Alexander Dorin: “Srebrenica Massacre” is a Western Myth

Alexander Dorin: “Srebrenica Massacre” is a Western Myth
May 23rd, 2009 | By De-Construct.net | In Bosnia, Bytes ’n Bits, Featured Articles
Alexander Dorin book about Srebrenica events
Srebrenica — The History of Salon Racism

“In the West, the popular mythology about 7,000-8,000 Muslim men being executed in Srebrenica in 1995 is still alive and well, but independent research shows some 2,000 Bosnian Muslim fighters were killed in battle for Srebrenica and that is the number of bodies Hague investigators were able to find”, said Swiss researcher Alexander Dorin, who has been investigating Srebrenica events for the past 14 years.

In his latest book titled “Srebrenica — The History of Salon Racism” (Srebrenica — die Geschichte eines salonfahigen Rassismus) published this month in Berlin, Dorin focuses on manipulations with the number of Muslims who lost their lives in Srebrenica.

“Regarding the events in Srebrenica in 1995, the media manipulations still reign in the West, claiming that after the town fell to Serbian hands some 7,000 to 8,000 of Muslim fighters and male civilians were killed. However, the researchers around the world have shown this bears no relation to the truth,” Dorin told Srna News Agency.

According to data he had gathered, Dorin discovered that at least 2,000 Muslim fighters were killed in battle for Srebrenica. He added the facts are showing that neither civilian nor military leadership of Republic of Srpska (Serb Republic in Bosnia-Herzegovina) ever ordered execution of the Muslim fighters and POWs.

“2,000 is approximately the number of bodies Hague investigators were able to find up to this day. To that number the Muslim side added several hundred Muslim fighters, most of whom came from abroad, who were killed in battle few years before the fall of Srebrenica, in Han Pijesak and Konjević Polje,” Dorin said, adding that this is evidenced even by the Muslim documents captured by the Bosnian Serb Army.
Bosnian Serb Army Fought Against Orić’s Cutthroats, Not Against Muslim Civilians

“Prior to the fall of Srebrenica, Naser Orić’s troops withdrew from this small town, leaving 25,000 civilians behind, although a certain number of civilians, some of whom were armed, was withdrawing together with Orić’s fighters,” Dorin said.

He said that Bosnian Serb Army “did not kill a single Muslim civilian of those who remained in Srebrenica or Potocari, while it did engage Orić’s column, which was breaking through to Tuzla in several groups, in fierce fighting.”

“There is no way the Serb Army could have captured seven or eight thousand Muslim fighters and male civilians and execute them somewhere, partly because that was technically impossible,” Dorin said. He explained that, among else, there was never enough Serb soldiers who could carry out a crime on such scale.

In his research, Dorin was using various sources, including statements by the Muslim fighters and commanders, as well as testimonies given by Dutch UNPROFOR troops who were stationed in Srebrenica at the time.

He pointed to a very interesting investigation carried out by the Bulgarian reporter and author Germinal Civikov, who wrote a book about the case of Croat Dražen Erdemović, former member of the Bosnian Serb Army, whose testimony represents the key Hague “evidence” of “Srebrenica massacre”, who claimed that his commander Milorad Pelemiš “ordered him and few other soldiers to execute some 1,000-1,200 Muslim POWs”.

But the analysis of that case, said Dorin, proves Erdemović invented most, if not all of that story.

Dorin explained that director of the Belgrade Center for Investigation of War Crimes Milivoje Ivanišević analyzed the lists of alleged Srebrenica victims. Ivanišević discovered that, a year after the fall of Srebrenica, some 3,000 Muslim men who were supposedly killed in 1995, were voting in the Bosnian Muslim elections.

In addition, at least 1,000 of the alleged 1995 “Srebrenica massacre victims” have been dead long before or after Bosnian Serb Army took the town over.

“It is perfectly clear that Muslim organizations listed as Srebrenica victims all the Muslim fighters who were killed in the fights after the fall of Srebrenica,” the Swiss researcher said.

