Цитат:War Torn
Joe Pappalardo | April 5, 2001 | 4:00am


"...Persons of humanitarian and reformist disposition often go...to the Balkan peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom...all came back with a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the massacre and never the massacrer."

--Rebecca West in "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" (1938)

On April 23, 1999, Nazar "Nick" Mehmeti stood outside the White House and chanted at Bill Clinton. The Albanian-American was one of hundreds there in support of NATO intervention in the Balkans. More than 4,000 miles away, bombs were crashing into the soil of Kosovo and Serbia, marking the historic apex of the U.S.-ethnic Albanian relationship.

A reporter approached Mehmeti, operator of several strip clubs and sports bars in Dallas, and asked why he had flown hundreds of miles to attend the rally. "We support the NATO troops, but we want them to put in ground troops also," he told the reporter. "Better yet, arm the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] and we can take care of our own."

The campaign and vilification of Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbs was an explosive validation of ethnic Albanian beliefs, and Mehmeti wanted to bask in it. Finally the world was acknowledging that its Serbian arch-foes were a thuggish band of criminals. It was a once-in-a-millennium opportunity for ethnic Albanians hoping to create a "greater Albania" with their self-considered historical lands, lands first occupied by the Ottoman Turk empire, then sliced and distributed like a pizza by European powers after World War I after the Turks were driven out.

Mehmeti retains the attachment to his nationalistic roots that is so common among first-generation immigrants. For ethnic Albanians in the United States, that also means supporting their people's often violent struggles in the Balkans, and on this front Mehmeti has distinguished himself. The founder of a national fund-raiser for the KLA, the violent underground movement whose acts prompted the fierce Serbian crackdown that in turn sparked the Kosovo intervention, said that Mehmeti donated more than a million dollars to the rebels, making him the largest donor in Dallas' Albanian community.

Mehmeti wouldn't return calls to validate how much he donated, but it's clear that he isn't alone locally in his support for the KLA: One-tenth of the money gathered in the rebels' U.S. fund-raising effort was raised in Dallas.

Not surprising, since the almost 2,000 ethnic Albanians in Dallas are a tight and nationalistic bunch, even though the thousands living in other metropolitan areas like Brooklyn dwarf their numbers. Here they stick close together, not only with social and cultural bonds but also through a support network of Italian pizzerias, a market that ethnic Albanians have dominated here since the 1980s.

But like so many immigrant groups, ethnic Albanians have found their niche in Texas much easier than finding a niche in their ancestral homes in Europe. And despite the close ties that bind, the newer generation Albanians are becoming accustomed to their lives in the United States, and their Albanian fervor is noticeably lower. The traditional dilemma of immigrants that pits the American culture against their homelands takes a dramatic turn as the Balkans is again torn by violence. That strife drives the community in Dallas together, gathering in Albanian American Community Center in Carrollton, serving as couriers bearing money for humanitarian or military uses and reinforcing the networks that the Albanian population has maintained here for two decades.

Over time, the pleasures and immediacy of American life overwhelm Balkan miseries. While remaining proud and patriotic, the newer generation doesn't rise to the level of nationalism that marks its predecessors or committed figures like Mehmeti.

For some, this disassociation is as simple as taking a bride. "I am the next generation, but I went the wrong way. I married an American girl. They don't think too much of that," says Agron "Roni" Sulejmani, whose father was one of the first to bring his family to Dallas in the early 1980s. "We don't get treated like other couples do, but that's fine. They're not what makes my world go 'round."

This week, Roni Sulejmani is opening a pizzeria called Luigi's Italian Café on FM 3040, near Flower Mound. This rather routine event is the latest entry in a story that extends across a generation; the family history of this 30-year-old entrepreneur is emblematic of the story of dozens of ethnic Albanian families here.

In the early 1980s, Sulejmani's father opened a pizzeria and named it after himself; Luigi's Pizza opened on Park Lane in Dallas. They estimate that they were the second ethnic Albanian family in Dallas, the first family being their cousin, who owned a successful pizzeria in Redbird Mall.

"He called my dad and said, 'Move to Dallas; this is where it's at.' So we sold everything in Philadelphia and moved," Roni Sulejmani says. "So I guess we were the second family of Albanians in Dallas."

Luigi Sulejmani opened eight pizza stores and sold all but one; he still operates a pizzeria on Mockingbird Lane. The successful business in America was combined with an effort to keep the Sulejmani kids, born in Philadelphia, aware of their Albanian roots. For almost 10 years they traveled to Macedonia every summer, teaching young Agron to speak Albanian.

