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Here’s a novelty. An honest book on the Yugoslav war has managed to get into print. An Irish Army officer Brendan O’Shea has published “The modern Yugoslav conflict 1991-1995; perception, deception and dishonesty”. He shreds the propaganda put out by the US and its allies, that their war was a noble intervention for humanitarian ideals. On this Walter J. Rockler, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial quoted Ibsen: “Don’t use that foreign word ‘ideals.’ We have that excellent native word ‘lies.’ ”
O’Shea’s is not the only book to focus on propaganda and deception, but one of the few that deal with “Western” war propaganda in Yugoslavia. Another book. contrariwise, omits the war in Yugoslavia, though its author was all over the place during the war. This is “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” (2006), by NY Times man Stephen Kinzer. His book is currently (January 2009) being promoted, courtesy of the Pritzker Military Library in a series broadcast on TV station WYCC in Chicago. Kinzer’s work would be quite a decent primer if re-issued with two caveats:
a) Everything in Kinzer’s book is known to everyone literate in the history of US diplomacy,
b) Kinzer does not once mention the biggest US Overthrow previous to the Shock & Awe and Mission Accomplished in Iraq.
The Irish soldier O’Shea concentrates precisely on what the newsperson Kinzer omits. O’Shea experienced the war in Yugoslavia in 1991-1995 and concluded that the whole mess was a Big Lie. – The Irish well know Perfidious Albion. See O’Shea’s works on the Irish War of Independence.
If ever there was a CNN war, this was it. I was a Fulbright linguistics lecturer in Yugoslavia from February to July 1990, which put me in a position to follow developments before the press declared war in 1991. Really, the war had begun when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. In 1990 the propaganda mills were revving up on Yugoslavia. I was observing things and reading the local papers, Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian.
Bosnia and Herzegovina. Early that summer I went on my own nickel to Sarajevo. I took a room in a Muslim house in the old Turkish center. Since I knew the language I illegally avoided paying the price for foreigners. I did observe and overhear a young girl being tutored in Arabic in the mosque of Bas Carsija (the old Turkish center), but there was otherwise little sign of what was to come. Nowadays Sarajevo is “Little Teheran”, streets flowing with burqas and hijabs, de rigueur for chaste women. Schools now ban Christmas observances and require Koranic instruction, but in 1990 “modest” Muslim female dress was a rarity, even in Muslim parts of town. I noticed just one head scarf. Incongruously, the young lady wearing it was a flirt. From Sarajevo I took the train to Herzegovina. It was a short hop to Mostar, where the beautiful old Turkish bridge still stood. Croatian artillery pulverized it. Here too my hosts were Muslim. I got a haircut there. My jovial barber, avoiding mention of her own religion, told me her husband was Catholic. In 1990 there were 30 000 Serbs living in Mostar, but not now. They fled for their lives in “ethnic cleansing” of 1992. Barely noticed in the free press.
On Dubrovnik. This legendary city has been part of Croatia for less than seventy years. O’Shea’s treatment is excellent. What I personally know is that in summer 1990 Dubrovnik was empty of tourists. That should itself have been newsworthy, as the place was a prime tourist destination, but the newshawks were flapping their wings elsewhere.
Yugoslav newspapers in 1990 were reporting that Dubrovnik was swarming with Croatian irregular soldiers. No reports of that in the “free press”. And they were reporting that Croatian irregulars were setting up road blocks on roads south to Montenegro, harassing business people whose “lichna karta” (personal ID card) revealed probable Serb ethnicity. The papers also reported that in Croatian towns along the coast very scared Serb travelers heard the blood-curdling old World War II songs howling for –Serbian and Jewish blood. On example “mi ne pijemo vina, samo krvi Srbina iz Knina –We don’t drink wine, just the blood of the Serb from Knin’. – In 1995, after Muslims and their patrons staged the market Sarajevo market place bombing in August for a casus belli, US air forces bombed Knin’s military and civilians – TV, hospitals, school. All Krajina was “cleansed” of a quarter of a million Serb subsistence farmers who had inhabited the region since settled there by imperial Austria before 1700.
In Zagreb July 1990 I read press reports about arson and demolition of non-Croatian houses on the Adriatic coast, not only Serbian, but also homes belonging to Croatian communists and even to the “westward-leaning” Catholic Slovenes. Serbs were always the biggest contingent of vacationers on the Adriatic coast, since there twice as many Serbs as Croats in Yugoslavia anyway, and all Yugoslavs then owned the coast. No more. Slovenia now has a coast line just a few kilometers long, and Slovene fisherman have been arrested and jailed by the Croatian coast guard for violating sovereign Croatia’s waters.
Back in Chicago in summer 1990 a Croatian student of mine told me that her parents had just warned her that war was coming and she must stay in Chicago. She said her mother told me what was unreported in “the West”, that Croats were attacking cars with Serbian license numbers, sometimes pushing them into the sea. Riding in one such car, as he himself told me a couple years ago, was the Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett. Yet another Croatian student told me her family fled to safe haven in Chicago: “they (Croatian fascists) blew up our house.” They weren’t Croatian enough.
In September 1991 Croatian propaganda, in unison with the world press, was beating the war drums. German, Dutch and Austrian papers were the most strident, claiming that the “Pearl of the Adriatic” was being reduced to rubble by the “Serb-dominated” Yugoslav navy. The commander of this Serb-dominated force was Admiral Stane Brovet, a Slovene. In Dubrovnik the first to die, a native (refugee) later told me, were a Serb couple incinerated in their car.
