INTRODUCTION

"In a sign of the times, and only this week, one of Britain's most-respected (and formerly pro-European) establishment figures, former foreign secretary Lord Carrington, launched an unprecedented attack on the EU and the damage it was causing. He laid the blame for the Bosnian civil war squarely at the door of the post-Maastricht European Union, which in a desperate attempt to prove it had a common foreign policy, rushed headlong into the recognition of Bosnia with the disastrous results now seen. Indeed he went further, arguing that "international involvement . . . has caused more, and greatly prolonged, the suffering of the Yugoslavs, meant more ethnic cleansing and more casualties. " (From "A Whiff of Panic in Western Chancelleries" in the Intelligence Digest of 25 March 1994.)

What follows are one hundred irrefutable facts about the civil-religious war in former Yugoslavia. Let these facts speak for themselves. Let them show you the pattern of distortions and manipulations the world has been subjected to by the media and certain circles in our government. Let them indicate as to which events have led to the war, who played a major role in the outbreak as well as, at a later phase, the escalation of the war; let them shed light on who the real participants in this conflict are, let them reveal their aims, let them show up the unjust accusations and views about the Serbs that have hitherto dominated the media and our public debates. Let these facts, that we believe to be irrefutable, speak the truth, because only with the help of the truth will we be able to stop the terrible falsehoods which like a deadly virus have infected the very core of our foreign policy.

These facts reveal the monstrous hypocrisy and detrimental deceit present in some powerful circles. The truth must be known so that the hopes raised by the fall of Communism, for cooperation, mutual respect, peace, and stability among nations, are given a chance. Only the truth can prevent the renewed cycle of devastating wars and the victory of a morally corrupt leadership.

THE FACTS

  1. The current civil and religious war in the former Yugoslavia is but the resumption of the 1941-1945 civil war in which the Croatian Fascists, collaborators of the Nazi regime, and Muslim religious extremists murdered between 600,000 and 1,200,000 Serbs. The issues are the same, the battlefields are the same, even the flags and army insignia are the same.

  2. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia has clearly revealed the reemergence of the old geopolitical ambitions of Germany, and the revival of Germany's alliances with primitive nationalists and religious fanatics in the Balkans. For the third time in this century Germany is trying to expand its influence in this region, and for the third time it is encountering Serbian resistance.

  3. The event which triggered the Yugoslav civil and religious war was the unilateral and illegal secession of the republics of Slovenia and Croatia from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The immediate cause of war, however, was the hasty and determined international recognition first of Slovenia and Croatia and then of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which also wanted to secede from the state of Yugoslavia. International recognition was awarded to these three secessionist states without any consideration whatsoever for the almost 3 million Serbs living there, not for their equal right to self determination and not for their political and cultural rights as a national group.

  4. Serbs have lived in the Krajina (Northern Dalmatia, Lika, Kordun, Banija, and Slavonia) since their ancestors settled these territories more than 500 years ago. After hearing of Croatia's intention to hold a referendum to vote on secession from Yugoslavia, Serbs in these territories conducted their own referendum in May 1991. They voted to remain in Yugoslavia if Croatia voted to secede from it. The referendum was not acknowledged as legitimate by the Croatian government, yet Croatia demanded that its own referendum on secession, held several days later, be recognized by the Yugoslav federal government.

  5. In his visit to Belgrade on June 21, 1991, Secretary of State James Baker said that the "breakup of Yugoslavia ... could have some very tragic consequences, not only here but more broadly in Europe. We are obviously not alone in having these concerns." Nonetheless, the United States made no significant effort to prevent this breakup.

  6. Four days later, encouraged by Germany and the Vatican, Slovenia and Croatia proclaimed their secession from Yugoslavia. This was a unilateral and illegal act on the part of both republics and removed, as a result, the last chance for a peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia.

  7. Soon after Croatia declared its independence on June 25, 1991, Krajina Serbs were subjected to harsh discrimination by the Croatian government: they began to lose their jobs, their houses were destroyed, their political and cultural rights abrogated, and their national identity threatened. When in the summer of 1991 the Croatian armed forces began to threaten them, the Serb population either fled to Serbia or took up arms in self-defense. These Krajina Serbs are the children and grandchildren of the Serbs in Croatia that had been systematically persecuted and massacred by the Croat Ustashas and Muslim extremists in World War E. Confronted with the extreme aggressiveness of the Croatian state and population, the Krajina Serbs were now rising to their self- defense under the motto: "Never Again."

  8. In August 1991, in the Hungarian city of Pecs, Pope John Paul II, speaking in Croatian, urged the world to "help legitimate the aspirations of Croatia." ("Everything that has happened in Eastern Europe in the last few years would not have been possible without the presence of Pope Paul John," said Mikhail Gorbachev in an article published in Stampa of Turin on March 3, 1992.)

  9. The Vatican has an intelligence chief, Jean-Louis Tauran, an efficient diplomat, who also involved himself in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. He was, moreover, instrumental in organizing the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia.

  10. In December 1991, the U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar and his special envoy in the Yugoslav conflict Cyrus R. Vance told German Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher that the premature and selective recognition of Slovenia and Croatia would "intensify and widen the war."

  11. In Maastricht, in mid-December 1991, Germany exerted pressure on the European allies to agree to the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. The initial vote had been 11 to 1 against recognition, but Germany (a) threatened to go "alone" and (b) offered concessions on monetary issues, particularly to Great Britain. To preserve the semblance of "European unity", the eleven members who wanted to keep Yugoslavia intact reluctantly joined Germany to recognize Slovenia and Croatia as independent states.

  12. On December 25, 1991, Germany recognized Slovenia and Croatia. It did so on the very day after German Foreign Minister Genscher visited Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.

  13. Germany's recognition of Slovenia and Croatia was in direct contravention of The Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) agreed upon in 1975. Clause IV of the Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States provides that:

    "The participating states will respect the territorial integrity of each of the participating states. Accordingly they will refrain from any action . . . against the territorial integrity, political independence, or the unity of any participating state ...."

