This page originates from:  

The articles collected by: Mr. Benjamin Crocker Works, Director
SIRIUS: The Strategic Issues Research Institute
www.siri-us.com
E-mail: BenWorks@aol.Com
The original page is at: Sirius Kosovo Archive ***

ARCHIVE: Cleansing of Serbs in Krajina and Bosnia

April 20, 1999

Note: This archive, intended for research purposes, contains copyrighted material intended "for fair use only."

1. NY Times, Mar. 21, 1999; War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Army 'Cleansed' Serbs
2. National Post (Ottawa), April 9, 1999; Ethnic Cleansing in Krajina
3. Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.); Fatal Flaws in Nato's Yugoslavia Intervention
4. Toronto Sun, Nov. 1, 1998; The Medak Massacre: Canadaâs trial by fire
5. Foreign Policy Journal Winter 93/94; Peter Brock, The Partisan Press
6. April 14, 1994 Letter from Herb Brin, Heritage Southwest, Jewish Press
7. Living Marxism, April 1997: George Kenney, How Media Misinformation Led to Bosnia Intervention
8. The Sunday Times (London), April 18, 1999; LtGen Michael Rose on Krajina-Bosnia Deal

This file is the first archive designed to begin to correct the record after so much propaganda aimed at demonizing the Serb people and their leaders has swamped our senses all these years.

About 90% of the atrocities attributed to the Serbs did not happen; what did were largely local acts of passion, as opposed to systematic or as policy. Concentration camps and rape camps never existed. Video tape exists demonstrating how the scrawny fellow in the infamous "concentration camp" at Trnopolje was filmed by a large group of reporters from inside the wire surrounding a storage shed at an unfenced refugee center. I have one copy and provided another to FoxNews.

Here in Astoria, Queens, I've had a few drinks with Osman, a "survivor" of another alleged concentration-death camp. He worked here with Milos R, a Serb from Dubica, In TV footage and around New York, I've seen and heard things most propagandists and reporters didn't want me to see and hear

The reduction of Srebrenica, the event which triggered the NATO air intervention in the summer of 1995, was vastly different than presented in the Western Press, as borne out by the International Committee of the Red Cross Report #37 of 1995 and other accounts yet to be received.

The letter of Lt. Gen Satish Nambiar, an early UN commander in Bosnia, reflects the off-the-record experience of a number of UN officers from Britain, France and Canada who found the Serbs to be straight-talkers and bound by a sense of honor, in a situation where the other sides --Croat and Bosnian-- were pulling every trick in the book and blaming the results on the Serbs (Article #3). Lt. Gen Sir Michael Rose, writing about the ongoing Kosovo bombing crisis, adds insight to why Krajina was cleansed and why the Bosnian war ended as it did (Article #8). Other military leaders, bound by variations of "official secrets" acts, remain silent as politicians continue the cover-up and subterfuge.

More material will be added to this and other archives as received.

Benjamin Works

By RAYMOND BONNER

WASHINGTON -- Investigators at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, have concluded that the Croatian army carried out summary executions, indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations and "ethnic cleansing" during a 1995 assault that was a turning point in the Balkan wars, according to tribunal documents.

The investigators have recommended that three Croatian generals be indicted, and a U.S. official said last week that the indictments could come within a few weeks.

The indictments would be the first of Croatian army officers for actions in the Balkan wars of 1991 to 1995, which first pitted an independence-seeking Croatia against rebel Serbs and Serbia proper, and then moved to Bosnia.

Any indictment of Croatian army generals could prove politically troublesome for the Clinton administration, which has a delicate relationship with Croatia, a U.S. ally with a poor human rights record in preserving the peace in Bosnia.

The August 1995 Croatian offensive, which drove some 100,000 Serbs from a large swath of Croatia over four days, was carried out with the tacit blessing of the United States by a Croatian army that had been schooled in part by a group of retired U.S. military officers. Questions remain about the full extent of U.S. involvement.

In the course of the three-year investigation into the assault, the United States has failed to provide critical evidence requested by the tribunal, according to tribunal documents and officials, adding to suspicion among some there that Washington is uneasy about the investigation.

Two senior Canadian military officers, for example, who were in Croatia during the offensive, testified that the assault, which saw some 3,000 shells rain down on the city of Knin over 48 hours, was indiscriminate and targeted civilians.

The Pentagon, however, has argued through U.S. lawyers at the tribunal that the shelling was a legitimate military activity, according to tribunal documents and officials. And U.S. officials have repeatedly maintained that they have provided full cooperation with the tribunal.

A spokesman for the Croatian Ministry of Defense denied that any war crimes or other illegal acts were committed during the offensive, which the Croatians dubbed Operation Storm.

To date, the war crimes tribunal, set up by the United Nations in 1993, has indicted 83 people, most of them Serbs. Its chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, will ultimately decide whether the indictments should be issued.

The investigators have also recently begun looking into whether the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman, should be held responsible under international law for his role in the assault, tribunal and U.S. officials said.

At the same time, the investigators have stepped up an inquiry focusing on Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader, who is widely seen as the architect of the Balkan wars. U.S. officials and tribunal staff said that a special team to investigate Milosevic was set up at the tribunal in October.

That the tribunal only recently began looking closely at Milosevic contradicts the widespread speculation that he has already been secretly indicted.

Tribunal officials rejected reports that the tribunal had refrained from indicting Milosevic because of pressure from the United States, which sees the Yugoslav leader as a guarantor of the Dayton accords.

To assist the tribunal, the Clinton administration has set up a task force to cull through reams of photos, telephone intercepts and other material held by various government agencies, including the CIA and the Pentagon, U.S. officials said last week.

"There was never any political pressure" against indicting Milosevic, said William Stuebner, an American who served as an adviser to the tribunal's chief prosecutor from 1994 to 1997.

Stuebner would not talk about any investigation, and the tribunal officials who did so spoke on condition of anonymity. An American lawyer who has been at the tribunal said that talking about the investigations was like revealing grand jury deliberations and that anyone who did so would be dismissed.

The tribunal has begun an internal investigation to determine who provided The New York Times with a copy of the report on Operation Storm, two former tribunal officials said last week.

Operation Storm was a stunning military assault. In just four days, the Croatian army regained territory that had been held by rebel Serbs for four years. The Croatian army then linked up with Bosnian Croat forces and began to roll over Serbian units in neighboring Bosnia. Those defeats, along with the NATO bombing, helped bring the Serbs to the negotiating table in Dayton.

But there was a darker side to Operation Storm, one largely overlooked in the West, which had little sympathy for the Serbs. The Croatian army drove more than 100,000 Serbs from their ancestral homelands, forcing them to flee on carts and in small cars jammed with their possessions. In terms of sheer numbers, it was the largest "ethnic cleansing" of the war, though it was not as brutal as the worst of Serb treatment of Bosnian Muslims during the war.

A section of the tribunal's 150-page report is headed: "The Indictment. Operation Storm, A Prima Facie Case."

"During the course of the military offensive, the Croatian armed forces and special police committed numerous violations of international humanitarian law, including but not limited to, shelling of Knin and other cities," the report says. "During, and in the 100 days following the military offensive, at least 150 Serb civilians were summarily executed, and many hundreds disappeared." The crimes also included looting and burning, the report says.

"In a widespread and systematic manner, Croatian troops committed murder and other inhumane acts upon and against Croatian Serbs," the investigators say at another point in the report.

The report says investigators gathered "sufficient material to establish that the three generals who commanded the military operation" -- Mirko Norac, Ante Gotovina, and the military governor of the Knin region, Ivan Cermak -- could be held accountable under international law.

