ANATOMY OF DECEIT
Copyright© 1997 by
Jerry Blaskovich.
Electronic edition by Studia Croatica,
by permission of the author
"We live
in an age where people no longer produce or create their own opinions, but
rather, where people reproduce opinions presented in the media."
-- Jean Baudrillard
in Simulations.
On December
15, 1991, I was awakened at 5 A.M. by a phone call from the Foreign Press Bureau's
chief in Zagreb, J.P "Pat" Mackley. He was
phoning from the combat zone: “I need your help. There’s been another massacre
and we have bodies to prove it! In a place called Vocin
near Podravska Slatina.
What’s different is that the Cro Army is holding the
terrain; the Serbs can’t hide the evidence. Unfortunately the Croatian Army has
started burying them."
"Stop them; dig up those already buried
and put them on ice. Pressure the Croatian government to send pathologists from
Zagreb's Medical School and work up each corpse as they would any murder
case."
With this
began my direct exposure to crimes committed by the Serbs in the name of
nationalism and ethnic cleansing.
When Mackley called I was blissfully ensconced in the safe
cocoon of the Lotus Land called California, though I was scheduled, on behalf
of the Foreign Press Bureau, to leave for Croatia that very day to evaluate the
health care conditions in Croatia and investigate allegations involving
incidents of poison gas and chemical warfare. Throughout the country, the
medical facilities had been devastated. Since the onset of hostilities in June,
1991, the Yugoslav Army's primary targets, aside from non-Serb civilians, had
been hospitals, churches, and Croatian cultural treasures. By February 1992,
378 towns, 210 Catholic churches, and 160 historical buildings had been
destroyed, 28 of which were designated by UNESCO as world cultural monuments,
including the city of Dubrovnik. The loss and destruction of the large number
of medical facilities seriously crimped health care delivery.
After Mackley told me about Vocin, and
knowing the way other Serbian atrocities had been handled, the first thing I
blurted out, after being suddenly awakened from my deep sleep, was for him to
institute a forensic investigation. He confirmed my arrival time, and told me
to get on it.
Going back to sleep proved impossible. My
wife, already fearful for my safety on this trip, became completely unglued
when I told her what had happened in Vocin. The
previous evening she had discovered her growing fear was justified when she
found a Kevlar bullet proof vest and helmet among my clothes, and told her the
items were the required wear in the areas I would be visiting. Another suitcase
brimmed with desperately needed anesthetics, antibiotics and anti-scabies
medications. Mackley had previously informed me that
scabies and crabs were endemic at the front lines, which was wherever Croatian
civilian forces were resisting the Yugoslav Army. When the Yugoslav army began
hostilities, they immediately rolled over everything in sight until the Croat
civilian defenders started to resist with whatever weapons they had. These
"frontlines" unexpectedly held (the Croats' motivation was, after
all, to defend their families).
My wife Kathy
had become painfully aware of the situation in former Yugoslavia when the
island of Brac in the Adriatic Sea, where her family
has its roots, had been bombed a few months earlier by the Yugoslav air force.
After Mackley's call, my wife knew she could not dissuade me. A
commitment was a commitment. To the contrary, my resolve stiffened after
hearing about this latest outrage. I was painfully aware of the civilized
world’s moral inertia that followed previous Serbian atrocities.
The Croatia I
would be going to would be a far cry from the Croatia where I studied medicine
on the GI Bill in the 60s. During my years as a medical student in Zagreb the
power of the Communist Party was at its apogee. It was a time when one had to
talk in whispers about anything political to another person; if a third person
was present, all political discussion stopped. You were never sure of who could
be an UDBA (secret police) informant. National identity was suppressed to a
point that the mere mention of the noun “Croatian” was viewed with suspicion.
