Ignore the lessons of Yugoslavia at your peril

or, why 'Balkanization' isn't what you think and "retreat to hold" strategy is doomed to fail

On this day, 30 years ago, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence and the slow and violent death of Yugoslavia officially began. My American readers may not care about this quaint historical fact, except they should. As someone who lived through the demise of Yugoslavia, it's my duty to warn them there are entirely too many similarities between what happened there and what's afflicting their own country right about now. 

Yugoslavia, too, believed in diversity as strength (called "brotherhood and unity") and "equity" (equality of outcomes, achieved by elevating some and denigrating others). There, too, everyone was equal - but the ruling politicians were more equal than others. There, too, inflation and national debt were spiraling out of control.

The political system was a version of Communism adapted by Dear Leader Josip Broz Tito, who was 11 years dead by that point. The country was divided into six "republics" - and one of them was subdivided further , with two provinces carved out - and ruled by a Presidency, a council of eight. Things were already falling apart, but once Germany reunited and Communism failed across eastern Europe, all of a sudden ethnic nationalism flared up.

What I'm going to say next will probably go against what you've read in the news, seen on CNN or learned from "history" books. I don't care. I know what happened because I was there. My goal isn't to relitigate whose cause in Yugoslavia was just (the rest of this blog speaks to that) but to address the argument of some Americans along the lines of "Balkanization is the way! Get out of cities, move to the countryside, form communities with like-minded people, build our own society there, etc." Because I don't think that will work. Let me explain why. 

In June 1991, the republics of Slovenia and Croatia moved to secede. The Yugoslav presidency was deadlocked on how to react, with one of the key votes being the representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a weak-willed Serb whose mysterious and murky elevation to that position over a better qualified candidate suddenly became clear. In the power vacuum, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) - where Marxist indoctrination trumped warfighting ability - decided to send a small, lightly armed force of fresh conscripts to "restore constitutional order" on the border between Slovenia and Austria. Due to their rules of engagement, they were ambushed and massacred by Slovenian militia.

At this point, the political leader of Serbia (Slobodan Milosevic) makes the biggest strategic mistake: he decides to let Slovenia go. On a moral level, that may have been the correct choice, as keeping the Slovenes in Yugoslavia by force seemed wrong. Yet by doing so, Yugoslavia's sovereignty and survival were effectively forfeit.

Yugoslav military intelligence actually managed to infiltrate the Croatian government and secretly film them buying weapons from Germany and preparing for war. The footage was aired on national television. But instead of sending a force to occupy Zagreb, arrest those involved as traitors and crush the rebellion in its infancy, Belgrade did... nothing.

When Croatia seceded, it was the local Serbs - who made up a majority on about a third of its territory, and had suffered a genocide during WW2 when Croatia was an ally of Nazi Germany - rose up and counter-seceded. This was not done on orders from Belgrade, and the Republic of Serbian Krajina (RSK) was never under Belgrade's direct command and control. This will prove important - and fatal - later on.

At this point, it's important to note that Croatia was not fighting a "war for independence," as Zagreb claimed. The Croats' right to secede from Yugoslavia was obviously not contested - not by the disintegrating federal government, not by Milosevic, not even by the local Serbs. While doing that might have given them the upper hand from the standpoint of international law, instead they chose to dispute only the amount of territory Croatia could claim as its own. Naturally, the Croats seized the vacated high ground and claimed they were victims of "Yugo-Serbian aggression."

The JNA actually got dragged into the conflict when Croat militias attacked their garrisons. When the JNA defended itself - de facto siding with local Serbs - the cries of "aggression" redoubled. The final ceasefire line, negotiated by the UN in late 1991, saw the Army and the Serbs in control of territories that mostly had a Serb majority.

By then, however, the Badinter commission - a bunch of European lawyers that appointed itself the arbiter of Yugoslavia's fate - had decided that the country was "in dissolution." Though the Yugoslav constitution said its PEOPLE had the right to self-determination, the commission said no, it was was the REPUBLICS, not people, and their borders were to be considered international ones.

In practice, this meant that the Serbs went from the legal and moral high ground (maintaining Yugoslavia as their homeland) to being minorities in Croatia and Bosnia - where its Muslim and Croat communities sought independence - and outlaws if they resisted. At the stroke of a foreign pen.

The Serbs in Bosnia agreed to independence (see the pattern?) but sought a power-sharing agreement by which the new country would be partitioned into ethnic cantons - like Switzerland - that would guarantee their rights. Croats agreed. Muslims, backed by the US, reneged on the deal after it had already been signed.

So what did the Serbs do? Instead of declaring the Muslim-dominated government illegitimate and its referendum illegal, they pulled back and basically abandoned several cities - most notably, the capital of Sarajevo. Their strategy was to stake out the territory where they were the majority and declared the Serb Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SRBiH, later known as Republika Srpska, RS). The idea was to leverage their military power to negotiate a political deal.

Belgrade had already implicitly recognized Bosnia's separation (again, perhaps the moral thing to do, but a strategic mistake), declaring the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, made up of Serbia and Montenegro. It didn't matter - foreign powers refused to recognize it as Yugoslavia's successor, and blamed Belgrade for "aggression" against Bosnia (!).

At this point, Muslims and Croats made a major tactical mistake: they attacked the JNA, which had been recalled and was retreating towards the FRY. Their officers later said this was in an attempt to capture the JNA's heavy weapons. In that, they mostly failed - but they radicalized the Serbs officers, NCOs and enlisted who might have otherwise stayed neutral to enlist in the Bosnian Serb military (VRS). One of those officers was Gen. Ratko Mladic, who took command from the ineffective JNA generals and proceeded to made quick work of Muslim commanders over the next three years. So it's not as if the Serbs were the only ones to make mistakes here.

As a consequence of Serbs giving up the moral and legal high ground, however, their situation was grim. Yugoslavia, built on some two million Serb lives over the two world wars, was gone. In less than a year, from June 1991 to May 1992, some two million Serbs went from being equal citizens of their own nation-state to being outlaws in their own homes. Their own RS and RSK were considered rogue states, while the separatists in Croatia and the Muslim government of Bosnia were internationally recognized as legitimate! That whole "let them go and hold our own in the countryside" worked out so well, didn't it?

It gets worse. By 1993, the US and NATO are openly involved, aiding Croatia and the Bosnian Muslims. Washington stops a war between Croats and Muslims - who had fallen out over territory - and forges them into an anti-Serb alliance. That's another example of their strategic error, as they thought it temporary but it's ended up poisoning their relations ever since. But for the US purposes, it worked perfectly.

UN peacekeepers were swept aside in May 1995, by US-trained Croatian troops, who overwhelmed the RSK enclave of Western Slavonia ("Operation Flash"). Then, in August, Croats launch a blitzkrieg against the rest of RSK. Neither the UN nor Yugoslavia lift a finger; it is said that Milosevic was either angry the RSK leadership was disobeying him, or was trying to disavow them to protect FRY proper. As we'll see later, it didn't work. With the RSK wiped out, the Croat troops move into Bosnia, while NATO launches airstrikes against the RS.

What happens then is an anomaly. The US sidelines the RS leadership by charging them with war crimes, so Milosevic would have to negotiate on behalf of all Serbs - thus validating the Narrative about the wars being "Serbian aggression." Yet by some miracle (if you read my review of Richard Holbrooke's memoir, you'll understand) he somehow manages to negotiate the Dayton Peace Agreement. The Muslims ended up being the reluctant ones in Dayton. They believed they could hold out and achieve "final victory" - i.e. destruction and expulsion of Serbs like in RSK - but the Clinton administration needed a peace deal right then and there, so it pressured them to sign.