These men, the report charges, were responsible for driving the Serbs out of the area, a process that became known as "ethnic cleansing" as leaders of different ethnic groups in the countries that were previously part of Yugoslavia sought to create ethnically pure territories.

The most contentious recommendation of the investigators related to the shelling of Knin.

Two senior Canadian military officers, Gen. Alain Forand and Col. Andrew Leslie, who were with the U.N. peacekeeping forces in Knin at the time, were unequivocal in their testimony to the tribunal that the shelling had been indiscriminate and did not serve a legitimate military function. "Why they shelled Knin is still hard to believe," Forand told the investigators. "There is no doubt in my mind that the Croats knew they were shelling civilian targets."

Of the 3,000 shells fired into Knin, fewer than 250 hit military targets, Leslie testified.

"That is either bloody poor shooting," Leslie said, according to the tribunal report, "or one must logically assume that the fire was deliberately directed against civilian buildings."

Last August, during a meeting to review the investigators' work and recommendations, a senior legal officer at the tribunal, William Fenrick, described the Canadian officers as "about as good as we will ever get as far as eyewitnesses to a shelling," according to the tribunal report.

But the report goes on to quote an American lawyer at the tribunal, Clint Williamson, as seeking to discredit the Canadian officers' testimony. They were "not capable of detached analysis," he said, according to the investigation report.

Williamson, who described the shelling of Knin as a "minor incident," said that the Pentagon had told him that Knin was a legitimate military target.

Even so, Fenrick is then quoted as telling the August meeting that he was inclined to include the Knin shelling in an indictment.

Then the review panel broke for lunch. When they returned, Fenrick had changed his mind. "I am switching from the Canadian general who watched, to the American general who probably planned the operation," he said, according to the report.

The review concluded by voting not to include the shelling of Knin in any indictment, a conclusion that stunned and angered many at the tribunal. On the other charges, which were less contentious, the review panel recommended further investigation. In January, a tribunal team went back to Croatia.

The identity of the "American general" referred to by Fenrick is not known. The tribunal would not allow Williamson or Fenrick to be interviewed. But Ms. Arbour, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, suggested in a telephone interview last week that Fenrick's comment had been "a joking observation."

Ms. Arbour had not been present during the meeting, and that is not how it was viewed by some who were there.

Several people who were at the meeting assumed that Fenrick was referring to one of the retired U.S. generals who worked for Military Professional Resources Inc., a private, Virginia-based training company staffed by retired U.S. military officers whose presence in Croatia was no secret, even though exactly what it was doing remains a matter of intense intrigue.

Noting that it has been widely speculated among European military analysts and diplomats that the Croats had outside help in planning their 1995 offensive, the company has insisted that its role in Croatia was limited to classroom instruction on military-civil relations.

The vote against including the shelling of Knin in any eventual indictment has stoked the belief among many at the tribunal that the United States was trying to manipulate the judicial body. Ms. Arbour and U.S. officials strenuously deny this.

Ms. Arbour said she would welcome the Pentagon's views on a military matter if it would help the tribunal prepare a case before going into court.

But there is evidence that the United States has not been as helpful as it might be with the Operation Storm investigation.

In May 1996, for example, the investigators asked the United States for eight satellite photos taken of specific grids in the Krajina region of Croatia, where the operation took place, on specific days during Operation Storm.

The grids related to the shelling of Knin, the location of Serb troops -- which might help determine whether it was a legitimate military target -- as well as the burning and looting of villages and possible bombing of refugee columns by the Croatian air force.

The team got no response, tribunal officials said. Ms. Arbour said that she could not comment on specific requests to governments. She also declined to say anything about the status of the investigation.

Sunday, March 21, 1999

Copyright 1999 The New York Times

Date: 99-04-10 00:14:54 EDT
From: mlad@sitefind.com (mlad)

2. An untold story of 'ethnic cleansing'

Steven Edwards
National Post
Friday, April 09, 1999

Photo: The Canadian Press / General Alain Forand, far right, was a member of a peacekeeping mission in Croatia. He has testified that he protested the shelling of Knin in a letter to the Croat military leader.

Photo: The Associated Press / The covered body of a civilian man outside his Knin home during attacks by Croatia. Knin

The Croatian army called it Operation Storm, and when it was over, 200,000 Serb civilians would be on the move, forced to leave their ancestral homelands in what is being called a campaign of "ethnic cleansing."

The allegations were made by two high-ranking Canadian military officials, in secretly sworn testimony as part of a UN war crimes investigation, the National Post has learned.

The two officers, Colonel Andrew Leslie and General Alain Forand, were members of a peacekeeping mission in Croatia, sent to monitor a ceasefire following Croatia's battle for independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. They were also to protect the minority Serb population living there.

Over two days in August, 1995, the two officers witnessed the shelling of the town of Knin by the Croatian army.

"The shells were impacting all around, all on residential areas, and there were quite a large number of casualties," testified Col. Leslie.

An unknown number of civilians were among the estimated 500 casualties of the two days of shelling, he testified, adding that he saw up to 50 bodies "stacked in the corridors . . . in piles," at Knin hospital.

"We estimate that 20% to 30% of the houses in Knin were either hit directly by shell fire or severely damaged."

Col. Leslie testified that Knin contained a maximum of seven legitimate military targets, among them railyards and a central government building. These targets were hit by about 250 of the estimated 3,000 shells fired at the city, the colonel testified.

"That is either bloody poor shooting, or one must logically assume that the fire was deliberately directed against civilian buildings," he testified.

Armed with this and other testimony, the investigators have recommended that three Croatian generals -- Ante Gotovina, Mirko Norac, and Ivan Cermak, the military governor of the region -- be indicted by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the New York Times has reported.

If the recommendation is heeded by the prosecutors' office of the tribunal, the indictments would be the first of officers of the Croatian Army for war crimes committed after Croatia began to break away from Yugoslavia in 1991. Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor, will ultimately decide whether the indictments should be issued.

Her office declined to confirm that any indictments are pending, saying the matter is still at the investigation stage.

 "The prosecutor does not comment on the existence or progress of any investigation," said Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor, in a statement.

"In the same way the prosecutor does not announce or confirm that particular persons are the subject of an investigation."

The 1995 Croat attack on Knin was part of a campaign that eventually forced 200,000 Croatian Serbs in the country from their homes. Although the town of Knin was not a military target, it was strategically important, Gen. Forand testified.

In 1993, Serbs in the region of Krajina, in which Knin is located, voted overwhelmingly in a referendum for integration with Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia.

Their dreams were never realized peaceably, so rebel Croatian Serbs took up positions in Krajina.

To extinguish all Serb resistance in the country, Croatia's military launched two lightning offensives in 1995, one in May, the other in August. But, say the Canadian officers, Croatia did not restrict its attacks to military targets.

"Knin had strategic value [for] it was the city where the parliament of the Krajina Serbs was located," testified Gen. Forand, who was in the town as commander of the UN's Sector South for Croatia. "[But] it's not a military target. The majority of the population there was civilian. Why they shelled Knin is still hard to believe."

Added Col. Leslie in his testimony: "I believe that the highest Croatian authorities knowingly and willingly ordered these unlawful attacks against the civilian population of Knin and other towns in a deliberate attempt to kill, injure, or cause to flee -- ethnic cleansing, in other words -- unarmed civilians and non-combatants. Knin was undefended. There were no offensive preparations."

Colonel Leslie told how he'd travelled through Knin during the shellfire to rescue various UN civilian employees.

Gen. Forand said he protested the shelling of Knin in an Aug. 4 letter to Major-General Gotovina, the Croat military leader presumed responsible for the attack.

