Book by Andy Wilcoxson and review written by Amarynth for the Saker Blog
Does one review a book of this nature on its meticulous scholarship and factual depictions of events?
Because the book is factual and the scholarship is meticulous.
Or does one review a book of this nature on the extreme political justifications used to instigate what amounts to four wars, depending on how you count?
Or even when you see the arcane legal trickery to present the political machine as ‘good’ in order to hide the crimes of which it is complicit?
Or does one review a book of this nature on the reality of the wars that it describes and the quality of the writing? Because those are both true, it describes the Yugoslavian wars before the region was split into pieces and it describes the results. The quality of writing is engaging, excellent, the pace is good and the information is accessible.
Or does one review based on the NATO strategy and projection of force in two bombing barrages. One can talk about their weapons, the targets and their consistency in hitting their acquired targets, (even the Chinese embassy which was excused as an oops), and civilians and military killed without distinguishing between the one or the other.
Or does one review this book based on the times when your stomach clenches in sheer horror at the accurate descriptions of the barbarities and butcheries done one against the other and without wanting to, your tears fall when you remember that there once was a nation called Yugoslavia, and even if you are not from the area, you can relate to the loss of home, from your own different experience.
The book is written factually, and not to elicit heightened states of emotion. Yet, that is exactly what it does. It enrages the sense of justice even though it is factual and sometimes even dryly factual. We all know the saying The Fog of War. Here we see what happens underneath that fog and we again have to come to a conclusion that war is a terribly beastly condition where both the aggressor and the defender are forced into actions that will not and must not enter human thought in normal circumstances and the false circumstances of war must not happen. On reading, you realize: war thus corrupts everyone, aggressor and defender alike, and is indeed a joint criminal enterprise that becomes a stark and malicious reality.
Chapter 5, Srebrenica: The Ugly Truth describes this perfectly.
On top of that, one has some President somewhere that wants to create a peace legacy for himself by bombing the defender ‘straight into peace and security’ until everything lies in ruins. First, it was a bombing campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995. Then, because not sufficient peace and security was bombed in presumably, a second major combat operation followed during March 24, 1999 to June 10, 1999.
Yes, reading this book affected me emotionally to the extent that I had to put it down from time to time. But, it is not written to be a tearjerker. And that is why you should read it, as it fulfills all the purposes of what a book of this nature should be.
The author is a ‘motherhood and apple pie’ American. He has no Serbian or Balkan roots, and his motivation consequently is not tribal. As a high school student during the 1990s he witnessed the attribution of full-spectrum guilt for the horrors of the conflict in the Balkans exclusively to one of the contending sides. Initially that piqued his curiosity. Then, listening to the Milosovich trial during lonely night-shifts, it propelled him into deconstructing the narrative of the wars in the Balkans because he became enraged. Whilst reading, I also became enraged.
The continuous background thread throughout, is the trial of Slobodan Milosovic told from real evidence and consistently and clearly documented. Then the interweaving stories of the wars slowly begin to make sense in terms of what happened, the sequence of events. These events can never make sense in terms of moral and ethical standards.
From Slovenia – 1991. Croatia – 1991-1995, Bosnia and Herzegovina – 1992-1995, the evidence on Srebrenica, Kosovo – 1998-1999 and culminating in the trial of Slobodan Milosovich, the story is one of incomprehensible violence where the innocent had done absolutely nothing to their attackers and cannot understand why and how someone can hate them so much when they didn’t even personally know their attacker/s, and vice versa. Then the universe becomes inverted! In the mind of the attacking force, he becomes the innocent victim and you are the evil attacker and he can justify every single attack, every action, by blaming you. Humanity is suspended and upended.
After all that, tribunals are dragged together with no rhyme or legal reason, and at the end of that, the victimizers in the tribunals start accusing one another as the collective guilt overcomes them as well.
A short quote and it does not matter which side it came from:
Q. When you were drinking that day, could you say what it was you were drinking?
A. Rakija brandy.
Q. Where did you get that?
A. Neighbors, the locals, brought that to us. We drank for courage, to be able to sustain looking at the blood and the bodies, and the brains of the people.
Q. During the course of that day, did you hear anybody mention a number of how many bodies were in the dom?
A. I heard somebody on the road saying that there were 550, but we ourselves did not count.
It is in this book that you will read that peacekeeping forces in one instance, were held for four hours, waiting for ‘orders’, while they heard and listened to the terrible sounds of a village being massacred, men, women, children, animals, and where water wells were salted or stuffed with dead animals, so that that any remaining inhabitant that may escape the carnage is not able to return.
When the trial of Slobodan Milosevic started its first prosecutorial phase, he expressed the following toward the American people. He said, “By deceiving their public through a systematic manufacturing of lies, their government and their media have abolished democracy for their own people precisely to the extent to which they have withdrawn the people’s right to truthful information. You can have the best possible mechanism for democracy, but if you feed it with lies, it cannot produce results that are humane, honest, and progressive.”
