Posted on 02/04/2006 12:59:01 PM PST by joan
The trial of Slobodan Milosevic resumed on Friday with the testimony of Ms. Eva Prentice. Ms. Prentice is a British journalist who has covered the Balkans for both The Guardian and the London Times newspapers since the 1980s. Over the course of her career she visited the former Yugoslavia at least forty times.
Ms. Prentice testified that she was concerned by non-objective reporting in the Western media. She said that Western politicians and journalists presented the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in terms of good vs. evil. She said that Serbs were demonized and portrayed as evil while Kosovo-Albanians, Croats, and Bosnian-Muslims were portrayed as innocent victims.
Ms. Prentice made it clear that she believed that all sides had committed crimes and that all sides had innocent victims. As her book “One Woman’s War” makes clear she is not an apologist for the Serbian cause.
Ms. Prentice testified that the KLA waged a terrorism war in Kosovo throughout the late 1990s. She said that Kosovo fell victim to a cycle of violence where the KLA launched attacks and the Yugoslav security forces retaliated.
Ms. Prentice was one of the few Western journalists who was actually in Kosovo during the NATO bombing campaign. She testified that she spoke to hundreds of Albanian, Roma and Turkish civilians.
She testified that the Kosovo-Albanians told her that they were leaving Kosovo primarily because they were afraid of the KLA and the NATO bombing. She only came across one Albanian who told her that he was leaving because the Serbian police had told him to.
She said that the KLA was telling the Albanian population that it was their “patriotic duty” to leave Kosovo in order to make it appear that the Serbs were victimizing the Albanians and ethnically cleansing the province.
Ms. Prentice testified that she took measures to speak to Albanian civilians at times when Serbian police were not around. Her Albanian interpreter was a lawyer who worked for Ibrahim Rugova.
She testified that Albanian civilians were afraid to speak freely in the presence of the KLA. She recounted one instance in Kosvoska Mitrovica where she was interviewing a group of Albanians and they would not speak to her once a member of the KLA came within earshot.
During her stay in Kosovo she never witnessed any inappropriate behavior on the part of the Yugoslav Army or the Serbian police. She said that she saw non-Serb civilians enjoying a relaxed relationship with the army.
She testified that she had heard from other journalists that some people had been forced to leave Kosovo due to pressure exerted against them by Serbian forces, but she never witnessed any such incidents herself.
Ms. Prentice testified that the civilian population was justifiably afraid of the NATO bombing. She witnessed the destruction of civilian targets almost daily. She saw the result of NATO’s cluster bomb attack on Nis. She saw at least 30 corpses in the streets and interviewed several wounded persons in the hospital.
She also witnessed the destruction caused by NATO bombing raids in Gnjilane, Istok (Dubrava Prison), Orohovac, and Meja. In each of these cases the indictment accuses Serbia for the destruction.
In the case of Meja, the indictment accuses Serbian forces of organizing a massacre, Ms. Prentice spoke to several victims in the hospital and they told her that NATO had bombed them.
While she was in Gnjilane she did not see any evidence of the deliberate burning of shops and houses alleged by the indictment. All she saw was the destruction caused by NATO.
The indictment says that Serbian troops forced the Albanian population to leave Prizren from March 28th onwards. But Ms. Prentice said that there were a lot of Albanians in Prizren while she was there in May.
Ms. Prentice was bombed by NATO herself. At about 3 PM on May 30, 1999 she was on her way to Prizren. She was on the road about 8 km east of Prizren when NATO attacked. Her driver was killed in the attack, and a cameraman she was traveling with was blown into a river several meters away.
She said that the NATO aircraft were flying low enough that they could have easily seen the civilian cars on the road below.
Ms. Prentice, who has a pilot’s license herself, estimated the aircraft to be flying at about 2,000 ft. Because she was traveling with a cameraman she also has videotape of the NATO aircraft. She was ultimately rescued from the scene Yugoslav Army personnel who took her to safety and gave her medical treatment.
About two weeks after the bombing Ms. Prentice began to suffer health effects. She lost her voice. Her immune system weakened. She has had cancer twice since then, and the presence of heavy metals in her blood stream causes her to suspect that NATO used depleted uranium weapons during the attack.
NATO has publicly denied that it carried out the bombing raid, but Ms. Prentice’s father (who is a member of the British House of Lords) received information from his contacts in the British military that NATO had indeed carried out the bombing.