    Recognizing Slovenia and Croatia, Germany made a deliberate decision, with the connivance of the rest of the world, to violate the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia which under the Helsinki Acts was one of "the participating states." This violation proved to be one of the key reasons for the subsequent anarchic conditions and the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia.

  14. On January 13, 1992, the Vatican recognized Slovenia and Croatia. Prior to this recognition Pope John Paul II rejected many appeals to use his moral power and responsibility to encourage and inspire a climate for peaceful coexistence in Yugoslavia, in fact, he welcomed the move toward secession.

  15. In accordance with the Maastricht bargain, on January 15, 1992, the European Community recognized Slovenia and Croatia, without paying any attention to the rights and liberties of the hundreds of thousands of Serbs living in these areas, particularly in Croatia. By the stroke of a pen, these Serbs found themselves in foreign and hostile states without legal rights and protection.

  16. On January 26, 1992, the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, a Croatian Muslim, declared that he will "sacrifice peace for a sovereign Bosnia." The declaration was an outright admission of his preference for war over peace.

  17. From his early years on, Izetbegovic dedicated himself to work for the Islamic cause. In 1940, at the age of 16, he was one of the founders of the "Young Muslims," a religious, political, terrorist organization whose task was to fight with "fire and sword" for the survival of Islam in the Balkans and its expansion into Europe. In the spring of 1943, as leader of the Muslim youth in Sarajevo, he welcomed Amin -el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a well known friend of Hitler. In the same year, Izetbegovic was one of the organizers in the formation of the notorious Waffen SS "Handzar Division" (Handzar in Arabic means "to slit the throat"), consisting entirely of Bosnian Muslim volunteers. This division (peak strength 25,000), officered by Germans and wearing German uniforms and insignia, committed such atrocities against the Bosnian Serbs that even the hardened German officers were shocked. Consequently, they were withdrawn from Bosnia and sent to the Russian Eastern Front. For his activities in the "Young Muslims" organization, Izetbegovic was arrested in 1946 and spent three years in jail.

  18. In his book, The Islamic Declaration, published in 1970 and republished in Sarajevo in 1990, A. Izetbegovic makes a clear and ringing statement for the absolute validity and dominance of the Islamic religion: "There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions. ³

  19. On February 23, 1992, in Lisbon, the Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims agreed to a confederate Bosnia-Herzegovina divided into three ethnic regions.

  20. On March 10, 1992, at the European-American meeting on Yugoslavia held in Brussels, a declaration was adopted on the recognition of the Yugoslav republics (including Bosnia- Herzegovina) and a day later agreement was reached on the principles, goals, and methods of an international campaign to solve the crisis. The first principle is self-determination for each national group; the second is the inviolability of borders, i.e., they cannot be changed by force; in case of conflict between these two principles a third should be applied to ensure that disputes are settled peacefully and through international mediation. This course of action, upon which all agreed, was never implemented.

  21. On March 16, 1992, the Bosnian Serb leader R. Karadzic warned of a civil-religious war -- with hundreds of thousands dead and hundreds of towns destroyed -- at the end of which Bosnia-Herzegovina would still have to be divided into three constituent units. Many warnings similar to this have come from such well informed and knowledgeable individuals as Lord Carrington and Cyrus Vance. Evidently, none of the foreign policy makers in Germany and the United States have paid heed to them.

  22. On March 19, 1992, under the E.C. sponsorship, the leaders of the three national parties in Bosnia-Herzegovina signed a document on the future constitutional arrangement for a Bosnia-Herzegovina with three constituent nations.

  23. On March 25, 1992, Muslim leader A. Izetbegovic publicly renounced the Lisbon agreement after Warren Zimmermann, the American Ambassador to Yugoslavia, who called on him in Sarajevo, told him that the United States favored a unitary Bosnia-Herzegovina, adding: "If you don't like it, why sign it?" In this manner, the last chance to avert a full-blown civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was thrown away.

  24. On April 4, 1992, the Presidency of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, without any Serb representative taking part, decided to mobilize the territorial defense troops, police, and civilian defense.

  25. Two days later, the agreement sponsored by the E.C. on forming three constituent nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina was transgressed by the European Community. On April 6, 1992 -- the anniversary of Hitler's "Operation Punishment" when successive waves of German bomb attacks wreaked the virtual destruction of Belgrade in 1941 -- the E.C. abruptly recognized the sovereignty and independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Next day the United States, too, recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as Slovenia and Croatia.

  26. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a geographical entity. It has never been a state with defined and internationally recognized borders until the United Nations recognized it as a unitary state to be controlled by the Muslim Government of Alija Izetbegovic.

  27. The policy of Germany and the E.C. has not only been contradictory, but also highly unprincipled. First they proclaimed the multinational, multireligious Yugoslavia an artificial state that has to be dissolved. Then, almost as a corollary to the first proposition, they insisted that a multinationaL multireligious Bosnia-Herzegovina, led by a Muslim government, was a viable democratic solution. On the one hand, this claim implies that it is alright to violate the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia as inherited from Communist times, and, on the other hand, the internal borders of Yugoslavia that had been arbitrarily imposed by the Communist dictator Tito in 1945 must be treated as sacrosanct. In short, whoever else -- outside the Bosnian Muslims -lives within these borders now declared unmovable by the E.C., Germany, and the U.S., be they Croats and Catholics or be they Serbs and Orthodox, must become subject to a Muslim-led government.

  28. The administrative divisions between the six republics of the post-war Yugoslavia were secretly drawn by Croat Josip Broz Tito and a few of his key cohorts during the 1941-1945 civil war. These administrative boundaries enabled the Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Macedonians to live in their national republics. Only the Serbs, the only adversaries of Tito and communism, were denied that right so that nearly one third of them found themselves living in the republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Serbia's two autonomous provinces, Vojvodina and Kosovo-Metohija.