Back in Texas, Agron was "Roni," learning the food-service trade and harboring his own ambitions. "Either you're a worker or you're an owner making money," he says. "I worked with my father and with other Albanian guys at various restaurants, before I decided to do something for myself. In the restaurant business you can make a decent living, but you can't feed three families off one restaurant."

Feeding a family is high on his list of priorities; his second daughter was born several months ago, and his first is 3 years old. Although he plans to introduce the Balkans to his children through frequent visits, as his father did, he is becoming unabashedly Americanized.

"I want to let them [his children] grow up in the American way," he says. "Our whole family lifestyle, I guess you could call it American."

Since the opening of the pizzeria by Luigi Sulejmani's cousin in 1979, nearly 90 Albanian-owned restaurants have opened in the DFW area. The story of the Albanian domination of the pizza business explains a lot about how the community sprang up here and thrived while remaining bound tightly together, despite creeping Americanization.

Dallas has a network of support for new arrivals, including no-interest bank loans between Albanian owners and an understanding that any new Albanian-owned restaurant needs to be more than a mile away from another. Every month or two, new accounts for Albanian-owned restaurants are opened with Lisanti Foods of Texas, which dominates the sales of pizza supplies to them.

There's a reason most Albanian eateries in Dallas buy their ingredients from Lisanti. In order to keep a lock on the market, Lisanti has worked hard to keep its clients happy and loyal. In an odd agreement, Lisanti has agreed to redirect 6 percent of the money it makes selling supplies to a local Albanian organization called the Dardani Group.

"It is strange for an industry to do this. We don't do it for anyone else," says Kari Sulejmani, office manager of Lisanti's of Texas and Roni's wife of almost five years. Their relationship started as customer-supplier but evolved into husband-wife. "You're basically paying them to be our customers."

The Dardani Group not only uses its network to get better prices from Lisanti, it invests in the stock market and devotes a portion of its funds to operate the Albanian American Community Center in Carrollton. The center serves as a mosque for the Muslim Albanians and a meeting place in times of celebration and fear. "We meet there once a month, but when tensions arise we try to meet there more often," says Feti Staraveci, owner of Alfredo's Pizza in Carrollton and the man at the helm of the Dardani Group. "We've been meeting a lot lately, about once a week."

Topics at meetings these days range from Macedonian violence to stock market upheavals, which have sunk Dardani Group investments into the red. More important, the meetings serve as a vital pipeline of unfiltered information about the Balkans, relayed through friends and family there. Staraveci started the Dardani fund in 1991, drawing support from the almost 40 new ethnic Albanian arrivals and from Lisanti Foods, which was also new to the area. By catering to the new Albanian restaurant boom, owner Joe Lisanti got a foothold in the DFW market.

Time, poor performing stocks and a shrinking pizza market have diminished the Dardani Group's popularity. Active members in the group are losing interest, according to Staraveci, and the enrollees are dropping off. Still, even though the official cohesive power-buying group may be floundering, more informal ties between ethnic Albanians remain strong. The practice of lending money to start-ups or troubled businesses still continues, as does the courtesy of establishing a competing restaurant at least a mile away from another Albanian-owned one. "There are so many people coming here and just so many good areas to move into," Staraveci says. "We try to respect each other's business."

These pizza places are the bedrock of the Albanian community here. It's where you'll find the beating heart of Albanian nationalism in first-generation immigrants.

Brother's Pizza, located in the Abrams-Forest shopping center, could be excised and transplanted to some of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation, and most small ones. The walls are lined with black-and-white images of industrial New York, those same images of the Flatiron building and waterfront docks that are somehow meant to convey a legitimate pizza experience. Business is brisk, and one year the pizza was declared by The Dallas Morning News to be the "Best in Dallas."

The décor may be typical, but the owner is not. Qemal Vraniqi, the stout and bald-headed owner of the pizzeria, looks like a man cast as the blacksmith in a bad medieval movie. To talk with him about the Balkans requires patience and unremitting agreement with his analysis of history, politics and justice. A conversation with him turns into a diatribe including, in no particular order: notable Albanians in world history, superior household customs of Albanians, the godlessness and profanity used by Serbs, the courage of Albanian-bred dogs, colonization of other planets, bias in the U.S. press against Albanians and obscure roads in Europe built by Albanians. His is the face of ethnic Albanian nationalism.

"The Macedonians and Serbs want us for work, work, work without giving anything in return," he says, thick-fingered hands splayed on the Formica table of his restaurant. "Just like the black man in the U.S."

In his youth, Kosovo native Vraniqi left to work in Serbia building roads, putting together the infrastructure for Serbs while his home remained a backwater. The first-hand experience with sneering Serbs and the low compensation for his work left a bad taste that lingers to this day. He can recall fistfights he had with Serbs he disliked, and distaste for Serbs he got along with who, he says, were actually informants.

