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Counting Bodies in Bosnia and Herzegovina

By David Peterson at Mar 25, 2006

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It turns out that, not just once, but at least twice over the past three months, in late December and then again in early March, the U.S. Department of State’s Review of European Security Issues has recognized that the “official death toll” from the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ca. 1992 - 1995, is dramatically lower than had been almost universally accepted as recently as last fall: On the order of 100,000 people on all sides in the wars there, civilian, military, and paramilitaries included.

Notice, in particular, the rather frank admission in the second paragraph of the December 30 blurb: "As recently as November, U.S. officials marking the 10th anniversary of the end of the war said the death toll ranged between 200,000 and 300,000 – a range that has been widely cited by government officials and media accounts for a decade."

Indeed.  When the death of Slobodan Milosevic was announced in the early morning hours of March 11, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and a chief architect of both the American policy with respect to the Dayton Accords of late 1995 and the American-led NATO-bloc aggression over the Serbian province of Kosovo in the spirng of 1999, Richard Holbrooke, began making the media rounds. (Including an op-ed in the March 14 Financial Times wherein Holbrooke wrote that Milosevic "started four wars (all of which he lost), causing 300,000 deaths....")

Whereupon Holbrooke continued to mouth the 300,000 figure---without anybody to challenge him. 

Thus, on Saturday, March 11, the U.S.-based Cable News Network (CNN) conducted an interview with Holbrooke, which CNN has since excerpted and re-run multiple times.  Particularly during the first weekend of Milosevic's death, March 11-12. 

As CNN's Betty Nguyen set the stage ("CNN Saturday Morning News," 11:00 AM EST, Transcript # 031105CN.V28):

NGUYEN: We wanted you to take us back. You helped create this Dayton Accord, which essentially ended the Balkan war.

Take us back to that time. You spent a lot of time there.

What was going on at the time and how did you create this? How did you help stop the violence, stop the killing, because over a qtr of a million people died in that?

HOLBROOKE: Well, Milosevic started four wars. He lost them all. The biggest of them all was the one in Bosnia, where over 300,000 people died, two-and-a-half million homeless. And we bombed him in August and September of 1995. We should have done this much earlier.

In a nutshell, here is the history of the American involvement in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia.  Lie about the nature and scope of the conflicts.  Stoke up mass hysteria about events on the ground---including sexed-up claims about Greater Serb Aggression; a sexed-up "joint criminal enterprise" involving ethnic Serbs and only ethnic Serbs; and a sexed-up genocide.  Stall.  And stall.  And stall some more.  Blocking every effort by other negotiators to bring an end to the fighting.  And in the end, bomb---then move in and take over behind the kind of multilateral facades that only a neocolonial regime has at its command.    


BOSNIA WAR OFFICIAL DEATH TOLL BELOW 100,000

The 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) was Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II, but newly released official statistics show that fewer people died than were previously reported. The BiH Research and Documentation Center has identified 94,000 people -- civilians and soldiers – who lost their lives in the war, the Defense Department’s Southeast European Times reported December 19.

The researchers presented their findings at a conference in Banja Luka, Bosnia, on December 16. Mirsad Tokac[a], the chief of the research center, specified that the figure refers to the number of victims whose identity is known, while the actual death toll probably exceeds 100,000. As recently as November, U.S. officials marking the 10th anniversary of the end of the war said the death toll ranged between 200,000 and 300,000 – a range that has been widely cited by government officials and media accounts for a decade. In 2005, the population of Bosnia was 4 million. (See related article.)

---- “Review of European Security Issues -- A Look Ahead For 2006,” December 30, 2005
 
 
UNITED NATIONS COURT TO HEAR BOSNIAN GENOCIDE CASE
 
Thirteen years after it was first filed, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s case against Serbia-Montenegro for violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention will be heard publicly by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague -- the principal court of the United Nations for disputes between States -- the U.N. News Service reported February 27. Public hearings began the day of the announcement. 

Numerous individuals already have been charged with crimes against humanity by the separate International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in connection with violence committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A formal study by the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina concluded  in 2005 that 100,000 people were killed in the country’s 1992-1995 war for independence. Many were singled out based on their ethnicity.

The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina first filed its case in March 1993 against the state then known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, according to a press statement released by the ICJ. (See statement on the ICJ Web site.)

In July 1996 the court determined that it had jurisdiction to adjudicate on the dispute on the basis of Article IX, on State responsibility, of the Genocide Convention.

To be held at the ICJ’s seat in Hague, the hearings on the merits of the case are expected to last until May 9. 

For background on U.S. policy in the region, see Southeast Europe.

---- "Review of European Security Issues," March 3, 2006

Nice racket.  Don't you think? 

“War-related Deaths in the 1992–1995 Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous Estimates and Recent Results,” Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, European Journal of Population, Volume 21, June, 2005, pp. 187-215
Population Losses in Bosnia and Herzegovina 92-95 Project, Research and Documentation Center, Sarajevo 

"The Bosnian Genocide Promoters," ZNet, February 15, 2006 
"Counting Bodies in Bosnia and Herzegovina," ZNet, March 25, 2006

 

 

 

 

 

Comment On This Blog Post  See All Comments (9)

Person

Clinton/Albright responsible for not preventing Rwanda genocide

By Kissenger, Clark at Jul 08, 2006 03:24 AM

Hi David, 

Thought you might like this reply of mine in response to a post from Noam's blog entitled "Shut Down the UN" available at:

http://blogs.zmag.org/node/2562#comment-55583

*******************************************************

"And don't forget that ten years ago thousands of Bosnian Muslims
were murdered by the Serb militias who were in a UN protected “safe haven” with hundreds of UN soldiers assigned to defend them.  Yet the UN stood by while the entire adult and teenage male
population was systematically butchered." 

