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 _______________________________
Hopefully you understand.
Don’t forget to say a prayer to (Serbian) Sveti VLAHO (= Croatian BLAZ^). His feast day is Feb 3 (Gregorian calendar).
You're confusing Orthodoxy with Serbian nationality, a typical mistake of Serb propagandists.
Thankfully, you've the common sense to admit you were wrong about the Statuta Valachorum being a "geographical descriptor".
It looks like I'm gonna have to teach you about the Vlachs, but that'll have to wait until I return from Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. I'm scheduled to give a lectureon WW2 in all three places.
“Statuta serbum” is not Latin: you want “Serborum”.
Dio. Thanks for coming out to play again. If Serbs are Vlachs and Tsar Dushan prohibited the marriage of Serbs and Vlachs, that made match-making complex. Wallachia is not Rumania?
“Tito stole parts of Croatia?” Which Croatia? The Nazi “Indepent” State of Croatia” NDH, of course. Hitler had given Srijem/Srem along with Bosnia -Herezegovina to the NDH.
Seems you’re saying unwritten languages don’t exist.
NO ALPHABET? Chinese has no alphabet. Neither does Japanese. Get thee to a liberry. Look up syllabary, logographhic writing, pictography...
Croatian got codified when Ljudevit Gaj adapted Vuk Stefanovuc Karadzic’s system.
Dio, you are a linguist? Dubrovnik dialect is East Hercegovinian Serbian —
“... the literary language [of Serbs and Croats] that has been adopted [codified 1850 Vienna] is basically the particular dialect spoken in Trebinje and Gacko” [in Herzegovina, just above Dubrovnik...]
Source: Austrian linguist Friedrich S. Krauss [1859-1938]. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 23, No. 121, (Jan., 1886), pp. 87-94
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/982914 .
GOOGLE Dubrovnik Republic. Its centuries-long independence was first lost when Napoleon’s army came in. Dubrovnik was not part of the NDH, but was German-occupied. After WW II Tito stole it for Croatia. — In 1991, Dubrovnik citizens founded a party to restore the Republic of Dubrovnik. They fled in Autumn 1991 to save their lives. Most went to Belgrade. All were senteced in absentia to life imprisonment by Comrade-General Tudjman’s government.
Teach? But you’ll have to learn something first. Start soon.
I did miss that, yes indeed. That was the rising which Tchaikovski commemorated in his Marche Slave, using — along with the Tsarist hymn — Herzegovinian Serb dances (kolo).
“Vlach Law” was a generic term applied to many nationalities, including Slavs — Moravians, Serbs, Croats — and Gypsies / Roma, too. Austrian reference to the Wallachei /Wallachia are geographic. All the landscapes there are multi-ethnic. Italian (by passport) skiers can be Italians, Germans or Ladins. — In Italian newspapers today, as opposed to scholarly publications, “Slavi” are Yugoslavian, in particular Gypsies / Roma. “Dutch” in Pennsylvania are Germans.
Erratum et corrigendum:
FOR “Christmas and Epiphany (January 6, 1991)”
READ “Christmas (1991) and Epiphany (January 6, 1992)”
Erratum & corrigendum:
FOR “Statorum Valachorum”
READ “Statuta Valachorum”. On his way to the Forums Diocletian mught drop into a library or check with someone who knows Latin.
My M.A. specialization is in Mediaeval Latin: there was no no single (codified) standard, but plenty of literature and many regional languages. —This doesn't have to be boring: get a CD of Carl Orff’s CARMINA BURANA (GOOGLE THAT). Fun music. The music is from the 1930s, the song texts (spring time, love making, satire of king and pope, drinking) are in mediaeval Latin and mediaeval German. Germans, too, had no standard (codified) language before Luther's Saxon dialect (Upper Silesian) dialect was adopted by the hundreds of German principalities as a lingua franca. — That was once Frankish, subsequently any international languge. So the plan is like “Vlachs, Valachi”, who were many diverse nationalities that were not German or Hungarian. Today's Franks are the Holland Dutch who kept the old language. In Gallia (called France today, though it isn't Frankish anymore) the Franks dropped Frankish and now use the Francien neo-Latin dialect of the region. Along this track, in Serbia there is Fruska Gora, which originally meant ‘Frankish mountain /woods’. (Which “Franks”?)
