Posted on 02/21/2003 8:23:13 AM PST by Destro
Serbian Orthodox suffer
At least 110 Serb Christian sites (churches, monasteries, graveyards etc.) have been damaged or destroyed in Kosovo since the United Nations took control in June 1999.
Most recently, a church building in the village of Ljubovo was completely destroyed by an explosion in the early hours of 17 November last.
A second explosion damaged another church in the town of Djurakovac. The bombings came on the eve of a visit to Kosovo by UN General Secretary Kofi Annan.
Church leaders and Orthodox worshippers also face violence and hostility from ethnic Albanians, especially where UN checkpoints in the vicinity of churches have been withdrawn in recent months.
Ethnic Albanian Muslim extremists regard churches as symbols of Serbian domination and see them as legitimate targets.
Hell, bucky, if you went into MY mother's house with a gun, and she had a hand grenade, she'd kill you too! Everyone has a right to self defense. And I might add a Bosniac treading into a Serb garden with a weapon is not likely to be welcomed with open arms. There's a technical term for this. I think the word is 'war', isn't it?
No. I'd call that civil war in practice. (A friend of mine who is a military historian says he won't touch the US Civil War because 'it was all amateurs and dilletantes.' Thus so. The war you just described is war as it has been traditionally fought through the centuries: round up a bunch of guys, give them pikes (or in the modern day AK47s), and tell them 'the front is that way comrade'. Think of it as War On The Cheap.
...what ever. Most of the Sebrenici dead where shown to have bullet holes in the front from distances not point blank...might as well accuse the Germans of mass murderer at Verdun.
You're partly right. I heard a presentation from an ICTY guy who said that about 1500 of the 8000 Sreb dead were considered "legitimate combat casualties," in that they were technically fleeing at the time they were shot rather than captured, and thus outside the purview of the Court. War happens. But the rest? The ones hat were captured? Check the ICTY web site for the judgment on Krstic: http://www.un.org/icty/krstic/TrialC1/judgement/index.htm.
But the Sreb dead were definitely forensically proven to be Bosniac/Muslims from their IDs and pocket litter etc. No question of them being Serbs.
Of course, if you don't accept the ICTY as having any validity at all, then there's no point arguing.
Just so. Although I understand they want to round up a bunch of others, and haven't yet unsealed indictments against them.
Don't worry. We have ALL the time in the world to track down the war criminals of all sides. (Cue Al Stewart's song "Running Man.")
That's my question: SOMEBODY had to investigate what happened. They didn't just gin this up out of thin air. It's based on real evidence, that Krstic and his lawyerS (plural) were able to challenge.
They ain't perfect. But SOMEBODY had to investigate what happened. They did. They found that the charges were true. They prosecuted. They found him guilty.
Problem is, tovarshch Stavka me boy, is that you're playing an endless game of move-the-goalposts. Every time I show evidence or quote evidence used in an official capacity, you come up with some nonsensical reason why it can't be true. You never try to back up your version of events with counterevidence; you just wave away what the rest of the civilized world knows to be true.
Back to Kravica. Look. The bodies they found had bullets in them from the same weapons that put bullets in the walls of the Kravica barn. DNA in the blood and brains on the wall matched DNA of the dead. It happened. Deal with it. Don't turn away from it. They spent a hell of a lot of time and a hell of a lot of effort bringing in third parties, including Americans, to establish what happened.
Now if you think that it was all Some Grand Conspiracy To Screw Serbia, you can go on living in Cloud Cuckoo Land if you wish. Fact is, the guys who looked into the slaughters for a living took it really seriously and told the truth about what they found. It wasn't just some grand conspiracy. We don't do business any other way in the West. It's too damned hard not to.
