Ceku must face justice

 

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/492868.html

The Halifax Herald

HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA | Tuesday March 28, 2006

Opinion

Ceku must face justice

By SCOTT TAYLOR / On Target

LAST WEEK, I just happened to be in Belgrade attending a conference on the future status of Kosovo when the funeral for former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was held.

True to form, the western media's coverage of these events presented accused war criminal Milosevic as evil incarnate and the Serbian people, by extension, as something bordering on the subhuman.

Almost entirely lost in the frenzy to heap responsibility for a decade's worth of death and destruction into Slobo's coffin was the announcement that the Albanians in Kosovo have just selected a new prime minister.

To have examined this development in the slightest would have served to spread around some of the blame and to illustrate that the Serbs certainly did not have a monopoly on war crimes during those bloody civil wars. In fact, if one only casually glances at the resume of the incoming prime minister, Agim Ceku, it becomes apparent that his election flies in the face of international justice, foreshadows more violence in Kosovo and ignores the sacrifices and valour of our Canadian Forces.

In summary, Ceku, an Albanian Kosovar by birth, began his military career as an officer in the former federal Yugoslavian army. When the initial Yugoslav breakup occurred in 1991, Ceku was quick to switch his loyalty to the Croatian cause. As a colonel in the Croatian army, Ceku commanded the notorious 1993 operation in what is known as the Medak Pocket.

It was here that the men of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry came face to face with the savagery of which Ceku was capable. Over 200 Serbian inhabitants of the Medak Pocket were slaughtered in a grotesque manner (the bodies of female rape victims were found after being burned alive). Our traumatized troops who buried the grisly remains were encouraged to collect evidence and were assured that the perpetrators would be brought to justice.

Nevertheless in 1995, Ceku, by then trained by U.S. instructors as 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-declared "safe" city of Knin during the Croatian offensive known as Operation Storm. Some 500 innocent civilians perished in those merciless barrages, and senior Canadian officers who witnessed the slaughter demanded that Ceku be indicted. Once again, their pleas fell of deaf ears.

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 war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Despite the Canadian connection to these alleged crimes, Arbour and her lawyers chose instead to pursue more "politically prominent" individuals such as Milosevic, and other senior Serbs, while nothing 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 and NATO, Ceku takes his retirement (at age 37) from the Croatian army and is pronounced supreme commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Throughout the air campaign against Yugoslavia, Ceku was portrayed as a loyal ally and he was frequently present at NATO briefings with top generals such as Wesley Clark and Michael Jackson (see photo at http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/pictures.htm).

Under the terms of the June 1999 Kosovo peace deal, Ceku's Albanian guerrillas were to be disarmed and reconstituted into a UN-sponsored (non-military) disaster relief organization known as the Kosovo Protection Corps. But despite the fact that they now collected UN paycheques, Ceku's men never gave up their guns - nor their quest for a Greater Albania

From the armed Albanian incursions into southern Serbia in 2000 - and Macedonia in 2001 - right up until the violent pogrom unleashed against Kosovo Serbs in March 2004, Ceku's brand of violence, hatred and ethnic cleansing has remained unchanged.

Now he is being hailed as a political leader, and the world is once again turning a blind eye to his crimes.

Hopefully, Canada at least will respect the eyewitness testimony of our own peacekeepers and finally insist that Ceku face the same justice that was demanded of Slobodan Milosevic.

Presenting the soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry with a belated Governor General's unit citation for the Medak Pocket battle will remain a hollow gesture until Ceku is held responsible for his atrocities.

( staylor@herald.ca)

Lies and Myths about Milosevic and the Serbs

 

["I never saw the Yugoslav Federal Army mistreat anyone in Kosovo" ]

 

http://www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2006-03-27.html

Free Nations

LIES AND MYTHS ABOUT MILOSEVIC AND THE SERBS

by Rodney Atkinson

Dateline 27th March 2006

"I never saw the Yugoslav Federal Army mistreat anyone in Kosovo" Roland Keith, Commander in the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission, 1999.

