FPIF Strategic Dialogue |
Serb Demonization as Propaganda Coup
Edward S. Herman | April 6, 2009
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
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This is part of a strategic dialogue on Yugoslavia. See John Feffer's opposing argument here, and their respective responses here.
The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day.
The demonization flowed from the gullibility of Western interests and media (and intellectuals). With Yugoslavia no longer useful as an ally after the fall of the Soviet Union, and actually an obstacle as an independent state with a still social democratic bent, the NATO powers aimed at its dismantlement, and they actively supported the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Kosovo Albanians. That these were driven away by Serb actions and threats is untrue: they had their own nationalistic and economic motives for exit, stronger than those of the Serbs.
Milosevic's famous speeches of 1987 and 1989 weren't nationalistic — despite the lies to the contrary, both speeches called for tolerance of all "nations" within Yugoslavia. He also never sought a "Greater Serbia," but rather tried to maintain a unified Yugoslavia, and when this failed — with the active assistance of the NATO powers — he tried, only fitfully, to allow stranded Serb minorities to stay within Yugoslavia or join Serbia, a matter of obvious "self-determination" that NATO granted to Kosovo Albanians and everybody but Serbs (for documentation on these points, see this Monthly Review article I co-authored with David Peterson in October, 2007).
Biased Reporting
Many well-qualified observers of the Bosnia wars were appalled at the biased reporting and gullibility of mainstream journalists, who followed a party line and swallowed anything the Bosnian Muslim (and U.S.) officials told them. The remarkable inflation of claims of Serb evil and violence (and playing down of NATO-clients' violence), with fabricated "concentration camps," "rape camps," and similar Nazi- and Auschwitz-like analogies, caused the onetime head of the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, Lieutenant Colonel John Sray, to state back in 1995 that
America has not been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and escalate the Vietnam War…Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian Muslim government…have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine. A strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the US State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.
Numerous others made the same point: Cedric Thornberry, a high UN official who investigated atrocities in Bosnia wrote in Foreign Policy in 1996 that
By early 1993 a consensus developed — especially in the United States, but also in some Western European countries and prominently in parts of the international liberal media — that the Serbs were the only villains…This view did not correspond to the perceptions of successive senior UN personnel in touch with daily events..[and one kindly soul at UN headquarters] warned me to take cover — the fix is on.
The same point was made by Canadian General Lewis Mackenzie, who insisted that "it was not a black-and-white picture and that 'bad' buys had not killed 'good' guys. The situation was far more complex" (Globe & Mail, July 15, 2005). The same was said by former NATO Deputy Commander Charles Boyd, former UNPROFOR Commander Satish Nambiar, UN officials Philip Corwin and Carlos Martins Branco, and former U.S. State Department official George Kenney. But anybody who parted from the party line was ignored or marginalized.
When George Kenney changed his mind from anti-Serb interventionist to critic, he was quickly dropped by the mainstream media. Journalist Peter Brock, who wrote "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," in Foreign Policy's Winter 1993-1994 issue, which documented systematic bias and errors, was viciously attacked and driven into multi-year silence. A reporter like David Binder of The New York Times who refused to adhere to the party-demonization line was soon taken off the beat.
An important part of the fix was dishonest demonization, as with the famous August 1992 picture of Fikret Alic, an emaciated prisoner behind barbed wire in a Serb "concentration camp." But the UK journalists had pushed forward a man who was sick and quite unrepresentative: the barbed wire was around the journalists, not the camp, and it was a transit camp, not a concentration camp. Western journalists went berserk over these alleged camps, but failed to report the Red Cross finding that "Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all run detention camps and must share equal blame." John Burns' Pulitzer for 1993 was based heavily on his interview with an alleged Serb killer-rapist, Borislav Herak, who later confessed that after torture he had recited lines forced on him by his Bosnian Muslim captors.
The joint Pulitzer winner in 1993 was Roy Gutman, who specialized in hearsay evidence and handouts from Croatian and Bosnian Muslim propaganda sources. Gutman never got around to Croat and Muslim camps. His and other journalists' claims about "an archipelago of [Serb] sex-enslavement camps" were spectacular and wrong — ultimately, there were more credible affidavits of Serb than Bosnian Muslim women rape victims. (For an excellent discussion of the wild news reports versus ascertainable facts, see Chapter Five of Peter Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting [GM Books, 2005]). All these journalists portrayed the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegović as a devotee of ethnic tolerance; none ever quoted his Islamic Declaration, which proclaimed that "there is neither peace nor coexistence between the 'Islamic religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions." For an extensive discussion of Izetbegović's close relations with Iran and commitment to an Islamic state, see John Schindler's Unholy Terror (Zenith Press, 2007), which I reviewed in Z Magazine.
Retaliation
Another part of the fix was the failure to pay any attention to crimes that preceded brutal Serb actions. This was frequent, although there certainly were cases where the Serbs (mainly paramilitary forces) struck first. But the tit-for-tat was common and much of it, and many of the mutual fears, were traceable back to the mass murders — disproportionately of Serbs — of World War II, the Nazi occupation, and Croatian fascist Ustasha. This background of truly mass killing was blacked out in the mainstream propaganda system.
Most important in recent tit-for-tat was the Srebrenica case, where the background to the Serb behavior in July 1995 was (and remains) ignored. You won't read in the U.S. press the claim by veteran British journalist Joan Phillips that by March 31, 1993, "out of 9,300 Serbs who used to live (in the Srebrenica municipality), less than 900 remain…only three Serbian villages remain and around 26 have been destroyed." ("Victims and Villains in Bosnia's War," South Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992 — published in 1993). Many more were destroyed after that, and a 1995 Serb monograph entitled The Book of the Dead listed 3,287 Serbs from the Srebrenica region who were killed in the three years before July 1995. Serb forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic and his team uncovered over a thousand Serb bodies in the Srebrenica area well before July 1995, and General Lewis Mackenzie has stated that "evidence to date suggests that he (Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim commander in Srebrenica) was responsible for killing as many Serb civilians outside Srebrenica as the Bosnian Serb army was for massacring Bosnian Muslims inside the town." Stankovic and the Serb authorities could never get the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or Western media interested in these massacres.
