Posted on 01/17/2009 7:57:23 PM PST by Ravnagora
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.
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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.
John P. Maher _______________________________
All that has happened is that the Mafias of Montenegro and Croatia have joined hands, and whoever is willing to "pay to play", does.
As for "Montenegrins being ashamed" -- the only thing I know them to be ashamed of is their own government -- who turned their country into a whore who does any trick for a buck -- the same government who "apologized to Croatia" is also the one who spit on the graves of its ancestors to accept "Kosovo Albanian independence". These are the acts of the corrupt few at the top, not the attitude of the people.
So how much of a cut is your friend paying to the Russian mafia who owns almost the entire coast line? All this talk of water under the bridge yet you can't solve your little border disputed with Slovenia. Planning on invading them anytime soon?
Guess those Ustashe saved their ire for the Jews during the latest Gaza conflict.
Translation "Kill a Jew", written on a fence of the Croatian theater in Bosnia. The Croatian media tried to say that it was "the work of pro-Palestinian Muslims", but since when do Muslims use the "U with a Cross" as their symbol? Only the Catholic Croat Ustashe does that.
But the point here is that after being shown Montenegrin contrition towards Croatia, you lash out with a pathetic smear. Typical.
Croatia doesn’t invade foreign countries. Our minor water zone flap with Slovenia will be resolved in time. Naturally we need not worry about Slovenes coming into our country and destroying our cities and murdering our people...they aren’t Serbs.
But the Slovenes should be worried because Croats do.
Personally, I'm quite content with Croatia staying out of the EU, so I see the Slovenes as doing us a favour.
Ah, you mean like the Ustasha graffiti on the gates of the Serbian Orthodox church in Sibenik of October, 2008.
Look pretty similar to this, to me, Dio -- and those aren't Muslim symbols.
Anyone can draw a symbol, boka. Keep reaching.
Poll: Slovenians don't want Croatia in EU
16 January 2009 | 13:11 | Source: Tanjug
ZAGREB -- Close to half of Slovenians—47.5 percent—do not want to see Croatia in the EU, according to a Median poll published in weekly Globus.
36.8 percent of Slovenes support Zagreb’s EU bid.
Furthermore, according to the telephone poll conducted from January 8 to 12 on a sample of 712 Slovenian citizens, only 48.2 percent of Slovenians would vote at a referendum on Croatia’s EU entry, with 31 percent saying that they definitely would not.
The results of the poll show Slovenia’s attitude towards Croatia’s EU integration, an issue that continues to stir strong emotions on both sides of the border.
The stakes were mostly recently raised by Croatian President Stjepan Mesić, who said that if the Croats had not liberated Istra and the Slovenian coastline in 1945, Slovenia would today be looking at the sea from 20 km away.
This statement has triggered an angry reaction in Slovenia, particularly in local historical circles. Slovenian historians acknowledge that the 60,000-strong Fourth Army units that liberated those parts of the former Yugoslavia contained 40,000 Croats, but 10,000 Serbs too, and that Slovenian units had helped liberate that territory, but that what was more important was that army had been a united army with a single mission.
According to Slovenian historian Jože Prijevec, if you were to look at things from Mesić’s angle, the Croats should then ask themselves whether they should not thank the Serbs for saving them from Islam, and defending them from Austro-Hungary and the claims of other countries in 1918.
Faced with inflammatory rhetoric on both sides, one group of Croatian and Slovenian historians have called for a truce in the war of words.
Nonetheless, the view of certain Croatian analysts is that Slovenia will continue to block Croatia’s EU entry until 2015 by using its veto, the groundwork for which has been under preparation for some months now.
Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Jandroković, for his part, does not believe that any referendum will be held, as it would lead to Croatia’s EU path being blocked.
During the Turks' most powerful era, the Serbs fought as vassals on the Turkish side against the Croatians in places like Krbavsko Polje, Siget, Sisak, Jajce, etc. This was during the 15th and 16th centuries.
The arrival of the Vlachs (who were later Serbianized) was due to the fact that the Croatian population was wiped out in many parts of Croatia due to defending Europe from Islam.
