BTW, if he can break away from his busy schedule of International ANSWER meetings or Cindy Sheehan vigils, Malic may be available for your next Free Slobo rally:
Posted on 08/31/2005 3:27:34 PM PDT by mark502inf
The Serbian mistake of 1918, when the victorious kingdom gambled on [establishing] Yugoslavia, rather than consolidating a compact state of Serbia, continues to haunt Belgrade.
Territory governed from Belgrade continues to shrink. Next year, Montenegro can call a referendum to decide whether to secede. -snip-
Montenegro is not alone in contemplating exit. Negotiations are likely to begin this year on the status of Kosovo, formally part of Serbia, in reality a ward of the international community, and in the minds of almost all its ethnic Albanian citizens a putative independent state.
What goes around comes around. Kosovo was the launching pad for the crazed nationalism engineered by Milosevic as Yugoslavia began to crumble. Now it will, in all likelihood, be the last piece of Serbia to go ... -snip-
The problem, however, is that Serbia, ever quick to denounce ethnic Albanian "terrorism" in Kosovo, has scarcely begun to confront the crimes it committed on a vast scale in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.
A video of Serbs killing Muslims at Srebrenica, shown in June, provoked a shock here. That was salutary. It was also a terrible indictment of the degree of Serbian ignorance ...
-snip- ... progress toward EU membership will not occur until two chief protagonists of Serbian violence, General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, are handed over to the international tribunal. ...
Within the army, younger officers, with an eye on potential NATO membership, favor Mladic's handover. But older officers cannot accept this. "They say they will never accept the arrest of a man with whom they fought in Bosnia," ...
That's interesting. One of Serbia's many fictions is that the Yugoslav Army never fought in Bosnia and the campaign there had nothing to do with Belgrade. Nonsense, of course, but Serbia remains ambivalent about reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
Malic is brilliant as usual. I can't say as much for the trolls though.
BTW, if he can break away from his busy schedule of International ANSWER meetings or Cindy Sheehan vigils, Malic may be available for your next Free Slobo rally:
Fact?
>>The Serb Republic issued a report taking responsibility<<
Not really, according to Mr. Bukejlovic's (Prime Minister of the Republika Srpska) interview of July 31, 2005
http://www.novosti.co.yu/vest.php?vest=43178&rubrika=Politika
Fact?
...>>Serbs are living in a state of denial. As further evidenced by your post.<<
No. This is your opinion only, absolutely no evidence of "living in a state of denial" in my post. Just good old facts.
That's gabrage. You did nto read all 284,000 of them! What a crock.
As far as that Slovene's distorted presentation of history -is concerned - it suits your agenda, but that doesn't make it true. If you actually knew the former Yugoslavia, rather than knowing something about it, you would have known that the Slovenes always acted as if they were doing someone a favor for being in Yugoslavia, when in fact it was Yugoslavia that gave them a state for the first time in their history. Their "gratitude" is impressive but not surprising for reasons you will never understand.
It was Slovenia that passed a law that placed the federal Constitution in subordinate position to the Slovenian constitution, an act of juro-political insanity, unheard of and unknown in the world, but very real and possible in the Mickey Mouse state called Slovenia.
You are just dumping a bunch of out-of-context information to obfuscate the issue and promote your warped but very real Serbophobic mind.
Malich may be disfavorbaly disposed to what he calls the "Empire" but not to all things American. The issue here is not whether he is accurate in his views of America's foreing policy, but whehther he knows a lot about the Balkans and especially the former Yugoslavia -- and the answer is YES he does.
Typical messenger shooting mindless troll response. I stand by my post #21.
The Wages of Denial
Washington -- TEN years ago this week, Serbian forces slaughtered more than 7,000 Muslim men in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Despite the efforts of a dedicated few in Serbia, and despite the war crimes prosecutions at The Hague, Serbia is no closer today than it was a decade ago to reckoning with its war guilt.
For years Belgrade has denied involvement by its citizens in Srebrenica and other massacres of the 1990s. The recent broadcast of a graphic video that showed Serbian paramilitary police executing six young men from Srebrenica should have made it very hard to sustain that revisionism. Amazing as it seems, however, the video was not enough to shatter what Serbian human rights activist Sonja Biserko has described as the country's ''state of collective denial.''
