[news] Bill Dorich responds to SEEMO

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Bill Dorich responds to a SEEMO* Press release which can be read at:
http://www.b92.net/eng/insight/pressroom.php?nav_id=36396 


It has to do with concerns worsening press freedom situation in Serbia and
Croatia.  Stella


*South East Europe Media Organization


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September 2, 2006

Dear SEEMO:

As the author of 5 books on Balkan history and the publisher of numerous
books on Balkan politics, I take exception to your current attack against
the alleged lack of press freedom in Serbia. No Serbian in his right mind
wants to become part of a European Union that betrayed the Serbian people
twice in the last century.  It was the EU that allowed its media to distort
the facts, or worse, to openly defy writing about the Serbian side of these
wars.

CNN's Ms. Amanpour was at the top of the list of those correspondents who
parked their backsides at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo and relied on Muslim
runners to collect the data for their stories.  Nearly all journalists who
went to Bosnia could not communicate in the language of the country and the
vast majority relied on Muslim translators for their so-called facts.  Now
your organization is insulted that the Serbs demand balanced stories rather
than more of the same?

I am the publisher of the recent book, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting...
Journalism & Tragedy in Yugoslavia by Peter Brock—an award winning
investigative reporter who has written a scathing expose about how
journalists conspired and colluded with their editors and newspapers to
deceive the world about the wars in the Balkans.  You and people of your ilk
were more concerned about toppling the Milosevic regime than you were at
telling both sides of the story—the millions of Serbs who protested and
marched in the snow for 60 days and nights against the Milosevic government
were simply ignored.  Millions more who protested in the streets of other
countries, especially in Greece, were never shown to the U.S. audience.
Little wonder why the snow job done on the minds of the American audience
was so successful.

More than 30 foreign correspondents are called to task in Brock’s book for
their deceptions, omissions and pure fabrications that condemned the Serbian
people with collective guilt.  However the passage of time reveals that you
in the press were all guilty of corrupt and irresponsible reporting.

Evidence then, as well as now, proves that the Markale Market bombing, was
perpetrated by the Bosnian Muslims who murdered their own people to gain
international sympathy.  This war crime was successfully used by the media
to condemn the Serbs for a crime they did not commit and to place sanctions
on Serbia including the withholding of food and medicine.  Dozens of babies
died from a simple lack of antibiotics.  These were crimes against humanity
that the media and SEEMO simply swept under the nearest rug.

Five years later we also know that "350,000" people were not killed in these
conflicts as President Clinton insisted in his last inaugural speech and
these inflated figures were used continuously by every news agency in the
world over a seven year period.  NONE of you did any real research.
Instead, everyone copied each others alleged facts.  Recently, Reuters
reported that after 5 years of research, human rights organizations were
having difficulty coming up with 90,000 victims on all sides in these wars.
You should hide your heads in shame for condemning the Serbs for a so-called
“Genocide” when the facts now reveal that Serbs and Muslims were killed in
nearly equal numbers. The fact that these were Civil Wars seemed to escape
journalistic common sense as correspondants stampeded to get their bylines
in the latest editions. 

We also know that “60,000 Bosnian women” were never raped but what Peter
Brock reveals is document #S24491, the only document on rape submitted to
the United Nations throughout this conflict.  That document contains the
video taped depositions of 800 Serbian rape victims who identified their
perpetrators...not one has been indicted.  These depositions were recorded
in the fall of 1991 at a time when every news agency in the world were
telling their readers that "Women in this culture will not step forward in
rape cases as this brings shame to the entire family."  That was pure media
driven rubbish and document #S24491 made fools out of all of you in the
press.   The same media that told the world that “Muslim women were being
raped 8-10 times a day until becoming pregnant—then held prisoners for 9
months so that they were forced to give birth to Serbian babies.”  Where are
the 60,000 babies?  The facts speak for themselves, there are 683 babies
born to rape victims, one-third to Serbian women.  This was NEVER a weapon
of war as alleged by dozens of reporters who were more interested in racing
toward the Pulitzer than writing the truth about these conflicts.

"Dubrovnik destroyed by the Serbs" were the kinds of sensationalized
headlines reported by Anthony Lewis in the New York Times who repeated this
hideous lie six times in six weeks.  Peter Brock reveals how the Croats use
old auto tires covered in petrol and burned throughout the walled city to
give the impression that Dubrovnik was burning... NO, IT WAS ONLY SMOKING.
Yet, these images were beamed around the world and placed on the cover of
Time, Newsweek and numerous major newspapers—a disgusting example of pack
journalism at its finest.  Those who took those pictures of Dubrovnik
burning knew full well that this was a media hoax but kept their ugly
secret.

We now know that the 42 victims at Racak were murdered in another location
and “their bodies were mutilated after their deaths and moved to the crime
scene,” according to a number of forensic experts who investigated this
alleged crime which was used as the pretext to bomb the Serbs. How utterly
appalling that the trial chamber at The Hague recently propose that cases of
Racak and Dubrava be erased from the indictment of Serbs currently on trial.
It is obvious that The Hague sees through these Muslim scams but morons in
the press seem incapable of pointing out any Muslim image manipulations. In
whose interest do you work so diligently?  It certainly is not the truth. 