"Slovanians curse God and they curse their own mothers," Vraniqi sums up. "Albanians, we don't curse no God."

Vraniqi was driven out of Kosovo by what he calls economic discrimination, a claim that most reports of working conditions in Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro bear out. After a three-year stint working for the U.S. military, guarding an air base in Germany as part of the civilian labor service, he moved to Brooklyn. It was 1968, and he felt far away from his hometown of Prizrem. By 1982 he became part of the migration to Dallas, and by 1984 his pizza shop opened.

But his heart never left Kosovo. When the Serbian crackdown gained worldwide attention, he helped raise $185,000 for Kosovar Albanians, money he says went exclusively to clothes, food and medical supplies. Two weeks after NATO stopped bombing, Vraniqi went back to Kosovo for the first time in more than 15 years.

"I feel embarrassed to cry," he says, and even now the burly man's voice chokes. "I see my people and I see my place. I smell the woods. I smelled the oak. The wood, it smells better there. I went into the forest and chopped some myself and I smelled it."

In the face of such emotion it's hard to argue geopolitical facts. He was shown stills from BBC footage showing a Macedonian Albanian with a grenade in his hand, ready to lob it at the backs of two fleeing police officers at a checkpoint. The man was gunned down before he was able to throw the grenade.

Vraniqi scans the images briefly. Rationalization comes quick. "They need something to protect themselves," he says of the grenade-wielding Albanians. "Because if you don't and people are killing you..." He spreads his hands like it's obvious.

A conversation with Vraniqi demonstrates that one man's nationalism is another man's fanaticism.

From Ben Franklin agitating in France for American revolution to Jerry Adams soliciting for the IRA in Boston, it's standard practice for rebel groups to set up support networks in other countries. Their status as criminals or heroes depends on perspective, and in the melting pot of America, that perspective is often ambiguous.

During the Kosovo campaign, U.S. foreign policy and Albanian ambitions intersected in a brief, star-crossed geopolitical love affair. Things are different now. The pro-Albanian movement is unwelcome in Europe, and now that they have stopped being slaughtered by Serbs the pendulum is swinging away from their interests. "Everybody in the Balkans can prove their case," says Joseph Lake, director of Dallas' office of international affairs and a former ambassador to Albania, "depending on what time in history they're in."

The Clinton administration saved and reinvigorated this abused street cat and let it loose in the Balkan neighborhood with no real way of controlling it. "We inadvertently breathed new life into this movement," says Brian Bender, former Washington, D.C., bureau chief for Jane's Defense group and now the senior military analyst for the Austin-based private intelligence firm Stratfor. "The last few months and days have been a real wake-up call. A lot of people pooh-poohed how serious they were about a greater Albania. They are a lot more serious than I think people wanted to admit."

Macedonia makes for fertile ground for insurrection because of the shoddy way the Macedonian government can treat Albanians there. On the surface, there is plurality with minorities, including a coalition government that includes Albanian representatives. But just beneath this veneer of equality lies problems, mostly revolving around educational opportunities and a lack of universities that teach using the Albanian tongue. The Macedonian constitution, drafted after the fall of Communism, makes a clear legal distinction between Macedonians and other minorities who live there. Efforts to open up economic and educational opportunities in Macedonia over the past 10 years have advanced at a glacial pace.

In this wake, the post-KLA era spawned two violent Albanian groups: the National Liberation Army (NLA) and the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (named after the areas it aims to seize from Serbia). The NLA made recent news when it began laying bombs at police stations and shooting up police convoys near the Kosovo border. It is currently being hunted by Macedonian armor and artillery, with some attacks coordinated by U.S. intelligence given to the Macedonian military. The conflict is roiling over into the tinderbox of Kosovo as refugees and NLA fighters cross into the buffer zone, where there are many holes to hide in and where U.S. forces have been slow to act against them.

The U.S. Balkans policy was pegged on the hope that the Kosovo Liberation Army would disband, disarm and become a peaceful political party. The KLA appeared to disband and even handed over weapons. But that the KLA really disbanded is a diplomatic myth. Many of the KLA soldiers and commanders fighting Serbs in Kosovo were Macedonians, meaning the same people the United States supported in Kosovo have changed the name of their organization and turned their attention to destabilizing their homeland. The National Liberation Army even has the same acronym in Albanian as the KLA.

"We are the same, just in different areas," says Albanian activist Florin Krasniqi, interviewed from his home in Brooklyn. "The Army of National Liberation is the same people [as us], but the world sees us as different."

