Monday, June 23, 2008
Michael Totten and Sean LaFreniere - On the Road to Kosovo
Dubrovnik is a spectacular walled city on the Croatian coast near the border with Montenegro. We booked a hotel room in Montenegro and needed to leave for Kosovo first thing the next morning, so there would be no time to go back to Dubrovnik if we missed it during daylight.There was no time to stop for proper food in a restaurant, so we pulled into a gas station to stock up on road food. I hoped oranges, bananas, or anything that had some nutritional value would be available, but gas stations all over the world sell little other than junk food, it seems. They had peanuts and pistachios, but the rest of our stock was a pile of cookies, potato chips, chocolates, and croissants. And the croissants were really just Twinkies from Turkey in the shape of croissants.
Sean and I wanted to speed through Bosnia and get to Croatia as quickly as possible, but the Opel we rented in Belgrade drove like it was built with a moped engine. Step on the gas and nothing much happens unless you're at a dead stop on a flat road. Passing slow trucks was impossible if there was a bend in the road anywhere in the same time zone.
The destruction wrought from ethnic-cleansing, including mass graveyards as well as blown-up houses and villages scourged by artillery fire, stretched from one end of Bosnia to the other. It was horrible...
When I read Michael Totten and Sean LaFreniere "On the Road to Kosovo", I went ballistic. What a bunch of Serb haters. They think they know something about the Balkans but they know little and what they know is upsides down. I left the following comment:
You guys really got duped. The Croatians and Muslims in the Balkans are very good at agitprop, and they very easily hoodwink naive Westerners that don't know the complex history of the region and can't read or speak the language. Many of the bullet pocked buildings that they told you about were Serbian. When the Croatians ethnic cleansed the Serbians out of the Krajina (the largest ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia in the 1990's covertly supported by Germany with US operational support that broke the international arms embargo to Yugoslavia) 250 thousand Serbs were driven out or killed. In Bosnia the Serbs were struggling to hold onto their farmland and villages against the Croat Muslim alliance of mass murders. The reason that you didn't see any damage in Dubrovnik is because it didn't happen, it was a PR stunt to hoodwink stupid Western journalists, and it worked. The Muslims bombed their own people on three difference occasions to convince Western journalists that those evil Serbs had bombed the innocent. The Western media ran with it. There is an official UN report on these bombings that concluded that Muslims bombed their own people. Gutman received a Pulitzer Prize for his report on a Serbian rape camp in Bosnia where he said ten thousand Muslim women were being repeatedly raped. When other reporters went to the town they found out that four women had been raped. The Muslims turned that into ten thousand women and a rape camp, and the ruse worked. The Gutman report stuck, and the media ignored the other reporters that went there and filed reports that the camp didn’t exist. There are many more examples of this. By the way, I’m not Serbian, I’m Armenian from a family that barely survived the Armenian Genocide in Turkey in 1915. There was no Serb genocide in Bosnia or Kosovo. In fact, its quite the opposite, the Kosovo Muslims cleansed (drove out or murdered) Serbs, Jews, and Roma, and the Bosnia Muslims in alliance with the Croatians tried to cleans the Serbs. The West needed a simple enemy for the sound bite addicted public, and pinned it on the Serbs. The Muslims used a public relations firm, Ruder-Finn, to convince people in the West that the Serbs were mass murdering Muslims. In an interview on French TV Ruder-Finn laughed at how they were able to convince the public when they actually had no evidence. It was all disinformation. Germany was behind a lot that happened in Yugoslavia. It assisted in the return of Croatian fascists (you don’t know, the kind of people that ran the death camp in Croatia during WW2 that killed 500 thousand Serbs and thousands of Jews). It provided arms, training, and operational support to create the KLA, a band of despicable murdering thugs. Everything I am telling you here is documented.
My comment on the Michael Totten website has been deleted. Apparently its only for unthinking Serb haters.
When I read Michael Totten and Sean LaFreniere "On the Road to Kosovo", I went ballistic. What a bunch of Serb haters. They think they know something about the Balkans but they know little and what they know is upsides down.
I read the same post, and I didn't get the impression that they were 'Serb haters'.
The post was a travel essay, a description of a road trip through the Balkans that took place in the Spring of 2008.
It's not a history lesson, and it's not a comparison of the various plusses and minuses of various ethnic/nationalist/religious groups.
It's not a description of who did what in the 1990's, in 1915 or the Middle Ages. It's just a description of the people they met and the places they saw. The bombings in the area were the result of ethnic hatreds. The question of 'who' launched each bomb may be debatable, but the fact that ethnic cleansing played a part is not debatable.