Dayton pulled a partial victory from the jaws of defeat. While the RS leadership was angry that Milosevic gave up "too much" territory - including all of Sarajevo - they eventually realized that Dayton gave them recognition as a legitimate political entity within Bosnia.

Meanwhile, the RSK was a total loss. Even the eastern region bordering with FRY was eventually handed over to Zagreb, "reintegrated" into Croatia. Two thirds of the Serbs living there pre-war had been expelled, and any who thought of returning - mostly the very old - harassed and abused.

Being a "key factor of peace" in Dayton didn't save Milosevic, though. In March 1999, the US launches an attack on Serbia itself and occupies Kosovo, on behalf of ethnic Albanian separatists there. Because suddenly the Badinter opinion is irrelevant and the law is whatever NATO says it is.

The Serbs complain this is unfair and point to a UN resolution (1244) that says Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia. So the Americans organize a "color revolution" in Belgrade in October 2000, get rid of Milosevic, and have him put on trial for war crimes - where he dies under mysterious circumstances, without a verdict, in March 2006. Two months after his death, the US-backed regime in Montenegro rigs the independence referendum and the last vestige of Yugoslavia is officially abolished.

Macedonia (aka FYROM, now North Macedonia) got some UN peacekeepers in 1992 out of fear of "Serbian invasion" that never materialized. Instead, its service to the West was repaid by forcing it to federalize in 2001, after US-backed Albanian separatists claimed a third of its territory. Again, some rebellions are more legitimate than others. Might makes right, etc.

While the sordid history of Yugoslavia's demise is an object lesson in the perils of making deals with foreign empires to fight your wars - only to realize that you were used to fight theirs, and to hell with your goals - that's cold comfort to the Serbs, or the point I set out to make about the merits of the "retreat and Balkanize" strategy.

Remember, at no point did it occur to anyone in the Serb leadership to deny Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims or "Macedonians" their independence (Albanians were different; they had a nation-state next door, and were trying to claim historic Serbian lands). The prevailing thinking every step of the way was "we'll retreat and regroup and try to preserve our own and maybe they'll leave us alone, and if they don't we'll fight until they do."

How did that Grand Strategy work out? Objectively speaking, overwhelmingly poorly. Dayton was an outlier, obviously. And even Dayton didn't really end the war, but only its kinetic dimension. Since then, the Muslims have endeavored to dismantle the RS and create a centralized state by means ranging from lawfare and leveraging foreign support to tactical demographics (targeted resettling of internally displaced people) and even a rigged census.

Croats and Albanians did not stop until they claimed all the territory they could, and expelled or killed all the Serbs living there that could be a "disrupting factor." As I just described, the Bosnian Muslims are still working on it. The "let them go we'll protect the Serbs' minority rights" backfired spectacularly in Montenegro as well, where the NATO-backed regime embarked on a campaign of aggressive nation-building and historical revisionism intended to turn the once-proudest part of Serbdom into a new group identity that's rabidly anti-Serb.

THIS is why I am skeptical of Americans who believe some kind of peaceful separation and Balkanization of their own country is, or may, be possible. Once you cede legitimacy to the other side, especially an enemy that has no intent or incentive to leave you alone - but seeks to either subjugate or eliminate you outright - you lose the war even before the first bullet is fired.

Believe me. I was there.

'Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal'

Since at least 1945, the US has treated people around the world like pawns on the grand chessboard (as Darth Zbigniew titled his magnum opus). Yet time and again, I see leaders and entire nations convince themselves that this time it will be different.

EU summit to discuss #Turkey sanctions next week – Paris

STORY: https://t.co/77Mph1vsCY
VIDEO: Civilians in northeastern #Syria flee Turkish #OperationPeaceSpring pic.twitter.com/Zs6BoK7DLc

— RT (@RT_com) October 11, 2019

That this time, they will get Washington to fight and win their wars for them, and then have their backs forever, because freedom and democracy and human rights, or whatever. That they are different, better, more deserving.

It may even seem like that's happening, for a while - a year, or four, or ten, or even twenty. But it never lasts. It can't. And each and every time, they curse Washington's sudden but inevitable betrayal, wondering why they had to suffer the sad fate of a used and discarded tool - not realizing that's exactly what they were to Washington, even as they thought it was the other way around.

Time and again, this happens. Because leaders and entire nations refuse to learn the simple truth that Empires have no friends, partners or allies - only vassals and victims. 

America's 'junkyard dogs' : Operation Storm, 23 years on

(The original version of this article appeared on RT.com on August 5, 2015)

‘Operation Storm’ in August 1995, when Croatia overran the Serb-inhabited territory of Krajina, was the biggest single instance of ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav Wars, Because the attack was backed by the US, however, it was never treated as a crime.

Between August 4 and August 7, up to 2,000 people were killed and over 220,000 driven from their homes by the Croatian army. No “invaders,” these Serbs had lived in the Krajina – their word for borderlands – for centuries. The 1995 onslaught was not just a final phase of the war that began in 1991, but a continuation of the 1940s Nazi atrocities, and a long, sordid history of oppression and betrayal going back to the 1800s.

In the late 1600s, the Hapsburg Empire (later Austria-Hungary) established a buffer zone along the border with the Ottoman Turks. in exchange for military service, the Orthodox Serb frontiersmen were granted religious liberties by the Catholic Hapsburgs. By the 1800s, the Ottomans were in retreat and Austria became obsessed with subjugating the Serbs and trying to subsume them into the Catholic Croat population. When Austria-Hungary disintegrated in 1918, the Croats chose to join the Serbs in a new South Slav kingdom – Yugoslavia – rather than be partitioned between Hungary, Austria and Italy. In April 1941, as Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers, Croatian Nazis known as “Ustasha” declared an independent state with the backing of Hitler and Mussolini.

This Ustasha Croatia conducted a campaign of mass murder, expulsion and forced conversion of Serbs to Catholicism, which outright disgusted the Italians and made even some Germans recoil in horror. A Croatian legion was sent to the Eastern Front, where it perished under Stalingrad. When the Communist regime of Marshal Tito took over Yugoslavia in 1945, however, Croatian atrocities were hushed up for the sake of “brotherhood and unity.”

The end of Communism in 1990 saw a revival of Nazi symbols and vocabulary in Croatia. President Franjo Tudjman denied Ustasha atrocities and expressed joy his wife was “neither Serb nor Jewish.” Serbs were stripped of equal citizenship and declared a minority. When Tudjman declared independence in June 1991, the Serbs saw 1941 all over again. They took up arms and declared the Krajina Republic – not denying the Croats their right to independence, but disputing Zagreb's claim to lands Croatia acquired under the same Yugoslavia it now sought to leave.

Remembering the Storm

(The original version of this article appeared on Antiwar.com in 2005).

Croatian Nazi salutes, caps and shirts at concerts of "patriotic" singer Marko Perković-Thompson celebrating Croatia's 1995 destruction of Serbs (via tatrenutek.si) 

In the early morning hours of August 4, 1995, on the heels of an incessant artillery and air bombardment, some 200,000 Croatian troops moved in to “liberate” Krajina - a stretch of mountains inhabited by Serbs who had rejected Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia four years prior. Overrunning the token UN observation posts, the US-trained Croatian army quickly overwhelmed localized Serb resistance. President Franjo Tudjman declared August 5, the day Croat troops entered the Serb capital of Knin, a national holiday: “Homeland Thanksgiving Day.” By August 7, the “Republic of Serb Krajina” was no longer in existence.