 

Sir, this claim is dead WRONG. The only "systematic butchering" that really took place in Srebrenica while the UN peacekeepers apathetically "stood by" (and which the UN top brass at New York's headquarters turned a blind eye and deaf ear to)  was the hideously brutal slaughter of over 3,800 Serbian CIVILIANS - mainly elderly men, women and young children from early 1992 to July 1995 - by Alija Izetbegovic's SDA party Bosnian Islamist fundamentalist Nazi faction warlord, Mr. Naser Oric (recently freed by the NATO owned ICTY "war crimes tribunal" after serving only 2 and a half years!!).This brutal slaughter, whilst NOT specifically denied by NATO, the NATO owned ICTY or the Bush Administration, is NEVER referred to as "genocide".  

See my below comment post on the UK "Scotsman" newspaper concerning this vile NATO obscenity and affront to humanity (available at: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=973262006):

************************************************************ 

Dear John, you write that: 

"Naser Oric is just as guilty as Gen. Ratko Mladic even if he didn't kill as many."

How is General Ratko Mladic "guilty" exactly? What evidence do you have that he ordered or participated in the alleged killing of "...some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War."

After 11 years the NATO owned ICTY at The Hague has failed to produce a shred of evidence to support the charge that Mladic and/or Karadzic ordered the execution of 8,000 of the late Alija Izetbegovic's troops. For example, the overwhelming majority of bodies examined have NOT been identified as Bosnian muslims (see http://www.srebrenica-report.com and http://emperors-clothes.com/sreb/branco-1.htm).

Even the Izetbegovic SDA Bosnian Islamists admit that 5,000 of their troops made it safely to the town of Tuzla through Izetbegovic's SDA held "Bosniak" Islamist lines - troops who were later on re-incorporated into Izetbegovic's "Bosniak" army. Add to this the approximately 3,000 of Izetbegovic's troops who according to the Red Cross also left the area WITHOUT their families being informed, and you discover how they came up with the figure of 8,000 supposedly executed.

See:
http://emperor.vwh.net/articles/pumphrey/Srebrenica.html

http://www.srebrenica-report.com/defense.htm

http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/refutat.htm

This alleged moral equivalence between Mladic and Oric is WRONG. Mladic's guilt for the alleged execution of 8,000 of Izetbegovic's troops has not been PROVEN with any documented evidence by NATO - all we have is ASSERTIONS made by the NATO-owned ICTY. Simultaneously we have the documented massacres of 3,870 Serbian civilians by Oric from 1992 to 1995 - which has been confirmed by UN officials and blue helmet "peacekeepers" on the ground at the time -such as French UN general Phillipe Morillon in testimony under oath at the late Milosevic's "trial" by NATO's ICTY.

Oric's massacres of 3,800+ Serbian civilians have NOT been specifically denied by NATO, NATO's ICTY or the UN itself, but have simply been whitewashed and COVERED UP.

Oric was a cold blooded killer who BOASTED to reporters of the Washington Post and Toronto Star about how he murdered Serbian CIVILIANS - elderly men, women and children - mostly by cracking skulls with iron bars & sledgehammers, as well as beheading & dismemberment with axes,knives, daggers and machetes. See

http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/oric.htm

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/fulltext.htm

http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/gorazde.htm
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/texts2.htm

http://slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg030904.htm 

All of this has been rigorously documented in official United Nations documents A/48/177, S/25835 and A/47/813, S/24991 describing the hideous murders and rapes of Serbian civilians in and around Srebrenica and other nearby Bosnian towns and villages - available at:

http://emperors-clothes.com/sreb/mem.htm

http://www.srebrenica-report.com/docs/UN-1993-1.pdf

The UN document A/47/813, S/24991 on rape by Bosnian Muslim & Croat forces in Bosnia in 1992 can be read at: http://www.srpska-mreza.com/Bosnia/rapes/raped-serbs.html

*********************************************************

As far as who was most guilty at the UN headquarters in New York for failing to prevent the Rwandan genocide, the evidence is quite clear that it was then US ambassador to the UN, the Clinton Administration's Madeleine Albright. See one of my posts from my blog.

Here is an excerpt below: 

************************************************************* 

Last year, in April 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the [genuine] Rwanda genocide, on an Australian current affairs program [the ABC 7:30 Report], they had a former "UN war crimes prosecutor" who made the following comment:

"Fortunately, in Kosovo, even though a lot of peopledid lose their lives, NATO was not as slow as whathappened, for example, in Rwanda and Bosnia."

This comment implies that what happened in Rwanda was a result of the US Clinton Administration and NATO being "slow" to act, and that while this contributed to the genocide in Rwanda, at least in the case ofKosovo this "slowness" on the part of the US Clinton Administration and NATO was miraculously avoided.Nothing could be further from the truth - in both instances.

The US government, along with NATO states knew EXACTLY what was going on in Rwanda - but patently refused to call it by its properterm-i.e.,genocide;unlike in Kosovo, where the term 'genocide' was frivolously being bandied about by NATO governments even BEFORE the bombing by US/NATO aircraft commenced.