The
friendships made in my student days in Zagreb have persisted. It may be that
true relationships, which develop in a communist society, are somehow even more
endearing and enduring than those nurtured in democracies. With every new
acquaintance, one always had to be on guard, both in word and deed, and in how
one talked, because of the lurking threat that 'someone' might be working for
UDBA (secret police). In my particular case, since I was a student from
America, I was perceived by some as working for the CIA or on a more
Machiavellian note, an agent provocateur for UDBA. But once one was trusted,
the relationships grew and persisted, warts and all. One way to maintain that
trust in a totalitarian society is never to volunteer information to anyone,
outside your own circle, who your close friends are. Another feature of
totalitarian societies is the preference not to name names of those who are
present when certain events take place. Until the situation in Croatia is
resolved, it is necessary that I continue to use such precaution.
In present day
Croatia these fears no longer exist, nonetheless the mentality persists. Among
my circle of friends the formula of compartmentalizing of friends has proven to
be successful; by my definition, "successful" means that none of
those friends has gone to jail or disappeared during the communist heyday.
Friends from
my student days have come to be judges, doctors, professors at the
university--not only in medicine but in other fields, including architecture
and engineering.
Since my
student days, I had revisited former Yugoslavia numerous times. Although each
visit had been interesting and a learning experience about new facets of life
under communism, none of my visits were of any political consequence. This trip
was my first in an official capacity. Yet, by coincidence, I was fortunate
enough to be in Zagreb on the two most historic days in contemporary Croatian
history: the Croatian Communist Party delegates walking out of the Yugoslav
Communist Party Congress in Belgrade and the Croatian Sabor
(Parliament) were voting to secede from Yugoslavia. When I witnessed the
walkout in January 1990, my parasympathetic system response went into
overdrive.
I immediately
realized it to be the death knell for Yugoslavia. Anything that happened after
this could only be anti-climatic. When the momentous event took place in
Belgrade, I was watching television in Zagreb with a number of my closest
friends. It would be an understatement to say that everybody was shocked; even
those who had access to the workings of the Communist Party at the highest
levels were flabbergasted.
Few of my
Croatian friends realized at the time the ramifications of the walkout in
Belgrade. Perhaps they were too close to the forest to see the trees--possibly,
if they had been vocal it might have placed them in jeopardy; they may have
feared that somehow the power and wrath of the Communist Party could rain upon
them.
Following the
parliament vote on February 21, 1991, the euphoria on the streets of Zagreb had
no bounds. My wife and I had been in Zagreb to celebrate our 25th wedding
anniversary. On Zagreb's main square, Trg Ban Jelacic, everyone was embracing or extending hands in
congratulations. It was akin to Life magazine pictures I'd seen of Times Square
in New York City following V-E day. Only one thing
dampened the scene for us. My wife ran into a man, an ex-army officer from her
hometown, whom she had not seen in years. After warm greetings and comments
about the parliament vote were exchanged, he predicted that the Serbs would not
give up Croatia easily nor would they allow the Croats their self-determination
without a great deal of blood being shed. How right he proved to be!
When the
Croatian parliament voted to secede from the Yugoslav federation, Slovenia's
parliament also voted the same way. The federal government's (read Serbian)
response to Slovenia secession was a tacit "good riddance;" but the
Croatian resolution was greeted in Serbia with consternation, and immediately
labeled "nationalistic." The federal government's response,
retrospectively, portended the Serbs' true feelings, as exemplified by what
transpired in the facts of the subsequent months.
Although I
hadn't been to Croatia since the Yugoslav army unilaterally initiated their
aggressive acts, I was nonetheless acutely aware of what was happening there.
When I visited Croatia in February, 1991, there had been rare, isolated
incidents of aggression. But within a few days after I left, incidents
instigated by the Serb rebels steadily increased, and these rebels became more
and more brazen when they were abetted by the Yugoslav army. The aggression
reached its crescendo after the army started attacking Croatian cities. Between
February and the time I received Mackley's phone call
in mid-December, the city of Vukovar had fallen to
the Serbs and Dubrovnik besieged for months. Vukovar’s
dead lay buried under heaps of rubble.