Frustrated Dreams

The area of Krajina was for several centuries the borderland between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, a buffer zone that protected the inner Hapsburg lands from Turkish raids. It was populated largely by Orthodox Serbs, who had fled Ottoman persecution, and who became frontiersmen for the Hapsburgs in exchange for land and liberty. By the 19th century, the Ottoman Turks were in retreat; the new danger to the Hapsburg Empire was Slavic nationalism. Vienna turned on its frontiersmen, encouraging conflict between the Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats, who became its staunchest supporters. Vienna’s Serbophobia eventually led Austria-Hungary into a fatal conflict that destroyed much of European civilization.

It also nurtured the hatred that would explode in 1941 as the vicious Ustasha genocide. These homegrown Croatian Nazis, led by Ante Pavelić, set out to destroy the “race of slaves” (as the founder of Croatianism Ante Starčević put it) with ruthless abandon, but ran out of time. Still, by 1945 they had killed anywhere between half a million and 750,000 Serbs.

With the end of communism in 1990, Franjo Tuđman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) brought a revival of Pavelić’s symbols and vocabulary. Some of the top supporters of the HDZ were Ustasha émigrés. Tuđman himself expressed relief that his wife was “neither Serb nor Jewish.” His constitutional reform redefined the republic as a nation-state of Croats, with Serbs as an ethnic minority. When Tuđman’s government declared independence from the Yugoslav federation in 1991, most Serbs saw 1941 all over again. This, not some imaginary “aggression” from Serbia, was the root of their “rebellion,” and the genesis of the Krajina Republic. After several months of bitter fighting, marked by massacres, ambushes, and the most vitriolic propaganda, the UN brokered an armistice. The so-called Vance Plan envisioned four “protected areas” with a Serb majority, whose eventual status would be resolved through negotiations.

Over the next three years, Tudjman’s government feverishly prepared for war, training its troops on the battlefields of Bosnia and staging quick, limited offensives at the strategic edges of UN-protected areas (most infamous being the Medak Pocket attack in 1993). Although enjoying political, diplomatic, and even military support from Vienna and Berlin since 1991, it was only when it got Washington’s support that Zagreb was ready – and able – to strike. “Retired” American officers, working for government contractor MPRI, claimed to teach Croat officers “democracy” and “human rights.” The events of May and August 1995 would demonstrate MPRI’s definitions of both.

Junkyard Dogs

"Dick: We ‘hired’ these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We need to try to ‘control’ them. But it is no time to get squeamish about things."
– To End a War, by Richard Holbrooke, Chapter 6

US envoy to the Balkans Richard Holbrooke thus described the note slipped to him by Ambassador Robert Frasure during a meeting with Croatian officials in 1995. Holbrooke’s own account of how the US officially condemned Croatian attacks even as he was meeting with Tudjman and telling him which cities to take, suggests he was hardly “squeamish” about using Croats to fight what he – and hundreds of advocacy journalists, lobbyists, and policymakers – had termed “Serb aggression.”

On May 1, 1995, Croatian troops tested both their readiness and the UN’s will by staging a lightning strike at an exposed Serb enclave of Western Slavonia. The operation was code-named Bljesak – “flash,” or perhaps more appropriately, “Blitz.” The clear violation of the armistice went unpunished. The stage was set for Oluja.

According to Serb documentation, the three-day offensive in August 1995 resulted in the expulsion of 220,000 people. Some 1,943 people have been listed as missing/presumed dead, including 1199 civilians, 523 women, and 12 children. The death toll would have been greater had the Serbs not fled en masse before the advancing Croat tanks; all who stayed behind were killed. The Croats, and their American sponsors, were definitely not squeamish.

Ten years later, Krajina is still a wasteland, with “scattered ghost villages strewn with shell-scarred houses overgrown with ivy and tall grass” (Reuters). Only a tenth of some 400,000 Serbs who lived in Croatia before it seceded have returned, only to face bureaucratic abuse and frequent physical violence. Tuđman made Pavelić’s dream to rid Croatia of Serbs a reality. It seems everything is in the choice of allies.

Unpleasant Comparisons

After obliterating Krajina, the conquering Croatian army moved into western Bosnia, aiding the Izetbegovic government to crush a dissident faction led by Fikret Abdic and assisting in the major Muslim offensive that “coincided” with NATO’s massive bombing of Bosnian Serbs. But after the Dayton Agreement was signed and peace imposed on Bosnia, Empire’s junkyard dogs discovered the supply of Milk Bones had run out. They had served their purpose.

Croatia and Albania joined NATO in 2009, ten years after the Alliance launched its first illegal war against what was left of Yugoslavia. Zagreb was admitted to the European Union in 2013 - a year after General Ante Gotovina and several others accused by the Hague Inquisition of war crimes during Oluja were acquitted on appeal in yet another show trial.

Some of the truth about atrocities against the Serbs is slowly coming to light, but interestingly enough, only after the prominent personalities accused have fallen out of political grace. The Zagreb leadership snaps back at any hint that Oluja might have been anything but just, right, and noble. In 2005, when Serbian president Boris Tadić called it an “organized crime,” Croatia's President Stipe Mesić replied it could hardly compare to Serb crimes such as Srebrenica.

But by all means, let’s compare! In both cases, a UN “safe area” was targeted by the attack. In Srebrenica, the UN at least tried to protect Muslim civilians; in Krajina, it did no such thing. Serbs evacuated Muslim noncombatants from Srebrenica; Serbs who did not flee Krajina were killed. Yet Srebrenica is somehow “genocide,” while Oluja is a victory worth a national holiday!

Another reason the Empire prefers to keep Oluja out of sight and out of mind is the push to establish an independent, Albanian-dominated Kosovo. If Croatia’s conquest of Krajina was legitimate, because Krajina’s existence violated its sacrosanct administrative borders, then why did Serbia not have the right to uphold its borders when it came to Kosovo? If obliterating the Serb population did not disqualify Croatia from keeping Krajina and Slavonia, how can the exodus of less than half of Kosovo’s Albanians disqualify Serbia from keeping Kosovo? If the Serbs, a constituent Yugoslav nation, did not have the right to ethnic self-determination in Krajina and Bosnia, how can the Kosovo Albanians (an ethnic minority) have one?

The “Abramowitz Doctrine”

This apparent paradox was “explained” by Morton Abramowitz, the eminence grise of U.S. foreign policy, in a 2003 interview: “there is no entirely rational answer … you seek perfect reasoning, which does not correspond to reality on the ground.” Logic does not apply to the Empire, because it creates its own reality; where have we heard that before?

The “reality” Abramowitz and his like-minded policymakers have sought to establish by force has been one in which, whatever the circumstances, Serbs are in the wrong. Apologists for the Empire dismiss this observable, verifiable fact as a “conspiracy theory” and claim the Serbs have a “victim complex” – even as their entire Balkans “reality” rests on the claim that everyone else has been victimized by the Serbs.

What “perfect reasoning” is involved in recognizing the simple fact that the centuries-old Serb community in Krajina is practically extinct, and that the Serb community in Kosovo – from which most of their ancestors came – is facing the same prospect?

Where the Nazis failed, the American Empire has succeeded. Is that really something to be thankful for?

(Nota bene, August 2017: Croatia and Albania remain the axis of Empire's dominion over the Balkans today. But the Empire itself is losing its grip on the fake "reality" it created with force and lies, and the East remembers.)

Challenging the Enduring Fallacies

Croats and Muslims called to join the
Waffen-SS (WW2 recruiting poster)

A book by Croatian-American economist Jozo Tomasevic, tellingly titled "War and Revolution," has served as the authoritative work of "history" on the matters of Yugoslavia in WW2. Published in 1975, it remains the foundation for numerous pseudo-histories written since, with the aim of somehow proving that it was really the "greaterserbian bourgeois oppressors" (actual Communist phrase) to blame for wartime slaughter and the interwar "oppression" of other groups.