Krasniqi was one of the founders of the enormously successful Homeland Calling Fund, which raised millions in war supplies for Kosovar Albanians. The money went toward purchasing weapons and other supplies to keep the KLA fighting Serbs. The fund-raising apparatus he set up channeled the million dollars reportedly given by Dallas strip club and sports bar owner Mehmeti to the KLA war chest. After the war and the dissolution of the KLA, the fund was closed, but Krasniqi says others have picked up the mantle. He should know; he still contributes money to Albanian insurgents, but he declined to identify who is now coordinating the national fund-raising effort.

Krasniqi says the Albanian community here makes good donors because many successful businessmen have direct ties to the Balkans and have money from the food industry. "It's hard to find an Albanian in Dallas who was born in America," he says. "They are not as Americanized."

For Krasniqi and other nationalistic Albanians, the term "Albanian" supersedes any borders, which he feels were forced on the Balkans. "We were split in six pieces. One half of a village was on one side, and the other half on another side. They just drew a line," he says. "It's going to get worse before it gets better. But this time we're better prepared. A lot of people will die, but there's nothing we can do about that."

"There has been a shift, and now they [ethnic Albanians] are being seen as the aggressor," says Dallas restaurateur Feti Staraveci. "But I think the U.S. will switch their view towards us when they see what these people really want...They want equal human rights as Macedonians. It's not much to ask."

Bruno Ceka seems caught in the gears of a subtly changing U.S. foreign policy.

Ceka left Communist Macedonia in 1985 because he had to. "First they jailed me, then they kicked me out," he says, speaking behind the counter of his restaurant, Bruno's, in Irving. It's conveniently close to the Dallas Cowboys' training camp, and players have been known to come in for a slice or 10.

Ceka was an athlete, too. During his youth he played soccer in Macedonia, but he says his anti-communist political views and status as an ethnic Albanian put him on the wrong side of the government. He landed on U.S. soil and put his feet to work, playing for the Baltimore Blast before hearing about business opportunities in DFW. He started waiting tables, eventually opening his own restaurants. Over time, he became a pivotal figure in the Albanian community in Dallas.

"I've been here 15 years, and I'm the oldest one around," he jokes, indicating the youth and freshness of Dallas' Albanian community. "We're from Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo, but we're the same people."

Ceka is very sensitive to the change in perception of Albanians from a persecuted people to the source of Balkans instability. As a member of the National Albanian American Council, he watched as U.S. policy subtly turned against Albanians, with the media following suit. "We see it. We need to do better PR," he says.

In late March, Ceka joined other council members on a trip to meet U.S. politicians in Washington, D.C., and air their grievances. On the agenda was combating the "Russian-Serbian-Macedonian lies" that have soured the relationship between the United States and Albanians in the Balkans.

Also on the agenda was Ceka's primary concern: help for the estimated 8,000 displaced Albanians in the Balkans. During the Kosovo campaign he paid for several Irving apartments for Kosovar refugees, and he said his fund-raising efforts are solely aimed at non-combatants. Much of that aid is coordinated through Catholic charities, he added.

"We don't aid the people who fight," he says. "We will never, ever do anything to jeopardize the relationship with the United States. If this government says they do not support them [the NLA] then we will not support them...I stand behind the U.S. government 100 percent. I'll be with them, but I want to educate these people on what's going on."

Ceka, the moderate Albanian-American, doesn't doubt that a fund-raising operation to support militants in Macedonia such as the Homeland Calling Fund would be running. "This is still in the early stages. Will the community rise up and help out? I don't doubt it."
We Believe Local Journalism is Critical to the Life of a City

Engaging with our readers is essential to the Observer's mission. Make a financial contribution or sign up for a newsletter, and help us keep telling Dallas's stories with no paywalls.
Support Our Journalism

There's no reason to doubt it: At a recent fund-raiser in New York City, an NLA commander raised $500,000 in one evening. But Albanians in Dallas credited with fund-raising feats two years ago are now more hesitant to talk about it. George Kalaj, owner of The Rocket restaurant in Dallas, was said by The Dallas Morning News to have raised $40,000 in donations to the KLA to buy rifles. Now, in a recent Observer interview, he says he only brought $4,000 in donations to "poor people on the streets and in camps."

Perhaps because of the changing perception of the Albanians' role in the current conflicts, some of the Albanians aren't as eager to admit to such fund raising. That doesn't mean that the older generation will abandon defending its brethren, even if they are the ones sparking cross-border Balkans violence. "If the Macedonians started acting like Serbs, and they already started, the Albanians have to support each other or they're crazy," says Vraniqi. "Now they say we want a greater Albania. If these places are liberated, these places aren't a 'greater Albania.' They are the real Albania."