  29. The recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina independence by the United Nations constituted an illegal intervention in Yugoslav internal affairs, to which Yugoslavia had every right to object. It was, moreover, contrary to the existing and internationally accepted criteria of the Convention of Montevideo of 1933 for the recognition of new states: (1) a government in full control; (2) clearly established borders; and (3) a stable population. The Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic evidently did not meet these basic prerequisites to statehood; yet, it was fully recognized and supported by the West.

  30. The Austro-Hunganan census after the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 showed that Serbs (Orthodox) constituted 44 percent and Muslim 33 percent of the total population. (It is worth noting that at the time of the census there were more Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina than there were in the Kingdom of Serbia.) This balance did not change until the Second World War, when about a quarter of a million Bosnian Serbs were murdered by Croats and Muslims in the Independent State of Croatia. Of the many Serbs who fled to Serbia, only a small percentage of them returned after the war. Even at the time of the last population census (1991), after a decade of continued Serbian emigration under Muslim pressure and a large influx of Muslims from the Serbian province of Sandzak, the Muslims accounted for no more than 43 percent of the total population, with Christian Serbs and Croats making up the other 57 percent.

  31. As in World War II, the Bosnian Muslims have aligned with the Croats against the Serbs. Overnight, the more than two million Serbs have become a threatened minority in a new state, Bosnia-Herzegovina, with no constitutional guarantees for their political religious, culturaL and economic rights.

  32. On April 10, 1992, the statement of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State T. Niles frankly indicated the fact that Croats and Slovenes had taken measures which could be characterized as violent. Taking over border crossings, making preparations to expel the Yugoslav People's Army from their republics as well as a host of other forceful actions could have been accomplished through negotiations.

  33. In Lisbon on May 24, 1992, Secretary of State James Baker called for United Nations sanctions against the Government of Yugoslavia for supporting the Bosnian Serbs. He did not, however, also call for sanctions against Croatia, which supported and directed Croatian nationalists in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  34. Three days after the Lisbon meeting, on May 27, 1992, eighteen civilians of Sarajevo, among them a number of Serbs, who had lined up for bread on Vase Miskina Street were killed by an explosion. The Muslim government claimed that it was a Serb mortar attack and the Serbs deny this, accusing the Muslim government of a set-up using ground explosives. The one clear fact about the incident is that the wounds sustained indicated without question the use of ground explosives. To date the world still does not know who the perpetrators of this heinous crime are. The U.N. report on this incident is still classified and unavailable to the world. To date the media and the West, although aware of the many unresolved questions about the incident, still refer to the "breadline massacre" by the Serbs.

  35. Three days later, on May 30, 1992, brushing aside the urgent appeals by the Serbs for a delay, the United Nations Security Council, pressed by the United States and an aroused American public, voted 13 to 0 to impose tough economic sanctions on the Yugoslav government. Yugoslavia's U.N. Ambassador was denied a hearing by the Security Council, which also refused to make public the report on the breadline massacre it received from the U.N. Protection Forces in Sarajevo. Today, almost two years after the incident, that report is still classified.

  36. A few days later the Muslim President of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alija Izetbegovic, asserted that he would "only accept outside military intervention or death for his' people." To this day, Izetbegovic is trying to persuade the world to intervene militarily in the current civil and religious war in Bosnia- Herzegovina.

  37. The visit to Sarajevo by Sir Douglas Hurd, the British Foreign Secretary, on July 17, 1992 is a good example of the way the media has been reporting the news on the Bosnian conflict. What actually happened was as follows: When Sir Douglas arrived at the Presidency, ten to fifteen of the Muslim Territorial Defense forces (TDF) stood on each side of the building's entrance as a sort of honor guard. Once he had entered the main door, the entire group of the TDF took cover behind the building. Thirty seconds later, ten mortar rounds landed immediately across the street from the Presidency, and seven innocent citizens were killed or seriously maimed. A pre-positioned pair of ambulances and the local television cameramen on the east side of the building rushed to the scene of tragedy, collected and filmed the dead and wounded, and moved off in the direction of the Kosevo hospital.

    This is how Craig R. Whitney of the New York Times describes this incident in a "special" from London, titled Factions in Bosnia Xccept U.N. Custody of Weapons:

    "... The agreement signed separately by leaders of all three factions calls for the fighting to stop at 6 p.m. on Sunday. Serbian forces around the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, showed no sign today of a letup in their bombardment of the city during a visit by the British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd. A mortar exploded near the site of his talks with the country's Muslim President, wounding 15 people." (The New York Times, July 18, 1992.)

  38. On September 6, 1992, in a move that expanded the civil-religious war to three sides, Croatian forces broke with the mostly Muslim Government. The E.C. and the U.S. remained silent to this dangerous escalation of the conflict.

  39. On September 10, 1992, an Iranian Air Force cargo plane secretly unloaded an estimated 4,000 machine guns and 1 million rounds of ammunition at a Croatian airport in an apparent attempt by the fundamentalist Islamic state to smuggle weapons to the Muslim forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There were many such attempts at circumventing the U.N. arms embargo in the region. The western intelligence estimates that over $2 billion worth of arms have been smuggled into Croatia and Bosnia.

  40. On September 23, 1992, after the U.S., Germany, and their allies had orchestrated certain procedures, the Security Council of the United Nations, violating its own rules, expelled Yugoslavia from the General Assembly for the duration of 1992 and thereafter.

  41. By the end of 1992, Serbia had taken in some 600,000 of the more than two million refugees resulting from the Balkan civil war thus far! Moreover, Serbia placed 96 percent of all these refugees in the private lodgings of Serbian families -- a development almost without precedent, relief officials say. Most but not all of them are Serbs fleeing the "ethnic cleansing" carried out against them by Muslims and Croats. The United States and the European Community are steadfastly denying Serbia the additional aid that they are granting BaLkan refugees. Furthermore, the world public is kept unawares of these suffering refugees, most of whom are women, old men, and children.