Ms. Prentice testified that after NATO entered Kosovo a massive exodus of the non-Albanian population occurred. She said that the KLA, together with Albanians from Albania, went around Kosovo forcing the non-Albanian population to leave. She said that NATO did nothing to protect the non-Albanian population.
The most explosive part of her testimony dealt with an interview that she scheduled with Alija Izetbegovic in November 1994. While she was waiting in Izetbegovic's foyer both she, and a journalist from Der Speigel, saw Osama bin Laden being escorted into Izetbegovic’s office. Yes *that* Osama bin Laden -- the same Osama bin Laden who masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Needless to say this evidence did not sit well with the tribunal. Mr. Nice immediately objected and Judge Robinson cut off the testimony immediately declaring it “irrelevant.”
Milosevic tried to explain that the involvement of Islamic terrorists with the highest level of the Bosnian Muslim government shows that the Bosnian Serbs were fighting a war for self-preservation, not a war for some made-up “greater Serbia” conspiracy. Unfortunately the Judges wouldn’t have any of it so he was forced to move on.
Milosevic questioned the witness questions about the Markale market. Over the course of her work, Ms. Prentice spoke with people who had access to ballistics data on the blast. According to the information she received the blast did not come from an outside projectile. The blast came from an explosive device that had been taped under one of the tables at the market.
When she interviewed Lord Owen she asked him whether he had believed that the Bosnian-Muslim government planted the bomb themselves. She said that Owen responded by refusing to confirm or deny the suggestion. The Markale Market is significant because NATO used it as the justification to bomb the Bosnian Serbs.
Ms. Prentice testified that when she visited Sarajevo in 1994 she did not find the city under siege. She said that there was some shelling but not a siege.
She said that one day while she was at the offices of the Bosnian presidency a shell exploded near the house she was staying. She observed that the shell fell in a location that was surrounded by tall buildings and narrow streets meaning that the shell could have only come in from a steep angle, which meant that it could only have been fired from a Muslim-held position.
During her time in Bosnia she visited Pale. She said that she was surprised to find that a large number of non-Serb refugees were being given shelter there. Before she actually visited Bosnia she had believed what the rest of the media told her about the Serbs.
She recounted one occasion where she tried to convince Robin Cook to visit Pale so that he could see for himself that non-Serbs were living freely in the Bosnian-Serb capital. Cook, who was on a fact finding mission, told her that he would not visit Pale because he thought the Serbs were “monsters.”
Mr. Nice spent the last part of the day cross-examining Ms. Prentice. As I said in the beginning of this report Ms. Prentice is not an apologist for the Serbian cause. She wrote a lot of things that were critical of the Serbian side and Mr. Nice spent his entire cross-examination quoting every unfavorable word that she ever wrote about the Serbs. Ms. Prentice could barely get a word in edgewise.
However, it is worth noting that nearly everything Mr. Nice quoted from Ms. Prentice’s work was hearsay. It was mostly information that she had heard from others – not events that she had directly witnessed herself.
At the end of the day Milosevic was left with practically no time for re-examination. He accused the prosecutor of quoting Ms. Prentice’s work in a selective and misleading fashion.
The trial will resume next Monday with the continued testimony of Prof. Branko Kostic.
Bump.
Inaccurate, misinformed, and wrong.
How much experience do you have delivering A/G ordnance? My guess would be zero.
There was an incident in 1995, right after the Dayton Peace Accord was signed, where a group of US Army Rangers were conducting a sweep for any Serbian forces who might have come across the border and they walked into a village that had been completely taken over by Chechen fighters who'd just finished clobbering the Russian Army back home and were out looking for another fight. If I recall correctly, one Ranger was killed and several others were severely injured before they could break contact. At first, no one wanted to admit what had happened, but it eventually broke, created a stir for a few days, then quickly faded into the background.
It came back from the squadron that we needed to let the forward air controllers go down to 5,000 feet, and to let the strikers go down as low as 8,000 feet in a diving delivery, to ensure that they verify their target and then right back up again to 15,000 feet. We acknowledged that that increases the risks significantly, but none of us want to hit a tractor full of refugees again. We can't stand that.So from that point on, the rules were: "Try to operate at 15,000 feet, but if you're a forward air controller, like my son is, in the daytime with your binoculars and you see something on the ground and you can't identify it from 15,000 feet, then you're clear down as low as 5,000 feet to make that identification." . . .