In the week of the death of Milosevic anti-Serb propaganda reached a peak with not a single word of praise for a people who have in all three European Wars of the 20th century proved their anti-fascist credentials. Instead it is the propaganda of Croatian fascism, German imperialism and BBC appeasement which defends the attack on Yugoslavia (illegal on at least 7 counts under international law) and its break up into the same petty nationalist states with clerical fascist governments which Nazism and Fascism constructed in the 1940s.

So the EU (under German direction) the USA and the UN conducted the most illegal war of all time, without UN approval, destroyed the most ethnically mixed State in the Balkans (Serbia) and brought about the most ethnically and religiously pure state of Croatia and a religiously divided Bosnia. The UN has failed to disarm the KLA who have now invaded Macedonia - with the weapons that the UN was supposed to remove from them! Now, having allowed the Kosovo Muslims to drive out most of the Christian Serbs from Kosovo, the UN seems bent on removing Kosovo from Serbia. This in religious and cultural terms would be like removing Kent from England or Texas from the United States, with Canterbury and Houston becoming Muslims cities!

Throughout the 1990s, the BBC, the British press and the Western media in general have lied and deceived, covered up the truth, broadcast fabrications prepared by anti Yugoslav forces, ignored historical fact and have been willing victims of one of the most successful propaganda missions of modern times. Here are some of the myths and lies which now pass for "facts" in the media today.


Milosevic "started the wars against Bosnia and Croatia"

Serbs were not the aggressors but the defenders of their internationally recognised State of Yugoslavia against foreign powers (principally Germany and the USA) who financed insurrection by Bosnian Muslims, Croatian nationalists (using the same "U" emblem as the Ustashe fascist allies of Germany during the second World War) and Kosovo Muslim Albanians. All three of these groups had provided the Nazis with Waffen SS divisions against our allies, the Serbs, between 1940 and 1945).

Milosevic was a "fascist"
He was in fact the exact opposite, his opponents in Croatia and Bosnia being the historical fascists whose 1990s actions were based on precisely the same imagery, ideology and in some cases even the names of their fascist movements during the second world war. Milosevic could be described, as the whole of Yugoslavia was during the cold war, as a "Reform Communist".

Milosevic was a dictator.
He was elected three times, with the same lack of Western democratic niceties which we praised in the election of Yeltsin and Putin!

He persecuted the Kosovo Albanians.
The exact opposite was the case for the Kosovo Liberation Army had been murdering Serbs and Albanian Kosovans for years. In this they had continued the ethnic cleansing of Serbs started by the Nazis and fascists during the Second World War and carried on by Tito (a Croat) after the war. There were Albanian Muslims in Milosevic's Government - but that did not stop the gradual ethnic cleansing of Serbs from their historic homeland (and centre of Orthodox Christianity) in Kosovo by the KLA, rightly described by international observers as a terrorist organisation.

The KLA has now invaded Macedonia, where Albanian Muslims are creating "a third Albania"!

Both the Commander of the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission in 1999 (just before Yugoslavia was attacked) Roland Keith and the former Canadian Ambassador in Belgrade James Bissett have condemned the war and defended the Yugoslav Government. Bissett said that the 1999 attack was a "put up job" and quotes the most revealing admission by the former British Defense Minister, Lord Gilbert, who told the British House of Commons in July 2000 that the terms that NATO sought to force upon Milosevic at Rambouillet were deliberately designed to provoke war.

Commander Keith described the KLA as a terrorist organisation which had a grip on most villages in Kosovo. He had direct experience of grotesque lies told by villagers about ethnic cleansing and he said he never saw the Yugoslav Federal Army mistreat anyone in Kosovo.