In present-day Serbia, the cult of Serbian collective guilt has dominated politics, culture and academia since the 2000 astroturf revolution. That explains why few, if any, challenges to Tomasevic's myth have been put forth. Until now.

Miloslav Samardzic, another economist who turned historian, has researched archives, interviewed eyewitnesses, and written over a dozen books about WW2, focusing on the royalist resistance (aka the "Chetniks"). He is also one of the authors of a documentary series about Yugoslavia in WW2, mentioned here before - which will be shown in Washington DC on April 19 (see here for more information).

Samardzic has recently written a two-part essay addressing the numerous problems in Tomasevic's work, too lengthy to reproduce here. I do, however, commend them to the attention of anyone interested in WW2 history of Yugoslavia:

- “Chetniks” by Jozo Tomasevich: The Fallacy that Endures (Part 1)
- “Chetniks” by Jozo Tomasevich: The Fallacy that Endures (Part 2)

If it were just the Communists distorting the history of the war, to justify their takeover in 1945, that would be one thing. Quite another is to see Communist-invented history championed (example) by heirs of Nazi collaborators in present-day Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia. Baffling as that might appear at first, once you realize that the common thread of these "histories" is the shared hatred of Serbs, things will begin to click into place.

Facts and Fascist Fantasies

On Friday, February 6, six Bosnian Muslims ("Bosnians", per the US media) living in Missouri, New York and Illinois were arrested on charges of aiding ISIS. The day before, police in Manchester (UK) raided 17 homes, targeting an Albanian drug-trafficking ring. Meanwhile, thousands of Albanians are leaving their "free, independent state of Kosovo" - carved out of Serbia for them by NATO in 1999, and declared independent in 2008. Nobody seems to know why - though that doesn't stop the Western media for blaming the Serbs.

Over in Bosnia - the place that set the precedent for America's "white knighting" in the 1990s - an entire village has been taken over by Wahabi jihadists flying ISIS flags. This is news all of a sudden; yet the village's Serb inhabitants were driven out 20 years ago, and it has been a jihadist commune ever since - and no one in the West gave a damn. "See no jihad" was the order of the day, even after 9/11. Why? Perhaps because of Washington's plan to earn the jihadists' gratitude - even though they've clearly showm what they thought of the idea, over and over again.

Last week, Russian agencies reported that "up to 200 mercenaries from the Balkans" were fighting for the Nazi junta in the Ukraine. According to the report, the US corporation formerly known as Blackwater recruited Croats and Albanians.

Croats in the Nazi "Azov" battalion  (source)

It wouldn't be the first time; when the tattered remnants of the German 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad in February 1943, among them were troops of the Croatian Legion - a unit personally deployed to the Eastern Front by the Croatian Nazi leader Ante Pavelić, proud of his alliance with the "Thousand-Year Reich." Albanians also served Hitler faithfully, as he (and Mussolini) gave them today's Kosovo and western Macedonia, a Waffen-SS division, and a blank check to murder and expel as many Serbs as they could.

Fast-forward fifty years after the end of WW2. Pavelić's heirs again hitched their wagon to the strongest power, and used the status of its "junkyard dogs" to fulfill their iron dream. But the International Court of Justice just said you shouldn't worry your pretty little heads about that.

Criminal Thanksgiving Day

It has been nineteen years since the Empire's "junkyard dogs" committed the biggest act of ethnic cleansing to date: Operation Storm.

What the Catholic Nazis of the 1941-45 Independent State of Croatia could not achieve with Hitler's help, their heirs of 1991-95 did with the funding, training, propaganda and material support of the Atlantic Empire. Of the Orthodox Serbs that have lived in Dalmatia and along the old Hapsburg Military Frontier for centuries, only traces remain - and even they are being destroyed on a daily basis.

Shameless in their bigotry and projection, the Croatian authorities celebrate "Homeland Thanksgiving Day" every August. But it is no victory, only a crime.

And the East remembers.

The Desperate Smearbund

Could it be an indicator of the Empire's desperation that they are now trying to "Serb" Vladimir Putin, resurrecting the Serbophobic propaganda of the 1990s to smear the Russians as "aggressors" while whitewashing the Ukrainian (and Croatian) Nazis?

What else is one to think of this June 19 article in The New Republic, by Vera Mironova and Maria Snegovaya, a combination of gross journalistic incompetence and Holocaust denial?

I have written up a reaction over at the Reiss Institute, which Julia Gorin has reposted and accompanied with further helpful links and research.

Don't let this filth go unanswered.

Screenshot of the TNR article whitewashing the Ukrainian and Croatian Nazis,
while blaming the Russians and the Serbs as "occupiers"

FIFA Upholds Sieg-heiling Conviction

In November last year, when Croatia's soccer team managed to win passage to the 2014 World Cup by the skin of their teeth, one of the players sieg-heiled with the crowd in triumph. While Nazi displays in Croatia - from soccer stadiums to symbols of state - have been ignored for over two decades, FIFA couldn't let this one go. "Crazy Joe" Šimunić was fined and suspended for 10 games - starting with the World Cup.

At the end of April, a Croatian web magazine (billing itself as "one of the world’s leading portals") quoted Šimunić's lawyer Davor Prtenjača, who was optimistic that the decision would be overturned on appeal. Citing the speed of the hearing - just a month after the appeal was filed - as cause for hope, Prtenjača added that "FIFA had given up on the assertion that “Za dom – spremni” was purely a fascist salute, but still claim Šimunić had provoked racial hated at Maksimir stadium."

Both the salute and the shield have been symbols of the Croatian Nazis (Ustasha), who committed genocidal atrocities against Serbs and Jews and Roma so vicious, even some Nazis were appalled. Yet the defense is now that the salute - the Croatian equivalent of the German sieg-heil - was "not purely fascist"? Same with the checkerboard shield, which the Croats claim is an ancient symbol of their people. So? The swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol, yet it's been banned throughout much of the world because of its association with Hitler.

But even allowing for all that, for the sake of argument, what explains this?

Široki Brijeg, Herzegovina, November 2010 (source)

This photo is from a November 2010 game in the overwhelmingly Croat Široki Brijeg, in Herzegovina, where fans of the local team waved around both the actual Nazi flag and that of the Vatican - because the Church of Rome was a major backer of the Croatian Nazis, in WW2 and thereafter.

In any case, the "not solely fascist" defense didn't work. Šimunić lost his appeal on May 13, and the only way he will be involved with the World Cup - which begins this afternoon - is as a spectator. 

Remembering the "Blitz"

At 0530 hours on May 1, 1995, some 16,000 Croatian troops attacked the Serb-inhabited portion of Western Slavonia known as Sector West (a UN Protected Area, UNPA).

Following the failure of Croatian militias to conquer this and other Serb-inhabited areas (later united in the Republic of Serbian Krajina - RSK) that rejected Croatia's anti-Serb, neo-Nazi regime in Zagreb. In January 1992, an armistice was signed ("Vance Plan") and a UN force deployed to safeguard the Serb-inhabited areas following the withdrawal of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA).

Operation "Blitz", May 1-2, 1995 (source: CIA, via Wikipedia)

Backed by the United States government, Zagreb launched the May 1 operation as a trial balloon. Within 36 hours, the Croats had expelled the area's 15,000 Serbs, and killed 283 (including 57 women and 9 children). The UN troops charged with protecting the zone did nothing. The so-called "international community" (the Atlantic Empire and its vassals, in practice) did nothing.