Today we see that he was right. If there was a silver lining, Milosovic effectively used the accusatory phase of his trial to set the record straight on ten years of Balkan war history. He died just as the defense phase of the trial started and the book outlines, but does not question the rather strange circumstances of his death. By then, he had decimated the prosecutorial accusations. It was during this phase and boring and long nightshifts, that the author started bringing the evidence together in the book.
Ten years after his death, the trial chamber that tried former Bosnian-Serb president Radovan Karadzic unanimously concluded that Slobodan Milosevic was not part of a “joint criminal enterprise” targeting Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian war. And it is fitting that the book ends with a chapter on the propaganda techniques that journalists and political leaders use to justify and incite war. They hide their warmongering behind a facade of humanitarian concern and smear anyone who opposes them.
It is cold comfort that Slobodan Milosevic returned to Serbia as a hero, but in death.
It is clear that I am not a war analyst, neither am I a weapons analyst, but I am a human, and can recognize the evil that men do. Read this book. Take it slowly and take it in. The game playing of falling empire and its NATO lapdog again becomes clear in stark horror.
JOINT CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE is available here: http://www.reissinstitute.org/en/books/joint-criminal-enterprise/
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Thank you Amarynth, for your heartfelt analysis of this work. I will purchase it immediately. And will finally know and understand what those wars and destruction were all about. I was much younger when these wars were covered,and heard the never ending lies from the West. Now I can get the truth.
It was all about destroying a strong Slavic state in the underbelly of Europe, that was far more democratic than any other country of today’s EU member states. I lived there, so I know, those who didn’t try balancing your reply. Yugoslavia had it all, food, technology, factories, knowledge, pristine and pure nature, tourism, culture, people had jobs, schools and universities, free medical care, etc… Today, we are forced to eat cheap discount junk shit-food from the west, high-tech companies were sold by our mega smart and rotten leaders, factories were sold to foreigners – same as banks, nature is being systematically targeted – let alone been bombed with depleted uranium, best tourism places are being bought by foreigners, good jobs are ever more scarce and so on. Some remnants of that era stayed, like free education and medical care, but also this is steadily being eroded. Yugoslavia was destroyed for MEGA PLUNDER (see Kosovo as a school-text-book example), now the same thing is happening in Ukraine, just that the stupid right wing idiots don’t see it (yet, before its too late)… Hard and good working people from Yugoslavia were used as a work force abroad, wiping rich fat western asses for pennies, colonialism in its free and unadulterated form. For me the Bosnia is a true example of that – just before the war those who stayed were only poor people, elderly and everyone else, who had no means to escape the killing machine, so only “sediment people” stayed, sadly not much of inteligencia left in there…
That Andy takes the view of a Srebrenica genocide is deeply disturbing.
Srebrenica has been contested as not being a genocide. When your victims are military age men and you spare women and children, that cannot be genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was set up to blame the Serbs for genocide, and they did so by a far-fetched sociological explanation, claiming that because the Bosnian Muslims had a patriarchal society, killing the men would be a sort of genocide in one town. But that is not what people understand by genocide. Christopher Black can go into further details.
Milosevic
Summer arrived, the time Communications departments recommend to deliver “Take out the Trash” news. Readers have to look carefully and sift thoroughly to find nuggets of information, long withheld from the public.
Serbian president Milosevic was exonerated by the ICTY of the most calamitous of charges, joint-enterprise in genocide. He was shown to actively be against the war. He had been lobbying for peace. A far cry from what we
consumed from NATO politicians and media so many years ago. We only get to know about it through another trial as his own was canceled by his death.
Andy Wilcoxon does the digging for us in the ICTY judgement, where the trial chamber that convicted former Bosnian-Serb president Radovan Karadzic of war crimes and sentenced him to 40 years in prison (there are also issues beyond the scope of this article), unanimously concluded that the Serbian
President, Slobodan Milosevic was not part of a “joint criminal enterprise” to
victimize Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian war… — how many of you know about it? Spoiler – read page 1303 of the 2’590 page verdict — ICTY, Karadzic Judgment, 24 March 2016, Para. 3460 ). The trial that started a great media circus was supposed to fall off media radar screens…
Slobodan Milosevic had to spend the last five years of his life in prison defending himself and Serbia from bogus war crimes allegations over a war that the ICTY now admits he was trying to stop. The admission comes out ten
years after his death. This arranges a few persons with rules of prescription.
The presiding judge in the Radovan Karadzic trial, O-Gon Kwon of South Korea, was also one of the judges in the Slobodan Milosevic trial. The ICTY did not bother to hold a press conference or make a public statement with regards to Milosovic who they had abused. It is now up to the family to sue for reparations.