Over time, the drive for a "greater Albania" may be swallowed by compromise, diplomacy or violence. Meanwhile, Albanian-Americans are living out their version of the American dream, building a future in Dallas while keeping a wary eye on the Balkans. But as life gets more comfortable in America, the tight bonds might start to unravel. Ethnic Albanians have stared down many enemies, but American opportunities may be the most insidious and effective.

"I'm a patriotic Albanian type of guy, but I love this country more than there," says Roni Sulejmani, busy preparing for the grand opening of his pizzeria. "I know the country that I come from, but I am American, and this is where I come from. This is where I'll always be from, and this is where my family will always be."

Цитат:Strip club aims to settle with city over license
Lipstick owner looking for permanent change to Dallas' sex-biz law

By Jeff Bounds – Staff Writer
Apr 9, 2006, 11:00pm CDT Updated Apr 6, 2006, 3:54pm CDT

The owner of a Harry Hines Boulevard strip club is in talks to settle a dust-up with Dallas and avoid the city's efforts to revoke his license to run the place.

Nick Mehmeti has already obtained a temporary restraining order preventing Dallas from yanking his sexually oriented business license to run Club Hospitality Inc., which does business under the name Lipstick. In a Jan. 13 letter, made available through court filings, the Dallas Police Department said it was pulling his license following about 16 arrests of Lipstick employees in 2005 on drug and prostitution charges.

Roger Albright, Mehmeti's attorney, said the city has made a settlement proposal to Mehmeti, and he expects to submit a response this week. "I expect we'll spend 30 to 60 days hammering out the details of that settlement," he said. "I'm optimistic we'll get there."

Mehmeti sued the city in federal court in Dallas Jan. 17, seeking a permanent injunction declaring parts of the city's sexually oriented business ordinance unconstitutional and barring the city from pulling his license. He subsequently requested a summary judgment, arguing he should win the case because the facts aren't in dispute and the law is on his side.

The city has not filed a response to Mehmeti's summary-judgment motion, and in March agreed to have the restraining order extended indefinitely.

Albright says the proposed settlement "would not be intended to modify the city ordinance. We just believe there are other alternatives" to settling the matter than having Mehmeti's license revoked.

The club is attempting to work with the city to reduce crime both on its premises and in the surrounding area, Albright says. Mehmeti's position, he adds, is that the problem isn't the club, but rather things going on in the surrounding area.

"There are issues of security, lighting (and other matters) that we can do that might have a greater effect ... than merely taking away our license," he says. For the past dozen years, Mehmeti has operated the roughly 20-year-old club "without any significant problem," he adds.
Second time around

Should the settlement pan out, it would mark the second time in about four years that Mehmeti has successfully prevented Dallas from taking away his SOB license for Lipstick because of alleged misconduct by his employees.
Recommended
Technology
Meet the 59 Oregon & Clark County, Washington firms on 2020's Inc. 5000 fastest-growing list (slideshow)
Commercial Real Estate
Downtown Louisville's Loft Reverie Hotel up for auction
Travel & Tourism
First look at Wauwatosa Renaissance Hotel as it opens near Mayfair: Slideshow

In 2002, federal Judge Sidney Fish shot down the city's attempt to revoke SOB licenses for Lipstick and another club, Cabaret Royale, because employees had been convicted of prostitution and related crimes. The city's actions, taken because of past acts by employees, were an unconstitutional prior restraint of freedom of speech, Fish's ruling said.

Mehmeti's attorneys are making essentially the same argument in the latest court case, contending courts have held that past conduct can't be a basis for putting the kibosh on future speech protected by the Constitution.

In addition, Mehmeti's side contends, the city's SOB ordinance essentially allows the city to revoke licenses without forcing Dallas to show their holders willfully or negligently failed to stop their employees' bad behavior. That, among other things, violates a four-pronged test in a federal case called U.S. v. O'Brien, which essentially governs when "content neutral" city ordinances can trump First Amendment rights, Mehmeti's court filings argue.

Doreen E. McGookey, an assistant city attorney handling the case for Dallas, couldn't be reached.

In addition to Lipstick, Mehmeti holds an interest in at least two other adult cabarets, the Million Dollar Saloon and The Gold Club, along with several sports bars and restaurants.

Цитат:New British Documents About Srebrenica: Not Exactly Sensational, but Useful Nevertheless
Stephen Karganovic
January 13, 2020
© Photo: Flickr / Val 202

In early January 2020, Serbian media reported the sensational news that recently declassified British Ministry of Defense files contained important new evidence suggesting that the official account of what happened in Srebrenica was unfounded.

