Harry's Place

Plus ça change, unfortunately.

He succeeded in (more or less: one can look the later “we Bosnian Serbs must have outlet to the sea” thing as a wilder than usual bit of rhetorical flourish, rather than an essential demand) redrawing the boundaries in the Balkans in the way that he wished; Dayton awarded him his “ethnically pure” statelet founded on ethnic cleansing and religious intolerance, the continuing existence of which has made Bosnia and Herzegovina desperately fragile (and perhaps, without international and EU oversight, almost ungovernable) ever since.

Even after NATO intervened, in many ways, Dayton was Karazdic’s victory. And today that illegitimate entity’s fake (de facto) capital Banja Luka gives no hint of any Ottoman heritage.

And, today, mocking the very concept of international justice, and the dignity of the court he is in, he still plays as though he has the upper hand, that he is the one who will impose his will and succeed get his way, evade justice; it depresses me to say it, as I don’t support capital punishment,but I think the approach meted out to Saddam in Iraq, however perfunctory the trial, was less of a mockery than this may yet turn out to be (and the tolerance of Milosevic’s behaviour most certainly was)

Plus ça change, indeed.

I think part of the reverence that was shown him (by outside observers: Serbs have other reasons related to his own patrimony) was the way that he played the part – so convincingly, at a superficial level, of some imperial statesman of the 18th or 19th century; the constant display of maps, the bouffant; the arm-waving – as though he were reassuringly reactionary

Via Oliver Kamm.. Steve Bell assesses Karadzic vs Blair.

One wonders if those on the Left who defended Milosevic will be equally keen to support Karadzic. They are generally not too keen on ‘isamophobes, and he was a bit ‘islamophobic’.

I reported from Banja Luka for The Times in autumn 1992. The terror in the ancient Ottoman city was almost tangible as Serb militiamen organised the ethnic cleansing of Muslim and Catholic residents, before blowing up the city’s 16 ancient mosques

So these would be the same Muslim communities who provided Hitler with his Bosnisan SS legions happy to join in with the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population and others in WW2. The same Muslims egged on by the Mufti of Jerusalem to vicariously promote the reach of the Holocaust for longer term Islamic interests in Europe.

From 1941 until 1945, the Nazi-installed regime of Ante Pavelic in Croatia carried out some of the most horrific crimes of the Holocaust (known as the Porajmos by the Roma), killing over 800,000 Yugoslav citizens – 750,000 Serbs, 60,000 Jews and 26,000 Roma. In these crimes, they were helped by Muslim fundamentalists in Bosnia and Kosovo who were openly supported by the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini.
http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/yugoslavia_collaboration.htm

Would such festering animosity in other country be much different? We are already aware of the impact Islamic migration is having in the minds of a European populace, witnessing imposed characteristic and visual changes to their national identity and cultural image.

An exponentially expanding Muslim presence in what was Serbian heartland, brought about by out through the Muslim propensity for large families and uncontrolled migration from a poverty stricken Islamic Albania.

What scares me is that as heinous as Karadizc’s charges are, is there not a whiff of potential hypocrisy in our outrage. Are there not uneasy similarities emerging throughout Europe and the UK with the significant rise in support for the policies of extreme political parties?

The UK is waking up to the fact that (if Andrew Neather? is to be believed), that the demographical picture of this Country is being deliberately manipulated for political ends by this insidious New Labour machine and its lust for a United States of Europe.

We should be careful before we cast the first stone.

@Pommy Bastard you whataboutard!

Do you take the existence of the French SS corps as evidence of the support of entirety of France for the Nazis, or the Friecorps Birtish corps as evidence of the support of the entirety of the British for the Nazis? Why then single out the Albanian muslims

odd site you quote from, given the ‘thumbs up’ by people on Stormfront, and terrible misspellings in the url…. what’s it’s angle I wonder.

@Pommy Bastard you whataboutard!

Do you take the existence of the French SS corps as evidence of the support of entirety of France for the Nazis, or the Friecorps Birtish corps as evidence of the support of the entirety of the British for the Nazis? Why then single out the Albanian/bosnian muslims

odd site you quote from, given the ‘thumbs up’ by people on Stormfront, and terrible misspellings in the url…. what’s it’s angle I wonder.

It is true that some Bosnian and Albanian Muslims formed their own SS divisions, the Handzar and the Skenderbeg. It is also true that many Bosnian and Albanian Muslims saved Jews – Albania is actually the only country to have a larger Jewish population (mainly Greek and Yugoslav refugees) in 1945 than 1939. But whatever happened in WWII, and however skilfully exploited by the Serb propaganda machine, is no excuse for the horrors that unfolded in 1991-1995.

apologies for the double post, eds please delete the first one.