I couldn't
reconcile the vast discrepancy between what I knew and what I was watching on
CNN and reading in the newspapers. The large number of atrocities being
committed by the Yugoslav army and Chetniks, the
Serbs' paramilitary force, on civilian Croats were ill-reported. And if they
were reported at all, the articles and broadcasts were loaded with half truths.
Prior to the
fall of communism in former Yugoslavia, my life style could have been best
described as typical for a middle American. My
existence centered on my family and I was happy practicing medicine in my
specialty of dermatology. Although concerned about America's growing drug
problem, illiteracy, and falling educational standards, I could not have, by
any stretch of imagination, been considered an activist. To the contrary, I was
apolitical and content with the superficiality of the news: the visual and
sound bytes from television, the Los Angeles Times,
the local "fish wrapper" San Pedro News Pilot, and sporadically US
News and World Report. Naively I believed in the sacred responsibility of the
media that could be trusted to deliver the truth.
The hostage
crises in Iran during President Jimmy Carter's and Secretary of State Cyrus
Vance's watch, however, unequivocally changed the direction of my life. Since
the media offered more confusion than explanation about what Shi'ites, Sunnis, or whatever any other sects they cited
were all about, I took a course at UCLA to get a better understanding. Before I
knew it, I had the tiger by the tail and couldn't let go. I was so intrigued I
decided to pursue the subject further. While maintaining a full time practice
and caring for my patients, I took the required classes at UCLA, as well as all
the available courses in Balkan history, and ended up getting a masters degree
in Islamic art history.
Since the
1960s I had been a keen student of Yugoslav affairs, but once the various
republics started to make overtures toward self-determination in the late
1980s, my readings increased markedly. Aside from having a number of close
friends in Croatia who kept me informed, I received faxes of a newsletter from
Croatia's Ministry of Health, Facts About Croatia.
Although issued by a government agency, this newsletter gave the most objective
information about the subject. The information I had at my disposal, derived
from a variety of sources, enhanced by my background in history, kept me
abreast about the events occurring in Croatia.
When the
situation in former Yugoslavia reached the crises stage, I knew Croatia would
be in dire straits, by every standard of measurement. Croatia, aside from being
ill-equipped for a war, was economically devastated; Serbia had confiscated
Yugoslavia's assets, including all its foreign monetary reserves. As the
Yugoslav army regiments pulled out of Croatian cites
and towns, they took with them everything, even the toilets out of the
barracks, or whatever wasn't nailed down. Medically speaking, too, Croatia was
a disaster in the making. When the first Yugoslav shells fired in 1991, I
immediately began soliciting friends and medical colleagues for contributions
to help implement humanitarian aid. The Croatian ministry of health sent
updated lists of desperately needed medical supplies that I undertook to send
to the devastated areas.
From September
to December, 1991, a number of reports had claimed that the Serbs were using
poison gas in some of their air attacks on civilian targets. Even Croatia's
capital, Zagreb, was not exempt from air attacks. Following ten days of air
raid alerts, Yugoslav MIGs fired missiles into the very heart of the city. They
hit the parliament and presidential buildings on September 7, 1991. Croatia's president Franjo Tudjman; the
Yugoslav federation president, Stipe Mesic; and Yugoslavia's Prime Minister Ante Markovic, escaped injury. It seems more than
coincidental that the attack came at a time when the highest ranking Croatian
leaders in the Yugoslav government were attending a summit conference with
Croatia's president. The air attack may have been the Serbs' way of sending a
message to the Croatian parliament, for that very same morning the parliament's
agenda was to vote for full independence, which didn’t take effect until 4
months later.
Between the
air attacks and the certain knowledge that the Serb forces were committing
atrocities in the areas they had conquered, the rumor mills among the
population were working overtime. The reported gas attacks had tremendous
psychological ramifications on the Croatian citizenry. Each time a plane flew
overhead (Croatia had no planes) it would elicit a degree of panic.
It enraged me
that, though all Serb aggressive actions during the conflict in Croatia had so
far been directed only at civilians, the Western media kept making it sound as
though the Yugoslav Army (JNA) and the Serb paramilitary forces were facing a
hostile and formidable Croatian army.
