this is a reasonably good documentary, important viewing at this time, as those dark days are recollected……for me personally, I have to say what is most palpable is my shame that I did not understand the issues sufficiently, nor did my husband of Russian descent, it is only in the last 5 years since finding the Saker that our thinking has evolved, now members of a Serbian Orthodox Church, this memorium is painful & cathartic, the youtuber Graham Phillips recently did a tour through Kosovo, which is very telling & well worth a watch
the depleted uranium is the work of the devil incarnate, remember that when you go to church on a Sunday NATO members!!!
Evidence to the contrary is overwhelming about Milosevic. Milosevic brokered 5 peace agreements which were violated by the other side in each case with US backing. Google the letter that was written to Gerhard Schroeder the German Chancellor by one of his political advisors who attended a conference in Bratislava Slovakia where plans were drafted to breakup Yugoslavia.
If you really want to know what happened in Yugoslavia read “Diana Johnstone, FOOLS’ CRUSADE Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Monthly Review Press, New York, N.Y, 2002;” or John Schindlers “Unholy Terror”. “John R. Schlinder served for nearly a decade with the US National Security Agency—work which took him to many countries in support of U.S. and allied forces operating in the Balkans—and was NSA’s top Balkans expert and Gregory Elich’s book “Strange Liberators as well.
What most people don’t seem to understand is that in Milosevic’s Serbia lived some seven million Serbs, two hundred and fifty thousand Croats, one million Muslims, two hundred and fifty thousand Albanians (excluding the million and a half that live in the Serbian province of Kosovo), four hundred thousand Hungarians and many other minorities who still live there today.
During the NATO war and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia not a single member of these minorities was maltreated and in fact thousands of Muslims, Croats, Albanians and Serbs escaped from conflict zones and found sanctuary in Serbia. So why would Milosevic go outside of Serbia to cleanse non-Serbs when he never touched a single one in his own province and doorstep? The Hague Tribunal refused to respond to this question.
Milosevic was tried for attempting to save the unity of Yugoslavia which NATO wanted to dismantle. NATO used nationalist Croats in the Diaspora and Muslim Fundamentalists in Bosnia to help them take over the region.
Examine who now owns, hydro, telecommunication, mining forestry and all other economic entities and you will see that the people in this region are no longer masters in their own home.
You want to blame someone for this mess blame Washington, London and Berlin. The Bosnian people Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic were all once Serbs. Old Serbia extended from north of Split and south to Albania. Look at the maps of this region from the period of the Crusades.
In the 13th century the Schism split the region into two and the Serbs on the West side were Catholicized (Rome) while those on the east side remained with Constantinople. The Turks took the region in the 14th century and many former Serbs on both sides of the line converted and became Muslims. The three groups in the region need to learn their history. One thing that they need to know or the Bosnian people already know when one fights with his neighbour all the neighbours are poorer and miserable.
“During the NATO war and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia not a single member of these minorities was maltreated and in fact thousands of Muslims, Croats, Albanians and Serbs escaped from conflict zones and found sanctuary in Serbia. So why would Milosevic go outside of Serbia to cleanse non-Serbs when he never touched a single one in his own province and doorstep?”
Well, just read a transcript of Milosevic’s 1989 speech in Kosovo.
The one that western MSM always refer to as Milosevic’s “notorious” Kosovo Speech.
An excerpt:
“Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is it’s advantage. National composition of almost all countries in the world today, particularly developed ones, has also been changing in this direction. Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully.”
There. Can’t you see it?
The man was obviously inflaming inter-ethnic phobia and hatred. ( sarcasm )
Verami, Milosevic’s Kosovo speech was immediately, and entirely falsely, reported by the Western fakestream presstitute vermin as ‘aggressive’, ‘nationalistic’ and ‘racist’. When I finally got to read it, and saw that it was exactly the opposite, I was, once again, impressed by the sheer moral Evil of the presstitute swine. And they still, even to today, keep lying about this event.
Milosevic was making mince-meat of the NATO thugs at the kangaroo court that was legally lynching him, so he was murdered, by medication. When his urine turned purple, a side-effect of Rifampicin use, a medication usually reserved for multi-antibiotic treatment of TB, they knew something was up. A rare side-effect of Rifampicin is that it interferes with certain cardiac medications, the type that Milosevic was on. When he alerted others to this occurrence, the NATO thugs claimed he was poisoning himself, a very stupid lie as he was strictly supervised in taking his medications. And, as you say, the vast majority of those fleeing the civil strife fomented by the USA, NATO and the Vatican in Yugoslavia, fled to Serbia, not the fascist successor states of Slovenia and Croatia, or the fascistic-Islamic Bosnia, the recipient of such fraternal assistance from al-Qaeda.
A German journalist embedded with the KLA witnessed the KLA ordering the Albanians to Albania and Macedonia. He testified about it at the ICTY in October 2004.
He said that the KLA had even drawn up lists, in anticipation of the NATO bombing, several weeks before, which had “priority” towns/villages/area which were to be evacuated first. And indeed, these very places were the first to be evacuated.
It was the KLA-controlled areas where Albanians left first and most thoroughly, while the Serbian government held areas, during the war, is where most Albanians stayed – such as Pristina. There were huge crowds of Albanians to greet the British troops as they entered.
Of course, the Serbs greeted the Russian troops who came over from BiH, but they never were able to help the Serb population and NATO blocked them from getting supplies from Russia by having Bulgaria and Romania shut down their air spaces. So they were soon dependent and incorporated into KFOR.
Vuki, looking at the title you had presented “Western Delusions” immediately gives away the whitewash attempt of this murderous attempt at destroying Yugoslavia. This war on Yugoslavia was a part of a “gang” to destroy country order in Europe and push the idea of EU down the Europen’s throats.
What really takes the cake is that most people in my part of the world know that they cant trust their governments and much less the Media and yet they go along with the lies.. Why? They hear simple minded drivel from uneducated news readers. Some news anchors who might want to tell the truth are fired. Walter Cronkite used to end his nightly broadcast with the words “and that is the way it is” . When he retired he admitted that it was never the way he said it. When one hears constant lies and when one is poorly educated one cannot tell the difference between the lie and the truth.
Now Serbia is just a smaller version of old Yugoslavia with the various ethnicities still there and their problems unsolved to be stoked up by enemies yet again when it serves their purpose. And if that’s not enough they now have immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere milling around. I don’t know if even God can save Serbia the way it is going.
Yes, it is sickening and evil behavior. It is not without reason this is called ‘crimes against humanity’. And they don’t care. This beast is still roaming the earth, lining up its next victim. They always leave the gift of D.U. with those they take freedom, democracy and humanitarianism to because it is the gift that keeps on giving.
Since a picture speaks a thousand words here is my contribution on this sad anniversary: https://twitter.com/nikola83dorcol/status/1109615336591147008?s=20
(Warning: GRAPHIC, for those sensitive souls who prefer not to see it here is a description: nightime, 3 Albanian soldiers, the middle one holding a severed head in each hand, smiling broadly, the UCK insignia,an albanian flag, red background with black eagle, is visible on the middle soldier’s left arm).
Thanks Nikola from Dorcol! UCK is indeed ISIS.
These headchoppers, allies of NATO, now call themselves the “government” of Kosovo.
I read the book “Cellist Of Sarajevo” and was annoyed at the ignorance of the author Stephen Galloway so I wrote this letter to him. There is a good review of this book at: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/wtrkla03.html
Vuki
Mr. Galloway
In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, US-NATO foreign policy had to re-imagine its role in the world. The Cold War served as a means of justifying US imperialist expansion across the globe with the aim of “containing” the Soviet threat. NATO itself was created and existed for the sole purpose of forging an anti-Soviet alliance. With the USSR gone, NATO had no reason to exist, and the US had to find a new purpose for its imperialist strategy in the world.
In 1992, the US Defense Department, under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney [later to be George Bush Jr.’s VP], had the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz [later to be George Bush Jr.’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and President of the World Bank], write up a defense document to guide American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, commonly referred to as the “New World Order.”
The Defense Planning Guidance document was leaked in 1992, and revealed that, “In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union,” and that, “The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”
Further, “the new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.” Among the necessary challenges to American supremacy, the document “postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea,” and identified China and Russia as its major threats. It further “suggests that the United States could also consider extending to Eastern and Central European nations security commitments similar to those extended to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf.”[1]
NATO and Yugoslavia
The wars in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s served as a justification for the continued existence of NATO in the world, and to expand American imperial interests in Eastern Europe.
The World Bank and IMF set the stage for the destabilization of Yugoslavia. After long-time dictator of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, died in 1980, a leadership crisis developed. In 1982, American foreign policy officials organized a set of IMF and World Bank loans, under the newly created Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), to handle the crisis of the $20 billion US debt. The effect of the loans, under the SAP, was that they “wreaked economic and political havoc… The economic crisis threatened political stability … it also threatened to aggravate simmering ethnic tensions.”[2]
In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic became President of Serbia, the largest and most powerful of all the Yugoslav republics. Also in 1989, Yugoslavia’s Premier traveled to the US to meet President George H.W. Bush in order to negotiate another financial aid package. In 1990, the World Bank/IMF program began, and the Yugoslav state’s expenditures went towards debt repayment. As a result, social programs were dismantled, the currency devalued, wages frozen, and prices rose. The “reforms fueled secessionist tendencies that fed on economic factors as well as ethnic divisions, virtually ensuring the de facto secession of the republic,” leading to Croatia and Slovenia’s succession in 1991.[3]
In 1990, US the intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), predicting that Yugoslavia would break apart, erupt in civil war, and the report then placed blame on Serbian President Milosevic for the coming destabilization.[4]
In 1991, conflict broke out between Yugoslavia and Croatia, when it, too, declared independence. A ceasefire was reached in 1992. Yet, the Croats continued small military offensives until 1995, as well as participating in the war in Bosnia. In 1995, Operation Storm was undertaken by Croatia to try to retake the Krajina region. A Croatian general was recently put on trial at The Hague for war crimes during this battle, which was key to driving the Serbs out of Croatia and “cemented Croatian independence.” The US supported the operation and the CIA actively provided intelligence to Croat forces, leading to the displacement of between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs, largely through means of murder, plundering, burning villages and ethnic cleansing.[5] The Croatian Army was trained by US advisers, and the general on trial was even personally supported by the CIA.[6]
The Clinton administration gave the “green light” to Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims and “from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia.” Further, “Iran, and other Muslim states, helped to bring 5000 Mujihadeen fighters into Bosnia to fight with the Muslims against the Serbs, ‘holy warriors’ from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yemen and Algeria, some of whom had suspected links with Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.”