Fewer than half of Serbs polled last spring believed the Srebrenica massacre took place. And while much has been made of the video's effects on a shocked Serbian public, it remains to be seen where that public will stand once the furor recedes. The Radical Party, which won 27 percent of the popular vote in the last national elections, making it the largest party in Parliament, has already criticized what it sees as the anti-Serb hysteria that ''wishes at all costs to put the burden of all crimes on Serbia.'' Graffiti has appeared in several cities praising the ''liberation'' of Srebrenica. Rumors circulate that the video was doctored, or that the men committing the crimes were acting independently.
Instead of coming to terms with its past, Serbia has circumvented the issue with the narrative skills befitting a psychopath. For example, a debate on Srebrenica at the Belgrade Law Faculty earlier this year was initially titled ''10 Years After the Liberation of Srebrenica.'' In response to the video, Serbia's president, Boris Tadic, said, ''Serbia is deeply shocked'' that ''the killers had walked freely among us.'' But Mr. Tadic's government surely knows that the killers in the video are but a small fraction of the number who continue to walk the streets of Serbia and Montenegro as free men.
A fairy tale has passed for public memory until now in Serbia and Montenegro and it is conspicuous in its omission of Serb atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, which left hundreds of thousands dead. The Serbian version of that history denies the fact that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and those like him enjoyed overwhelming popular support in Serbia during the war, despite the evictions, rapes and unchecked slaughter by Yugoslav troops and irregulars. It suggests that Belgrade today has nothing to do with Belgrade as it was 10 years ago. It aims at an absurd relativism, placing Serbian atrocities within the context of crimes committed by other ethnicities (in fact, the C.I.A. has reported that Serbs were responsible for 90 percent of all atrocities committed in Bosnia). Mr. Tadic was quoted as saying, ''Crimes are always individual.'' All of this is fiction.
At the end of the Second World War, Allied troops forced German citizens to walk through Nazi death camps. They were confronted by crimes committed in their name, in order to ensure that those crimes could not be denied or minimized later. The people of Serbia and Montenegro, by contrast, have never been forced to acknowledge the crimes committed in their name.
There are those who refuse to whitewash Serbia's recent past. The Helsinki Human Rights Committee in Serbia and the independent broadcaster Radio B92 are admirable examples. People like Natasa Kandic, chairwoman of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, have spent years fighting for the truth, often at great personal risk. Extremists threatened to lynch Ms. Kandic at the law school debate on Srebrenica, and one of them spat in her face.
Eight of Serbia's human rights groups have drafted a declaration on Srebrenica that would obligate the country's government to confess to the massacre and to ''expose and punish any ideological justification of crime.'' But the daily newspaper Blic reported that the majority of parties in Serbia's Parliament refused not only to endorse the declaration but also to debate it.
Serbia must relinquish the fairy tale that its own wartime suffering was equivalent to the devastation it visited on others. Adopting an honest declaration on Srebrenica would have been an important first step, and the Serbian Parliament should have taken it. For as long as Serbia's people deny complicity in war crimes, they undercut any hope for justice and cheat their country out of any decent future. The Western aid money that has poured into Serbia may help rebuild the country's infrastructure, but it will do nothing to cut out the cancer that riddles the country's heart.
Western governments are anxious for reconciliation in the Balkans, which would ensure future stability in the region. They are pushing hard for the arrests of people like Radovan Karadzic, the architect of the genocide, and Ratko Mladic, who carried it out, and they lauded the speed with which the Serbian government detained those suspected of being the killers shown on the video. But those arrests will not be nearly enough.
Such men were not exceptions, nor were they acting independently, and Serbia must acknowledge this truth, rather than denying or minimizing it. That means surrendering all war crimes suspects to The Hague and paying reparations to the victims of war. The West should ask for no less than this when it considers Serbian requests for aid.
Courtney Angela Brkic is the author of ''Stillness: And Other Stories'' and ''The Stone Fields,'' an account of her work excavating mass graves outside Srebrenica.
Kosta, that was in response to Former Lib calling the war with Slovenia a lie. That war was very real.
