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I should have known that there had been a news item I missed when Ralph wrote me another scathing e-mail Saturday, which didn't seem to be connected with anything I had written, which said:
Hitler and his Nazis believed in the BIG LIE. In other words make up some preposterous tale and repeat it again and again until some people believed it. Apparently Milosevic and his Serbs also believe in the BIG LIE. Your repetitions of these lies are helping him. You should be ashamed and hopefully you will be punished. Your web site is full of incorrect information designed to mislead people.Then a reader sent me a clipping from the New York Times, which had been published last Wednesday which said:
No Bodies at Rumored Grave Site in Kosovo
By REUTERS
PRISTINA, Kosovo -- War crimes investigators have found nothing in a Kosovo mine shaft where hundreds of bodies were rumored to be hidden, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has said. "They found absolutely nothing," a tribunal spokeswoman, Kelly Moore, said on Monday.
Rumors that Serbian forces had hidden the bodies of up to 700 ethnic Albanians in the Trebca lead and zinc mine, near the northern city of Mitrovica, had been circulating for months. Tribunal experts had brought in special excavation equipment to investigate the rumors, which had been widely reported in the Kosovo media.
The Hague-based tribunal has indicted President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four other senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials on war crimes charges stemming from the Serbian campaign of violence against Kosovo Albanians earlier this year.
Forensic scientists with the tribunal have investigated more than 150 mass grave sites across the Serbian province in the last few months and have hundreds more suspected sites to examine.
This followed on the heels of the report on September 28th from Spain issued by the group of Spanish forensic experts who had been given the Istok area which, they were told by NATO, was "one of the worst sites of mass killings by the Serbs." NATO informed the Spanish forensic experts that "there were over 2000 dead Albanians" slaughtered by the evil Serbs in the area. Istok contains a prison where a group of convicted felons were housed. "Crimes of War - yes, Genocide - no," the report states. "This was definitely shown yesterday by the group of Spanish experts formed by officials from the Scientific Police and Civilian Forensics that has just returned from Istok, the Zone in the North of Kosovo. 187 cadavers found and analyzed in 9 villages were buried in individual graves, oriented for the most part toward Mecca out of respect for the religious beliefs of the Albanian Kosovars and without sign of torture. 'There were no mass graves. For the most part the Serbs are not as bad as they have been painted,' reflected the forensic official Emilio P�rez Pujo." Furthermore, most of the prisoners had been killed by shrapnel when NATO bombed the prison. Others were shot while fleeing the prison after the bombing.
On September 22nd, Ralph had written me an e-mail to tell me how inaccurate my writing is, because I had consistently questioned NATO figures, which they appear to have gotten from the KLA. Ralph wrote:
Like the Nazis the Serbs today are engaging in horrible atrocities against many innocent peoples.There was a large scale effort by the Serbs in Kosovo to hide their crimes and their victims bodies
1) ie. they were dug up, burned, reburied in garbage dumps etc.)
2) Many mass graves of Serbian victims have already been uncovered. and
3) There are (many more than) 100,000 Kosovars missing.
While many Serbs have been killed in Kosovo since the NATO takeover, this is not NATO's fault. The resident ethnic Albanians are seizing every opportunity to revenge themselves upon their oppressors. NATO troops are daily risking their lives to PROTECT the Serbian population. It would help greatly if the Serbian population acknowledged their guilt, repented and punished their war criminals themselves. Treating war criminals as heroes and appointing them to leadership positions generates additional hatred towards the Serbian people from their victims. As long as the ethnic Albanians, the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims etc. do not get justice from the Serbian people, these Serbian people will be subject to revenge atrocities.
So, here we are, three weeks later, and one by one all the big "mass graves" sites which were supposedly the location of the bodies of some of those supposedly missing 100,000 Kosovars are turning up either totally empty or with a few bodies that could easily be explained by the NATO bombs or the ground war that was going on between the KLA and the Yugoslav Army. And we still have not been given ANY numbers of deaths from the ground war, except by Milosevic who said 476 Yugoslav soldiers had been killed in the war - something over 300 of them by the KLA and the remaining by the NATO bombs. Remember Jamie Shea claimed during the bombing that NATO had killed 10,000 Yugoslav soldiers in their stated aim to "degrade" the Yugoslav military. Apparently that 10,000 was actually less than 200.
Most of the Kosovo minorities have fled - including not only 175,000 Serbs, but, according to reports from Albanian opposition parties, up to 150,000 ALBANIANS who oppose the KLA, plus the Gypsies, the Jews, the Gorans, the Egyptians, the Montenegrins and the Turks. Increasingly, Kosovo is inhabited mostly by Albanians and KFOR troops, and there are about 800,000 MORE Albanians now than in 1998. The State Department said there were 1.3 Million Albanians in Kosovo in 1998. Today, they claim, there are 2.1 million Albanians in Kosovo. If, as it increasingly appears, all those massacre horror stories the KLA told gullible journalists, NATO and UN officials turn out to be false, it will be increasingly obvious to the rest of the world that NATO used its massive military power to destroy a sovereign nation and then took part of its land and handed it over to a non-government group of criminals known as the KLA, which in 1998 was designated even by the Clinton State Department as a terrorist organization financed through crime - illegal drugs, prostitution, robbery, etc.