It was “Western intervention in the Balkans [that] exacerbated tensions and helped to sustain hostilities. By recognizing the claims of separatist republics and groups in 1990/1991, Western elites – the American, British, French and German – undermined government structures in Yugoslavia, increased insecurities, inflamed conflict and heightened ethnic tensions. And by offering logistical support to various sides during the war, Western intervention sustained the conflict into the mid-1990s. Clinton’s choice of the Bosnian Muslims as a cause to champion on the international stage, and his administration’s demands that the UN arms embargo be lifted so that the Muslims and Croats could be armed against the Serbs, should be viewed in this light.”[7]
During the war in Bosnia, there “was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah.” Further, “the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs.”[8] Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, also ran arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and Croatia to fight against the Serbs.[9]
The US had influenced the war in the region in a variety of ways. As the Observer reported in 1995, a major facet of their involvement was through “Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), a Virginia-based American private company of retired generals and intelligence officers. The American embassy in Zagreb admits that MPRI is training the Croats, on license from the US government.” Further, The Dutch “were convinced that US Special Forces were involved in training the Bosnian army and the Bosnian Croat Army (HVO).”[10]
As far back as 1988, the leader of Croatia met with the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to create “a joint policy to break up Yugoslavia,” and bring Slovenia and Croatia into the “German economic zone.” So, US Army officers were dispatched to Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, and Macedonia as “advisers” and brought in US Special Forces to help.[11] During the nine-month cease-fire in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, six US generals met with Bosnian army leaders to plan the Bosnian offensive that broke the cease-fire.[12]
In 1996, the Albanian Mafia, in collaboration with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militant guerilla organization, took control over the enormous Balkan heroin trafficking routes. The KLA was linked to former Afghan Mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden.[13]
In 1997, the KLA began fighting against Serbian forces,[14] and in 1998, the US State Department removed the KLA from its list of terrorist organizations.[15] Before and after 1998, the KLA was receiving arms, training and support from the US and NATO, and Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had a close political relationship with KLA leader Hashim Thaci.[16]
Both the CIA and German intelligence, the BND, supported the KLA terrorists in Yugoslavia prior to and after the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The BND had KLA contacts since the early 1990s, the same period that the KLA was establishing its Al-Qaeda contacts.[17] KLA members were trained by Osama bin Laden at training camps in Afghanistan. Even the UN stated that much of the violence that occurred came from KLA members, “especially those allied with Hashim Thaci.”[18]
The March 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo was justified on the pretense of putting an end to Serbian oppression of Kosovo Albanians, which was termed genocide. The Clinton Administration made claims that at least 100,000 Kosovo Albanians men and boys were missing and “may have been killed” by the Serbs. Bill Clinton personally compared events in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The US State Department had stated that up to 500,000 Albanians were feared dead. Eventually, the official estimate was reduced to 10,000, however, after exhaustive investigations; it was revealed that the death of less than 2,500 Albanians could be attributed to the Serbs. During the NATO bombing campaign, between 400 and 1,500 Serb civilians were killed, and NATO committed war crimes, including the bombing of a Serb TV station and a hospital.[19]
In 2000, the US State Department, in cooperation with the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, held a conference on Euro-Atlantic integration in Slovakia. Among the participants were many heads of state, foreign affairs officials and ambassadors of various European states as well as UN and NATO officials.[20] A letter of correspondence between a German politician present at the meeting and the German Chancellor, revealed the true nature of NATO’s campaign in Kosovo. The conference demanded a speedy declaration of independence for Kosovo, and that the war in Yugoslavia was waged in order to enlarge NATO, Serbia was to be excluded permanently from European development to justify a US military presence in the region, and expansion was ultimately designed to contain Russia.[21]
Of great significance was that, “the war created a raison d’être for the continued existence of NATO in a post-Cold War world, as it desperately tried to justify its continued existence and desire for expansion.” Further, “The Russians had assumed NATO would dissolve at the end of the Cold War. Instead, not only has NATO expanded, it went to war over an internal dispute in a Slavic Eastern European country.” This was viewed as a great threat. Thus, “much of the tense relations between the United States and Russia over the past decade can be traced to the 1999 war on Yugoslavia.”[22
Mr. Galloway I am not sure if a writer of fiction has a moral duty to base his fiction on facts or does the fact that he claims the book is fiction absolve him or her from that moral responsibility so whatever he/she writes is OK. Your book the Cellist [—] deals with recent history which does not need any more misinformation and confusion. Your book would have been an effective comment about nationalism and ethnic strife if the fiction was developed around the truth of this conflict. You use factual events and then go fishing in order to give your characters a moral position. A writer or historian has a moral duty not to fish with just one type of bait since one type of bait only catches one type of fish. The moral duty also extends to how the fish is cooked so that many people will find it palpable. You develop your sense of morality on events surrounding people going for water, crossing streets, and dodging snipers as well as snipers hunting humans as if they were vermin. The moral fabric of your Arrow character is no bigger than a heart of a fruit fly.
I got carried away with my comment to you but reading your book and comments by the reviewers National Post, Vancouver Sun and The Globe and reading the Afterwards where you thank others for their support I was not surprised what was in the book.
A very good friend, Wilf Schmidt, gave me your book, and at first I was skeptical about reading one more book by a westerner who had no idea where Bosnia was located was not something I wanted to do. Before he gave it to me I had to promise him that I would read it. If I had known at that time you were from Kamloops I would have read it without his insistence. I am not sure if you went to KAM High or St Ann’s but I seem to remember you or maybe just your family since I do know your father Mel, or am I mistaken?
I was discussing the recent books that I read with Wilf —The White Tiger and Shantaram telling him that they were a great read. He recommended The Cellist of Sarajevo, saying that I would enjoy it. I made the promise to read it because he knows how skeptical I am about reading another book about this conflict. I have read so much crap about the conflict that I just did not need any more. I include with my comments how I see that conflict.
I read your book to the end and like many other books about this war this fits the pattern of the others. I have been to Sarajevo many times Ilidja, Mojmilo, the Turkish section and so on. Like most tourists I had my picture taken where Princip’s footsteps were imbedded in a slab of concrete and took the tram to Dobrinja and stayed in the old Europe Hotel. I had dozens of relatives who lived there once and now are scattered in every corner of the world. I have one cousin who works with the Sarajevo Orchestra and she personally knew the cellist. She is the interpreter for the Sarajevo Orchestra when they tour in the West. I spoke with her while we had dinner in Bascarsija last year so I know something about the Orchestra and the things about which you write.
I know that your book is fiction, fiction which continues the fabrication that NATO and the Muslim side used to convince many in West that the NATO and Muslim cause was just. Like other media and writers who write for a client NATO they never quote the likes of Michael Parenti, Dr. Diana Johnstone, James Bissett, Scott Taylor, David Orchard, Professor Mundell, Edward S. Herman and many more including generals who led the UN forces: General Lewis Mackenzie, Rose, Nambiar, Philippe Morillon and reports of the Spanish UN representatives from the region. These people did not have a client they just decided to tell the truth even when in some cases it cost them their job.
What about your book Mr. Galloway. In Chapter One you write “they shoot unarmed men, women and children”, The men on the hill who we know are Serbs, however, it is well documented that the Muslim-Croat side killed their own people, men women and children for propaganda purposes, they killed prisoners and played soccer with their heads, they killed soldiers who were given free passage to leave their barracks, they killed at the Markale Market and at the Bread Line and blamed it on the men in the hills as you do in your book. Why did you not ask the generals I name rather than your Muslim-Croat contacts and they will tell you who did the killing in these places. You would have also learned that for propaganda effect they killed on the street, at greave side services and in front of homes like that of my cousin in Ildja just days after the war was over just so that the Muslim family could move into his house.
You write on page 12 how the soldiers in the hills robbed Arrow of her gift of Sarajevo. She was robbed by NATO, Croat Diaspora who are the children of the Ustase, the Nazis in Croatia and Bosnia. Izetbegovic, the leader of her faction was a member of the SS Handjar the Nazi WWII Muslim Division. Izetbegovic, Arrow’s leader with the help of NATO stole the elections in Bosnia from Fikret Abdic the man who wanted unity of the country. Vraca where Serbs and Jews were killed during WWII was the Croat –Muslim legacy but you glance over that. You write on page 14 how the men in the hills did not allow anyone to leave. Let me remind you of the story of Boshko and Emina, a Serb boy and a Muslim girl who loved each other and who one day attempted to leave the city but the men in the city did not allow this. They killed them and as Boshko lies dying the wounded Emina crawls to him drapes her arms around him to protect him as the bullets find her and kill her. Their bodies remained in the open in no man’s land for several days for all to see the morality of your Arrow.
One of my cousins whose father was German was able to leave the city because his name was Hauptmann and he was able to convince the Muslims that he was a Slovene so they let him leave. He is back living in Ilidja that before the war was 90% Serb but now it is 90% Muslim.