In fact it was NOT a matter of being "slow" to act inthe case of Rwanda - and "quick" to act in the case of Kosovo; it was actually a matter of outright REFUSAL bythe Clinton/Albright team to acknowledge that genocide was happening in Rwanda and then deliberately obstructing-at every turn- every effort by UNpeacekeepers to prevent the genocide of up to 800,000 people.

Why did the US Clinton Administration do this? One possible answer can be found at the following url:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO305A.html

In a report by an eminent panel entitled "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide" by the Organization for African Unity [now the African Union-released in May 2000] it is openly declared that even though the US was fullyaware that genocide was occurring in Rwanda, then-US ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, was responsible for "playing the key role" in "tossing uproadblocks" at the UN to "..prevent effective action" to stop the genocide.

Isn't it strange how Clinton and Albright were ACTIVELY involved in direct actions at the UN to ensure that the Rwanda genocide took place [ which is far worse and completely different to doing 'nothing' at all] and yet claim that they were intervening on the side of of a known terrorist organization [the KLA] in Kosovo and siding with the Iranian-backed Islamist regime of Alija Izetbegovic [a known Osama bin Laden ally] in Bosnia because they were allegedly trying to "prevent genocide"? It just ISN'T credible.

See the story at:
http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2001/6.html

The report can be viewed in its entirety at:

http://www.visiontv.ca/RememberRwanda/Report.pdf

As terrible as the carnage committed by all three sides was during the Bosnian civil war from '92 to'95, it certainly did NOT qualify as anything approaching genocide [i.e the literal dictionary meaning of the word] of any single ethnic group in thewar [i.e., deliberate extermination of an entire people].
See for example the articles by the prestigious International Strategic Studies Association at: http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Sep1703.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Sep1903.htm

Nor did what occurred in Kosovo in 1999 (max. 2,200 to 2,500 deaths in total for all civilian and military personnel on ALL sides from ALL causes-including "accidental" NATO bombing of civilian victims) qualify as genocide either-despite Clinton/NATO claims to the contrary.

See for example the article by renowned Canadian author, Professor Michel Chossudovsky: "NATO'S CLAIM OF ETHNIC CLEANSING CHALLENGED" at:
http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/chossudovsky/ethnic.htm

Since June '99, at least 95% of the pre-war non-Albanian minority population of 19 distinct ethnic groups [amounting to approximately 350,000 people] has been ethnically cleansed from the province under the very supervision of NATO troops who were supposed to be protecting them.

The NATO bombing of Serbia/Kosovo in 1999 had less to do with preventing genocide and more to do with "regime change" in Belgrade just as the 2003 war in Iraq had less to do with preventing an attack by WMD and more to do with installing a compliant regime in Baghdad.

The attempt by US and NATO governments to exonerate themselves by, in effect, saying [to paraphrase]:

"Well we know that 800,000 people were masscared in Rwanda and it's really an unfortunate and sad thing we didn't prevent it because we were just too slow to act, but hey, at least we prevented genocide in Kosovo and you have to give us credit for that"
is a lame and specious argument not supported by the facts.

Regards,

Peter Robert North.

PS: The Srebrenica Hoax was a Cover Up for Clinton's support of Alija Izetbegovic: a fanatical Al Qaeda Islamist Jihad supporter and close friend of Osama bin Laden and KNOWN WAR CRIMINAL Naser Oric [to top it all off, the terrorist KLA leader was Agim Ceku - also a KNOWN WAR CRIMINAL -who worked with the brother of Osama bin Laden's #2 man, Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri - also another Al Qaeda fanatic supported by Clinton and NATO]

http://nato-media-lies-exposed.blogspot.com/2005/12/exposing-sbs-bias-censorship-hypocrisy.html
**********************************************************************

 "...Holbrooke, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the Clinton White House all played key rôles in supporting the Islamists who, as it transpired, were consistently working with al-Qaida and the Iranian Government, among others, in planning major terrorist attacks on the US. Amb. Hays worked closely with Mr Holbrooke in the UN during this period. As a result, it was now seen as important that this pattern of support for people who were later seen to be involved in terrorist actions against the US should not be allowed to emerge, particularly in the build-up to the elections, which were regarded as being critical to Sen. Hillary Clinton and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander-Europe (SACEUR) Gen. Clark."

International Strategic Studies Association, Washington DC: GIS Special Topical Reports - Balkan Strategic Studies: October 20, 2003.

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Oct20%2003.htm

*****************************************************

International Strategic Studies Association, Washington DC: GIS Special Topical Reports - Balkan Strategic Studies: The New Rome & The New Religious Wars, March 1999.

"Little wonder that numerous US policy analysts, even
those who are hostile to Yugoslavia as a basic stance,
are extremely uncomfortable with the Clinton
Administration's close ties with the KLA.

"There is no doubt that the involvement of the two
brothers al-Zawahiri in the two movements is not
coincidental. Ben Works, director of the Strategic
Research Institute of the US, noted: "There's no doubt
that bin Laden's people have been in Kosovo helping to
arm, equip and train the KLA. . . . The [US]
Administration's policy in Kosovo is to help bin
Laden. It almost seems as if the Clinton
Administration's policy is to guarantee more
terrorism."

"Noted strategic analyst and columnist, former US Army
Colonel Harry Summers, said on August 12, 1998, that
in Kosovo, the US found itself "championing the very
Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups who are our
mortal enemies elsewhere".