  42. On December 3, 1992, the conflict between Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina was adopted by Islamic fundamentalists as the newest holy war against Christian infidels bent on the destruction of Islam. In the few weeks before December 1992, the conflict lured several hundred militants, many of them veterans of the war in Afghanistan, to join the Bosnian forces. The E.C. and the U.S. have never officially or publicly censured this aggressive act.

  43. In an effort to sully the reputation of Serbian doctors, a member of the German parliament, Stephen Swartz, claimed in his speech in the German Parliament that in vivo experiments have been carried out "by Serbian physicians on Muslim women." As an illustration of such experiments, Mr. Swartz asserted that, based on statements by an unidentified Croat lady doctor, the autopsy of a Muslim woman had revealed a dog's embryo which Serbian doctors allegedly had implanted in her uterus after abortion.

    These ghastly and totally unverified claims by a member of the German parliament -- obviously intended to satanize the Serbs, in this instance, Serbian physicians -- were reported toward the end of December 1992 by the German newspaper "Bild am Sontag" and the Dutch papers "Haagache Courant" and "Folkskrant."

  44. A well-financed Croat-Muslim lobby and its public relations operatives unleashed a vicious anti-Serbian campaign, falsely blaming Serbian soldiers of raping some 60,000 Muslim women. Prompted by these media allegations, a team of European Community investigators reported on January 8, 1993 that they estimated that 20,000 Muslim women had been raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers in recent months as part of a deliberate pattern of abuse aimed at driving them from their homes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  45. Under the leadership of the Special Rapporteur Tadeusz Mazowiecki, and pursuant to the Commission on Human Rights resolution 1922/s-1/1 and 1922/s-2/1, a second commission of inquiry went to Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia to investigate the rape reports under the larger umbrella of a general human rights investigation. For that investigation an international team of medical experts was assembled who met with physicians and examined medical records. This was the first attempt by an impartial body to seek actual evidence. Their report was submitted as Annex II of the larger report E/CN.4/1993/50 February 10, 1993. Based on their evidence, approximately 2,400 women, Muslim, Serb, and Croat had been raped.

  46. On January 29, 1994, the Secretary General of the United Nations issued a report to the U.N. on the current status of the investigation on the issue of rapes by the Commission of Experts. The experts who went to Sarajevo received from the Bosnian Government all of the data available on rapes. The Muslim Government was able to provide data on exactly 126 cases. Yet, the Western media and even some official Western governments continue to propagate the story that 60,000 Muslim women were raped by the Serbs.

  47. On January 25, 1993, Western naval forces intercepted a large shipment of weapons bound for the Bosnian Government. The ship contained surface-to-surface rockets, Chinese-made pistols, and ammunition for Kalashnikov rifles and Toyota jeeps, all believed to have been shipped from Iran. No one has yet proposed that the arms embargo on Bosnia-Herzegovina be tightened and that surveillance includes the Muslim states shipping arms on a regular basis.

  48. On February 9, 1993, Czech daily Rude Pravo carried a story from the German newspaper Sueddoutsche Zeitung about Ruth Suesmuth, the president of the German parliament, who went to a hospital in Donja Stubica, Croatia, to visit with 85 Croatian women who were allegedly raped by Serbian soldiers. She carried with her a check for 185,000 German Marks she was going to give these women, but was surprised to find there instead only Croatian soldiers on medical treatment. On her return to Bonn Mrs. Suesmuth said that she would demand an explanation for the misleading information given by the Cap Anamur charity foundation.

  49. On March 30, 1993, a military court imposed on two Serbs death sentences by firing squad after they were found guilty of having gone on a killing and raping rampage while serving in the Serbian national army in Bosnia. The trial received the greatest attention by the Western media and government officials.

    One of the defendants was Borislav Herak whose confession of having committed 35 killings and 16 rapes was the centerpiece of the trial. The other defendant, Sretko Damjanovic, protested his innocence: "I know I have been unfairly condemned. "

    In reaching its verdict, the court appeared to have accepted as true - despite the lack of corroborating evidence -- the account Herak first gave to investigators within days of his arrest. Later, the court found him to be mentally incompetent and his case was dismissed because of his mythomania. The New York Times and other leading Western media used this trial, which by all accounts had been staged, as an opportunity for a new wave of Serbophobic reporting. Once again, the Serbs were being held responsible for every act of aggression and every transgression of internationally accepted human standards.

  50. One of the key reporters covering the Herak trial was John Burns who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for the quality of reporting on the conflict in Bosnia. While ostensibly covering the war in a fair manner, that is, from the perspective of all sides, Burns actually,r lived within the presidential quarters of the Bosnian-Muslim government and during August 1992 in the personal bunker of Bosnian Vice-President Ejup Ganic, where he received and processed exclusively all of the information on the war. Of the dozens of articles on the civil and religious war in Bosnia- Herzegovina that Burns wrote, virtually all of them blamed either directly or by implication, the Bosnia Serbs for incidents of aggression and virtually none presented the full picture from all sides as required by objective reporting.

  51. In the case of the Herak trial for example, Burns totally ignored the centerpiece of Borislav Herak's confession of November 26, 1992. Burns, like the York Times itself, expediently omitted the part of Borislav Herak's confession on November 26, 1992 in which Herak made the spectacular accusation against &e then-UNPROFOR General MacKenzie, claiming that he, Herak, personally witnessed MacKenzie rape captive Muslim females at Sonja's motel.

  52. With respect to other foreign correspondents in former Yugoslavia, many have complained that their reports are being tampered with in the home bureaus. Editors make changes in their reports to reflect an anti-Serbian bias.

  53. On April 12, 1993, winding up nearly 19 months as a peace negotiator in the Balkan conflict, Cyrus R. Vance said that the "premature" recognition of the independence of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina by the European Community and the United States brought about the war that is. going on now.