In real life Arrow was a Muslim Sniper and I have read about her. She, like many Muslim soldiers who swore allegiance to Brotherhood and Unity were trained in Yugoslavia, got a free education and lived in a society that tolerated differences. Bosnians are 70% intermarried but she chose to side with the Nationalist Croats and Muslim Fundamentalists which is another statement of her morality
.
You write on page 14 how certain people have aged due to the war. This is nonsense. People here work hard, drink and smoke too much and look 20 years older than we do here in Canada. I am sure war did age people as well.
You write on page 39 about occupied this or that area. The city was divided into ethnic enclaves and each side protected their turf.
On page 60 you write about Princip’s footsteps and the Museum which was built not to remember Serbian nationalists but to remind people of foreign oppression and domination. The Muslim got rid of the footprints and proposed a statue to Ferdinand since most members of the Black Hand were Serbs. There was one Muslim member of the Black Hand (Mehmetbasic) who escaped capture after the assassination The Museum was destroyed by the Muslims to get rid of Bosnian history just like the Croats burned the Museum in the Serb Orthodox Church in Dubrovnik to get rid of the Serbian history of this region.
On Page 62 you write how Kenan was bothered with the destruction in Bascarsija. I can sympathize since I felt saddened by the destruction of the old Turkish section of Mostar. All the new designer shops on the Croat side cannot justify destruction of one roof tile in the old town. In a small town north of Dubrovnik I took some photos of Bogomil (Predecessors to the Cathars in France) Monuments that Vladimir Dedijer (Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre and Dedijer committee on war crimes in Vietnam) saved from flooding after the construction of a dam north of Trebinje. The monuments were silent just as silent as a museum to the Partisans of this region which the locals burned during the recent conflict. I wondered if I had been there, I ask myself could I have stopped them from burning it. My relatives tell me that those that burned the museum were children whose parents were killed by the communists in WWII.
As a child I remember our house burning, the heat was intense from the basement where the fire was most intense. I was no more than two years old when I experienced this. Later I found out that the basement was full of crates of new equipment that my uncle had imported from America. The equipment was for a new flour mill to replace the hand mills in the villages. You would think that those who burned the house would have saved the equipment in order to use it and help the people after the war, but no hate colors reason and so does lack of knowledge and clan mentality.
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The cellist and the location where the cellist played was used for propaganda by the Muslims and Croats. It was not a bomb from the hills that killed those in the bread line it was a mine planted by the Muslims who took photos seconds after the bomb went off and within minutes we had live pictures in Canada and USA of the carnage. Within hours Clinton give the Muslim an Air force and bombed the Serb positions.
Your book is full of errors. People in Bosnia don’t go to funerals by invitation. Serbs, Croats and Muslims go to funerals of their friends and family members just as we would here, even during the war this happened.
In many towns under control of different groups people of the other ethnicity were held in camps some beaten and others forced to dig trenches like Dragan was in your story. Thousands of those who intermarried were forced to leave and they left for Canada and Serbia where they were housed and looked after. The question very few writers ask is why the Serbs would go outside of Serbia to cleanse non Serbs when they never harmed any minority in Serbia. This was not true in Croatia and Bosnia. You also write about occupied Grbavica, occupied by whom, the ethnic majority that lived there. The hills around Sarajevo are populated by Serbs and many had militias to protect their villages.
Srebrenica for example was surrounded by Serb villages and Naser Orich who was the Muslim Warlord in Srebrenica used Srebrenica to attack these villages killing women children and burning the countryside. His army with foreign mercenaries from the Middle East burned over 100 villages and killed some 2000 Serbs. I am sure that once Srebrenica fell there was retaliation. Read Captain (British Army) Thornton’s letter to Time magazine 1996 I think from Vitez Bosnia where he writes about this. When Srebrenica fell many soldiers from this Bosnian Muslim army fled through the forest and some were captured, and some killed in fighting, some fled to Serbia and were then returned to Tuzla their home base.
You make Arrow into some moral person while the Snipers on the other side are killers. The truth is that Snipers from her side targeted civilians as they ran the gauntlet on the streets in Sarajevo. This was a common practice if foreign news media’s were around. Anywhere where one would expect a sanctuary from snipers (hospitals, gravesides, churches, schools and water stations) Muslims targeted people so your heroine Arrow’s moral struggle is farcical. Croats did this in Dubrovnik. I was in Dubrovnik twice in the past five years and the only damage done in the Old Town was the Serbian Church and its library which had centuries of old manuscripts attesting to Ser settlements in and around Dubrovnik. The Croats destroyed the tile roofs of the old city on purpose and since Dubrovnik is a UNESCO heritage site they paid for new roofs for the whole Old Town.
The killing in Sarajevo started when Muslims killed a bride, groom and father of the bride at a Serbian wedding procession. It is common in Serbian culture to celebrate a wedding through the city and treat children to candy and older people to a drink of brandy. It was during this procession that these celebrants were killed. You use names such as Emina a famous Muslim name popular with Muslims and some Serbs immortalized in a poem by Aleksa Šantić.
EMINA
Last night, returning from the warm hamam,
I passed by the garden of the old imam,
And lo, in the garden, in the shade of a jasmine,
There with a pitcher in her hand stood Emina.
What beauty! By my Muslim faith I could swear,
She wouldn’t be ashamed if she were at the sultan’s!
And the way she walks and her shoulders move . . .
–Not even a hodja’s amulet could help me!
I offered her salaam, but by my faith,
Beautiful Emina wouldn’t even hear it.
Instead, scooping water in her silver pitcher,
Around the garden she went to water the roses.
A wind blew from the branches down her lovely shoulders
Unraveling those thick braids of hers.
Her hair gave off a scent of blue hyacinths,
Making me giddy and confused!
I nearly stumbled, I swear by my faith,
But beautiful Emina didn’t come to me.
She only gave me a frowning look,
Not caring, the naughty one, that I’m crazy for her!
Aleksa Santic was from Mostar Herzegovina (Bosnia and Herzegovina) was the region where Old Serbia was located. If you look at maps of this region dating back to the crusades you will see that this region was called “Servia” by the Anglo Saxons and people here like the rest of Christian Europe practiced the same religion. After the Schism which divided medieval Christianity into Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches, which later became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, respectively
Bosnia and Herzegovina was split between the two religions. This is why in Herzegovina the Catholics, Serbs and Muslims for the most part have the same family names and their language is the same other than that Catholics use the Latin script. Prior to the Schism all the script was Old Slavonic based on the Greek alphabet. The Orthodox and Catholic family and given names are identical in this region. Muslim given names are different but family names are in 90% of cases identical. One would not know who is Serb and who Croat is unless they told you or you knew their religion. For example the names you use there are Filipovic’s who are Muslims, Serbs and Croats and Dragan as well as Slavko could be a Serb or a Croat. For example my name can be a Croat, Muslim or Serb. The demarcation line was drawn down the middle of Serbia. The Schism which split families and people in this region, so those to the West side of the line became Catholic and those on the East Orthodox. Ivo Andric who was Catholic when he wrote his Nobel Prize novel Cuprija na Drini or Bridge on the River Drina traced his family to his Serbian roots and he converted back to Orthodoxy (many Croats never forgave him) as did the Muslim film maker Kosturica When the Muslims conquered this area many Christians converted to Islam and became bureaucrats and city dwellers. The Christians lived in villages and on farms, therefore, in fee simple Serbs and Croats at the outbreak of this conflict controlled 85% of the land according to Austro Hungarian record.
Any educated Serb Muslim or Croat reading your book will know this about the names. All the ones you use seem to be from mixed marriages. I am not sure if this was by design or just lack of knowledge on your part?
You write that most of the snipers in the hills were mercenaries. I had a nephew in the hills in Herzegovina and he never fired his rifle once. He tells me that they used to meet soldiers from the opposite side in the valley and exchange mementoes like shirts with slogans on them and even food. Many of them knew each other. On one occasion my nephew mentions a Croat soldier called out to him and as they told each other where they were from he told him that he ate many times in his restaurant while in the army in my nephew’s home town. All sides had mercenaries. Muslims had over 5000 Arabs, Pakistanis, and Turks and so on. Croats had many skinheads from Germany while Serbs had many Serbs from Serbia. Germany was the first to break international law in her recognition of the breakaway regions I guess a payback for the WWII alliance with Croatia. I read about a Canadian girl, who was a sniper in a Serb unit; she was nicknamed “tele” “the calf” because others in her unit forced her to follow at the end of the column.
You write on page 102 that the enemy sniper I guess you mean Serbs in the hills did not differentiate between soldier and civilian. In Bosnia about 98, 000 people died and many were civilians. These statistics are Muslim (Tokaca) and I give them here since you seem to write from their moral perspective. The death toll was 98 000 (even one was too many) not 400, 000 or 200 000 as NATO propaganda shouted from every media outlet in the West. The numbers dead reflect ethnic makeup of the country both in civilian death and soldiers.
You write how the other side had an ulterior motive in Bosnia. The only thing Karadzic and Milosevic are guilty of was not being able to save the Unity of Yugoslavia. I listened to a recording (CIA) where Milosevic is telling Karadzic to do everything in his power not to allow the people to go to war. Karadzic responds saying I will and I am but it looks like Iset (Izetbegovic) is doing everything to start a war.
Izetbegovic broke six brokered peace agreements in Bosnia which the Serbs signed and yet writers continue the farce about the men in the hills. You write on page 117 how the other side will not make things right. I wrote earlier about Ilidja which was mostly Serb prior to the war and now it’s 90% Muslim. Sarajevo lost 130 000 Serbs at the end of the war and those that stayed lost jobs and their life like my cousin who lived in Ilidja did. .
