March 26, 2006

Indicted war criminal Agim Ceku still collects a UN paycheque

 

http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/sept01/hed4073a.shtml

The Halifax Herald Limited, September 10, 2001


Contributed

Indicted war criminal Agim Ceku still collects a UN paycheque

By Scott Taylor ON TARGET

WITH SOME 200 troops now on the ground in Macedonia, as part of NATO´s latest intervention force, it´s about time somebody started seriously questioning Canada´s long-range Balkan policy.

Throughout the decade of bloody civil wars in the 90s, which accompanied the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Canadian soldiers have been on continuous deployment to the region. Originally serving as UN peacekeepers (who evolved into NATO peacemakers by the time of the Kosovo crisis), Canada´s military had become a belligerent in this complex conflict. Despite our oft changing role, one constant that has remained is the reality experienced by our frontline soldiers, which is rarely reflected by the Western (read: U.S. State Department inspired) media portrayals of the ongoing Yugoslavian tragedy.

The most vivid examples of this dichotomy became evident during the 1999, 78-day NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. As cockney spokesman Jamie Shea took to the airwaves to demonize the Serbian people and justify NATO´s attacks, respected veteran officers such as General Lewis Mackenzie and Colonel Don Ethell spoke out to publicly denounce Canada´s participation in the bombing. Having witnessed first-hand the multi-factional hatred which pervades the Balkan theatre, Canadian soldiers are unwilling to assign blame and/or take sides in this brutal civil war. However, driven by U.S. interests and fuelled by a jingoistic media corps, NATO leaders have not been so hesitant to play favourites.

This current crisis in Macedonia originated last March with Albanian guerrillas attacking from inside NATO-occupied Kosovo. The guns carried by the Albanians were the same weapons that NATO was to have removed from the Kososvo Liberation Army (known as the UCK) back in 1999. However, over the past two years with a powerful 40,000 strong occupation force, NATO has been unwilling and/or unable to strip these Albanian (UCK) guerrillas of their arsenal. Only now that a wave of terror has been successfully exported into heretofore peaceful Macedonia, and the UCK have seized control of some 30 per cent of Macedonia territory, has NATO decided to intervene.

The Canadian Combat Group which has been hastily dispatched from service in Bosnia to participate in the Macedonia mission is equipped with new Coyote reconnaissance vehicles. These state of the art armoured personnel carriers have been roundly praised by NATO spokesmen for "providing a vital asset in monitoring the flow of illegal arms across Macedonian/Kosovo border."

Disgruntled Macedonian citizens are correct in asking "if such a surveillance capability existed within NATO´s arsenal-why wasn´t it employed to prevent Albanians from entering Macedonia in the first place?"

A similar stumper could be posed to NATO spokesmen regarding their reluctance to arrest the UCK´s military figurehead General Agim Ceku, an indicted war criminal. Many of our peacekeepers witnessed the barbarism committed by Ceku´s troops in Croatia in 1993 and 1995 and it is largely on the strength of Canadian soldiers testimony that The Hague War Crimes Tribunal has been forced to issue this rogue commander a sealed indictment.

Agim Ceku, an Albanian Kosovar by birth, began his military career as an officer in the former federal Yugoslavian Army (JNA). When the initial Yugoslav break-up occurred in 1991, Ceku was quick to switch his loyalty to the Croatian cause of independence. As a colonel in the Croatian army, Ceku commanded the notorious 1993 operation now known as the Medak Pocket.

It was here that the men of the Second Battalion Princess Patricia´s Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the vulgar savagery of which Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops that buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence.

Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then a general of artillery, was still at large. In fact, he was the officer responsible for shelling the Serbian refugee columns and for targeting the UN "safe" city of Knin during the Croatian offensive known as Operation Storm.

Just a few months after the Storm atrocities, Canada´s own Louise Arbour began making a name for herself as the chief prosecutor for The Hague tribunal. Despite the Canadian connection to these alleged crimes, Arbour and her lawyers chose instead to pursue more "politically prominent" individuals and seemingly little was done to bring Ceku to justice.

Fast forward to January 1999 and the world´s attention begins to focus on a war ravaged Kosovo. With the blessing of the U.S. State Department, Agim Ceku took his retirement (at age 37) from the Croatian army and was pronounced Supreme Commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK).