The German press had published a photo of a Catholic nun standing by the damaged porch railing and a festoon of St Blaise’s cathedral in September 1991. On March 25th, I filmed a spot on the pavement in front of St Blaise’s marked with blue spray paint. This was an instruction where street crews were to patch up a pothole where a mortar round had landed. Whose mortar I do not know. JNA units were on the sea; the mortar is an infantry weapon, not navy. Other JNA units were on some heights over the city. Croatian units were directly overhead at the old Napoleonic fort of St Sergius..
In November 1991 a dramatic photo attributed to Peter Northall (I haven’t located him) is a real prize winner. A huge black pillar of smoke towers over the customs house on the old harbor (outside the walls, of course). When I later showed a Chicago fireman a copy of the famous picture and asked him what kind of fire it was, his verdict was immediate; “a petroleum fire, oil; maybe tires, too”. I photographed the quay there on my 1992 walk-about, no traces of fire to be seen. So I tentatively consider that the blaze was aboard a boat or barge that was then towed to sea and sunk.
To flatten the OldCity it would have taken the JNA (Yugoslav Peoples Army) two hours. If the “port of Dubrovnik” was being shelled, I – as a translator – was immediately aware of the ambiguity that a monoglot might not notice: I had to ask myself, “the whole city (which is a port) or the port area of the city?”. Only one way to find out. Go there. So I did, just three months after the alleged destruction. O’Shea mentions that I did a little walk-about there, on 25 March 1992, with a professional cameraman to film the OldCity and environs. I immediately offered my tape to Chicago Tribune editor Richard Longworth; he sniffed, before he hung up, “That contradicts our information”.
I filmed decorations from Christmas and Epiphany (January 6, 1991) that were still up in March 1992. Presumably not much house-keeping had been done to change appearances since December. Had a ruined city been restored in just three months?
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Fluff travelogues and Voice of America chat about new red or pink roof tiles. They can’t agree which. Travelers may tell you they saw roof tiles missing, but they took their pictures years later, when renovations were starting up. In 1992 the roof tiles were old and weathered, as my films attest. New Zealand’s star journalist Martin Fletcher. launched the “Buy A Tile” scam that was run by Ruder Finn PR firm. This was shut down and a Washington source has leaked confidential information that that an FBI investigation of Ruder Finn was ordered closed by the Clinton Administration.
The day before I walked through Dubrovnik, a fake air raid alarm sounded and Dubrovnik citizens ran for cover in their cellars to wait out a bombing that never came. The scare was a smoke screen, figuratively speaking: Yugoslav military intelligence, one of their number told me, observed a German freighter docked at the industrial port at Gruz, off-loading a consignment of tanks from stores of the defunct East German Army. This can only mean there was a fix in and that the army was being held back from crushing the Croat rebels against the sovereign state of Yugoslavia.
Outside Dubrovnik’s OldCity at the so-called Little Belgrade – Beogradsko Naselje, literally “Belgrade Settlement” There I saw 19 substantial vacation houses of masonry construction, all blown up by explosive charges in a regular pattern. In the countryside I photographed a tiny stone-built Serb Orthodox chapel at a little known locality called “Bosanka” (Bosnian Woman). The interior was burnt out and the icon screen hacked to pieces. A little window in the apse had been plugged with stones. To prevent someone escaping? I wondered. An empty steel barrel that had contained acid lay tipped over next to a heap of burnt organic remains. Human? There was a powerful stench.
In the OldCity there was sparse damage, for example, a burnt out bar with interior walls pocked from machinegun bullets. This damage had been inflicted by rival armed Croatian gangs on the ground who were everywhere in the citySince I am a veteran of US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) trained in Serbo-Croatian, I read the language. On building front walls along Dubrovnik’s main street (Stradun, Venetian dialect ‘big street’) I photographed graffiti reading “Srbe na vrbe, zhidove na zidove”. Meaning? – “Lynch the Serbs, Jews to the Walls (that is to the firing squad).
Minimal damage to the OldCity was also reported by Serbophobe journalist Maggie O’Kane (Guardian, BBC, Irish Times), by Stephen Kinzer (NY Times August 1992), by EU (then EEC) observers and many others.
In and around Dubrovnik I talked with various Yugoslavs, Croat and Serb, and more. A young Dubrovniker told me at lunch (risotto) how he and his neighbors – Muslim, Croat, Serb – had put out a fire set one night by Croatian fascists in the car of a neighbor. The next night they came back and finished the job. “Why’d they do it?–“ I asked him. The young man’s answer: “Because he’s Serb. And I’m a Muslim.”
Dubrovnik is very Italian, not only in culinary, but also in architectural matters. A palazzo belonging to the Croat artist Ivo Grbic was the only destroyed building in Dubrovnik’s OldCity. First reports erroneously said it was the Serbian church library. I was by this name that my photographer took me there. The Grbic house stands several storeys high; it was gutted. Adjacent buildings were unscathed. A business shingle advertising Mr Grbic’s studio was prominent, written ICONS in English and IKONE in Serbian Cyrillic capitals. He had had a clientele of Yugoslavs interested in owning an Orthodox icon. The artist was subsequently summoned to the Hague to testify at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia). That was in December 1993. At that time my videotape of Mr Grbic’s house, made in March 1992, was screened in the court during the trial of President Milosevic. The justices and prosecutors were perplexed: “Who is this person?” Ivo Grbic’s health, alas, did not permit the rigors of travel to the Hague. Mine did. In February 2006 I was summoned to the Hague to testify in the trial of President Slobodan Milosevic regarding what I had seen in Dubrovnik in 1992.
The Dutch authorities had less compunction about the health of the kidnapped president of a sovereign country than with artist Grbic. Not many days after President Milosevic and I conferred, his health ran out. He was found dead in his cell. Like Grbic, I didn’t get to testify in the Hague.
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