As from time to time has been the case, Western sources have again disclosed some information about Srebrenica in July 1995, which until recently was kept confidential and therefore not available to the public. The source of this particular batch of documents is the UK Department of Defense. The documents that have finally been declassified contains very interesting assessments and reports that take on even greater significance when cross-checked against data which are already known. The document that has attracted the most attention is a letter from a Ministry of Defense official under the date of July 11, 1995, sent to Roderick Lyne, private secretary to the then Prime Minister John Major. The purpose of the letter was to brief Major through his private secretary on developments in the Srebrenica area in order to enable the Prime Minister to handle expected parliamentary questions on that subject.

A definitive judgment on these until quite recently inaccessible documents (they were released by the National Archive of the United Kingdom on December 31, 2019) must await thorough examination. Both the subject matter and everything we know from these and other official sources suggests the conclusion that these are issues too important to be left to very selective and often shallow media interpretations.

But even if we were to confine ourselves to the fragments with which the general public has now been acquainted, some significant and, for the official Srebrenica narrative, rather unfavorable conclusions may even now be drawn.

First and foremost, we see here a report emanating from the British Ministry of Defense, dated July 11, 1995, which matter of factly informs the Prime Minister that at that particular moment British intelligence services lacked knowledge of any intention on the part of the Republika Srpska Army to conquer Srebrenica and place the enclave under its control. (Bosnian Serb army forces did enter Srebrenica on that very day, but that was widely acknowledged to have been an opportunistic move, no resistance having been encountered.) This British assessment is of great importance because of the implications that emanate from it.

According to the “facts” alleged by the Hague Tribunal in its numerous judgments, the “genocide” is supposed to have begun only two days later, on 13 July. Why is this chronology important?

Because for “genocide” to have occurred in the legal sense of the term, even of a relatively small group of 8,000 people (if we compare that to the scope of the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews under the Nazis, or Serbs in the Nazi-aligned Croation state during World War II), presupposes the existence of specific intent, as well as adequate logistical preparation.

To that end, the Hague Tribunal has unpersuasively construed meetings held at the Fontana Hotel in nearby Bratunac on 12 July to bolster its conclusions (see Krstic Trial Judgment, paragraphs 126-134). In its comments, the Tribunal itself accepts that these meetings were held shortly before the alleged genocidal events, in fact only a day before a crime of such serious magnitude was supposed to have begun, but at the same time it acknowledges that there is no “concrete evidence” of the existence of a genocidal plan. Furthermore, the only direct perpetrator of the “genocide” to have been brought before that court, the mildly punished Drazen Erdemovic, who turned Prosecution witness, when cross-examined by defendant Radovan Karadzic admitted freely that neither he nor his colleagues from the 10th Sabotage Detachment execution squad were motivated by the intent to exterminate Muslims when taking part in the execution of war prisoners at Branjevo. As for logistics, since the intent evidently could not have been formed until the eve of the “genocide”, the issue is practically moot. Since no evidence of logistics to carry out such a large-scale killing operation was discovered, there are no specific allegations or details in ICTY judgments on this important issue.

A review of the documents already publicly available for some time makes it crystal clear that the “sensational disclosures” from the British archives must already have been known to anyone with a serious interest in these issues.

The Hague Tribunal’s long-time chief investigator, Jean-Rene Ruez, said much the same thing as the recently declassified British documents when he testified before the French Parliamentary Commission on Srebrenica in 2001. The British Defense Ministry’s assessment subsequently proved to be essentially correct, but since it was drawn up contemporaneously with the events to which it refers, it did not necessarily have to be. However, Ruez’s assessment is retrospective, made five years after the event, with the benefit of insight into the relevant documentation, and it therefore carries more weight. A very precise sequence of events, which virtually rules out the possibility that the official version of the event could be accurate, was presented by ICTY military prosecutor Richard Butler at the “Pelemis and Peric” trial before the Bosnia and Herzegovina War Crimes Court in Sarajevo in 2010. Therefore, far from constituting a sensation, British MoD documents are important pieces of the mosaic that do not disclose anything basically new. They do, however, round out a picture that was already familiar.

Another important detail that the British documents do not reveal, but certainly do confirm, is the refusal of members of the 28th Division of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose troop strength in July 1995 was about 5,000, to engage in natural and normal conduct in the situation in which they found themselves (also here, footnote 28). The armed outfit in question did virtually nothing to counter “one company and four tanks” (a direct quotation from the British MoD document) of the Bosnian Serb Army that was approaching Srebrenica from the south side of the enclave. To journalists, this may appear as a sensation, but for those who have studied these matters in the context of the Bosnian war — it definitely is not.