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Rome.htm

**************************************************** 

For more evidence of the above concerning the true character of the late Alija Izetbegovic - that of a pro-Islamist Jihad/al Qaeda radical Islamist fundamentalist Nazi - as well as further details on what really happened in Kosovo and Srebrenica, see:

http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija1.htm
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija2.htm
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija3.htm 

http://www.srebrenica-report.com
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/freezer1.htm

http://www.serbianna.com/features/srebrenica/

http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1997/iran.htm 

http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1999/fr033199.htm
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/guide-yugo.htm
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ranta.htm
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/kosovo.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Oct0703.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Sep1703.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Sep1903.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Oct1503.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Oct0903.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Oct1603.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Oct20%2003.htm

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Jun1503.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Sep0803.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Aug3193.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Genocide.htm
http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Dec3192-2.htm

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Rome.htm
http://www.espritdecorps.ca/new_page_220.htm
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO310B.html
http://michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MOS20050803&articleId=795
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=HER20051229&articleId=1667

http://emperors-clothes.com/bosnia/svijet.htm

http://emperors-clothes.com/sreb/branco-1.htm

http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/documents/srebrenica.pdf

 

******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

ex-Clinton 'peace envoy' Richard Holbrooke- beneficiary of KLA Narco Terrorist Child Sex Slavery Mafia - gets president of Hague ICTY to free ex-Kosovo PM and KLA war criminal, Ramush Haradinaj, IN ADVANCE of his "surrender" to The Hague ICTY: "a deal would be struck to ensure that he did not serve prison time for the charges he faced."

*********************************************************************************************************************************************************************

 

US Policy in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean: Time to Stop Choosing Sides, and to Start Choosing Strategic Interests

 

By Gregory R. Copley,

President, the International Strategic Studies Association.[1]

Presented at the Capitol Hill Conference on

FYROM: The Need for Reassessment of US Policy in the Balkans.

 

Longworth House of Representatives Office Building,

Washington, DC: April 14, 2005

 

"The fact that the KLA leader and, until March 8, 2005, Prime Minister of Kosovo, Ramush (Hilmi) Haradinaj, was indicted for war crimes and taken to The Hague for trial still has not penetrated the consciousness of what is transpiring. Moreover, in order to somewhat ease the embarrassment of having backed the wrong side — the side of al-Qaida, the narco-traffickers, the true genocidal xenophobists, and the criminal gangs — in Kosovo, the US is in some ways actively working to let Mr Haradinaj out of prison, so that he can “fight his legal battle from a position of freedom”.

"This is a man charged with having directly and personally killed many innocent people, not a politician who allegedly allowed things to happen by default. The scandal of this particular case has yet to break, but suffice it to say that Albanian mafia linked to the KLA have worked through former US Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke — a close associate of the KLA and a beneficiary of its support — to approach the US President of the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Theodore Meron, to see Haradinaj released.[4] There are reports from within the ICTY that the State Department would approve the release of Haradinaj, and had, in fact, agreed with Haradinaj in advance of his surrender to the ICTY, that a deal would be struck to ensure that he did not serve prison time for the charges he faced."

4] Meron, a professor of law at New York University, was a member of the US official delegation to the Rome talks in 1998, at which the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was discussed. At that conference, he reflected the US line, which was in complete opposition to the foundation of the ICC, but subsequently accepted to be President of the ICC's subsidiary court, the ICTY.

http://www.macedoniansincanada.com/Grecory%20R.%20Copley.htm

******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

http://www.kosovo.net/ramush.html 

"In 1999, the KLA unit under Ramush Haradinaj's command killed 40 civilians from the Kosovo village of Glodjani and threw the bodies into the Radonjic Lake canal."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now the United Nations is investigating him after a shooting incident, an investigation which the US has tried to interfere with. Here are the facts:
In June, 1999, Ramush ordered the killing of four members of FARK (Armed Forces of the Republic of Kosovo), a rival group to the KLA. As is Albanian custom, the brothers of one dead man went to the father of Ramush to ask for their brother's bones. Ramush later that night went to the brothers, of the Musaj family, where a shooting incident took place.

Ramush was helicoptered to the US base in Kosovo, Camp Bondsteel and then to a United States military hospital in Germany to receive treatment. He is at present in Washington, the guest of congressman Benjamin Gillman, raising funds for his political party before next October's elections in Kosovo.
United Nations investigators into this incident claim that while Ramush was away, Unites States officials left Bondsteel, went to the village of Strellic, where the incident took place, and removed forensic evidence that Ramush had been present, including the act of taking bullets from walls.

United Nations police reports link Ramush to two well-known Albanian Mafia men, Naser Kelmendi and Ekrem Lluka. Lluka is suspected by UN police of being involved actively in the trafficking of drugs in Kosovo, Greece, Italy and Albania.

British military sources, who asked to remain unnamed, classified Ramush as “a psychopath”.

“Someone would pass him information and he would disappear for two hours. The result would be several bodies in a ditch”.

 

http://www.kosovo.net/ramush.html  (Photographs and excerpts from article on details of atrocities  against Kosovo Serbs perpetrated by US/UK ally KLA commander & ex-Kosovo Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj)

 

" At the end of 1999 the chief prosecutor of the Hague tribunal, Carla del Ponte, announced that an investigation had been started regarding war crimes against the non-Albanian population in Kosovo. The investigation was almost completely blocked until recently because information was not forthcoming from either side, the spokeswoman of the prosecutor's office of the Hague tribunal, Florence Hartmann (Florence Hartmann-Domankusic), told "Reporter". The new government in Serbia, according to Hartmann, has submitted all documentation to The Hague. "Indictments will be issued only against those persons against whom we have evidence," she explained. Zoran Zivkovic, the Yugoslav minister of internal affairs, told "Reporter" that "more than 30 kilograms of various documents were turned over to the head of the office of the Hague tribunal in Belgrade." In the meanwhile, the investigators of this tribunal have collected about 80 testimonials from family members of the missing and witnesses.

