The Dismantling of Yugoslavia

Can you provide a link?

I worked with bosnian refugees in ireland and in germany. In germany there were many many refugees in the streets before it was even officially a war.
It really happened.
In early 1990's london, croats told me it was already civil war.
What next? Denying the holocost?

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Originally posted by DonnyBGood:
[b]The entire issue of Monthly Review is devoted to the single topic of Yugoslavia's demise and the atrocious media spin given in support of NATO's war crimes there.

Unfortunately it is not yet posted but this article essay mini treatise documents the way the West exploited - indeed caused - ethnic violence in the name of humanitarian goals.

It is stunning to hear ironic citations of prominent Canadians like Michael Inatieff who say that any attempt to point out that more Serbs were "ethnically cleansed" than Bosnian Muslims is "rewriting history".

The fact is that Serbia now has the largest and most ethnically diverse number of refugees. How could this be the authors ask if what the west was saying about Mislosevic was true?

What is compelling about the article is not only the clinical exposure of the sea of lies and slander propagated by the Western allies but also the revelations of media denial of Western war crimes and the genocidal actions of its agents in the destruction of the communist state.

Just about everyone in the elite of the West is condemned on the facts alone. The UN security council, the European Union, The United States, Britain all looked to murder Serbs by the thousands to 'justify' this last kick at the Cold War can.

It is compelling reading because it demonstrates how war shapes of public opinion, and provides Orwellian "justification" for rogue criminal states like the USA.

Americans must question why their government is evil and why it cynically uses them to further its own evil ends...

The thesis is that the bombing and war and the propaganda engine that won public opinion for it in reality created the entire concept of territorial wars as being "good thing" if the cause was "just"... leading to Iraq, Afghanistan and who knows, Iran?

The idea here is the essential modus operandi of representative democracy. That is, if you can convince people of an idea, however ill-informed, then it is "true". It was the "on" switch for Nato's genocidal bombing program.

The essay is one of those tomes that leaves cold comfort for those who believe that there is something to the idea of "civilization" as we know it.

[ 06 November 2007: Message edited by: DonnyBGood ][/b]

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Originally posted by Brian White:
[b]I worked with bosnian refugees in ireland and in germany. In germany there were many many refugees in the streets before it was even officially a war.
It really happened.
In early 1990's london, croats told me it was already civil war.
What next? Denying the holocost?
[/b]

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He did no such thing, Brian.
I dont think he said that Serbs were completely innocent or that there were no war crimes commited.

I met displaced Serbs also. One of them was my friend, who was especially enraged during the glorious "freedum" NATO barrage on Yugoslavia(1999). He told me that more than 100 of his relatives were killed in Bosnia.

I think that DonnyBgood was talking about the demonization of Serbia until its defeat in 1999.He's not only talking about 1991-95 wars but also about the 1999 Kosovo adventure.
Serbia did not commit genocide in Bosnia, e.g Srebrenica. Its true There were serb volunteers and paramilitary among the Bosnian serbs. But, there were also Croat volunteers and para's to match them. There were Muslims killed by Croats in Mostar for example.

The Kosovo war was an an act of poorly disguised imperial aggresion. Brit magazine Socialist review made a fine point in 1999 (as the bombs rained down), that US was funneling huge military aid and weapons sales to Turkey, its valued NATO ally. Where did most of these funds go?
Same place where they go today: crushing Kurdish militants, i.e similar to what Milosevic did in Kosovo(although Turks are looking more bloodthirsty and jingoistic toward minorities).

SInce we're talking about books:
I recommend Michael Parenti's book To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia

[url=http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859847765]Michael Parenti on amazon[/url]

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Originally posted by BetterRed:
[b]I think that DonnyBgood was talking about the demonization of Serbia until its defeat in 1999.He's not only talking about 1991-95 wars but also about the 1999 Kosovo adventure.
Serbia did not commit genocide in Bosnia, e.g Srebrenica. Its true There were serb volunteers and paramilitary among the Bosnian serbs. But, there were also Croat volunteers and para's to match them. There were Muslims killed by Croats in Mostar for example.[/b]

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Mm-hmm. I remember noticing the media practically ignoring the Croatian and Bosnian complicity in their own war atrocities, and focussing just on the Serbs.