  54. On April 24, 1993, in an interview with a French journalist, James Harff, the Director for Public Affairs of the Ruder & Finn public relations firm in Washington, D.C. bragged about his efforts on behalf of Tudjman's Croatia and Izetbegovic's Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina, both well-known for their very real and cruel anti-Semitism. His greatest achievement, Harff said, was to move Jewish intellectuals and the three major Jewish organizations -- B'nai B'rth And-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American-Jewish Congress -from being hostile to Croats and Muslims, to becoming active participants in their campaign to defame the Serbs with slanderous claims about Serbian death camps, mass rapes of Muslim and Croatian women, and ethnic cleansing.

  55. It has become customary for the world to accuse and condemn the Serbs for -- allegedly -- running "death camps." This accusation has turned out to be yet another one of the concocted stories, spread around by the Croats and Muslims in their "public relation" campaigns against the Serbs. Upon inspections, the "death camps" turned out to be some empty dwellings used for temporary detention of captured Muslim and Croat soldiers. The inspectors of those detention camps found no proof of tortured or killed war prisoners and no torture cellars and gas chambers. Comparing those war prisoner camps to German death camps in World war II is a grievous insult to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

    What the world had not been told about or offered to see on television were the detention camps where Croats kept Serbs and Muslims, and those where Muslims kept Croats and Serbs. Here is what the Special Rapporteur for Human Rights on the territories of former Yugoslavia, Tadeusz Mazoviecki, says in his 1994 report:

    "... As of December 31, 1993, there were 5,500 detainees on the 'active' register. According to reliable estimates around 40 per cent of detainees are held by Bosnian Croat authorities, 25 per cent by the Government, 13 per cent by the Bosnian Serbs and the remainder by the forces of the so-called 'autonomous' province of western Bosnia.

    "The HVO Bosnian Croat forces] continues to detain Bosnian Serbs and Muslims for labor at the front line and as human shields.... An appalling variant on the practice was reported during November 1993 whereby, at Novi Travnik, two detained Muslims were forced to carry remote-controlled explosives and to walk across the front line until they reached the midst of the government troops, when the explosives were detonated.

    "... The conditions in which detainees are held by the Government is a serious cause for concern. In particular, the

    Special Rapporteur is aware of appalling conditions in the detention camps at Bugojno and Jablanica. At Bugojno detainees are held in a sports stadium in unsanitary and cramped conditions, without light, access to bedding or physical exercise. Conditions are no better at Jablanica where many civilians are held. Among the detainees are a number suffering from psychiatric illnesses." (s/19941265, Pages 10 and 11.)

    " . . . Only a small proportion of the registered detainees were believed to be prisoners-of-war. The others were civilians of Bosnian Serb or Bosnian Croat origin, detained in order to provide a pool of prisoners to exchange for Bosnian Muslims held as prisoners-of-war, or for use on the front-line as forced labor, or to protect the army's advance as 'human shields.'"

    (s/26765, Page 8.)

  56. On May 10, 1993, a U.N. relief official accused Bosnian Croat forces of conducting a deliberately cruel campaign to expel Muslims from the city of Mostar. "The siege of Mostar," according to Lord Owen, "has been more vicious and more lives per head of population have been lost than in Sarajevo, " a fact which has never been publicized in the West.

  57. On August 4, 1993, Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, addressed a letter to their fellow Jews in America, protesting the involvement of Jewish organizations and leading Jewish personalities for their condemnations and slanderous attacks on the Serbian people in former Yugoslavia. "It is incomprehensible to us that Jewish institutions and Jews in the world, who have themselves for thousands of years been the victims of prejudice, exile, and annihilation, would participate in a racist pogrom of the same nature against the Serbs. Nothing can excuse Jewish involvement in such a campaign. "

  58. On October 26, 1993, masked Croat soldiers massacred possibly 80 Muslims in the central Bosnian village of Stupni Do over the weekend; many residents were still missing after the attack ended. A Danish truck driver died and nine U.N. workers were wounded when U.N. convoys were caught in cross-fire between Croats and Muslims in the same region. While this massacre was officially confirmed, neither the E.C. nor the U.S. followed up with any official condemnation of these crimes nor with any plans to punish the Bosnian Croats.

  59. In one of the biggest attacks in months in central Bosnia, on November 16, 1993, Croat soldiers, backed by artillery barrages of 10 shells a minute, battled yesterday to sever a key Muslim-held supply road. An estimated 4,000 Croat troops were trying to cut the road between Gornji Vakuf and Prozor, about 40 miles west of Sarajevo, thus demonstrating again that the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a war between Serbs on the one hand and Muslims and Croats on the other -as the E.C., U.S., and U.N. are claiming -- but a civil and religious war in which each party is fighting against the other two.

  60. On January 3, 1994, faced with Muslim advances against their separatist proxy militia in central Bosnia, leaders of the Croatian government were threatening direct military intervention. "If the interests of the Croat people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are threatened, Croatia will become involved directly to protect its own interests and the interests of the Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina," defense minister Gojko Susak said. The fact is, however, that Croatia was directly involved all along, with impunity and apparent disregard for potential reprisals by the E.C. and U.S.

  61. On January 7, 1994, according to U.N. officials it was the Bosnian Government's mostly Muslim army that caused this week's surge in street fighting in Sarajevo which led to retaliatory Serbian artillery bombardments. This was a pattern that became established right at the beginning of hostilities between Muslims and Serbs.

  62. On January 14, 1994, Belgian Lt. Gen. Francis Brikuemont, the outgoing commander of U.N. troops in Bosnia, launched a scathing verbal assault against Croatia for what he claimed was the direct involvement of its army in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He also lambasted the Muslim government for attempting to use U.N. "safe areas" as a platform for attacks against the Serbs in the surrounding areas. The general reserved his sole praise for Bosnian Serb forces - widely held to be the main aggressors in this 21-month-old conflict -- because, he claimed, they lived up to their agreements with the U.N. Protection Force. Briquemont went so far as to call for an easing of an international embargo against the new Serbian-led two-republic Yugoslavia.