Like I said. JAG for MND(N) HQ on Eagle Base. I got to travel around a lot because SOMEONE had to go check out claims of maneuver damage before we paid. If some schmuck claimed we ran over his cornfield with a tank, I had to go out and check it out and measure the "tank tread" to see if it was one of ours or not before we told him to screw himself. That's why I got to travel so much. Think of it as a sort of insurance claims investigator. Not much fun, but at least I got the hell off Evil Base more often than most and got to meet people. And just as you did most of your interaction with Serbs out of Ugly, I did most of my interaction with Bosniacs, most of whom were pretty decent people (while, ahem, I did find that it's awful hard to outrude a Serb).
So don't think I'm some naive schmoe. I've been lied to by professionals from all THREE ethnic groups. My job was to sort truth from lies.
Mine was a year, and we didn't see all this evidence. Now, considering we were there just after the war, I'd think that there would be a lot more evidence...yet...where was it?
Oh, there sure was/is a LOT of evidence if you want to look for it. Don't trust the ICTY? Or the UN? There's the official Dutch government report, which the Dutch did NOT want to release because it would (and did) cost them their government. And the investigators, the forensics guys at the ICMP HQ in Tuzla, etc. all love to discuss their work, within reason. Just a matter of knowing who they are and making friends. There are also a hell of a lot of books out there now. (Though you really REALLY need a good BS-detector for the native stuff.)
As for access to the evidence.... I'm a lawyer of course, and I used to do a lot of crim work, so collecting info on the war and the crimes during the war was a particular interest of mine. It's what I did in my spare time. I just made a point of noting the stuff I heard and saw; after all, I needed some reason to justify why I had to spend x months of my life out there. And again, I'm not bad at picking out "no-$#!+-there-I-was" war story tellers vs. true atrocity survivors. You can't make it in the legal world if you can't tell when your client is a lying sack of $#!T.
For instance: A man describing thirty people being machine gunned while talking to you over a beer is probably lying. One who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and who checks the windows and doors for eavesdroppers six times before he talks is probably not.
There's a ton of evidence out there, if you want to go look. On the other hand, no evidence will convince those who don't want to look.
You were there way too late to find out what happened. You, as JAG, theorize to what transpired and can only assume.
The ICTY only pushes their own agenda, who in part are funded by the US. Therefore, they push the US agenda. Why do you assume they are always right and all the ones that are Pro-Serb or one that sides with the Serbs are chocked full of propoganda or lies? It has been clearly shown the past twelve years the lies exhibited and demonstrated by the Muslims and NATO/US.
Fact is, video of Jihadest mass murdering Serbs, and absolutely no move against said Jihadest. That is the reality of the UN/ICTY. 6,000+ Serbs were butchered by Oric and his gang in and around the area of Sebrenicia...no one talks about that. The biggest ethnic cleansing and mass murder was of Serbs by Croats, no one again talks about that...especially since the very nations that sponsor the ICTY trained and equiped the Croats for Operation Storm. That is the reality.
Is the same group who claims 300,000 dead (Richard Holbroke's book "End a War" You have to read the last two paragraphs, this is much too hilarious. I had milk running from my nose from laughing too hard, anyone involved or in the know of this truth, can only wonder why this person and others involved can get away with these fricking lies. I guess they control the internal and external media leaks/sources/outlets. Who controls the media, wins the war. Regardless what your handlers trained you to spew, I have known US soldiers who were threatened with court-martial for them saying the US sided with the wrong side or saying how the Musim/Croat Army is in support or compliance with the Jihadians in-country.
OR the attempt of NATO/US to cover up their role and responsibility in destroying a once co-existing multi-ethnic state with the encouragement of declarations of independence? Not only were the Serbs the first one to sign the Lisbon Agreeement in 1992 to avoid war, then only to have the Muslims say they can not agree in "clear conscience" AFTER they already signed on. This is after Wm Zimmerman INFORMED Alija the US WILL support any decision he declares.
Fact is, if you guys post for each other and nobody challenges you, then what you post may actually be believed by the ignorant. That's why I'm here.
If you want to think that it's All A Grand Conspiracy To Screw Serbia, knock yourself out. The fact is, it wasn't. And you know it wasn't; you just don't want to admit that the Serbs blew it big time when they went stupid-crazy at Sreb and lost the war. Anything but admit that to the world, much less to yourselves.