You write some nonsense on page 150 151 how one side is different from the other. Yes they are. Croats when they want to look civilized tell us that they listen to Bach and read Goethe but as soon as they have a few drinks they become louts singing fascist songs which they and their Franciscan leader sang as they killed thousands at Jasenovac and dozen other camps in Croatia during WWII. Muslims become obsessed as followers. If a Muslim girl marries outside her faith her children become obsessed to show their Serbs or Croat loyalty and to show this they become the nationalists worse than the original.
Bosnia has hundreds of Karst pits where Muslims and Croats during WWII rounded up Serb villagers and threw them into these pits that Tito sealed after the war. Prior to this last war as Serbs went to search for the bodies of their family members in these pits the Muslims and Croats who lived in the vicinity of the pits used to yell at them “get the dead out so there will be room for you”. I was in a small Inn with my wife many years ago and the lady who owned it joined us but as soon as she found out that my wife’s family was Catholic she got up and left. Croats and Muslims killed her husband and another 120 men from the surrounding villages and threw them into a pit few hundred meters from her Inn.
The best book on Yugoslavia is Diana Johnston’s ‘Fools Crusade”. Ms. Johnstone is an American who lives in Paris. The best source in Canada if you are interested in the truth is James Bissett our former ambassador to Yugoslavi who opposed NATO and globalization. He lost his job for his moral stand unlike your Arrow who never questioned anything beyond what target to hit and then justified it that others wanted her to do this or the other side was worse than they. Morality is not found through the scope of a rifle. Morality is in the heart of the individual or simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Well, I see where its been said that Serbia will join the EU, but forgo NATO membership.
If true, that would be somewhat tolerable to them also joining NATO, because I’ve always refused to see how a majority of Serbians could willingly opt for NATO membership, after what was done to them by the same organization, less that a generation ago.
Then again, we are witnessing that the opinion of the majority, in several countries, counts for nought, when it runs counter to the wishes of the tiny elites in those countries.
This is so for the Britain, where the majority that voted to leave the EU are being given the run-around by a handful of miscreants who are defying the will of the people by resorting subterfuge and sabotage.
It is true in Venezuela, where the majority of Venezuelians voted for Maduro, but are being told that a clown called Guiado is the man that Venezuelian elites and Washington want. Because they want to privitize the countries resources and move its embassy from Tel-a-Viv to Jerusalem.
And is true in Brazil, where Lula and his sucessor Dilma Rouseff were elbowed out of the way so that Temer and then Bolsonaro could take over and move the country’s embassy from Tel-a-Viv to Jerusalem and institute right-wing policies, while working to undermine the BRICS from within.
The same goes for Egypt, Argentina, France, etc. etc.
Attack on Yugoslavia by the war alliance NATO // ARD – Doku https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFD7KfKHGfg
“It started with a lie”, a film by Jo Angerer and Mathias Werth for the WDR broadcast
on ARD on February 8, 2001.
March 24, 1999: In Piacenza, Italy, German fighter jets launch against Yugoslavia
You can change the subtitles to English
On the subject of the Kosovo war, there is also the book “Strategy of Deception” written by Paul Virilio originally published in 1999. Virilio, who died only last September, should be considered as important as Foucault, Deleuze or Baudrillard.
Allow me to quote the following from said book (p.74):
“The time has come, then […] to call things by their names, and to cleave strictly to the operational reality of the event: what we have witnessed in Kosovo has been a ‘globalised putsch’. That is to say a seizure of power by an anational armed group (NATO), evading the political control of the democratic nations (the UN) – evading the prudence of their diplomacy […]. It then becomes easier to understand the extent to which this ‘purely revolutionary’ state of affairs necessitated the ‘mass-consumption version’ of the events we have has served up to us with the aim of obtaining a popular consensus.”
And I tell you it continues….
In comparison to others, the point I will make about Virilio is that he was the one that was correct all along.
(BTW the book is very cheap 2nd hand on Abebooks!)
“A Soviet rocket manufactured in the 1960s, courage, optimism, and a patriotic upsurge managed to take down an ‘invisible’ $42.6 mln American bomber packed with modern technology that NATO was using to ‘carry freedom’ to the people of Yugoslavia. This is the story of an unexpected “miracle” that occurred in the early days of the bombing of Serbia.
The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, ‘the Invisible’, the pride of the US Air Force and a technological wonder, was shot down just three days after the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began — on 27 March 1999, near the village of Buđanovci; the aircraft became the only confirmed loss of a NATO stealth plane.
Zoltán Dani, a colonel in the Yugoslavian Air Defence Forces, was the commander of the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade during the NATO war of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Members of his team have become Serbian national heroes.
“These metre-range radars can detect stealth-technology planes more easily, so that we were able to spot the aircraft in time and let it into our danger area. It was only when the aircraft was 15 metres away (certainly a typo – vt) that I commanded to lock on the target and ordered Senad Muminovich, the gunner, to press the launch button and the missile was fired,” Zoltán Dani recalled.
Dani told Sputnik that they were using a Soviet S-125 “Neva” missile system that was produced in the 1960s and delivered to Yugoslavia in the early 1980s.
Few people know this, but the warriors of the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade didn’t realise how lucky they were that night. As Dani recalls, after the target had been shot, the most important task at hand was to turn off all the devices so that the enemy couldn’t detect them.
“We congratulated each other and that was it. The feeling was very good, as if we scored in a very important match. In the morning, an officer from the high command came; he congratulated us and asked if we knew what we had shot down. I answered: ‘I have no idea, some target’. And then the officer told us it was an F-117,” the retired colonel said.
“The most important thing is that in a team, there should be good trust-based relations between the governing structures and those who fulfil tasks. The morale and patriotic motivation were very high; and the people on the ground were willing to cooperate with us; they were helping in any way they could. I remember one example. We were deployed in difficult terrain near Ogar; our suppliers failed to bring us our dinner and the locals brought us baskets filled with food. This was just fantastic!” Dani recalled.
The pilot of the downed F-117 was American Dale Zelko; in order to find him, the largest search campaign since the Vietnam War was launched. 12 years later, director Zeljko Mirkovic made two films about the destinies of Zoltan Dani and Dale Zelko: The 21st Second in 2009 and The Second Meeting in 2013.
“Zelko told me that six months before the bombing started, they were gathered at a base in New Mexico, where, in addition to combat training, they were ‘brainwashed’ psychologically. They watched films showing the Yugoslavian situation in the worst light. And they really thought they had come to bring us freedom. Later, when Zelko came to Serbia for filming, he said: ‘I think they deceived us’,” Dani told Sputnik.”
A Soviet rocket manufactured in the 1960s, courage, optimism, and a patriotic upsurge managed to take down an ‘invisible’ $42.6 mln American bomber
You are completely correct, and I would like to add that professional skill, cunning and deception displayed by the members of the 250th missile brigade also contributed a significant part in the downing of the F-117. As they did later on, by shooting down the F-16.
It is of great significance also that, when the remains of the F-117 were shown on Serbian national TV, US reaction was first to deny everything and refuse Serbian TV footage as a lie (that took place in the morning on the day of the shootdown), later on during the day, they admitted that F-117 indeed fell in Serbia, but as a result of a technical malfunction. Late in the afternoon, US finally admitted that F-117, pride and joy of US military, was shot down by ‘a third rate AA defence’ when footage clearly showed the indisputable evidence. This was a tremendous slap in the face for arrogant US military. According to UK sources in an article published in ‘Air Forces Monthly’ a few years later, two more F-117s were damaged by Neva AA missiles, one of which was written off after crash during landing in, if I remember correctly, Spangdahlem.
There is also the never resolved claim of our AA defence of a shootdown of a B-2 ‘Spirit of Missouri’. The US once again flatly denies this and asks for photographic evidence. IT should be emphasized that the aeroplane in question did not crash on Serbian territory, but in Croatia in the region of Spačvanske šume (Spačvanska forest) which are literally impassable for people due to extremely dense foliage, so no photo evidence could have been obtained. However, the NATO radio traffic that was monitored by Serbian radio amateurs on that night recorded ‘Mayday’ calls from a stricken aeroplane, and AA defence officers and crews state that their missile hit ‘a large target’ ( a target with a large radar signature). Knowing official US military predilection for evading truth, I trust the statements of our AA missile crews.
The aforementioned article in ‘AF Monthly’ also records the very successful interception of NATO UAVs that were sometimes intercepted by Serbian AF helicopters who flew side-by side along UAVs and downed them with MG fire.
The remains of the F-117 and F-16 are on display at the Belgrade Aeronautical Museum located at Surčin airport (Belgrade). A few years back, a high-ranking US officer visited Belgrade and expressed desire to see the museum. He was duly assigned a guide fluent in English who took him through the building. When he was shown the F-117 and F-16 fuselage parts, etc., this US officer asked the guide: ‘Tell me, but frankly, how did you feel while you were at war with the mightiest military the world has ever known?’. The guide pondered for a moment and answered ‘I really can not tell you – you see, we have never been at war with Russia…’
this is a reasonably good documentary, important viewing at this time, as those dark days are recollected……for me personally, I have to say what is most palpable is my shame that I did not understand the issues sufficiently, nor did my husband of Russian descent, it is only in the last 5 years since finding the Saker that our thinking has evolved, now members of a Serbian Orthodox Church, this memorium is painful & cathartic, the youtuber Graham Phillips recently did a tour through Kosovo, which is very telling & well worth a watch
the depleted uranium is the work of the devil incarnate, remember that when you go to church on a Sunday NATO members!!!
Evidence to the contrary is overwhelming about Milosevic. Milosevic brokered 5 peace agreements which were violated by the other side in each case with US backing. Google the letter that was written to Gerhard Schroeder the German Chancellor by one of his political advisors who attended a conference in Bratislava Slovakia where plans were drafted to breakup Yugoslavia.