According to Dorin, some Western reporters wrote back in 1995 that part of Srebrenica Muslim population, after the town’s takeover, migrated to other countries. This includes an American journalist who wrote that around 800 Srebrenica Muslims went abroad — from Serbia.

“It was not possible to conduct an in-depth investigation, since no one can search the entire world to pinpoint each and every name [from the lists of alleged Srebrenica victims]. Still, the available evidence already shows there were immense manipulations at play,” Dorin said.

A number of photos of Muslim fighters taken during their breakthrough to Tuzla, which Dorin obtained from the Muslim sources, show Izetbegović’s fighters in uniforms, with many of them wounded.

“On these photos one can see a number of wounded fighters who survived the battle against the Serb Army. Muslim side is now presenting its fighters who did not recover from their wounds as the victims of an execution”, said Dorin.

He pointed out that some Muslims have admitted at least 2,000 of their Srebrenica-based fighters were killed in the battle.

Dorin also reminded of the statements by the Muslim politicians given to media about an “offer” American president Bill Clinton made to Bosnian Muslim war leader Alija Izetbegović back in April 1993, to have “the Chetnik [Serb] forces enter Srebrenica and massacre 5,000 Muslims, which would result in the [US-led NATO] military intervention” against Bosnian Serbs.

At the same time, Dutch UNPROFOR troops testified that Serb Army treated Muslim civilians in an entirely correct manner, while Srebrenica Muslim warlord Naser Orić with his fighters was massacring Serb civilians in the most monstrous fashion for years in Srebrenica municipality, and pillaging and destroying their property all the while.
… For Those who Want to Know the Truth About Srebrenica

Despite all the evidence about what really took place in Srebrenica and the fact there was no ‘massacre’, Dorin doubts the Hague verdicts in regards to Srebrenica events can be contested or overturned, being that this “so-called tribunal has convicted a number of people for the alleged Srebrenica massacre without any evidence whatsoever”.

He cited a case of the Serb Vidoje Blagojević, convicted to a long prison term even though he had no connection to Srebrenica events, while “the mass murderer Naser Orić was acquitted of all responsibility for killing the Serbs”.

“That court routinely discards everything that proves Serbs are not the monsters they have been made out to be. That tribunal has a purely political function. It has no relation to the justice and truth”, Dorin told Srna.

The Swiss researcher does not expect his book about Srebrenica events will be able to break down the stereotypes. He said the book was written for those who wish to learn the truth about the events Western mainstream media sold as “Srebrenica massacre” and even “genocide”, in order to justify their war against the Serbs.

Dorin added that mostly left-oriented Western newspapers and organizations have shown an interest in his latest book and have offered cooperation.

Alexander Dorin’s book about Srebrenica events is expected to be translated both into Serbian and English language.
Related

* Sarajevo Islamic Regime’s Srebrenica Manipulations
* Srebrenica: Genocide or Major Hoax?
* Srebrenica Serbs
* Jihad in Bosnia
* More Proof of Srebrenica Manipulations
* Srebrenica Christmas Massacre
* Pogrom of Srebrenica Christians
* New Evidence Against Srebrenica Warlord
* Srebrenica: The Real Picture
* No Justice in the West
* Hague has Failed
* Srebrenica Myth
* Srebrenica Serbs
* Serbophobia Obscures the Facts
* Dutch Soldiers to Testify in Karadzic’s Defense
* Dutchbat III
* Indictment Against War Criminal Naser Orić
* Agony of the Serbs in Srebrenica Death Camps
* 91 Dutchbat Witness for Radovan Karadžić
* Srebrenica ID, by Milivoje Ivanišević
* Yugoslav Civil War Yet to Be Properly Examined

Black Propaganda: Of Spooks, Journos and Politicos
Jun 14th, 2009 | By De-Construct.net | In Books, Bytes ’n Bits, MSM Watch
Web of Deceit, by Mark Curtis

