By Wm. Dorich

The conference Non-Violent Struggle Against Repressive Regimes was held in Washington by the U.S. Institute for Peace, on January 13, 2002. Both sponsor and participants, who came from various countries, blamed all the ills of the Balkans on Slobodan Milosevic and the Serbs. The approved version of history maintains that Milosevic led a nation of 9 million 'racist zealots' into 4 wars. This is institutionalized bigotry. In a decade of writing about the dismemberment of Yugoslavia I have not once claimed that the Serbs are innocent. What I have demanded however is equal justice: war criminals like former President of Bosnia Alija Izetbegovic, must be indicted. As Commander and Chief in Sarajevo, he is responsible for the establishment of the first concentration camp in Bosnia in May of 1992 in a grain silo on the outskirts of Sarajevo at Tarcin. This was a death camp, in which Serbs were tortured, raped, and murdered. Half a justice is no justice!

In Kosovo, after the genocide and ethnic cleansing of WWII, the Serbian population had been reduced from 45% to 36%. 50 years later the Serbs represent less than 2%. The U.S. Institute for Peace has chosen to ignore such ethnic cleansing. Since the arrival of KFOR, more than 200,000 Serbs have been expelled, 105 Serbian churches have been razed or set on fire, over 2 million Serbian books have been burned, and over 1,000 Serbs have disappeared and are presumed dead. When Tito granted autonomy to Kosovo in 1974, the oppression of Serbs began once again. From 1974 to 1989 over 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave Kosovo. Their departure was encouraged by threats, assaults, beatings, rapes, and killings. Serbian churches were desecrated. Serbs were fired from their jobs. Books on Serbian history and religion were removed from Kosovo schools and libraries and burned. The work of Nobel prize winner Ivo Andric was removed from the curriculum at Pristina University because Andric said he was a Serb. On June 3, 1983 a headline in Politika, Belgrade's major newspaper, read: Monthly-400 Emigrants. The article reported that 10,000 Serbs and Montenegrins had been forced out of Kosovo in the previous 2 years. That forced exodus continued for the entire decade. David Binder, correspondent in the Balkans for The New York Times, discussed such oppression in Kosovo but his reports were ignored.

In my book Kosovo, on page 158, I reprinted an interview from 1982 with Mother Superior Paraskeva of the Devic Monastery. Her recollections of Albanian violence was a litany of beatings, rape, destruction, desecration and oppression. Standing in the monastery courtyard and pointing her finger to the surrounding mountains, Mother Paraskeva explained: "Let us start with the village of Poljana, 48 [Serbian] families, all gone; Kraljica, 58 families, all gone; Ljubovac and Dugovac, around 60 homes, all gone; Gornje and Donje Prikaze, 30 Serbian homes, all gone, Klina, some 28 families, all gone; Novo Selo, 28 families, all gone; Lavusa, there were 25 homes, all gone; all these people moved out; Oluza, there were 12 homes, all gone; Trstenik, some 45 families, all gone; then Cikatovo, at one time 60 homes, and Glogovats with 70, no one around any more; Brocana, 28 families, not a single one there.... I was beaten, had broken ribs, my head was bloodied 10 times." She was assaulted again in 1994 and again in 1998. In 1989, the 79 year-old Serbian bishop of Kosovo was attacked and beaten on the streets of Kosovo by a gang of Albanian youths. The bishop was in intensive care for 3 months nearly dying of his wounds. That bishop is now the Serbian Patriarch Pavle, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church. In a spirit of non-violence and spiritual forgiveness, the bishop refused to press charges; some people repaid the bishop by leading animals into his church to defecate.