A microcosm of the bias of the ICTY can be seen in its treatment of Naser Oric. When a video turned up in 2005 showing an alleged Bosnian Serb execution of six Bosnian Muslims (its provenance and authenticity uncertain), this received widespread and indignant attention in the West, and was alleged to be a "smoking gun" proving the 8,000 executed at Srebrenica. But there are more clearly authentic videos that Oric showed to Toronto Star journalist Bill Schiller and Washington Post reporter John Pomfret, in which Oric brags about the Serb killings and beheadings displayed for them, and claims to have killed 114 Serbs in just one of these incidents. Pomfret had a single back page article on this, Schiller two, and otherwise silence reigned. Nobody said this was a "smoking gun" proving that Serb victimization in the Srebrenica area was massive and that the supposed "demilitarization" of that "safe area" was a fraud. There was no comment when it took the ICTY till 2002 to indict Oric, charging him not with killing but failure to control his subordinates in six cases, and ultimately throwing out the case on a technicality. The ICTY never took evidence from Schiller or Pomfret, and failed to use the videos they had seen as part of the evidence.
The ICTY also failed to take the evidence of Ibran Mustafic, a Bosnian Muslim official in Srebrenica, who in his recent book, Planned Chaos, declares Oric to be "a war criminal without par," and describes personally observed gruesome murders by Oric. French General Philippe Morillon, was also not called, although he had testified in the Milosevic trial, claiming that Oric "took no prisoners," and that his mass killings from the "safe area" had been the key factor in explaining Serb vengefulness in their takeover of Srebrenica.
The ICTY wasn't an instrument of justice — it was a faux-judicial arm of NATO, created to service its aims in the Balkan wars, which it did in numerous ways. But a key role was to focus on, demonize, isolate and condemn Serbs, who were the NATO target. Whenever NATO needed a lift, the ICTY was there to help — indicting Karadzic and Mladic explicitly to remove them as negotiators at Dayton; indicting Milosevic in May 1999 just as NATO was starting to draw criticism for its bombing of Serbian civilian facilities (war crimes). For crushing analyses of the ICTY and its role, see Travesty by John Laughland (Pluto Press, 2007) and Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away with Murder (Pluto Press, 2004).
Inflated Killings
Inflating Serb killings was institutionalized early in the Yugoslavia conflict, crucially helped by media and liberal-left gullibility. There was huge dependence on Bosnian Muslim and U.S. officials, who lied often, but were never doubted by the press. In the case of the infamous Markale Market massacre on August 27, 1993, timed just before a NATO meeting at which bombing the Serbs was approved, key experts and observers on the scene — UK, French, Canadian, UN, even U.S. — were convinced that this was carried out by the Bosnian Muslims. But this could make no headway in the mainstream media. The Bosnian Muslims claimed 200,000 dead by early 1993 (and of course, exclusively Serb concentration and rape camps) and it was swallowed, along with the alleged drive for a "Greater Serbia."
The same inflation took place regarding Kosovo both before and after the bombing war, with an alleged pre-war genocide and a more wildly claimed bombing-war genocide (with the State Department estimating as many as 500,000 Kosovo Albanians murdered). These were all big lies. The 200,000 (later, up to 300,000) has shrunk to 100,000, including about 65,000 civilians, on all sides in Bosnia. The prewar Kosovo toll was diminished to some 2,000 in the year before the bombing, a majority of them victims of the KLA rather than the Serbs (according to British Defense Secretary George Robertson), and the body-plus-missing total for Kosovo during the bombing war contracted to some 6,000-7,000 on all sides. But there were neither apologies nor reassessment from the mainstream media or liberal apologists for the "good war."
They still have Srebrenica. But like the other inflated or untrue elements of the demonization process, they have it by cheating. There's no doubt that there were executions at Srebrenica, but nothing like 8,000 and very possibly not any more than the number of Serb civilians killed by Naser Oric in the Srebrenica areas, as suggested by General Lewis Mackenzie (who in my opinion was conservative on this point). The morality tale rests heavily on failure to acknowledge that Srebrenica wasn't a demilitarized "safe area" but a protected Bosnian Muslim military base that had been used to decimate the local Serb population. It also rests on the failure to see that the massacre was immensely useful, like the Markale Market massacre, with the hope and expectation that it would produce a NATO military response. Bosnian Muslim leaders were crying "genocide" even before the Serbs captured Srebrenica.
It also rests on numbers manipulation. There were only about 2,000 bodies found near Srebrenica after intense searches over the next six years, not all Bosnian Muslims and those that were not necessarily executed. There had been intense fighting outside Srebrenica, but it was convenient for numbers inflation that these deaths could be ignored and any "missing" could be assumed executed.
The idea that the Serbs moved several thousand bodies en masse has never been plausible: Trucking them would have been easily caught by satellite surveillance — no such pictures have been produced — and some of the alleged new graves were closer to Srebrenica than the alleged places of removal. The belated grave findings after the year 2000 have been under the control of the Bosnian Muslim leadership, which has provided disinformation from 1992 on a very consistent basis. Their post-2000 findings and DNA identifications have been further compromised by their very unscientific handling of the body remains (in the ground five or more years), their inability to distinguish between bodies killed in fighting and executed, or those that may have died before or after 1995, and their frequent timing to reinforce political events.
The continuous publicity over Srebrenica, like its initial surge, has been hugely political — this selective and inflated victimization has political payoffs for the victims and their patrons, along with psychological rewards in inflicting pain on longstanding enemies and targets. And in this case, the imperial rulers aren't only able to point to an allegedly justified "humanitarian intervention" to help cover over their larger plans in a global projection of power, but they have been able to transform the Balkans into a staging ground for NATO's post-Cold war expansionist order.
Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, is the author of many books on economics, foreign policy, and the media, including Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (with Philip Hammond, eds., Pluto, 2000).
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Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies.
Recommended citation:
Edward S. Herman, "Serb Demonization as Propaganda Coup," (Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, April 6, 2009).