It is true, however, that Serbs have attempted to be the hegemonic group in Yugoslavia for a long time, and even during Tito's time, there were occasional tensions, and Milosevic's intentions of attaining Serb superiority were actually established in the 1980s, if I may trust my memory on some reading I did about Yugoslavia's political situation then.

One of the factors that makes it hard for some of us to have much sympathy for the Serbian leaders' position is that they never seemed to be interested in anything remotely resembling negotiation or compromise.

Why couldn't the Serbs ever have said "We're willing to work with the other nationalities involved to make Yugoslavia be the kind of place it was meant to be-a federation in which all nationalities are equal and in which the boundaries between nationalities break down and we eventually start dealing with each other simply as human beings"?

Why did their position always seemingly have to be "all non-Serbs must live in subordination to us or we'll kill them"?

Finally, how would not intervening have made anything any less brutal?

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
[b]

If the US and the West and the human rights movement had just stayed out of it as far as Yugoslavia was concerned, how would anything be BETTER?[/b]

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Since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the U.S. military has bombed something on the order of 21 countries. Which of them is better off or even more democratic for it, Ken?

Yugoslavians once lived in peace and a fair bit of prosperity until neoLiberal dogma for globalization began emanating from the U.S. This is what Canadian Michel Chossudovsky had to say about the events leading up to NATO bombing of a sovereign country.

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[url=http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/62/022.html]Multiethnic, socialist Yugoslavia[/url] was once a regional industrial power and economic success. In the two decades before 1980, annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaged 6.1 percent, medical care was free, the literacy was 91 percent, and life expectancy was 72 years (11). But after a decade of Western economic ministrations and five years of disintegration, war, boycott, and embargo, the economies of the former Yugoslavia are prostrate, their industrial sectors dismantled.

Yugoslavia's implosion was partially due to US machinations. Despite Belgrade's non-alignment and its extensive trading relations with the European Community and the US, the Reagan administration targeted the Yugoslav economy in a "Secret Sensitive" 1984 National Security Decision Directive (NSDD 133), "Us Policy towards Yugoslavia." A censored version declassified in 1990 elaborated on NSDD 64 on Eastern Europe, issued in 1982. The latter advocated "expanded efforts to promote a 'quiet revolution' to overthrow Communist governments and parties," while reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into a market-oriented economy

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And he goes on to reveal the beginnings of "ethnic strife" in the former Yugoslavia. There seems to be a lot of renewed ethnic tensions around the world, especially in natural resource rich countries coveted by the cabal of transnational corporations pushing for an ideology that was proven to fail in several well-known international experiments conducted under near laboratory conditions in the last century. Is that a wild coincidence, Ken? Are people in general really that sinister toward one another and require NATO bombing in the end to straighten things out for them? Or do they just need a little push sometimes?

[ 09 November 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Fidel, I didn't write any of the posts I made in my thread as a defender of US intervention per se.

The question of Yugoslavia has haunted me for years.

The problem I have with a complete non-interventionist position in Yugoslavia remains this:

Had no one from outside intervened at all, had no one spoken out about the crime visited upon Sarajevo(and, btw, there were Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats fighting in defense of Bosnia AGAINST Milosevic and his lackeys Karadzic and Mladic) wouldn't everything, bad as it is now, have been far worse? How could any developments have ended up being more humane?

Was not Milosevic the worst possible leader? And would leaving him in power not have guaranteed that Yugoslavia would have remained a police state forever?

I agree that neoliberalism played a terrible role, but nationalism on all sides, it seemed to me, was a purely negative force as well.

How would leaving Milosevic unchallenged have improved anything is the question I have no answer for at present.

In fact there was a negotiated settlement which Madelein Albright encouraged the Bosniaks to reject even after they had already accepted. And it is not even necessarily true that there would have been a civil war of the kind you describe, had the US not supported Tudjmans Croatian governement through State Department licensed corporate military contractors.

