The Dubrovnik and Bosnia-Hercegovina Deception

The following is a book review and testimony from American professor and veteran of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), John Peter Maher, who visited the former Yugoslavia several times during the 1990s, both before the wars there began and during them. His observations remain essential for any truthful historical review on what really went on over there, as opposed to the "facts" that were fed to the public via the media. Ravnagora.

Here’s a novelty. An honest book on the Yugoslav war has managed to get into print. An Irish Army officer Brendan O’Shea has published “The Modern Yugoslav Conflict 1991-1995; Perception, Deception and Dishonesty”. He shreds the propaganda put out by the U.S. and its allies, that their war was a noble intervention for humanitarian ideals. On this Walter J. Rockler, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, quoted Ibsen: “Don’t use that foreign word ‘ideals.’ We have that excellent native word ‘lies.’ ”

O’Shea’s is not the only book to focus on propaganda and deception, but one of the few that deal with “Western” war propaganda in Yugoslavia. Another book. contrariwise, omits the war in Yugoslavia, though its author was all over the place during the war. This is “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” (2006), by NY Times man Stephen Kinzer. His book is currently (January 2009) being promoted, courtesy of the Pritzker Military Library in a series broadcast on TV station WYCC in Chicago. Kinzer’s work would be quite a decent primer if re-issued with two caveats:

a) Everything in Kinzer’s book is known to everyone literate in the history of US diplomacy, and

b) Kinzer does not once mention the biggest U.S. Overthrow previous to the Shock & Awe and Mission Accomplished in Iraq.

The Irish soldier O’Shea concentrates precisely on what the newsperson Kinzer omits. O’Shea experienced the war in Yugoslavia in 1991-1995 and concluded that the whole mess was a Big Lie. The Irish well know Perfidious Albion. See O’Shea’s works on the Irish War of Independence.

If ever there was a CNN war, this was it. I was a Fulbright linguistics lecturer in Yugoslavia from February to July 1990, which put me in a position to follow developments before the press declared war in 1991. Really, the war had begun when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In 1990 the propaganda mills were revving up on Yugoslavia. I was observing things and reading the local papers, Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian.

On Bosnia and Herzegovina: Early that summer I went on my own nickel to Sarajevo. I took a room in a Muslim house in the old Turkish center. Since I knew the language I illegally avoided paying the price for foreigners. I did observe and overhear a young girl being tutored in Arabic in the mosque of Bas Carsija (the old Turkish center), but there was otherwise little sign of what was to come. Nowadays Sarajevo is “Little Teheran”, streets flowing with burqas and hijabs, de rigueur for chaste women. Schools now ban Christmas observances and require Koranic instruction, but in 1990 “modest” Muslim female dress was a rarity, even in Muslim parts of town. I noticed just one head scarf. Incongruously, the young lady wearing it was a flirt. From Sarajevo I took the train to Herzegovina. It was a short hop to Mostar, where the beautiful old Turkish bridge still stood. Croatian artillery pulverized it. Here, too, my hosts were Muslim. I got a haircut there. My jovial barber, avoiding mention of her own religion, told me her husband was Catholic. In 1990 there were 30, 000 Serbs living in Mostar, but not now. They fled for their lives in the Croatian “ethnic cleansing” of 1992. This was barely noticed in the free press.

On Dubrovnik: This legendary city has been part of Croatia for less than seventy years. O’Shea’s treatment is excellent. What I personally know is that in the summer 1990 Dubrovnik was empty of tourists. That should itself have been newsworthy, as the place was a prime tourist destination, but the newshawks were flapping their wings elsewhere.

Yugoslav newspapers in 1990 were reporting that Dubrovnik was swarming with Croatian irregular soldiers. No reports of that in the “free press”. And they were reporting that Croatian irregulars were setting up road blocks on roads south to Montenegro, harassing business people whose “lichna karta” (personal ID card) revealed probable Serb ethnicity. The papers also reported that in Croatian towns along the coast very scared Serb travelers heard the blood-curdling old World War II songs howling for Serbian and Jewish blood. One example “Mi ne pijemo vina, samo krvi Srbina iz Knina" –"We don’t drink wine, just the blood of the Serb from Knin". In 1995, after Muslims and their patrons staged the Sarajevo market place bombing in August for a casus belli, US air forces bombed Knin’s military and civilians – TV, hospitals, school. All of Krajina in Croatia was “cleansed” of a quarter of a million Serb subsistence farmers who had inhabited the region since settled there by imperial Austria before 1700.