On March 25th, less than 24 hours into the bombing of Yugoslavia, I wrote in a column entitled, "Kosovo - Clinton Propaganda vs Eye Witness E-mail War Correspondents" (http://originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-25-1999.1.shtml). I noted, in that column that "This is the first war that is being reported by on the spot eye witnesses sending e-mail around the world to friends and family, not merely by reporters who faithfully follow the political direction given by government leaders - whether that leader is Bill Clinton or Slobadan Milosevic."
Clinton ordering the bombing of Serb television and trying to halt all e-mail coming out of Yugoslavia was not entirely successful. The e-mail kept coming and has chronicled the Kosovo war in thousands of separate accounts by ordinary people, some of them Americans married to Serbs, who were under those bombs. Even that early I was questioning the rationale for the bombing, the so-called "Serb atrocities" which had never been documented and which are not being documented now. We don't HAVE bodies, as we did at the end of World War II when Allied forces took control of Nazi concentration camps. I ended that column with:
Accusations by Muslims and Croatians of Serb "atrocities" have been widely reported with some newspapers, like the Los Angeles Times, publishing 8000 anti-Serb articles compared to Zero "pro-Serb" articles.That kind of imbalance alone is suspicious.
When a possible worldwide conflagration is at risk, the truth needs to be known. And, when the truth is tracked down, and we find that the KLA, a largely mercenary army that hired its own PR firm in Washington, possesses the most up-to-date weaponry and has technical advisors for training in their use, is being financed with money made from selling heroin all over Europe, the matter takes on a truly sinister nature.
Milosevic is stubborn and nationalistic but he IS the legitimate elected head of State for Yugoslavia. If he needs to be removed, the people of Yugoslavia need to do the removing, not the President of the United States directing missile shots from 10,000 miles away. And, if the choice is between stubborn and nationalistic Milosevic or unknown, unnamed drug lords who run a mercenary army with a New York Public Relations firm and Washington Lobbyists as its propaganda arm - I think I'll choose Milosevic. We don't need another nation which has a government controlled by drug dealers.
The natural result of putting a group of drug dealers with their own army in charge of Kosovo is what now exists there - corruption and violence. Even the rabidly pro-KLA London Telegraph is beginning to see a few problems. In Sunday's paper it reported:
And as ethnic hatred continues to plague the territory, fresh violence erupted in the divided city of Mitrovica when French troops fired tear gas and clubbed young Albanians who tried to storm across a bridge into the Serb quarter during several hours of rioting. The events in the two towns illustrate how the defense of the remaining Serb pockets in Kosovo is the biggest dilemma facing the international peacekeepers of Kfor. For although Tony Blair and President Clinton insisted that the air war was intended to forge a safe and multi-ethnic Kosovo, the reality is very different. More than three-quarters of Kosovo's 200,000 Serbs have fled. And while United Nations officials consider plans to create "safe havens" for those still there, such de facto areas already exist under Kfor's auspices.
It then repeats KLA propaganda about the area of Veliko Krusa being the:
"scene of one of the conflict's biggest massacres and one of the war crimes listed in the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav President. That gives the role of ethnic cleansers still at large in Orahovac particular significance. "Some of those responsible for the killings are in jail, but others are still up there," Lt-Col Tony van Loon said. "We are creating a database of possible war criminals based on the testimony of local witnesses. There are some Albanians, but the big majority are Serbs."
Of course, all that is lacking to indict the Serbs is evidence. Not hearsay. Evidence, like the dead bodies of those 100,000 the KLA claim the Serbs killed. At least the Serbs produce the bodies, and the NAMES of the people when the Albanians kill Serbs. So far, there are more Serb bodies than Albanian bodies. Finally the Telegraph verifies what the Serb media has been saying for months. The Serbs remaining in the area are in real danger:
As it is too dangerous for them to venture down the hill to the shops, they now rely on food supplies delivered by charities and the Red Cross. From what was once a small grocery, boxes of milk, flour, biscuits and canned meat are handed out to keep people going. Nor can they bury their dead in the Orthodox cemetery as that lies outside the enclave. Instead, a small plot of land behind the church has been turned into a makeshift graveyard for the Serbs who have died recently - some naturally; others in revenge killings by Albanians. ...But elsewhere, Kosovo is fast becoming a Serb-free territory and ethnic enmity shows no sign of easing. On Pristina's main throughfare, Mother Teresa Street, a Bulgarian UN worker was shot dead by a group of Albanian thugs last week. His crime was to have answered in Serbian when asked the time.
Folks, the skepticism I had before and during the bombing about believing the stories of drug dealers and criminals, and their accomplice in the White House who will go down in history as a president who lied even to a grand jury, is being borne out by what is happening now in Kosovo. Americans were propagandized by liars - Bill Clinton and the KLA, - just as effectively as the Germans were propagandized by Hitler. Just as no major national leader, not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, stood up to defend Hitler's victims, it seems today's leaders are just as cowardly about defending the Serbs against an ongoing "final solution." Only Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary General, seems to be speaking up in protest against Clinton's and the KLA's "Final Solution" in Kosovo.
Is this how America will end the 20th Century? Not even OBJECTING to another holocaust experience for Serbs who lost 1.7 million to the Nazi forces of Croatia, Bosnia and Albania in World War II?