Since I received no reply from Haaretz to my letter/OPINION, I decided to post it. Best regards, and Happy New Year!!!! Stella
----- Original Message ----- The Unfinished State: <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1132545.html> http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1132545.html Haaretz To the editors. I long hesitated in sending my response to The Unfinished State of 3 December due to the length of my letter/OPINION. I hope you will do me the courtesy of reading my letter/OPINION in its entirety. Although my submitted letter/OPINION is long, please consider it for publication, either all or in part as it may help to counter the many years of demonizing the Serbian people, our ally of two world wars. The voices of the Serbian people have been suppressed since the inception of the war in Bosnia. Whether you publish it or not, I would appreciate your forwarding my letter/OPINION to the author, Shlomo Avineri. Thank you. Author Stella L. Jatras ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------- "The Unfinished State," The Other Side of the Story by Stella L. Jatras Since the beginning of the 1990's war in the Balkans, the Serbian people, collectively, have been accused of (and punished for) committing some of the worst atrocities since those of the Nazis in World War II. Following are excerpts from a 1999 AFP report from a Newsweek edition which quoted Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who stated: "Serbian acts in Kosovo do not constitute genocide." Elie Wiesel further goes on to say, "In my view, genocide is the intent and the desire to annihilate a people. This is not the case here. As early as 1992, media coverage of the war in Bosnia mistakenly compared Serbian 'ethnic cleansing' to the Holocaust,' referring to comparison between the prison camps in Banja Luka to the death camp in Auschwitz. "The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that Milosevic and his accomplices seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?' he [Wiesel] asked rhetorically." To the contrary, an often ignored fact is that tens of thousands of Muslims fled from the fighting and sought refuge in Belgrade. The demonizing of the Serbs began in Bosnia. One example was the staged massacre at the Markale market in Sarajevo on 5 February 1994. Yossef Bodansky, author of Bin Laden, The Man Who Declared War on America, wrote in his book Offensive in the Balkans, that the mortar used to bomb the Markarle market place was designed by HizbAllah experts and then most likely dropped from a nearby rooftop onto the crowd of shoppers. Video cameras at the ready recorded this expertly-staged spectacle of gore, while dozens of corpses of Bosnian Muslim troops killed in action (exchanged the day before in a 'body swap' with the Serbs) were paraded in front of the cameras to raise the casualty count." Bodansky, most importantly, goes on to say, "This callous self-killing was designed to shock the West especially sentimental and gullible Washington, in order to raise the level of Western sympathy to the Bosnian Muslims and further demonize the Serbs so that Western governments would be more supportive of Sarajevo's forthcoming aggressive moves, and perhaps even finally intervene military." In violation of International Law, the NATO Charter and without the approval of the United States Congress, NATO, at the urging of President Clinton, bombed the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia, a nation that did not have weapons of mass destruction, never attacked any NATO country and was never a threat to the United States. This was a war of images as I wrote in my commentary which was posted in Jewish World Review on 22 August 2006, "It appears that Hezbollah has taken a page out of the Bosnian Muslim playbook: Win the PR battle, and you win the war. What better example of media disinformation than the Bosnian War, where images of civilians 'slaughtered' at Sarajevo's Markale market place, allegedly by Serb forces, were so instrumental? If it worked for the Bosnian Muslims, why not for Hezbollah? Will Qana, Lebanon, become Israel's Markale market place?" The 1994 letter written by Herb Brin of Heritage Southwest Jewish Press to President Bill Clinton fell on deaf ears when he wrote, "Now, a year ago, I went to Bosnia to see for myself what was meant by ethnic cleansing and the rape stories attributed to the Serb armies in the field.....I learned to my dismay that the rape story was a total concoction." It appears that the more outrageous the accusation of atrocities committed by Serbs, the more the people were willing to believe rumors of Serb forces having thrown 700 bodies [Kosovo Albanians} into the Trepca mine shaft in Kosovo. A three-man French Gendarmerie team were sent half a mile down the mine to search for bodies. They found nothing. It was Daniel Pearl who exposed the Trepca mine massacre as a hoax in The Wall Street Journal in 1999. No matter, the people believed and I am reminded of the quote made by Hitler in 1939, "The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." The author, Shlomo Avineri of the 3 December commentary entitled, "The Unfinished State," should also have reported that at one time