There were 5 times the amount of Serbs who volunteered for the Waffen-SS, as Albanians.

Sophie’s choice is an easy if cruel concept for us to grasp and shudder at. The whining Bosnian the BBC keeps digging up is another kettle of fish altogether. These Beeb stories defy basic logic and sometimes interpretation. This guy watches his mother and family walk out of a compound to their death in which he appears to be working at as an interpreter.
Are the Dutch guilty? The British Government would have been doling out the compensation by now.I do not know if Karadvic is guilty or not. I do know his muslim counterpart tried to persuade the UN. Rep. to use his powers and take any random Serb. and execute two for every Bosnian Muslim, because I heard him saying this on the BBC. The awful muddy lie the BBC reporter Liddel came up with recently. Liddel compared Arthurian Legend with the whole Serbian mind set concerning the Turkish Atrocities, from Blackbirds onwards. Liddel knows history and true knowledge has no meaning in our society any more. Arthur inspired the Victorians and greece under the Turkish yoke inspired Byron!

It’s an irony that supporters of Israel are sometimes so hypocritical about issues like this.

History and current events repeatedly show us that any society that becomes ‘duo-cultural’ (i.e. two similarly large cultural, ethnic or religious groups living in the same space) will inevitably descend into inter-community conflict. And that’s what we saw in the former Yugoslavia.

I support Israel’s right to exist as a predominantly Jewish nation. I understand how sensitive the existence of Israel is to demographics. I understand that Israel wouldn’t exist with a Muslim majority.

So why do some supporters of Israel not accept that these concerns also apply to the rest of the world?

There were 5 times the amount of Serbs who volunteered for the Waffen-SS, as Albanians.

Indeed. Besides googling for “SS-Volunteer mountain division “Prinz Eugen”" our friend Pommy might look up “Serbian Volunteer Corps” a collaborationist army of Serbian fascists formed in 1943 and which, a year later was transferred to the Waffen-SS as the Serbian SS Corps and made up of four regiments with three battalions and a training battalion. And if that failed to convince him, then reference to Milan Nedic, the Zbor, and the Banjica concentration camp in the Belgrade suburb of that name would be sobering.

Shiraz Socialist has a good point that even today people like Slobodan Milosevic are considered a role model by the so called Left, witness Neil Clark’s Morning Star piece.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/The-leftists-who-didn-t-sell-out

And people still say Nick Cohen’s thesis about the sell out of the Left to the far Right is not real.

Brothers and Sisters, surely we can all come together and agree Neil Clark is a total and utter cock?

Given how often apologists and supporters of Bosnian Serb war crimes parrot the same factually dubious yet superficially plausible talking points it would be useful if one of the Balkan experts would do a thorough debunking of all the myths, as Popular Mechanics did for 9/11 trutherism.

‘And if that failed to convince him, then reference to Milan Nedic, the Zbor, and the Banjica concentration camp in the Belgrade suburb of that name would be sobering.’

Graham beat me to it. It’s funny how pan-Serbs are so willing to throw around the accusation of collaboration with the Nazis during WWII, given the less-than-glorious role their predecessors played in former Yugoslavia (there’s also the Cetniks as well).

‘Brothers and Sisters, surely we can all come together and agree Neil Clark is a total and utter cock?’

Cocks serve a purpose in life.

My point, obviously inadequately expressed, was an attempt to raise the concern that before Karadzic attains the position of White European Martyr through knee-jerk responses like that of the BBC vs. Griffin debacle. The circumstances on the ground leading up to and surrounding the alleged crimes need to be examined.

Apologists for both sides will be quick enough to muddy the waters with A did this and B did that and totally miss the opportunity available from the lessons to be learned by using the evidence now available addressing contemporary realities.

There is an apparent reluctance from most commentators to look to seek comparisons of how Serbia reacted to Islamic expansion within its own borders, and that of popular feeling in Europe today. The accepted liberal arguments seem to accept that it is legitimate to refer to ‘Muslim Lands’ or the ‘Muslim World’ with out questioning or identifying where these deliberately unspecified border lines are drawn. Conversely, culturally Western nationalities are castigated and branded Nazi for laying claim to any rights at all to preserve their individual boundaries and traditional identities.

Islamists know that the weakness of democracy is voter apathy and complacency. They have harnessed IT as a weapon far more efficiently than anything the West has come to employ so far. National identity and Religious identity seem to be exploited ruthlessly by OIC and the Muslim Brotherhood (in its many guises) throughout the whole world.