"The letter [was sent via] the liaison officer of [the general], so I am sure he got it," said Gen. Forand. "[I said] I will document all the attacks fully for investigation by international authorities."

He added: "[The shelling] is hard to understand unless they wanted to create a form of panic to ensure that the civilian population would flee. There's no doubt in my mind that the Croats knew they were shelling civilian targets."

Col. Leslie surmised that authority to shell Knin may have come directly from the Croatian president, Franjo Tudjman.

"The shelling of Knin, the capital of the rebel Serbs, was a decision that could have very easily resulted in Serb guns shelling Croatian coastal communities along the edge of Sector South," he said.

"No commander in his right mind would attack an enemy's capital knowing that the enemy could respond in kind without seeking the permission of the highest political figure in the land."

Col. Leslie also testified that there was no doubt in his mind that the Croatian army knew what was happening -- they had observers.

"This was confirmed to me by General Cermak during one of the many discussions I had with him in his office. . . It is my professional and personal opinion that the shellfire on Knin was observed and that the

Croatian authorities knew exactly where their shells were impacting . . . that their shooting was aimed at the civilian infrastructure of Knin."

From: Oklop@aol.com
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 16:35:42 EDT
Subject: Fwd: PRAVO PISMO "Straight Letter"

3. THE FATAL FLAWS UNDERLYING NATO'S INTERVENTION IN YUGOSLAVIA

By Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retd.)

(First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia 03 Mar92 to 02 Mar 93. Former Deputy Chief of Staff, Indian Army. Currently, Director of the United Services Insitution of India.)

My year long experience as the Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces deployed in the former Yugoslavia has given me an understanding of the fatal flaws of US/NATO policies in the troubled region.

It was obvious to most people following events in the Balkans since the beginning of the decade, and particularly after the fighting that resulted in the emergence of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, that Kosovo was a 'powder keg' waiting to explode. The West appears to have learnt all the wrong lessons from the previous wars and applied it to Kosovo.

(1) Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive but also dishonest. According to my experience all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels while the others would insist that they were. With 28, 000 forces under me and with constant contacts with UNHCR and the International Red Cross officials, we did not witness any genocide beyond killings and massacres on all sides that are typical of such conflict conditions. I believe none of my successors and their forces saw anything on the scale claimed by the media.

(2) It was obvious to me that if Slovenians, Croatians and Bosniaks had the right to secede from Yugoslavia, then the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia had an equal right to secede. The experience of partitions in Ireland and India has not be pleasant but in the Yugoslavia case, the state had already been taken apart anyway. It made little sense to me that if multiethnic Yugoslavia was not tenable that multiethnic Bosnia could be made tenable. The former internal boundaries of Yugoslavia which had no validity under international law should have been redrawn when it was taken apart by the West, just as it was in the case of Ireland in 1921 and Punjab and Bengal in India in 1947. Failure to acknowledge this has led to the problem of Kosovo as an integral part of Serbia.

(3) It is ironic that the Dayton Agreement on Bosnia was not fundamentally different from the Lisbon Plan drawn up by Portuguese Foreign Minister Cuteliero and British representative Lord Carrington to which all three sides had agreed before any killings had taken place, or even the Vance-Owen Plan which Karadzic was willing to sign. One of the main problems was that there was an unwillingness on the part of the American administration to concede that Serbs had legitimate grievances and rights. I recall State Department official George Kenny turning up like all other American officials, spewing condemnations of the Serbs for aggression and genocide. I offered to give him an escort and to go see for himself that none of what he proclaimed was true. He accepted my offer and thereafter he made a radical turnaround.. Other Americans continued to see and hear what they wanted to see and hear from one side, while ignoring the other side. Such behaviour does not produce peace but more conflict.

(4) I felt that Yugoslavia was a media-generated tragedy. The Western media sees international crises in black and white, sensationalizing incidents for public consumption. From what I can see now, all Serbs have been driven out of Croatia and the Muslim-Croat Federation, I believe almost 850,000 of them. And yet the focus is on 500,000 Albanians (at last count) who have been driven out of Kosovo. Western policies have led to an ethnically pure Greater Croatia, and an ethnically pure Muslim statelet in Bosnia. Therefore, why not an ethnically pure Serbia? Failure to address these double standards has led to the current one.

As I watched the ugly tragedy unfold in the case of Kosovo while visiting the US in early to mid March 1999, I could see the same pattern emerging. In my experience with similar situations in India in such places as Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, Nagaland, and elsewhere, it is the essential strategy of those ethnic groups who wish to secede to provoke the state authorities. Killings of policemen is usually a standard operating procedure by terrorists since that usually invites overwhelming state retaliation, just as I am sure it does in the United States.

I do not believe the Belgrade government had prior intention of driving out all Albanians from Kosovo. It may have decided to implement Washington's own "Krajina Plan" only if NATO bombed, or these expulsions could be spontaneous acts of revenge and retaliation by Serb forces in the field because of the bombing. The OSCE Monitors were not doing too badly, and the Yugoslav Government had, after all, indicated its willings to abide by nearly all the provisions of the Rambouillet "Agreement" on aspects like cease-fire, greater autonomy to the Albanians, and so on. But they insisted that the status of Kosovo as part of Serbia was not negotiable, and they would not agree to stationing NATO forces on the soil of Yugoslavia. This is precisely what India would have done under the same circumstances. It was the West that proceeded to escalate the situation into the current senseless bombing campaign that smacks more of hurt egos, and revenge and retaliation. NATO's massive bombing intended to terrorize Serbia into submission appears no different from the morality of actions of Serb forces in Kosovo.

Ultimatums were issued to Yugoslavia that unless the terms of an agreement drawn up at Rambouillet were signed, NATO would undertake bombing. Ultimatums do not constitute diplomacy. They are acts of war. The Albanians of Kosovo who want independence, were coaxed and cajoled into putting their signatures to a document motivated with the hope of NATO bombing of Serbs and independence later. With this signature, NATO assumed all the legal and moral authority to undertake military operations against a country that had, at worst, been harsh on its own people. On 24th March 1999, NATO launched attacks with cruise missiles and bombs, on Yugoslavia, a sovereign state, a founding member of the United Nations and the Non Aligned Movement; and against a people who were at the forefront of the fight against Nazi Germany and other fascist forces during World War Two. I consider these current actions unbecoming of great powers.

It is appropriate to touch on the humanitarian dimension for it is the innocent who are being subjected to displacement, pain and misery. Unfortunately, this is the tragic and inevitable outcome of all such situations of civil war, insurgencies, rebel movements, and terrorist activity. History is replete with examples of such suffering; whether it be the American Civil War, Northern Ireland, the Basque movement in Spain, Chechnya, Angola, Cambodia, and so many other cases; the indiscriminate bombing of civilian centres during World War Two; Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Vietnam. The list is endless. I feel that this tragedy could have been prevented if NATO's ego and credibility had not been given the highest priority instead of the genuine grievances of Serbs in addition to Albanians.

Notwithstanding all that one hears and sees on CNN and BBC, and other Western agencies, and in the daily briefings of the NATO authorities, the blame for the humanitarian crisis that has arisen cannot be placed at the door of the Yugoslav authorities alone. The responsibility rests mainly at NATO's doors. In fact, if I am to go by my own experience as the First Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations forces in the former Yugoslavia, from March 1992 to March 1993, handling operations in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, I would say that reports put out in the electronic media are largely responsible for provoking this tragedy.