Web location:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/5973
Production Information:
Author(s): Edward S. Herman
Editor(s): Emily Schwartz Greco
Production: Jen Doak |
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| Name: |
DefenderOfTruth |
Date: Apr 06, 2009 |
| Nobody is saying that there weren't any Bosnian Serb victims in the war but facts speak louder then propaganda and the facts clearly show that it WAS the Bosnian Serbs who are most responsible for committing war crimes, ethnic cleansing, rapes, the setting up of concentration camps, and implementing the policy of murdering an forcefully displacing non-Serbs from large parts of the country. As objective analysis shows, the vast majority of the civilians that were murdered in the war were Bosniaks. The vast majority of ethnic cleansing campaigns were orchestrated by the Bosnian Serb leadership and the only proven genocide that occurred was the one carried out by the Bosnian Serbs in the town of Srebrenica. Also let us not forget that it was the Bosnian Serbs who brutally laid siege to Sarajevo for 3 years and murdered over 10,000 civilians. Was the complete destruction of Sarajevo by the Serbs in front of international TV crews a propaganda exercise in your opinion? Are the dozens of mass graves in which Bosniaks were dumped after being murdered around Srebrencia clever propaganda tools used to fool the media? Please do not play the "all groups are equally to blame" card that war criminals like Radovan Karadzic so effectively played in the war in order to mask the massacres that the Bosnian Serbs were committing all over eastern and northwestern Bosnia during the war. Would you consider the NAZIs to have been demonized by the media? Does the intentional large-scale killing of thousands of innocent civilians not deserve to be demonized? One should not blame all Serbian people of course but their leadership during the war were true cold-hearted killers and no sympathy must be awarded to them in the hopes of making the victims seem like the aggressors and rewriting history to exonerate the aggressors, which were the Bosnian Serb political and military leaders and their fascist followers. |
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| Name: |
Mike |
Date: Apr 06, 2009 |
| Finally!!! It's just a shame though that all these findings will fall on deaf ears. The Serbs continue to be demonized even today. But I'm sure that has more to do with setting up that region for the next war that's already planned. I watched CNN during the war. All they played during primetime were the lies the you mentioned above... in the wee hours of the morning, sometime around 4a.m., they'd play a reel of Croatian, Albanian and Bosniak terror for all of 5 seconds. I don't watch CNN anymore. |
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| Name: |
Edin |
Date: Apr 06, 2009 |
| Keep feeding those lies to yourself and others like you, if it makes you sleep better at night. This is possibly the biggest piece of written propaganda I have read in recent years. |
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| Name: |
Patriot |
Date: Apr 06, 2009 |
| Dear readers,
This article for well documented reasons is nothing more than an attempt to blur truth about the war in Bosnia and its etiology. The article hides the facts, minimizes well documented data and ignores reality.
It was not Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia (which made only 43 % of entire population only) who wanted and eventually declared independence of Bosnia but more than 60 % of Bosnians, including Bosnian Croats and some Bosnian Serbs. In the later case of Monte Negro (one of six Yugoslavanian former republics with huge Serbian population) it was enough that 51 % of entire population vote for independence to get independence (which eventually happened), but in the case of Bosnia more than 60% was not enough to persuade Serbian nationalists not to initiate war conflicts and to listen to the voice of majority of Bosnian citizens (if we are to follow the principle of majority). However, majority of Serbs ignored the voice of majority (at least in the case of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia) for the simple reason: they and their officers had almost absolute control of entire weaponry of former Yugoslavia, which was paid for be all Yugoslavanian ethnicities and not only Serbs. The Yugoslavanian Army entirely put itself on the side of Serbs wherever they waged the wars, while Bosnian Army had to defend the territory using guns made of water tubes! The first negotiating argument of Serbs in Bosnia, for your inforamtion Mr. Herman, were guns and shelling weaponry which they had plenty because all other ethnicities in Yugoaslavia paid for that with their taxes and then the weaponry ended in the hands of Serbs. And everybody in this world knows that when starting the war side with overwhelming military power does not care much about peaceful and diplomatic negotiations! As simple as that!
As for the minority status of Serbs of Bosnia and right for referendum, Serbs in large waves moved to Bosnia from other Yugoslavanian Republics during comunist regime. War criminal Radovan Karadzic himself was not born in Bosnia but in Monte Negro and then moved to Bosnia. His brother and relatives still stay in Monte Negro and his mother few years ago died in Monte Negro! Giving Serbs who 40 years ago moved to Bosnia right to divide is equal to giving the right to American Arabs to have an Islamic state in USA! In addition to that two facts are important: 1) Bosnian borders (just like any other former Yugoslavanian republic) were clearly established by communists from all ethnicities themselves during Second World War in Jajce and Mrkonjic Grad (two Bosnian cities) and they need to be respected. 2) In terms of ethnic demography Bosnia looked like tiger skin with ethnic spots intimately intertwined and with Muslims (for example) being overwhemingly majority in Bosnian cities on Drina river which stands as natural border between Bosni and Serbia. In such ethnically intertwined country any kind of internal division is introduction to ethnic conflicts, which Serbs actually were just looking for because they had entire weapanry of Yugoslavnian Army and accordignly did not have much of reason to negotiate, and that is exactly what they did. the rest is horrific history which Mr. Herman is not ready to aknovledge in which more than 50 % of killed Bosnian Muslims are civvilians according to well documenetd statistics of foreign authors! Let him explain to us that in Republic of Srpska almost all mosques including more than 4 centuries old historical and cultural monuments such as Ferhadija mosques in Banja Luka (today capital of Republic of Srpska), Aladza in Foca were mined and destroyed! Such thing did not happen with Orthodox churches in parts of Bosnia contorlled by Bosnian Army! Only this year Serbian Orthodox Church decided to remove the church it built on remainings of the mosque in 100% Muslim village of Divic, which Serbs destroyed during the war and only after the Church was paid more than 100 thousands of US dollars to cover expenses of removal!
However, definitely not all Serbs are devils and they are invited and welcomed to peacefully coexist with all other ethnicities in Bosnia. Unfortanetely, it remains the fact that majority of them obviously supported politics of Radovan Karadzic and their likes that resulted in inhumane attrocities and massive destructions in Bosnia. The only question are Serbs ready to distance themselves from such politics and their results.