 

Despite increasingly frequent public discussion (in Serbia) that Agim Cheku, Hashim Thaci and Ramush Haradinaj are under investigation by the Hague tribunal, Hartmann said that "the investigation is in progress", however, she added that she "never confirmed that these three men are under investigation."

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Person

Update on Mr.Daniel Lam - Srebrenica Nazi LIAR strikes again!!

By Kissenger, Clark at Jul 07, 2006 13:24 PM

Hi David,

An update on Mr. Daniel Lam, from Quebec, Canada - the mentally deranged, incredibly profane,obnoxious individual that not only lauds Islamist Nazi mass murderers such as Mr. Naser Oric (recently freed bythe pro-Nazi NATO-owned ICTY) but also regularly sends unbelievably offensive, abusive comments to people under many assumed names.

You may not be aware of the fact that I have completely BANNED anonymous comments from my blog. Why? To refresh your memory, please see the following for an explanation:

http://nato-media-lies-exposed.blogspot.com/2006/06/mr-daniel-lam-author-of-srebrenica.html

So what does Mr. Daniel Lam do? He creates a new blog - this time under an assumed identity of a Jewish man whose

relatives were murdered in the Holocaust by - get this..... wait for it......drum roll please......BRITISH BACKED SERBIAN PRO-ALLIED RESISTANCE FIGHTERS,KNOWN AS THE ROYALIST "CHETNIKS"(?!)

See Mr. Daniel Lam's latest Nazi racist anti-Serbian  pro-Srebrenica genocide PHONY Jewish authored blog, at http://balkan-studies.blogspot.com

On this latest blog under the assumed identity of a non-existent phony Jewish man by the name of "Gabriel Piterberg" (whom supposedly lost 17 relatives in the Holocaust at the hands of the pro-Allied Royalist "Chetnik" Serbs) Mr. Lam yet again repeats his tired old "are you STILL beating your wife?" Big Lie, that less than 2,000 Serbs - both civilian and military- died in ALL of Bosnia in three and half years of warfare with the Islamist Nazi SDA fundamentalist faction led by the late Alija Izetbegovic.   

Oh I wish I was kidding about all of this, David.

He even wrote me a comment on my blog. Here it is below, along with my reply: 

============================================================================================================================
Gabriel Piterberg said...
hi Peter Robert North,

 

I lost 17 relatives in the Holocaust. They were killed by Serbian chetniks.

Please read my latest article in it's entirety:

http://balkan-studies.blogspot.com/2006/06/serbia-carried-holocaust-against-jews.html

Thanks.

Gabriel Piterberg

10:11 AM

***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Peter Robert North said...
Dear Mr.Daniel Lam of "Srebrenica Genocide Blogspot"(a.k.a. "Gabriel Piterberg": A TOTALLY FAKE non-existent Jew)

 

[For those unfamiliar with Mr.Daniel Lam of Quebec, Canada, he is a mentally deranged, obnoxious,incredibly rude and profane,incorrible teenage Bosnian Islamist Nazi COWARD and a fan of notorious Bosnian Islamist Nazi mass murderer, Naser Oric (recently freed by the pro-Nazi NATO owned ICTY) whom posts under numerous aliases in order to hide his identity - a Bosnian Islamist teenager with an awful lot of time on his hands - whom claims that less than 2,000 Serbs in TOTAL - both civilian & military - died in Bosnia in THREE & A HALF YEARS OF BITTER INTERNECINE WARFARE with the Izetbegovic SDA Islamist Nazi faction.]

 See

 

http://nato-media-lies-exposed.blogspot.com/2006/06/mr-daniel-lam-author-of-srebrenica.html]

http://nato-media-lies-exposed.blogspot.com/2006/03/open-letter-to-mr-daniel-lam-of-quebec.html

Daniel,you really are undermining your credibility with this kind of CRETINOUS, IMBECILIC & puerile deception.

You are about as Jewish as Adolf Eichmann was.

Mr.Lam, PLEASE stop doing such silly things as the above post and your latest identity - amongst dozens of others- this time as a supposed Jew whose relatives were supposedly murdered by the anti-Nazi pro-Allied anti-Communist Royalist "Chetnik" Serbs.

This totally PHONY new blog of yours under an assumed Jewish name only undermines and further erodes your microscopically infinitesimal "credibility" and that of your imbecilic,brain-dead pro-Nazi Islamist friends, such as the Scottish Liberal Democrats' proven LIAR, Mr.Norman Fraser (See http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006/06/trnopolje-omarska-2-examples-of.html).

Cheeers!!! And have a NICE and happy day, Daniel.