Throughout the air campaign against Yugoslavia, Ceku was portrayed as a loyal ally and he was frequently present at the NATO briefings with top generals such as Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson.

Under terms of the Kosovo peace deal, Ceku´s Albanian guerrillas were to be disarmed and re-constituted into a UN sponsored, (non-military) disaster relief organization known as the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC). ButCeku´s UCK never gave up their guns - nor their quest for a Greater Albania.

Although he is nominally maintaining an ´arms-length´ posture towards his former comrades, Agim Ceku is still worshipped as a saviour by both the UCK troops and Albanian-minority in Macedonia.

As this indicted war criminal continues to enjoy his freedom, bask in public attention, and collect a UN paycheque, our Canadian soldiers are risking their lives to disarm his UCK in Macedonia.

All in the name of peace and justice.

"History will prove Milosevic right"

Latest news
http://news.google.be/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=milosevic


Canadian who have 'altered the course of history'
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20060323/wendy_crewson_feature_060323/20060324/

"They were afraid of pulling Russia into a larger war if they upset Milosevic, so NATO didn't want to step in to police this"
http://www.edmontonsun.com/Entertainment/Weekend/2006/03/24/1503348-sun.html



English translation of family letter read out at President Milosevic's funeral
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ml031806.htm


"History will prove Milosevic right"
http://www.worldpress.org/Europe/2294.cfm








Slobodan Milosevic coverage: When can we expect some truth from the CBC?

 
Subject: Slobodan Milosevic coverage: When can we expect some truth from the CBC?
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 21:28:24 -0600
From: Marjaleena Repo <mrepo@sasktel.net>
Reply-To: mrepo@sasktel.net
To: CBC Radio Sunday Edition <thesundayedition@cbc.ca>
CC: Rabinovich Robert <robert_rabinovitch@cbc.ca>, Jane_chalmers@cbc.ca, Richard_stursberg@cbc.ca


Saskatoon
24.3.2006

To: CBC Radio Sunday Edition

Dear Michael Enright and staff,

Your last Sunday's programme on Slobodan Milosevic’s death revealed a biased and propagandist approach to the whole tragedy of the systematic dismantling of Yugoslavia, You blame one man and one man alone, and label him  “The Butcher of Balkansâ€,  "a tyrantâ€,  “a mass murdererâ€, and throw in the suggestion that he “murdered millions,†all this in the brief introduction to the interview of your equally biased interviewee, Mr. William Schabas. You make no attempt to offer proof; yours is a guilt-by-accusation approach.

Six years after the bombing of illegal, immoral and unjust US instigated and NATO conducted war on Yugoslavia you should have had plenty of time for second thoughts, particularly as the evidence is out there, easy to locate, that both Mr. Milosevic and the Serbs have been and continue to be falsely accused.

Back in ’99 I wrote a piece, "The Media and the demonization of Serbs," which I urge you to read with fresh and open eyes.  (See below.)

Michael Parenti’s article of 2003, "The demonization of Slobodan Milosevic," adds more to the contarary evidence of Milosevic's  and Serbs' "guilt" that you and your programme so completely ignore. (See below.)

To bring the point home about the absurdity of the claims against Milosevic, I am sending Swiftian piece by Jan Oberg from Sweden, " The real story: How Milosevic was more evil than you ever knew," which I hope will tickle your funny bone, and waken your (dormant) sense of honesty and truth in broadcasting. (See below.)

I will end with the hope, which is fast fading, that the CBC  in general and your programme in particular, would pull away from the NATO/US dominant perspective on all matters regarding international affairs, ands start speaking truth to power, at last. Canadians have the right to expect more from our public broadcasting!

After William Schabas’ morally and intellectually lazy justification of the victor’s courts  such as the one that has provided “judicial lynching†(in Edward L. Greenspan’s words)  to Slobodan Milosevic, I would hope that you would soon do an in-depth interview with Professor Michael Mandel from York University’s Osgoode Hall, whose book, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity, tells all, from the perspective of international law. (You can find a review of it by Edward Herman  at 
http://zmagsite.zmag.org/JulAug2004/herman0804.html )

Sincerely

Marjaleena Repo
201 Elm Street
Saskatoon, SK
S7J 0G8
mrepo@sasktel.net

THE MEDIA AND THE DEMONIZATION OF THE SERBS

by Marjaleena Repo

Tuesday, March 30, 1999

 


The Yugoslavian government has just expelled some journalists from NATO countries from its territory. This is deplored by the media as “censorship,†but in some of us it has created a strange sense of relief: perhaps now there will be a ceasefire in the 10-year disinformation campaign about the Yugoslavian conflict in general and the Serbs in particular. Or at least the “journalists†(few actually deserve the name) have to declare that what they are talking about is unverified rumour and hearsay since they are nowhere near the scene. Up to this point they have been able to create the false impression that they have witnessed the events they report on.