I invite the author to open his senses, heart and mind to the facts. Otherwise, the suggestions of the article will remain to be nothing more than an attempt of defying of facts, human reason and intelligence, insult to those who suffered from the politcs of Serbian nationalists in region, and blinding for all people trying their best to understand dynamics behind the Balkan wars.
Best regard,
Reader from USA |
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| Name: |
Mike |
Date: Apr 06, 2009 |
| You obviously have no idea what was going on in the former Yugoslavian war or should I say Serbian war that left quarter of a million people dead mostly Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats! Milosevic'c famous speech did in fact call for greater Serbia and he tried to accomplish this by attacking every neighboring country and whipping out everything that was not Serb that is a fact... I was there and have witnessed all of it!! It is same as saying Holocaust never happened! |
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| Name: |
mario |
Date: Apr 06, 2009 |
| You perpetuate the myth that all the parties involved in the conflict were equally guilty. By bringing up the issue of “aggressor and the victim”, placing Serbia and Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo on the same defendant`s bench was “tasteless in relation to values of the western civilisation”. The only crime bigger than the war crime is the post war one, for which the aggressor is absolved. Let there be no doubt, Serbia is guilt as sin of the wars and massacre at Srebrenica, Vukovar...
Yugoslavia Serbia and Milosevic's frenzied butchers will undoubtedly be a shameful part of history. From my point of view, the FPIF Editor could have made a decisive statement that it would no longer tolerate genocide but it didn’t. I would ask of you do research on your text. Respect the people and places you write about. And don’t fall into the trap of writing sensationalism. There are enough politicians out there twist the truth and tell us lies. |
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| Name: |
Anonymous |
Date: Apr 07, 2009 |
| I just have to correct some of the myths you have portrayed in this piece and there are many!
Firstly, let us have a look at what is titled 'biased reporting. I want to use this particular incident to highlight my point.
On November 20, 1991 headlines around the world screamed "Croatian Militias Slit Throats of 41 Children". Reuters news agency reported: The children, between 5 and 7 years old, reportedly were found with their throats cut in the cellar of the kindergarten in Borovo Naselje after Croatian forces abandoned it during the weekend". The children were, according to the report, all Serbs.
This story demonstrates mythology in the making. It was carried on every electronic network and in newspapers throughout the world without any form of confirmation. That the village in question had been under siege for months, that all children had been evacuated months before, and that obviously no kindergarten classes had been held anywhere in the war zone for some time did not seem to catch the attention of a single editor. The following day some papers ran the Reuters retraction in small print after the twenty-two year Serbian photographer, Goran Mikic, admitted that he had fabricated the story. In Belgrade, the press never printed the retraction and in fact later cited the non-incident in its news coverage as a part of its propaganda campaign against Croatia.
Propaganda is defined as information and opinions, especially prejudiced ones, spread to influence people in favor of or against some doctrine or idea. Myth is defined as an old traditional story or legend. Mythology represents a body of myths. Over the past seventy years a great deal of propaganda has become mythology with a life of its own, growing and changing with each retelling. Myths were not only resurrected and embellished by propagandists, but by well-intended journalists and others attempting to understand and to justify the Serbian wars of aggression. Regardless of the motivation of those who repeat the myths, the result is always the same. Another generation is introduced to the mythology created to keep the Croatian nation in bondage.
I am sure you have found many instances of Serb propaganda that you refuse to see past because it does not fit into your anti-West views.
Secondly, I would like to debunk your part about 'retaliation' resulting from WWII atrocities.
World War II came to Yugoslavia as a direct result of the pro-Axis sentiments of the Serbian controlled Yugoslav government. Under Prince Paul Yugoslavia moved steadily away from France and toward Germany after the death of King Alexander. As early as February of 1936 Hitler promised to support the government of Premier Milan Stojadinovic.
By 1937 Stojadinovic had visited Mussolini, developed his own squad of "Green Shirts" and adopted the Nazi salute. It was perhaps taking the title Vodja (Fuhrer) that finally sent Prince Paul into action, replacing Stojadinovic with Dragisa Cvetkovic who maintained the same pro-Axis foreign policy but with fewer Fascist trappings.
Prince Paul saw the Third Reich as the only power able to maintain the artificial state of Yugoslavia and he began secret negotiations with top Nazi officials in December 1939. He hoped that he could become King under the New Order, denying the young Crown Prince Peter his title. Yugoslavia joined the Axis on March 24, 1941. The only member of the government who refused to sign the "Pact of Steel" joining the Axis was the Croatian minister, Vladko Macek of the Croatian Peasant Party. After the signing Cvetkovic assured Hitler that Yugoslavia "...would be ready to cooperate with Germany in every way." In fact, Paul had been cooperating since 1939 with mass arrests of Jews, strict racial laws, and the prohibition of trade unions. By 1940, legislation had been passed limiting the types of businesses which Jews could own, direct, or work in and severely limiting educational access for Jews. A secret protocol was attached to the Axis pact which promised Yugoslavia access to the Aegean Sea at the expense of Greece in the New Order.
Coup and Invasion: On March 26, 1941 two Serbian generals, Bora Mirkovic and Dusan Simovic, led a British-assisted coup against the Cvetkovic government. The Anglo-American press went wild with stories about the Serbs' stand against the Axis. In fact, the coup had its roots in both foreign and domestic policy.
Lost in the mythology is the fact that the generals did not think Germany would invade and wanted to maintain cordial relations with the Axis. On March 30 the Yugoslav Foreign Minister made a formal statement to the German envoy that the new government respected the Axis pact and that Simovic was "devoted to the maintenance of good and friendly relations with its neighbors the German Reich and the Kingdom of Italy." Simovic believed that his close personal friendship with several top Nazis, especially Reichmarschall Goring, would save the day. His error led to a German invasion on April 6.
Before seeing a single German soldier, the Serbian-led army withdrew from Slovenia and Croatia to defend Serbia, leaving the Croatians and Slovenes without supplies or ammunition. Most Croatian soldiers simply went home. The Yugoslav military disintegrated at first sight of the Germans as 100 of 135 generals in the top-heavy Serbian officer corps surrendered during the first week. Belgrade was taken by a single platoon of Waffen-SS shock troops led by a second lieutenant on April 12. As General Simovic and his government fled the country with millions in gold, only the Croatian Peasant Party minister Vladko Macek stayed to share the fate of his people.