How would the US and the rest of the Western nation react if through democratic process ethnic Mexicans/Hispanics out-voted the rest for California to seek independence based on numbers at the ballot box. Is this so far away from the previous situation in the Balkans?

Just a thought!

Do you take the existence of the French SS corps as evidence of the support of entirety of France for the Nazis

Remember, ‘Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion’……
No, that a huge number, if not the bulk of France supported the Nazis one could glean from the fact that France under Marshal Pétain effectively swapped sides after Dunkirk and became a de facto Axis power. French forces opposed 2 Allied landings – in North Africa – operation Torch and in Madagascar – operation Ironclad, and a huge number of the Axis troops were stationed on the Atlantic wall opposing the Allies, including at Normandy, were French. The French refused to sail their Navy to Allied control ports after Dunkirk, forcing us – the Brits – to sink much of it so that it did not fall into German hands, they had an air force that repeatedly bombed Gibraltar and Malta and attacked Allied Mediterranean shipping. France shipped off 90,000 Jews for ‘extermination’ to the death camps, the French ‘Resistance’ was notoriously dodgy compared to the Dutch and Norwegian equivalents. Vichy France maintained armed occupation of French Indochina throughout the war, operating jointly with the Japs, and just about any Allied soldier’s account of the battle for France post 6th June 1944 details the lackluster and all too often perfid reception received. Yes, some French did serve with the Allies bravely and with destination, including with the Commandos, but this was very much the exception, more served with Axis forces.

It just suited Allied propaganda to paint a picture of the French as stalwart allies and this continued to become post war revisionism.

hmmmmm

But the fact remains that from an Albanian population of about 500,000, 3000 joined up with the Wafflen SS.

There is an apparent reluctance from most commentators to look to seek comparisons of how Serbia reacted to Islamic expansion within its own borders

There was Islamic expansion within Serbia? When?

Any word what the ex-RCPers such as Brendan O’Neill are making of this? My guess is there’ll be an appalling piece of contrarian apologia on the Spiked website shortly but it’s such a vile place and I don’t want to make a bad day any worse by having to visit it.

Adam, terrific piece. If we’re urging to Karadzic to ‘fess up, I wonder what he’d say about UNPROFOR, the UN force in former Yugoslavia (full disclosure: I was a media officer for UNPROFOR in 1994). It seems odd now to think of Britain, France and Russia as an axis, but back then they worked together energetically to prevent any serious challenge to the Serbs on the ground. Gen. Michael Rose – the British officer in charge of the UN force in Sarajevo before the much more able Rupert Smith took over – went out of his way to consult with both Karadzic and Mladic. The notion of the Bosnian Serb paramilitaries as war criminals was regarded as laughable by Rose, Yasushi Akashi and other assorted UN military and civilian leaders, and they’ve never been called to account.

I don’t know much about the Bosnian genocide, however could someone with the facts tell me if the following two stories have any basis in fact? It is not a trick question it is for something I am looking into in relation to another issue. If the moderators allow such an inquiry that is, if it is OT then I could place my inquiry/comment on the “outside” facility of HP.

“The SDA, the ruling party of Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic, decides in private meetings that war in Bosnia is inevitable. They begin forming their own paramilitary force called the Patriotic League, which answers to Izetbegovic and his party, not the Bosnian government as a whole. Hasan Cengic, a radical militant imam, is given control of the Patriotic League and begins arming it. The Bosnian Muslims have no armed force at all at this time while the Yugoslavian army they face is very large and well supplied. Cengic travels to many countries arranging secret arms deals to supply the new force, planned to be 30,000 soldiers strong. By the end of the year, he arranges deals with Slovenia, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. [SCHINDLER, 2007, PP. 70] Cengic’s efforts will be the start of an illegal arms pipeline into Bosnia of massive proportions (see Mid-1991-1996).”