Three books, compiling impressive evidence about the unsavory collusion of mainstream media with the elites in power, offer an invaluable insight into the intricacies of black propaganda, war making, manufacturing consent and cover-up of the real motives and agenda behind the all-too-frequent Anglo-American philanthropic pursuits, threatening to devour the globe. Anyone who still views “unexpected outbreak of hostilities” or wars, seemingly out of the blue “crisis” and political emergencies as a series of unconnected, random, unrelated events mysteriously flaring up in various parts of the world in cryptically rhythmic intervals, like tornadoes and earthquakes, should consider these three books a must read, to break free from the paralyzing delusion.
The Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, By Mark Curtis

Curtis’s “deeply disturbing book” drawing on formerly secret UK government files, according to John Pilger “unwraps the whole package, layer by layer, piece by piece”, marshaling a formidable arsenal of documented evidence which demonstrates that “Britain under New Labour is a systematic violator of international law and ethical standards in its foreign policy – in effect, an outlaw state”.

“A web of deceit is obscuring this picture. People in Britain are largely unaware of what has been done in their name, even as government policies undermine our own interests. The public’s understanding of Britain’s real role in the world is being obscured by an ideological system – principally, the mainstream media – that is largely accepting at face value New Labour’s rhetoric on its moral purpose.

“Current British foreign policies are generally not only immoral, but also dangerous, for the British public as well as others. These policies are helping to make the world more insecure, unequal and abusive of human rights. In the post-September 11th world, the threat of terrorism by organisations like Bin Laden’s Al Qaida is certainly real, but it is the policies of our own government, and our principal ally, the US, that are in reality the greatest threat to the public.”

Curtis shows that “never before has the public of a democratic country been subject to such an extraordinary ongoing tirade of propaganda. For the government is, quite generally, promoting actual policies that are directly opposite to this rhetoric.”

“The reality of Britain’s current and past role in the world can be shown by taking an independent look at current policy using a variety of sources beyond the mainstream and by revealing the formerly secret, now declassified government planning files. This book argues that we need to extricate ourselves from the web of reporting and analysis that obscures this reality and from the deceit promoted by the elite – and that behind the diplomatic language and presentation of policy-makers lies a peculiar British viciousness, evident all around the world, past and present. It is not that British elites are evil or that everything they do is immoral and dangerous. There are some exceptions to promoting generally unethical foreign policies – but they are few and pale in comparison with the broader picture.

“[…]The liberal intelligentsia in Britain is in my view guilty of helping to weave a collective web of deceit. Under New Labour, many commentators have openly taken part in Labour’s onslaught on the world, often showering praise on Tony Blair and his ministers for speaking the language of rights, development and global security as they proceed to demolish such noble virtues in their actual policy. To read many mainstream commentators’ writings on Britain’s role in the world is to enter a surreal, Kafkaesque world where the reality is often the direct opposite of what is contended and where the starting assumptions are frighteningly supportive of state power. My view is that the intelligentsia suffers from the same malady of ‘elitism’ as policy-makers, generally choosing to side with them, often being willingly taken in. The British liberal intelligentsia generally displays its servitude to the powers that be rather than to ordinary people, whether here or abroad.

“The view has long been held that Britain ‘has lost an empire and not yet found a role’, in the famous words of US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, several decades ago. Yet Britain’s real role is easily discovered if we are concerned enough to look; the problem is that the results of such a search are quite unpleasant. Britain’s role remains an essentially imperial one: to act as junior partner to US global power; to help organise the global economy to benefit Western corporations; and to maximise Britain’s (that is, British elites’) independent political standing in the world and thus remain a ‘great power’.

“[…]The ideological system gears into particular action during war, providing justification for the government’s resort to force and backing its (always noble) aims. In war, the public is in effect actively mobilised by the various components of the elite in support of state policy. Television news functions even more extremely ideologically at these times, in practice usually abandoning any pretence of objectivity and acting simply as the mouthpiece of the state, though trying to preserve a facade of independence. Only rarely is real dissent possible in such crises in mainstream newspapers and never on television.