I knew very
well that Croatia, for the first two years of the conflict, had neither a
national army nor any organization that could, in the wildest imagination, be
considered an "army." The Croatian defenders were auxiliary policemen
or local civilians trying to protect their families. They were, in the
strictest sense, analogous to the Minutemen who fought the British in the
American Revolution. And like them, the largest weapons at
their disposal were
hunting rifles.
The big league
media, with its long and cozy relation to Belgrade, and seemed to relentlessly
justify the JNA's actions as an effort to protect the Serb minority in Croatia.
But, in carrying out this so called "defensive policy," one of the
JNA's first actions was to occupy Slavonia, an eastern province in Croatia, and
to expel most of the Croatians and Hungarians who made up the majority
population in the villages there. Once this was accomplished, the Yugoslav army
proceeded to attack the large towns: Osijek (70 % Croat, 15% Serb), Vinkovci (80% Croat, 11% Serb), and Vukovar
(47% Croat, 32% Serb). The alleged "defenders" of the Serbs were, in
fact, attacking Croatian towns and villages.
The
relationship between the JNA and the Croatian government was difficult to
understand. Nearly every town in Croatia still retained a military presence.
During the very time the JNA were laying siege to Slavonian
Croatian towns and cities, the JNA bases in non-combat zones in Croatia, not
only were never attacked, but the Croatian government continued to supply the
day-to-day needs to those JNA garrisons. The government was fueling the very
tanks that were destroying Croatian cities and towns less than 100 kilometers
from Zagreb. They allowed access to its ports and free movement of war material
to the Yugoslav Army while it was engaged in besieging Croatian cities. The
situation seemed to me baffling, to put it mildly.
As I prepared
to leave, I packed literature about poison gas to read on the plane to Graz. I
was landing in Austria, by way of Frankfurt. Commercial airlines quit flying
into Zagreb because the Yugoslav Air Force controlled the air space. But
reading proved to be difficult since I was haunted by the possibility of what Mackley described by phone had not been an exaggeration.
Finally I gave up and settled back in my seat to reflect on the difference
between reading about a war and actually entering a war zone. I had served in
the U.S. Navy and with the Marine Corps as a Corpsman during the Korean War,
but that experience was from a different time and place, from an altogether
different world. Now I was heading into a situation where there were no clear
battle lines and all civilians were potentially in harm's way. I didn’t know at
time that my experiences treating casualties during the Korean war and covering
the emergency room at Cook County Hospital, euphemistically called the “zoo,”
couldn’t have come close to prepare me for Vocin.
Mackley really opened my eyes to the true situation in Croatia. I had met him
several months earlier after he gave a talk to a civic group in Los Angeles on
the political situation in former Yugoslavia. His knowledge was first hand
because he had recently returned from Croatia after spending a great deal of time
there--from observing the front lines to the dealing with the highest echelons
in the government. Since that time we had many extensive discussions centering
on Yugoslavia and about the ongoing atrocities committed by the Serb forces.
Although what Mackley had told me about Vocin was shocking, it was not surprising. In November,
after Croatian civilians destroyed a Yugoslav tank close to the village of Skrabrnje, Serb forces retaliated by massacring 55
villagers. Autopsy reports had revealed that most of them had been executed by
a bullet to the head at close range--Nazi style--though some of the victims had
perished under the treads of Yugoslav tanks. Identification of the crushed
remains had been almost impossible. Yet a few were identified; I recall one witness
telling me he had identified his father because one quarter of the face, with
one eye still in the orbit, and the surrounding skin, was relatively intact.
Despite the media received more than adequate substantiation about other
Croatian slaughters, they were mostly ignored. Although what happened at Skrabrnje wasn’t unique, it was the very first massacre
that appeared in the American press.