and

“Renate Flottau, a reporter for Der Spiegel, later claims she meets Osama bin Laden in Bosnia some time in 1994. She is in a waiting room of Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic’s office in order to interview him when she runs into bin Laden. He gives her a business card but at the time she does not recognize the name. They speak for about ten minutes and he talks to her in excellent English. He asks no questions but reveals that he is in Bosnia to help bring Muslim fighters into the country and that he has a Bosnian passport. Izetbegovic’s staffers seem displeased that bin Laden is speaking to a Western journalist. One tells her that bin Laden is “here every day and we don’t know how to make him go away.” She sees bin Laden at Izetbegovic’s office again one week later. This time he is accompanied by several senior members of Izetbegovic’s political party that she recognizes, including members from the secret police. She later calls the encounter “incredibly bizarre.” [SCHINDLER, 2007, PP. 123-125] A journalist for the London Times will witness Flottau’s first encounter with bin Laden and testify about it in a later court trial (see November 1994). Members of the SDA, Izetbegovic’s political party, will later deny the existence of such visits. But one Muslim politician, Sejfudin Tokic, speaker of the upper house of the Bosnian parliament, will say that such visits were “not a fabrication,” and that photos exist of bin Laden and Izetbegovic together. One such photo will later appear in a local magazine. Author John Schindler will say the photo is “fuzzy but appears to be genuine.” [SCHINDLER, 2007, PP. 124-125, 342] According to one account, bin Laden continues to visit the Balkan region as late as 1996. [WALL STREET JOURNAL (EUROPE), 1/11/2001]”

This is not an attempt to deflect attention from the crimes of Karadzic or in anyway to muddy the waters, I am just trying to find out if these people, John Schindler and Renate Flottau are credible.

Thanks.

Sandal. That the Bosnian government had no army and had to acquire weapons is fairly well known. Hasan Cengic as far as I am aware is not an imam: in fact he is more usually accused of being gangster-like and is a member of a very powerful clan. He was certainly instrumental in arms dealing at the time.

The Bin Laden in the Balkans theory cannot be proved or disproved. I don’t see how anyone could have stopped him going to the country during war time but the idea that he was hanging around Izetbegovic’s office has the whiff of Serb propaganda all over it. The idea that the militant Bin Laden would have been impressed with the wishy washy “synthesis” Islam of Izetbegovic seems rather faint to me. If he really was there every day the Bosnian government would certainly have been trying to “make him go away” as you suggest.

Also, remember that the Bosnian government was under an arms embargo of dubious legality, given that BiH was recognized as an independent state with UN membership in April 1992. One consequence was that Bosnian officials became more dependent on support from Arab and Muslim states than they might have otherwise done. However, the sense I had at the time was that this support was more declarative than substantial. The OIC states were an important bloc of diplomatic support but they didn’t make much difference to the military balance. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that Muslim countries like Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh were the biggest contributors of troops to the very same UN Mission that wanted the Bosniaks (a more accurate term than “Muslims”) to roll over and be done with it.

@ puzzled: much of serbia, up to novi sad was once part of the ottoman empire. belgrade a century ago was home to numerous mosques, and turbes (ottoman tombs). almost all of this was eradicated by the Nazi carpet bombing and the serbs themselves. we could discuss at length the similarities between late ottoman political culture (ethno-centric, genocidal) and Serbia in the 1990s…..

Sandal – The idea of Bin Laden having a cosy chat with a female western journalist and handing over his card seems, well, rather fanciful.

As for the SDA deciding in private meetings that war was inevitable, check this clip from 1:30 on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5kD1FdxvIE&feature=related

I’d say Karadzic made the decision for them, and in public.

Thanks for the replies folks.

I think it’s the business card that makes me doubt this claim of a meeting with OBL. what would be written on it?! having said that, there were, and I saw in Bosnia some very hard-line and very hostile Muslim foreign fighters and numerous ‘aid-workers’ of questionable provenance….

“”"How would the US and the rest of the Western nation react if through democratic process ethnic Mexicans/Hispanics out-voted the rest for California to seek independence based on numbers at the ballot box.”"”

Even putting aside the fact that the analogy doesn’t make sense because the hispanics in the USA are not organized within that party system along ‘ethnic’ lines. This question that the pommy bastard asks reveals one of the major biases that many people have towards the war in Bosnia.

First of all, you look at Bosnia as a mirror for your own anxiety over the need to cope with diversity. This is a trend among some of the regular commentors in this blog.

But, most importantly, your argument does not make sense if we look at facts and the process that led to the war. Bosnia opted for independence rather reluctantly, given that the dissolution of Yugoslavia was an undeniable fact.

Furthermore, arguments based on the security dilemma don’t apply to the case of the bosnian Serbs, because the facts don’t match, it’s as simple as that. Rational people with any attachment to intellectual honesty should be able to question their assumptions in the face of facts.

Nick (Ex-South Africa)
There were no French troops fighting the Western Allies in Normandy, nor were there French planes bombing Gibraltar or Malta. The French SS Legion, the Charlamagne Division was fighting the Russians. The record of Vichy France is bad enough without gross lies like these.