Where does all this leave the international community which for the record does not comprise of the US, the West and its newfound Muslim allies? The portents for the future, at least in the short term, are bleak indeed. The United Nations has been made totally redundant, ineffective, and impotent. The Western world, led by the USA, will lay down the moral values that the rest of the world must adhere to; it does not matter that they themselves do not adhere to the same values when it does not suit them. National sovereignty and territorial integrity have no sanctity. And finally, secessionist movements, which often start with terrorist activity, will get greater encouragement. One can only hope that good sense will prevail, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Lt General Satish Nambiar
Director, USI, New Delhi
6 April 1999

sent by Vojin Damjanac
500 Glenwood Circle # 520
Monterey, CA 93940
Phone: 408-373-0519
Fax: 408-656-9611
email: vojind@redshift.com
vojind@usa.net

Subj: Tor. Sun: Medak Massacre (1)
Date: 98-11-01 18:16:53 EST

THE SUNDAY (TORONTO) SUN, Sunday, November 1, 1998 p. 50-51 NEWS

4. The Medak Massacre: Canada's trial by fire

Untold story of this nationâs largest military action since Korean War

During Canada's UN peacekeeping stint in the Balkans, prior to taking a more aggressive role with NATO, some 100 soldiers became casualties, and were often put in impossible situations ö taken hostage, mined, fired at, resented, threatened ö all the while with imprecise orders on whether they could, couldnât or shouldnât fight back.

Perhaps the closest the Canadians came to war, or battle, was in the Croatian invasion of the Medak Pocket in the Serb-held Krajina area of Croatia in the fall of 1993. Yet, for political reasons, virtually no publicity was given to the Canadiansâ trial by fire.

Here, in the first of three excerpts of a starling new book focusing on Canadaâs UN peacekeeping in the 1990s, is the little-known story of Canada's role in the battle of the Medak Pocket.

The book, Tested Mettle, published by Esprit de Corps books, is by Scott Taylor and Brian Nolan whose previous book, Tarnished Brass, was a national bestseller.

By SCOTT TAYLOR and BRIAN NOLAN

At 6:05 a.m., on Sept. 9, 1993, the Croatian artillery bombardment rolled into the Medak Pocket like a wave of thunder. All along the 25-km valley geysers of earth and flame shot skyward. Lieutenant Tyrone Greene of the 2 PPCLI (Princess Patriciaâs Canadian Light Infantry) was heading out the door on his way to the morning orderâs group when he observed a shell explode about 5 km away. He turned to go back inside to report the shot when a 152-mm mortar round impacted behind him and threw the big officer flat.

Seconds later, the rest of the Croat mortar battery opened fire in earnest.

Greeneâs platoon was to witness firsthand a devastating barrage that would crumble Serb defenses. From the outset, the town of Medak was the primary target for the Croat gunners. It was the Serb headquarters and a vital transportation hub.

Back at battalion headquarters in Gracac, LCol. Jim Calvin anxiously wondered what was happening north in the Medak Pocket. He could feel the ground shake and saw the plumes of smoke.

As the day progressed, Calvin was pressured by his anxious UN commanders in New York to provide them with a clear assessment of the deteriorating situation. He went forward in his APC to liaise with Lt. Greene and ordered the subaltern to set up an observation post to keep track of the battle. For the next three days, the men of Greeneâs Nine Platoon were the sole eyes and ears of the international community. It was essential that they hold their ground.

That evening, there was a significant shift in the Croat bombardment. The change in the fire plan signified the next phase of the Croat attack: Atop the ridgeline, Croat special forces and dismounted infantry launched a lightning pincer advance, rolling up the surprised Serb pickets in a series of deadly, one-sided firefights. Croatian armour columns then rolled down the valley.

Calvin was constantly calling Lt. Greene for updates as the UN Headquarters tried to plot out the political ramifications of the offensive. Every time Greene radioed in his reports, his position was immediately bombed by Croat mortars. It dawned on the young lieutenant that the Croats were using their radio "direction finding" equipment to zero in on his broadcasts, apparently mistaking his signals for those of the Serbians (who were, in fact, using land-line field telephones to communicate messages).

From then on, Greene only used the radio in emergencies, and tried to switch locations when he did so.

By the evening of Sept. 11, the tide of the battle began shifting as a major Serbian counter-attack was mounting. The gaggle of wounded soldiers and fleeing refugees along the main road in Medak was replaced by determined Serb reinforcements pushing forward into the pocket.

Buses, tanks and even armoured trains began pouring into the region from all over the Krajina. For the next 72 hours, the Serbs and Croats fought a pitched battle. The counter-thrust blunted the Croat offensive and both sides began digging in along their new front lines.

With the combat situation temporarily stalemated on Sept. 14, the UN began to press the warring sides for a ceasefire. International pressure was for the Croatians ö clearly the aggressors in this instance ö to pull back to the Sept. 9 ceasefire lines. To help force the issue, the Serbs soon demonstrated their resolve to escalate the strategic stakes. On the afternoon of Sept. 14. They launched a Soviet-built Frog missile at the suburbs of the Croatian capital of Zagreb. The heavy-calibre tactical rocket plunged harmlessly into a field, but Croatians quickly agreed to remove their troops from the Medak valley. The "buffer zone" created as the Croats withdrew was to be occupied by UN peacekeepers.

French General Jean Cot, the UN commander in Sector South, knew that for the ceasefire to take hold, oeacekeepers would have to be deployed, quickly and in as much strength as could be mustered. LCol. Jim Calvin and his Patricias were ordered to prepare to advance within the next 24 hours. To reinforce his two rifle companies (Charlie and Delta) which were already in the Medak Pocket, Calvin was to receive two companies of well-equipped mechanized infantry from the French army.

Calvin was uneasy that he might have to forcibly oust the Croat forces. The magnitude of this possibility weighed heavily on him.

At 2 p.m. the next day, Lt. Greene gave the order for his APCs to advance into the killing zone. As they moved forward, the troops could see how close the Serbs had been to losing the town of Medak itself. Battle debris and bodies indicated that the Croats had even established a foothold in the northernmost buildings before being beaten back.

Calvinâs plan was for a two-pronged push up the valley. The Canadian companies would provide the left-hand column and the French army the right. Greeneâs Nine Platoon was the centre of Charlie Companyâs formation, with Seven Platoon right and Eight Platoon on the far left. Major Dan Drewâs Delta Company would follow Charlieâs advance and take up position to prevent any subsequent Serbian advances.

On the afternoon of Sept. 15, 1993, Private Scott Leblanc, an artillery reservist from Nova Scotia, was humping a C-9 light machine gun, as Eight Platoon advanced toward the little village of Sitlik. Off to their right flank, they heard the developing fire fight between Greeneâs men and the Croat defenders. Leblancâs section, commanded by Sgt. Rod Dearing, had just reached a low hedgerow when Capt. Dan McKillop signaled them to halt. McKillop had heard Greeneâs situation report on the company radio net and had spotted the Croat rifle pits about 200 metres to their front. The troops began digging in. Fire-team partners took turns shoveling. Leblanc was pumped up as gunfire continued to erupt across the Medak Valley floor and crept ominously closer.

Capt. McKillop yelled to Sgt. Dearing that combat engineers were on the way with heavy equipment to assist with the trench digging. A Croat machine-gun burst cut short McKillopâs comments. Dearing took cover behind his APC and started pumping rounds back at the opposite hedgerow. The burly sergeant radiated; his example was infectious. Young Leblanc switched his C-9 to automatic and loosed a long, withering burst toward the Croat muzzle flashes.

At dusk, with the firefights still raging across the valley, Maj. Drew shouted for Warranr Officer Matt Stopford to prepare a section of soldiers. Calvin had received a telephone call from the local Croatian commander, who seemed to want to negotiate a peaceful UN passage of no-manâs-land.