If you really want to know what happened in Yugoslavia read “Diana Johnstone, FOOLS’ CRUSADE Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions, Monthly Review Press, New York, N.Y, 2002;” or John Schindlers “Unholy Terror”. “John R. Schlinder served for nearly a decade with the US National Security Agency—work which took him to many countries in support of U.S. and allied forces operating in the Balkans—and was NSA’s top Balkans expert and Gregory Elich’s book “Strange Liberators as well.
What most people don’t seem to understand is that in Milosevic’s Serbia lived some seven million Serbs, two hundred and fifty thousand Croats, one million Muslims, two hundred and fifty thousand Albanians (excluding the million and a half that live in the Serbian province of Kosovo), four hundred thousand Hungarians and many other minorities who still live there today.
During the NATO war and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia not a single member of these minorities was maltreated and in fact thousands of Muslims, Croats, Albanians and Serbs escaped from conflict zones and found sanctuary in Serbia. So why would Milosevic go outside of Serbia to cleanse non-Serbs when he never touched a single one in his own province and doorstep? The Hague Tribunal refused to respond to this question.
Milosevic was tried for attempting to save the unity of Yugoslavia which NATO wanted to dismantle. NATO used nationalist Croats in the Diaspora and Muslim Fundamentalists in Bosnia to help them take over the region.
Examine who now owns, hydro, telecommunication, mining forestry and all other economic entities and you will see that the people in this region are no longer masters in their own home.
You want to blame someone for this mess blame Washington, London and Berlin. The Bosnian people Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic were all once Serbs. Old Serbia extended from north of Split and south to Albania. Look at the maps of this region from the period of the Crusades.
In the 13th century the Schism split the region into two and the Serbs on the West side were Catholicized (Rome) while those on the east side remained with Constantinople. The Turks took the region in the 14th century and many former Serbs on both sides of the line converted and became Muslims. The three groups in the region need to learn their history. One thing that they need to know or the Bosnian people already know when one fights with his neighbour all the neighbours are poorer and miserable.
“During the NATO war and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia not a single member of these minorities was maltreated and in fact thousands of Muslims, Croats, Albanians and Serbs escaped from conflict zones and found sanctuary in Serbia. So why would Milosevic go outside of Serbia to cleanse non-Serbs when he never touched a single one in his own province and doorstep?”
Well, just read a transcript of Milosevic’s 1989 speech in Kosovo.
The one that western MSM always refer to as Milosevic’s “notorious” Kosovo Speech.
An excerpt:
“Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is it’s advantage. National composition of almost all countries in the world today, particularly developed ones, has also been changing in this direction. Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully.”
There. Can’t you see it?
The man was obviously inflaming inter-ethnic phobia and hatred. ( sarcasm )
Verami, Milosevic’s Kosovo speech was immediately, and entirely falsely, reported by the Western fakestream presstitute vermin as ‘aggressive’, ‘nationalistic’ and ‘racist’. When I finally got to read it, and saw that it was exactly the opposite, I was, once again, impressed by the sheer moral Evil of the presstitute swine. And they still, even to today, keep lying about this event.
Milosevic was making mince-meat of the NATO thugs at the kangaroo court that was legally lynching him, so he was murdered, by medication. When his urine turned purple, a side-effect of Rifampicin use, a medication usually reserved for multi-antibiotic treatment of TB, they knew something was up. A rare side-effect of Rifampicin is that it interferes with certain cardiac medications, the type that Milosevic was on. When he alerted others to this occurrence, the NATO thugs claimed he was poisoning himself, a very stupid lie as he was strictly supervised in taking his medications. And, as you say, the vast majority of those fleeing the civil strife fomented by the USA, NATO and the Vatican in Yugoslavia, fled to Serbia, not the fascist successor states of Slovenia and Croatia, or the fascistic-Islamic Bosnia, the recipient of such fraternal assistance from al-Qaeda.
A German journalist embedded with the KLA witnessed the KLA ordering the Albanians to Albania and Macedonia. He testified about it at the ICTY in October 2004.
He said that the KLA had even drawn up lists, in anticipation of the NATO bombing, several weeks before, which had “priority” towns/villages/area which were to be evacuated first. And indeed, these very places were the first to be evacuated.
It was the KLA-controlled areas where Albanians left first and most thoroughly, while the Serbian government held areas, during the war, is where most Albanians stayed – such as Pristina. There were huge crowds of Albanians to greet the British troops as they entered.
Of course, the Serbs greeted the Russian troops who came over from BiH, but they never were able to help the Serb population and NATO blocked them from getting supplies from Russia by having Bulgaria and Romania shut down their air spaces. So they were soon dependent and incorporated into KFOR.
Vuki, looking at the title you had presented “Western Delusions” immediately gives away the whitewash attempt of this murderous attempt at destroying Yugoslavia. This war on Yugoslavia was a part of a “gang” to destroy country order in Europe and push the idea of EU down the Europen’s throats.
What really takes the cake is that most people in my part of the world know that they cant trust their governments and much less the Media and yet they go along with the lies.. Why? They hear simple minded drivel from uneducated news readers. Some news anchors who might want to tell the truth are fired. Walter Cronkite used to end his nightly broadcast with the words “and that is the way it is” . When he retired he admitted that it was never the way he said it. When one hears constant lies and when one is poorly educated one cannot tell the difference between the lie and the truth.
@Vuki
Now Serbia is just a smaller version of old Yugoslavia with the various ethnicities still there and their problems unsolved to be stoked up by enemies yet again when it serves their purpose. And if that’s not enough they now have immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere milling around. I don’t know if even God can save Serbia the way it is going.
Yes, it is sickening and evil behavior. It is not without reason this is called ‘crimes against humanity’. And they don’t care. This beast is still roaming the earth, lining up its next victim. They always leave the gift of D.U. with those they take freedom, democracy and humanitarianism to because it is the gift that keeps on giving.
Since a picture speaks a thousand words here is my contribution on this sad anniversary:
https://twitter.com/nikola83dorcol/status/1109615336591147008?s=20
(Warning: GRAPHIC, for those sensitive souls who prefer not to see it here is a description: nightime, 3 Albanian soldiers, the middle one holding a severed head in each hand, smiling broadly, the UCK insignia,an albanian flag, red background with black eagle, is visible on the middle soldier’s left arm).
Thanks Nikola from Dorcol! UCK is indeed ISIS.
These headchoppers, allies of NATO, now call themselves the “government” of Kosovo.
I read the book “Cellist Of Sarajevo” and was annoyed at the ignorance of the author Stephen Galloway so I wrote this letter to him. There is a good review of this book at: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/wtrkla03.html
Vuki
Mr. Galloway
In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, US-NATO foreign policy had to re-imagine its role in the world. The Cold War served as a means of justifying US imperialist expansion across the globe with the aim of “containing” the Soviet threat. NATO itself was created and existed for the sole purpose of forging an anti-Soviet alliance. With the USSR gone, NATO had no reason to exist, and the US had to find a new purpose for its imperialist strategy in the world.
In 1992, the US Defense Department, under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney [later to be George Bush Jr.’s VP], had the Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz [later to be George Bush Jr.’s Deputy Secretary of Defense and President of the World Bank], write up a defense document to guide American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, commonly referred to as the “New World Order.”
The Defense Planning Guidance document was leaked in 1992, and revealed that, “In a broad new policy statement that is in its final drafting phase, the Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-cold-war era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union,” and that, “The classified document makes the case for a world dominated by one superpower whose position can be perpetuated by constructive behavior and sufficient military might to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy.”
Further, “the new draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role’.” Among the necessary challenges to American supremacy, the document “postulated regional wars against Iraq and North Korea,” and identified China and Russia as its major threats. It further “suggests that the United States could also consider extending to Eastern and Central European nations security commitments similar to those extended to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf.”[1]
NATO and Yugoslavia
The wars in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s served as a justification for the continued existence of NATO in the world, and to expand American imperial interests in Eastern Europe.
The World Bank and IMF set the stage for the destabilization of Yugoslavia. After long-time dictator of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, died in 1980, a leadership crisis developed. In 1982, American foreign policy officials organized a set of IMF and World Bank loans, under the newly created Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), to handle the crisis of the $20 billion US debt. The effect of the loans, under the SAP, was that they “wreaked economic and political havoc… The economic crisis threatened political stability … it also threatened to aggravate simmering ethnic tensions.”[2]
In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic became President of Serbia, the largest and most powerful of all the Yugoslav republics. Also in 1989, Yugoslavia’s Premier traveled to the US to meet President George H.W. Bush in order to negotiate another financial aid package. In 1990, the World Bank/IMF program began, and the Yugoslav state’s expenditures went towards debt repayment. As a result, social programs were dismantled, the currency devalued, wages frozen, and prices rose. The “reforms fueled secessionist tendencies that fed on economic factors as well as ethnic divisions, virtually ensuring the de facto secession of the republic,” leading to Croatia and Slovenia’s succession in 1991.[3]
In 1990, US the intelligence community released a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), predicting that Yugoslavia would break apart, erupt in civil war, and the report then placed blame on Serbian President Milosevic for the coming destabilization.[4]
In 1991, conflict broke out between Yugoslavia and Croatia, when it, too, declared independence. A ceasefire was reached in 1992. Yet, the Croats continued small military offensives until 1995, as well as participating in the war in Bosnia. In 1995, Operation Storm was undertaken by Croatia to try to retake the Krajina region. A Croatian general was recently put on trial at The Hague for war crimes during this battle, which was key to driving the Serbs out of Croatia and “cemented Croatian independence.” The US supported the operation and the CIA actively provided intelligence to Croat forces, leading to the displacement of between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs, largely through means of murder, plundering, burning villages and ethnic cleansing.[5] The Croatian Army was trained by US advisers, and the general on trial was even personally supported by the CIA.[6]
The Clinton administration gave the “green light” to Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims and “from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia.” Further, “Iran, and other Muslim states, helped to bring 5000 Mujihadeen fighters into Bosnia to fight with the Muslims against the Serbs, ‘holy warriors’ from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Yemen and Algeria, some of whom had suspected links with Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.”