Once a safe distance from the fighting, Simovic immediately announced that Yugoslavia had fallen because of the Croatians, all of whom were traitors and Fascists. Ignoring the military abandonment of Croatia and Slovenia, the mass surrender of the Serbian officer corps, and the obvious fact that the entire government had fled, Simovic announced that Serbia had been stabbed in the back.
The Yugoslav ambassador to the United States, Konstatin Fotic, worked overtime spreading the tale that Yugoslavia had been defeated only because of Croatian disloyalty, despite the fact that his cousin headed the new pro-Nazi government in Serbia and that another cousin was leader of the Serbian Nazi Party.
The Croatian State: Croatia was occupied by Germany and Italy and divided into German and Italian occupation zones. The Independent State of Croatia was established with the consent of Germany and against the expressed wishes of Italy which wanted to make it an Italian Kingdom. Italy went so far as to name a "King of Croatia" who never set foot in his erstwhile kingdom. The Croatian government was led by Ante Pavelic and his Ustase movement. Pavelic had been an elected Deputy in Parliament and vice-president of the Croatian Bar Association when Alexander declared the dictatorship and dissolved Parliament. Pavelic founded the Ustase in exile with the aim of liberating Croatia by force. When war broke out, underground Ustase throughout Croatia took control of the government well before the Germans arrived. As in the Soviet Union, when the Germans did arrive, they were at first welcomed as liberators. The new Croatian government adopted German racial and economic laws and persecuted Jews, Serbs, Communists, Peasant Party leaders and others. While fighting primarily for its own survival against Serbian Cetniks who wanted to restore the Serbian monarchy and the Communist-led Partisans, the Croatian State joined the Axis and later sent troops to the Russian front.
While the majority of the Croatian people favored an independent Croatian state, many did not support the Ustase regime. 'When the war broke out there were fewer than twelve thousand members of the movement representing less than one per cent of the Croatian population. At its height in 1942, there were only sixty thousand Ustase. Over sixty per cent were from impoverished Western Herzegovina with a strong anti-Serbian sentiment from the dictatorship of Alexander. Some twenty per cent were Muslims who joined in direct response to Serbian massacres in Bosnia. The leader of Croatia's popular Peasant Party was jailed by the regime during the War.
Many members of the Croatian officer corps were pro-Allied and supported the Croatian Peasant Party. In September 1944 pro-Allied officers attempted a coup against Pavelic. The plotters had been promised an Anglo-American landing in Dalmatia and would have turned the Croatian Army against Germany to support the Allied invasion. The landing never took place. Dr. Ivan Subasic of the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile learned of the plot and informed the Soviets. Stalin immediately contacted Roosevelt and informed him that any such, action would be a violation of the Tehran agreement dividing Europe into spheres of influence. Roosevelt canceled all plans for the landing but British secret channels withheld the information from the Croatians on the premise that any revolt, even one doomed to failure, was better for the Allied cause than nothing.
Serbia and the Cetniks: In Serbia, a new pro-Nazi government was first established under the leadership of Milan Asimovic and later under former Minister of War General Milan Nedic which governed until 1945. Nedic supported Hitler and met with him in 1943. This new government established even harsher racial laws than Prince Paul had enacted and immediately established three concentration camps for Jews, Gypsies and others. Nedic formed his own paramilitary storm troops known as the State Guard. The Guard was comprised of former members of the Cetniks which had existed as an all-Serbian para-military police force under Alexander and Paul to enforce loyally from non-Serbian members of the armed forces. When Yugoslavia disintegrated, one faction of cetniks swore allegiance to the new Serbian Nazi government. Another group remained under the pre-war leader Kosta Pecanac who openly collaborated with the Germans. A third Cetnik faction followed the Serbian Fascist Dimitrije Ljotic. Ljotic's units were primarily responsible for tracking down Jews, Gypsies and Partisans for execution or deportation to concentration camps. By August 1942 the Serbian government would proudly announce that Belgrade was the first city in the New Order to be Judenfrei or "free of Jews." Only 1,115 of Belgrade's twelve thousand Jews would survive. Ninty-five per cent of the Jewish population of Serbia was exterminated.
Still other Cetniks rallied behind Draza Mihailovic, a 48 year-old Army officer who had been court-martialed by Nedic and was known to have close ties to Britain. Early in the War Mihailovic offered some resistance to the German forces while collaborating with the Italians. By July 22, 1941 the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile announced that continued resistance was impossible.
Although Mihailovic and his exiled government would maintain a fierce propaganda campaign to convince the Allies that his Cetniks were inflicting great damage on the Axis, the Cetniks did little for the war effort and openly collaborated with the Germans and Italians while fighting Ustase and Partizans. At its peak, Mihailovic's Cetniks claimed to have three hundred thousand troops. In fact they never numbered over thirty-one thousand.
Mihailovic was executed in 1946 for treason. The extent of Cetnik collaboration with the German and Italian armies as well as their vicious war against the pro-Allied Partisans is well documented in dozens of books, including Professor J. Tomasevich's scholarly and definitive work The Chetniks.
The Partisans: The Partisans, founded by Josip Broz Tito, a Croatian Communist, represented the only true resistance to the Axis in Yugoslavia during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of Croatians joined the Partisans and thirty-nine of the Partisan's eighty brigades were Croatian. On June 22, 1941 Croatian Partisans began what would come to be known as the War of Liberation in Yugoslavia. On July 13, 1943 a Democratic Republic of Croatia under the leadership of Andrija Hebrang was declared in those areas occupied by the Croatian Partisan forces. As the war progressed more and more Croatians, especially from Dalmatia, joined the Partisans. Serbs joined in great numbers late in the War as entire Cetnik units changed their allegiance. By 1943 Allied support shifted to Tito and by 1944 the Partisans were the only recognized Allied force fighting in Yugoslavia. The complexities of World War II saw Croatian fighting Croatian, Serb fighting Serb, and both fighting each other as well as German, Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian forces. Both Serbia and Croatia, like Finland, Hungary, France and virtually every other nation in Europe, were occupied by the Axis and had governments which collaborated with the Axis. Both Croatia and Serbia also had Partisan governments fighting for the Allies. A half century later Germany and Japan were again great world powers and Italy was a full partner in the European community while Croatia, having been occupied by Germany and Italy, continued to be tarred with the brush of Fascism by Belgrade's mythology. After the war, the reformed Yugoslavian army and government was quickly filled by the majority Serbian population. To this affect, though it was Croatian Communists who started the resistance against the Axis powers, it was the Serbians who created a power-vacuum.