The meeting was heated, with Calvin matching his Croat hostâs bluster and rhetoric. It was agreed that Stopfordâs and Drewâs protection party would remain at the Croatian lines to ensure that the main battle group would cross without incident the next day. Calvin returned to his headquarters while Stopford set up a duty roster for his six soldiers and two APCs deployed in the middle of the road.

Almost immediately the Croats began moving into fire positions around the Canadian detachment. At point blank range, they set up heavy machine guns and Russian-made anti-tank missiles. "I guess weâre not going anywhere for a while," quipped Stopford.

Throughout the long night, Stopford remained uneasy about his situation. He could see tracer fire being exchanged between Sgt. Dearingâs men and the Croat forces in the village of Sitlik. Despite the intensity of that combat, he was more concerned about the activity of the Croat troops to his immediate front. They appeared to be a special forces unit, unlike anything heâd seen thus far in the Balkans. Well equipped, with an assortment of modern weaponry, these guys were all young, fit and extremely intense. The men Stopford was observing were part of the new Croatian army ö equipped and trained by U.S. "advisers."

These Croats were unconcerned by the Canadian presence. Muffled explosions could be heard up the valley and occasional single shots rang out. From a cluster of buildings just to his front, Stopford heard sudden screams, punctuated by a burst of gunfire. A moment of silence followed by raucous laughter.

Moments later, a nearby explosion shook the ground and a farm building burst into flames. Stopford raced back to his APC and radioed headquarters. His voice cracking with emotion, Stopford said the Croats had begun "ethnic cleansing" of the Medak Pocket. "Youâve got to move now, " he yelled. "Theyâre killing people. We canât wait·"

Four kilometers to the rear, LCol. Calvin didnât need Stopfordâs report to understand what was happening. Fires were visible everywhere in the valley. He radioed UN headquarters in Zagreb and requested permission to advance immediately. He was ordered to remain in location and gather evidence for use at a future war crime trial.

Stopford was furious. Leaving his APC, he walked towards the Croat position, where the little village was burning furiously. Gunshots still echoed, along with drunken laughter. A drunken Croat soldier emerged from a building and staggered toward Stopford. A girl could be heard screaming inside the house. Draped on the drunken soldierâs head was a pair of blood-soaked panties.

The Canadian stepped forward, chambered a round in his rifle and flicked off the safety catch. Shaking with horror and rage, Stopford wanted to kill the Croat so badly he could taste it. The Croat smiled, threw down his assault rifle and held up his hands ö empty now except for the undergarment. To shoot him would be cold-blooded murder. Stopford couldnât do it. As he walked slowly back to his carrier, he could hear the drunken rapist laughing.

As the sun rose over the horizon. It revealed a Medak Valley engulfed in smoke and flames. As the frustrated soldiers of 2PPCLI waited for the order to move forward into the pocket, shots and screams still rang out as the ethnic cleansing continued.

Sharp at noon, Major Drewâs Delta Company began to roll forward. The long line of white UN APCs bristled with rifles and machine-guns as infantry rode topside with the cargo hatches open. For the weary, embattled soldiers of Charlie Company, the armoured column with large, blue UN flags fluttering from the radio antenna was a welcoming sight.

However, the Croat defenders werenât impressed. Their special forces company that had deployed behind Stopfordâs detachment concluded their extra-curricular activities and took up fire positions to block the main road. Somehow the Croatian generalâs agreement had not been passed along to his forward troops. The Croat company commander was adamant that any attempt to cross his lines would be resisted with "all available force."

Calvin played his one trump card to avoid a slaughter.

About 20 members of the international press had tagged along, anxious to see the Medak battleground. Calvin called an informal press conference at the head of the column and loudly accused the Croats of trying to hide war crimes against the Serb inhabitants.

The Croats started withdrawing back to their old lines, taking with them whatever loot they hadnât destroyed. All livestock had been killed and houses torched.

French reconnaissance troops and the Canadian command element pushed up the valley and soon began to find bodies of Serb civilians, some already decomposing, others freshly slaughtered. In one village, Calvin saw the bodies of two young girls who had been repeatedly raped, tied t ochairs and then set on fire.

Rain fell steadily through the night as those few soldiers who had deployed into no-manâs-land waited for a possible counter-attack from either Serbs or Croats. Finally, on the drizzly morning of Sept. 17, teams of UN civilian police arrived to probe the smouldering ruins for murder victims.

Rotting corpses lying out in the open were catalogued, then turned over to the peacekeepers for burial.

The emotional effect on the Canadians was incalculable. They had seen the decomposed bodies and lived with the putrid stench of death, and had helplessly listened to people dying and being killed.

However, as details of the casualties inflicted on the Croat forces by the Canadian "peacekeepers" became known, morale was roused. Officially, the Croats admitted to 27 of their soldiers being killed or wounded by the UN troops in the Medak. Unofficially, the tally was pegged at 30 dead and over 100 wounded.

It was the most severe action Canadian troops had been involved in since the Korean War. Yet they had sustained only four wounded and no one killed.

Senior defence bureaucrats back in Ottawa had no way of predicting the outcome of the engagement in terms of political fallout. To them, there was no point in calling media attention to a situation that might easily backfire. Besides, a general election was underway in Canada with former defence minister Kim Campbell now the prime minister. So Medak was relegated to the memory hole ö no publicity, no recriminations, no official record. Except for those soldiers involved, Canadaâs most lively military action since the Korean War simply never happened.

TOMORROW: Collapse in the Krajina

Reprinted with permission of Esprit de Corps Books

Foreign Policy Journal

Winter 1993-94 Peter Brock

5. Dateline Yugoslavia: THE PARTISAN PRESS

by Peter Brock

Published in: "FOREIGN POLICY", Number 93, Winter 1993-94, pages 152 - 172.

The international news story since mid-1992 has been Bosnia-Herzegovina - the atrocities, the refugees, and the world's inaction. In most accounts, the villain has been denounced for the worst crimes committed on European soil since the death of Adolf Hitler and the demise of Joseph Stalin.

The evidence appears overwhelming that the military forces of the Bosnian Serbs have perpetrated grave offenses. But throughout the crisis the Serbs have complained that they were also victims, and there is apparent evidence to support their complaint. The almost uniform manner by which the international news media, including the American media, dismissed Serb claims has played a critical role in the unfolding tragedy in the former Yugoslavia. As the first phase of the crisis perhaps now draws to a close, it is time for a searching look at the performance of the international media.

The verdict is anything but positive. As one of America's most prominent journalists on America's most prestigious newspaper said in a risky moment of candor early last summer, "I despair for my profession, and I despair for my newspaper. And this is very definitely not for attribution". As the routine, sometimes zealous bearers of bad news, especially in war, news-people cynically shrug off criticism (and especially abhor self-criticism) and trudge back to the trenches. But in the Yugoslav civil war, the press itself has been a large part of the bad news. Legitimate concern for personal safety undoubtedly affected the coverage. Many stories that deserved a follow-up did not receive it because journalists could not get to the scene of the conflict and were forced to rely on less-than-perfect sources. But a close look at the record since the war began on june 27, 1991, reveals avoidable media negligence and a form of pack journalism that reached its extreme last winter and spring.

During that period, readers and viewers received the most vivid reports of cruelty, tragedy, and barbarism since World War II. It was an unprecedented and unrelenting onslaught, combining modern media techniques with advocacy journalism.

