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Tue, 27 Dec 2005 08:08:21 -0800
AN APPEAL TO REASON
R.K.Kent
G.M. Books of Los Angeles has just published and released Peter Brocks powerful
and devastating book which takes a very close and intimate look at the trees
and the forest. Its title is Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting Journalism and
Tragedy in Yugoslavia. While the major media in the U.S. and Western Europe
continue to repeat endlessly that the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and BOYS by
the Serbs at Srebrenica constitutes the only case of genocide in Europe
since WWII, Brock shows that the claim is built like a house of cards. Poke
SERIOUSLY at any angle and the claim collapses. The numbers are, to say the
least, highly suspect. Actual findings, even years after l995, do not
support them.
All kinds of researchers, in teams and individually, have arrived at a host of
major doubts about this constantly repeated claim even before Brocks new
book. The context of the event alone, based on factual and verified information,
exposes the claim as a methodical, structured and manipulative adjunct to an end
or ends that have transcended an initial propaganda phase.
It managed to hide (a) that there was a civil war ongoing in Eastern Bosnia,
involving the entire district of Srebrenica;
(b)that a SYSTEMATIC extermination and ethnic cleansing of near-by Serb
villagers.---men, women and children-- had been going on even before Srebrenica
became, by U.N. mandate, a safety zone, inhabited only by unarmed
civilians;
(c)that this old silver-mining town was, in fact, used by well armed Bosnian
Muslims, led by a warlord named Nasir Oric, to liquidate all the near-by Serbs
by terror and mayhem, DOCUMENTED BY ORIC HIMSELF;
(d)that Oric and up to about 5,000 of his men, forewarned from Sarajevo, fled
to the Bosnian Muslim stronghold of Tuzla, days before the Bosnian Serb Army
took Srebrenica ;
(e)that the allegation of genocide with which General Ratko Mladic is
being charged, could not stand in any real court of law because he put the
Muslim elderly, women and children of Srebrenica into buses and sent them to
Tuzla, in sharp contrast to the real GENOCIDE carried out by Oric;
(f)that while Oric has been running a disco for U.S. G.I.s in Tuzla, under no
indictment by the Hague Tribunal until recently (for mistreating
prisoners) Mladic is wanted by it as a major war criminal for having
committed genocide at Srebrenica;.
(g)that the U.S.under a NATO cosmetic umbrella had the command and put into
action its preponderant personnel and weapons systems to wage a 78-day purely
punitive air war against a defenseless Serbia, without the Congressional
declaration of war mandated by the Constitution and causing over 3,000 civilian
death plus a damage to Serbias infrastructure, governmental and private
properties estimated at the low of $20 and high of $40 billion;.
(h)that the punishment exceeded by far the non-existent SERIE of sins into
which the Serbs are being marched, with sticks and carrots, to accept
collective guilt because some ethnic Serbs committed egregious crimes in an
egregious tripartite fratricide heavily assisted via the classic
Balkanization by foreign powers of our own moment in time, some with an
attested pedigree .in repetitive invasions, civilized savageries and
undergoing an acute historical amnesia.
Given all that plus the latest and decidedly irrefutable work by Brock it is
difficult to understand the unending flow of political venom against
present-day Serbia from our powerful Solons who have inducted the U.S. Congress
into additional, this time economic, threat of punishments if Mladic and
Karadzic are not delivered by Serbia to the Hague Tribunal, by 31st May 2006.
Since the International Community has constructed an international boundary
between Serbia and Bosnia, Belgrade cannot send troops into Bosnia to
capture Mladic. If foreign requests were to be put to Syria to deliver Bin
Laden to the U.S. one could only laugh at them. But, the analogy is symmetric.
It is also doubtful that Karadzic is still in any ex-Yugoslav space. This turns
the demand to Serbia into either a fait accompli to punish since it cannot
be met or, else, borders on the irrational..
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The Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) Canada
News Fixing
By Dimitri Diamant
December 26, 2005
Many know that price fixing by the largest competitors in any industry is
against the law. Stories have been told of top execs meeting in hotel rooms in
order to fix such industry-wide prices, nothing written down, not even on slips
of paper.
Lately, there seems to be an ominous trend towards something similar that could
be described as News Fixing.
Proper journalistic standards require that the most authoritative sources that
are available be referred to, and there should be confirmation; but are there an
increasing number of circumstances where such proper journalistic standards are
not being followed? This situation suffers from even more aggravation due to
the well known concentration of major news source outlets into fewer and fewer
hands, so that now, only a handful of media CEOs can make it clear to all
journalists that the quality and reliability of news sources can be fudged.
One serious example of this practice would be an alleged massacre that all
journalists dutifully always describe as the worst since World War II. This
would be the alleged massacre that may have taken place in Srebrenica, Bosnia in
July, 1995.