Three months later, Croatia launched an all-out assault against the Serb-inhabited areas, with full diplomatic and political support of the United States government, killing 930 (with another 922 missing and presumed dead), while expelling almost all the remaining Serbs from the territories claimed by the Croatian state. By 2001, there were 380,032 fewer Serbs living in Croatia than in 1991, when Zagreb declared independence.

Both "police actions" were named in the true tradition of WW2 Croatia: "Flash" (Blitz, in German) and "Storm" (Sturm).

Croatian map of the "liberation" of Western Slavonia;
Serb-inhabited territories in blue were "liberated" in 1991,
in operation "Hurricane" (Orkan)  

Because Croatia was a proxy of the Atlantic Empire, it got away with this murder. Now the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev, which seized power in the illegal coup of February 22, is expecting to do the same, launching a military attack against the Ukrainians refusing to submit to them. But while they expect May 2014 will be like May 1995, they should remember what happened when someone else tried to replicate August 1995 in August 2008.

God is just, and His justice does not sleep forever.

The East remembers.

Shameless

The great Serb poet Jovan Dučić, who sought refuge in 1941 from the atrocities of Nazi Croatia, once called the Croats the bravest people in the world, "not because they are fearless, but because they are shameless." Just to be clear, it was not meant as a compliment.

Almost every day brings new proof of Dučić's accuracy, from sieg-heiling on football pitches and smashing Cyrillic signs, to street "art" about hanging Serbs on willow trees.

Downtown Zagreb last week (photo: BN TV)

But while the EU and its quisling cult constantly insist the Serbs apologize for the unforgivable crime of continuing to exist, there are no calls on Croats to apologize for their overt Nazism. Nor do Croats feel any urge to do so. Quite the contrary!

"Joe" Simunic is "proud to be a patriot." The sign-smashers and "artists" believe they are honoring the legacy of the "Homeland War." Because Croatia has been a loyal client of the Atlantic Empire and even more so of Berlin (being "rewarded" earlier this year with EU membership), there is little criticism of such behavior in the mainstream Western press. What there is, usually contains an attempt at moral equivalence, such as "Croatia fought a war with Serbia [sic] in the 1990s". So I guess that makes hating the Serbs OK?

A simple litmus test would go like this: Read anything in the mainstream Croatian press about the Serbs. Replace the word "Serb" with "Jew." See how that reads.

Now a Croatian grievance group in France has sued Bob Dylan and Rolling Stone magazine, claiming he "incited hatred" with a 2012 (!) interview, in which he said - among other things - this:

“Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery - that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

Supposedly, the CRICCF was horribly offended because Dylan dared "compare Croatian criminals to all Croats." This is baffling. On one hand, isn't official Croatdom proud of their hatred of Serbs and service to the Reich? Also, doesn't phrasing it this way mean they agree the Ustasha - and their present-day heirs - are criminals? These, however, are hatefacts, and all you are supposed to do is focus on how horribly offended they are because Dylan - who, by the way, is an actual participant of the U.S. civil rights struggle - made a comparison that hit a little too close to home.

The timing of the lawsuit ought to be a clue: right as Nazi incidents in Croatia are out in the open, and Dylan has just been given a Legion of Honor. This is a PR stunt, pure and simple. Unfortunately, under EU's most-progressive-and-democratic "hate speech" laws, there is a more-than-zero chance a Parisian judge may decide the horrifying anguish of Croats in France upon being compared to Nazis and the Klan is entitled to financial compensation.

The ironic part about Dylan's statement is that it's the Croats usually sniffing around for "Serb blood" in people they dislike - an obsession even more absurd because the vast majority of Croats are genetically indistinguishable from Serbs. It's just that they were ruled by Catholic kings for over a thousand years, and their national identity was eventually formulated in the late 1800s (under the influence of Austro-Hungarian expansionism) as militantly Catholic, Serbophobic and anti-Semitic. Driven by that hatred, entirely unprovoked, they committed barbaric atrocities against the Serbs in both world wars, and again in the 1990s (having murdered most of the Jews in 1941-45). Call it a triumph of monstrous nurture over nature, if you will.

It would be interesting to see if any Serbs in France will file an amicus brief in Dylan's case, detailing all the Croat "contributions to civilization," such as Jastrebarsko, the only death camp for children in WW2. Not so much for Dylan's sake - I'm sure he can defend himself - but for their own. Because the untold numbers of their kin, "civilized" to death by the "bravest people in the world", cry out for justice - in this world or the next.

Poor Little Nazis

Yesterday, after Croatia's victory over Iceland qualified them for the 2014 Soccer World Cup, one player led the home crowd in a victorious chant. AP (via HuffPost) has a video of it, noting that it caused a bit of furor on account of being, well, Nazi. 

WW2 Ustasha poster

AP quotes "Joe" Simunic - born in Australia, to Croatian emigre parents - saying, "I did nothing wrong. I'm supporting my Croatia, my homeland," and "some people have to learn some history."

Let's learn some history, then.

Ustasha (усташа, pl. усташе) - is an old Serbian word for "insurgent", appropriated (like everything else) by Croats. Specifically, a violent chauvinist movement sponsored by Fascist Italy after WW1, seeking to establish an independent Croatian state.

They were given the opportunity in 1941, when Axis powers invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. An "Independent State of Croatia" was proclaimed on April 10. Mass murder of Serbs, Jews and Roma (in that order) began within days.

Ustasha Croatia opened an extermination camp in Jasenovac (with adjacent camps for women and children - the only such facility in Nazi Europe) almost a year before Germany's Nazi leadership decided to seek the "final solution to the Jewish problem" through mass murder. Their atrocities were so visceral, even the SS were appalled. But Hitler and the Roman Catholic Church had their back, so the genocide continued.

Ironically, it was the Italians who managed to rein in the Ustasha and provide some sanctuary to Serbs and Jews in their occupation zone - at least until Italy's surrender to the Allies in September 1943. From then onward, to the end of the war, Croats and Germans were able to murder with impunity.

The Communist Partisans, who later claimed to have liberated Yugoslavia single-handedly, did absolutely nothing to stop the slaughter. Oh no - after the war they resurrected Croatia as a "republic" within the Yugoslav "federation" reanimated from the kingdom's corpse, and rewarded it with territories ethnically cleansed of Italians, Germans and Hungarians. All in the name of "social justice", of course, because everything before and during WW2 had really been the fault of the "Greater Serbian bourgeois imperialism." No joke.

When a Holocaust-denying Ustasha fan became the first "democratic" president of that Croatia in 1990, his revival of Ustasha language, symbols and values was cheered in the West as "anti-Communist" (and again, got the Roman Catholic Church's blessing). Thousands of Ustasha Croats returned from exile in the U.S., Canada, Australia (Simunic, for example). Meanwhile, Serbs living in Croatia were first disenfranchised, then subjected to state abuse, property destruction and outright murder. But when they took up arms in self-defense, that was dubbed "aggression."

So obviously, in this twisted world, the Ustasha Croatians are "good guys" and their victims - the Serbs - are evil incarnate. And "Joe" Simunic is just a misunderstood patriot.

Sure, technically his words were innocent. All he said was, "For the home," and the crowd howled back, "Ready!" And it's not like they haven't done so before. So,  should we mind if, say, Germans give a salute to victory?

Oh wait.

The East Remembers

In the early morning hours of Aug. 4, 1995, on the heels of an incessant artillery and air bombardment, some 200,000 Croatian troops moved in to “liberate” Krajina, a stretch of mountains inhabited by Serbs who had rejected Croatia’s secession from Yugoslavia four years prior.