Foreign observers who happened to be in the immediate vicinity or who were following the events on the ground in some official capacity have shed light on this mystery. For example, Portuguese General Martins Branco, Deputy Commander of the UN Observation Mission at the time of the events in question, made the following observation in his memoir, “The War in the Balkans,” published in 2017:

“The topography of the Srebrenica region, as well as Eastern Bosnia as a whole, is very hilly. The virgin, densely forested landscapes and deep ditches make it difficult to move combat vehicles and facilitate infantry operations. The numerical ratio of forces, when considered in relation to the terrain properties, which undoubtedly favors the defenders, suggests that the ARBiH forces had more than enough manpower to defend themselves. However, they failed to do so.”

Other observers made similar assertions as Martins Branco (here, pp. 47-48). So once again the British documents did not reveal anything fundamentally new, but the fact that they have been made public is nevertheless helpful because one can never go too far stressing the startling fact that in Srebrenica there was no resistance and that the armed and much more numerous “men and boys” withdrew to the mountains, leaving their womenfolk and elderly unprotected in the face of an “aggressor” who by that time in their eyes had already acquired a genocidal reputation.

Finally, the question must be raised: why did they act that way? Was it to take the opportunity to lure the Serb forces into a strategic trap (remember General Morillon’s testimony at The Hague, where he used precisely such language to describe the situation), hoping the Serbs would slaughter several thousand refugees in Potocari? That certainly would have satisfied the terms of Izetbegovic’s and Clinton’s secret convention, which envisioned exactly such a scenario in order to ensure the political preconditions for a US intervention in the conflict.

It is almost always the case when new files concerning Srebrenica are opened, whether the result is really new data or just a confirmation of already known facts, that not only do these disclosures in no way help the official narrative, but on the contrary they systematically undermine it. It is not surprising therefore for such information to have been kept under lock and key for decades precisely so as not to disturb the prevailing, concocted narrative in the expectation that buying time (and criminalizing “genocide denial”) would assist the narrative in taking hold.

The Karl Rovian way the process of rearranging reality now unfolds was recently explained by Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, in a remarkable article, “The Terrifying Rise of the Zombie State Narrative”. The ruling establishment, Murray claims, has learnt one important lesson from the collapse of the official lies about the non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction: “Never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong.”

And the same goes now for all their monumental lies, from the pretext for invading Iraq to Srebrenica, and more recently the political crisis engendered by the cold-blooded assassination at Baghdad airport on January 3. The security services, Murray writes, understand “that in future they just have to brazen it out.” If a hypothetical situation like the mythical Iraqi weapons were to recur today “and the security services decided to brazen it out” by asserting deliberately the false claim that the armaments were in fact found, “there is not a mainstream media outlet that would contradict them.“

The rebuttable or easily refuted claims that are blatantly disseminated and parroted, and believed by millions who blindly take them at face value even though evidence refuting them is close at hand, Murray christens “zombie narratives.” Srebrenica is undoubtedly one of the prominent illustrations of Murray’s thesis.

The “declassification” of the British documents is therefore no evidence of Western transparency or democratic will to keep the public informed. It is proof, rather, of a perfidious damage-control tactic. As we have seen, some of the major “disclosures” in the British documents have long been in the public domain and have gradually been seeping into the public discourse. Extending the embargo would accomplish nothing, but the removal of the secrecy mark should impress the simpleminded who may imagine that this is evidence of regrettably belated, but still highly commendable “transparency” of the Western system.

Those who think this way have already forgotten the farce about finally making public the remaining, most sensitive documents about the assassination of John Kennedy. In the 1990s, Congress explicitly ordered that by 2017 everything must be disclosed, even the last scrap of paper. Yet, under a Presidential directive countermanding Congressional instructions, 2017 has come and gone but the most compromising documents remain locked away for several additional decades, for the reasons of “national security” to which Murray has alluded. Locked away and unpublished documents on Srebrenica surely also abound in the secret files of “all the usual suspects,” as Captain Louis Renault picturesquely put in the movie “Casablanca.”

The availability of these British Srebrenica documents — assuming Ambassador Murray is correct — may in some circles achieve a favorable propaganda effect for the UK, but in relation to Srebrenica, a wall of blatantly imposed lies will not permit them to change or meaningfully challenge anything. Tactical damage control operations should not be confused with permission to touch the core of a protected zombie narrative.

If in 2015 the general public were unaware of these “sensational” documents kept in the British Defense Ministry safe, the British government certainly were. Yet, that did not prevent them from attempting to push through in the UN Security Council a resolution chastising the Serbian nation for genocide in Srebrenica. The resolution failed only thanks to the veto placed by the Russian Federation. And as we now learn, British government sources, in their own contemporaneous and confidential report, had frankly stated that their misleading resolution alleging genocide in Srebrenica was to do with an attack undertaken by a local commander, not by the Bosnian Serb military and political leadership in Pale, and therefore even less probably so by the Serbian leadership in Belgrade.