Will Carla del Ponte and Louis Arbour (Louis Arbour, who was asked to investigate all Nato leaders for war crimes, instead accepted a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada from one of them, Prime
Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien), who were part of the witch-hunt be held to account?
Milosovic died in custody after multiple refusals for proper rest, medical care and surgery while in custody. His defense attorney wrote to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that he thought he was being poisoned by Rifamicin that counteracted the high blood pressure medication he was taking. It increased his risk of the heart attack that ultimately did kill him. The medication was inexplicably found in his blood samples.
The Tribunal’s admitted that they knew about the Rifampicin drug for months, but didn’t tell Milosevic the results of his own blood test until just days before his death.
U.S. State Department cables
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg-aw071816.htm#_ftn20
disclosed to Wikileaks confirm that UN detention unit commander McFadden in violation of his role and prison rules, discussed Milosevic’s medical condition and his medical records with U.S. Embassy personnel in The Hague without his consent.
The murder of a national leader is an attack on a nation’s right to exist which is a war crime. This makes the need for an independent public inquiry to investigate the suspect death of Mr. Milosevic even more pressing today (the Dutch police inquiry, from a NATO state is worthless). Christopher Black and Alexander Mezyaev state there was no attempt to rescucitate Mr. Milosevic, http://nsnbc.me/2013/03/14/death-of-president-slobodan-milosevic-in-nato-prison-remains-a-central-question-in-international-justice/
which amounts to manslaughter by gross negligence.
What amount should be paid to Serbia by the western governments who sought to punish Serbia in order to hold Milosevic “accountable” for crimes that their own Tribunal now admits he wasn’t responsible for, and was in fact
trying to stop?
Nato now needs to explain the real reasons for the aggression against Yugoslavia.
A good starting point is to watch French Air Force retired Brigadier-General
Pierre-Marie Gallois,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgUNO3SZBP4
in his own words, admit to the planning, motivation of his co-conspirators for launching the destruction of Yugoslavia. Gallois admits that he was involved in the planning of the crime against peace and implicates others, including the late German Defense Minister Franz Josef Strauss as well as British and French
officials. None of them have ever been charged with crimes against peace and the war crimes which were committed during the war.
Geneva Observer
Slobodan Milosevic was murdered in the Hague because the prosecution could not frame a charge against him. His defense was superb. He was killed by being denied proper medical treatment and by being given wrong medication, something that was done intentionally. That was murder in the first degree, for which both the doctor’s at the Tribunal and the Tribunal Administration need to answer for.
As for Srebrenica, I would like to draw readers attention to the following two Internet links, which pertain to articles written by the well known American analyst Stephen Lendman:
https://stephenlendman.org/2016/03/radovan-karadzics-sham-trial-and/
https://stephenlendman.org/2017/11/ratko-mladics-sham-trial-conviction/
The articles give an accurate presentation of what really happened.
“Slobodan Milosevic was murdered in the Hague because the prosecution could not frame a charge against him. His defense was superb. He was killed by being denied proper medical treatment and by being given wrong medication, something that was done intentionally. That was murder in the first degree, for which both the doctor’s at the Tribunal and the Tribunal Administration need to answer for.”
Yes. Yet the Hague Tribunal is fawned over as the epitome of the Western “rule of law.”
The Rule of Law–like America’s “Rules-based International Order”–are merely legal figleafs for American and European gangsterism.
The Tribunal against Milosevic deserves to be put on trial themselves.
I think that Tudjman (cancer treatment in US) Isetbegovic (pushed down some long set of stairs) and Milosevic were killed by the NATO planners and participators in the breakup of Yugoslavia. The real criminals were Tudjman, Isetbegovic as the participated in the “joint Criminal Enterprise” to start the war in Yugoslavia. Imagine the stories that they could tell that would implicate western leadership in murder and mayhem in the Balkans.
Yes, Srebrenica could be in the worst case be defined as a war crime. But, and there is a but, on the basis of muslim testimonies, we know that many muslim soldiers have been killed during the fightings with serbian troops, and many others have been executed by their own troops while retreeting. Some others have been executed by a dubious special sabotage unit composed of Croats and future french mercenaries.
As a matter of fact, during the balkans wars there happened a real genocide. It was in the Medak Pocket, in Krajina, where Croatians soldiers and western mercenaries, killed, raped and tortured during three days the entire serbian population (women, children, men, elders) in front of Canadian blue helmets, who where witness of this genocide, and have left many testimonies of it. Croatian soldiers even killed the domestic animals and poisonned the wells. This was a genocide and a warning adressed to the remaining Serbs : the same fate is waiting you if you stay in Croatia.
I am indebted to Michael Parenti. I bought all the hype at the time about the Serbs being the aggressors. Then, I read his book To Kill A Nation. Then, when I tried to tell my friends here in the US about this, they refused to believe the facts.
Life here in the most propagandized nation on the planet….