It was “Western intervention in the Balkans [that] exacerbated tensions and helped to sustain hostilities. By recognizing the claims of separatist republics and groups in 1990/1991, Western elites – the American, British, French and German – undermined government structures in Yugoslavia, increased insecurities, inflamed conflict and heightened ethnic tensions. And by offering logistical support to various sides during the war, Western intervention sustained the conflict into the mid-1990s. Clinton’s choice of the Bosnian Muslims as a cause to champion on the international stage, and his administration’s demands that the UN arms embargo be lifted so that the Muslims and Croats could be armed against the Serbs, should be viewed in this light.”[7]
During the war in Bosnia, there “was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah.” Further, “the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs.”[8] Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, also ran arms shipments to the Bosnian Muslims and Croatia to fight against the Serbs.[9]
The US had influenced the war in the region in a variety of ways. As the Observer reported in 1995, a major facet of their involvement was through “Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI), a Virginia-based American private company of retired generals and intelligence officers. The American embassy in Zagreb admits that MPRI is training the Croats, on license from the US government.” Further, The Dutch “were convinced that US Special Forces were involved in training the Bosnian army and the Bosnian Croat Army (HVO).”[10]
As far back as 1988, the leader of Croatia met with the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to create “a joint policy to break up Yugoslavia,” and bring Slovenia and Croatia into the “German economic zone.” So, US Army officers were dispatched to Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, and Macedonia as “advisers” and brought in US Special Forces to help.[11] During the nine-month cease-fire in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, six US generals met with Bosnian army leaders to plan the Bosnian offensive that broke the cease-fire.[12]
In 1996, the Albanian Mafia, in collaboration with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a militant guerilla organization, took control over the enormous Balkan heroin trafficking routes. The KLA was linked to former Afghan Mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan, including Osama bin Laden.[13]
In 1997, the KLA began fighting against Serbian forces,[14] and in 1998, the US State Department removed the KLA from its list of terrorist organizations.[15] Before and after 1998, the KLA was receiving arms, training and support from the US and NATO, and Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, had a close political relationship with KLA leader Hashim Thaci.[16]
Both the CIA and German intelligence, the BND, supported the KLA terrorists in Yugoslavia prior to and after the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The BND had KLA contacts since the early 1990s, the same period that the KLA was establishing its Al-Qaeda contacts.[17] KLA members were trained by Osama bin Laden at training camps in Afghanistan. Even the UN stated that much of the violence that occurred came from KLA members, “especially those allied with Hashim Thaci.”[18]
The March 1999 NATO bombing of Kosovo was justified on the pretense of putting an end to Serbian oppression of Kosovo Albanians, which was termed genocide. The Clinton Administration made claims that at least 100,000 Kosovo Albanians men and boys were missing and “may have been killed” by the Serbs. Bill Clinton personally compared events in Kosovo to the Holocaust. The US State Department had stated that up to 500,000 Albanians were feared dead. Eventually, the official estimate was reduced to 10,000, however, after exhaustive investigations; it was revealed that the death of less than 2,500 Albanians could be attributed to the Serbs. During the NATO bombing campaign, between 400 and 1,500 Serb civilians were killed, and NATO committed war crimes, including the bombing of a Serb TV station and a hospital.[19]
In 2000, the US State Department, in cooperation with the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, held a conference on Euro-Atlantic integration in Slovakia. Among the participants were many heads of state, foreign affairs officials and ambassadors of various European states as well as UN and NATO officials.[20] A letter of correspondence between a German politician present at the meeting and the German Chancellor, revealed the true nature of NATO’s campaign in Kosovo. The conference demanded a speedy declaration of independence for Kosovo, and that the war in Yugoslavia was waged in order to enlarge NATO, Serbia was to be excluded permanently from European development to justify a US military presence in the region, and expansion was ultimately designed to contain Russia.[21]
Of great significance was that, “the war created a raison d’être for the continued existence of NATO in a post-Cold War world, as it desperately tried to justify its continued existence and desire for expansion.” Further, “The Russians had assumed NATO would dissolve at the end of the Cold War. Instead, not only has NATO expanded, it went to war over an internal dispute in a Slavic Eastern European country.” This was viewed as a great threat. Thus, “much of the tense relations between the United States and Russia over the past decade can be traced to the 1999 war on Yugoslavia.”[22
Mr. Galloway I am not sure if a writer of fiction has a moral duty to base his fiction on facts or does the fact that he claims the book is fiction absolve him or her from that moral responsibility so whatever he/she writes is OK. Your book the Cellist [—] deals with recent history which does not need any more misinformation and confusion. Your book would have been an effective comment about nationalism and ethnic strife if the fiction was developed around the truth of this conflict. You use factual events and then go fishing in order to give your characters a moral position. A writer or historian has a moral duty not to fish with just one type of bait since one type of bait only catches one type of fish. The moral duty also extends to how the fish is cooked so that many people will find it palpable. You develop your sense of morality on events surrounding people going for water, crossing streets, and dodging snipers as well as snipers hunting humans as if they were vermin. The moral fabric of your Arrow character is no bigger than a heart of a fruit fly.
I got carried away with my comment to you but reading your book and comments by the reviewers National Post, Vancouver Sun and The Globe and reading the Afterwards where you thank others for their support I was not surprised what was in the book.
A very good friend, Wilf Schmidt, gave me your book, and at first I was skeptical about reading one more book by a westerner who had no idea where Bosnia was located was not something I wanted to do. Before he gave it to me I had to promise him that I would read it. If I had known at that time you were from Kamloops I would have read it without his insistence. I am not sure if you went to KAM High or St Ann’s but I seem to remember you or maybe just your family since I do know your father Mel, or am I mistaken?
I was discussing the recent books that I read with Wilf —The White Tiger and Shantaram telling him that they were a great read. He recommended The Cellist of Sarajevo, saying that I would enjoy it. I made the promise to read it because he knows how skeptical I am about reading another book about this conflict. I have read so much crap about the conflict that I just did not need any more. I include with my comments how I see that conflict.
I read your book to the end and like many other books about this war this fits the pattern of the others. I have been to Sarajevo many times Ilidja, Mojmilo, the Turkish section and so on. Like most tourists I had my picture taken where Princip’s footsteps were imbedded in a slab of concrete and took the tram to Dobrinja and stayed in the old Europe Hotel. I had dozens of relatives who lived there once and now are scattered in every corner of the world. I have one cousin who works with the Sarajevo Orchestra and she personally knew the cellist. She is the interpreter for the Sarajevo Orchestra when they tour in the West. I spoke with her while we had dinner in Bascarsija last year so I know something about the Orchestra and the things about which you write.
I know that your book is fiction, fiction which continues the fabrication that NATO and the Muslim side used to convince many in West that the NATO and Muslim cause was just. Like other media and writers who write for a client NATO they never quote the likes of Michael Parenti, Dr. Diana Johnstone, James Bissett, Scott Taylor, David Orchard, Professor Mundell, Edward S. Herman and many more including generals who led the UN forces: General Lewis Mackenzie, Rose, Nambiar, Philippe Morillon and reports of the Spanish UN representatives from the region. These people did not have a client they just decided to tell the truth even when in some cases it cost them their job.
What about your book Mr. Galloway. In Chapter One you write “they shoot unarmed men, women and children”, The men on the hill who we know are Serbs, however, it is well documented that the Muslim-Croat side killed their own people, men women and children for propaganda purposes, they killed prisoners and played soccer with their heads, they killed soldiers who were given free passage to leave their barracks, they killed at the Markale Market and at the Bread Line and blamed it on the men in the hills as you do in your book. Why did you not ask the generals I name rather than your Muslim-Croat contacts and they will tell you who did the killing in these places. You would have also learned that for propaganda effect they killed on the street, at greave side services and in front of homes like that of my cousin in Ildja just days after the war was over just so that the Muslim family could move into his house.
You write on page 12 how the soldiers in the hills robbed Arrow of her gift of Sarajevo. She was robbed by NATO, Croat Diaspora who are the children of the Ustase, the Nazis in Croatia and Bosnia. Izetbegovic, the leader of her faction was a member of the SS Handjar the Nazi WWII Muslim Division. Izetbegovic, Arrow’s leader with the help of NATO stole the elections in Bosnia from Fikret Abdic the man who wanted unity of the country. Vraca where Serbs and Jews were killed during WWII was the Croat –Muslim legacy but you glance over that. You write on page 14 how the men in the hills did not allow anyone to leave. Let me remind you of the story of Boshko and Emina, a Serb boy and a Muslim girl who loved each other and who one day attempted to leave the city but the men in the city did not allow this. They killed them and as Boshko lies dying the wounded Emina crawls to him drapes her arms around him to protect him as the bullets find her and kill her. Their bodies remained in the open in no man’s land for several days for all to see the morality of your Arrow.
One of my cousins whose father was German was able to leave the city because his name was Hauptmann and he was able to convince the Muslims that he was a Slovene so they let him leave. He is back living in Ilidja that before the war was 90% Serb but now it is 90% Muslim.
In real life Arrow was a Muslim Sniper and I have read about her. She, like many Muslim soldiers who swore allegiance to Brotherhood and Unity were trained in Yugoslavia, got a free education and lived in a society that tolerated differences. Bosnians are 70% intermarried but she chose to side with the Nationalist Croats and Muslim Fundamentalists which is another statement of her morality
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You write on page 14 how certain people have aged due to the war. This is nonsense. People here work hard, drink and smoke too much and look 20 years older than we do here in Canada. I am sure war did age people as well.