  63. On January 24, 1994, the United States and France clashed openly over a French request that the Clinton Administradon pressure the Bosnian government to accept a European peace plan dividing Bosnia and Herzegovina along ethnic lines. "If the Americans do not convince the Bosnian Muslims that they must stop fighting and that there is no chance that the United States would come to their rescue, then the United States will give them incentives to pursue the fighting on the ground. It would be a catastrophe. And we say to our American friends that they will be responsible for this."

  64. On January 28, 1994, Bosnia's government appealed to the United Nations Security Council to take action against neighboring Croatia, accusing it of mounting an invasion. A confidential United Nations report appeared to support the Bosnian contention. Still, on the very same day the General Secretary Boutros Boutros- Ghali told the Security Council of the U.N. that he was ready to call for NATO air strikes against the Serbs, while letting the Croats proceed waging war with impunity.

  65. On January 31, 1994, as fighting in central Bosnia intensified because the Muslims continued to reject the peaceful solution, the chief U.N. mediator in the former Yugoslavia told the Security Council that while Serbs, Croats, and Muslims were closer than they had ever been to a peace agreement on paper, the Muslims effectively sabotaged the last round of Geneva peace talks in January. He also suggested that the Bosnian government wanted the Security Council to maintain its crippling trade embargo against Serbia.

  66. Report for February 5, 1994: A mortar shell exploded in the jammed central market of Sarajevo on Saturday, allegedly killing at least 66 people and wounding more than 200 others in the worst such incident in the 22-month siege of Sarajevo. International condemnation of the attack attributed to the Serbs came immediately. President Clinton called for an urgent U.N. investigation. In Washington, White House officials raised the possibility of NATO air strikes once responsibility for the attack in the Sarajevo marketplace had been determined. "We rule nothing out," Clinton said in a statement.

    By luck or otherwise, Peter Jennings of the ABC Television Network and his cameraman were on the scene on the very day it happened. To reinforce the accusation that the Serbs were the guilty party, he falsely informed his viewers that a recent UNPROFOR investigation had established that it was the Serbs who were responsible for the breadline massacre in Sarajevo on May 27, 1992.

    Also by some coincidence, John F. Burns of The New York Times refereed to the same "recent" report a month earlier on January 10, 1994 on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour television program. Asked by the interviewer whether it was not true that the Muslims were responsible for the breadline massacre in 1992, Mr. Burns replied that was absolutely false, and went on to claim that there had been a recent U.N. investigation that proved that the mortar shell came from the Serb position in the hills some 17,000 feet away.

    When Mr. Sergio Vicira de Mello, Head of the Civil Affairs, UNPROFOR, Zagreb, was asked whether such a report, regarding the breadline massacre, indeed existed, he replied:

    "We are not aware of any UNPROFOR reports having been completed recently regarding the massacre. UNPROFOR has not been in a position to establish with certitude the responsibility for this incident.

    In order to clarify the media report you referred to, we have tried to contact Mr. Peter Jennings in Sarajevo. Unfortunately, we have not been successful so far."

    The same question was put to Ms. Jane Gaffney of the Press Office for Peacekeeping Operations at the U.N. in New York. Her reply was that she was not aware of any recent study of the breadline massacre. She added that the only report the United Nations has is the report that was made immediately after the massacre had occurred. That report is still classified.

  67. One day later, on February 6, 1994, U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali urged NATO to approve air strikes on Serbian positions in Bosnia, hours after President Clinton sidestepped pressures to retaliate for the shelling that allegedly killed 68 people in a Sarajevo marketplace. He knew, of course, from reports he had received, that there was no evidence that the Serbs were responsible for the massacre. He knew that:

    -- no single mortar shell could be either as destructive or as accurate;

    -- no known artillery projectile has the capability to kill so many people, even when gathered in a finite space, while leaving the site itself virtually intact;

    - TV material had shown human-size dummies being manipulated on the market place;

    -- witnesses had heard no whistle characteristic of mortar shells before explosion;

    ‹the dead were buried with undue speed and without any autopsies through which to confirm the presence of shell fragments in the bodies;

    -- all of the wounded were dispersed at once, preventing media to question them as eye-witnesses;

    -- the site of the massacre was located in the section of Sarajevo inhabited by the Serbs and Croats and seldom frequented by the Muslims;

    -- ballistic and pathological investigation has been rejected by the Muslim Government.

  68. The Bosnian Serbs had accepted the proposal for the U.N. administration and demilitarization of Sarajevo before the carnage at the Sarajevo market on February 5, 1994 as well as before the NATO ultimatum.

  69. The Bosnian Muslim Government, as it has demonstrated on many occasions, is against the administration and pacification of Sarajevo by the United Nations.

  70. In early 1994, after nearly two years of armed hostilities between Bosnian Croats, Muslims, and Serbs, U.S. officials were considering the formation of a state based on a federation of two of the three combatants. In their view such a federation would constitute a key building block for peace in the divided republic.

  71. The Bosnian Government and Croat separatists signed a peace agreement on March 1, 1994 to form a federated state. U.S. Officials hailed this as a significant step toward ending two years of fighting‹some of the bloodiest occurring in Bosnia- Herzegovina. The Croats agreed to withdraw tanks and thousands of soldiers of Croatia's regular army from Bosnia-Herzegovina. These tanks and soldiers had been tolerated by the E.C., U.N., and U.S. for two years in clear violation of the U.N embargo and international understandings.

  72. The role and policies of the German Government have been crucial in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, prompting even U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to declare in 1993 that "Germany was very responsible" for the civil war in Yugoslavia.

  73. There have been comparisons between the Yugoslav conflict and the Holocaust on varied occasions. They are gross oversimplifications and trivializations of the World War II Holocaust. These comparisons have been made most frequently by Islamic groups with the obvious intent to propagandize against the Serbs and win the sympathies of the West.