Aaaaaant. Wrong answer. They have identified by name 7028 named dead who were known by Dutchbat to have been in the city at the time the city fell and who haven't been heard from since. ICTY estimates from the sattelite photoes that there were maybe another thousand that they didn't name. Hence the 8000 number. There were certainly 4000 known Sreb dead -- identified by forensics (i.e., pocket litter, known time of death, etc) at the ICMP Tuzla Morgue; there were a large number of mass graves from the Sreb area that haven't been excavated yet because the Tuzla Morgue is now full and they haven't buried the dead there yet.
You were there way too late to find out what happened. You, as JAG, theorize to what transpired and can only assume.
I am not 'assuming' any more than you were--were any of YOU at Srebrenica? But I'm no generator of smoke: what I have is more than war stories; I m quoting evidence presented by the UN, the ICTY, the ICMP, and the Dutch government in their official reports on what happened there.
And as for determining the value of evidence, well, that's what trials are for. And the ICTY has determined what has happened through a trial process, where the main perpetrators, starting (but please God not ending) with Krstic, were confronted with full and formal evidence of what transpired. He was granted hundreds of thousands of dollars for his own defense and a team of lawyers of his choosing to challenge the evidence. They convicted him, for one simple reason: He did it, he was in command. The charging document, you can look it up, is very long and highly detailed.
The ICTY only pushes their own agenda, who in part are funded by the US. Therefore, they push the US agenda.
What is the ICTY's agenda? To bring the perpetrators of war crimes to justice, in accordance with the authorization granted them by the UN Security Council in 1992. (If you think they get together with the Elders of Islam to conspire against the Serb People, knock youself out--if you need to comfort yourselves with lies.)
As for the US agenda? It's this. (Actually since you won't believe ANYTHING I write, since it threatens your entire worldview, I'll tell the LURKERS what the US agenda is.) The US agenda is this: 1) Stop the people of the former Yugoslavia, ALL of them, Croat, Serbs and Bosniacs/Muslims, from killing each other and once stopped, keep it from resuming. 2) Creating some semblance of order in Bosnia and Kosovo so that people can live their lives. 3) Bring the perpetrators of the major crimes that happened during the war to justice. #3 is necessary in order to maintain #1. You think it's some vast conspiracy to screw Serbia? Hell no. We never wanted to go into the former Yugoslavia; we got dragged in there by circumstances YOU GUYS created, and pretty much we had to make up our policy as we went along.
As for why we had to jump in to stop the mass killing? This is Europe, dammit; we don't want people to get the impression that you can commit mass atrocities there again: somebody, oh like in Germany, may notice you can commit genocide and get away with it. Can't have that.
Why do you assume they are always right and all the ones that are Pro-Serb or one that sides with the Serbs are chocked full of propoganda or lies? It has been clearly shown the past twelve years the lies exhibited and demonstrated by the Muslims and NATO/US.
Because that's the case. The fact is that you guys HAVE been lying to yourselves massively since the very beginning of the war in Bosnia. Likes like, 'To Arms, Serbs, for the Muslims want to marry all your daughters four per male!' Or 'All the Churches in Gornja Tuzla Have Been Burned by Muslim Terrorists!' (when there haven't been any churches in Gornja Tuzla since the 15th century). Or my favorite: Biljana Plavsic accusing Sarajevo city leaders of feeding Serb children to Sarajevo zoo animals during the siege (the zoo animals in question were all dead at that point). In short, the Serbs practiced classic Big Lie techniques from the beginning of the war to justify what they wanted to do: create an ethnically pure homeland where only Serbs would live, preferably in houses that used to belong to their neighbors. The war was, in short, a combination of land-grab and grab-the-neighbor's-TV-set, with a cover of Nazi propaganda to justify it.