“Consider how the media supported the Blair government during 1999 in mobilising the nation to bomb Yugoslavia supposedly in defence of the highest humanitarian values. This was no easy task since it soon became clear to any independent onlooker that it was the NATO bombing that precipitated, rather than prevented, the humanitarian catastrophe. At the same time, as noted in chapter 7, our allies in Indonesia were engaged in atrocities in East Timor similar to those of Milosevic; while a few months later the same values were still relevant as Putin’s Russia was committing crimes in Chechnya greater in scale than those of Milosevic in Kosovo. But in these cases the values that provided the pretext for bombing Yugoslavia needed to be buried. After a few obvious parallels were drawn between the situations in the media, the previous humanitarian pretexts used for Kosovo were indeed safely forgotten in these other conflicts.

“Criticism in the mainstream of British wars tends to be restricted to the tactics used to achieve the assumed noble aims, and whether the government has chosen the right strategy to discharge its high nobility or whether it will make “mistakes”.

“The debate in the mainstream on bombing Yugoslavia over Kosovo, did involve argument over whether it was a “just war” or not; but both sides of this debate generally accepted that the government was seeking to achieve its stated humanitarian aims. That the government may have been acting out of other motives entirely was almost never questioned, despite the evidence.”
Degraded Capability, by Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman
Degraded Capability, by Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman

Degraded Capability digs deeper into the media “highly partisan and propagandistic role in NATO’s Kosovo war”, providing priceless analysis of the “hysteria and misinformation that permeated media coverage” and offering an insight into the mechanisms and techniques used by MSM to demonize the enemy of the day and misrepresent the reality by omitting or purposely misinterpreting events in order to justify the official policy.

Providing further proof of Mark Curtis’s assertion that the Western mainstream media becomes no more than the “mouthpiece of the state” during war, Mick Hume explains (under the subtitle “Nazifying the Serbs, from Bosnia to Kosovo”) that “the most effective way to demonise anybody today is to link them somehow to the Nazi experience.”

“The accusation that President Milosevic’s Serbia was carrying out ‘another Holocaust’ in Kosovo was the culmination of a long campaign to Nazify the Serbs, which had escalated throughout the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. A significant part of the responsibility for this Nazification campaign has to lie with those sections of the media that have been guilty of displaying an anti-Serb bias, described by Nik Gowing as the ’secret shame’ of the journalism community during the Bosnian civil war.

“The clearest way in which the Serbs have been linked with the Nazis has been through accusations that they have committed genocide, first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. From the start of the war against the Serbs, British government ministers appearing at the daily press briefings seemed hardly able to open their mouths without mentioning the ‘G’ word. During one brief morning session in March, Defence Secretary George Robertson told reporters that Nato was facing ‘a regime which is intent on genocide’; that the sole purpose of the air strikes was ‘to stop the genocidal violence’ and the ‘ethnic extermination’; that the air war would continue until ‘the genocidal attacking stops’; that Nato was united in its determination ‘to stop this ethnic cleansing extermination policy’; and that Serbian commanders should look to their consciences and refuse to obey ‘these genocidal orders’.

“Foreign Secretary Robin Cook seemed equally determined to link present-day Serbs with the Nazis of the past. As recently as February 1999, in response to an allegation from the German Culture Minister that modern Britain remained obsessed with the Second World War as its ’spiritual core’, Cook had promised not to mention the war. ‘I have never at any point in any of my speeches referred back to the last war and I can give and undertaking that we won’t,’ said the Foreign Secretary (Telegraph, 16 February). By April, however, in the midst of the war over Kosovo, it sometimes appeared that he could allude to nothing else. Nato unity, Cook told the Ministry of Defence press briefing, was based on:

our common belief that the revival of fascism which we have witnessed in Kosovo must have no place in the modern Europe. Nato was born in the aftermath of the defeat of fascism and genocide in Europe. Nato will not allow this century to end with a triumph for fascism and genocide.