In Zagreb, Croatia in July 1990 I read press reports about arson and demolition of non-Croatian houses on the Adriatic coast, not only Serbian, but also homes belonging to Croatian communists and even to the “westward-leaning” Catholic Slovenes. Serbs were always the biggest contingent of vacationers on the Adriatic coast, since there are twice as many Serbs as Croats in Yugoslavia anyway, and all Yugoslavs then owned the coast. No more. Slovenia now has a coast line just a few kilometers long, and Slovene fisherman have been arrested and jailed by the Croatian coast guard for violating sovereign Croatia’s waters.

Back in Chicago in the summer of 1990 a Croatian student of mine told me that her parents had just warned her that war was coming and she must stay in Chicago. She said her mother told her what was unreported in “the West” - that Croats were attacking cars with Serbian license plate numbers, sometimes pushing them into the sea. Riding in one such car, as he himself told me a couple of years ago, was the Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett. Yet another Croatian student told me her family fled to safe haven in Chicago: “They (the Croatian fascists) blew up our house.” Her family wasn't "Croatian enough".

In September 1991 Croatian propaganda, in unison with the world press, was beating the war drums. German, Dutch and Austrian papers were the most strident, claiming that the “Pearl of the Adriatic” was being reduced to rubble by the “Serb-dominated” Yugoslav navy. The commander of this Serb-dominated force was Admiral Stane Brovet, a Slovene. In Dubrovnik the first to die, a native (refugee) later told me, were a Serb couple incinerated in their car.

The German press had published a photo of a Catholic nun standing by the damaged porch railing and a festoon of St. Blaise’s cathedral in September of 1991. On March 25th, 1992 I filmed a spot on the pavement in front of St Blaise’s marked with blue spray paint. This was an instruction where street crews were to patch up a pothole where a mortar round had landed. Whose mortar I do not know. JNA units were on the sea; the mortar is an infantry weapon, not navy. Other JNA units were on some heights over the city. Croatian units were directly overhead at the old Napoleonic fort of St Sergius.

In November 1991 a dramatic photo attributed to Peter Northall (I haven’t located him) is a real prize winner. A huge black pillar of smoke towers over the customs house on the old harbor (outside the walls, of course). When I later showed a Chicago fireman a copy of the famous picture and asked him what kind of fire it was, his verdict was immediate; “a petroleum fire, oil; maybe tires, too”. I photographed the quay there on my 1992 walk-about, no traces of fire to be seen. So I tentatively consider that the blaze was aboard a boat or barge that was then towed to sea and sunk.

To flatten the Old City it would have taken the JNA (Yugoslav Peoples Army) two hours. If the “port of Dubrovnik” was being shelled, I – as a translator – was immediately aware of the ambiguity that a monoglot might not notice: I had to ask myself, “the whole city (which is a port) or the port area of the city?”. Only one way to find out. Go there. So I did, just three months after the alleged destruction. O’Shea mentions that I did a little walk-about there, on 25 March 1992, with a professional cameraman to film the Old City and environs. I immediately offered my tape to Chicago Tribune editor Richard Longworth; he sniffed, before he hung up, “That contradicts our information”.

I filmed decorations from Christmas and Epiphany (January 6, 1991) that were still up in March 1992. Presumably not much house-keeping had been done to change appearances since December. Had a ruined city been restored in just three months?

Fluff travelogues and Voice of America chat about new red or pink roof tiles. They can’t agree which. Travelers may tell you they saw roof tiles missing, but they took their pictures years later, when renovations were starting up. In 1992 the roof tiles were old and weathered, as my films attest. New Zealand’s star journalist Martin Fletcher launched the “Buy A Tile” scam that was run by the Ruder Finn PR firm. This was shut down and a Washington source has leaked confidential information that that an FBI investigation of Ruder Finn was ordered closed by the Clinton Administration.

The day before I walked through Dubrovnik, a fake air raid alarm sounded and Dubrovnik citizens ran for cover in their cellars to wait out a bombing that never came. The scare was a smoke screen, figuratively speaking: Yugoslav military intelligence, one of their number told me, observed a German freighter docked at the industrial port at Gruz, off-loading a consignment of tanks from stores of the defunct East German Army. This can only mean there was a fix in and that the army was being held back from crushing the Croat rebels against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia.