As often seems the case with our Serb FReepers, their version of history is replete with gaps, revisions, and ignorance of actual historical events--even recent ones such as the massacre at Srebrenica--that do not fit Serbian cultural myths.
There is a small but loud and well paid minority in Serbia that prostitutes your point of view (prostitute because they live off of that). Sonya Biserko is one of them. Of course, they are given all the coverage in the West because they work for your side. Their character is of no concern to you because, to paraphrase President Roosevelt, "they may be thugs but they are out thugs."
In Serbia, they are marked people. They are collaborators. Fifth Column. Quislings. Every country has them. No country likes them. Even if they have an inkling for truth, they are tainted.
What is your point, anyway?
Name one country that doesn't have myths!
Less than 2 weeks of confused sporadic fighting and only a handful dead... hardly a "war".
Considering the anarchy caused by their unilateral secession, things could have been much uglier. Yugoslavia should in fact be praised for quieting the situation as quickly as it did. I doubt other nations could have handled the situation any better.
How about the accusers? Mr. Cohen here starts off by blaming Serbia for the creation of Yugoslavia, ignorant of the most basic historical facts that Yugoslavia was predominantly a Croatian/Slovenian movement.
How about Milosevic's "infamous" speech in Kosovo in 1989? Have you ever actually read it? Did you read the excerpt posted above? It is about that farthest thing one can imagine from being a "nationalist" rallying cry. Yet it is repeated ad nauseum as such.
What do you think of those basic historical untruths?
Cindy Sheehan is on your side, Mark....She's founded by your mentor and "Fuehrer"...GEORGE SOROS...
Just like Roger Cohen and Courtney Angela Brkic...
How many troops did the Serbs march against Slovenia?
One helicopter, piloted by a Slovene.
Some war effort, huh? LOL!
Slovenia seceded illegally. Their mutinous reserves took over Yugoslav border crossings and the federal government (at that time headed by a Croat) simply sent troops to secure the country's borders, which is the right of every sovereign state on this earth. Exercising their sworn duty to protect the country from enemies, foreign and domestic (sounds familiar, doesn't it?), and fulfilling a lawful order to secure the borders, the federal units were brutally ambushed by Slovene territorial units. How did this turn out to be an act of "aggression" against Slovenia is beyond me! It becomes an "act of war" only in the twisted minds of some habitual anti-Serbian bigots on this forum. It is no different than the Union troops marching into Confederate territory after the (illegitimate) secessions by the Southern States.
Former Lib, you are exhibit A for the author's thesis on Serbian illusions.
Read this:
"After the communist dictator Josip Tito died in 1980, longstanding ethnic, religious, and economic tensions within Yugoslavia became more apparent. Although the country comprised six republics and two self-governing provinces, Serbia (the largest republic) dominated the federal government and army. Resentment of Serbia grew when Slobodan Milosevic (1941-), who eventually became president of the republic, began stirring up Serbian nationalism in 1987. The prosperous republics of Slovenia and Croatia, no longer willing to subsidize less-developed Serbia or to accpet a centralized federal government under its control, declared their independence from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991. After Slovenia took control of its border crossings, its defense forces blockaded federal army bases in the republic and captured about 2,300 federal soldiers. Meanwhile, the federal army moved tanks in and bombed the airport at ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, and some border posts. Fighting continued until mid-July 1991 by which time several dozen people had been killed. The war ended when the federal army withdrew its tanks and troops to concentrate on the neighboring secessionist republic of Croatia"
Well, Kosta, the Slovenes disagree--that was what the war was about.
My point was that--no matter how wonderful the Serbs think Serbia is--those who know the Serbs best all wanted out--the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Macedonians, the Kosovars, and now apparently even the Montenegrins.
The stuff you are quoting is again based on incorrect information. Former YU was anything but Serb dominated.
So what, Panta? The Bosnians & Slovenes & Croats & Kosovars & Macedonians didn't want out because of the ethnic make-up of the diplomatic corps. As you well know, seccession was sparked by Serb nationalist nut-job Slobodan Milosevic coming to power.
So what, Panta? The Bosnians & Slovenes & Croats & Kosovars & Macedonians didn't want out because of the ethnic make-up of the diplomatic corps. As you well know, seccession was sparked by Serb nationalist nut-job Slobodan Milosevic coming to power.
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