Peter Robert North

========================================================================== 

PS: For further info on the who the real Nazis were in WW2 Yugoslavia as well as NOW, see:

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Jan1995.htm

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Genocide.htm

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Dec3192-2.htm

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE0DE1E30F933A25751C0A967958260

http://www.reformation.org/holocaus.html

http://128.121.186.47/ISSA/reports/Balkan/Balkanindex.htm

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Srebrenica Genocide Blogspot & Mr. Daniel Lam of Quebec, Canada

By Kissenger, Clark at Apr 25, 2006 21:47 PM

Hello David,

Regarding Mr. Daniel Lam of Quebec, Canada and his "Srebrenica Genocide Denial" blogspot, see my blog post "An Open Letter to Mr. Daniel Lam of Quebec Canada, author of "Srebrenica genocide blogspot"  at

 http://nato-media-lies-exposed.blogspot.com/2006/03/open-letter-to-mr-daniel-lam-of-quebec.html

and at the blog run by Neil Craig of Glasgow, Scotland:

 http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_a-place-to-stand_archive.html

scroll down to the comments section under the article post "Milosevic: Murder of the Century"

 

Best,

Pete. 

 

 

  

 

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Hoare

By Kissenger, Clark at Apr 01, 2006 14:17 PM

 

  Good points you make. A lot of it can/will depend on who is making the interpretation, what their agenda is and what their level of intellectual honesty is. In war people often, in fact usually tend to kill along ethnic, racial, religious or national lines. The hysteria about "genocide" over the last fifteen years is all about politics in the service of power. One of many good example: Marko Attilla Hoare while shamelessly promoting the "genoicde in bosnia" line has also pushed the line that the Chetniks committed genocide against the Croats and Muslims during WWII. (a bold claim) You'll find the claim if you check out his piece "The Left Revisionists" assuming you have the stomach and the masochism. It's quite extroadinary that such people can then cry about "revisionists". 

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Genocide

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 31, 2006 23:58 PM

Dimitri,

Good point you bring up.  This is something that has interested me, especially since the actual wording of the 'Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide' in pertinent part says:

"Article 2

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;"

[snip] 

 Let’s start with the beginning, “…acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part…”.  OK, first how do you determine the intent when one is killed?  It is now genocide to kill or cause serious bodily or mental harm to a part of a group?  What, pray tell, is the common, dictionary definition of genocide?

gen·o·cide (jµn“…-sºd”) n. The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.
American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition 1992

OK, so now we have a convention with loopholes you could drive a semi through.  Theoretically, you could kill a number of people of a group but if your intent was not “…to destroy, in whole or in part…” then you may have committed mass murder but not genocide, right?  Alternatively, if you killed a single individual member of “…a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” with the intent “…to destroy, in whole or in part…” that group you have committed genocide, right?  Confused yet?

Given the proclivity of lawyers to swallow elephants effortlessly and strain at swallowing a single gnat, the wording of this section is so imprecise, so designed to confuse and allow any manner of political misinterpretation as to render the statute totally useless!

I invite your observation and comments.

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Gotta keep going

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 31, 2006 18:47 PM

 

  Of course, when the ICTY wrapped up its great body exhumation campaign back in 2000 they came up with a grand total of well under 4,000 bodies AND body parts (ethnicities, cause of death, time of death, occupation not specified).  The Court historians, instead of noting these lies and checking earlier claims to see if they're factual simply take for granted everything else from the oficial line: Milosevic is an evil dictator, bloodthirsty nationalist etc. who pursued a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and committed "genocide" in Bosnia. Since the "genocide in Bosnia" and "ethnic cleansing the Albanains" lines are used to justify the NATO intervention with its low body count the ICW can't stop lying about those as well. And if they actually told the truth about those and about the role played by the Western powers or the other sides well then the whole NATO machine would be shown up, wouldn't it? I guess they have to keep on lying as long as they can. Too many paychecks and too much "credibility" on the line.
 

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The Right To Lie

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 30, 2006 12:25 PM

Friends:

Two Imperial Court Weavers of the highest orders---Michael Ignatieff and Ian Williams.  (Though Ignatieff belongs in a class by himself.)  These commentaries shows us exactly how the historical revisionists-before-the-fact prefer to operate.  In their defense of the right to lie and the concomitant privilege of not having lies challenged, one strategy---clearly adopted in the work reproduced here---is to accuse their challengers of raising, not factual, but sick and crazed and somehow impossible-to-be-true challenges against them.  Hence, a challenger is not simply right or wrong but, crucially, a “revisionist” and a “denier.”  It all goes with protecting one’s turf and one’s privileges.  The right to lie being the most valuable right of all, and therefore requiring a vigorous defense.---I’ve always marveled at the fact in the first of these---and notice where it appeared---Michael Ignatieff managed to use a form of the term ‘revisionist’ (singular or plural) no less than 17 different times!  Talk about being a hardcore historical revisionist-before-the-fact.  This man’s work is X-rated from start to finish.


The New York Times
November 21, 1999, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 4; Page 15; Column 1; Editorial Desk 
HEADLINE: Counting Bodies In Kosovo
BYLINE:  By Michael Ignatieff;  Michael Ignatieff is the author of the forthcoming "Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond."
DATELINE: LONDON

Where are the bodies in Kosovo?

The question goes to the heart of the rationale for the war itself. Our leaders took us into the war, so the argument goes, to stop a European state from massacring its own citizens. If the massacres never took place, what justification for intervention remains?

This style of revisionism began to surface in September when war crimes investigators from Spain began telling reporters that they were finding fewer bodies than expected. Juan Lopez Palafox, the chief of the Spanish forensic team, told El Pais that before he arrived in Kosovo, he had been told to prepare for as many as 2,000 autopsies. His team found only 187 bodies. Other investigators reported that when they had tried to find the bodies that the Serbs had supposedly burned at the Trepca mine in northeastern Kosovo, they found nothing at all. The Federal Bureau of Investigation went in prepared to find thousands of bodies and is reported to have found only 200.