Outside Dubrovnik’s Old City at the so-called Little Belgrade – Beogradsko Naselje, literally “Belgrade Settlement”, I saw 19 substantial vacation houses of masonry construction, all blown up by explosive charges in a regular pattern. In the countryside I photographed a tiny stone-built Serb Orthodox chapel at a little known locality called “Bosanka” (Bosnian Woman). The interior was burnt out and the icon screen hacked to pieces. A little window in the apse had been plugged with stones. To prevent someone from escaping? I wondered. An empty steel barrel that had contained acid lay tipped over next to a heap of burnt organic remains. Human? There was a powerful stench.

In the Old City there was sparse damage, for example, a burnt out bar with interior walls pocked from machinegun bullets. This damage had been inflicted by rival armed Croatian gangs on the ground who were everywhere in the city. Since I am a veteran of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) trained in Serbo-Croatian, I read the language. On the front walls of the buildings along Dubrovnik’s main street (Stradun, Venetian dialect ‘big street’) I photographed graffiti reading “Srbe na vrbe, zhidove na zidove”. Meaning? “Lynch the Serbs, Jews to the Walls" (that is, to the firing squad).

Minimal damage to the Old City was also reported by Serbophobe journalist Maggie O’Kane (Guardian, BBC, Irish Times), by Stephen Kinzer (NY Times August 1992), by EU (then EEC) observers and many others.

In and around Dubrovnik I talked with various Yugoslavs, Croat and Serb, and more. A young Dubrovniker told me at lunch (risotto) how he and his neighbors – Muslim, Croat, Serb – had put out a fire set one night by Croatian fascists in the car of a neighbor. The next night they came back and finished the job. “Why’d they do it?“ I asked him. The young man’s answer: “Because he’s Serb. And I’m a Muslim.”

Dubrovnik is very Italian, not only in culinary, but also in architectural matters. A palazzo belonging to the Croat artist Ivo Grbic was the only destroyed building in Dubrovnik’s Old City. First reports erroneously said it was the Serbian church library. It was actually the Grbic house and that's where the photographer took me. The Grbic house stands several storeys high; it was gutted. Adjacent buildings were unscathed. A business shingle advertising Mr. Grbic’s studio was prominent, reading "ICONS" in English and "IKONE" in Serbian Cyrillic capitals. He had had a clientele of Yugoslavs interested in owning an Orthodox icon. The artist was subsequently summoned to the Hague to testify at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia). That was in December of 1993. At that time my videotape of Mr. Grbic’s house, made in March 1992, was screened in the court during the trial of President Milosevic. The justices and prosecutors were perplexed: “Who is this person?” Ivo Grbic’s health, alas, did not permit the rigors of travel to the Hague. Mine did. In February of 2006 I was summoned to the Hague to testify at the trial of President Slobodan Milosevic regarding what I had seen in Dubrovnik in 1992.

The Dutch authorities had less compunction about the health of the kidnapped president of a sovereign country than with artist Grbic. Not many days after President Milosevic and I conferred, his health ran out. He was found dead in his cell. Like Grbic, I didn’t get to testify in the Hague.

Don’t feel bad, Piytar: the fog is thick over the Balkans.
See this Croat’s remark

http://croatiancrescent.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html

“When I visited Montenegro, I spoke Croatian with the lady that sold me an ice cream. She said: “You speak nice Serbian”. I felt very proud, but at the same time I wondered: Who is crazy here? If the lady listens to her government, next time she should tell me: “You speak nice Montenegrin”. My CV is getting longer and longer.”

It’s better than bilocation. More angels now fit onto the head of every pin. One person can now thanks to the New World Order simultaneously speak Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Vojvodinian.

Radio Telefis Eireann broadcasts in Irish, but not in a single standard dialect. Each news reader speaks his own dialect. It’s all Irish. Could the the Irish be sane?

Tovarish Stipe Mesic, more than once I have been told by people who knew him when he was young, USED TO BE VERY HANDSOME. This time it was the duckling who was beautiful and grew up to be the swan. My remark is not intended as an argument against Stipe’s ideas. That would be a logical fallacy. It’s simply an aesthetic judgment AD HOMINEM. Now, a logically impeccable argument AD REM:

One of my espionage agents who knew the lovely duckling before he moulted says that he and his family were quite the opportunists and BIG communists in Tito Times. Stipe and family touted themselves with Soviet Russian moniker as “comrade” —TOVARISH.

Dio, you are correct about the Montenegrin boonie goons' drunken orgy of plunder up the southern coast. And quite right about the no "30,000 Ustasha" as well. So far, all factual. But only so far.