I could go on and on here but would it be worth it? |
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| Name: |
Benjamin |
Date: Apr 07, 2009 |
| Oh my god. Do you really believe in this revisionist history? Did Slovenes, Croats or Bosnians attack Serbia or other way around. Not to mention Kosova, which was part of Serbia, but autonomous. Why? Why the revision of history and defense of murderers and criminals? Articles like this will spin Bosnia back into 1991. Please stop! |
|
| Name: |
Elton |
Date: Apr 07, 2009 |
Is this article for real? Mr. Herman is dealing with number of victims as if they were financial reports, this number on non-Serbian is equal to this number of Serbian corpses. Sometimes is better to write nothing.
There were atrocities on both parts that is for sure. But is a mistake to compare an organized army with guerrilla groups. It is clear who has the responsibility and who decides to make peace. |
|
| Name: |
George |
Date: Apr 07, 2009 |
| This article is shameful. Shame on you! Yeah, and Jews and Nazis share the responsibility for what happened during the WW2. Shame, shame, shame! |
|
| Name: |
JC |
Date: Apr 08, 2009 |
| Fantastic article, thanks for writing it! |
|
| Name: |
Andrej |
Date: Apr 08, 2009 |
| Great article, which obviously hit the spot! Just to see all these "history and current affairs experts" attacking Herman...tells you all really. If you want to check how right is Ed Herman and this article, just see the testimony of Lord Owen in Hague or read one of the few interviews of Lord Carrinton about Wars in Yugoslavia. Both of them were EU envoys in Yugoslavia at the begining and during the wars. Bravo Mr Herman, so factual and so good! as always! |
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| Name: |
Sirena |
Date: Apr 08, 2009 |
| check also: http://www.electricpolitics.com/2009/03/the_balkan_chameleon.html |
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| Name: |
Joe Public |
Date: Apr 08, 2009 |
| Re: Posted Comments
Those who got the actual Bosnian Civil War casualty number right (in the area of 100,000, as opposed to the flawed 200,000 and over figures) continue to be slurred by a coterie of anti-Serb nationalists, as well as piously misinformed neoliberals and neoconservatives. The trumping up of casualty figures to gain favor is extremely disingenuous.
None other than the not so Serb friendly Warren Zimmerman acknowledges that the Slovenes provoked the short war they had against the then Yugoslav government. JNA casualties in that conflict included Slavic Macedonians.
It's off the wall false to deny the nationalist fault lines among some Croats and Bosnian Muslims.
Anti-Serb/pro-Izetbegovic propagandists downplay how a good number of Bosnian Muslims (supporters of Fikret Abdic) opposed Izetbegovic's nationalism.
As for the lauding of Tito, the Chetniks of Mihailovich opposed the Nazis before him. Why? At the time, Tito was a Soviet stooge. He only started opposing the Nazis after the USSR was attacked (recall the Hitler-Stalin pact). Mihailovich's Chetniks aided about 500 Anglo-American airmen shot down over Yugoslavia. So much for anti-Serb misinformation which attempt to equate Mihailovich with the Croat Ustasha Pavelic and Bosnian Muslim SS Hanschar. Overall, ther's no comparing Serb WW II manner to that of the Croats. The Nazis recognized Croatia as a state unlike Serbia - the former which was treated as a Nazi occupied territory without even the window dressing of a nation status like pro-Nazi Croatia under Pavelic.
BTW, since when do civilian dead automatically mean that one side was more just than the other? many more Japanese civilians died during WW II than American civilians.
Izetbegovic and Tudjman were nationalist goons, who didn't have as great a military capability as the Serbs. These two fiends resorted on propaganda to win over foreign support for their efforts. Moreover, many Croats in Bosnia fought the pro-Izetbegovic Muslims and at times the former sided with the Serbs (in addition, there was the mentioned Bosnian Muslim supporters of Abdic, who fought with the Serbs and Croats against Izetbegovic's forces).
It's false to assert as established fact that 7000 or more Muslim males were summarily executed at Srebrenica. If anything, the actual evidence puts that claim as a most dubious one.
The Serb shelling of Sarajevo involved armed pro-Izetbegovic Muslims in that city who bullied non-Muslims. FACT! |
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| Name: |
J. P. Maher |
Date: Apr 08, 2009 |
| The "Srebrenica Massacre" was unreported and even unmentioned for weeks after the purported event.
Atrocity stories are a classic and effective way to motivate hatred against an enemy you are out to destroy. Poland attacked Germany on 1 September 1939, right? The British press in 1914 had “Huns” raping every maiden in Belgium. The “Ulster Massacre of 1641” was a hoax by London to foment hatred of the Irish; it was intended to “justify” all-out war for centuries on the Irish, citing numbers of victims that were astronomically in excess of the number of Protestants in Ireland. And then there’s that big hit ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” which “proved” that Jews were out to exterminate Gentiles.
WHEN DID THE “PRESSTITUTES” (thanks for that to Ilana Mercer) FIRST START USING THE PHRASE “The Srebrenica Massacre [of x-thousands of Muslim men and boys]”?
When did the “Srebrenica Massacre” story break?
No reports from 10 July 1995 and the immediately ensuing days and weeks ever refer to “the massacre of Muslim men and boys”. The numbers ranged from 2,000 to 8,000 and 10,000...
From Iran, no mention of a massacre having taken place:
“Iranian foreign minister [Velayati], in a message to the UN secretary-general, has asked for immediate action to PREVENT a massacre of the defenceless people of Srebrenica by the Serb rebels. SOURCE: Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1, Tehran, in Persian 0930 gmt 11 Jul 95; Source: Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1, Tehran, in Persian 0930 gmt 11 Jul 95; SECTION: Part 4 Middle East; THE MIDDLE EAST; IRAN; ME/2353/MED. Message to UN secretary-general. Text of report by Iranian TV on 11th July.