The Western media's relentless demonization of the Serbs of Yugoslavia has, however, produced a very predictable (and no doubt, wished-for) result: a truly genocidal assault on the Serbian people by Western military might, Canada to its eternal shame participating, breaking every relevant international covenant and treaty.

The pack-journalism over the last ten years has also succeeded in hoodwinking many Canadians into thinking that what is at stake is the good-riddance of a Serbian Hitler who has attempted a "final solution" of sorts on assorted ethnic groups in Yugoslavia. A lot of well-intentioned people are cheering the bombing of yet another pariah nation into the Stone Age. With the accumulated effects of media rumour-mongering and willful disinformation, who can blame these folks for their barely controlled blood thirst? After all, because Hitler wasn't stopped in time, millions perished in concentration camps, goes the heart-felt argument.

Yet the labelling of Yugoslavia's Serb leaders as Hitlers — and the Serbs themselves as brutal, subhuman monsters — is a familiar trick from recent history. It has been perpetuated by the various hired hands, PR firms, who have worked overtime for the various ethnic groups pushing for secession which would utterly destroy the once well-functioning, multi-ethnic Yugoslavian federation and replace it with small nation-states which ethnically cleansed themselves (Croatia, for instance, expelled between 500,000 and a million Serbs from its territory.) The media has merely carried the message of these "hidden hands" of the Balkan conflict.

The world was shocked to find out that a PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, had manufactured the "incubator babies" incident in Kuwait which precipitated the Gulf War: Iraqi soldiers ripping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators in a genocidal fashion. Phony eywitnesses to this atrocity tearfully testified in front of U.S. politicians and the media, adding to public support for the subsequent bombing of Iraq and contributing hugely to the demonization of the Iraqis, leaders and citizens alike. Even Amnesty International was taken in by the falsehood, which was later exposed as such, but only after the military damage was done.

Yet the shock of being duped soon wore off and gullibility returned. In no time another American PR firm, Ruder Finn, working for the Croatian and Bosnian separatists, publicly bragged that it had been able to turn world opinion against the Serbs. In April 1993 on French television, James Harff, the director of Ruder Finn, described his proudest public relations effort as having "managed to put Jewish opinion on our [Croatian and Bosnian] side." This was a "sensitive matter," he added, as "the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by real and cruel anti-semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished in Croatian camps... Our challenge was to reverse this attitude and we succeeded masterfully. At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations.... That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia.... By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz. "

The PR firm was piling hoax upon hoax. The famous story of Serb concentration camps was built on a photo of a gaunt man surrounded by others, staring at the viewer from behind barbed wire; surely an image to chill one to the bones. It took years before a German journalist Thomas Deichman, in an article titled "The picture that fooled the world," described how the famous photo was staged by its takers, British journalists, who were photographing the inhabitants from inside barbed wire which was protecting agricultural products and machinery from theft in a refugee and transit camp; the men stood outside of it; and at no time was there a barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. But by that time the image had done its deed, terminally slamming the Serbs as genocidal mass murderers.

There are countless other stories, all deliberately maligning the Serbs to further the ends of military intervention. These stories and photos of "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" (a la Hitler) in a civil war, in which Serbs are guilty as sin and others are their innocent victims, are repeated ad nauseam by western reporters without the slightest evidence, and have provided the ground for the public's (hopefully only temporary) acceptance of the illegal and brutal war against the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia. They continue after NATO's bombing began, unabated, with new absurdities such as the suggestion that the Serbs are really bombing themselves! Perhaps in the war crimes court there will soon be a place for journalists and PR firms who with their inflammatory reporting and fraudulent actions cause wars to begin. THE END

http://www.counterpunch.org/disinfo.html

The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic  by Michael Parenti
December 2003


U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected governments---guilty of introducing redistributive economic programs or otherwise pursuing independent courses that do not properly fit into the U.S.-sponsored global free market system---have found themselves targeted by the U.S. national security state. Thus democratic governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cyprus, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Syria, Uruguay, and numerous other nations were overthrown by their respective military forces, funded and advised by the United States. The newly installed military rulers then rolled back the egalitarian reforms and opened their countries all the wider to foreign corporate investors.