This is how I began "Remembering the Storm", published on the 10th anniversary of that atrocity. Croatia has since joined NATO and the EU. General Ante Gotovina was captured, extradited, convicted - and released. Yet that essay remains as true today as it was eight years ago.

"United Europe fights in the East"-
Nazi Croatian poster from 1942

Documentary evidence publicized during the trial of Gotovina et. al clearly confirms that Franjo Tuđman and his government wanted the Serbs gone. They wanted to finish the job begun in 1941, by their political progenitors, who aimed to "kill a third, expel a third, and convert a third." Of the two million Serbs in the "Independent State of Croatia," German sources estimated anywhere between 500,000 and 750,000 perished.

When Germany lost the war, the Ustasha - Croatian Nazis - had to flee. However, the cause of Croatian statehood was rescued by the Communists, who spun a myth of moral equivalence between the genocidal Ustasha and the Serb royalists. Croat nationalists could thus say they had "won WW2 twice". And in 1991, when Yugoslavia was weak and Germany strong once again, they came back for a rematch.

Just like in 1941, the Serbs fought back. Just like in 1941, Croatia had outside backers. Not ready to intervene in 1991, they arranged an armistice, deploying UN peacekeepers to disarm the Serbs. Meanwhile, American "advisors" trained Tuđman's troops in "human rights and democracy," while American diplomats exchanged notes calling Croatians their "junkyard dogs", cultivated for the purpose of fighting "Serb aggression".

The all-out attack on the Republic of Serb Krajina was launched on August 4, 1995. The following day, Croatian troops entered the Krajina capital of Knin. Tuđman declared it "Homeland thanksgiving day," cribbing from Americans the same way he cribbed from the Soviets in dubbing his extermination campaign the "Homeland war."

Krajina's defenders were surrounded and outnumbered. The Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina were dealing with a series of offensives by NATO-armed Muslim and Croat troops. Belgrade had refused to help, hoping to avoid a war with NATO (it didn't work; appeasement never does). Krajina's population chose exile over death. The 2001 census showed 380,000 fewer Serbs in Croatia than in 1991. Tuđman succeeded where the Ustasha had not. But then, he had better sponsors.

Croatia is American Empire's "junkyard dog" even today, though the Croats in Bosnia got the worst of that bargain. Empire's favor extends to other Nazi allies - be they militant Muslims in Bosnia, or Albanians occupying Kosovo and claiming more territories besides. A real 1940s reunion, today's Balkans.

To add insult to injury, the "war crimes" kangaroo court is now claiming the Ustasha plans for extermination of Serbs are really Serb plans for genocide of Muslims!

Tuđman died in 1999, and his party is no longer in power, but Croatia continues to celebrate August 5 as a national holiday. Montenegro's corrupt government separated from Serbia in 2006 and is trying to impose a rabidly anti-Serb (and pro-Croatian) national identity on its populace. Albanian-occupied Kosovo was declared an independent state in 2008, the same year an openly quisling regime was installed in Serbia.

Not everything has gone Empire's way, though. There are Serbs who still resist. The insane plan to woo jihadists "of all color and hue" isn't working out so well. And when another client tried to replicate the Krajina scenario, in August 2008, all the Imperial training and tech didn't last a day against a Russian frontier army.

The West may think it has won. But the East remembers.

Weapons to Syria: A Croatian Confessional

Much as the mainstream media would like to fudge it with talk of "former Yugoslavia", the fact that Croatian weapons have found their way to the Syrian jihadists is becoming more difficult to deny. The Croatians themselves, in fact, aren't even bothering to try. The Zagreb daily Jutarnji List (The Morning Paper) published a story on March 7, explaining where the weapons came from, who delivered them and how, and who was behind it all. The original article can be found here. My translation follows below.

Jutarnji Reveals: 
In four months, 75 airplanes with 3,000 tons of weapons departed Zagreb Pleso airport for Syria in the past four months.

By Krešimir Žabec, March 7, 2013

(Jutarnji.hr)

Between the beginning of November last year and February this year, altogether 75 civilian cargo planes departed Zagreb's Pleso airport, loaded with weapons for Syrian rebels, Jutarnji has learned from diplomatic sources. In addition to Croatian weapons, the aircraft carried weapons from other European countries, gathered in the organization of the United States of America.

According to our sources, the first two or three deliveries went via Turkish Cargo, a subsidiary of Turkish Airlines. Subsequent deliveries were made via Jordanian International Air Cargo.

Related story: NY Times on our soldiers withdrawal from Golan: "Our report compromised safety of Croat Blue Helmets"

Until recently, it was thought that a high-raking Croatian official had arranged with his American colleagues the transport of surplus Croatian arms to the Syrian rebels, which was reported by the New York Times. Reliable diplomatic sources indicate, however, that the plan to arm the Syrian rebels was part of a broader context. 

Namely, American officials had enlisted several partners - Croatia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey - to arm the opponents of the Syrian regime. The USA organized the procurement of weapons, the Saudis paid for it, and Jordan and Turkey made the deliveries, via Jordan, to Syria.

Croatia had a dual role. It supplied part of its weapons surplus, including the M79 and RPG-22 launchers, and M60 recoil-less cannon. A yet unknown quantity of those departed from Pleso in early November last year, on a Turkish A310. However, the Americans organized deliveries of weapons from several other European countries, including the UK, to Pleso, from where it was loaded into Jordanian cargo plans and sent to Syria via Jordan.

Related story: CROAT WEAPONS TRANSFERRED TO SYRIAN REBELS: Everything arranged last summer in Washington!

Thus it could be said that Pleso has been the international hub of arms deliveries to the Syrian rebels, over the course of several months. As the cargo aircraft involved were A310 and Ilyushin 76MF, it is estimated that around 3,000 tons of weapons and ammunition have been transported on 75 flights.

YouTube videos confirm that the Syrian rebels are receiving large quantities of arms and ammunition. Videos show the rebels bragging about the new weapons they have received. Western media claim that Americans and Turks have organized the weapons deliveries.

As our sources tell us, the security of the operation came into question after the Bosnian air traffic control started making inquiries about the large number of Jordanian cargo flights from Zagreb. Nor did the sudden frequency of Jordanian cargo flights go unnoticed among the Zagreb populace. Our sources indicate it isn't know exactly how many of the weapons ended up with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army, as opposed to several dozen militant jihadist militias, also fighting against the Syrian regime.

Recent YouTube videos suggest that part of the weapons that came from Croatian stores ended up with the jihadist movement Ahram al-Sham. This was confirmed by their spokesman, who said they shared weapons with the Free Syrian Army.

There have also been allegations that some of the weapons that reached Syria via Zagreb have ended up with the Yarmuk Martyrs' Brigade, the jihadists who seized 30 Filipino UN peacekeepers on the Golan Heights two days ago. Afraid that the weapons might end up with militants, most Western politicians insist on keeping the EU's embargo on exports to Syria. Croatia has stated its support for the embargo, and is technically not in violation of it, since the weapons were sold to Jordan.

The entire affair has demonstrated that Croatia is a reliable partner of the United States. Washington has played a crucial role in Croatia's admission to NATO and subsequently the EU. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Defense is greatly supporting the Croatian Army in Afghanistan with weapons and equipment, and provides free transport to our troops that are part of the ISAF. So it is natural that Croatia, as a faithful ally, positively responded to the American request for taking part in a weapons delivery operation for Syria.