When I have used the term 'Nazi' to describe the Serbs in Bosnia, I have to be careful: I don't believe that all Serbs are or were Nazis. A lot of Serbs were perfectly decent human beings. BUT. Some of them acted like Nazis.
I apply that term to two groups of people: the executioners such as the men of Drina Corps who commited crimes such as Sreb, who acted exactly like SS executioners. I also apply that term to the RS government leadership who used Nazi propaganda techniques to convince Serbs that their neighbors were about to come into their homes and 'marry their daughters' and so on, to whip ignorant locals into ethnic cleansing attacks against their neighbors.
I know that not all Serbs acted that way. Some Serbs acted with decency and humanity toward their opponents and neighbors and many Serbs fought honorably and observed the laws of war. But those who committed the atrocities must be brought to justice. And the fact is that, once you strip away the war propaganda, far more Serbs committed war crimes than anyone else in Bosnia.
As for the Serb regions in Croatia, again, the Serbs had a decent case to make at the start of the war: but they drove out all the Muslims and Croats from those regions, which really ticked off the rest of Croatia. And when Croatia retook control of the areas, huge numbers of Serbs fled. Whether they were 'ethnically cleansed' or whether they left of their own accord is hard to assess: the Croats say 'fled', the Serbs say 'cleansed.' That's why 'ethnic cleansing' as such is not a crime that can be tried in The Hague; it's too he-said-she-said. But war crimes, with bodies and known victims and dates and actors who can often benamed individually, are a different story.
Look, the crimes happened. The ICTY brought some of the perpetrators to justice. If you want to think it was a grand conspiracy, go ahead. It certainly must be more pleasant to pretend than confront ugly reality.
I should add 4): figure out some way to get US soldiers the hell OUT of the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately that will probably take about 40 years.
Read now what George Kenney, former State Department undersecretary (1992) in charge of the Yugoslav desk and rather with anti-Serb attitude like you (George Kenney in 1992:"We spare no effort against Iraq, but we let the Serbs get away with murder. That's why I left the State Department.") wrote in the NY Times Magazine about the victims in Bosnia in 1995 the following:
George Kenney
The NY Times Magazine, April 23, 1995
- George Kenney, a Washington writer, resigned from the State Department int 1992 to protest United States policy Yugoslavia. -
ALL TOLD, HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE DIED IN BOSNIA? For news organizations and policy specialists, the easy answer is 200,000. As someone who have followed the conflict closely from the begining in a proffesional capacity, I'm not convinced. Bosnia isn't the Holocaust or Rwanda; it's Lebanon.
A relatively large number of white people have been killed in gruesome fashion in the first European blowup since World War II. In response, the United Nations has set up the first international war crimes trial since Nuremberg. But that doesn't mean the Bosnian Serbs' often brutal treatment of Bosnian Muslims is a unique genocide, as the United Nations and the Bosnian Muslims have charged.
There can be no minimizing of what the Serbs have done in Bosnia. Their punishment of the Muslims far outweighs any Muslim transgression. For there to be peace in the long run there must jusitice. Yet the more serious the charge, the more effort we must make to get the facts right. We should think twice before revising historical fact into a fearful epic that plants the seeds for a future war.
By my count, the number of fatalities in Bosnia's war isn't 200,000 but 25,000 to 60,000 -- total from all sides. What surprises me is not that the popular figure is so inflated -- informed people can and will argue about it for some time to come -- but that it has been so widely and uncritically accepted.
The notion of hundreds of thousands of deaths emerged late in 1992, when "ethnic cleansing" was in full swing and journalists suspected the State Department of concealing its knowledge of a Bosnian killing field. It didn't. Its real failure was knowing nothing and not wanting to know.
In August 1992, shortly before I resigned as acting head of the State Department's Yugoslav desk, I wrote a memo suggesting that we send teams to investigate, and was rebuffed. At that time my most dire concern was a C.I.A. report predicting up to 150,000 deaths through the winnter if the West did nothing. Leaked in September, the report seemed tame next to a prediction of 400,000 deaths, made by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Special Envoy, Jose-Maria Mendiluce, a man, one senior United Nations official says, "gifted with theatrical flair." As it turned out, the winter was exceptionally mild. Few died.