Same in my Country Britain,i never believed the establishment narrative on the Balkan wars from day one,i have argued with people about Srebrenica,there was no Genocide,they say i should be ashamed for having that opinion,when i give them facts about how Mladic put the women and kids and old people on transport to places like Tuzla or try and tell them about Naser Oric and how there were thousands of Bosnian Muslim troops in Srebrenica attacking Serbian villages then returning to Srebrenica,they refuse to listen,i believe many of those Bosnian Muslims were in fact soldiers killed trying to breakout through Serb lines,the oficial narrative is there was a Nazi style massacre,i didn’t buy itthen and still don’t.
Thanks for review and the link to purchase the book.
The war crimes committed in the destruction of Serbia have eluded a concise presentation. Because of that the destruction of Libya and Syria followed the same pattern.
This book becomes counterweight to the mountain of lies fed to the world since 1999.
Interesting dates on book cover on the Reissinstitute link with 1389 and 1989 on it.
I presume it refers to Vidovdan 28 June 1389 and 28 June 1989 (when he gave his famous speech) . Do you know that Milosevic was also extradited to the Hague Tribunal on this date, 28 June, in 2001?
Milosevic wasn’t a very good statesman. As a defendant, however he was unexpectedly brilliant. I think they were quite horrified at the Hague when he started dismantling the prosecution. He was lawyer, after all..he knew what he was he doing.
It is his transformation from statesman to defendant of the Hague Tribunal that marked an important turning point for him and for all of us. It is the Vidovdan prophecy.
Btw, for those who aren’t familiar with Vidovdan, many far-reaching events have taken place on this date, 28 June (Gregorian calendar), including Battle of Kosovo, declaration of war against the Ottoman empire, creation of the first state of Yugoslavia, Tito- Stalin split etc.
There are also two world events of the last century:
28 June 1914: Assasination of Archduke Ferdinand (leading to ultimatum from Austro -Hungary to Serbia and then WWI)
28 June 1919: Signing of the Versailles Treaty (leading to rise of Hitler and WWII)
Let us hope this upcoming Vidovdan, 28 June 2021 will be a peaceful, uneventful one.
Thanks so much Amarynth for your review and endorsement of this book by Andy Wilcoxson.
Dear Serbian girl:
Your comments are like lessons for those of us who know nothing and not much of Serbian culture and the civilization the demons of the West have tried to destroy.
Like we are the tourists and you the docent leading us to knowledge and awareness.
You are a blessing to the Vineyard.
Thank you so much Larchmonter for your very kind words. I assure you it is I who am blessed to be here.
Sending you much love!
It is absurd , yet it is modern, American new ideology to criminalize enemy .
It was war . Preemptive war, just war , aggressive war, civil war ?
All of the above, but War ! In war people are killed .
So new American ideology is : when they kill in war it is just, if enemy does
the same it is genocide ! So there is no peace , it is declaration of permanent war !
Time is to refuse this absurd discourse altogether and prepare for long Total and
very specific modern Hybrid War that is going on now.
When Milosevic took power in Serbia in 1986 and 1987, Yugoslavia entered into death spiral, entered into the hell
His strategy was first to get predominantly Serbian Army generals on his side, then artificially creating chaos, overthrowing governments of some other republics and autonomies violently and then Army generals to make coup under excuse of saving Yugoslavia and Army to take power and then to install him, Mosevic as absolute Master in Yugoslavia.
Then to transform Yugoslavia into unitary state under absolute Serbian hegemony like Yugoslavia was before WWII
But manufacturing of chaos went wrong to something neither him nor Army generals could not control any more.
Other republics fiercely resisted.And we had bloody war
Milosevic and his clique killed Yugoslavia.
Bosnian Croat,
Milosevic tried to centralise the power of the state of Yugoslavia, *in response to* the rise in far-right nationalism/ nazism which was appearing, at that time, in the autonomous republics like Croatia and Kosovo.
Milosevic abrogated the Albanians’ constitutional autonomy in Kosovo due to a worsening security situation there caused by the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army).
He was a communist who tried in every way (misguidedly in my opinion) to preserve the state of Yugoslavia.
Since you’re looking for someone to blame: The one single event that led to the final demise of Yugoslavia was the unilateral declaration of independence of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991.
It is pointless to argue with Bos. Cr. Hard for me to say whether he is trolling, or just suffers from selective + myopic interpretation of the past events. I have read about dozen of his comments and was often left with confused and/or meaningless narrative.
The very first thing “The West” grabs in a country it is looking to wreck, subjugate or occupy is the media. 10, 20 or 30 years later you have a thoroughly propagandised local population. I don’t think he is trolling, I am sure he feels his skewed view is sound knowledge of past events.
“He was a communist who tried in every way (misguidedly in my opinion) to preserve the state of Yugoslavia.”
I agree.