“[…]Where Nato politicians tended to imply that there were parallels between the Serbs and the Nazis, the newspapers insisted upon it and added the dreaded ‘H’ word. On 29 March the Daily Mail’s front page reported, beneath a picture of Kosovo Albanian children in a lorry, headlined ‘Flight from Genocide’: ‘Their terrified and bewildered faces evoke memories of the Holocaust.’ On 1 April, the Daily Mirror ran a front-page picture of refugees with a mother and child picked out in black and white, Schindler’s List style. Under the headline ‘1939 or 1999?’ it reported that ‘Nazi style terror came to Kosovo yesterday in a horrific echo of the wartime Holocaust.’ That same day, the Sun bluntly headlined its Kosovo spread ‘Nazis 1999 — Serb cruelty has chilling echoes of the Holocaust.’ By now, the pattern was well-established.

“The continual, deliberate talk of genocide in the coverage of Kosovo was much more significant than the usual wartime rhetoric. In terms of international law, the allegation of genocide has important implications. As the New York Times (4 April) reported:

Policy-makers in the United States and Europe are invoking the word to help provide a legal justification for their military campaign against Serbia. It is one based in part on concepts of humanitarian law, where no word is more evocative.

“In particular, the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948 could allow for international intervention to prevent it,” Hume explained.

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson analyzed the most widely reaching NATO propaganda through one of the main Anglo-American agitprop agencies, CNN.

“When US Special Envoy for Yugoslavia Richard Holbrooke lauded the mainstream US media for providing ‘extraordinary and exemplary’ coverage of the Kosovo war on 22 April 1999, he named CNN among the exemplars. And with good reason. CNN’s anchors and reporters almost without exception took the justice of the Nato war as obvious and were completely unaware of or unconcerned with their violation of the first principle of objectivity — that you can’t take sides and serve as a virtual promoter of ‘your’ side. The result was that in word usage, assumptions, and choice and treatment of issues and sources, CNN and its reporters on the Kosovo war followed Nato’s lead and served as a de facto public-information partner. These journalists never questioned Nato’s motives, explored any hidden agendas, challenged Nato’s claims of fact, or followed investigatory leads that did not conform to Nato propaganda requirements.

“If Nato said that the bombings were motivated by ‘humanitarianism’, that was enough for CNN reporters, and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asserted that Nato’s war was for ‘the first time … a war fought for human rights’ (6 October 1999). That ‘only a fraction of 1 percent of the [Nato] bombs went astray’ was gospel for Amanpour simply because that is what Nato says (6 October). If Nato claimed that the Serb brutalities and expulsions that followed the bombing would have happened anyway, Amanpour took this as unquestioned truth (’this has been an offensive that has, you know, been planned for a long time’, 3 April). That the Serbs were committing ‘genocide’ (Tom Mintier, 18 March; Miles O’Brien, 26 June), whereas Nato’s military operations were regretfully doing only what was necessary and proper, was a premise of CNN anchors and reporters. And that Nato patiently sought a negotiated peace while Milosevic was the ‘wild card’ who ‘may be testing Western resolve’ and with whom the West was ‘fed up’ (Brent Sadler, 27 January; Andrea Koppel and Joie Chen, 29 January), was standard CNN usage.

“[…]CNN’s journalists not only followed Nato’s agenda and failed to ask critical questions, they also served as salespersons and promoters of the Nato war. Time and again they pressed Nato officials toward violent responses to Serb brutalities and unwillingness to negotiate, with Nato allegations on these latter points taken at face value. CNN’s Judy Woodruff repeatedly asked Nato officials about the threat to Nato’s credibility in the absence of forceful action (18 January 1999); Wolf Blitzer pressed unrelentingly for an introduction of Nato ground troops, raising the matter a dozen times in a single programme (4 April). Amanpour complained bitterly that General Wesley Clark ‘had to lobby hard to get his political masters to escalate the bombing’ and that there were ‘19 different leaders who insisted on vetting the bombing’ (6 October), her last point a patent falsehood. When Nato bombing was constrained by bad weather, a CNN anchor expressed clear disappointment; and when delays were announced in the delivery of US Apache helicopters, CNN’s correspondents were dismayed. In short, CNN’s personnel were rooting for the home team.”

In a step-by-step guide through an appallingly biased CNN coverage of the conflict in Kosovo province, Herman and Petersen use the alleged Racak massacre as one of the samples of the “exemplary reporting” Holbrooke and NATO officials found worthy of a praise.