Nevertheless, revelations of ethnic cleansing, combined with the C.I.A. and United Nations predictions, created expectations. Images of a killing field lingered, personified in grim photographs of skeletal Muslim men in Serbian concentration camps. That backdrop made it easy for Haris Silajdzic, then Bosnia's Foreign Minister, to give the first big boost in the number of deaths. In December 1992, he told journalists that there were 128,444 dead on the Bosnian side (induding Croats and Serbs loyal to the Bosnian Government). He evidently got the figure by adding together the 17,466 confirmed dead and the 111,000 that the Bosnian Institute of Public Health had estimated to be missing. An able politician, Silajdzic understood the benefit of apparent slaughter. In the West, it meant political support; in the Islamic world, much-needed donations to lubricate the Bosnian war machine.
At first, such high numbers didn't take. But on June 28, 1993 -- as near as I can pin it down -- the Bosnian Deputy Minister of Information, Senada Kreso, told journalists that 200,000 had died. Knowing her from her service as my translator and guide around Sarajevo, I believe that this was an outburst of naive zeal. Nevertheless, the major newspapers and wire services quickly began using these numbers, unsourced and unsupported (Mea culpa: I used the figure of 200,000 dead in articles and speeches for a while in 1993.) An inert press simply never bothered to learn the origins of the numbers it reported.
Today, Silajdzic, now the Prime Minister, routinely talks about genocide and the "Bosnian holocaust" with nary an eyebrow raised in his audience. But there was no holocaust. For Bosnia, an area slightly larger than Tennessee, to have suffered more than 200,000 deaths would have meant roughly 200 deaths per day, every day, for the three-plus years of war. But the fighting rarely, if ever, reached that level. After the Serbs carved out the areas they wanted in 1992, fighting declined steadily, reaching a virtual stalemate by autumn 1993. Now on the front lines, combatants often shoot past each other, tacitly understanding that in a low-intensity war nobody wants to get hurt.
Outright warfare, therefore, has probably resulted in deaths measured in the tens of thousands, induding civilians. If there were huge numbers of other dead, they would be accounted for only by systematic killing in concentration camps or the complete, as- yet-undiscovered extermination of entire villages.
Neither the International Committee of the Red Cross nor Western governments have found evidence of systematic killing. Nobody, moreover, has found former detainees of concentration camps who witnessed systematic killing. Random killing took place in the camps, but not enough to account for tens of thousand of dead. And, apart from the few well-known massacres nobody sees signs of missing villages, either.
The Red Cross has confirmed well under 20,000 fatalities on all sides. Extrapolating from that and from the observations of experienced investigators in Bosnia, its analysts estimate total fatalities at 20,000 to 30,000, with a small chance that they may exceed 35,000.
Analysts at the C.I A. and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research put fatalities in the tens of thousands but hesitate to give a more precise range until the war is over. European military intelligence officers with extensive experience in Bosnia estimate fatalities in the mid tens of thousands. From these and other estimates by generally reliable relief workers, and given the arguments about the physical impossibility of high numbers, I arrived at the range of 25,000 to 60,000 fatalities.
The question of how many fatalities there have been in Bosnia is far from academic. Many wars, maybe all -- but this war especially -- are fought for prestige and honor, not rational reasons. Many atrocities in the former Yugoslavia have been justified as revenge for killings during World War II. Yet the number of fatalities in Yugoslavia during World War II was also never documented. In fact, interpreting those numbers today defines your brand of ethnic nationalism. Thus, people in the Balkans think the number of fatalities makes a difference -- and since they do, so should we. The difference could be between getting a settlement in our lifetime and waiting generations. Not to break the cycle is a grattuitous, even immoral error.