Milosevic would have been found guilty of war crimes.
In fact the trial and Milosevic's detailed and penetrating challenge to prosecution witnesses had made a complete fool of the kangaroo court which had effectively kidnapped him in Belgrade (using the same anti-constitutional methods as the European Union did to destroy the sovereignty of the nation states of Europe - Presidential or Crown Prerogative!)

Milosevic was not accused in the International Court in The Hague but by a "special Tribunal" set up by the anti Serb forces. Blair and his partners in the illegal war were indicted at the REAL International Court - but refused to turn up.

The evidence at the trial proved Milosevic's guilt.
Far from that the Court was repeatedly unable to make any connection between Milosevic's orders and the assumed "atrocities". Indeed several Serb army personnel gave evidence that Belgrade had always insisted that soldiers who committed crimes should be brought to justice. The Court case also revealed that Lord Paddy Ashdown had lied to the Court and one of the Prosecution's star witnesses exonerated Milosevic and said he had been tortured to make him provide evidence against the accused.

What about the war time atrocities?
Most were myths, the rest questionable. The Sarajevo market bomb was not set by Serbs but by Bosnian Muslims, as the UN later confirmed. The skeletonic "concentration camp" victim was a hoax, as the BBC's John Simpson confirmed. The "10,000 deaths in Kosovo" was proved a complete myth. The Srebrenica "massacre of 8,000 Muslims" consists of some 2,000 bodies including Serbs who died in battle over a long period. Teenagers among the dead were commonplace especially among Croat and Bosnian army troops. The "International Community" never describes the massacres of Serb villagers around Srebrenica before the Yugoslav army moved in, nor the evil Muslim Commander Naser Oric who, Roland Keith testifies, carried out those raids and showed journalists video tape of the beheadings he ordered. Oric withdrew his troops from Srebrenica before the Serbs arrived. His army was later caught and badly defeated - which explains the origins of the Bosnian bodies found.

What about ethnic cleansing?
Why should the leader of Yugoslavia break up his own country? Only the Croats (who drove out 400,000 Serbs from the Krajina) and the Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians (who drove out a similar number of Serbs) had a reason to do so - and they did. It was in fact the federal Prime Minister of Yugoslavia who happened to be a Croat who ordered the army into Slovenia and Croatia. And it was another Croat President Tudjman who wrote a constitution which described the Serbs as an "alien minority". He then drove 40,000 Serbs out of Croatia - the first ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia.

What about political bigotry?
Anyone reading Milosevic's historical speeches would recognise someone who lacked political, racial or religious bigotry - unlike the extreme bigotry of his opponents President Tudjman of Croatia ("genocide is a natural phenomenon commanded by the almighty in defence of Roman Catholicism") and President Izetbegovic ("There can be no peace or co-existence between the Islamic Faith and non Islamic institutions"). So why were Izetbegovic and Tudjman not put on trial in The Hague?

In the light of such hypocrisy it is not surprising that one of the most criminal war Commanders - General Agim Ceku, who at various times fought in the Croat and KLA armies, murdered hundreds (at the Medak Pocket) and ethnically cleansed hundred of thousands of Serbs (from the Krajina) and has been indicted at The Hague, is also on the payroll of the UN in the "Kosovo Protection Force"!!!!!!

For further evidence of the massive fascist attack on Yugoslavia over the years please read the following papers - all but the first one are on this website:

The Illegality of NATO's War against Yugoslavia www.ukconservatism.freeuk.com/archive27.html

Canadian Ambassador and Kosovo Commander explode myths of Yugoslav War
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2004-10-14.html

John Kerry gets funds from Terrorist KLA
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2004-10-18.html

The Carcass of Yugoslavia
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2004-12-08.html

Illegal Yugoslav War a boost to Islamic Extremism
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2005-08-15.html

Kosovo - German Imperialism to defy UN?
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2005-09-03.html

The Vatican and Islam
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2005-10-22.html

German Nazis aided Croat Fascists in 1990s.
www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2006-03-15.html