You write on page 39 about occupied this or that area. The city was divided into ethnic enclaves and each side protected their turf.
On page 60 you write about Princip’s footsteps and the Museum which was built not to remember Serbian nationalists but to remind people of foreign oppression and domination. The Muslim got rid of the footprints and proposed a statue to Ferdinand since most members of the Black Hand were Serbs. There was one Muslim member of the Black Hand (Mehmetbasic) who escaped capture after the assassination The Museum was destroyed by the Muslims to get rid of Bosnian history just like the Croats burned the Museum in the Serb Orthodox Church in Dubrovnik to get rid of the Serbian history of this region.
On Page 62 you write how Kenan was bothered with the destruction in Bascarsija. I can sympathize since I felt saddened by the destruction of the old Turkish section of Mostar. All the new designer shops on the Croat side cannot justify destruction of one roof tile in the old town. In a small town north of Dubrovnik I took some photos of Bogomil (Predecessors to the Cathars in France) Monuments that Vladimir Dedijer (Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre and Dedijer committee on war crimes in Vietnam) saved from flooding after the construction of a dam north of Trebinje. The monuments were silent just as silent as a museum to the Partisans of this region which the locals burned during the recent conflict. I wondered if I had been there, I ask myself could I have stopped them from burning it. My relatives tell me that those that burned the museum were children whose parents were killed by the communists in WWII.
As a child I remember our house burning, the heat was intense from the basement where the fire was most intense. I was no more than two years old when I experienced this. Later I found out that the basement was full of crates of new equipment that my uncle had imported from America. The equipment was for a new flour mill to replace the hand mills in the villages. You would think that those who burned the house would have saved the equipment in order to use it and help the people after the war, but no hate colors reason and so does lack of knowledge and clan mentality.
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The cellist and the location where the cellist played was used for propaganda by the Muslims and Croats. It was not a bomb from the hills that killed those in the bread line it was a mine planted by the Muslims who took photos seconds after the bomb went off and within minutes we had live pictures in Canada and USA of the carnage. Within hours Clinton give the Muslim an Air force and bombed the Serb positions.
Your book is full of errors. People in Bosnia don’t go to funerals by invitation. Serbs, Croats and Muslims go to funerals of their friends and family members just as we would here, even during the war this happened.
In many towns under control of different groups people of the other ethnicity were held in camps some beaten and others forced to dig trenches like Dragan was in your story. Thousands of those who intermarried were forced to leave and they left for Canada and Serbia where they were housed and looked after. The question very few writers ask is why the Serbs would go outside of Serbia to cleanse non Serbs when they never harmed any minority in Serbia. This was not true in Croatia and Bosnia. You also write about occupied Grbavica, occupied by whom, the ethnic majority that lived there. The hills around Sarajevo are populated by Serbs and many had militias to protect their villages.
Srebrenica for example was surrounded by Serb villages and Naser Orich who was the Muslim Warlord in Srebrenica used Srebrenica to attack these villages killing women children and burning the countryside. His army with foreign mercenaries from the Middle East burned over 100 villages and killed some 2000 Serbs. I am sure that once Srebrenica fell there was retaliation. Read Captain (British Army) Thornton’s letter to Time magazine 1996 I think from Vitez Bosnia where he writes about this. When Srebrenica fell many soldiers from this Bosnian Muslim army fled through the forest and some were captured, and some killed in fighting, some fled to Serbia and were then returned to Tuzla their home base.
You make Arrow into some moral person while the Snipers on the other side are killers. The truth is that Snipers from her side targeted civilians as they ran the gauntlet on the streets in Sarajevo. This was a common practice if foreign news media’s were around. Anywhere where one would expect a sanctuary from snipers (hospitals, gravesides, churches, schools and water stations) Muslims targeted people so your heroine Arrow’s moral struggle is farcical. Croats did this in Dubrovnik. I was in Dubrovnik twice in the past five years and the only damage done in the Old Town was the Serbian Church and its library which had centuries of old manuscripts attesting to Ser settlements in and around Dubrovnik. The Croats destroyed the tile roofs of the old city on purpose and since Dubrovnik is a UNESCO heritage site they paid for new roofs for the whole Old Town.
The killing in Sarajevo started when Muslims killed a bride, groom and father of the bride at a Serbian wedding procession. It is common in Serbian culture to celebrate a wedding through the city and treat children to candy and older people to a drink of brandy. It was during this procession that these celebrants were killed. You use names such as Emina a famous Muslim name popular with Muslims and some Serbs immortalized in a poem by Aleksa Šantić.
EMINA
Last night, returning from the warm hamam,
I passed by the garden of the old imam,
And lo, in the garden, in the shade of a jasmine,
There with a pitcher in her hand stood Emina.
What beauty! By my Muslim faith I could swear,
She wouldn’t be ashamed if she were at the sultan’s!
And the way she walks and her shoulders move . . .
–Not even a hodja’s amulet could help me!
I offered her salaam, but by my faith,
Beautiful Emina wouldn’t even hear it.
Instead, scooping water in her silver pitcher,
Around the garden she went to water the roses.
A wind blew from the branches down her lovely shoulders
Unraveling those thick braids of hers.
Her hair gave off a scent of blue hyacinths,
Making me giddy and confused!
I nearly stumbled, I swear by my faith,
But beautiful Emina didn’t come to me.
She only gave me a frowning look,
Not caring, the naughty one, that I’m crazy for her!
Aleksa Santic was from Mostar Herzegovina (Bosnia and Herzegovina) was the region where Old Serbia was located. If you look at maps of this region dating back to the crusades you will see that this region was called “Servia” by the Anglo Saxons and people here like the rest of Christian Europe practiced the same religion. After the Schism which divided medieval Christianity into Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches, which later became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, respectively
Bosnia and Herzegovina was split between the two religions. This is why in Herzegovina the Catholics, Serbs and Muslims for the most part have the same family names and their language is the same other than that Catholics use the Latin script. Prior to the Schism all the script was Old Slavonic based on the Greek alphabet. The Orthodox and Catholic family and given names are identical in this region. Muslim given names are different but family names are in 90% of cases identical. One would not know who is Serb and who Croat is unless they told you or you knew their religion. For example the names you use there are Filipovic’s who are Muslims, Serbs and Croats and Dragan as well as Slavko could be a Serb or a Croat. For example my name can be a Croat, Muslim or Serb. The demarcation line was drawn down the middle of Serbia. The Schism which split families and people in this region, so those to the West side of the line became Catholic and those on the East Orthodox. Ivo Andric who was Catholic when he wrote his Nobel Prize novel Cuprija na Drini or Bridge on the River Drina traced his family to his Serbian roots and he converted back to Orthodoxy (many Croats never forgave him) as did the Muslim film maker Kosturica When the Muslims conquered this area many Christians converted to Islam and became bureaucrats and city dwellers. The Christians lived in villages and on farms, therefore, in fee simple Serbs and Croats at the outbreak of this conflict controlled 85% of the land according to Austro Hungarian record.
Any educated Serb Muslim or Croat reading your book will know this about the names. All the ones you use seem to be from mixed marriages. I am not sure if this was by design or just lack of knowledge on your part?
You write that most of the snipers in the hills were mercenaries. I had a nephew in the hills in Herzegovina and he never fired his rifle once. He tells me that they used to meet soldiers from the opposite side in the valley and exchange mementoes like shirts with slogans on them and even food. Many of them knew each other. On one occasion my nephew mentions a Croat soldier called out to him and as they told each other where they were from he told him that he ate many times in his restaurant while in the army in my nephew’s home town. All sides had mercenaries. Muslims had over 5000 Arabs, Pakistanis, and Turks and so on. Croats had many skinheads from Germany while Serbs had many Serbs from Serbia. Germany was the first to break international law in her recognition of the breakaway regions I guess a payback for the WWII alliance with Croatia. I read about a Canadian girl, who was a sniper in a Serb unit; she was nicknamed “tele” “the calf” because others in her unit forced her to follow at the end of the column.
You write on page 102 that the enemy sniper I guess you mean Serbs in the hills did not differentiate between soldier and civilian. In Bosnia about 98, 000 people died and many were civilians. These statistics are Muslim (Tokaca) and I give them here since you seem to write from their moral perspective. The death toll was 98 000 (even one was too many) not 400, 000 or 200 000 as NATO propaganda shouted from every media outlet in the West. The numbers dead reflect ethnic makeup of the country both in civilian death and soldiers.
You write how the other side had an ulterior motive in Bosnia. The only thing Karadzic and Milosevic are guilty of was not being able to save the Unity of Yugoslavia. I listened to a recording (CIA) where Milosevic is telling Karadzic to do everything in his power not to allow the people to go to war. Karadzic responds saying I will and I am but it looks like Iset (Izetbegovic) is doing everything to start a war.
Izetbegovic broke six brokered peace agreements in Bosnia which the Serbs signed and yet writers continue the farce about the men in the hills. You write on page 117 how the other side will not make things right. I wrote earlier about Ilidja which was mostly Serb prior to the war and now it’s 90% Muslim. Sarajevo lost 130 000 Serbs at the end of the war and those that stayed lost jobs and their life like my cousin who lived in Ilidja did. .
You write some nonsense on page 150 151 how one side is different from the other. Yes they are. Croats when they want to look civilized tell us that they listen to Bach and read Goethe but as soon as they have a few drinks they become louts singing fascist songs which they and their Franciscan leader sang as they killed thousands at Jasenovac and dozen other camps in Croatia during WWII. Muslims become obsessed as followers. If a Muslim girl marries outside her faith her children become obsessed to show their Serbs or Croat loyalty and to show this they become the nationalists worse than the original.