Red Cross officials, normally secretive, surprised me by warmly embracing a public airing of the question. Their worry is that obsessive attention to Bosnia will come at the expense of the world's ability to allocate humanitarian resources among similar or more serious wars. Of perhaps greater long-term concern to them is that wild inflation of Bosnian fatalities will discredit reports of subsequent atrocities.
There is always a tension between moral outrage at particular horrors and the effort to put them into perspective. Michael Berenbaum, director of the Holocaust Research Institute at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, deftly explains: "The Holocaust has raised our tolerance for ordinary evil. This forces people to make their own plight more Holocaust-like." Bosnia was an ideal candidate for such an image make-over, since in the early confusion of ethnic cleansing and concentrauon camps American uncertainty about what was happening made our worst fears seem quite real.
Those who sounded the early alarm profoundly believe that "Never again" means "Never again." Preventive concern, however, evolved perversely into a distorted picture. My sense is that the chorus warning of genocide gradually got taken over by those who sought to stampede the United Sutes into unilaterally lifting the arms embargo against the Muslims. The activists half-succeeded. Though there has been no unilateral lifting, recent polls suggest that a large majority of Americans believe that the Serbs committed genocide. It may already be too late to change that perception.
Magnitude matters. As Berenbaum notes genocide with a small "g" (in which we might lump Bosnia with East Timor, Liberia, Guatemala, Sudan and Chechnya, among a score of others) is quite different from Genocide with a big "G" (the Holocaust -- and, perhaps, Cambodia or Rwanda). To their discredit, some advocates of lifting the embargo played down the difference. The emotional resonance of Genocide obscured the dismal possibility that arming the Muslims could inflame the war, killing far more than had already been killed: after a supposed 200,000 deaths, it didn't matter if additional tens of thousands died so long as we did what was "right." Like the cruel Balkan leaders themselves, advocates of arming the Muslims became strikingly callous.
In 1995, lacking the bodies, the charge of Genocide has worn thin. It seems to have almost become sensationalism for its own sake. Apart from any question of the number of fatalities, journalists have begun a hot little debate about how "objective" coverage of Bosnia has been, about whether it has tended to favor the Muslims. Several journalists with whom I spoke expressed the uneasy feeling that something was obviously wrong. In the words of the writer David Rieff, "Bosnia became our Spain," though not for political reasons, which is what he meant, but rather because too many journalists dreamed self-aggrandizing dreams of becoming Hemingway.
Who could do a reliable count? Probably not the State Department. Unfortunately, Secretary of Stae Warren Christopher folded under pressure from the interventionists and began-however furtively -- charging the Serbs with Genocide. Having thus taken sides, the State Department can hardly be expected to investigate reliably.
The United Nations is well placed, but its officials have every incentive to duck controversy. Western govermnents have repeatedly shrugged off any responsibility for an authoritative count. The news media can report figures only from others; it does not have the access needed to compile its own numbers. And the Balkan people can't be trusted.
The only other possible sources are nongovernmental organizations like the Red Cross, and their counting criteria vary greatly. But a neutral source is important. As long as the world tosses around words like "genocide" so loosely, the present tragedy will revolve endlessly. Counts count.
The New York Times Magazine, "THE BOSNIA CALCULATION: How many have died?", April 23, 1995
http://www.balkan-archive.org.yu/politics/war_crimes/srebrenica/bosnia_numbers.html (<- click)
homeagain balkansvet, whose victim of Islamist propaganda are you? On what sources the western "neutral" countries rely on? Have you ever thought about that. Even such a high US authority like George Kenney (and rather anti-serb - read his statement again) who was officially specialized for this very subject Bosnian war, admits in this article that he was misled by Mr Haris Silajdzic Muslim Propaganda ref. the Muslim victims in Bosnia in order to get support from the West and from Islamic countries. Explain me that.
Ref. the Serbian victims: You explained me that there is no evidence that Serb civilians were killed by Jihad Mujahedeen Bosnian Muslims. How this fits in your Silajdzic argumentation?
Karadjordje
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