In the process, the media became a movement, co-belligerent no longer disguised as noncombatant and nonpartisan. News was outfitted in its full battle dress of bold head-lines, multipage spreads of gory photographs, and gruesome video footage. The clear purpose was to force governments to intervene militarily. The effect was compelling, but was the picture complete? In fact, the mistakes were blatant:

- Street scenes of ravaged Vukovar in 1991 were later depicted as combat footage from minimally damaged Dubrovnik on Western television networks...

- The 1992 BBC filming of an ailing, elderly "Bosnian Muslim prisoner-of-war in a Serb concentration camp" resulted in his later identification by relatives as retired Yugoslav army officer Branko Velec, a Bosnian Serb held in a Muslim detention camp.

- Among wounded "Muslim toddlers and infants" aboard a Sarajevo bus hit by sniper fire in August 1992 were a number of Serb children - a fact revealed much later. One of the children who died in the incident was identified at the funeral as Muslim by television reporters. But the unmistakable Serbian Orthodox funeral ritual told a different story.

- In its January 4, 1993, issue, "Newsweek" published a photo of several bodies with an accompanying story that began: "Is there any way to stop Serbian atrocities in Bosnia?" The photo was actually of Serb victims, including one clearly recognizable man wearing a red coat. The photo, with the same man in his red coat is identical to a scene in television footage from Vukovar a year earlier.

- CNN aired reports in March and may 1993 from the scenes of massacres of 14 Muslims and then 10 Muslims who were supposedly killed by Serbs. The victims later turned out to be Serbs. There was no correction.

- In early August 1993, a photo caption in "the New York Times" described a Croat woman from Posusje grieving for a son killed in recent Serb attacks. In fact, the Croat village of Posusje, in Bosnia near the Dalmatian coast, had been the scene of bloody fighting between Muslims and Croats that had caused 34 Bosnian Croat deaths, including the son of the woman in the photo.

By early 1993, several major news organizations appeared to be determined to use their reporting to generate the political pressure needed to force U.S. military intervention. In testing the effects of their stories, U.S. networks and publications conducted numerous polls during the Yugoslav civil war. But no matter how pollsters sculpted their questions, majorities of public opinion remained stubbornly opposed to all forms of armed intervention. Finally, on August 11, an ABC news - "Washington Post" poll said that six out of ten Americans supported allied "airstrikes against Bosnian Serb forces who are attacking the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo". The poll also showed that Americans overwhelmingly rejected air strikes by the United States, "if the European allies do not agree to participate". But the poll sought no objective opinions about Bosnian government forces who, according to many credible reports, frequently fired on their own positions and people in Sarajevo and manipulated artillery attacks elsewhere in Bosnia for public relations and other purposes. A "Washington Post" spokeswoman said opinions were not asked about that because pollsters were "not sure the public would understand it". Also, she said, there "was not enough space" for other questions in the poll's format.

In May 1993, United Nations secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali chided the media for breaking the first commandment of objectivity as he addressed CNN's fourth world report contributors conference in Atlanta: "Today, the media do not simply report the news. Television has become a part of the events it covers. It has changed the way the world reacts to crisis". Boutros-Ghali accurately described the routine and consequence of coverage of the Yugoslav civil war: "Public emotion becomes so intense that United Nations work is undermined. On television, the problem may become simplified, and exaggerated".

Three months earlier, several high-ranking u.n. officials in Belgrade, usually reserved in their criticisms, privately shared confidences from journalists-verified during subsequent interviews in Belgrade with the correspondents themselves. The correspondents reported that they had met obstructions from editors. They told of stories changed without consultation and in some cases totally revised to coincide with the pack journalist bias that prevailed in Western news bureaus.

"The American press has become very partisan and anti-Serbian. They are very selective and manipulative with the information they use", said one U.N. official. "The reporters here have had their own wars with their editors. It was driving one literally crazy until she demanded to be transferred".

"I've worked with the press for a long time, and Ihave never seen so much lack of professionalism and ethnics in the press", and another. "Especially by the American press, there is an extremely hostile style of reporting". "A kind of nihilism has been established", said yet another U.N. official.

"I was shocked when a relative read a story to me over the telephone", added an American correspondent in Belgrade. "My byline was on top of the story, but I couldn't recognize anything else". Another reporter in Belgrade, previously singled out by one group of Serbian-Americans as especially one-sided, said he had argued with his editors at the New York Times until "they finally said I could write it like it really was. I finished the story and moved it to them. And after they read it, they killed it".

Also killed in the Yugoslav war was the professional mandate to get all sides of a story and to follow up on it-despite the obstacles. A British journalist angrily recalled how in May 1992 she had received an important tip in Belgrade. More than 1,000 Serb civilians-including men, women, children, and many elderly - from villages around the southwestern Bosnian town of Bradina were imprisoned by Muslims and

Croats in a partly destroyed railroad tunnel at Konjic, near Sarajevo. "My editors said they were interested in the story", the reported said. "But I told them it would take me three days to get there, another day or so to do the story and another three days to get back. They said it would take too much time". Months later, the same reporter was near Konjic on another story and managed to verify details of the earlier incident, though the Serb prisoners were no longer there. "The story was true, but several months had passed", she said. "I did the story anyway, but it wasn't played very well because of the late timing".

By late 1992, the majority of the media had become so mesmerized by their focus on Serb aggression and atrocities that many became incapable of studying or following up numerous episodes of horror and hostility against Serbs in Croatia and later in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Reporting from a Distance

The imbalance in reporting began during the war in Croatia. Despite steady reports of atrocities committed there by Croatian soldiers and paramilitary units against Serbs, which some Belgrade correspondents were later able to confirm, the stories that reached the world talked only of Serb abuses. The other stories went unreported "because it was difficult to get close to those villages in Croatia. And it was damned dangerous", said one Belgrade correspondent. Reporters tended to foxhole in Sarajevo, Zagreb, or Belgrade and depend on their networks of "stringers" and outlying contacts. Most arriving correspondents spoke no Serbo-Croatian, and interpreters were often domestic journalists or "stringers" with established allegiances as well as keen intuitions about what postcommunist censors in the "new democracies" in Zagreb and Sarajevo preferred. Reporters began to rely on aggressive government spokespeople - the government information ministry in Zagreb soon acquired scores of English-fluent publicists, and the Bosnian government also mobilized scores of handlers for the Western media. In that struggle for media attention, the Serbs were handicapped by the media sense that "the story" lay in the plight of the Muslims and by the isolation of Serbia because of U.N. sanctions and its own policies, ...

[...]

Before the summer of 1991, only a handful of Western correspondents had been based in Belgrade. The majority, along with new reporters who arrived in late 1991 and 1993, eventually migrated to Sarajevo or Zagreb, where technical communications with the West became centered - especially following the imposition of U.N. sanctions against Serbia on May 30, 1992. Establishing Zagreb as the communications and media hub during late 1992 and 1993 was all the more astonishing in light of Croatia's own repression of domestic media, which has included the resurrection of a communist - era law that threatens five years' imprisonment for anyone in the media - domestic or foreign - who criticizes the government.

Not surprisingly, western journalists failed to produce meaningful stories with Zagreb datelines or hard-hitting reports that might shed unfavourable light on Croatian government figures or the darker sides of that "new" Balkan democracy, where libraries where being purged of volumes unsympathetic to official policies. Although some stories were filed, foreign journalists tended to look the other way as the government reclassified requirements for Croatian citizenship and ordered new policies for religious instruction in public schools. Boulevards and public squares were brazenly renamed for World War II Ustashi figures.