When is Dio going to explain “Vlach” to us? I'll keep my calendar open.
Good read and many excellent comments. I have many Serb and Croatian friends and though they tolerate each other its hard to get a non biased opinion.
Geographically Dubrovnik is to 1991 Croatia what Florida and Alaska are to the USA, at the fringes. As for Serbian ethnos and Orthodoxy, let the following letter speak for itself:
THE REPUBLIC OF DUBROVNIK
Letter to the Editor, Belgrade newspaper Borba. Thursday.
3 October 1991, from Stijevo Brandzulica, Molfetta (Italy).
Just a few days ago I read in your esteemed newspaper Borba of 24 August 1991 an article about the founding of the Dubrovnik Republic. As an old Dubrovniker who has been living and working in Italy, I would like you to publish my reflections, tardy though they may be.
Dubrovnik has for ages been a special city, a city of peace and freedom, a special symbiosis of Romano-Slavic life. The Slavic element stems from the surrounding countryside, whose inhabitants for thirteen centuries have been primarily Serbs.
Dubrovnik was under Byzantium when medieval Italian culture came into flower. The majority of families were Serbs, who remained in the Orthodox faith but were under the constant pressure of the Catholic Church to convert.. This is the story of my own lineage. My family have over the years all become Catholics. Because of this mixture we now feel ourselves to be neither Serb nor Croat, but distinctly the people of Dubrovnik.
The language of Dubrovnik is based on the Serb dialect of East Herzegovina, which still has a Serb Orthodox population. Catholic Serbs make up a goodly part of the population of Dubrovnik. And regardless of the present-day situation, truth to tell, all through the nineteenth century Dubrovnik was linked especially to Serbia, because alone of the South Slav peoples she then enjoyed statehood; she protected us and finally liberated us from Austrian captivity.
The most distinguished of the Serb Catholics was Matija Ban, who held that the Serbs and Croats were a single people with the same language, but with two different names. Dubrovnik was the proper place of that symbiosis and of the successful communal coexistence of the two.
It must be said also that the Catholic Church has done much to destroy the unity of these two traditions. Another truth is that today Dubrovnik is dominated by Croats, unfortunately of an extremist Croatianism, whose bearers are not from the old Ragusan lineage, but uncultivated, half-civilized West Herzegovinian rednecks.
Dubrovnik used to be a separate republic. Dubrovnik can be that again, to the advantage of all its inhabitants. Until 1800 Dubrovnik had a multi-ethnic character and was recognized as a separate state, until this condition was destroyed by Napoleon. He turned Dubrovnik over to the Austrians, the first occupiers in her history.
The younger generation should know that it was only in 1939 that Dubrovnik entered into the Croatian world. And it was only in 1941 that Dubrovnik for the first time in its history was incorporated into the fabric of a Croat state, the ill-famed Nazi “Independent State of Croatia”. And in 1945 Dubrovnik was attached to Tito’s Socialist Republic of Croatia.
If we know the history of Dubrovnik we cannot tolerate modern falsifiers of history and the historical untruths they manufacture. I see Dubrovnik as a Yugoslav and multi-ethnic city with open borders. If anything of Dubrovnik’s traditional intelligence and diplomacy had remained, Dubrovnik today would today be a city state just like San Marino and Liechtenstein. I am convinced that Dubrovnik can find her salvation only in her individuality and that she must once again become the Republic of Dubrovnik. Those who favor this concept and desire a Republic of Dubrovnik, as I have found out, have been put under arrest in Croatia. Since this is so, democracy has not triumphed, but an occupation has taken place more perilous than war, and more tragic.
I implore my fellow citizens to sit down at the table and cool-headedly work things out. For Dubrovnik the most profitable thing would be for Dubrovnik to belong to no one else but to Dubrovnik alone.
