to the bizzaro world of Red6 .
It's even better than you thinking you're an expert because you dredged up some quote from Wikipedia . Wiki "oh my God" pedia .
Do keep on posting , the Christmas re runs don't touch your posts for sheer entertainment value .
Hey , glorious and wise Hoplite , you've yet to tell us why you rave so much over Dr. Balls research . Pray tell , oh wise one .
The Albanian head of state , Berisha , is the same guy who invited the EIJ into Albania . To this day , at the trials in Egypt , the EIJ are known as "the Albanian Returnees " .
Guess who was a member of the EIJ?
a) Mickey Mouse
b) Donald Duck
c) Hello Kitty
d) Al Zawahiri , the Al Qaeda number two and definitely the brains behind the terror . He convinced Bin Laden to strike at the US .
There , I made it real simple .
ALMOST correct , Mark Mark , almost . It was in fact "A KLA commander" , not Joan , who testified under oath that the KLA ordered out ethnic Albanians from Kosovo .
A KLA commander .
You were almost there , Marky Mark . Well done , and keep on trying . There's a boy , I'm sure Mumsie is impressed .
Joan . Marky Mark thinks you're a KLA commander .
That's up there with Red Adare's posts .
I can see it now . Las Vegas . And a new comedy double act takes the Strip by storm . Laugh along with Mark and Red .
Who said that double acts were a thing of the past .
Your comment to Red6
"I think you're the only person I've seen on here who actually defends what was done to the Serbs."
Not only that , but he can't see , for the life of him , the problem of his hero , Izetbegovic , meeting with Bin laden AND the TWRA ( they were behind the FIRST attempt on the WTC )
Think of him as one half of a very funny double act . A kind of post modernist brand of humour . Irreverent and very ironic .
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