Meanwhile, by late 1991 Belgrade - based journalists and correspondents were nervously confronting the arrival of 60,000 Serb refugees from Croatia who had horrifying accounts of atrocities and of the destruction of scores of Serb villages. Nearly 100 of the 156 remaining Serbian Orthodox churches in Croatia had been razed, according to the patriarchate in Belgrade. (More that 800 Serbian churches stood in Croatia before World War II) media scepticism at the reports of refugees and Serbian officials limited any reporting about "concentration camps" holding Serb inmates, such as the one reported at Suhopolje among 18 destroyed Serb villages in the Grubisno Polje district. Another, later confirmed to exist, was at Stara Lipa, among the remains of 24 Serb villages in the Slavonska Pozega district where Serbs had been evicted from their homes.

A Reuters photographer, who returned from Vukovar to report the discovery of the bodies of 41 Serb children in plastic bags, was initially quoted in other wire stories. But because he had not personally seen the bodies, news organizations pulled their stories about the alleged massacre. The same media standards regrettably did not apply when Western newspeople dealt with reports based on second - and third - hand sources of massacres of Croats and later Muslims. The willingness to print without confirmation later affected the coverage of stories about tens of thousands of rapes of Muslim women.

By January 1992, it was too late to tell the Serbs' side of the war in Croatia because that war had ended.

The war in Bosnia was about to erupt, with a host of new complexities. Few could follow the bewildering and abrupt alliances and counteralliances as Bosnian Serb and Croat forces attacked Bosnian government and Muslim troops and then Muslims fought Bosnian Croat forces.

[...]

"Fingerprints" in the media war could be traced to public relations specialists, including several high-powered and highly financed U.S. firms, and their clients in government information ministries. The Washington public relations firms of Ruder Finn and Hill & Knowlton, Inc. were the premier agents at work behind the lines, launching media and political salvos and raking in hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of dollars while representing the hostile republics-sometimes two at a time-in the Yugoslav war. Hill & Knowlton had for several years represented agencies in the previous federal republic of Yugoslavia before it disintegrated. (The firm is best remembered for producing the phony witness who testified before a congressional committee about the alleged slaughter of Kuwait infants after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.) Ruder Finn, having simultaneously represented the governments of Croatia and Bosnia until mid-1993, when both stepped up ethnic cleansing of each other's civilians in Bosnian villages, finally abandoned the capital-drained Croatia and hired on exclusively for Bosnia, with its liberal donations from Islamic countries. Soon after, Ruder Finn scored a public relations home run in helping its Bosnian Muslim clients dominate the June 1993 conference on human rights in Vienna, virtually hijacking the two-week agents that climaxed with an 88-to-1 vote deploring the failure of the U.N. to stop the war and demanding that the arms embargo on Bosnia be lifted.

[...]

Far rarer was the introspection about the media's coverage of the war that Charles Lane voiced in Newsweek seven months earlier: "There is hypocrisy-in the current outrage of Western journalists, politicians and voters. And perhaps even a strain of racism."

An excellent case of hyperbole was the peculiar statement that appeared in the March 15 Time cover story... Time also repeated that 70,000 "detention camp inmates" still existed. That echoed an exaggerated and uncorroborated statistic from a State Department spokesperson, whose mistake the Associated Press and the New York Times publicized during January 1993. A State Department official had admitted when confronted with the figure of 70,000 that it was a typographical error. The correct State Department estimate, she said, was less than 7,000.

News reports themselves showed that Bosnian Serbs were unusually cooperative in allowing international inspection of their camps, while Bosnian Muslims and Croats either refused or obstructed inspection of their camps - but that fact also received little public attention.

[...]

Peter Brock, a special projects and politics editor at the "El Paso Herald-Post", has lectured and written about Yugoslavia, as well as Eastern Europe and Russia, since 1976.He is writing a book on the Western media in the Yugoslav civil war.

6. April 14, 1994 Letter from Herb Brin, Heritage Southwest, Jewish Press

To: President Bill Clinton April 14, 1994
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

I am aware of the anguish in your heart over the Bosnia and Iraq situations. All Americans understand how deeply troubled you are in these difficult times. Yet, I must add this note of caution and for a very special reason.

It happens that Heritage publications were the first newspapers that urged your support for the presidency. The very first indeed!

Larry Lawrence asked me to write a suggested Jewish New Year message for you upon your election -- which I did.

Dee Dee Myers knows the role our papers play in California. I watched her grow into maturity as a public relations specialist. At Heritage, we love her!

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 was concerned by the fact that the Serbs, Jews and Gypsies of Yugoslavia were brutally victimized during World War II by the Croatian Ustasha created by a monster named Artukovic for Adolph Hitler.

The Serbian people lost more than a million men, women and children in the Hitler years. The Jews lot 65,000. And who can know the tragedies suffered by the Gypsies!

When I visited the Serbian front a year ago, I learned to my dismay that the rape story was a total concoction. In wars, rapes occur -- but in the hundreds of thousands and as a means of so-called "ethnic cleansing?" This was incredible and false. After reporting the facts, and Dee Dee knows me for being an accurate journalist, the rape story fell apart and disappeared from the national media.

It happens that, at 79, I am the oldest working journalist in America. Certainly the oldest to visit the war fronts both in Bosnia and in the Middle East.

I found the Serbian soldiers to be utterly truthful and honorable. I found a war in the former Yugoslavia which the Serbian young men and women refused to lose. That is the national purpose of any army in the field. And after suffering the most heinous losses in World War II to the Croats and the Muslims, the Serb forces were not about to be defeated this time around. Nor slaughtered as they were at the Croatian death camp known as Jasenovac.

The Serbian people were the staunchest allies of the United States in World War II. The Muslims gave haven to Hitler's notorious friend, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

I would suggest to my President not, I repeat -- not to hurt the Serbian people more. The decision to bomb the Serb position in Bosnia breaks my heart.

With all human respect,

Herb Brin
Heritage Southwest
Jewish Press

7. How Media Misinformation Led to Bosnian Intervention

George Kenney in "Living Marxism" (London), April, 1997

Was it inevitable that the West intervened militarily in Bosnia's civil war, taking sides against the Serbs, and then occupying the country? I doubt it. Was it right? No, not insofar as careful, objective, after-the-fact investigation of key media events was lacking.

The first turning point, that led straightaway to the introduction of Western troops,coincided with ITN's broadcast of images of what was widely assumed to be a concentration camp, at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje refugee collection centre in August 1992. Now, in a stunning development, Thomas Deichmann has discovered that those ITN images 'fooled the world'.

To understand the impact that those misleading ITN pictures had, one must look at the atmosphere of July/August in Washington. Beginning with his 19 July articles on the Serb-run detention centres at Manjaca and Omarska, Roy Gutman of Newsday began filing a series of storiesbased, he minimally acknowledged at that time, only on second and third-hand accountsthat culminated in his charge in several stories filed from 2-5 August that the Bosnian Serbs were operating 'Nazi-style' (his words) death camps for non-Serb prisoners of war.

As the Yugoslav desk officer at the State Department, I knew about these stories before they were printed, because Gutman had contacted the then US Consulate General in Zagreb to tell officials of his suspicions and ask for help in corroborating his findings.

Specifically, he wanted US spy satellites to determine whether a 'death camp' was in operation. Nobody took this request seriously, but I knew such reports could create a public relations firestorm, so I made a special effort to keep the highest levels of the State Department's management, including Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger's office, informed of his work. I did not, however, think management paid much or enough attention before Gutman's story broke.

Among other tasks, I was responsible for drafting press materials, which mainly involved preparing State Department Spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler for her daily noon press briefing. Tutwiler, who was Secretary James Baker's closest confidant and unofficially the second most influential person at State, felt that the USA should have been doing considerably more to stop, or at least suppress, the civil war in Bosnia. Alone among senior officials in her surreptitious dissent, she drew constant attention to the war's worst aspects, hoping to spur the administration to greater action if for no other reason than Baker's fear of bad press. At my initiative, she had already used the term 'ethnic cleansing' in mid-May to describe Bosnian Serb actions, introducing this previously unknown revilement into the vernacular. Frequent use of this sort of lurid language conditioned the press into a Pavlovian yearning for ever more shocking news of atrocities.