Sidebar: Josipović officially requested withdrawal of Croatian peacekeepers

President Josipović has requested parliamentary confirmation of his decision to withdraw 97 Croatian soldiers from the UN mission on Syria's Golan Heights. He justified the decision by the deteriorating security situation in the Golan, and argued that withdrawing the soldiers would remove them from danger. The Sabor is due to debate the decision in their next session, and confirmation requires a two-thirds majority. If the Sabor rejects the President's decision, the soldiers will remain in the Golan.

The withdrawal from UNDOF mission was announced last week by Prime Minister Milanović, who said it was the consequence of media reports of Croatian arms deliveries to Syrian rebels. The military command is already preparing for the withdrawal, and Defense Minister Ante Kotromanović announced the soldiers could return within a month. The retreat will be organized via Israel.

Injustice for All, Redux

When the ICTY convicted two Croatian generals (and acquitted another), in April last year, I wrote:

"It would be a mistake to believe that the Tribunal or the Empire have suddenly developed a case of caring about Serb suffering. At best, the judgment against the generals is a gambit to create the perception of impartiality, while continuing to pursue the "Greater Serbian conspiracy." Under the JCE, the accused is guilty of merely existing - i.e. holding a position of authority the Tribunal decides should have had control or even awareness of events - so the fact that one of the generals was acquitted strongly suggests the verdict was political. It is entirely possible that the other two will be acquitted in the appeals process..." (Injustice for All, April 15, 2011; emphasis added)

So I can't say that I was surprised by today's decision by the ICTY to overturn the original verdict in the appeals process, and set the generals free.

The original verdict had two objectives: to clear the nominal obstacles to Croatia's entry into the EU, and to bait the Serbs into lending the ICTY some legitimacy, until it could finish the process of blaming them for the 1990s Balkans wars. It has accomplished both, so now it can be disposed of.

This is just one more tile in the mosaic of evidence indicating that the faux "tribunal" is a political court, nothing more.

Wherefore the Distortions?

On the pages of the Washington Post, Serbophobia tends to be impersonal: just your everyday sneering at nations standing in Empire's way.  Even the famously wrong Richard Cohen sticks to using the standard manual of Serbophobia, hitting the appropriate cliches in order to make a point about supporting interventionism.

Then there is the Washington Times, a paper claiming to be as conservative (i.e. GOP) as the Post is liberal (i.e. Democratic). True enough, over the years, the Times has printed criticism of the Democrats' Balkans policies. And in 2007, they did publish an unusually frank staff editorial condemning the "perception management" in the case of the Fort Dix Six. On the other hand, they employ Jeffrey T. Kuhner.

A regular columnist at the Times, Kuhner can be relied on for a good hysterical rant about the "Evil Serbs" just about anytime. In 2003, he blamed the Serbs for jihad in Bosnia. In 2004, he saw the sky falling when the Serbian Radical Party got the biggest chunk of votes in the election that saw the demise of DOS. Yet the apocalypse he foresaw failed to materialize. Now he's at it again, arguing that the election of Tomislav Nikolic to Serbian presidency is a "vote for war" in the Balkans.

Kuhner's latest screed is simply stuffed with so many factual errors that arguing with them would take up three times his word count: a clever strategy, when letters to the editor are typically limited to 150 words. But at its core is the smear of the newly elected President of Serbia as "neo-fascist", and the Serbs themselves as Nazi Germany reborn.

Per Kuhner:

"Mr. Nikolic embodies the worst forms of Serbian nationalism, whose ideological roots go back to the “Chetniks” - the term for Serbian royalists - of World War II. Led by Drazen Mihailovic, the Chetniks formed a racist far-right-wing movement that sought to forge an ethnically pure Great Serb empire incorporating Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, most of Bosnia and large chunks of Croatia. Allied to Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy, the Chetniks engaged in murderous ethnic cleansing, slaughtering tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Croatians and Kosovar Albanians." (emphasis added)

Where to begin? First off, Kuhner doesn't even know the proper party line, which is that "Serbian nationalism" supposedly dates back to the 19th century (and Ilija Garashanin's "Nachertanie"). The whole "Greater Serbia" claim was manufactured by Austria-Hungary in the early 1900s, to create a pretext for a war against the independent principality that obstructed its plans for hegemony in the Balkans (a war Vienna finally got in 1914, but ended up not liking very much).

Kuhner can't even get Mihailovic's name right - it's Dragoljub, shortened to "Drazha", not "Drazen". "Chetnik" is actually a Serbian term for a guerrilla, dating back to the conflicts of the early 1900 (in particular the 1912-13 Balkan Wars). Mihailovic's forces were actually the Royal Yugoslav Army, a legitimate resistance movement fighting against the Axis occupation. The claim they fought for an ethnically pure Serbian state is a lie concocted by Communist propaganda, as are the allegations of their mass murder of innocent civilians. That was actually the policy of the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia; established in April 1941, it included most of present-day Croatia, Bosnia and parts of Serbia, and engaged in wholesale genocide of Serbs, Jews and Roma.

Kuhner doesn't mention Nazi Croatia even once. Yet he can't possibly believe it's irrelevant, since he claims the "Chetniks" were allied with Mussolini's Italy. What actually happened is that there was a truce between the Royalists and the Italian troops stationed in southern "Croatia" (but not in Montenegro or Albanian-occupied Kosovo) - but only because Mussolini's men actually opposed the Croatians' mass murders. Why would they fight the Italians, when the Italians were trying to prevent genocide?

So "fascist" was the royalist resistance, Mihailovic was decorated by President Truman, and his men rescued over 500 Allied aviators (including the men who bombed Serb civilians), at great cost in lives. Kept under wraps for decades so as not to offend the Communists in Yugoslavia, the story only recently came to light, even as its heroic protagonists pass away.

But none of this fits Kuhner's narrative, so it isn't mentioned. He barrels on:

"As Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s, Belgrade launched brutal wars of aggression against Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. More than 250,000 were killed and nearly 2 million ethnically cleansed."

Here "disintegration" serves to sanitize the violent and illegal secessions by the above-named entities, accompanied by wholesale murder of Serbs and the resurrection of Nazi-era symbols and policies. To cover this up, propagandists concocted the story of "Serb aggression" and deliberately invoked Nazi imagery to defame the Serbs. Kuhner recycles the old, debunked figure of 250,000 dead, and doesn't count one million Serbs who were ethnically cleansed.

He then proceeds to talk of "death camps" in Croatia and Bosnia, quoting outlandish claims of alleged survivors - whereas even the Hague Inquisition (established for the purpose of blaming the Serbs for everything) has shied from such allegations. Even the most outspoken professional Serbophobes haven't dared to claim that Ovcara was a "death camp" for 2000 people, as opposed to a farm where about 200 Croatian POWs were executed. Until Kuhner, that is.

Kuhner's diatribe is basically another example of what happens when the official distortions of WW2 history are allowed to go unchallenged: we see a triumph of Hitler's allies and Hitler's policies, while those opposing them get smeared as "fascists".

Why would Kuhner engage in these distortions of history, so extensive they cannot possibly be accidental or a product of ignorance? He has a degree in history, and even taught it for a couple of years, if his Wikipedia page is correct. But the page also says he was "born in Montreal, Canada to Croatian immigrant parents."

The only conclusion I can draw from Kuhner's op-ed - which is just the latest in a long series of Serbophobic diatribes - is that he's harping on about Serbs-as-Nazis in order to cover for the real Nazi allies: the very same Croats, "Bosnians" and ethnic Albanians claiming to be victims of "Serb aggression."

If that's "conservatism" then Edmund Burke is spinning in his grave.