Bosnia has hundreds of Karst pits where Muslims and Croats during WWII rounded up Serb villagers and threw them into these pits that Tito sealed after the war. Prior to this last war as Serbs went to search for the bodies of their family members in these pits the Muslims and Croats who lived in the vicinity of the pits used to yell at them “get the dead out so there will be room for you”. I was in a small Inn with my wife many years ago and the lady who owned it joined us but as soon as she found out that my wife’s family was Catholic she got up and left. Croats and Muslims killed her husband and another 120 men from the surrounding villages and threw them into a pit few hundred meters from her Inn.
The best book on Yugoslavia is Diana Johnston’s ‘Fools Crusade”. Ms. Johnstone is an American who lives in Paris. The best source in Canada if you are interested in the truth is James Bissett our former ambassador to Yugoslavi who opposed NATO and globalization. He lost his job for his moral stand unlike your Arrow who never questioned anything beyond what target to hit and then justified it that others wanted her to do this or the other side was worse than they. Morality is not found through the scope of a rifle. Morality is in the heart of the individual or simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Well, I see where its been said that Serbia will join the EU, but forgo NATO membership.
If true, that would be somewhat tolerable to them also joining NATO, because I’ve always refused to see how a majority of Serbians could willingly opt for NATO membership, after what was done to them by the same organization, less that a generation ago.
https://www.rt.com/news/454611-serbia-nato-membership-bombing/
Then again, we are witnessing that the opinion of the majority, in several countries, counts for nought, when it runs counter to the wishes of the tiny elites in those countries.
This is so for the Britain, where the majority that voted to leave the EU are being given the run-around by a handful of miscreants who are defying the will of the people by resorting subterfuge and sabotage.
It is true in Venezuela, where the majority of Venezuelians voted for Maduro, but are being told that a clown called Guiado is the man that Venezuelian elites and Washington want. Because they want to privitize the countries resources and move its embassy from Tel-a-Viv to Jerusalem.
And is true in Brazil, where Lula and his sucessor Dilma Rouseff were elbowed out of the way so that Temer and then Bolsonaro could take over and move the country’s embassy from Tel-a-Viv to Jerusalem and institute right-wing policies, while working to undermine the BRICS from within.
The same goes for Egypt, Argentina, France, etc. etc.
Selah
Attack on Yugoslavia by the war alliance NATO // ARD – Doku
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFD7KfKHGfg
“It started with a lie”, a film by Jo Angerer and Mathias Werth for the WDR broadcast
on ARD on February 8, 2001.
March 24, 1999: In Piacenza, Italy, German fighter jets launch against Yugoslavia
You can change the subtitles to English
Garda Panteri – Mauzer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kohsgr4kLdM&list=RD02TB8y4XZFc&index=3
Crni Bombarder – Black Bombers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4sqMNHZxjI&list=RD02TB8y4XZFc&index=43
On the subject of the Kosovo war, there is also the book “Strategy of Deception” written by Paul Virilio originally published in 1999. Virilio, who died only last September, should be considered as important as Foucault, Deleuze or Baudrillard.
Allow me to quote the following from said book (p.74):
“The time has come, then […] to call things by their names, and to cleave strictly to the operational reality of the event: what we have witnessed in Kosovo has been a ‘globalised putsch’. That is to say a seizure of power by an anational armed group (NATO), evading the political control of the democratic nations (the UN) – evading the prudence of their diplomacy […]. It then becomes easier to understand the extent to which this ‘purely revolutionary’ state of affairs necessitated the ‘mass-consumption version’ of the events we have has served up to us with the aim of obtaining a popular consensus.”
And I tell you it continues….
In comparison to others, the point I will make about Virilio is that he was the one that was correct all along.
(BTW the book is very cheap 2nd hand on Abebooks!)
Andrew
SREBRENICA the place where a genocide never happened, Aleksandar Dorin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Rv28PXvzSo
The TRUTH about Srebenica (US/NATO Warcrimes in Yugoslavia)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygTDiqrbHCA
The Srebrenica Massacre was a Gigantic Political Fraud
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-srebrenica-massacre-was-a-gigantic-political-fraud/5321388
‘Sorry, We Didn’t Know It Was Invisible’: How Serbs Downed an F-117 Stealth Jet
https://sputniknews.com/world/201903241073363844-yugoslavia-nato-bombing-f117/
“A Soviet rocket manufactured in the 1960s, courage, optimism, and a patriotic upsurge managed to take down an ‘invisible’ $42.6 mln American bomber packed with modern technology that NATO was using to ‘carry freedom’ to the people of Yugoslavia. This is the story of an unexpected “miracle” that occurred in the early days of the bombing of Serbia.
The Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk, ‘the Invisible’, the pride of the US Air Force and a technological wonder, was shot down just three days after the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began — on 27 March 1999, near the village of Buđanovci; the aircraft became the only confirmed loss of a NATO stealth plane.
Zoltán Dani, a colonel in the Yugoslavian Air Defence Forces, was the commander of the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade during the NATO war of aggression against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Members of his team have become Serbian national heroes.
“These metre-range radars can detect stealth-technology planes more easily, so that we were able to spot the aircraft in time and let it into our danger area. It was only when the aircraft was 15 metres away (certainly a typo – vt) that I commanded to lock on the target and ordered Senad Muminovich, the gunner, to press the launch button and the missile was fired,” Zoltán Dani recalled.
Dani told Sputnik that they were using a Soviet S-125 “Neva” missile system that was produced in the 1960s and delivered to Yugoslavia in the early 1980s.
Few people know this, but the warriors of the 3rd battery of the 250th Missile Brigade didn’t realise how lucky they were that night. As Dani recalls, after the target had been shot, the most important task at hand was to turn off all the devices so that the enemy couldn’t detect them.
“We congratulated each other and that was it. The feeling was very good, as if we scored in a very important match. In the morning, an officer from the high command came; he congratulated us and asked if we knew what we had shot down. I answered: ‘I have no idea, some target’. And then the officer told us it was an F-117,” the retired colonel said.
“The most important thing is that in a team, there should be good trust-based relations between the governing structures and those who fulfil tasks. The morale and patriotic motivation were very high; and the people on the ground were willing to cooperate with us; they were helping in any way they could. I remember one example. We were deployed in difficult terrain near Ogar; our suppliers failed to bring us our dinner and the locals brought us baskets filled with food. This was just fantastic!” Dani recalled.
The pilot of the downed F-117 was American Dale Zelko; in order to find him, the largest search campaign since the Vietnam War was launched. 12 years later, director Zeljko Mirkovic made two films about the destinies of Zoltan Dani and Dale Zelko: The 21st Second in 2009 and The Second Meeting in 2013.
“Zelko told me that six months before the bombing started, they were gathered at a base in New Mexico, where, in addition to combat training, they were ‘brainwashed’ psychologically. They watched films showing the Yugoslavian situation in the worst light. And they really thought they had come to bring us freedom. Later, when Zelko came to Serbia for filming, he said: ‘I think they deceived us’,” Dani told Sputnik.”
@ vot tak
A Soviet rocket manufactured in the 1960s, courage, optimism, and a patriotic upsurge managed to take down an ‘invisible’ $42.6 mln American bomber
You are completely correct, and I would like to add that professional skill, cunning and deception displayed by the members of the 250th missile brigade also contributed a significant part in the downing of the F-117. As they did later on, by shooting down the F-16.
It is of great significance also that, when the remains of the F-117 were shown on Serbian national TV, US reaction was first to deny everything and refuse Serbian TV footage as a lie (that took place in the morning on the day of the shootdown), later on during the day, they admitted that F-117 indeed fell in Serbia, but as a result of a technical malfunction. Late in the afternoon, US finally admitted that F-117, pride and joy of US military, was shot down by ‘a third rate AA defence’ when footage clearly showed the indisputable evidence. This was a tremendous slap in the face for arrogant US military. According to UK sources in an article published in ‘Air Forces Monthly’ a few years later, two more F-117s were damaged by Neva AA missiles, one of which was written off after crash during landing in, if I remember correctly, Spangdahlem.
There is also the never resolved claim of our AA defence of a shootdown of a B-2 ‘Spirit of Missouri’. The US once again flatly denies this and asks for photographic evidence. IT should be emphasized that the aeroplane in question did not crash on Serbian territory, but in Croatia in the region of Spačvanske šume (Spačvanska forest) which are literally impassable for people due to extremely dense foliage, so no photo evidence could have been obtained. However, the NATO radio traffic that was monitored by Serbian radio amateurs on that night recorded ‘Mayday’ calls from a stricken aeroplane, and AA defence officers and crews state that their missile hit ‘a large target’ ( a target with a large radar signature). Knowing official US military predilection for evading truth, I trust the statements of our AA missile crews.
The aforementioned article in ‘AF Monthly’ also records the very successful interception of NATO UAVs that were sometimes intercepted by Serbian AF helicopters who flew side-by side along UAVs and downed them with MG fire.
The remains of the F-117 and F-16 are on display at the Belgrade Aeronautical Museum located at Surčin airport (Belgrade). A few years back, a high-ranking US officer visited Belgrade and expressed desire to see the museum. He was duly assigned a guide fluent in English who took him through the building. When he was shown the F-117 and F-16 fuselage parts, etc., this US officer asked the guide: ‘Tell me, but frankly, how did you feel while you were at war with the mightiest military the world has ever known?’. The guide pondered for a moment and answered ‘I really can not tell you – you see, we have never been at war with Russia…’
DFS
“The guide pondered for a moment and answered ‘I really can not tell you – you see, we have never been at war with Russia…’”
Great response, & thanks for the other info.
Unfortunately he did not remember his nation’s history. Serbia was a member of the post WWI invasion of Russia where some 10 million Russians died.
Russia never helped Serbia rebuild from this damage and that’s a big factor why the Serbian government eventually fell to a western puppet government.