By late October, the British conservative weekly The Spectator was arguing that the "crude Manicheanism" of Western leaders led them to exaggerate the evil of the Serb regime. Hadn't Tony Blair written in an Op-Ed article in this newspaper on April 24: "Only NATO has the ability to oppose the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing -- a sustained campaign of brutality that has turned Kosovo into a slaughterhouse, with Mr. Milosevic's death squads burning, raping and killing."

This was the kind of rhetoric, revisionists argued, that encouraged others to make inflated claims about the numbers killed in Kosovo. George Friedman, a revisionist who runs Stratfor.com, a private research company in Austin, Tex., seized on a statement by Defense Secretary William Cohen on May 16 on CBS's "Face the Nation" in which he claimed that 100,000 men of military age were missing and unaccounted for.

Revisionists also singled out the comment on June 17 by Geoff Hoon, a British Foreign Office minister, that 10,000 people had been massacred. Last week, when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague announced that it had been able to find only 2,108 bodies in its five-month investigation in Kosovo, revisionists were quick to claim that the West had exaggerated Serb crimes by a factor of five.

Actually, the revisionists may have been the ones to get their facts wrong.

In Mr. Cohen's appearance on "Face the Nation," his statements were actually much more complicated. While he said that 100,000 were missing, he also clearly stated that his reports showed that 4,600 Kosovars had been executed, a claim that has been confirmed by the forensic trail of evidence uncovered by war crimes investigators since June. Yes, Jamie Shea, the NATO spokesman, compared Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader, to Cambodia's Pol Pot, but his factual claims -- that the Serbs had executed 4,000 men -- were cautious. The NATO leaders' rhetoric was highly moralistic, but by and large they did not exaggerate the body count. The revisionists' claim that we were lied to is simply not proven.

Moreover, the revisionists have misinterpreted the Hague tribunal's numbers. The tribunal's total figure -- 2,108 bodies uncovered from 195 sites -- appeared at first to confirm the revisionists' claims. But the revisionists failed to notice that there are at least 334 other sites that the investigators will turn to in the spring when the ground thaws and digging can resume. No one knows how many bodies will be uncovered from these remaining sites or whether more sites will be discovered.

The tribunal's current estimate -- from Western intelligence sources, eyewitness statements and evidence taken from surviving family members -- is that there are 11,334 bodies at 529 sites. Instead of exaggerating the case, the British Foreign Ministry's estimate in June of 10,000 bodies appears, if anything, to understate it.

Whether these 11,334 bodies will be found depends on whether the Serb military and the police removed them. Serb forces made substantial efforts to cover their tracks. For example, at Izbica, villagers told war crimes investigators that they had buried 143 bodies after a Serb massacre in early April. Spy satellite images, published in the Western press in June, showed these 143 graves. In late June, when tribunal investigators reached the village, the bodies had been removed, and earthmovers had been used in a crude and unsuccessful attempt to erase traces of the site. The real problem in establishing how many people actually died in Kosovo is not Western propaganda, but Serb attempts to cover the traces of their crimes.

But the deeper issues the revisionists raise are not about numbers.

They are about what threshold of atrocity justifies intervention in the domestic affairs of other states. Just how bad should human rights violations be before we send in the planes and the troops?

The revisionists' case is that the violations must be overwhelming for intervention to be justified, especially if intervention requires us to bypass the United Nations Security Council and treaty provisions, like the NATO charter, that do not authorize offensive operations. The revisionists concede that urgent necessity might justify throwing aside international legal restraints on the use of force -- but only if the crimes are truly flagrant.

There is a distinction between oppression and mass murder, and the core of the revisionists' case is that Mr. Milosevic has not crossed that line. His opponents in Belgrade, incidentally, make the same argument. They grudgingly concede the oppression: from 1989 onward, Mr. Milosevic eliminated the institutions of Kosovar self-government provided under the 1974 constitution; his police routinely jailed, beat and abused Albanian activists; in the summer of 1998, during his battle against the Kosovo Liberation Army, his forces drove hundreds of thousands of Albanians from their villages.

These actions, both the Western and Belgrade revisionists insist, were not examples of ethnic cleansing, just the temporary displacement of populations during anti-terrorist sweeps by Serbian forces. The revisionists' key claim is that Mr. Milosevic was fighting the K.L.A., a terrorist group that was executing his soldiers and policemen. He responded in kind, but without genocidal massacre. The descent into massacre and ethnic cleansing occurred only after NATO warplanes attacked.

So the revisionist case is not merely that our criteria for intervention failed to distinguish between oppression and mass murder, but that our intervention helped to precipitate the evils our intervention was supposed to stop. This is actually a case not against intervention per se, but against the way we did it. We went in too late, when Kosovo had exploded into uncontrollable civil war, and because we did not deploy ground troops, Mr. Milosevic failed to understand that we were serious about stopping him.

The revisionist case could be turned on its head. They imply that we should have waited until the oppression turned into mass murder. But the point of interventions is surely to stop that deadly downward spiral before it begins.

The true lesson of Kosovo might be that we should have intervened in the summer of 1998 -- when the Serb offensive was beginning. We should have deployed troops on the Albanian and Macedonian borders and conducted an air campaign sufficiently robust to convince Mr. Milosevic that we knew where the line was between oppression and massacre, even if he did not. Had we done so, had we matched means and ends more adequately, we might not be arguing about body counts at all.
 

