Institute for Research on Suffering of the Serbs in XX c.

told by Zora Delić Skiba.[1] 

Translated 1991
by John Peter Maher Ph. D.

    I was one of the girls wearing a number around the neck, one of the 23,000 children from Mount Kozara who were  scattered around the Ustasha camps.[2]  I was only four years old when they shut me behind barbed wire, beat me, and told me that the Partisans had brutally murdered  my mother and father.
   
    I'm the fourth child. People who knew my parents say I look like my father and have his nature.
   
    I was born in the village of Kruhari. The Orthodox church where I was baptized was burnt down by the fascists in 1941. That's why I don't know the exact date of my birth. Older people say that I was born three years before the war.
   
    My father wasn't able to work his big farm alone, so he hired tenant farmers. Among them was Omerica Alagić, nicknamed "the broom," a poor farmer. My father helped feed and educate his numerous children. It was no other than Omerica who took my father off to be shot. That was August 2, 1941. He put on the Ustasha uniform in order to get my father's farm.
   

MR M. DANBY MP
MEMBER FOR MELBOURNE PORTS
PO BOX 2086

ST KILDA WEST VIC 3182
Tel: (03) 9534 8126
Fax: (03) 9534 1575

18 November 2011

Dear Mr Danby,

RE: Your MOTION proposed for 21 November 2011
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

It is with great concern that we write to you about your proposed motion which has the potential to be divisive and unnecessary from Australia's interest perspective. You should avoid being drawn into the one-sided web of misinformation born of a war-time propaganda campaign. You should withdraw this Motion.


The Politics of Division:
The human tragedy arising from the destruction of the Former Yugoslavia in the 1990's is well recognized and Australia has accepted as Citizens many refugees and migrants from
that destruction of a European State into several smaller States and Protectorates. The
recently applied "politics of division" has resulted in Bosnia's population being more
divided than ever into of the 3 Minority groups, Serbians, Croatians and Bosniaks. Each
group speaks the same language (but the politics of division have dictated that each must
have their own language - Serbian, Croatian and Bosniak). The analogy is that if that
policy were applied here, we would speak Australian, and English would be a foreign
language ( with the emphasis that we never spoke English ever). Bosnia is a small
territory, about the size of Tasmania. In terms of religion, it has a Christian majority and a Muslim minority.

 

 

By Doug Bandow on 11.3.11 @ 6:07AM

Intervening in the Balkans always was a mistake for the U.S.

The end of the Cold War removed the most important constraint on Washington's tendency towards empire. Since then no country has gone to war more often than America. Yet the only conflict with any degree of necessity was Afghanistan -- initially going after al Qaeda. And none of these adventures has turned out particularly well.

One of Washington's great failures has been the Balkans. The region is of no geopolitical significance to America and should have been left to NATO's European members. If they, like Otto von Bismarck, did not view the Balkans to be worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier, then the U.S. certainly had no reason to get involved.

Yet a dozen years ago Washington bombed Serbia, which had neither attacked nor threatened any NATO member. Western nations which over many centuries fought bitter conflicts against the hint of secession went to war to support independence for the territory of Kosovo.

 

 

From Archive - Find out more in our Library

 

An interview with David N. Gibbs, author of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia

By Charles Bogle and Paul Mitchell
23 July 2009

Earlier this month, the World Socialist Web Site posted a review of First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia by David N. Gibbs, Associate Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Arizona. We commended the book as the first full-length critique of the widely held belief that the Western powers, and especially the US, intervened reluctantly in the Yugoslav conflict of the 1990s.

 

We also commended Professor Gibbs for debunking the claim that the great powers acted only after “anti-establishment intellectuals” had pressured them to do so.

First Do No Harm is not a flawless book. We thought his characterization of Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia, was incomplete. We also found his “first do no harm” solution to the problem of “humanitarian interventions” to be inadequate and the result of an inconsistent consideration of the class and geopolitical interests that motivate US policy.

 

 

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott

   
Global Research, July 29, 2011
The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 31 No 1, August 1, 2011

Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.

U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.

In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse for intervention.

 

 Twice in the last two decades, significant cuts in U.S. and western military spending were foreseen: first after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But both times military spending soon increased, and among the factors contributing to the increase were America’s interventions in new areas: the Balkans in the 1990s, and Libya today.1 Hidden from public view in both cases was the extent to which al-Qaeda was a covert U.S. ally in both interventions, rather than its foe.U.S. interventions in the Balkans and then Libya were presented by the compliant U.S. and allied mainstream media as humanitarian. Indeed, some Washington interventionists may have sincerely believed this. But deeper motivations – from oil to geostrategic priorities – were also at work in both instances.In virtually all the wars since 1989, America and Islamist factions have been battling to determine who will control the heartlands of Eurasia in the post-Soviet era. In some countries – Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan in 2001 – the conflict has been straightforward, with each side using the other’s excesses as an excuse for intervention.

 

 

M. Bozinovich Blog |Saturday, November 12, 2011

November 4, 2011 – 8:09 am

From the UN’s Al-Qaida Sanctions List maintained by the UN and published in October 2011:

Bosnian Muslim terror groups

QE.A.107.04. Name: AL FURQAN

A.k.a.: a) Dzemilijati Furkan b) Dzem’ijjetul Furqan c) Association for Citizens Rights and Resistance to Lies d) Dzemijetul Furkan e) Association of Citizens for the Support of Truth and Supression of Lies f) Sirat g) Association for Education, Culture and Building Society-Sirat h) Association for Education, Cultural, and to Create Society -Sirat i) Istikamet j) In Siratel k) Citizens’ Association for Support and Prevention of lies – Furqan F.k.a.: na Address: a) 30a Put Mladih Muslimana (ex Pavla Lukaca Street), 71 000 Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina b) 72 ul. Strossmajerova, Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina c) 42 Muhameda Hadzijahica, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina d) 70 and 53 Strosmajerova Street, Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina e) Zlatnih Ljiljana Street, Zavidovici, Bosnia and Herzegovina Listed on: 11 May 2004 (amended on 26 Nov. 2004, 24 Mar. 2009) Other information: Registered in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a citizens’ association under the name of “Citizens’ Association for Support and Prevention of lies – Furqan” on 26 Sep. 1997. Al Furqan ceased its work by decision of the Ministry of Justice of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation (decision number 03-054-286/97 dated 8 Nov. 2002). Al Furqan was no longer in existence