War criminal Albanian Commander Agim Ceku who led Operation Storm in Croatia
in 1995 in which 200,000 Serbs were ethnically cleansed and dozens murdered
was also responsible for the deaths of more than 500 Sebs in Kosovo who were
brutally mutilated and murdered.  He received the lightest sentence thus far
for war crimes.  If Serbs cannot trust the politically inspired Hague
Tribunal how can you expect them to trust dishonest journalists who seem to
excel at writing articles packed with their own political agendas? 

In my opinion, Roy Gutman is likely the most dishonest reporter of these
wars and he was given half a Pulitzer?  In the introduction to his book “A
Witness to Genocide” an oxymoron for a title since Mr. Gutman never
witnessed a single war crime—he wrote:  “Having set such lofty standards, I
immediately made an exception and wrote about the Omarska camp which I had
not visited, based on the secondhand witness accounts.”  In other words,
Gutman decides for himself when to be lofty and ethical and grants himself
permission to decide right or wrong and then admits that he was never at
Omarska and that he relied on ‘secondhand’ sources.  One of his sources,
Jadranka Cigelj, a Croatian woman and member of the CIC Croatian Information
Center, a known Tudjman propaganda machine was later exposed for filing rape
charges under five different aliases. These facts about her came to light
after she came to the United States and appeared on national television and
before members of the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committee where she
embellished her stories to a naïve American audience and to even more
gullible elected officials.  And they believed!

Gregory Copley, Editor of Defense & Foreign Affairs sums up the media with
the strongest condemnation in his endorsement of Media Cleansing: Dirty
Reporting when he wrote:  “ The free press of the world fought to be
recognized as the guardian of truth and as a pillar of good governance. It
cannot now deny culpability and reject criticism, or avoid the growing
sentiment that it—as with all aspects of public life—requires constant
review, and reform.  It is evident from Brock’s vital and eminently readable
book that for freedom to parish, all it takes is for the media to exempt
itself from its ethical responsibility toward impartiality.”

The brand of ugly journalism during the Balkan wars nearly destroyed the
Serbian nation and the lives of 7 million Serbs.  The lies led to 78 days of
bombing that did more than $50 billion in infrastructure damage to that
country, where international assistance in repairing this damage has been
ignored now for six years.  Why should Serbs openly grant hospitality to
foreign journalists who like all of the previous reports could once again
fabricate their stories to the complete destruction of Serbia? The Kosovo
“independence” story is a perfect example of the Serbian side being totally
muzzled by the media.

Since the end of hostilities in the Balkans in 1999, Albanian goons and
thugs of the KLA have shed their terrorists clothing and replaced them with
so-called "legitimate" police uniforms.  Former Albanian War Criminals are
now heads of state as the world looks the other way. Not many journalists
have told the world that these Albanian terrorists have destroyed 155
Ancient Serbian Orthodox churches in Kosovo since the arrival of KFOR.  In
March, 2005, Albanians created a Kristallnacht in Kosovo destroying 40
Serbian churches, monasteries and 500 Serbian homes.  The story of that four
nights of Kristallnacht was only briefly mentioned in the mainstream media
in the U.S., as though Serbs deserved for their religious shrines to go up
in smoke.

Imagine how the Serbs feel when for the entire decade of the 1990’s not ONE
SINGLE article written by a Serbian journalist, author, scholar or political
leader was published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times or the
majority of American newspapers.  Serbs were made persona non grata in
Washington and were not permitted to appear before House or Senate hearings
on the war.  Serbs were simply silenced, just like your organization seems
to take pleasure in muzzling those with whom you disagree.  And you expect
the Serbs to be even-handed with Journalists who mock Serbia’s human rights
and openly deny them equal justice?  You people are word fascists and its
time countries start ejecting you from their territory until you learn to
practice your profession with honesty and balance.  However, the evidence is
quite clear… SEEMO does not rise to this level of journalistic ethics or
morality.

It is time for SEEMO to stop worrying about the possible limited freedom of
your reporters and start being concerned about the total lack of freedom for
the Serbian people in their own country.

A Pox on all of your houses.


 

William Dorich, Publisher, Los Angeles

The writer is the author of 5 books on Balkan history including his 1992
book Serbian Genocide 1941-45 co-written with the late David Martin and
Michael Lees published on the 50 anniversary of WWII.  His 1992 book,
Kosovo, was the first book published in the United States on this region of
the world when most Americans could not find it on a map or pronounce the
word.  The 1993 book, The Suppressed Serbian Voice and the Free Press in
America exposed the biased media in the U.S.; the 1995 book A Brief History
of Serbian Music and the 1996 book, Hilandar Octocentenary, published to
commemorate the 800th anniversary of the Serbian Monastery on Mt. Athos.  He
is the recipient of The Order of St. Sava, the highest recognition given to
a layperson by the Holy Synod of Serbian Bishops and an Award of Merit from
the Serbian Bar Association of America.  His article have appeared in
numerous newspapers including the Washington Times, The Arizona Republic,
Southwest Jewish Press. He was a correspondent for the American Srbobran,
the Serb newspaper published in Pittsburgh since the turn of the century.

 

 


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