Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- [The author of the following alarming account is Laura Silber, co-author of Yugoslavia: Death Of A Nation, one of the bibles of the pro-NATO, anti-Yugoslav crusades of the past decade. As noted at the bottom of her feature, she's recently graduated to become a senior policy adviser at George Soros' Open Society Institute. An insightful review of Yugoslavia: Death Of A Nation by Nebojsa Malic follows Silber's harrowing tale. The message, hardly one that could be missed, is to watch what one wishes - or works - for, as it may come to haunt one personally. Silber's contribution to the defamation and dehumanization of the Serbian people has worked its way back very intimately in her life: To poison the lives of her own husband andd herself. Let the warning be heeded by others of her stripe.] New York Times AUG 30, 2001 The Other Dusan Knezevic By LAURA SILBER I married a war criminal � at least that's what immigration officials tried to tell me every time we landed at Kennedy Airport. The routine was always the same. We handed over our little stack of passports: American blue, with gold trim and bald eagle, for our daughter and me; a similar blue for my husband, who is Serbian, but with the double-headed eagle of Yugoslavia. The immigration agent typed in his name: D-U-S-A-N K-N-E-Z-E-V-I-C. Then came the order "Step over there," and it was back to that airless holding room in the bowels of the international arrivals terminal. In that windowless room last May, three women were shackled to chairs. In July, a man in handcuffs kept saying he would commit suicide if he were forced to go back to the Dominican Republic. On that July day, we had arrived at Kennedy from our summer holiday in St. Barth's. "Just a minute while we check out a few things," a uniformed man told us. An hour later we were still waiting. I knew better than to argue. I had negotiated my way through dozens of checkpoints in Bosnia as a reporter during the war there. But my husband, whose good name was on the line, did not know better. "This is a violation of the rights of my wife and child as American citizens," he fumed. Our 2-year-old daughter, Mila, looking at the rows of chairs, asked the official, an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, if this was a school. My husband laughed. The agent glowered and told him not to. They thought they had their man: Dusan Knezevic, a citizen of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is 10 years of gristle and a thousand packs of cigarettes older than my husband. He is 50 pounds heavier and a foot shorter. He was part of a gang accused of killing, torturing and abusing Muslim prisoners in a ceramics factory in the opening months of the war in Bosnia. In 1995 that Dusan Knezevic was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. He is still at large, thought to be lying low somewhere in Bosnia. I once asked an I.N.S. supervisor how to prevent this mistake in identity from being repeated, so we would not be detained in the future on account of the other Dusan Knezevic. His response: "Catch him." Another agent, standing nearby, told us, "We can't be sure who you are." The last time we returned to New York my husband, a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side, produced a letter from the State Department saying that he was not a wanted war criminal but a legal alien from Yugoslavia. An agent looked at it and said: "How do I know the letter is real? Our job is not to believe you." This unfortunate coincidence of names has given us some insight into the way immigrants � illegal, legal and criminal � may sometimes be treated by the I.N.S. But knowing you're not alone only goes so far when you are jet-lagged and you want to grab a taxi and get your child to bed. At last, however, it should all be over. Last Friday my husband became an American citizen. He has passed the test; he can tick off the 13 colonies; he knows who said, "Give me liberty or give me death." For everyone present in the federal courtroom where my husband and 249 others took the oath of citizenship, the ceremony was an extraordinary event, the pledge of allegiance to a new country. For us it meant that and a little more � the beginning of my husband's life as Citizen Knezevic, a life off the wanted list. Laura Silber, senior policy adviser at the Open Society Institute, is co-author of "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation." _______________________________________________________ http://news.suc.org/bydate/Jun_27/7.html. Bookreview: A Chronicle of Foretold Death, Nebojsa Malic, Jun 26 "Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Laura Silber and Allan Little (Penguin books, 1996-97) By Nebojsa Malic, June 26, 2000 First published in 1996, after the Dayton agreement ended five years of fighting in what became Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, this book was supposed to be the all-encompassing view of Yugoslavia's death and unraveling during the early 1990s. Decently researched, accompanying the BBC documentary of the same title, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation was praised by the Washington Post Book World as the "most authoritative account in English or any other language about how the war began." Unfortunately, this praise deserves a major qualifier. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is an authoritative account of how the mainstream West observers and policymakers thought the Balkans war began and unfolded. Its table of contents starts with "Serb nationalism" and the "rise of Slobodan Milosevic," and continues through the "awakening of Croatia" and "the cleansing" in Bosnia, ending with the split between Serbs east and west of the Drina. Its final chapter, Pax Americana, reflects how only American bombs and American-led Muslim-Croat land offensive brought the "war of Serbian aggression" to an end. The terminology of the book is also similarly colored. It calls the illegitimate, self-proclaimed regime in Sarajevo "the Bosnian government," accepting without question its accusations of "genocide" in northern Bosnia and "massacres" in Srebrenica. Krajina Serbs are called "rebels." Many books have offered a similarly flawed interpretation of the Balkan conflict. None have done it with so much research and so much attention to detail that an eyewitness could almost believe things really happened that way. Many passages in the book are factually true. Unlike, say, Noel Malcolm's openly partisan "histories" of Bosnia and Kosovo, or other such quasi-historical propaganda literature, Silber and Little's volume is relatively moderate. It does acknowledge the suffering of Serbs in World War Two, for example, and admits that the secession of Slovenia and Croatia was against the law. There is a wealth of first-hand accounts and confessions of secessionist leaders that should not be neglected. Even though the book accuses the Serbs of starting all the wars, committing all the crimes and finally only giving up when they were "justly" defeated, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is structured around the premise that it was all the work of one man: Slobodan Milosevic. He is simultaneously accused of orchestrating Yugoslavia's collapse in order to create a Greater Serbia, and of abandoning the Serb cause once the world interfered decisively (which is, by the way, applauded). From the ripped-up campaign poster of Milosevic on the front cover, to the book's organization, to repeated and unsubstantiated accusations made by the interviewed politicians - with a single exception (Borisav Jovic) all enemies of Milosevic - everything points to Slobodan Milosevic as the root cause of Yugoslavia's destruction. This, rather than flawed terminology or the false premise of "Serbian guilt," is the book's greatest problem, and its greatest danger. The style in Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is good enough for someone knowledgeable about Balkan affairs to take it at face value. Even someone more sympathetic to the Serb cause, who does not subscribe to the racist tendency to blame the Serbs for everything, would find it easy to blame Milosevic instead. The book offers plenty of opportunities for that. Accusing Milosevic of provoking the Serbs to rise up and destroy Yugoslavia, then abandoning them when things got rough, is believable but false. Accusing Milosevic of somehow being responsible for the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, Izetbegovic Bosnia and Macedonia is just ridiculous and insulting to the people of these republics. Both these charges, however, lay the foundations for the argument made by NATO in the spring of 1999 that Milosevic was to blame for everything that happened in Kosovo, thus justifying the barbaric assault in Yugoslavia and constant attempts to break it up ever since. In that sense, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is the Bible of the mainstream public opinion in the West. Its premises reflect the prevalent opinion of great powers that have systematically interfered and manipulated the peoples of Yugoslavia to their ends, and assaulted the one people that refused to cooperate in this diabolical project. Its conclusions sowed the seeds of fallacy and hatred even deeper, perpetuated the lie and prepared the ground for further aggression and demonization. Some clues to the motive of this paramount work can be gained from looking at its authors. In a few short years after Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation was published, Laura Silber became a NATO cheerleader, writing heartbreaking stories about the "injustice" done to General Clark by Washington and Brussels. Alan Little made a BBC documentary titled Moral Combat, which challenged some basic tenets of NATO's Kosovo script - but perpetuated the myths of "Serbian genocide" against the Albanians and "ethnic cleansing," thus ultimately justifying everything NATO did. Nebojsa Malic __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! 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