Knight Ridder/Tribune
November 23, 1999, Tuesday
HEADLINE: Counting bodies in Kosovo
BYLINE: By Ian Williams

NEW YORK _ Holocaust revisionism--denial of the massacre of Jews during the war--is illegal in some countries. But now, just as President Clinton is preparing to visit Kosovo, the downward revision of the numbers murdered in Kosovo is proving very fashionable _ even in The New York Times.

Last month, a Texas-based analytical group called Stratfor (http://www.stratfor.com) issued a report claiming that casualty figures among civilians in Kosovo were deliberately exaggerated to justify NATO's attack on Serbia.

"It really does matter how many were killed in Kosovo," the report said. "The foreign policy and political implications are substantial. There is a line between oppression and mass murder. It is not a bright shining one, but the distinction between hundreds dead and tens of thousands is clear. The blurring of that line has serious implications not merely for NATO's integrity, but for the notion of sovereignty."

The report was widely circulated on the Internet by opponents of the war, who seized upon it for retrospective justification of their position _ and their indifference to Kosovo Albanian casualties.

Stratfor's own summary, published on October 17, stated that "during its four- month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international investigation, bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200."

The reaction from the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) was dismissive. Paul Risley, ICTY spokesman, said the Stratfor report was "like reading a bad term paper, a few loose hanging pieces of evidence and then these dramatic conclusions."

Carla del Ponte, the new ICTY prosecutor, should have put questions concerning the death toll to rest in her speech to the United Nations Security Council on November 10. But instead, The New York Times report the following morning almost reversed the thrust of her figures under the headline: "Early Count Hints at Fewer Kosovo Deaths."

In fact del Ponte told the Security Council that investigators had reports of 11,334 dead from eyewitnesses and had identified 529 grave sites. Of these, they had investigated only 195 of the sites, from which they had exhumed 2,108 bodies _ half the 4,256 their information had led them to expect there.

To some people this came as confirmation that "only" 2,000 were killed and therefore the Serb massacres did not meet some kind of quantitative test for genocide.

In fact, the 2,108 bodies found are a bare minimum. As del Ponte herself said, there was extensive evidence of tampering with grave sites, some of which only revealed parts of cadavers left behind by digging equipment, and others where bodies were burnt, making it impossible to count how many had fed the flames.

Del Ponte was at pains to point out that it is not her investigators' prime task to count how many had been killed. Their task is to identify the victims and search for evidence against those responsible.

The figure of 10,000 casualties was first used at the end of the war when the scale of the mass graves and the refugee reports were assessed. Stratfor and others complained that Bernard Kouchner, later to become the UN chief in Kosovo, used the figure of 11,000, and could not back it up.

In fact, in the light of del Ponte's report, it is clear that Kouchner based the figure on information from ICTY investigators, who in turn based their estimates on reports from eyewitnesses.

Stratfor argues that "evidence of mass murder has not yet materialized on the scale used to justify the war." Does this mean that if Milosevic's men had "only" killed 200 or 2,000 or 10,000 in the process of driving almost the entire indigenous population of Kosovo from their homes, then the international community was under no obligation to act?

One could almost morbidly imagine some Serb commander ordering his men to cease fire, lest they lift their kill quota over some academic genocide threshold.

Numbers matter. Yet while the grim task of counting the corpses continues, it is important not to lose sight of the broader issues at stake, over which their lives were lost in such horrible and sordid circumstances.

ABOUT THE WRITER:

Ian Williams is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation magazine and a frequent contributor to the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a London-based independent media organization.

 

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Here's A Partial Reply

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 27, 2006 00:26 AM

Graeme:

Superb points and questions all.  Nor does this peculiar version of history end with Richard Holbrooke.  Among the members of the Bosnian Genocide Lobby, we find verymuch the same Holbrooke - Office of the Prosecutor - High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina line iterated endlessly.  Thus, for example, to reproduce a few excerpts from Marko Attila Hoare ("Slobodan Milosevic: The Spirit of the Age"---be sure to notice the Orwellian name for the outfit which posted Hoare's commentary):

Milosevic deliberately promoted the break-up of Yugoslavia and the independence of Croatia and Slovenia....
[Milosevic] waged wars against sovereign independent states without a mandate from the United Nations Security Council.....
Milosevic was the leader of a secessionist Serbian rebellion against a Titoist Yugoslavia that had kept Serbia in check.

 

 

Statements such as these depict the recent past in such an upside-down manner that they are incomprehensible.  Except---and here's the really important part---insofar as the person making them is doing so on behalf of a kind of Truth Squad or enforcement regime.  (As in regime, regimen, regiment.  With the emphasis falling upon the regime's enforcement of uniformity and strict discipline.)  

 

 

Now.  Repeat after the Enforcers: Milosevic started four wars. 

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Here's an Interesting Question...

By Kissenger, Clark at Mar 26, 2006 17:31 PM

Was the Bosnia War even "Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II?" Anybody have any accurate figures about how many people were killed in the Turkish repression of the Kurds during the 1990s? Turkey counts as Europe doesn't it?

Interesting how Holbrooke et al keep switching the 300,000 figure from Bosnia to all the Balkan wars. Certainly some people at least must have died in the other three? By "four wars" Holbrooke is referring I assume to the Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts, and not various "Bosnia wars," as Peterson writes above.

I would REALLY love to hear Holbrooke explain how Milosevic started the Slovenia and Croatia wars.

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