Initially, in
early November, the Foreign Press Bureau had invited me to Croatia to lend my
expertise as a physician in investigating alleged Serbian poison gas attacks on
civilian targets and evaluating the way health care was being delivered in the
devastated areas. Because of my commitments to my practice and business in
California, it took me a month to make preparations to leave.
The
coincidental massacre in the Croatian village of Vocin
now took precedence over my primary mission. Although the alleged gas attacks
were the main topic of discussion in Croatia, the issue was clouded with
controversy since government sources were reluctant to be interviewed and few
could get a handle on the situation. The Foreign Press Bureau had contacted me
to tap my experience in A.B.C. Warfare (atomic, biological, and chemical)
learned in the American military; and because of my expertise as a
dermatologist who understood the skin manifestations of disease (the most
common sequelae of gas attacks are skin lesions).
Aside from
being knowledgeable about the clinical effects of chemicals and/or gas, I knew
many physicians in Croatia on a personal basis and spoke Croatian. With my
access to the highest levels in the medical field, including the Chief of
Medical Services of the Croatian Armed Forces and the Health Ministry, the
Foreign Press Bureau felt I was ideally suited to obtain accurate medical
information. Besides questioning my personal contacts, during my three weeks of
investigation I interviewed physicians practicing in a number of hospitals,
especially those at the front lines. As the primary treating physicians, they,
more than anyone else, eventually provided me with all the information I
needed. None were able to cite that they have seen or treated one clinical case
of poison gas exposure.
From what I gathered and concluded from my
in-depth investigation, what triggered off the poison gas scare, apparently,
was that the Serbs, whether purposely or accidentally, were sporadically
dropping from their planes almost microscopic sized, spider web quality
filaments. These filaments were comprised of inorganic substances that
"stuck to the skin." Evidently, contact with this material had no
clinical significance. According to military experts these objects had
something to do with anti-radar or anti-detection devices.
My
investigation established that such attacks were unsubstantiated and probably a
manifestation of mass hysteria--a common phenomena
under the conditions the Croatians had been subjected to.
Although I'd
been to Croatia less than a year earlier, nothing could have prepared me for
the excess of unbridled nationalistic symbolism I witnessed when I arrived in
Zagreb on my mission in December 1991. In contrast to the former Yugoslavia
era, there was now an outpouring of Croatian symbolism everywhere:
Croatian flags
fluttered from every window; Croatian songs poured from boom boxes every few
meters; and busts of the Croatian president, Franjo
Tudjman, were being sold like cherished icons on every corner.
What I found
most surprising was that all hindrances to free speech had vanished. The
plethora of political parties in Croatia is testimony to this new found
freedom, belying the media's contention that Croatia is a dictatorial state.
The Western
media misinterpreted Croatia’s unbridled nationalism and lambasted it. Without
foundation, they equated the rebirth of Croatian nationalistic spirit to the
fascist government of World War II.
To be sure,
what was now going on seemed like an orgy of nationalism; but, after decades of
repression under the artificially constructed Yugoslavia and its Communistic
dictatorship, the new political climate was simply the spontaneous explosion of
a forty- years-in- the-making, pent up identity crisis.
Thoughts of
what had taken place in the previous months ran through my mind. Whenever
legitimate Croatian government officials confirmed the minority Serb rebel
aggressive act, the Yugoslav Army always intervened on the rebels' behalf. With
each incident, the distinction between the Army and the rebels blurred.
When the
Slovenes and the Croats seceded in June 25, 1991, the Yugoslav army unleashed
their juggernaut attacks. Since then they took 30% of Croatian territory, most
of which has been only recently regained by the 1995 Croat offensive. The
reason the Serbs didn't take more land was the steadfast resistance of the
Croats who defended their homes with hunting rifles.
At the time of
my December 1991 mission, the State Department had placed a travel advisory
against travel to Yugoslavia. While planning my trip I had anticipated that I
would have to be smuggled across the border close to Graz, Austria, because the
borders were still controlled by Yugoslav forces. However, by the time I
arrived the borders of Slovenia and Croatia were no longer in the hands of
Yugoslavia. Since all flights to Zagreb were canceled because of the potential
of being shot down by Yugoslav MIGs, the trip had to be made by bus from Graz.