“CNN reported the story intensively but uncritically. It never mentioned that the Serb action was carried out with TV and OSCE observers invited and present, who along with a French journalist were in and around the villages for many hours, but said nothing about a massacre before the presentation of the corpses in a gully the following day. The account of the incident by the two Associated Press TV reporters who filmed the operation, cited in both Le Monde and Le Figaro, contradicted the conclusions of William Walker and the KLA, but was never picked up by CNN. CNN’s one reporter who had the chance to see the bodies reported that they had been deliberately mutilated (Bill Neely, ITN correspondent, 16 January). But forensic tests by a Finnish investigating team as well as by Serb and Belorussian experts denied this and explained the damage as a result of animal bites (probably from packs of hungry stray dogs, numerous in Kosovo), contradictory evidenc that went unreported by CNN (Johnstone, 1999:66). The Finnish experts were very cagey about releasing their report, and stories abound regarding the political pressure that was put on these experts right up to the date on which they announced their findings. ‘The Americans in particular … were hoping that [the Finnish experts] would accuse the Yugoslav authorities of a massacre to back up an initial judgment by the American head of the Western monitoring mission in Kosovo, William Walker’, London’s Daily Telegraph noted. But this never happened. Belgrade forensic expert Branimir Aleksandric claimed that the Serb, Belorussian and Finnish studies all found that each of the dead bodies recovered from the villages had been killed by firearms used at a distance, adding that 37 of them had gunpowder residues on their hands, indicating that they were KLA fighters rather than civilians as claimed. CNN, which initially followed William Walker and the KLA in asserting that all the victims ‘appeared to have been shot at close ranges’ (Juliette Terzieff, 16 January), never reported the conflicting findings by the forensic experts.

“From beginning to end in reporting this story, CNN allowed itself to be led by the nose by the Walker-Nato hook. CNN never mentioned Walker’s background as long-time Reagan administration official in Central America and apologist for government crimes in that area; its reporters never questioned the appropriateness of his appointment as head of the OSCE’s observer mission, a fact that was resented by other OSCE officials and personnel; nor did they question the possibility that Walker was pursuing a war-preparation agenda. Prominent European newspapers — among them Le Figaro, Le Monde, Frankfurter Rundschau and the Berliner Zeitung — raised questions about Walker’s qualifications and agenda, about the possibility that the Racak ‘massacre’ was set up to be exploited by the war-making clique within Nato, and the peculiar facts of the massacre scene itself, but CNN ignored them, choosing instead to play the game precisely according to the rules of William Walker and Nato.”
Shadowplay by Tim Marshall
Shadowplay, by Tim Marshall

However, it turns out there is often more than willful disregard for the basic precepts of objective journalism, or a misplaced sense of ‘loyalty’ governing the behavior of the mainstream media reporters and journalists.

According to an obscure book (first published in Serbian under the title Igra senki, and unlisted on Amazon.com or in any of the major Western bookstores) by the Sky TV reporter, it is not a rare occurrence that “spooks, journos and politicos” are merged into one.

In his article, entitled The Technique of a Coup d’État, John Laughland reveals how Marshall’s book he stumbled upon while in Belgrade inadvertently provided “unexpected confirmation of the extent of secret service involvement” in the toppling of former President Milosevic’s government in Serbia — a supposedly democratic, supposedly revolution that, supposedly, was spontaneous, carried out by the “students, intellectuals and opposition” who, supposedly, self-organized in a “popular movement” against a supposedly oppressive regime, which just happened to coincide with the Anglo-American long-held dream of removing Serbia’s socialist leader from power, as the last obstacle to the wholesale of Eastern Europe under the banner of progress and “open society”.

“[…]The value of his account is all the greater because Marshall, like all other TV reporters, supports the New World Order view that Slobodan Miloševic was evil and that Nato was right to attack Yugoslavia in 1999.