The U.S. national security state also has participated in destabilizing covert actions, proxy mercenary wars, or direct military attacks against revolutionary or nationalist governments in Afghanistan (in the 1980s), Angola, Cambodia, Cuba, East Timor, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Fiji Islands, Grenada, Haiti, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Iran, Jamaica, Lebanon, Libya, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Syria, South Yemen, Venezuela (under Hugo Chavez), Western Sahara, and Iraq (under the CIA-sponsored autocratic Saddam Hussein, after he emerged as an economic nationalist and tried to cut a better deal on oil prices).

The propaganda method used to discredit many of these governments is not particularly original, indeed by now it is quite transparently predictable. Their leaders are denounced as bombastic, hostile, and psychologically flawed. They are labeled power hungry demagogues, mercurial strongmen, and the worst sort of dictators likened to Hitler himself. The countries in question are designated as "terrorist" or "rogue" states, guilty of being "anti-American" and "anti-West." Some choice few are even condemned as members of an "evil axis." When targeting a country and demonizing its leadership, U.S. leaders are assisted by ideologically attuned publicists, pundits, academics, and former government officials. Together they create a climate of opinion that enables Washington to do whatever is necessary to inflict serious damage upon the designated nation's infrastructure and population, all in the name of human rights, anti-terrorism, and national security.

There is no better example of this than the tireless demonization of democratically-elected President Slobodan Milosevic and the U.S.-supported wars against Yugoslavia. Louis Sell, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, has authored a book (Slobodan Milosevic and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, Duke University Press, 2002) that is a hit piece on Milosevic, loaded with all the usual prefabricated images and policy presumptions of the U.S. national security state. Sell's Milosevic is a caricature, a cunning power seeker and maddened fool, who turns on trusted comrades and plays upon divisions within the party.

This Milosevic is both an "orthodox socialist" and an "opportunistic Serbian nationalist," a demagogic power-hungry "second Tito" who simultaneously wants dictatorial power over all of Yugoslavia while eagerly pursuing polices that "destroy the state that Tito created." The author does not demonstrate by reference to specific policies and programs that Milosevic is responsible for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, he just tells us so again and again. One would think that the Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, Macedonian, and Kosovo Albanian secessionists and U.S./NATO interventionists might have had something to do with it.

In my opinion, Milosevic's real sin was that he resisted the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and opposed a U.S. imposed hegemony. He also attempted to spare Yugoslavia the worst of the merciless privatizations and rollbacks that have afflicted other former communist countries. Yugoslavia was the only nation in Europe that did not apply for entry into the European Union or NATO or OSCE.

For some left intellectuals, the former Yugoslavia did not qualify as a socialist state because it had allowed too much penetration by private corporations and the IMF. But U.S. policymakers are notorious for not seeing the world the way purist left intellectuals do. For them Yugoslavia was socialist enough with its developed human services sector and an economy that was over 75 percent publicly owned. Sell makes it clear that Yugoslavia's public ownership and Milosevic's defense of that economy were a central consideration in Washington's war against Yugoslavia. Milosevic, Sell complains, had a "commitment to orthodox socialism." He "portrayed public ownership of the means of production and a continued emphasis on [state] commodity production as the best guarantees for prosperity." He had to go.

To make his case against Milosevic, Sell repeatedly falls back on the usual ad hominem labeling. Thus we read that in his childhood Milosevic was "something of a prig" and of course "by nature a loner," a weird kind of kid because he was "uninterested in sports or other physical activities," and he "spurned childhood pranks in favor of his books." The author quotes an anonymous former classmate who reports that Slobodan's mother "dressed him funny and kept him soft." Worse still, Slobodan would never join in when other boys stole from orchards---no doubt a sure sign of childhood pathology.

