Since I do not expect my letter to be published, I decided to forward it. Stella
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- The Economist Letter to the editor(s) 24 January 2009 With regard to Carla del Ponte's Madame Prosecutor as co-authored with Chuck Sudetic, I take exception to Chuck Sudetic's statement in his book, Blood and Vengeance, which described the killing of some 7,500 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1999. There is enough evidence to refute Mr. Sudetic’s claim. Gregory R. Copley, editor of Defense and Foreign Affairs, and a group which included a former UN official, intelligence experts and journalists, released a statement in 2003 that challenged the alleged casualty figures as "vastly inflated and unsupported by evidence." Who can forget the picture of then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as she frantically waved the CIA satellite photo over her head of the plowed field that was the alleged mass grave of the Muslin men? "Proof positive!" she claimed, of those who had been slaughtered and whose bodies were lying there only waiting to be exhumed. Journalists from all over the world went to Bosnia to look for bodies. Crews from CNN, CBS, BBC, France II, TG1 (Italy), Dutch Television and elsewhere arrived in August 1996: but they found very little. Some crews did not bother at all to find the soccer field from the satellite photo, because the journalists had already come to believe that there was no mass grave there anyway. Tim Butcher of The Daily Telegraph, (UK) of 24 July 1995, wrote, "After five days of interviews the United Nations chief investigators into alleged human rights abuses during the fall of Srebrenica had not found any firsthand witnesses of atrocities." Before US intervention, Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural sovereign nation. In his "The Islamic Declaration, former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic wrote, "There can be no peace or coexistence between Islamic faith and non-Islamic faith political institutions....The Islamic movement must and can take place as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough, not only to destroy the non-Islamic one, but to build up a new Islamic one." Furthermore, "As early as 1992, Izetbegovic outlined a very precise and uncompromising strategic political objective for the Sarajevo regime: To get the West to defeat the Serbs and establish a Muslim-dominated state for him." (Offensive in the Balkans, author Yossef Bodansky). The legacy of the deceased Izetbegovic has come true. Today, Bosnia has become his "Muslim-dominated state for him." Stella L. Jatras Madame Prosecutor - The Economist: http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12970818