From the front, no mention of a massacre having taken place:
Reports from the front in mid-July 1995, e.g. Chris Hedges in the New York Times of 18 July 1995, reported that thousands of armed Muslim fighters “slipped” through Serb lines under fire and arriving safe in Tuzla, held by Muslim forces (and a US garrison).
The lag time between as yet unbaptized “Srebrenica Massacre” on 10-11 July 1995 and the first press reports is over a month. David Rohde, who spearheaded the story that became known as “the Srebrenica Massacre”, did not himself use any such phrase or make such a claim. In his story in the Guardian of 19 August 1995 we find “…I saw what appeared to be a decomposing human leg protruding from freshly turned dirt…” He repeated Albright’s fabrication about a massacre in a soccer stadium in a nearby town, [where] human faeces, blood, and other evidence indicated large numbers of people were CONFINED, and PERHAPS shot.” Also: “United Nations official estimate that 4,000 to 6,000 Muslim men are still MISSING in the wake of the Srebrenica and Zepa ASSAULTS.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski:
The news would have still been hot when Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote an Op-Ed piece in “The New Republic” of 7 August 1995, under the headline: AFTER SREBRENICA. Zbig Brzezinski says only that something awful “MIGHT” happen.
Nowhere does Brzezinski mention a “Srebrenica massacre”. That catch phrase does not appear until weeks after the alleged event. It will not be found in the press until the American-sponsored Croatian “Storm” (Oluja) on Serb Krajina in August-September 1995.
(In)Consistency: Madeleine Korbel Albright, whose “Albright Group” now has the franchise for the cell phone business in Kosovo, brought the earliest allegation of a POSSIBLE Serb massacre of Muslims on August 11, 1995. But the chief United States delegate to the United Nations told a closed session of the Security Council only that 2,000 to 2,700 MISSING “Bosnians” (i.e. Muslims; Serbs and Croats, like “Diocletian” are Bosnians, too) from the Srebrenica enclave MIGHT HAVE BEEN shot by the Bosnian Serbs.– She did not use the formulation “Srebrenica massacre.”
So, the numbers in Albright’s document and subsequent tellings and re-tellings are not consistent.
LEXIS-NEXIS searches now permit us to track down and date press reports on whatever story. Readers can see for themselves what results turn up in searches dated between 10 July 1995 and the beginning of October 1995, using parameters such as
(Srebrenica AND massacre) (Srebrenica AND missing) Srebrenica AND 7000 OR 8000) (7000-8000 men and boys) …
(Koranically, once boys attain the age of fifteen, they are “warriors” for Islam.) Remember boy bombers in Israel.
Did the Srebrenica Massacre” happen? Draw your own conclusions.
Why the absence of reports of a “Srebrenica Massacre”? Simple. There was nothing to report. That is, until the US needed a lie to smokescreen Europe’s biggst ethnic cleansing since World War II. This was “Storm”, i.e. Honest Bill Clinton’s US (MPRI) attack of August-September 1995 on Krajina’s native population, Serbs.
This was Europe’s biggest ethnic cleansing since World War II. It took a BIG Lie to conceal it, plus a bunch of presstitutes and a voyeuristic public that’s hooked on Cop TV shows, Judge Judy et al., Jerry Springer, Maurie Povich and RAPE headlines.
From http://www.srebrenica-report.com/numbers.htm
Mike Wallace and a score of other Free Pess newshawks went to Srebrenica in 1995. He’s not one to miss a spectacular story. He didn’t file any. |
|
| Name: |
Goran |
Date: Apr 09, 2009 |
| Thank you sir, for a well-informed article. To Mr. Anonymous, you get a B+ for a very good effort but producing text and reciting history books is not in itself a sign of accuracy or truth. And no, please do not go on, I already have a headache. For the rest of you, I'll give you a hint; just because you read it in the newspaper doesn't mean it's true. The truth generally comes out much later and is communicated by those who have had the courage to dig deeper and question the "truth" of the day. |
|
| Name: |
Steve |
Date: Apr 09, 2009 |
| The numbers are an exact thing, they speak for themselves. First of all, Serbia could not "attack" "Albania", Bosniaks, Croats... As it was the civil war, in one country that later dissolved, but the myth of Serbs attacking (i.e. fmr yugoslav army) bosniaks or kosovo albanians is like saying "US army is attacking Chicago, it's an aggression on Serbian Americans, so genocidal US army must be bombed, and Chicago put under UN jurisdiction". In its essense, it was a civil war between yugoslav loyalists (Serbs, Montenegrins, Western Bosnia muslims), and the separatists, who were heavily aided and supported by greatest powers. This is the reason why the truth is that distorted. The reason why greatest powers recognized the separatist movements (direct breach of UN Charter), and why the Serbs have been so demonized. The public does not know about NATO arming the islamist army, and the documented fact that "unarmed" Srebrenica muslims withdrew with NATO Hecklers, not some soviet Kalashnikov's. UN official reports completely disputed the victims' figures repeated over and over again in the media when it was neccessary to doctor the public support for NATO intervention. The statement that Serbs contributed nothing to the allies cause in World Wars (i.e. they are fascists, as the demonization tried to prove) is just as ridiculous as it is worthless: 70% of all males of Serbia died fighting for the allied cause in WWI showing unprecedented heroism, and that didn't stop them to have a first guerilla movement against Hitler in WWI. As almost a million of them ended their lives in Nazi Croatia concentration camps, everything that says otherwise would be real revisionism of history. Just as the anti-Serb propaganda of the 90s was.
I am astonished that fmr Yugoslav army, the one that still had majority of yugoslav-orientated communist generals, is identified as a crazed anti-"everyone-non-Serb" while the separatist forces, who were formed in public and incited and armed by BND, as lone guerilla groups. It is a historical fact that Germany "forced" the EU recognize Croatia in 1992, despite the war between loyalists and separatists, thus actively taking part in dismembering Yugoslavia. United States triggered the Bosnian war when they announced they will recognize Bosnia-Herzegovina altough it was known that the war will break out if the separatists get any support from abroad, the agreement ("Cutilheiro plan") has already been signed, meaning that Bosnia-Herzegovina remains part of Yugoslavia (i.e. no war), and bosnian muslim leader would become the president of that smaller federation. US diplomats said to Izetbegovic to withdraw his signature, as he will get all the support in the forthcoming war against Serbs and all who were pro-Yugoslavia. That is what really happened: the West was turning the blind eye to muslim arming themselves despite the arms ban, and NATO intervened on their side during the conflict, despite its own rules. The sanctions agains everyone pro-Yugoslavia had the same goal as in the case of Iraq- to weaken the country economically, to pave the path to subdue the country at the later stage, getting free access to all its resources and land.