On Tuesday, 4 August Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Tom Niles was scheduled to give routine testimony to the House International Relations European Subcommittee, and in carrying out this obligation he badly erred, compounding public outcry about Gutman's 'death camps' report. Inexplicably, Niles decided to stonewall instead of earnestly declaring that we knew little, but took the matter seriously and were looking into it. The subcommittee responded poorly, with Niles particularly enraging its presiding member, Tom Lantos, a survivor of pro-Nazi Hungarian concentration camps. Adding to public frustrations, Niles' comments appeared to differ from what Tutwiler's assistant Richard Boucher told the press pool at the State Department the day beforethat the USA knew about the Gutman stories. Boucher had meant only that US officials read newspapers, but the leading papers unanimously (and mistakenly) reported that he said State had independent confirmation from its intelligence sources. Reporters, smelling a cover-up, launched into full-throated choruses of 'what did they know, and when did they know it?' More importantly, they asked, 'what is the USA going to do?'.

The truth was, the State Department knew very little. The real scandal was that it did not want to know more, because whatever could have been learned might also have brought new obligations to do something (anything). But by early 1992 the White House had decided not to incur the least substantive responsibility for the Yugoslav crisis, in order to avoid a Vietnam-like slippery slope and messy foreign entanglements during an election. We did not know whether minor measures might have brought results, but had no will to experiment. Yugoslavia, in the US government's view, was Europe's problem; the State Department was determined it should stay that way. In any case, by mid-week the State Department's public affairs officials were in a nuclear panic. The Yugoslav desk was asked, twice, to review its files about what we knew on 'death camps', and I gave Boucher a thick folder to photocopy of telegrams from my unofficial, personal file on Bosnia. There was not much information therenothing confirming Gutman's storyand the State Department struggled to find words to get out of the hole it had dug for itself. We had to explain our limited knowledge and say something more than 'we do not like concentration camps', but less than 'we intend to invade Bosnia and shut them down'.

Sensing an opportunity to attack President George Bush, on 5 August then-candidate Bill Clinton renewed his call for the USA, through the United Nations, to bomb Bosnian Serb positions. The US Senate began consideration of a symbolic vote (eventually approved) to permit the use of force to ensure aid deliveries and access to the camps. Even high Vatican officials, speaking unofficially for the Pope, noted parallels between Nazi atrocities and Bosnian camps, and called for military intervention 'to hold back the hand of the aggressor'.

A kind of hysteria swept through the Washington press corps. Few outsiders believed State was trying to tell the truth. After I resigned over policy in late August, senior Clinton campaign officials speedily approached me regarding the camps issue, seeking advice on whether they should pursue spy satellite records which the administration allegedly ignored. I told them not to waste their time. And for years afterwards journalists continued to ask me about 'the cover-up'.

On Wednesday 5 August, in an effort to quell the burgeoning Boucher/Niles 'cover-up' story and regain control of the press, Deputy Secretary Eagleburger's office issued a clarification of the State Department's position, including an appeal for 'war crimes investigations' into reports of atrocities in Bosnian detention centres. Immune to his efforts, extremely harsh press criticism continued to mount from every quarter. On Thursday, President George Bush issued an ill-prepared statement urging the United Nations Security Council to authorise the use of 'all necessary measures' to ensure relief deliveries, but stopped short of calling for the use of force to release prisoners. British and French officials responded that his statement was a reaction to political concerns in the USA. Meanwhile, further inflaming the public outcry, Serb forces stepped up their attacks on Sarajevo.

At almost exactly the moment of President Bush's call to arms, ITN's pictures first aired. I do not know whether senior State Department officials saw or learned of them that day, but I viewed them, to the best of my recollection, with a handful of colleagues on Friday morning or possibly early afternoon, in the office of European Bureau's chief of public affairs. We were unanimous, from our respective mid-to-mid-senior level vantage points, that the tape was ruinous for the Bush administration's hands-off policy and could not but result in significant US actions. The notion that 'we have got to do something' echoed down State's corridors.

At the start of the week possible critical policy shifts were dimly perceived and highly tentative, but by week's end ITN's graphic portrayal of what was interpreted as a 'Balkan Holocaust' probably ensured that those shifts became irreversible. Those shifts remain fundamental to policy to this day. On 13 August the UN Security Council passed Resolutions 770 and 771, which for the first time authorised the international use of force in Bosnia and promised to punish war criminals, the precursors of the current international occupation of Bosnia and the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. On the 14th, the United Nations Human Rights Commission appointed former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a highly pious Catholic, as Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Former Yugoslavia, a position from which he tended to target only Bosnian Serbs. And, on the 18th, Britain reversed itself and pledged to send 1800 soldiers to Bosnia for humanitarian aid operations, the first step towards what became by mid-September a UNSC approved, enlarged UN Protection Force mission in Bosnia the seed that sprouted into IFOR and now SFOR.

Lost in the shuffle was any understanding of what was actually going on in the camps, who ran them, and why. Official Washington and the US press almost completely ignored an International Committee of the Red Cross report issued on 4 August, describing ICRC visits to 10 camps and their finding of blatant human rights violations by all sides. And though the Serbs did indeed, as the ICRC said, run more camps, it was not disproportionately more. In the rush to convict the Serbs in the court of public opinion, the press paid no more attention to other, later reports throughout the war, up to and after the Dayton agreement, of hellish Croat and Muslim run camps. Nor did the press understand that each side had strong incentives to hold at least some prisoners for exchanges.

Medieval xenophobes reincarnated as high-tech cowboys, Western opinion leaders fixated their fear and anger against the unknown. Defying reason and logic, a myth of a Serb perpetrated Holocaust, coupled with the refusal to even acknowledge atrocities against Serbs, became conventional wisdom. This was the first instance and future model for post-modern imperialistic intervention to determine the winner in a bloody civil war.

Washington loves to go to war in August. The florid atmosphere of August 1992, though not (yet) exactly a shooting match, comprised a more than satisfactory propaganda war, vaguely reassuring those who lost their bearings with the end of the Cold War, together with a new generation of journalists who needed a fraught, dirty conflict on which to cut their teeth. Bosnia made excellent sport.

It is no surprise, after all, that the temptation for news organisations to try to change policy, when they knew how easily they could, was overwhelming.

George Kenney resigned from the US State Department in August 1992, in protest at the Bush

Administration's policy towards the former Yugoslavia. This is his personal account of how the bogus interpretation which the world placed upon ITN's pictures of Trnopolje camp helped to put Washington on a war footing.

HTTP://www.idsonline.com/gkenney/

---

   Back to:

    [ SIRIUS ARCHIVE: Kosovo Files ]
    [ Yugoslavia's problem with Kosovo ]
    [ NATO helps its Kosovo proxies ]
    [ Kosovo Home Page ]

---

Where am I? PATH:   Book of facts History of the Balkans Big powers and civil wars in Yugoslavia (How was Yugoslavia dismantled and why.) Proxies at work (Muslims, Croats and Albanians alike were only proxies of the big powers) - Croats are resurrecting Nazi Croatia - Muslims are resurrecting Turkish Empire - Kosovo Albanians are making Drug Haven The Aftermath

The truth belongs to us all. Feel free to download, copy and redistribute. First posted: February 27, 2003 Last revised: May 31, 2004