An interesting article on how the western media and so called “scholars” have deliberately distorted and misquoted Milosevic’s June 28 1998 speech at Kosovo Polje to make him sound like some kind of nationalist demagogue.
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/milospeech.htm
@Serbian Girl: “The one single event that led to the final demise of Yugoslavia was the unilateral declaration of independence of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991.”
Which Germany promptly recognised. I heard it on the radio and thought, Haydn was born in Croatia but they always count him as a German composer. Next step, return of Austrian rule? Then return of Anschluss?
Then I thought, Heaven help us once we unleash those sleeping ethnic dogs; it’s going to be a dogfight. I still thought the main trouble would come from ethnic rivalries in Yugoslavia. Little did I realize that the real criminality would come from my beloved European Union. Then, led by Clinton and BLiar, we started to drop bombs on Belgrade, threatening to level entire areas of the city (“mow the lawn” as Israelis call it), dropping graphite on power cables to disrupt their electricity supply, destroying bridges and blowing up factories to spill chemical pollutants into the blue Danube.
That’s when I flipped and began 30 years of digging for the Why?
I would have a question for the Serbs Croats and Muslims,was life better when they were part of Yugoslavia? if they answered in a honest way i believe it would be yes.
Dear Bosnian Croat, have you ever red the authoritative biography of Franjo Tudjman by the croatian star journalist Darko Hudelist? On some seven hundred pages Hudelist who was an intimate of president Tudjman, repeat the same thing. Tudjman, a croatian communist, was converted to the ideology of extreme croatian nationalism and to the idea of reconciliation between the Ustasa emigration and the local communists with the goal of founding an independent greater Croatia cleansed of Serbs. Tudjman has in many occasions disclosed that his (and his party) strategic goal, was to reduce the Serbian population in this greater Croatia to 3% and that he needed war to accomplish that.
Bosnian Croat
Don’t be absurd. Milosevic and his clique did not kill Yugoslavia, but rather the Slovenes, Croats and Muslims, who wanted to leave it, grabbing Serbian territories along the way. What did Stipe Mesic, the former President of the Presidency of Yugoslavia say when Slovenia and Croatia declared independence ? Answer: “My job is completed. Yugoslavia does not exist any more”. Stipe Mesic is a Croat. As for Serbian generals, they of course existed. However, Croat generals had some of the top jobs in the Yugoslav military.
Head of the Air Force was general Anton Tus, a Croat.
Actual commander of the Air Force was Zvonko Jurjevic, Colnel or Major General, the lowest rank among generals, barely above colonel., Croat and honorable man. AT the early beginning, there were negotiations between Slovenian government and government in Belgrade about safe return of JNA units from Slovenia. JNA nor anybody els did not want war with Slovenia to force them to stay, so they were ‘”allowed” to leave. However, agreement about peaceful return o JNA from Slovenia was never achieved – Slovenia did not want it. There was a meeting in Belgrade, generals and I assume politicians about the situation. What was to be done? Silence in the room. The first one to speak – Zvoko Jurjevc, commander of Air Force, Croat (so much about Serbs holding all or most important positions in the Army.) He offered to burn the corridor through Slovenia, from Austrian border to Croatia (sti part of Yugoslavia then), 400 meters wide through which remnants o JNA units. It takes a big load of bombs to clear 400m in about 100km length. After clearing the envisioned corridor, no local or foreign force would have dared to attack retreating units, let alone start the war, civil or otherwise. The buck would have stopped there and then. That was very honorable gesture. The offer was rejected by then high commander – Blagoje Adzic, a Serb, orphan from II World War whose family was slaughtered by Croatian Ustashe. Strange, word Ustashe does not exist in the spell checker.
So, Croat officer wanted to protect JNA and Yugoslavia, a Serbian general prevents that. Later, Z.J went back to Croatia, was offered a high position in Croatian Armed Forces, I believe he refused. Nothing was heard of him during the war and later. He did not accompany destroyers of the country he was ready to fight for. That is an honorable man. Blagoje Adzic? Who cares, a worm remains a worm.
Blahoje Adzic family was killed by Ustashe but Muslim ustashe from neighbour village.
In that region of Herzegovina Croats almost did not existed. Only muslims and Serbs. In that region muslims were predominantly supporters of Ustashe regime
But it is past, they are not any more pro Ustashe. They are Bosniaks today with their own ideology.
Only what remained is animosity toward Serbs and Serbs and Muslims in Herzegovina are real enemies.
You are an apologist for murder and bestial activity to which you and like-minded Croats are building monuments. In a letter To Mussolini from one of his officers. “And villages, such as Prebilovci, are all around Herzegovina, Bosnia, Lika and Dalmatia. Slaughter of Serbs has reached such proportions, that, in these areas, even water resources are polluted. Fromone spring in Popovo Polje, near the pit in which 4000 Serbs were thrown, a reddish water ran, I have seen it myself! On conscience of Italy and our culture a dark stain will fall forever if we do not distance ourselves from ustashe and their demented crimes” Maybe you should read the works of Croatian historian Saric who will open your eyes to see the shame from which even the Germans turned their heads. Pointing fingers at the Muslims will not wash the blood from the Croatian Catholic Church or the Ustase.