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In 1995, [b]during a U. N. embargo on arms sales to Croatia, Bosnia- Herzegovina and Yugoslavia,[/b] MPRI persuaded the State Department to grant it a license to train Croatia's military, pledging that it would teach only leadership skills, budgeting and military ethics.

When the Croatian military, in a highly effective offensive called Operation Storm, captured the Serb-held Krajina enclave later that year, there were suspicions that MPRI instructors must have been directly involved. The operation played a key role in reversing the tide of war against the Serbs and, consistent with American policy, in bringing both sides to the negotiating table. [b]But the same Croatian military was subsequently implicated in uprooting more than 150,000 Serbs from their homes. [/b]

The company denies that its employees played any direct role in the Croatian army's sudden transformation into an effective fighting force.

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[url=http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/peacekpg/training/pmc.htm]US Companies Hired to Train Foreign Armies [/url]

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Originally posted by Ken Burch:
[b]So Donny, tell us...

If the US and the West and the human rights movement had just stayed out of it as far as Yugoslavia was concerned, how would anything be BETTER?[/b]

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Why don't you answer the opposite. What good did it do? Did it prevent the Croatians from ethnically cleansing the Serbs? Did it prevent the Serb and the Croats from trying to carve of Bosnia. Did it prevent the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosniaks at Srebrencia? Did it turn Bosnia into a credible undevided society with managable inter-ethnic relations? Is there any evidence that Serbia is more democratic now than it was in 1992, after all there were numerous elections between 1992 and 2000, all of them a little crooked, but are they less crooked now?

Any answers?

Show for me, that if left to their own devices that the Balkan peoples that made up the Yugoslav Republic would not have figured out some means of resolving their difficulties, as they had been doing repeatedly since the foundation of Yugoslavia, even in the midst of two world wars.

I really hate this "something had to be done", line, as if we "do something" it will automatically have a positive effect. When a cat runs out into a road, and then observes a speeding oncoming car, and the dashes back across the road directly into the path of the car, it is "doing something" for sure, but wether or not that is the right thing is up for debate.

[ 09 November 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Yeah, I guess it would have been better to turn a blind eye like in burma or east africa.
They stopped milosovic because ordinary europeans like me were sickened by several years of murder and mayhem in southern europe. And I was in germany at the time, there were illegal refugees everywhere begging on the streets. (The legal ones got housing, the illegals begged for what they could get on the streets).
By all means read your books. Do you think ethnic cleansing was a myth too?
What was it in one town? Several thousand young men taken away and dumped in holes in the ground?
Lets all play pretend.

But Brian, apparently there were significant numbers of Afghan refugees who fled to countries like Germany and western nations in general after 1992. NATO countries basically turned their backs on that particular carnage in the same politically expedient way in which they ignored Croat atrocities to focus on Serb ones in the 90's. Was there noticable concern in Germany for Afghan refugees then?

Germany was full of refugees. And there are limits. And living in Canada you have absolutely no idea how many there were. I worked in a little town called weisenheim am sand and the town had a little refugee complex. These complexes were scattered throughout germany.
And I talked to people. And I worked with bosnians in germany and in ireland.
Anybody who knows anything knows that Russia was backing serbia and that is what delayed humanitarian action for so long. Greece was also backing serbia a bit. Something about macedonia.
Remember why nato went in? Public pressure. To protect the kosovo muslims who were being driven out of their homes.
Yugoslavia was destroyed because milosovic was a racist nut from the hitler mould. He did have opposition in serbia but a faceful of bullets or other similar punishment for an opposition leader is discouraging for followers.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
[b]But Brian, apparently there were significant numbers of Afghan refugees who fled to countries like Germany and western nations in general after 1992. NATO countries basically turned their backs on that particular carnage in the same politically expedient way in which they ignored Croat atrocities to focus on Serb ones in the 90's. Was there noticable concern in Germany for Afghan refugees then?[/b]

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Originally posted by Brian White:
[b]Germany was full of refugees. And there are limits. And living in Canada you have absolutely no idea how many there were. I worked in a little town called weisenheim am sand and the town had a little refugee complex. These complexes were scattered throughout germany.
And I talked to people. And I worked with bosnians in germany and in ireland.
Anybody who knows anything knows that Russia was backing serbia and that is what delayed humanitarian action for so long. Greece was also backing serbia a bit. Something about macedonia.
Remember why nato went in? Public pressure. To protect the kosovo muslims who were being driven out of their homes.
Yugoslavia was destroyed because milosovic was a racist nut from the hitler mould. He did have opposition in serbia but a faceful of bullets or other similar punishment for an opposition leader is discouraging for followers.