Crossing the borders into Slovenia and then into Croatia was, for me, a red
letter day. Getting visas stamped in my passport from the new authorities was
the first evidence of the sovereignty of these new states. For the first time
in centuries, Slovenia and Croatia had their own borders, symbolizing that they
were in control of their own destiny.
In contrast to
my earlier visit in February of that same year, the mood on the streets was
somber and subdued. A curfew and a blackout were in effect. The citizens of
Zagreb were still being subjected to air alerts.
The front
lines were within streetcar distance away, and it was not uncommon to hear an
occasional explosion.
Serbian sniper
attacks from Zagreb's apartment windows, although rare enough, kept everyone on
edge.
Branko Zmajevic, a Croatian Supreme Court Judge and a close friend
of mine, was almost hit by a sniper a few yards from his home. The bullet flew
by within inches of his head. At street level, most of the windows of the
buildings had sandbags in place.
This was the
atmosphere in Zagreb when I arrived to investigate what happened at Vocin. The ground floor of The Hotel Intercontinental,
where I was housed, and which served as headquarters for the Foreign Press
Bureau, looked like a bunker because its windows were boarded up and lined with
sandbags. The hotel's lobby, a favorite watering hole for Western media folk,
teemed with refugees from Vukovar, the city which had
been reduced to rubble by the Serbs after a siege as devastating as that of
Stalingrad in World War II.
As these
events were taking place in Croatia the international media, aside from
misinterpreting the causes of the conflict, painted an entirely different
picture. Filing their stories, they all but ignored Croatian sources, which, in
any case, were inadequate to the task of setting the record straight. A group
of concerned Croatian Americans established the Foreign Press Bureau to help
provide objective news analysis. Originally its function was to act as
translators for the growing presence of the international media in Croatia, but
in a short period of time, the reporters came to rely upon the Bureau for hard
and fast information and access to inside sources which heretofore had been
closed to them.
When I first
entered the Bureau’s office, everything appeared to be in chaos. I soon learned
that the apparent chaos was, in fact, orderly; and I came to respect the
dedicated young men and women volunteers who ran the Bureau. Even before I had
a chance to unpack and freshen up, Mackley had me
roll up my sleeves to begin evaluating and verifying 43 pathology reports that
were available of the 58 Vocin victims. Although I
felt a sense of mission as I approached the work at hand, I learned from
reading a number of related documents that many other massacres had occurred in
Croatia, which had gone unreported by the press. Vocin
was only the latest in a series of atrocities committed by the Serb forces in
widely separated geographic locations in Croatia, which have now been well
documented by teams of the European Community (EC) and of the Helsinki Watch.
A January 21, 1992, open letter from Helsinki
Watch addressed to President of the Republic of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic and
Acting Minister of Defense and Chief of Staff of the Yugoslav People's Army
General Blagoie Adzic,
focused on rampant Serbian human rights violations and accused the Yugoslav
Army and Federal government of being directly responsible for atrocities.
Despite the scathing indictment the media were loath to report it.
When Mackley asked me to investigate the medical aspects of the
slaughter he told me especially to look for chicanery in the pathology reports.
In other slaughters committed by the Serbs, some of the investigating
pathologists not only downplayed the Serbs’ inhuman acts in their reports, they
tried to cover them up. In one example of many, following atrocities in Sisak, an ethnic Montenegrin pathologist’s protocol made no
mention that a victim’s throat was cut ear to ear. Rather, his report stated
that the victim had succumbed to a ricocheted projectile. Apparently the pathologist
had forgotten Mackley was present during the autopsy
and Mackley placed his finger into the lumen of the
severed carotid arteries and jugular veins after the pathologist pointed them
out to him.