Sell further describes Milosevic as "moody," "reclusive," and given to "mulish fatalism." But Sell's own data---when he pauses in his negative labeling and gets down to specifics---contradicts the maladjusted "moody loner" stereotype. He acknowledges that young Slobodan worked well with other youth when it came to political activities. Far from being unable to form close relations, Slobodan met a girl, his future wife, and they enjoyed an enduring lifelong attachment. In his early career when heading the Beogradska Banka, Milosevic was reportedly "communicative, caring about people at the bank, and popular with his staff." Other friends describe him as getting on well with people, "communal and relaxed," a faithful husband to his wife, and a proud and devoted father to his children. And Sell allows that Milosevic was at times "confident," "outgoing," and "charismatic." But the negative stereotype is so firmly established by repetitious pronouncement (and by years of propagation by Western media and officialdom) that Sell can simply slide over contradictory evidence---even when such evidence is provided by himself.

Sell refers to anonymous "U.S. psychiatrists, who have studied Milosevic closely." By "closely" he must mean from afar, since no U.S. psychiatrist has ever treated or even interviewed Milosevic. These uncited and unnamed psychiatrists supposedly diagnosed the Yugoslav leader as a "malignant narcissistic" personality. Sell tells us that such malignant narcissism fills Milosevic with self-deception and leaves him with a "chore personality" that is a "sham." "People with Milosevic's type of personality frequently either cannot or will not recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception of the way the world is or should be." How does Dr. Sigmund Sell know all this? He seems to find proof in the fact that Milosevic dared to have charted a course that differed from the one emanating from Washington. Surely only personal pathology can explain such "anti-West" obstinacy. Furthermore, we are told that Milosevic suffered from a "blind spot" in that he was never comfortable with the notion of private property. If this isn't evidence of malignant narcissism, what is? Sell never considers the possibility that he himself, and the global interventionists who think like him, cannot or will not "recognize the reality of facts that diverge from their own perception of the way the world is or should be."

Milosevic, we are repeatedly told, fell under the growing influence of his wife, Mirjana Markovic, "the real power behind the throne." Sell actually calls her "Lady Macbeth" on one occasion. He portrays Markovic as a complete wacko, given to uncontrollable anger; her eyes "vibrated like a scared animal"; "she suffers from severe schizophrenia" with "a tenuous grasp on reality," and is a hopeless "hypochondriac." In addition, she has a "mousy" appearance and a "dreamy" and "traumatized" personality. And like her husband, with whom she shares a "very abnormal relationship," she has "an autistic relation with the world." Worse still, she holds "hardline marxist views." We are left to wonder how the autistic dysfunctional Markovic was able to work as a popular university professor, organize and lead a new political party, and play an active role in the popular resistance against Western interventionism.

In this book, whenever Milosevic or others in his camp are quoted as saying something, they "snarl," "gush," "hiss," and "crow." In contrast, political players who win Sell's approval, "observe," "state," "note," and "conclude." When one of Milosevic's superiors voices his discomfort about "noisy Kosovo Serbs" (as Sell calls them) who were demonstrating against the mistreatment they suffered at the hands of Kosovo Albanian secessionists, Milosevic "hisses," "Why are you so afraid of the street and the people?" Some of us might think this is a pretty good question to hiss at a government leader, but Sell treats it as proof of Milosevic's demagoguery.

Whenever Milosevic did anything that aided the common citizenry, as when he taxed the interest earned on foreign currency accounts---a policy that was unpopular with Serbian elites but appreciated by the poorer strata---he is dismissed as manipulatively currying popular favor. Thus we must accept Sell's word that Milosevic never wanted the power to prevent hunger but only hungered for power. The author operates from a nonfalsefiable paradigm. If the targeted leader is unresponsive to the people, this is proof of his dictatorial proclivity. If he is responsive to them, this demonstrates his demagogic opportunism.

In keeping with U.S. officialdom's view of the world, Sell labels "Milosevic and his minions" as "hardliners," "conservatives," and "ideologues"; they are "anti-West," and bound up in "socialist dogma." In contrast, Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovo Albanian secessionists who worked hard to dismember Yugoslavia and deliver their respective republics to the tender mercies of neoliberal rollback are identified as "economic reformers," "the liberal leadership," and "pro-West" (read, pro-transnational corporate capitalist). Sell treats "Western-style democracy" and "a modern market economy" as necessary correlates. He has nothing to say about the dismal plight of the Eastern European countries that abandoned their deficient but endurable planned economies for the merciless exactions of laissez-faire capitalism.

