A Letter to The Guardian (UK) from Prof. John Peter Maher - with additional comments
======================================================================== First of all...here is the item in The Guardian (UK) to which Prof. Maher is referring: Regular version at http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/serbia/article/0,2479,379868,00.html Printer-friendly version at http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4074291,00.html "Forbidden film pierces Serbs' fog of denial: Less room to hide for men who committed atrocities - Special report: Serbia, Rory Carroll in Belgrade, Tuesday October 10, 2000, The Guardian Email addresses for The Guardian are as follows: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] ======================================================================== Subject: to the Guardian: Dubrovnik hoax again To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 11:20 Sir: Your piece mentions the "...pounding of the beautiful Croatian town of Dubrovnik in 1991. 'They used ships. Can you believe it?'... This is a fraud. Who on your staff was bought by Ruder Finn? Since 1991 the press has dozens of times printed the hoax that the Pearl of the Adriatic was reduced to rubble. Those stories were fakes. That Dubrovnik has been rebuilt is exponentially fake. On March 25, 1992, I visited Dubrovnik to see for myself the truth about the war. The Old City of Dubrovnik was never destroyed. It was barely scratched. Roof tiles blown off by concussion had all been replaced when I visited the city TWO YEARS AGO, THREE MONTHS after the "destruction". Your writer has a poor vocabulary in English. Buildings are "holed." Dubrovnik's destruction was an invention of PR companies in the hire of the war criminals who broke up Yugoslavia without negotiations. The big bombardment was from PR fakers, not navy guns. -- like the Kuwaiti incubator babies hoax used by President Bush to stoke up war fever. PR liars Hill & Knowlton, Ruder Finn, and Waterman Associates have earned millions in fanning the flames of this war. The press, that's you, belongs in the war crimes docket with the New World Order thugs for churning out mendacious "news" stories about Serb death camps and rape camps, abetting war and mayhem. The story of an organized Serb rape policy is a racist fraud, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, propagated to foment hatred and incite war against the innocent. Though it's not polite any more to slander Afro-American or Jews, Serbs are fair game for the lynch mob. The "Serb-dominated federal navy" off Dubrovnik was commanded by Admiral Stane Brovet, a Slovene. The target was not the Old City, but the Napoleonic fort of St. Sergius far above Dubrovnik and hotels outside the city walls, where Croatian forces were billeted and because of the presence of refugees, had set up gun positions from which they fired on the federal forces in order to provoke death and destruction. Zagreb's aim was to provoke a Western attack on the Serbs. On December 5, 1991, Croatian forces mounted a mortar on a flat bed truck running up and down the Stradun taking potshots at naval forces in order to provoke counterfire. The "Dubrovnik burning" pictures were shot with long lenses. This compresses perspective, making it look like there is no distance between objects that are quite separated in real space. Thus, columns of smoke billowing up from the harbor are superimposed on the walled city. The photographic effect is as staged as the stabbing of the lady showering in Hitchcock's movie "Psycho." That smoke was from the fuel tanks of two pleasure boats burning in the Old Harbor -- outside, of course, the walls. Dubrovnik's Old City never burned. Bullet holes along Stradun were from gunfire inside the walls, at ground level at close range in a fight on the street between rival Croatian factions. Scaffolding was set up in front of facades in anticipation of the shooting to come. Video tapes of gunfire along the ancient walls, run backward, show clearly that the puffs of gun smoke are from outgoing, not incoming fire. "Western" reporters in Dubrovnik since they cannot read Serbo-Croatian, do not mention the graffiti calling for the lynching of Serbs: Srbe na vrbe (literally "[hang] the Serbs on the willow trees"). My videotapes of Dubrovnik from March 25, 1992, have been aired on Chicago Cable Access TV, Channel 19. Want to see them? Croatian city? Tito made a gift of it to his native Croatia after WW II. Dubrovnik was never before "Croatian." The Byzantine decoration found by restorators beneath paint in the Dominican monastery attests the Serbian and Greek origins of Dubrovnik. This war is the latest chapter in the predation of Orthodox lands by the Western Church. (I'm RC, by the way.) The only building in the Old City of Ragusa to be gutted by explosives and fire was the one housing a priceless collection of medieval