[/b]

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That's more like it is. "Public preassure," like Ostlander rouse!

What a bunch of BS Tudjman and Milosovic were having cocktails with each other and making plans on how to cut up Bosnia up until the war broke out. Your bias is totally obvious, Milosovic is "Hitler" and Tudjman and all the other ethnic nationalists don't even feature in your narrative.

What you don't seem to get is that it was all the ethnic nationalists, against Yugoslavia, as in the federated state, including Milosovic.

[ 10 November 2007: Message edited by: Cueball ]

Nato bombings were to stop the attack on kosovo.
It had nothing to do with croatia or bosnia. That was all over at that stage.
Remember?
Guess not.
There was major disquiet about all the disappeared young muslem men but no bodys, no proof.
When Milosovic destroyed yugoslavia, he had no land to give his buddys. So the plan was to throw out people he didn't like (due to their race) and take their land to give his generals to build nice homes and country estates.
There were too many to kill and hide so he forced them out of their homes and tried to drive them all over the border.
Remember now?
Sure, there was bad on all sides (all wars have bad on all sides) but the driving force behind it has been milosovic from day 1 because he very quickly grabbed control of the army. (Which was huge and well trained) and used it as a tool for starting a greater serbia empire.
I have nothing against serbs. Milosovic was a carasmatic bad man. That type springs up everywhere and trys to grab power.

I think there is a direct link between the Nato operations in the former Yugoslavia, and what is going on today. For one thing the war in Afghanistan is being prosecuted by NATO, which first asserted its right to prosecute pro-active wars during the Yugoslav crisis. As for Iraq, what is NATO, other than a coalition of the willing?

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Originally posted by DonnyBGood:
[b]
So what is it when you use the example of one persons to condemn an entire nationality?

I think readers should remember that Dr C also supported the War in Iraq which used the same techniques of disinformation.
[/b]

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This is a perfect illustration of why radical politics is in such sad shape nowadays.

Brian:

The official reason NATO bombed Yugoslavia was because Belgrade would not accept the Rambouillet accord which would have allowed NATO occupation of all of ex-Yugoslavia AND independance/separation of Kosovo within three years. After the 11 weeks of bombing Belgrade and the West accepted what could have been agreed to before the bombing.

I shake my head in bewilderment when people bring up western conspiracies regarding the break up of former Yugoslavia.

Such people often omit the true timeline which includes AT A MINIMUM, the mid-1980s (eg the agitation for greater autonomy for Kosovo and the subsequent elimination of much of that autonomy by Milosevic and his lackies in the late-1980s).

Does anyone not remember James Baker (US foreign secretary), George Bush Sr and most western leaders declaring that they supported a unitary Yugoslavia even after the vast majority of Slovenian and Croatian citizens had voted to seceed from Yugoslavia? No - of course not, it wouldn't fit into "the Plan".

When the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences declared in 1986 that "but for the NDH era, Serbs in Croatia have never been as threatened as they are today" - this at a time when nobody in the world was complaining about discrimination against Serbs and nobody could find any such evidence (indeed in former SR Croatia Serbs were over-represented in the bureaucracy and police), what type of message was being sent to non-Serbs in Yugoslavia.

Or when Milosevic encouraged "rallies of the people" - the rebirth of Serbian nationalist rallies throughout the late 1980s. Or when Milosevic mentioned in Gazimestan, Kosovo in 1989 during the Kosovo battle commemoration (eg before big bad Croats went on a so-called fascist option of independence to kowtow to western capitalists) that "we are engaged in battles though not bloodshed but that cannot be excluded yet" - why does that not register with the conspiracy theorists?

