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18 July 2006

The Serbs Admits Their Missteps; Will America's Orthodox throw stones?

Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church in USA and Canada

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Truth about Serbia and Recent Balkan War
The Truth About Serbia and the Recent Balkan War

Compliments of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of Denver ©1996

"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."
(John 8:32)

Contents:

Bosnia - The Bloodshed and the Blame
by Nora Beloff

A Commentary
by Bishop Isaiah of Denver

This pamphlet is dedicated to all the innocent victims of the civil war in
the former Yugoslavia.

Bosnia - The Bloodshed and the Blame

(The following article was written by Ms. Nora Beloff, who was contacted at
her home in England and gave permission to reprint this article. Ms. Beloff
is the former chief political correspondent of the Observer, and the author
of several books, including Tito's Flawed Legacy.)

It is one of the paradoxes of Yugoslavia's tragic civil war that most of the
leaders of the Jewish community favour the Croats and the Muslims, backed
respectively by the Germans and the Islamic world, against the Serbs, who are
fighting primarily to rescue Serb enclaves from what they see as ethnically
and religiously biased rule.

Every Jew must shudder at the words 'ethnic cleansing' or 'genocide' and this
agonised sensitivity has been exploited, by selective reporting and
unconfirmed atrocities, to make the Serbs appear as Hitlerite aggressors.
Most Serbs see themselves, on the contrary, as protectors of the Serb
minorities who are living inside the internationally recognised but
multi-ethnic provinces of what had been Yugoslavia, as well as acquiring the
access routes to reach them.

Recognising this discrepancy in no way denies the appalling suffering
imposed by the siege of Sarajevo and other contested areas, nor belittles the
efforts to rescue Jews from this inferno.

But what we also need to admit is the overwhelming evidence that, although
the Serbs have the heaviest and most televisable guns, they have no monopoly
on the slaughter and sadism. All three communities, Orthodox, Catholic and
Muslim, incited by vicious nationalist leaders, are guilty of war crimes
against hapless civilians who happen not to belong to their own ethnic group.

In this respect, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia is no worse than
President Franjo Tudjman of Croatia or President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia.

Political and religious leaders, whether Jewish or not, cannot help being
influenced by a public, enraged by daily TV news bites presented to them by
reporters with no knowledge of the historical or political background and who
compete against each other for the most easily accessible horrors, the
bloodier the better.

Wiser judgements might prevail if the origins of the present conflict were
examined. For there is no good reason to suppose that the dreadful civil war
need never have taken place, had it not been for German and, later, American
promotion of unilateral declarations of independence by the component parts
of the Yugoslav federation – despite both the mixed ethnic composition of the
populations and the repeated warnings from France and Britain.

The Tito brand of Communism was already in an advanced state of decomposition
and, in any case, had never been run for the benefit of the Serbs. New
forms of self-government within appropriate boundaries might, with the help
of international mediators, have been negotiated, with little acrimony and
skirmishes. For when the fighting stops, the contenders, at least those who
survive, will have to go on living within the same geographically narrow
confines, though the present violence may have indefinitely delayed the
ultimately necessary reconciliation.

The simplistic Western view is that the troubles started when Milosevic
re-imposed Serb rule on the Albanian-inhabited Serb province of Kosovo. Like
other Communist bosses, he had recognised that he could retain power only by
playing up the nationalist issue.

What the media ignore is that, in the late 1960s, Tito had transferred power
from the Serbs to his Albanian cronies and, as I saw during my own visits,
they built up local support by harassing and driving out the hated and
vulnerable Serbs.

The Serb response was, of course, excessive but so was the reaction of the
Slovene and Croat nationalists who used the Kosovo issue to fuel hatred and
fear of the Serbs and to incite war hysteria.

Even so, violence might have been averted had the Austrians and Germans not
encouraged the rupture and fostered the belief that the struggle for
independence would have international support.

German intervention was itself provocative. Jews should be the first to
remember that, in 1941, after Belgrade had rebelled against allowing
Yugoslavia to be incorporated into the Axis, an enraged Hitler had condemned
the Serbs to rank with the Jews and gypsies as a people to be destroyed. He
left the genocidal job to his Croat nominee, the extremist Ante Pavelic –
whose daughter has now been re-admitted to Tudjman's Croatia, where she has
registered a party aiming to rehabilitate her father......This article can be accessed by clicking on the following link.

http://www.westsrbdio.org/info/showa...the_recent_war