  74. Between 1992 and 1994 Iran and other Islamic countries smuggled large quantities of arms to Bosnian Muslims despite the U.N. embargo.

  75. The ethnic cleansing of Serbs in the former Yugoslavia began in April 1941 when the Catholic and Muslim fascists proclaimed the creation of the Independent State of Croatia and declared war on the United States of America. Their plan to get rid of the over two million Serbs living in what is today Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was described on July 22, 1941 by the Minister for Education and Religion, Dr. Mile Budak:

    "We shall kill some of the Serbs, we shall expel others, and the remainder will be forced to embrace the Roman-Catholic faith."

    The killing work by the Catholic and Muslim Ustashas began in the summer of 1941. They slaughtered, beheaded, chopped to pieces, ripped apart, roasted alive, hanged, drowned, bombed, cremated, gassed, starved to death Serbian men, women, and children; many thousands of them, while still alive, were thrown into bottomless pits and abysses. The exact number of those who perished so horrible a death is not known. Estimates range from 600,000 to 1,200,000. These same Croat and Muslim Ustashas also killed about 30,000 Jews and 26,000 Gypsies. The number of Serbs who managed to escape to Serbia is about 200,000. These and subsequent killings and expulsion of Serbs by the Croats and Muslims have permanently altered the demographic structure of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

    The killings and forcible expulsions of Serbs and large-scale destruction of Serbian properly, wherever Serbs lived outside Serbia, have never been acknowledged by the Croats. Unlike Germany and Austria, Croatia has never made restitutions or even apologized to its Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy victims.

  76. Fifty years later, after it unilaterally seceded from Yugoslavia in 1991, Croatia destroyed all traces and records of Jasenovac, one of the most notorious death camps in Europe. It is estimated that in this camp alone more than half a million Serbs, 30,000 Jews, and 26,000 Gypsies were slaughtered by the Croatians during the 19411945 period. This is but one of the many efforts by the Croats and their supporters to revise the history of World War II.

  77. Tito's favorite method of punishing the Serbs, whom he hated personally and discriminated against officially, was to allow the Croats and Muslims to rid their territories of Serbs by depriving them of their political, cultural, religious, and human rights. The number of Serbs and others who were ethnically cleansed from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during Tito's rule, 1945-1881, are:

    SerbsOthersTotal
    From Croatia121,37665,201186,577
    From Bosnia-Herzegovina205,54256,311261,853
    Total326,918121,512448,430

  78. Expelling Serbs during the past three years of the civil war has continued unabated, although it is hardly ever reported. The total number of Serbs and others who were ethnically cleansed from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1991 to 1993:

    SerbsOthersTotal
    455,00048,000503,000

  79. A large number of religious structures of Serbian Orthodoxy have been vandalized and destroyed in this war. This fact, too, is rarely, if at all, mentioned in the western media. Serbian churches, monasteries, chapels, episcopal residences, and graveyards destroyed or damaged:

    In Croatia, 1991 to 1994DestroyedDamagedTotal
    Churches and monasteries7094164
    Chapels9918
    Parochial and church buildings342963
    Graveyards11

    In Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992 to 1994DestroyedDamagedTotal
    Churches and monasteries7256128
    Chapels415
    Parochial and church buildings311234
    Graveyards17

  80. The sanctions imposed against Serbia and Montenegro are the most severe sanctions imposed on any nation in modern times. In addition to the trade embargo, the sanctions prohibit all cultural, scientific, and sports exchanges. This embargo has been coupled with the tightest system of enforcement which, in effect, has prohibited even the humanitarian and medical aid permitted by the U.N. to reach Serbia and Montenegro. But the sanctions have:

    -- failed in their stated objective to stop the war and weaken the regime of Slobodan Milosevic;

    -- caused thousands of deaths and brought on untold suffering to tens of thousands of innocent people, particularly the old, the children, and the refugees from the war-torn former Yugoslavia;

    -- ruined the middle class and weakened the democratic opposition;

    -- badly hurt the economies of the neighboring countries in South eastern and Eastern Europe.

    One reason for the severity of these sanctions is that they are coordinated by the U.N. Sanctions Committee, most of whose members are Americans and Muslims.

  81. On March 5, 1994, former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker admitted that the United States had made a mistake by its premature recognition of the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina from the former Yugoslavia. Asked why the Bush administration did it, Baker said they feared that a civil war would otherwise break out. The problem was, Baker said, that Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina used military force rather than peaceful negotiations to achieve their independence.

  82. After the formation of the Croat-Muslim federation, the Bosnian Muslim Army Commander Gen. Rasim Delic threatened Bosnian Serbs with new military operations on March 5, 1994. He explained that in view of the military accord with the Bosnian Croats, several army brigades, until now engaged at the Croatian front, had been released and were to be sent to fight "the Serb enemy." Like the Muslim Army Commander, the Muslim military in Sarajevo, controlled by the Islamic fundamentalists, has also consistently sought war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and, furthermore, has tried to provoke the United Nations to intervene militarily on its side. The most recent of these Bosnian Muslim attempts at foreign intervention has prompted U.N. Lieutenant General Sir Michael Rose to explicitly state that "they want us to fight their war for them."

  83. On March 7, 1994, a series of Muslim offensives were launched against Serb positions and villages in the region of Doboj, around Mount Ozren, Gorazde, and Cajnice. These aggressive military activities carried out long after Gorazde had been declared a "safe haven," shortly after the siege of Sarajevo had been lifted, and at a time when the entire world had high hopes that a fair and just resolution of the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina was about to be achieved.

  84. On March 13, 1994, President of the Bosnian Serb Republic R. Karadzic ordered the Bosnian Serb army to abstain from responding to provocations during the Muslim holiday Bairam (March 13 and 14).

  85. On Monday night, March 21, 1994, Bosnian Croats torched the last Mosque in the central Bosnian town of Zepca, regardless of their agreement signed with the Muslims three days earlier in Washington to form a binational federation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This and similar acts by the Croats reinforce the doubt that the Croat-Muslim federation can survive for very long.