"Twice the Winners" of WW2

In April 1945, with the Soviets and their Yugoslav Communist allies approaching, the Ustasha (Croatian Nazis) tried to exterminate the surviving inmates of their principal death camp complex. The 760 women at the adjacent camp of Stara Gradiska had already been massacred. Of the 1,000-plus men in Jasenovac, 700 chose to risk a breakout on April 22. Only 90 of them succeeded.

Communist authorities were happy enough to declare the Ustasha enemies of the state, but made every effort to suppress the exact extent of their atrocities, for the sake of "brotherhood and unity" in the new Yugoslavia. Yet there is no question that a genocide happened. There was clear intent, manifested in speeches, official proclamations and laws of the "Independent State of Croatia" (NDH) There were the countless pits in Herzegovina and Dalmatia, where butchered Serb civilians were disposed of until Italian outrage put a stop to it. By then, the Jasenovac complex had become operational, with death camps not just for men, but for women and even children. German sources suggest anywhere between 750,000 and one million dead, between the pits and the camps.

In 1941, there were 2 million Serbs in territories claimed by the NDH. In 1991, there were almost as many in the same territories - now claimed by Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Yet the overall population of Yugoslavia had grown from just over 15 million in 1948 (after the war and genocide) to 23.5 million in 1991. You do the math. 

Today the Croatian leadership - President Josipović, Prime Minister Milanović and speaker of the parliament Šprem - visited the Jasenovac memorial and swore that "fascist, Nazi and Ustasha ideas will never again" hold sway in Croatia. Well, why should they, having served their purpose?

The few Serbs remaining in Croatia live in fear and face constant abuse and discrimination. Yet when they tried to rebel against Franjo Tuđman's Ustasha revival in 1990, they were branded "aggressors" and the Empire funded, trained and supported their destruction - specifically, "Operation Storm," the mass ethnic cleansing campaign of August 1995. Since the anniversary of "Storm" is a national holiday in Croatia ("Homeland Thanksgiving Day"), the very same officials who were in Jasenovac today will see nothing wrong in celebrating come August. 

It brings to mind the words of Josipović's predecessor, Stjepan Mesić, who once said: 

"in the Second World War, the Croats won twice and we have no reason to apologize to anyone... We won on 10 April [1941] when the Axis Powers recognized Croatia as a state, and we won because we sat after the war, again with the winners, at the winning table." (BBC Monitoring; December 10, 2006)

Sure enough, in 1945, the Communist leader Tito "punished" Croatian atrocities by creating a large Croatian republic in the federated Yugoslavia. In 1991, with the backing of Berlin, Vienna and the Vatican, Franjo Tuđman declared this republic an independent state. Croatia was admitted to NATO in 2009. Next year it will be joining the European Union. American weapons, propaganda and diplomacy served the same Croatian agenda in 1991-95 as Hitler's had half a century prior. 

Lest there be any doubt as to the character of that "Croatia as a state," here are just three wartime posters (more can be found here) testifying to the relationship between Zagreb and Berlin:  

"United Europe fights in the East", poster for the 1942 exhibit in Zagreb. Nazi eagle, center; Croatian checkerboard over to the right 

"Great Leaders Adolf Hitler and poglavnik Dr. Ante Pavelić call on you to defend your homes - join the volunteer Croatian SS!" And yes, that's a mosque over on the right, and one of the SS is wearing a fez.

"A German victory is a victory for Europe: the German-Croatian brotherhood in arms"

All this ought to make you wonder who really won WW2.

Storm, Kosovo and Empire

I really don't have much to add to my 2005 essay about "Operation Storm," the Empire-sponsored ethnic cleansing operation by which Franjo Tudjman's government effected a final solution of its "Serb problem."

Though the Hague Inquisition has declared it part of a "joint criminal enterprise" when convicting two Croatian generals in April, it is unlikely this verdict will be allowed to stand for long. Zagreb maintains that this was a great and noble victory, celebrates the holiday as "Homeland Thanksgiving Day" and - most importantly - the sponsors of the operation still look upon Croatia with favor, even as it is no longer their "junkyard dog."

There is no doubt that "Storm" was cooked up in the Pentagon kitchen; the Empire doesn't deny its mercenary outfit MPRI was instrumental in turning Tudjman's army from rabble into something resembling a military. A decade later, the pattern was repeated in Georgia (which eventually attempted a similar-style operation, albeit with a very different outcome).

Of course, the conquest of Krajina was greatly helped by the fact that Croatians had the Serbs outnumbered, outgunned, surrounded, blinded (NATO airstrikes took out their communications) and - last, but not least - abandoned. Perhaps the calculation in Belgrade was that the sacrifice of Krajina might save Serbia from Imperial invasion; if so, they soon realized their mistake. But that's a topic I'll save for later.

Croatians and their Western advocates erroneously label the war a struggle for independence; no one - not Belgrade, nor the Krajina Serbs - actually sought to stop Croats from having their own state, as much as that would have been a perfectly legal course of action under the extant Yugoslav constitution. The only thing in dispute was whether a Croat government - moreover, one that has deliberately sought continuity with the WW2 Ustasha - had any right to rule over territories inhabited mostly by ethnic Serbs.

There is one aspect of that conflict that remains largely ignored: the involvement of Kosovo Albanians in the Croatian military. I am not aware of any research into the actual number of Albanians who joined Tudjman's forces. There is anecdotal evidence of Albanians fighting in both that war, and the subsequent/parallel war in Bosnia, where they supported the Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic. But the plural of anecdote is not data. More research is needed.

Two names do come to mind, however. Rahim Ademi was a brigadier-general during the Medak Pocket operation, and was even put on trial for war crimes there, but was acquitted by a Croatian court - surprise! - along with General Norac, in 2008.

Somewhat more (in)famous is Agim Ceku, who also joined Tudjman's army in 1991, and took part in the Medak operation (where he was wounded). Ceku commanded Croatian army units during "Storm." After the war, Tudjman gave him command of the 5th Military District - but in 1998, he "retired" to join the KLA, which was being rebuilt in Albania (the Serbian law enforcement having successfully quashed the Jashari rebellion).

Neither Ceku nor his political superior, KLA supreme leader Hashim Thaci, have ever been charged with any atrocities, even though under the Inquisition's own doctrine of command responsibility they were ultimately responsible for every single act of terrorism their underlings (such as Fatmir Limaj or Ramush Haradinaj) had committed. Thaci is now "Prime Minister" of the self-proclaimed Kosovaristan, while Ceku simply changed insignia and continued to command the KLA under the name of "Kosovo Protection Corps" (which now passes for Thaci's military).

The Official Truth in Croatia (and Kosovia) is that their separatist rebellions were legitimate self-defense from "Serbian oppression" embodied in the evil Slobodan Milosevic. The problem with this theory is that it completely fails to explain the prior history of Albanian and Croat belligerence towards the Serbs, which predates Milosevic by a great deal.

What is one to make of Albanian separatism in Tito's Yugoslavia, which created Kosovo as a political entity in the first place, invested vast amounts of money into its modernization, and provided a welfare system that enabled Albanian families to have a dozen children or more? What is one to make of the 1973 "Maspok" (mass movement) events in Croatia, long before Milosevic was even on the political radar?

And for that matter, what about the Croat and Albanian alliance with Hitler in WW2, exemplified by the "Independent State of Croatia" and its Devil Division at Stalingrad, or the 21st Waffen-SS division "Skanderbeg", composed primarily of Albanians from Kosovo?

When one connects the dots, the pattern is there: Croats and Albanians, joined in pursuit of the same cause. Where Hitler failed to deliver, the Atlantic Empire succeeded (so far, anyway). It seems everything is in the choice of allies.