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/interviews/short.html
Do you know what a FAC is?
You know all us guys in the miltary are liars.
I have heard Michael Medved say similar things.
In other words the Serbs were not completely innocent but they were probably the lessor of two evils, and we sided with the Moslem terrorists.
Also, I do remember seeing footage of the Chinese embassy bombing, and the bomber planes didn't fly there all that much higher than the building itself. The bombs were sent in, one after the other, at strong angles (not directly downward), and seemingly into the windows, as the plane flew practically alongside, but a little higher. That plane wasn't any higher than a few hundred feet. Nothing in Belgrade is near World Trade Center towers'height (1368 and 1362 ft.).
Not all guys..but this story is a farce...unless
you are a cave dwellar..you won't see..OBL....He
will live there and die there...and that brings up
a question...if we know he is in a certain area...
why have we not the intellience to pinpoint it for
a nice visiting..50 ton missile..forget the capture...
look at the Hussein trial...take him out...Jake
I have no love for the Serbs---I know Croats and Slovenians who were brutalized by his thugs. But I agree that we should have stayed out and let it run its bloody course.
Regarding the Chinese embassy, that strike was not conducted at low altitude either. I would love to see the footage you are claiming showed aircraft at roof level, especially at night.
My expirienca is that some 60% of all NATO hits were large stationary objects, and that laser-guided bomb couldnt hit anything smaller than steel bridge. For attack on smal mobile targets, A-10 was produced on a first place. Most of small targets in 1999 hade to be attacked from low altitude, and even than, hits were not best.
Your expirience might have ben on exercise, good weather drops, but in real cmbat, on bad terrain, with hills and forests, and large number of small cal AAs and portable SAMs, targets can me hitted only by low-flying sudden strikes, and that includes under 1,000 ft flights.
First thing that I wondered was whether she'd seen a UAV. The Serbs did shoot down a lot of those during Clinton's war on them and they thought they were shooting down combat aircraft. If trained military folks can make that sort of mistake, it only makes it more likely that a civilian might.
No big surprise about bin Laden working with the Bosnian Muslims, though.
Osamma was 'out and about' before 9/11. . .
I know clinton is and I know that slug Gen Clark is too.
Your expirience might have ben on exercise, good weather drops, but in real cmbat, on bad terrain, with hills and forests, and large number of small cal AAs and portable SAMs, targets can me hitted only by low-flying sudden strikes, and that includes under 1,000 ft flights.
Your statement is supported the continual successes of the Serbs against NATO air forces.
Well, my English is slipping probably due to the fact that Im Serb.
And about success of war of 1999, NATO should not brag about.
Also, about success of NATo war, you may discuss with people from Manhattan. They will tell you taht America certanly lost that war, ant that entire world is about to lose the war if people like than president Clinton are to came to power.
You might want to check your source on this one, Stonewall. The only source I'm familiar with on the "Rangers in Bosnia" line of stories is Serbian, and purported service in the Balkans is one of the litmus tests used to sniff out posers by veterans of the Regiment.
Special Operations Forces In Bosnia (1/27/96)
Army special operations units in the area include the 1st Special Forces Group, Fort Lewis, Wash.; the 5th Group from Fort Campbell, Ky.; the 10th Group, Fort Carson, Colo.; and the Army National Guard 20th Special Forces Group, Birmingham, Ala. Portions of Fort Bragg’s (N.C.) 4th Psychological Operations Battalion, 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, and 112th and 528th Special Operations Signal battalions are also in Bosnia.
While the Rangers are high speed and do secret squirrel stuff, they're not higher speed nor doing more covert secret squirrel stuff than the aforementioned Special Forces Groups.
I saw Elvis once. At a gas station.
When the priest went out to help, the planes came back, bombed the place again and killed him( he was de-capitated) and other rescuers. I read about this on FR. The MSM made no big deal of it. So what another Christian is murdered.. that IS the MSM attitude.
Eyewitnesses said the planes were quite low in that bombing run as well.
clinton and clark are war criminals... as much if not more than slobo and slobo is a commie. So, what does that make clinton/clark... lower than whale poop, that's what!
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