Yes ALL groups suffered in this war - and it was terrible. But popular opinion in Croatia was quite muted after the suppression of the Croatian spring in 1971 (Croatia's version of the Prague Spring when Croatian reform communists were swept out of power). Milosevic's antics provided the push for Croats to seriously reconsider their place in Yugoslavia - well actually first the Slovenes, then the Croats.

Why no mention of the ethnic cleansing of PROTESTANT Slovaks in Ilok, Croatia by Serbian irregular forces and the JNA in 1991? Because that doesn't fit into the conspiracy theory that the evil Croat Catholics were rebuilding a clero-fascist state? Or Hungarian Catholics and Protestants in Baranja, Croatia in 1991? Or ethnic Italians in the Pakrac area of Croatia or ethnic Czechs in Daruvar? Again this doesn't fit into the conspiracy theory!

Was Tudjman a saint? Of course not! He was a nationalist but nobody can deny that the original focus was on decentralization of the country, not outright separatism in 1990. And what happened in the meantime?

JNA removed arms of the territorial defence units of Croatia.
JNA supplied arms to Serbian irregular units in Croatia.
Milosevic stole 1.7 billion in assets from the central Yugoslav bank.
Milosevic took over the governments of Vojvodina and Kosovo and in defiance of the majorities on the ground in those regions (thereby gaining 4 votes of 8 in the Yugoslav federation - with Montenegro of course) and blocked the natural succession of Stipe Mesic as president of Yugoslavia (each republic and autonomous region had a one-year term and the only time this was questioned was when it was Croatia's turn).

Do you really think unity was possible after this? As for western interests, funny that US government officials had shares in Yugoslav enterprises based in Belgrade - sort of explains the pro-Yugoslav mantra expoused (remember that the US was one of the last western countries to recognize Croatia and Slovenia - April 1992, this is after the genocide in Vukovar and after most of Europe recognized their independence).

Why is it never mentioned that Jovan Raskovic, Serbian leader in Croatia was offered a cabinet position in government in 1990? Why is it not mentioned that the leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church refused to attend the opening of the Croatian parliament in 1990 (though they had been invited).

Someone above mentioned that Tudjman said he wanted to exterminated the Serbian nation in Croatia - no such thing.

The only thing that was done was changing the reference of the Croatian constitution which once said "Croatia is the home of the Croatian nation and Serbian nation" to "Croatia is the home of the Croatian nation and national minorities including Serbs, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, etc" - a boogeyman for sure for crazies but not evidence that the Ustase were returning to Croatia. In fact the Croatian constitution stated that the foundation of Croatia is the PARTIZAN movement (read the constitution of Croatia but then again, that doesn't fit in with the conspiracy theory).

Did Serbs rightfully have concerns regarding Croatian sovereignty? Of course - their collective experience in 1941-1945 meant that they rightfully were skeptical. But this does not justify blocking roads and access to towns a mere six weeks after the opening of parliament in 1990. Or refusing positions within the Croatian government (all under the orders of Milosevic).

Speaking as a Croat whose family was sent to die in Dachau, I am sympathetic to ALL those who suffered but the public campaign of fear in the Serbian population of Croatia was manipulated in Belgrade (eg superimposing pictures of Tudjman with the Ustase in Jasenovac, for instance or media labelling of Ivica Racan, Croatian Communist leader as an Ustasa - this a guy that was born in a German workcamp in which his dad was killed!)

An independent analysis of the causes of this conflict is in order but so-called "academics" such as Parenti and others who fail to take into account the complete historiography of the conflict are doing a disservice to the public.

As for the situation today, HDZ (Tudjman's old party governs in a coalition with the Serbian political party) - this Serbian party beat out another Serbian party in 2003 - eg the Serbian community has different political options competing for their vote.

Serbs and Croats are being prosecuted for war crimes in Croatia and Serbs and Croats are being released as well. The judicial process in Croatia is light years ahead of Serbia and Bosnia in this regard (though progress is being made there as well).

And in 2007, HDZ might very well be toppled by the Social Democrats (who governed in 2000-2003). In Serbia, the current government's strongest opposition is a party which has not dropped its support for "Greater Serbia".