Sell's sensitivity to demagoguery does not extend to Franjo Tudjman, the crypto-fascist anti-Semite Croat who had nice things to say about Hitler, and who imposed his harsh autocratic rule on the newly independent Croatia. Tudjman dismissed the Holocaust as an exaggeration, and openly hailed the Croatian Ustashe Nazi collaborators of World War II. He even employed a few aging Ustashe leaders in his government. Sell says not a word about all this, and treats Tudjman as just a good old Croatian nationalist. Likewise, he has not a critical word about the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic. He comments laconically that Izetbegovic "was sentenced to three years imprisonment in 1946 for belonging to a group called the Young Muslims." One is left with the impression that the Yugoslav communist government had suppressed a devout Muslim. What Sell leaves unmentioned is that the Young Muslims actively recruited Muslim units for the Nazi SS during World War II; these units perpetrated horrid atrocities against the resistance movement and the Jewish population in Yugoslavia. Izetbegovic got off rather lightly with a three-year sentence.

Little is made in this book of the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Serbs by U.S.-supported leaders like Tudjman and Izetbegovic during and after the U.S.-sponsored wars. Conversely, no mention is made of the ethnic tolerance and diversity that existed in President Milosevic's Yugoslavia. By 1999, all that was left of Yugoslavia was Montenegro and Serbia. Readers are never told that this rump nation was the only remaining multi-ethnic society among the various former Yugoslav republics, the only place where Serbs, Albanians, Croats, Gorani, Jews, Egyptians, Hungarians, Roma, and numerous other ethnic groups could live together with some measure of security and tolerance.

The relentless demonization of Milosevic spills over onto the Serbian people in general. In Sell's book, the Serbs are aggrandizing nationalists. Kosovo Serbs demonstrating against mistreatment by Albanian nationalists are described as having their "bloodlust up." And Serb workers demonstrating to defend their rights and hard won gains are dismissed by Sell as "the lowest instruments of the mob." The Serbs who had lived in Krajina and other parts of Croatia for centuries are dismissed as colonial occupiers. In contrast, the Slovenian, Croatian, and Bosnian Muslim nationalist secessionists, and Kosovo Albanian irredentists are simply seeking "independence," "self-determination," and "cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty." In this book, the Albanian KLA gunmen are not big-time drug dealers, terrorists, and ethnic cleansers, but guerrilla fighters and patriots.

Military actions allegedly taken by the Serbs, described in the vaguest terms, are repeatedly labeled "brutal," while assaults and atrocities delivered upon the Serbs by other national groups are more usually accepted as retaliatory and defensive, or are dismissed by Sell as "untrue," "highly exaggerated," and "hyperventilated." Milosevic, Sell says, disseminated "vicious propaganda" against the Croats, but he does not give us any specifics. Sell does provide one or two instances of how Serb villages were pillaged and their inhabitants raped and murdered by Albanian secessionists. From this he grudgingly allows that "some of the Serb charges . . . had a core of truth." But he makes nothing more of it.

The well-timed, well-engineered story about a Serbian massacre of unarmed Albanians in the village of Racak, hyped by U.S. diplomat and veteran disinformationist William Walker, is wholeheartedly embraced by Sell, who ignores all the contrary evidence. An Associated Press TV crew had actually filmed the battle that took place in Racak the previous day in which Serbian police killed a number of KLA fighters. A French journalist who went through Racak later that day found evidence of a battle but no evidence of a massacre of unarmed civilians, nor did Walker's own Kosovo Verification Mission monitors. All the forensic reports reveal that almost all of the forty-four persons killed had previously been using fire arms, and all had perished in combat. Sell simply ignores this evidence.

The media-hyped story of how the Serbs allegedly killed 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica is uncritically accepted by Sell, even though the most thorough investigations have uncovered not more than 2,000 bodies of undetermined nationality. The earlier massacres carried out by Muslims, their razing of some fifty Serbian villages around Srebrenica, as reported by two British correspondents and others, are ignored. The complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or 100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes unnoticed.

Sell's rendition of what happened at Rambouillet leaves much to be desired. Under Rambouillet, Kosovo would have been turned into a NATO colony. Milosevic might have reluctantly agreed to that, so desperate was he to avoid a full-scale NATO onslaught on the rest of Yugoslavia. To be certain that war could not be avoided, however, the U.S. delegation added a remarkable stipulation, demanding that NATO forces and personnel were to have unrestrained access to all of Yugoslavia, unfettered use of its airports, rails, ports, telecommunication services, and airwaves, all free of cost and immune from any jurisdiction by Yugoslav authorities. NATO would also have the option to modify for its own use all of Yugoslavia's infrastructure including roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and utility systems. In effect, not just Kosovo but all of Yugoslavia was to be subjected to an extraterritoriality tantamount to outright colonial occupation.