Serbs were a minority in the officer core in Yu military.. Slovenes, Croats and Montenegrins made up the majority of the officer core. Stipe Mesic was the last president of Yu and he has said that his job was to dismantle Yu . He met with the German chancellor and was given his marching orders as well as the outline of how to achieve the breakup and who would recognize Croat independence.. Iceland was first . The Czech president Milos Zeman apologized for his action saying that he was ashamed of what he did.. Hungarians supplied truckloads of weapons . The first atrocities were against JNA in Slovenia . Slovene generals wanted to go in and wipe the nationalists out. Milosevic Serbian President at that time opposed this saying i oppose killing our own people. The killing continuer .In Gospic (Tesla’s home town) where 90 of Tesla’s relatives were killed by the Ustase. The professionals from Gospic were first to be killed . When the Serbs saw this they rebelled. In Split riots the Croat crowd pulled a young JNA (Macedonian) soldier out of his tank Turret and cut his throat on national TV. So when I read this nonsense from the Bosnian Croat I ask myself why bother even responding to such ignorance.
It was not Milosovic that was hell bent on breaking up Yugoslavia,it6 was the West helped by you Croats and Bosnian Muslims.
Agree with Englishman. It was not natural ethnic rivalry which broke up YugoSlavia, it was heavy armaments of NATZO, the armed wing of Anglo Zio Capitalism, after our diplomatic corps, our media, our money and our imported fanatical “Islamic” mercenaries had stirred up murderous incidents to ignite ethnic strife. Same way we broke up Ukraine and tried to break up Syria.
They achieved their agenda . First they destroyed everything of value and then bought everything of value at 10 cents on a dollar. Now they indebted you to build your infrastructure, for which you pay through the nose. The nice thing about all of this they plant their NGO’s into your society to tell you what to do and the profit of the corporate sector that they now own goes home to the criminal gang that destroyed you. Nice, they destroy you and make you pay for it.
This is the official NATO line espoused by western powers to justify the destruction of Yugoslavia via their Croatian & Slovenian (& Bosnian muslim) proxies – the role of the Croatian separatist factor was particularly insidious, as it has been historically, it is an artificial national identity manufactured by the Hapsburg empire alongside the Vatican for the sole purpose of eliminating the Serbian people completely – & true to form the only consistent ideology within the Croatian political class has been clero-fascism, i.e. “ustashtvo”. In communist Yugoslavia under Tito, Croatian clero-fascist separatist agitation began as early as 1971 during the so-called “Croatian spring”. During this “Croatian spring” there was no sign of Serbian nationalism as an explicit political tendency anywhere within Yugoslavia, to use Milosevic as an alibi for their own extremist & genocidal aspirations has been very convenient for the Croatian political class & their slave masters in the west, esp. Germany & the Vatican, to whom said Croatian political class bows down to & aspires to serve as their one & only mission in life, of which mass murdering the Serbian population of ex-Yugoslavia is an intrinsic element. As time passes, this has become so patently obvious that it is no longer necessary to argue the point, the current conduct of the Croatian political class, who continue to obsess about all things Serbian, despite having expelled & murdered off the remaining Serbian population in their fascist state, is there out in the open for all to see.
I read many of your comments and like most of them. Especially when you write about international relations.
But when it comes to internal Yugoslav matters, you are biased against Serbs. (None of us are completely objective. We are all humans, emotions play important role in our reasoning. And personal experience colors the way we experience the world around us).
As you must know, organized anti-Serb extreme Croatian nationalism, predates S. Milosevic for the century at least …
I recall seeing this book mentioned recently so many thanks for the great review and link to buy the book.
Lots of people from these balkan countries moved to Sweden … are doing very well running crime of all sorts … living on taxpayers money … and more …
Never ending wars to secure natural resources
Never ending wars to secure territory for transnational piplelines to carry stolen natural resources
Never ending wars to eliminate intransigent governments that resist transnational piplelines
Never ending wars to pacify local populations regarding stolen natural resources and territory for piplelines
Never ending list of targets for fun and profit
And they ruined the best football team in Europe
the Brazilians of Europe
Yep MSM created by the US empire of lies.
If there was (is) a joint criminal anti-Serbian enterprise then undoubtedly Russia was (is) part of it. Today, it has been lavishly praised by the West for its services and good work. We the Serbs are quite envious of Russia for stealing our title as the world pariah No.1.
As a Serb, I can tell you that Russia has been world (read West’s) pariah No.1 for centuries.
During the very short periods Serbs were used as a replacement, but Russia has always been either #1 or very strong #2.