Despite the UN data on the victims, U.S. administration kept on telling the lies on the alleged genocide in Kosovo when the public support for the intervention was needed, while German minister of foreign affairs even said that Serbs have a death camp in Pristina which is "worse than Auschwitz", while it was neccessary to explain why is Germany going to attack some other country for the first time after WWII. One thing remains very clear: The leading geopolitical analysts agree that the background of Kosovo intervention lies in the fact the Serbia and Montenegro were the last place in Europe where IMF and World Bank did not establish the financial system of the new world order, dictating terms and keeping the client obedient thru enormous debt. Some people simply call this - Neocolonialism. While it is impossible to demonstrate all the magnitude of the lies and the demonization of Serbs in few sentences, it is obvious how institutionalised and dogmatised it has become in the mainstream media: One article that exposes the truth is followed by ten articles/comments attacking it, saying otherwise. Serb guilt must be kept intact. For sure one day the truth about those victimised people will come out, I can only refer you to "jugdment", the documentary about the Serbian death camp hoax, excellent articles on "emperor's new clothes". Truth is at hand if you really look for it. For everyone else, I'll let everyone believe that NATO threw bombs on people for humanitarian reasons. For pure, selfless altruism. Just like WMD and Iraq oil. |
|
| Name: |
Steve |
Date: Apr 10, 2009 |
| to quote a comment above. "One article that exposes the truth is followed by ten articles/comments attacking it, saying otherwise. Serb guilt must be kept intact." This is my view as well. Serbs are being victimised. Yet we have learned so much in these last 20 years about how the world works. |
|
| Name: |
Nancy Waren |
Date: Apr 12, 2009 |
| I think that the USA is fascist state and that is the reason they like folks like themselves: the Croats, Bosnians and the Albanians. I do not like what the USA has become and I am ashamed of the place. I am a natural born American with family on this North American continent for thousands of years, when you count my Native American relatives among my ancestors of English origin who arrived in the "new world" 1650. The USA is going down, down....that will make the world a safer place for people who want freedom. |
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| Name: |
Daniel |
Date: Apr 12, 2009 |
| Just to set record straight with all these Srebrenica genocide deniers commenting in favor of Edward Herman.
You claim that Muslims trapped in Srebrenica raided Serb villages, but you fail to mention that Serbs around Srebrenica murdered more than 1000 Muslims in 1992. Furthermore, Serbs around Srebrenica torched Muslim villages and expelled predominantly Muslim population of Podrinje. Serbs in villages around Srebrenica NEVER demilitarized. Serb villages around Srebrenica were armed and used as bases to attack hungry Muslim population that was trapped in the Srebrenica enclave.
To view photos of Serb terror around Srebrenica, go here:
http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2008/12/bosniak-women-children-burned-alive-by.html |
|
| Name: |
anonymous |
Date: Apr 12, 2009 |
| Its hard for Bosnians to accept the facts, that they were the real murderers and animals in the war. They can't accept that they are Serbs who converted to Islam during the Ottomans, they can't accept that there is no such language as Bosnian, so why should we expect them to accept this. The main problem is that the majority of the Bosnian population is highly uneducated thus making them very controlable. This is a great article, thank you for having some courage and good luck from the backlash you are going to receive. |
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| Name: |
Zlatan |
Date: Apr 15, 2009 |
| Another article from the people who play the victims. Your race will burn in hell for what they did in Bosnia, no amount of money or apologies will bring back the people you slaughtered. I was there in Sarajevo when it was besieged for months, all those nightmarish stories you have read (Concentration camps, Rape camps) they are all true. One day we will have our revenge, there will be no Russia, or China to protect you, then we will do what you did to us. We will never forget or forgive. |
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| Name: |
L |
Date: Apr 16, 2009 |
| To Zlatan and rest of negative response to this article. Can you at all recognise how many serbs were killed and mutilated during this last war and ww2. Nothing in civil war is one sided and when winner writes history books, they are usually made up mostly to suit their propaganda. So, there are many broken hearts out there be it serbs, muslom or croats. It usually hurts only those that we love and it is easy to blame the other side. If you don't let it go, Balcan will burn in hell for ever. |
|
| Name: |
Sava |
Date: Apr 17, 2009 |
Croats like Thompson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_(band)#Controversial_statements
Croats liked Nazis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiTQbiiJRc0
Belgrade was punished on the other hand:
http://www.svetskirat.net/slike/katastrofa/beograd_1941.jpg
Nazi Croatia had 200.000 soldiers at the end of WW2. A lot for a small country of 4.5 millions of whom more than 1 million were Serbs fighting for survival!!! |
|
| Name: |
David Campbell |
Date: Apr 22, 2009 |
| Edward Herman is committed to his position regardless of any evidence to the contrary.
For example, he writes:
"An important part of the fix was dishonest demonization, as with the famous August 1992 picture of Fikret Alic, an emaciated prisoner behind barbed wire in a Serb "concentration camp." But the UK journalists had pushed forward a man who was sick and quite unrepresentative: the barbed wire was around the journalists, not the camp, and it was a transit camp, not a concentration camp."
All of his claims in this statement are demonstrably untrue. I have examined this famous image and its production in detail, and none of Herman's claims stand up. You can read the evidence at http://www.david-campbell.org/photography/atrocity-and-memory/. We have to ask why Herman is so impervious to evidence. |
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| Name: |
Goran M |
Date: Apr 29, 2009 |
| Mister Campbell, why did the English judge say the picture of Fikret Alic was misrepresented? He claimed this before he ruled that LM was liable of slander for claiming that ITN doctored the photo intentionally. |
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