there were over 80,000 Serbs living in Pristina out of a population of 350,000. Today, there are fewer than 150, mostly elderly who are too terrified of Albanian mobs to leave their ghettos in search of food without KFOR escort. Where was outrage shown for this ethnic cleansing of the Serbians? There was none, not even by our Congress who where jumping up on the floor of the House at every accusation of atrocity, alleged or manufactured, to have been committed by Serbs. The author praises Ivory Tower Yale graduate Veton Surroi, whose publication, Koha Ditore with his Albanian staff, is not exactly someone who can be called impartial nor credible because of his virulent anti-Serb editorials. Thus far, Serbian priests have been beaten and murdered, over 200 churches have been put to torch by Albanian mobs, over 250,000 Serbs have had to flee in addition to having been subjected to decapitation, rape and stabbing, not to mention "Grannies" being targeted for specifically horrific deaths, such as being drowned in bathtubs by Albanian forces (Washington Times 1999). Even the 1999 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, France's Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) or Doctors without Borders (DWB) expelled the Greek arm of DWB because the Greeks showed compassion by treating those injured or dying Serbians in Yugoslavia during NATO's bombing campaign. Apparently the Hippocratic Oath by France's Medecins Sans Frontiers stopped at the Serbian border. It was the height of arrogance for the U.S. government to send VP Joseph Biden to visit Serbia considering the egregious comment made by then Senator Biden on the Senate floor in 1999 over NATO's attack against Serbia. Biden declared "all Serbs should be placed in Nazi-style concentration camps." This disgraceful display of ethnic hatred for the Serbian people by Senator Biden should have been condemned by the entire civilized world, but was not. Virtually no mention is made of the fact that Iran had sent in mujahedin from all over the Muslim world to fight the Christian Serbs and with little attention to the fact that Osama bin Laden, the world's greatest terrorist, after having been provided a Bosnian passport in 1992 by then Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, visited Bosnia and Kosovo on three different occasions. We have jumped into bed with a bunch of narco-terrorists Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) cutthroats, many of whom were trained in Osama bin Laden's camps and who have now established their own mini-terrorist camps in Kosovo. Need I remind the readers that four of the six Fort Dix terrorists came from the Kosovo area? Furthermore, the links of the KLA to organized crime have been documented by Interpol and the US Congress. According to the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service,) Kosovo's Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci is one of three Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) kingpins who run the Albanian mafia rackets in Kosovo. Thaci is also known for eliminating anyone who crosses his ambitions. Thaci should be called what he really is, a terrorist who has taken over the baton as Kosovo's prime minister from another terrorist, Agim Ceku, who, according to Jane's Defense Weekly, was linked to two of the grisliest episodes of brutality against Serbian civilians in the Yugoslav war. Like a chapter out of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," former KLA leader, Hashim Thaci has been implicated in the harvesting of body parts of young Serbian soldiers in 1999. It was Special Envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard who said of the KLA on BBC in 1998, "I know a terrorist when I see one, and these men are terrorists." I often marvel at how so many intelligent people could have fallen prey to the disinformation and outright lies against our ally of two world wars so easily. Perhaps it can easily be explained in the July 1998 The Financial Times of London when it wrote, "Want to start a war? Better yet, want the U.S., Britain, France, NATO, the United Nations on your side? Call in the cameras....it lies in those magic initials CNN, NBC, BBC." It was a brutal civil war and instead of being honest brokers, the US took the side of the very same terrorists whom we are fighting today all over the world. And finally, one must ask the question. "If Kosovo Albanians have been ethnically cleansed as has been claimed, then why are they over 90% of the population and the Serbians, who were once the majority in their Jerusalem, fewer than 10%?" I close with the following quotes: "This organized anti-Serb and pro-Muslim propaganda should cause anyone believing in democracy and free speech serious concerns. It recalls Hitler's propaganda against the allies in World War II. Facts are twisted and, when convenient, disregarded." - Yohanan Ramati, Director of the Jerusalem Institute for Western Defense. "The gigantic campaign to brainwash America by our media against the Serbian people is just incredible, with its daily dose of one sided information and outright lies." John Ranz, Chairman of Survivors of Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA. Stella L. Jatras USA