Say what you want about the conflicts, the fact is that since 1981, the autonomy given to Albanians was largely removed, the automony to Vojovdina (53% Serbian, but historically nobody was in the majority, with a large Hungarian minority) was largely removed, there were wars in Slovenia (marginal amount of Serbs), in Croatia (even in areas with relatively few Serbs like Eastern Slavonia, Slunj, Dubrovnik, etc), in Bosnia, in Kosovo - it can't just be a western conspiracy.

My friends, I don't place the blame on an entire nation - Serbs and Croats were victimized by nationalism but the primary cause of the chaos that resulted was Slobodan Milosevic. Even if you think that Tudjman, Kucan, Izetbegovic were "just as bad", these guys would not have had a large public following had Milosevic not scared the daylights out of the smaller nations within Yugoslavia.

I also blame Tito - this is the guy who had prison camps on islands for all dissidents - whether genuine Liberals or reformed Communists - he is the guy that threw out reformists in Croatia and Serbia in the 1970s. He is the guy under which true democratic development was frozen, allowing hatred to fester underneath - never to be addressed appropriately.

To all Serbs and others who lost their loved ones in the war, I express my deepest sympathies and hope that your return to Croatia will occur. Progress has been made (about 1/3 or so have returned) but more progress needs to occur.

Cheers and peace!

Tom, I have read your link before - one thing that strikes me again is the total absence of the pre-1989 actions of Milosevic. How do the Parentis of the world explain Lovas, Vukovar, Ilok, etc? How do they account for the disarming of Croatian forces in 1990 and the re-arming of Serbian irregulars in 1991?

Exactly how did a corporatist agenda serve to destroy Yugoslavia? Part of this theory states that Yugoslavia was the sole example of a successful socialist/mixed market system? But the truth is that Yugoslavia was spending beyond its means by the mid 1970s and the communist party did nothing to address this (go look at the transcripts of communist party sessions in the late 70s).

In addition, one of the articles makes mention of Jasenovac - a terrible crime indeed, but not a camp where 700,000 died. Listed in the death list for Jasenovac are 23 people from our village - they died in Dachau or were killed by local nazi forces - but not in NDH (our region was not even part of NDH during the war and yet I have tracked 5,000 names from our region who supposedly were killed there - and this is a region that to this day has no rail link to Croatia and in those days didn't even have a proper road link to transport so many people in that direction).

I take exception with your equating of Milosevic and genocide with the WMD fiasco.

In Vukovar in 1991, the battle cry recorded by BBC as Croatian civilians were marched out of Vukovar (many of whom were slaughtered) was "Slobo, give us salad...we have meat as we are slaughtering the Croats!"

Where did they get these arms from? JNA? Who was in charge of JNA? Allies of Milosevic!

There are transcripts of Milosevic and Karadzic discussing when it is best to bombard Sarajevo (no not today, as negotiations are continuing, etc).

I have no problem with looking at media manipulation - it's just that the people who focus on this point as if to wash away Milosevic's role in the conflict neither know nor care to understand the precise timelines of events.

Croatian Serb leaders like Babic and Martic did not act out on their own - they were guided through links with Milosevic.

Those banding around the country in mass mobs in the late 80s were guided by Milosevic.

I find it interesting that there are those who condemn nationalism but blindly accept Milosevic's version of events. Listen to the Gazimestan speech - listen to the original carefully - if his speech was as innocent as the apologists make it, then why is the crowd shouting "Too bad Obilic didn't have Slobo"....and other warmongering chants.

In my view, western capitalists had already invested in Yugoslavia, much of it in Serbia - they had little to gain by a country spliting apart and heading towards war.

That's why, and I say it again.....look at the timeline and what the leaders were saying re: supporting the integrity of Yugoslavia - this was a line universally supported until around October 1991 as Croatia was already embroiled in war for four months. This is where most "conspiracy theorists" fail in their argument. Sure the US warned Milosevic on having elections - Milosevic was dead set against free elections, leading to the famous walkout by Slovenes in the communist party in 1990.