Yeah, the guy is a Slovene professional historian, Professor Maher is an American professional historian -- and they ALL have it "wrong" and you have it "right". Of course, Dio! Would like fries with that?
The fact is that ultimately Croats couldn't hold the border against the Turks alone and called in Austro-Hungary to do it -- the Krajina (military frontier) was virtually empty of Croats, many were killed off and the rest escaped to the interior. No Croat who was sane and prosperous wanted to die there, given a choice.
So the Empress Maria Theresa invited Serbs from Ottoman conquered Bosnia to inhabit the deserted Krajina in Croatia. She promised the Serbs that they could keep their religion and way of life, as long as they defended against the Turks -- so they did. This is how Serbs would up in what was the old Krajina of Croatia in the first place. Huge numbers of Serbs died there, defending the Croatian border.
But once the Turks were no longer a threat, and the Krajina was eventually abolished, the Croats wanted the Serbs to either convert to Catholicism or get out. Croatians wanted their land back from those Serbs and the only way they could get it was to drive those Serbs out or kill them off -- so during WWI, WWII, and the last war, Croats did both.
This is what the Slovenian was referring to about Croats "thanking the Serbs for defending them from Islam".
As for the rest of it, had Croatia not been allowed to join the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later called Yugoslavia) post-WWI, Croatia would have been hacked up into little pieces at Versailles instead of preserving and even ultimately increasing its territory. On that, the Slovene is also right.
The Serbs couldn't hold the border against the Turks and were overrun. Croatia was almost overrun itself and suffered major population losses but held on for a lot longer than the Serbs.
So the Empress Maria Theresa invited Serbs from Ottoman conquered Bosnia to inhabit the deserted Krajina in Croatia. She promised the Serbs that they could keep their religion and way of life, as long as they defended against the Turks -- so they did. This is how Serbs would up in what was the old Krajina of Croatia in the first place. Huge numbers of Serbs died there, defending the Croatian border.
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.
But once the Turks were no longer a threat, and the Krajina was eventually abolished, the Croats wanted the Serbs to either convert to Catholicism or get out.
Patently nonsense. Orthodox Croatians played a large role in Croatia after 1881, with men like Borojevic, Preradovic and Runjanin leading the way. Recall that Starcevic's mother was herself an Orthodox Vlach.
Croatians wanted their land back from those Serbs and the only way they could get it was to drive those Serbs out or kill them off -- so during WWI, WWII, and the last war, Croats did both.
During WW1, the Serbs of Croatia fought in the Habsburg Army. There was no "cleansing of Serbs" in Croatia during WW1. In the last war the Serbs cleansed themselves, as they themselves have admitted.
I am not sure what you saw out of that short video, but all I saw was a handful of words from Djukanovic and a whole War & Peace of monologue extrapolating on what these words were supposed to mean according to their propaganda. Whoever added the "Montenegrin communist" to all of it should have doen it as a joke, because there wasn't a leader of one of the Yugoslav republics who didn't have "communist" attached to their history, somehow -- especially Croatia's Tudjman who actually fought for the communist side during WWII! (Or at least said that he did.)
I said it before and I'll say it again -- Montnengro's Milo Djukanovic is a pimp, a mafia Don, who'd sell his country, his people and his own mother, for a buck! And the only thing worse than "a communist" is a "reformed communist" -- because the first has no morals, and the second has no morals and no ideals, they are just whores to highest bidders and embrace capitalism not as an economic system, but as a religious system as well!
Do you realize what an idiot you sound like when you say that, Dio?
"Those were Vlachs, not Serbs"
> MS Encarta:
Slavonia was under Turkish occupation for more than a century, ending in 1699. At that time, it was transferred to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the 18th century, under Empress Maria Theresa, Serbs were invited into parts of Croatia including Slavonia, in order to garrison the frontier with the Ottoman Empire. Except for a brief interval during the Napoleonic Wars, when it was incorporated into the so-called Illyrian provinces, Slavonia remained under Habsburg rule until 1918, when it became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia. During World War II it was part of the fascist Independent State of Croatia.
To extend your logic, the high command of the RSK army are idiots too because they admitted that they cleansed themselves.
Boka: I can post more excerpts from the Montenegrin-produced documentary if you’d like.....
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