Anti-Serb hate propaganda commonly heard in the West spins for us a tale of Serb oppression and domination of the other nations of Yugoslavia . In reality, Serbs ranked in 4th place in Yugoslav government positions including the diplomatic corps. Tito, a Croat, tried to disenfranchise the Serbian people by establishing artificial internal borders in which large segments of the Serb population were transformed into minorities in Croatia and Bosnia. International recognition of those internal borders made civil war inevitable. When the war started, the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia was a Croatian, Ante Markovic. The Deputy Prime Minister was Zivko Pregl, a Slovenian. The Defense Minister was General Veljko Kadijevic, from Croatia, son of a Serbian father and a Croatian mother. The Deputy Defense Minister was a Slovenian, Admiral Stane Brovet. The head of the air force was General Anton Tus, a Croat. The armed forces and the federal government were in no way controlled by the Serbs.

Serbs know their history but are not set on revenge, and minorities still thrive in Belgrade. On June 23, 1941, Viktor Gutich, Croat Governor of Western Bosnia, made a speech in Banja Luka in which he announced that the region would be: "thoroughly cleansed of Serbia dirt... We will use an Iron Broom until Banja Luka and the Krajina is cleansed of the last Serb." (The War We Lost-Yugoslavia's Tragedy and The Failure of the West by Constantin Fotitch. New York: The Viking Press, 1948, pp. 118-.) Yet, when Bosnia exploded in 1992, more than 95,000 Muslims and 33,000 Croats fled to Belgrade into the arms of their alleged Serbian persecutors. When NATO bombing started in Kosovo nearly 40,000 Albanians fled to Belgrade. Today, as in past decades, Serbia continues to be the most multi-ethnic region in Europe. But the labels of "bigots and Jew haters" assigned to the Serbs by some charlatans in the human rights movement, were bought by an irresponsible Western press, too lazy to check facts. The press ignored the fact that Jews fleeing Spain's Civil War were given a home in Serbia or that most Yugoslav Jews who survived the Holocaust were saved by Serbs who hid them in their barns, basements and attics. Those Serbs caught hiding Jews now share common graves. The Serbs had lost 52% of their adult male population as our allies in the First World War and 27% of their overall population in World War Two. Yet, in 1991, the media convinced the world that Serbs were Jew haters and fascists. In the meanwhile, the real fascists, political heirs and open sympathizers of the Croat, Muslim and Albanian SS divisions, were called "freedom fighters." Such historical revisionism was aided by organizations like the U.S. Institute for Peace.

Libby Dole, as President of the American Red Cross, was a party to withholding food and medicine claiming that Serbs were aggressors and did not deserve the aid, apparently in service to her husband's agenda. It had been Senator Dole in 1990 who buried 23 lines in Foreign Appropriations Bill #101513 that cut all loan guarantees to Yugoslavia. This was in direct violation of the Helsinki Final Act which forbids "any act of economic or other coercion." Dole's bill allowed continued U.S. financial aid to the 6 Yugoslav republics with the stipulation that these republics held elections within 6 months. This was intended to set the leaderships of the various republics against each other, an outrageous assault upon the integrity and sovereignty of Yugoslavia, ignored by the media and by the U.S. Institute for Peace.

The Rev. Robert Bigler, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Butte Montana, a former medical specialists in Vietnam, went to Kosovo in 1998. He gave this reporter an interview, in which he detailed his eyewitness accounts about Albanians being photographed in the forest by CNN, and then returning to their homes immediately after the CNN camera crews left the forest. Western journalists staying at the same hotel as Rev. Bigler were heard joking about the fake Albanian victims in the forest. When Rev. Bigler challenged their knowledge that this was a ruse, the journalists laughed and told him they were "only doing their jobs." The bombing of Yugoslavia was proposed and accepted, in 1998, as a solution to the "humanitarian catastrophe" of the Albanians starving in the woods.

In 1939 Goebbels said, "Tell a lie a hundred times, it becomes the truth." Hitler had an even more telling thought when he said, "The great masses will fall victim to a big lie more easily than to a small one." This conference was about the big lie.

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William. Dorich is author of 5 books on the Balkans including Kosovo (1992), The Suppressed Serbian Voice and the Free Press in America (1994), A Brief History of Serbian Music (1997), and Hilandar's Octocentenary, which commemorates the 800th anniversary of the Serbian monastery on Mt. Athos.