As someone who travelled there in 1989, it was the silly things, hearing Milosevic complain about the "Alpe-Adria" tourist region (which was an association of Croatia, Slovenia and parts of Italy and Austria) as the re-incarnation of "Austria-Hungarian hegemony against the Serbs". These things were widely reported in the paper. It was the calling of Racan an Ustasa! It was the constant attacking of the "separatist Albanians, disloyal Slovenes, fascist Hungarians, Ustase Croats and Islamic Terrorists Bosnians" etc.

In my view Milosevic is the founder of the Republics of Croatia, Slovenia, BiH, Macedonia, Montenegro and the soon to be new country or entity of Kosovo/Kosove. I doubt separatism would have been more than a expat dream had Milosevic not stoked those fires.

And no amount of "media distortion" in the west could change that.

As for an emotional reaction, I think my emotions are in check, thank you very much.

Tom,

Have you listened to the speech in its original Serbian? Have you seen the video? The Gazimestan event was billed as a Yugoslav event and therefore you had the parliamentary reps there but the net effect of the speech, especially when you hear the hoars when "armed battles cannot be excluded yet" - you do not hear the hoars for the ethnic sharing because it was not sincere (and the crowd certainly didn't support that brotherhood and unity concept). Just like Hitler when he made some very nice speeches about social and economic justice - i mean who is kidding whom?

Contrast Gazimestan to the elimination of autonomy for Kosovo and Vojvodina - why no mention of this? Surely Milosevic, the lover of minorities would have been against that, right?

And why the demonization of Racan by Belgrade TV when Milosevic controlled the press with an iron fist?

Death camps - interesting you should mention this - yeah i've heard that this guy was on the opposite side of the face (according to how the barbed wire is supposedly placed). Funny thing about barbed wire - it doesn't really matter how you lay it out - it still works to prevent people from leaving. Their existence occurred and people did witness them - some of those who wrote of their existence and took photos are still alive. I know of people who were in Omarska so don't tell me it didn't happpen.

Exodus of Krajina

I've certainly read about it in mainstream press but then again what happened mere days before? SREBRENICA - you know that place that Serbs for years said no one was killed and now we acknowledge at least a couple of thousand slaughtered. And what else happened, oh yes, Serbian forces from Krajina invading Bihas and threatening the western Muslim enclave a la Srebrenica. Again look at the timelines here instead of retreating to propaganda. The Serbs were not interested in any negotiations at that point and unfortunately this meant invasion to save Bihac. Serbs gave Croats a reason to reclaim its territory.

As for the exodus and war crimes that were committed, I am truly sorry. But just as we don't really mourn the loss of the German community in the Sudeten, the world community had little sympathy for the exodus of Serbs. Is that right, probably not. But war is war and those perceived as supporting ethnic cleansing (eg Slunj, Kijevo, Vukovar, Ilok, Baranja, and other areas that had a non-Serb majority) cannot claim innocence and support without acknowledging the many crimes committed by their side in 1991.

As for media manipulation, how about the fabricated stories that Croats killed 41 children in Vukovar (ultimately held to be untrue and made up by a Serbian photographer but not before the story made headlines around the world) or the so-called fascist bombing of the Jewish centre in Zagreb which looked more like a communist plot designed to turn opinion against Croatia. Or the fake Jewish-Serbian friendship society or the "claim" that Ankica Klempuh was a Croatian jew killed by Croats when in fact she was a Croatian Catholic killed by Serbs!

Media manipulation was practiced quite effectively by Milosevic.

Why did Milosevic actively opposed free democratic elections? That's the reason for the Slovene communist walkout in January 1990 - but I guess that doesn't fit the theory of Milosevic the good guy!

An interesting note regarding the claims of "inflated numbers" at Jasenovac:

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp]This link[/url] (Wikipedia, but you can check the references yourself) cites a number of different analyses of the death counts and the majority hit 500,000 or so.

I actually find it interesting that the effective equivalent of Holocaust denial is being practiced by Croatians who claim that the calculated death counts are far too high. We would rightly excoriate anyone claiming that only 500,000 Jews died instead of 5 to 7 million.