And no, Russia has never been part of the joint anti-Serbian enterprise, though some Russian western-controlled politicians (Yeltsin and his clique, but they were anti-Russian as well) were although even at that time there were strong supporters for Serbia like in prime minister (Primakov), Russian army etc.
Serbian communists with Milosevic chose to wholeheartedly support the communist fraction in Russia during the attempted putsch against Yeltsin (that was an internal Russian matter, whether Yeltsin acted unconstitutionally or not).
I remember watching Serbian state public broadcaster RTS reporting live from Moscow during the seizure of and burning of the Parliament (Duma) building with entrapped Duma-members who were shooting back at the shelling Taman tank division https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_crisis
The reporter was openly cheering for the opposition, which reflected the Serbian official politic at the time.
My strong opinion since then is that Serbian communists with Milosevic gambled with extremely high stake and lost. They turned away not only Yeltsin but also alarmed his masters.
After that event all the credit Yugoslavia, represented by mostly Serbian communists, had for the WW2 and opposition to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War was erased and Serbs had to endure wrath of the neoliberals alarmed that their project of subduing former communist states could be jeopardized.
All resistance had to be mercilessly crashed.
All of yours or of the Russian excuses won’t make it for us. The fact is that the Serbian 7 million strong people, spread all over former Yugoslavia, faced historically unprecedented military and economical wrath of the West and, for all intents and purposes of the whole world, and that 140 million strong supposedly Slavic and supposedly Orthodox Russia joined the gang, tells it all about Russia (at least as far as we are concerned). To look for the trivial faults of the Serbs or Milosevic in such a situation is meaningless. And, the truth is that all the way up to 2014 to us Russia remained the same (and most likely still is). Whatever Russia was looking for the last 30-40 years, it is exactly what it is getting nowadays.
You forgot “trivial” sanctions against Srpska by Milosevic. How about betrayal of Krajina? National celebration of 1. maj, with total media blockade in Serbia while Croats and Muslims were bombing (from airplanes) and massacring Serbian refuge columns escaping collapsing Krajina. By the way that was the larges refugee group after ww2.
My mother living in Serbia wouldn’t believe me about Krajina when I talked to her by the phone, so she got nervous breakdown afterwards.
Деране, деране није свима сврака попила мозак. Остави се брањења неодбрањивог и “праведничког” кривљења Русије.
Google translation,MOD:
Derane, derane, not every magpie drank the brain. It is left to defend the indefensible and “just” guilt of Russia.
Thank you for your book review Amarynth. Do not belittle yourself simply because you don’t know as much about war and weapons analysis as others. The Russians in the Great Patriotic War, the North Koreans in the fifties and the Cubans and Vietnamese in the sixties relied on something more fundamental and important. The human heart and its capacity for courage and persistence, and its insistence on love of home lands. Like them you have a big heart. It always prevails in the long run. But of course, there are the tears to be shed along the way.
i will buy the book as soon as it is available at my online bookstore.
I hope nobody these days believes “good guys – bad guys” propaganda, and that West was “liberating people of any country from evil dictators and butchers”. It worked really well in ex-Yugoslavia case. NATO won, people of ex-Yugoslavia were liberated from their wealth, and the blueprint (with more or less success) was used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. It was done at the heights of unipolar moment, when it appeared that US will rule the world, and if you dared to oppose it, Serbs and their leaders will be the example about what will happen to you if you in that case. Hague was established to show the world leaders, and their generals that even them will not be spared if they dare to oppose the empire.
The only real thing that you can blame Milosevic for, it is that he was to naive to be able to predict what kind of evil machine he was opposing. I am pretty sure if he had a slightest idea, he would have probably run to Washington before it all started, and donated his own residency in Belgrade to build a new US military base. He indeed was not a good statesman, and his chess game was always behind his opponents. He was always forced to play defence in the game that everybody knew was lost before it even started. He was too proud for a politician, and Serbs paid a huge price for his incompetence. Yet Serbs, as proud people, will celebrate him as a hero, because Serbs have this notion that only life in freedom is worth living. Even if fight for freedom will sometimes make your life short and difficult, it is life fulfilled, so Serbs respect his courage, especially in Hague. “Our kingdom is Heavenly Kingdom” – Serbs will often say, meaning you have to deserve your place up above by being just, brave, and by fighting evil even if that puts you in grave danger. Milosevic, even as a devoted communist, has definitely earned his place in the Kingdom of Heaven judging the way how he single handedly fought the empire in Hague, so much that they had to poison him to get rid of him. If his sacrifice helped others to understand evil that was eventually coming for them, it was worth it.