Sell does not mention these particulars. Instead he assures us that the request for NATO's unimpeded access to Yugoslavia was just a pro forma protocol inserted "largely for legal reasons." A similar though less sweeping agreement was part of the Dayton package, he says. Indeed, and the Dayton agreement reduced Bosnia to a Western colony. But if there was nothing wrong with the Rambouillet ultimatum, why then did Milosevic reject it? Sell ascribes Milosevic's resistance to his perverse "bunker mentality" and his need to defy the world.

There is not a descriptive word in this book of the 78 days of around-the-clock massive NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, no mention of how it caused the loss of thousands of lives, injured and maimed thousands more, contaminated much of the land and water with depleted uranium, and destroyed much of the country's public sector industries and infrastructure-while leaving all the private Western corporate structures perfectly intact.

The sources that Sell relies on share U.S. officialdom's view of the Balkans struggle. Observers who offer a more independently critical perspective, such as Sean Gervasi, Diana Johnstone, Gregory Elich, Nicholas Stavrous, Michel Collon, Raju Thomas, and Michel Chossudovsky are left untouched and uncited. Important Western sources I reference in my book on Yugoslavia offer evidence, testimony, and documentation that do not fit Sell's conclusions, including sources from within the European Union, the European Community's Commission on Women's Rights, the OSCE and its Kosovo Verification Mission, the UN War Crimes Commission, and various other UN commissions, various State Department reports, the German Foreign Office and German Defense Ministry reports, and the International Red Cross. Sell does not touch these sources.

Also ignored by him are the testimonies and statements of members of the U.S. Congress who visited the Balkans, a former State Department official under the Bush administration, a former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, several UN and NATO generals and international negotiators, Spanish air force pilots, forensic teams from various countries, and UN monitors who offer revelations that contradict the picture drawn by Sell and other apologists of U.S. officialdom.

In sum, Sell's book is packed with discombobulated insider details, unsupported charges, unexamined presumptions, and ideologically loaded labeling. As mainstream disinformation goes, it is a job well done.

MICHAEL PARENTI received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He is an award winning author and activist who has published some 250 articles and 19 books, including Superpatriotism (2004), and The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003) which won the “Book of the Year Award†(nonfiction) from Online Review of Books. His most recent book is The Culture Struggle  (2006). Various works of his have been translated into some twenty languages. For further information, visit his website:  www.michaelparenti.org


The real story:
HOW MILOSEVIC WAS MORE EVIL THAN YOU EVER KNEW

By Jan Oberg, TFF director

"The media call him a butcher and compare him with Stalin,  Mao and Hitler. That's right, but too diplomatic. They don't give us the  the broader picture. At his death I choose to tell you  how I believe Slobodan Milosevic single-handed caused all the troubles. And I met him and many of his opponents.

Here, for the first time, the Milosevic' Master Plan is revealed and analysed in depth. When you hear that he caused four wars and ruined millions of lives, THIS tells you how he actually did it.

Here is the conclusive evidence that every massacre, all ethnic cleansing, every village that was torched and any woman who was raped all happened because of his personal cruel Master Plan and on his order. I can no longer keep silent. My findings substantiate the general media image of the YU drama.

History, economy, the activities of other actors in former YU don¹t mean a thing. He is guilty of it all and we should not be afraid of saying it aloud just because he has died. Indeed, I've found reasons to believe that he can be tied to the genocides in Rwanda and Burundi too.

It doesn't matter what the Hague trial might have concluded. U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke is right that world public opinion have already found the dictator guilty. That's what counts.

This path-breaking document concludes that we would all have lived in Greater Serbia had the U.S., the EU, NATO and the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosova not stood up as one for their deeply held beliefs in justice, peace, human rights and democracy. Indeed, they saved Europe from this new dictator who might even have dwarfed Hitler," says the author.

The analysis is in 3 parts, begin here:
http://www.transnational.org/forum/meet/2006/Oberg_Slobo_1.html