Could Dubrovnik ever suffer more tragic days than to have its streets mined and barricaded? Who are Croatia’s forces “protecting” Dubrovnik from? The answer is clear, from the people who actually built Dubrovnik, the Serbs of Eastern and Southern Herzegovina and Monte Negro. These have been Dubrovnik’s builders, never her destroyers. — The Serbo-Croatian saying goes “If the goat lies, the horn doesn’t”. Herzegovinian Serbs were never, to use the Serbophobes’ own buzzword, a “disruptive factor” for Dubrovnik.
The shoe is on the other foot: the “disruptive factor” are really the people who have figuratively and literally sandbagged Dubrovnik into her present isolation.
Dubrovnik must, in the words of her great 17th century poet Ivan Gundulic, reclaim her “golden freedom”. This can be only when Dubrovnik is again a free and independent republic.
Translator J. P. Maher, Chicago, February 1992.
PS: 14 April 1992. Wall posters were put up overnight in the Old City demanding the withdrawal of all military formations and a plebiscite on Independence for Dubrovnik.
This echos what a friend of mine's father, who was raised there pre-WWII, said. When I asked him if he would return to Dubrovnik for a visit, he said, "No. The place I was raised doesn't exist anymore. I was raised Catholic but I am not a Croat, I am & always will be a Dubrovcanin."
Professor Maher is the king of the anecdote. He’s always able to back up his facts with a story, whether it’s his own personal experience or the experiences of others whom he considers credible sources. The anecdotes make the facts come alive, and he has no reason to lie or to make things up. He’s not a “paid propagandist”. His motives are to discover and share the truth. It’s called integrity.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that Croats and Serbs ever lived together “peacefully” and that they shared common experiences. As to your point about “bias”, I feel that once the essence of an “opinion” is shown to be “fact”, it’s no longer “biased”. There are, believe it or not, Serbs and Croats who are able to look at the history of their people honestly and to provide a truthful description of their history. There are Croats who have testified to the crimes their own bretheren have committed who actually lived to tell about it. And with Serbs, you have to always keep in mind where they are coming from “politically” and “ideologically” when they are giving you their analysis of things. For example, a pro-Tito Serb will often paint a whole different picture than a chetnik Serb will.
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.
Good point. No one people in the World such as Croats have just one opinion, Tito’s partizans and Ustasha have the samepicures of the Serbs, they (Serbs) must be destroyed,Croats don’t care, Communist Tudjman or Fascist Pavelic, killing Serbs is duty for all Croats.
From Croatia: a competent view of “Vlach”.
from
http://croatiancrescent.blogspot.com/
“A little street runs along the base of the low hill on which the cathedral stands, called Vlaška ulica. The adjective “vlaška” comes from the noun “Vlah”, the name used for descendants of Roman colonists in the Balkans. As Romanians are the only Balkan people that speak a Roman language, the word Vlach became associated with Romanians, and especially with Romanians living outside of Romania.
In Croatian, however, the them Vlah was used for foreigners in general, and Italians in particular. Foreigners in Zagreb lived mostly at the foot of the Bishop’s palace, just outside of the walls. That is how Vlaška ulica got it’s name. It is a street for strangers.”
On standard language and “codification”, a German opinion is reported in Croatia:
http://croatiancrescent.blogspot.com/
“Croatia was the guest country of last year’s Leipziger Buchmesse, the biggest German book fair after the Frankfurter Buchmesse. A great opportunity to present Croatian literature to the (German speaking) world, one would say. The weekly [magazine] ‘Stern’ remarked that Croatia is a literary terra incognita for Germans: “No wonder,” explained Stern, “as Croatian is a very young national language.”
Croatia, however, blew it. Right before the fair a split occurred in the Croatian Writers Society.
A Croatian author who has successfully entered the German market is Edo Popovic.”
This surname is of some interest for Croatian ethnogenesis. — POP in Slavic languages means ‘priest’. POPOV in Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia’s Vojvoda is ‘priest’s son’. Although the Irish Bishop Eamonn Casey sired a son, the boy doesn’t bear his father’s name. Orthodox priests are not celibate.
Two illustrious sons of Orthodox priests are Nikola Tesla and the polymath Rudjer Boskovic, of Dubrovnik. (Google him for his magnificent accomplishments.)
PS. jpm: in 1990 German-hatched Croatia ethnically cleansed thw “Society of Writers of Croatia” to “Society of Croatian Writers”.
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