  86. The Muslims in Bosnia are abusing the U.N. protected "safe areas" by turning them into military strongholds from which they try to undermine the Serb state, using all available means.

  87. On March 31, 1994, Bosnian Serbs, chafing from diplomatic pressure and angry about increased attacks by the Muslim Army which had been going on for weeks before the very eyes of the U.N. observers, have stepped up their counter-assault on Gorazde, a Muslim enclave in eastern Bosnia.

  88. On April 9, 1994, U.N. Secretary General Boutros-Ghali called on the Bosnian Serbs to give up all the territory they have gained in this month's offensive against the besieged Muslim enclave of Gorazde and did not rule out airstrikes if they did not comply.

  89. With NATO's, bombing of Serb positions around Gorazde (April 10 and 11, 1994) the United States, United Nations, and NATO became participants in and, in effect, took the side of the Bosnian Muslims in the two-year-old civil and religious war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

  90. On April 17, 1994, in a BBC TV interview, Lord Carrington, former chairman and mediator of the E.C. Conference on Yugoslavia, said U.N.'s virtual involvement in the civil war against Bosnian Serbs "was madness" and stressed that the U.N. did everything the wrong way in trying to restore peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  91. On April 19, 1994, the French public was told for the first time that the confusion regarding Gorazde is being created by false information being broadcasted by Muslim-controlled Sarajevo radio. The commentator of the "France-2" TV station said that this Muslim controlled radio intentionally dramatized events in Gorazde in an attempt to set off a western military intervention against the Serbs.

  92. The date April 20, 1994 is significant for several coincidental events: Bosnian President Karadzic pointed out that the Muslims had provoked the latest conflicts by launching an offensive from their Gorazde enclave a month ago, and that it was only when their offensive failed miserably that they remembered that Gorazde was a so-called protected area. The international community should have wondered, Karadzic added, what a Muslim army division in full war gear had been doing in a "safe area" in the first place.

  93. On April 20, 1994, U.N. spokesman J. Sills said that there was still no cease-fire in Gorazde, because the Muslims stationed there were still firing on Bosnian Serbs, who were occasionally shooting back. Sills also said that the Muslims show no inclination to accept the latest offer hammered out by the Bosnian Serbs and the UNPROFOR.

  94. On April 20, 1994, in a speech delivered to Iranian soldiers, Iranian religious leader Ayatollah A. Khamenei ordered Iranian soldiers of the regular army to be prepared to go to Bosnia-Herzegovina to "defend Muslims from Serb attacks. "

  95. On April 20, 1994, President Clinton appealed to the American public, Russia, and the European allies to support his call for a major expansion of NATO's military role in trying to stop the fighting in Bosnia. Despite clear evidence of Muslim military attacks on Serb positions, President Clinton said NIt was time for the United States and its allies to make the Serbs 'pay a higher- price' for continued violence."

  96. On April 21, 1994, in a letter sent to the leaders of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security CounciL calling on them to use their influence to bring about an immediate cease-fire in the entire Bosnia-Herzegovina, President of the Republic of Srpska Karadzic said:

    -- The time to act is now.

    -- The Serbs have in the past unilaterally declared cease-fires, but the Muslims are not interested in cease-fires.

    -- The international community, in its attempt to achieve a balance of power on the ground, is merely prolonging the conflict.

    -- Sanctions and threats against the Serbs encourage the Muslims to stay on the war path.

    -- Western countries are repeatedly stating that their approach to the conflict has been mistaken, yet the same mistakes are now being made again, thus compounding the problems of war.

    -- We believe that the only way to attain peace immediately is to make the whole of the former Bosnia-Herzegovina a safe area, taking into account that there are two realities there: the Muslim-Croat federation, and the Republic of Srpska.

    -- A general cessation of hostilities cannot prejudice the outcome of political negotiations. An end to the war is possible only through political agreement. A political agreement is only possible in the absence of fighting. A general cessation of hostilities is thus the only way forward to peace.

  97. On April 24, 1994, several hundred Serb civilians from villages around Gorazde returned to their villages from which they had been expelled by Muslim forces earlier in the war. UNPROFOR, whose troops are being deployed along lines separating Serb and Muslim forces, have guaranteed safety to the Serb villagers. Upon their return, the expelled Serb civilians found devastation, as Muslims had razed and burned down their houses and other buildings.

  98. On April 25, 1994, deadly Muslim sniper bullets in Gorazde directed against Serbs and hitting a Serb soldier conferring with Ukrainian peacekeepers, symbolized the unabating intentions of the Muslims to violently provoke the Serbs.

  99. On April 26, 1994, the special correspondent of the French television channel ³TF-1" in Sarajevo admitted that the figures given by the Muslims, humanitarian organizations, and western media for Muslim casualties in Gorazde, 700 dead and nearly 2,000 wounded Muslims, were grossly inflated. He added that only several dozens of seriously wounded Muslims had been evacuated from Gorazde. The "TF-1" special correspondent also said that neither U.N. spokesmen nor humanitarian workers could explain how several hundreds of dead and wounded Muslims from Gorazde were able to suddenly disappear without trace.

  100. On April 29, 1994, two U.N. officials, a general, and a civilian, accused the United States of prolonging the war in Bosnia. They said that Muslims had orchestrated their defeat in Gorazde in the hope that NATO warplanes, reacting to pressure from the United States, would help lift the Serb siege. They also indicated that the extent of the destructions of the city and of the killing and wounding of civilians in the past month has been grossly exaggerated by the U.N. officials stationed in Gorazde. Their comments reflected an overwhelming feeling on the part of the U.N. officials in Sarajevo that the greatest impediment to peace has been the flawed policy of the United States. The aim of this policy has been the establishment of the unitary Muslim state of Bosnia Herzegovina, an aim that has been the very cause of the two-year long civil and religious war in this region.