manuscripts and icons. It was not navy guns that did the damage, but plastique and incendiary devices planted on the spot by Croatian forces. Enter it on your map, across the street from the Orthodox church, which you fail to note is Serbian. -- 3,000 Serb and 7,000 Croat refugees from Dubrovnik have taken refuge -- in Belgrade. J. P. Maher Ph.D. Emeritus Professor, Chicago ======================================================= (Here we quote Prof. Maher again, from his review of another book, in which Prof. Maher recounts his own visits to Dubrovnik to investigate the claims of damage.) ======================================================= I went with Dejan Lucic into the Old City on 25 March 1992, three months after the fighting. The shutters along the Stradun showed traces of small arms fire from street fighting that could only have been between Croatian rival forces The limestone pavement had a dozen shallow pock marks from mortar rounds, not navy guns It is not clear to me whether these were from JNA or Croatian positions. The press gave us pictures, shot with long lenses, hence compressing intervening space, in which plumes of smoke issue from the fuel tanks of boats in the Old Harbor (Ploce side), hence outside the walls Also outside the walls on the far side smoke billowed from a hotel, housing Croatian gun emplacements The smoke from the two sources, both outside the walls, bracketed and silhouetted the towers of the Old City in scenes evocative of Dante's Inferno, which was also fiction. In March 1992 damage to the Old City was negligible Every roof was tiled, most showing the patina of weathering and age Visitors today can confirm this as they look over the city from above. Dr Cohen refers (page 127) to the "shelling of the synagogue." I filmed the synagogue One window pane on the street side, Zudioska Ulica, was broken. I had read in Croatian and western publications that the "Serb dominated NA " was destroying or had destroyed the "port of Dubrovnik.". I read the contrary in Serbian newspapers A competent grammarian or translator must ask if is this is appositional of (as in [the City of] Chicago ) or some other relation (as in the mayor or the South Side of Chicago)? Was it possibly the port section of Dubrovnik, i. e. Gruz? I felt the only way to be sure of the truth was to see it with my own eyes Having read, too, that a treasure of Serbian manuscripts and icons had been destroyed by Croatian forces, I asked my camera man, a native Dubrovniker, to take us to the site He took us to a building in front of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral There stood the shell of a multi-storey building. On the facing wall of a building to the left of it was a sign, plainly and prominently lettered in Serbian Cyrillic IKONE, and in English "ICONS" The building indicated was gutted, a shell. The walls were intact; the interior was a void And it was not navy guns that did it, since adjacent buildings showed no damage. It was plastique and arson on the spot. On 15 May 1995 Princess Francesca Von Habsburg gave a slide show at the National Press Club in Washington Between two shots of a ruined two-floor villa at Cilipi, near the airport. (Airports tend to be outside the walls of medieval cities.) Her Highness sandwiched an interior shot that she said was of the same villa, despite the discrepancy that the interior shot was of a building with several storeys. It was the one I just described The target of the JNA ships had been the Napoleonic fort high above the city on Mount Saint Sergius, Srdj. Artillery concussions blew off the tiles of the roofs far below British journalist Boris Beloff and EU representative Michael Shuttleworth each also (separately) visited the scene and reported they found it as I describe Had the Old City been targeted, it would have taken only two hours to demolish it. Croatia and her helpers, the PR companies, enjoy a revolving door between press and government White House Officials "leave government service" and turn up in lucrative jobs with the PR merchants They pulled a fast one on the public with this horror story of the destruction of Dubrovnik One Washington PR firm, Ruder Finn, is collecting money to buy tiles for shattered Ragusa. There have been reports that this is the target of an FBI fraud investigation, but we should not be surprised if the Clinton administration sees that the matter is swept under the rug. Croatian strategy from the beginning was to provoke all out war to destroy Yugoslavia, painting the Serbs as the "bad guys" . Here is Susan L. Woodward: An assault on Dubrovnik (beginning in early October), which was protected under the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), was particularly significant in creating antagonism toward Serbia and the Army: the Croatian government had calculated in using sharpshooters on the Dubrovnik walls to provoke a YPA attack on the city, knowing that Dubrovnik would attract . attention. Susan L Woodward. 