Цитат:Auschwitz Was Evil But So Was Jasenovac, Yet Few Dare To Talk About It
27 January 2020
Auschwitz Was Evil But So Was Jasenovac, Yet Few Dare To Talk About It
The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is a somber event marked by deep reflection across Europe about the evils of its genocidal past, which makes it an appropriate time to remind everyone about Jasenovac, the Croatian-operated death camp that few are aware of and even fewer dare to talk about.

Europe is reflecting on the evils of its genocidal past as the world marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a somber event that's forever etched into the West's collective memory. The Allies swore that they'd never let anyone forget about the crimes against humanity that were committed in that Nazi death camp, which is why they continue to mark its liberation every year with high-profile visits, keynote speeches, and heavy media coverage. Everyone in the world is therefore aware of the Nazis' racist policies and the campaign of killing that accompanied them, yet Hitler's forces weren't the only ones in World War II who did such a thing. Few outside of the Balkans have ever heard of Jasenovac, the Croatian-operated death camp where around one million people -- at least 800,000 of them Serbs -- were brutally murdered by the Ustashe regime of the Nazi-allied so-called "Independent State of Croatia" (known by its abbreviation as the NDH), and even fewer people dare to talk about it.

All lives are equal and there shouldn't be any hierarchy of victimhood, but the suffering of the Serbs has regrettably been forgotten by almost all but the Serbs themselves (and even some among them don't seem to care all that much anymore). The Nazis' genocidal campaign of conquest across Europe affected the entire continent whereas the Croats' equally evil genocidal campaign was "only" waged in part of the Balkans, so there's less interest in what they did. That's a shame too because everyone's understanding of World War II would be enriched by learning about what happened there at that time. The Croats declared "independence" right after the Nazi-led fascist invasion of Yugoslavia, literally stabbing their South Slavic brethren in the back out of solidarity with their German allies. The NDH was so rabidly racist that it established Jasenovac in order to contribute to Hitler's so-called "Final Solution", not just against Jews but also against the Slavs, a fact that's often omitted from history nowadays as well.

Although the Croats are Slavs themselves, the Ustashe regime claimed that they're actually somehow connected to the self-professed "master race", unlike their fellow Serbs who they insisted were inferior and thus "deserving" only of the most painful death possible. The Nazis obviously supported the actions of their regional allies but didn't have to assist them since this fascist, separatist, terrorist organization was more than willing to do all the killing on its own. This makes Jasenovac different from Auschwitz, which was built and operated by a foreign occupying army, since it was an entirely grassroots killing center that embodied everything that the Ustashe stood for. Therefore, it is solely the Croats that are to be blamed for all of the atrocities that took place there, and any efforts to shift their collective guilt onto the Nazis are insincere deflections aimed at eschewing their full responsibility. Jasenovac was a unique evil even by World War II standards, but it's mostly taboo to talk about outside of the Balkans (and even within it for the most part).

Shockingly, the Ustashe were also Vatican allies, and Croatia is nowadays a proud member of both the EU and NATO after having previously received their support during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. It's held up as a "shining example" of "Euro-Atlantic integration" and the model that the West wants Serbia to follow. Criticizing the country is akin to criticizing the "Euro-Atlantic integration" project as a whole and exposing one of the many skeletons still hidden in the Vatican's closet. It's also fashionable nowadays to conveniently pin the blame for all of World War II's horrors on the Nazis just as it's fashionable to do the same with the Serbs in more recent times for everything that happened after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. This attitude is tacitly revisionist since it strongly implies that the Serbs are genocidal when in reality they've been the victims of several genocides in their history which can collectively be described as the Serbocide, with the most recent one being attempted in the 1990s and partially carried out by the Croats (once again). These are historical facts but are often smeared as "conspiracy theories" -- or even worse, "genocide-inciting lies" -- whenever they're brought up.

The Europeans owe it to the Serbian people to properly commemorate the Serbocide just like they do the Holocaust, but one shouldn't realistically get their hopes up that this will soon happen for the reasons that were explained. As such, the best that the Serbs can do is remind everyone about Jasenovac every year when the world remembers the liberation of Auschwitz, resorting to social media campaigns to raise awareness about the crimes against humanity that the Croatian Ustashe committed against them out of their own will without the Nazis ever having to order them to do so. The evils of World War II are many, but all of its victims are equal, so historic justice cannot be served in the Balkans until everyone the world over thinks of Jasenovac whenever they hear the words World War II, Auschwitz, concentration camps, and genocide. It's admittedly an ambitious goal, but one that should always remain on Serbs' minds and pursued with the utmost passion because everyone can literally make a positive difference in their own way by informing as many people as possible.
By Andrew Korybko
American political analyst