What are the sources for this story? When News Fixing takes place, we see that
all journalists, for example, from television, whether presenting the news or
conducting interviews with pre-selected guests, always rigidly preach from
exactly the same hymn book, News Fixing, almost as though the top level CEO is
always looking over their shoulder. Is this the free press?
Whenever any noted journalist is constrained to provide a source for the
Srebrenica story, they always immediately refer to the International Committee
of the Red Cross, the ICRC, Geneva, Switzerland, but without any further
elaboration whatsoever. Is this their only source, as vaguely as it is
presented, for a story as singularly important as this?
It is possible to delve into the statements made by the ICRC at that time with
regard to Srebrenica. The most authoritative source would be an interview
granted to Junge Welt (Young World), a Berlin newspaper, www.jungewelt.de .
This newspaper was founded at the time of the DDR, continues to publish during
the subsequent fifteen years of the Federal Republic, and their editorial policy
would continue to be critical of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, a country that
was founded in 1920 by Woodrow Wilson. This authoritative interview was granted
to Junge Welt on August 30, 1995 by an official spokesperson from the ICRC
headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland. A pertinent excerpt from this interview,
granted by a Mr. Pierre Gaultier of the ICRC, would be as follows:
"All together we arrived at the number of approximately 10,000 [missing from
Srebrenica]. But there may be some double counting... Before we have finished
[weeding out the double counting] we cannot give any exact information. Our work
is made even more complicated by the fact that the Bosnian government has
informed us that several thousand refugees have broken through enemy lines and
have been reintegrated into the Bosnian Muslim army. These persons are therefore
not missing, but they cannot be removed from the lists of the missing (...)
because we have not received their names."
Other sources, including the original ICTY indictment issued by Richard
Goldstone, accurately describe these thousands of men as armed fighters, which
is why Mr. Gaultier refers to them as "refugees" reintegrated into the "army".
Some of these armed fighters, eighteen or nineteen years of age, are now
described by all journalists as boys.
Thus, from this interview, we see that thousands did reach, on foot,
essentially the town of Tuzla. The remaining thousands are said to be missing,
not massacred. However, instead of relying on this authoritative source, all
journalists, if pressed, will refer instead to an idle speculation by a Red
Cross field worker, with the last name of Barry, who once said that "5,000 have
simply disappeared". Now, one has to think cleverly for a moment to see that
the word "disappeared" is not the same as "massacred", and the disappearances of
thousands more or less took place in the direction of the town of Tuzla, and
then on from there into the Muslim, Islamic army. Today, in 2005, ten years
later, six thousand such bodies have yet to be found by zealous, well funded
professional gravediggers hired by the ICTY, and that would be because missing,
and even disappearing, is not the same as massacred.
Returning to the subject of news source reliability, why do all journalists, at
the direction of their CEO's, always refer to Barry instead of Mr. Gaultier?
The ruminations of a lone, low-level ICRC field worker are a far cry from an
authoritative interview granted by an official spokesperson from the ICRC
headquarters at Geneva, Switzerland.
What has been the position of the ICRC since then? No doubt, from national
contributors, they have eventually felt the need to conform with the uniform
Srebrenica story. However, on July 26, 2005, about a month before the Junge
Welt interview, and some days after the alleged massacre of July, 1995, the ICRC
issued the following news release, four paragraphs altogether, only the fourth
and last paragraph presented in its entirety:
26-07-1995 ICRC News 30
Bosnia-Herzegovina: ICRC action in enclaves crisis
"More than 1,000 civilians - most of them women and children - have
fled the fighting that is now raging in the north of the Bihac enclave to seek
refuge with relatives in the town of Cazin. ...
"At the start of the crisis affecting the enclaves, the ICRC set up a
special tracing service in Kladanj, on the Tuzla air base and in the various
places where displaced persons have gathered, to try and locate people separated
from their families or reported missing. ...
"Emergency teams of medical personnel and water supply experts,
stationed by the ICRC at the Kladanj checkpoint and in the Tuzla area, stand
ready to take action in the event of a fresh influx of displaced people from
Zepa and its surroundings. ...
"Since the fall of the Srebrenica enclave, the ICRC has not succeeded
in gaining access to individuals detained by the Bosnian Serb forces. It is
relentlessly pursuing its approaches to the authorities in charge, which have
publicly pledged, on several occasions, to respect the Geneva Conventions. So
far they have not honoured their commitments, and the ICRC is deeply concerned
about the plight of all those whom it is unable to protect."
The Srebrenica enclave is mentioned last, and there is no mention of a major
massacre.
Concluding, price fixing is supposed to be against the law, and News Fixing
ought to be seriously frowned upon, if only this were possible.
The url address of this article is:
www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=1640
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=1640>
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Srebrenica 'killings' video
http://www.srpskapolitika.com/video/Srebrenica.html
Serbian News Network - SNN
news@antic.org
http://www.antic.org/