I think the above-mentioned Montenegrin rampage had a lot more to do with having a manufactured excuse to go on a grand progressive pillage party than it had to do with any "Greater Serbian Project". Free booze and VCRs and lots of smashing stuff up. Yee-ha.

And this has nothing to do with the outrageous propaganda campaign about the supposed destruction of the Old City by SFRY naval forces during the Siege of Dubrovnik. Nor does it have to do with what happened to all the Dalmatians, moderate Croats, Serbs and other folks persecuted by nationalist Croats well before and after.

Serbs, for a long time, believed that the “truth” would prevail as events unfolded in the Balkans at the beginning of the 1990s. One day it will.

I used to think there would be a more objective analysis of the whole 1990s mess in the Balkans about 20 years after it ended. Now, I think it will take much longer.

Why? The further entrenchment of the idea that questioning the current biased, inaccurate and overblown view is tantamount to being a Holocaust denier. Based on these (usually unstated) absurd equations: Serbs=Nazis and Srebrenica=Auschwitz.

It was a bloody three-way civil war, but for some reason we must recast it as a mini-WWII. Serbs play the part of the Nazis, Croats play the part of the Brits and "Free French," and the Muslims play the part of the Jews.

I used to think of it being recast as a cowboy movie by the media: Croats in white hats, Serbs in black hats, Muslims as school marms tied to the railroad track. But when you think of the language and imagery used by the media, it's really portrayed more as a mini-WWII.

Those were Vlachs, not Serbs. That is why the document guaranteeing their rights was called the Statorum Valachorum. They were Serbianized at the end of the 19th century. Secondly, the Vojna Krajina always had a Croatian majority population...the Vlachs were brought in to fill the gaps.

Wow! An excellent point:)

What about the privileges from the previous rulers such as Ferdinand I(1538), Mathias Corvin(1481), Sigismund(1404, 1428), Vladislav II and II, Queen Beatrix and Anna? Vladislai and Matyas colonised all together 300, 000 Serbs in Hungariae to fight agains the Turks? Even King Matyas wrote to the pope Sixtus on few occasions about that. The Vienna and Graz archive are loaded with paperwork about the Serbs.
In those documents they mentioned the Serbs(Servianos, Rascianos)? Ferdinand’s ambassador to Porta Mr Busbecquii(”Turskish Letters”c) writes in the 1550’s that the Serbs live all the way to Drava river. What about the 1604 special document that was published by the Jesuit scholar Nicolaus Nilles about the colonisation of the Serbs in Slavonia?

The document was issued by Dvorska ugarska kancelarija?
What can we do about the tombstone in the Franciscan monastery in Zadar where a catholic Serb was burried(Serviani, Zovinichio). Croatian historian Grga Novak published a report(1572) by the Dalmatian general providur Foscarini in 1964(JAZU, Zagreb) where the providur calls the population along the Bosnian border on the Turskih side “Morlacchi de fede serviana”(Morlaci srpske vjere)?
How about the special povelja of Vladislav Posmrtni, he mentiones the Serbs in Zagreb, Kalnik, Koprivnica in 1447? Bogavac Milakovic was a Serbs that governed Zagrebacko polje in 1450’s as Ivan Tkalcic published a document(Monumenta Zagrabiae). And there is also a mention of the Serbs.

The emperor Leopold I, againg calls those people the Serbs. Maria Theresia’s minister Bartenstein writes about the Serbs. Croatian historian Adami Balthasari Kerschelich writes in his history of the Zagreb Church(1770) that the Serb Uskokse emigrated to Lika, Udbina, along the river Kupa in the 16th century. There’s far to many sources to destroy your argument about the Vlachs. :)

The Vlachs are based in Istria today and they called themselves “Rumeri” and spoke “lingua Rumer” a few centuries ago. The italian historian De Croce writes about this in his history of Trieste publish at the end of the 17th century. They are the real Vlachs, or the Aromunians. Nicola Jurisic, the Croatian nobleman wrote to King Ferdinand and separated the Serbs from the Vlachs, as they call them the old Romans(Alt-Romer). They indeed moved up to Vojna krajina, sometimes with the Serbs, sometis separate and they decided to go to Istria. But they preserved their own language even today, whilst the Serbs speak stokavian not a Romance language as the best Croatian expert on the romance languages Petar Skok wrote that the Croatian Serbs do not have anything Vlach or Roman in their speech!

I rest my case.:)

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