Milosovic had failings like any man,what i will always admire about the Man is despite some Quislings such as Zoran Dindic who i believe spent most of his time during the war hiding in Montenegro giving interviews to the BBC attacking Milosovic,Milosovic confronted those Nato thugs, Dindic should have been tried for treason,Milosovic was also sold down the river by those in power in Russia at the time,they more or less told him he was on his own and best surrender to Nato or face annihilation,i don’t know how true it was but i believe some Russian military were outraged that Milosovic had been abandoned,remember they occupied Pristina airport that act alone scared Nato to death,i believe if Putin had been in charge it would have been a different story.
It seems to me when you come across someone’s child, grandchild, mother and father, sister and brother murdered with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other hand you have to be a Catholic to excuse the horror done in the name of God. How many crusades, like the Albigensian at Minerve in South France where the choice given by the Catholic leader Simon de Montfort was convert or die. Many died. Sixty million Native people in the Americas perished by the Catholic sword, . Just Recently they discovered 215 bodies of Children at a Catholic residential school in BC Canada whereby death they washed out the Indian out of the child. To defend and justify such actions is to open the door to more of the same. Denial of such barbarism tells you something about the ones who will defend these crimes and then go to church on Sunday and pray.
In the early nineties, I too was intensely interested in what was going on in the Balkans. But I was in my early 60s. However, I had spent 1977 & 78 in Iran and fifteen months in The Emirates, so I was quite aware that this could well be another move on the part of The Great Satan (and it’s lackies) toward the new Great Game in Central Asia. Additionally, I had read an essay on the “Pipeline Corridors” theory and the Belgian author had suggested that the route through the Balkans would be one of them. In any case, I had the same initial views of that war that Wilcoxon did.
Funny how some curiosity, some inherent suspicion and a little research can bring you to unpopular conclusions that are justified thirty years later.
No sign of the book in Amazon/Kindle yet, but there are two others that touch on the subject.
Just catching up with comments here – thanks for the kindnesses :-)
This book will probably not ever be available on the Amazon / Kindle route. If you take a look at the Reiss institute it is available for donation.
http://www.reissinstitute.org/en/books/joint-criminal-enterprise/
I may make it available for download at the community site, if they give me permission and we can agree on price for that, and agree on how I pay them. These things are not simple. Let’s see – its early days.
Donations to this recipient aren’t supported in this country, according to PayPal
Hi Amarynth,
Many thanks for this review. I just bought the book but since it is a donation, it doesn’t seem to be transmitting a delivery address with Paypal. Do you have a point of contact for the Reiss Institute by any chance?
All the best!
@Yoda and
@Leslie Wilk
Seemingly we’re going to have to give them a little help :-)
May I ask for something please. Kindly contact me at my email address at the bottom of the page to establish contact. I’ve just told them that we’re encountering problems. So, if I have your email and your issue, then I can take it further.
Would much appreciate if I can handle it on email, instead of on comments.
Amarynth
Information from Reiss Institute:
Please let people know that they should simply send an email to
Reissinstitute at protonmail.com
and if they indicate how many books they paid for and where to send them, it will be done. ”
There we are.
Chapter 5 is the weakest part of the book because Wlicoxon simply regurgitates the NATO prosecution claims of what happened there and only challenges their numbers. But there is no credible evidence whatsoever of any massacre at Srebrenica. The few witnesses they relied on were clearly unreliable and scripted by the prosecution. Those killed were killed in fighting as the 28th Division of the Muslim forces tried to retreat and get to Tuzla and fought running battles with the Serb forces on the way. They all could have lived if they had accepted the surrender offered to them. In fact the witnesses the prosecution rely on do not even claim there was any massacre at Srebrenica itself but state some prisoners captured during those battles were executed at other places en route. But again, the witnesses are the “I was the only survivor to tell the tale” that the prosecution at both the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals was notorious for using as their tales turned into fantasies on cross-examination. Further, Dutch marines who were there, told me that no massacre took place at Srebrenica, and that it was propaganda concocted by NATO and that to support the story they were accused of doing nothing to stop it, made scapegoats, for something that never happened. Anyone watching the Fontana Hotel meetings between General Mladic and NATO officers that took place thr day before the 28th Division withdrew would know that it was not possible, that Mladic offered to protect women and children, which he did, and that the fighters would be ok if they surrendered. If they did not -they would be attacked. Even the dissenting judge on the appeal case in the Mladic trial recently stated that they would have acquitted Mladic since in their view there was no reliable or credible evidence at all that a crime had been committed. Wilscoxon could have pointed all this out but chose to reopeat prosecution claims and only argue about numbers. It is the weak point of an otherwise very good book. NATO made the Mladic trial a show trial just as they did with Milosevic who they murdered in his cell. I was consulted by Mladic to be his counsel on the case along with a Rusian collleague. But we were kept put of the case when rhe family was threatened that if they engaged us to defend Mladcis, they would have big problems with their safety, So we were prevented from taking becuase they knew they could not control us as they culd other lawyers. That’s how it worked there in all the cases. Mladic is guilty of nothing.