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I hope for more happy endings for crusaders such as Silber.
On 30 Aug 01, at 23:21, Rick Rozoff wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>
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