1995. Balkan Tragedy Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War Washington: The Brookings Institution. ============================================================== Now here's what we, T.V. and Alida Weber, observe: First of all, a disclaimer: We take NO position either for or against any individual, action, organization, or government policy position in Yugoslavia. And unless we decide to move there ourselves, we think that's none of our business. More to the point, we insist that it is none of the U.S. government's business. We were outraged when we found out that foreign political contributions had influenced the last U.S. election. And we're just as outraged that the U.S. government tells people in other countries what to do and whom to vote for. More to the point, we absolutely condemn any Western propaganda that makes false allegations against, and stirs up enmity toward, the Serbian people. This racist material should never be circulated anywhere, and ESPECIALLY not in Serbia. Why do we say this? First of all, FALSE accusations of genocide can be, and all too often are, used as an excuse to perpetrate very REAL genocide against the nation that was falsely accused. In fact, FALSE accusations of genocide are probably the most effective type of propaganda for bringing about real genocide, for those so evilly inclined. "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" is punishable, according to Article 3 of the U.N. General Assembly resolution 260 A (III), "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." (See http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm). "The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide." And then there's Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which reads: "Any propaganda for war shall be prohibited by law." "Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law." Evidently, a film was recently shown in Belgrade that is nothing more than a cobbled-together mess of recycled Western propaganda about all of the evils that the Serbs allegedly committed under Milosevic. Why would any Serb show a racist, anti-Serb film like this? Who knows... maybe it was an act of appeasement to the insatiable powers-that-be in the West. Maybe it was an effort to get Serbs angry at Milosevic for supposedly having led the Serbian people down the wrong path. Maybe it was a misguided and wrongheaded notion of "glasnost and perestroika." Be that as it may, this propaganda film was crammed with lies and distortions, of which the nonexistent attack on Dubrovnik is just one. As usual, there is no attempt to present anything that would stand up to the rules of evidence. Were it to be presented in any fair trial, it'd be laughed out of court. But it wasn't presented in a fair trial. Instead, it was presented at a time and place that neither lent itself to any healthy debate nor offered any opportunity to refute this libeling of the Serbian people. Even some SERBS don't realize that, just because you see a picture of dead bodies, and someone blames it on Serbs, does NOT mean that Serbs actually did it! The exhibition of this film, along with Western "news" coverage of its exhibition in papers such as The Guardian, will have the following bad effects: 1. It will turn Serbs, especially young people, against their own people. How? Easy. After all, no one person can be everywhere at once during a war. They'll think that, just because THEY never saw Serbs commit any atrocities, doesn't mean Serbs weren't doing something terrible SOMEWHERE. And Serbs all too often are outspoken and vociferous in their criticism of themselves and one another...without realizing the evil purposes to which this criticism may be put by their mortal enemies. 2. This leads to the fact that the film will provide additional fuel for the Tony Blair contingent - for use as damage control, to renew attacks against Serbs in the future, or to provide an excuse for attempting to keep Serbs from returning to Kosovo. 3. It will prepare public opinion in Serbia for Kostunica or his successors to give in to Western pressure and begin turning Serbs over to the U.S.-funded kangaroo court at the ICTY. 4. It will give the neo-Ustashe and neo-Handjak Holocaust-deniers yet another 'red herring,' to keep people from figuring out what happened to the Serbs in World War II. And it will probably have other bad consequences as well. The long and the short of it is not only that the lies and distortions in the film itself will affect the Serbs who see it, but that - under the guise of 'news' - the fact that the film was just now shown in Belgrade becomes an excuse for all sorts of nefarious Serb-bashing in the West! T. V. Weber and Alida M. Weber, nee Jatich NEXT YEAR IN KOSOVO!!!!! Srpska Informativna Mreza serbian_way@antic.org http://www.antic.org/
