The Globe and Mail
Letter to the editor(s)
28 February 2011
It is said that truth is the first victim of war - and there could be no better example than the 1990's war in the Balkans.
As an American, I have always admired Canada's value of freedom of speech, especially in its universities. That appears not to be the case today at the University of British Columbia where, apparently based on one protest to the president of the university from the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada, renown Balkan expert Professor Srdja Trifkovic was denied entry into Canada.
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For a university to allow only one side of an issue to be heard is a gross disservice to its students. Surely, Canada does not want to be compared to Hitler's Germany, or to Stalin's Sovietn Union, for that is how they controlled the minds of their students. Let the students hear the evidence and then let them judge for themselves, or perhaps President Toope does not believe that his students are mature enough to hear the other side of the story.
In 1999, Serbian forces were accused of killing 700 Kosovo Albanians, grinding up their bodies and throwing them down the Trepca mine shaft after they had been incinerated. Not so. The outrageous story was proven to be a hoax by New York Times journalist Daniel Pearl. Hatred against the Serbs by the pro-Bosnian media was further fanned by reports of Serbs having killed 250,000 Bosnians. However, a 2002 BBC report puts the number killed in Bosnia, on all sides, at 40,000
If we are to talk about Srebrenica, we should then talk about the fact that not only Srebrenica, but the Sarajevo, Tuzla, Bihac and Gorazde "safe areas," that were supposed to be demilitarized, were used for training, recuperating and refurbishing troops not only for Bosnian government forces but also for mujahidin fighters from the entire Islamic world to fight the Christian Serbs. Although 7,000 is a large number alleged to have been killed by Serbian forces, a number challenged by Defense & Foreign Affairs analyst, Gregory Copley, along with a former UN official, intelligence experts and journalists, who released a statement that the alleged casualty number of 7,000 victims as "vastly inflated and unsupported by evidence." While the alleged Srebrenica massacre in July 1995 received massive media coverage, the fact that 14,000 Serbian men, women and children were killed in August 1995 by Croatian forces during Operation Storm, as well as 250,000 who were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral lands in the Krajina region of Croatia, received little coverage in the Western media. Commanding Operation Storm, with massive US support, was Brig Gen. Agim Ceku, an ethnic Kosovo Albanian. Operation Storm became the largest land offensive in Europe since World War II and resulted in the murder and inhumane treatment of thousands of ethnic Serbs.
The decision to ban Professor Srdja Trifkovic from Canada can only go down as a black mark in Canadian history. Let those who disagree with Professor Trifkovic engage him in a battle of facts and intellect, not hide behind boycotts and name calling. Let the University of British Columbia be an institute of learning, not a
close-minded propaganda mill.
Stella L. Jatras
USA
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