“At every turn, Marshall seems to know who the main intelligence players are. His account is thick with references to ‘an MI6 officer in Priština’, ’sources in Yugoslav military intelligence’, ‘a CIA man who was helping to put together the coup’, an ‘officer in US naval intelligence’, and so on. He quotes secret surveillance reports from the Serbian secret police; he knows who the Ministry of Defence desk officer is in London who draws up the strategy for getting rid of Miloševic; he knows that the Foreign Secretary’s telephone conversations are being listened to; he knows who are the Russian intelligence officers who accompany Yevgeni Primakov, the Russian prime minister, to Belgrade during the Nato bombing; he knows which rooms are bugged in the British embassy, and where the Yugoslav spies are who listen in to the diplomats’ conversations; he knows that a staffer on the US House of Representatives International Relations Committee is, in fact, an officer in US naval intelligence; he seems to know that secret service decisions are often taken with the very minimal ministerial approval; he describes how the CIA physically escorted the KLA delegation from Kosovo to Paris for the pre-war talks at Rambouillet, where Nato issued Yugoslavia with an ultimatum it knew it could only reject; and he refers to ‘a British journalist’ acting as a go-between between London and Belgrade for hugely important high-level secret negotiations, as people sought to betray one another as Miloševic’s power collapsed.

“Perhaps the unidentified journalist is himself. For one of the themes which inadvertently runs through his book is that there is a thin dividing line between journalists and spooks. We have observed this phenomenon in Georgia, as Western newspapers do the work of the secret services by gushing with undiluted propaganda about the ‘hopes’ the Georgian people have in their ‘young’ new American-installed president.[2] Early in the book, Marshall refers casually to ‘the inevitable connections between officers, journalists and politicians’, saying that people in all three categories ‘work in the same area’, and he then goes on jokingly to say that ‘a combination of ’spooks’, ‘journo’s’ and ‘politicos’, added to ‘the people” were what had caused the overthrow of Slobodan Miloševic. If Marshall pretends to cling to the myth that ‘the people’ had any role at all, it is also he who shows beyond doubt that the Kosovo war and the subsequent overthrow of the Yugoslav president occurred only because of political strategies secretly conceived in London and Washington to get rid of him.

“Above all, Marshall makes it clear that, in 1998, the US State Department and intelligence agencies decided to use the Kosovo Liberation Army to get rid of Slobodan Miloševic. He quotes one source saying, ‘The US agenda was clear. When the time was right they were going to use the KLA to provide the solution to the political problem’ – the ‘problem’ being, as Marshall explains earlier, Miloševic’s continued political survival, as diagnosed by the spooks in Washington and London. This meant supporting the KLA’s terrorist secessionism, and later fighting a war against Yugoslavia on its side. Marshall quotes Mark Kirk, a US naval intelligence officer, saying that, ‘Eventually we opened up a huge operation against Miloševic, both secret and open.’ The secret part of the operation involved not only things like staffing the various observer missions which were sent into Kosovo with officers from the British and American intelligence services, but also – crucially – giving military, technical, financial, logistical and political support to the KLA, which, as Marshall himself admits, ’smuggled drugs, ran prostitution rackets and murdered civilians’.

“The strategy began in late 1998 when ‘a huge CIA mission (got) underway in Kosovo’. President Miloševic had allowed something called the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission to enter Kosovo to monitor the situation in the province. This ad hoc group was immediately stuffed with British and American intelligence agents and special forces – men from the CIA, US naval intelligence, the British SAS and something called ‘14th intelligence’, a body within the British army which operates side by side with the SAS ‘to provide what is known as ‘deep surveillance’. The immediate purpose of this operation was ‘Intelligence Preparation of Battlefield’ – a modern version of what the Duke of Wellington used to do, riding up and down the battlefield to get the lie of the land before engaging the enemy. So as Marshall puts it, ‘Officially, the KDOM was run by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Unofficially, the CIA ran (it). The organisation was just packed with them. It was a CIA front.’ Many of the officers in fact worked for another CIA front, DynCorp, the Virginia-based company which employs mainly ‘members of US military elite units, or the CIA’, as Marshall says. They used the KDOM, which later became the Kosovo Verification Mission, for espionage. Instead of doing the monitoring tasks assigned to them, officers would go off and use their global positioning devices to locate and identify targets which would be later bombed by Nato. Quite how the Yugoslavs could allow 2,000 highly trained secret service agents to roam around their territory is difficult to understand, especially since, as Marshall shows, they knew perfectly well what was going on.

“The head of the Kosovo Verification Mission was William Walker, a former ambassador to El Salvador, whose US-supported government ran death squads. Walker was also accused during the Iran-Contra hearings of running arms to the Contras in Nicaragua in the mid 1980s. It was Walker who discovered the ‘massacre’ at Racak in January 1999, the event which was used as a pretext for starting the process which led to the bombing which began on 24th March. There is much evidence to suggest that Racak was staged, and that the bodies found were, in fact, those of KLA fighters, not civilians as was alleged. What is certain is that Walker’s role was so key that the country road in Kosovo which leads to Racak has now been renamed after him. Marshall writes that the date for the war – spring 1999 – was not only set in late December 1998, but that the date was also communicated to the KLA at the time, which is further circumstantial evidence to suggest that Racak was staged. At any rate, when the KVM was withdrawn on the eve of the Nato bombing, Marshall says that the CIA officers in it gave all their satellite phones and GPS equipment to the KLA. ‘The KLA were being trained by the Americans, partially equipped by them, and virtually given territory,’ Marshall writes – even though he, like all other reporters, helped propagate the myth of systematic Serb atrocities committed against a totally passive Albanian civilian population.

“The war went ahead, of course, and Yugoslavia was ferociously bombed. But Miloševic stayed in power. So London and Washington started what Marshall calls ‘political warfare’ to remove him. This involved giving very large sums of money, as well as technical, logistical and strategic support, and including arms, to various ‘democratic opposition’ groups and ‘non-governmental organisations’ in Serbia. The Americans were by then operating principally through the International Republican Institute, yet another CIA front, which had opened offices in neighbouring Hungary for the purpose of getting rid of Slobodan Miloševic. ‘It was agreed’ at one of their meetings, Marshall explains, ‘that the ideological arguments of pro democracy, civil rights and a humanitarian approach would be far more forceful if accompanied, if necessary, by large bags full of money.’ These, and much else besides, were duly shipped into Serbia through the diplomatic bags – in many cases of apparently neutral countries like Sweden who, by not participating formally in the NATO war, were able to maintain full embassies in Belgrade. As Marshall helpfully adds, ‘Bags of money had been brought in for years.’ Indeed they had. As he earlier explains, ‘independent’ media outlets like the Radio Station B92 (who is Marshall’s own publisher) were, in fact, very largely funded by the USA. Organisations controlled by George Soros also played a crucial role, as they were later to do, in 2003-4, in Georgia. The so-called ‘democrats’ were, in reality, nothing but foreign agents – just as the Yugoslav government stolidly maintained at the time.

“Marshall explains that it was also the Americans who conceived the strategy of pushing forward one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, to unite the opposition. Koštunica had the main advantage of being largely unknown by the general public. Marshall then describes how the strategy also involved a carefully planned coup d’état, which duly took place after the first round of the presidential elections. He shows in minute detail how the principal actors in what was presented on Western TV screens as a spontaneous uprising of ‘the people’ were, in fact, a bunch of extremely violent and very heavily armed thugs under the command of the Mayor of the town of Cacak, Velimir Ilic. It was Ilic’s 22 kilometre-long convoy carrying ‘weapons, paratroopers and a team of kickboxers’ to the federal parliament building in Belgrade. As Marshall admits, the events of 5th October 2000 ‘looked more like a coup d’état’ than the people’s revolution of which the world’s media so naively gushed at the time […]“
Related

* NYT Propaganda Again and Again
* The Dark Arts 2: New York Times
* Big Lie Propaganda Campaign to Vilify the Serbs and Destroy Yugoslavia
* Deceiving the World with Pictures
* NY Times Comrade Simons‘ Tough Year
* MSM’s Deserved Collapse
* Louis Dalmas: Fake Morality of the West
* Pacifists with Bloody Hands