Since there
were a number of pathologists who were ethnic Serbs and Montenegrins that
performed some of the autopsies on the Vocin victims,
Mackley’s index of suspicion was high. In the Vocin massacre, although there were a number of reports
about genital mutilation--including one by an American journalist who saw the
bodies in situ--I found no mention of those findings in the reports. The
photographers either selectively omitted taking photos and/or the pathologists
ignored the mutilations. Was it a cover-up? At this stage, only their
consciences know the truth.
For some
strange reason Mackley’s attempts to get the reports
and photos from the forensic department met a stonewall.
Mackley suspected this lack of cooperation was due to
ethnic Serbian or Montenegrins being in the department’s leadership positions.
His suspicion prompted Mackley to tell Branko Salaj, Ministry of
Information, that he would use force to obtain the records. After Salaj notified the lab that a crazy American would be
coming with intent to do violence they suddenly cooperated.
With this
information in mind I proceeded to organize the investigation systematically,
beginning by correlating the pathology reports I'd requested with the
photographs (many of which are reproduced in this book) taken prior to the
autopsies. I personally interviewed some of the eye witnesses. Bill Bass, a
judge of the Texas Court of Appeals, who happened to be among the first to
arrive on the scene, summarized the situation I witnessed only as a post-mortem
analyst: "A mindless orgy of violence. There is no excuse on earth to
justify this kind of murder and devastation."
From the time Mackley called me on the phone in Los Angeles, between the
flight to Europe and transfer to Zagreb, and as I was immediately put to work
on the Vocin pathology reports, I had been up for 44
hours. Despite the fatigue, sleep did not come readily that first night in
Zagreb. It was an eerie feeling to hear sporadic explosions and machine gun
fire in the background. Although they were supposedly a great distance away, I
received little comfort from the knowledge that my room was not in the line of
fire from potential Serb artillery. What was even more eerier
was the lack of city noises, of lights, and of any vehicular traffic
whatsoever. It was a far cry from the Zagreb that I knew so well. The boarded
up windows and sand bags that surrounded the hotel's ground floor provided no
security for me on the tenth floor where I had a panoramic view. What disturbed
my rest even more were the images of the pathology photos from Vocin that I had examined shortly before. I couldn't help
imagining what the last hours and minutes had been like for the victims, and
how they were tortured before they were murdered.
At first I
could not understand why, despite the ample documentation, the press had either
disingenuously chosen to avoid reporting about Croat victims or had chosen,
with motives that seemed increasingly suspicious to me, to report them with
skepticism. Yet when rumors that Croats may have committed war crimes
circulated, the world press on the scene immediately published the stories that
were verified by the JNA. And, almost invariably, later investigation would
reveal that the stories describing Serb victims were fabrications.
At times the
reporting has seemed almost intentionally perverse. In a number of instances,
when the media reported finding Serbian victims of an atrocity, subsequent
investigations revealed the victims were, in fact, Croatians. In one example of
the many I had first hand knowledge of; the British
media reported under banner headlines that the Croats slaughtered a large
number of Serbs in Daruvar in October 1991. But
European Community (EC) monitors, who were called in to investigate the alleged
slaughter a month later, concluded that the victims had been Croats. United
Nation Forces (usually British) often reported finding Serb victims who had
been mutilated by either Croats or Muslims. Time and again, investigators were
unable to provide verification.
In spite of
glaring evidence to the contrary, there has never been a retraction to this
day. These stories were used by Belgrade to inflame the Serbs against the
Croats. The pattern continues.
After the
Croats retook their territory in Western Slavonia in May 1995, the U.N. and in
particular the British delegation, immediately attributed "massive and
inhuman" human rights violations by the Croatian forces upon the fleeing
Serbs. These charges were later dispelled by independent investigating
organizations.
The leading
human rights watchdog, the Helsinki Watch, criticized the U.N. for its false
report and concluded that the U.N. misused the issue as a pressure mechanism
against the Croatian government.
Reuters
committed one of the most perverse examples of media abuse in November 1991,
when they reported that one of their journalists had witnessed the discovery of
the bodies of 41 Serbian children butchered by Croatian guardsmen. The
children, between the ages of five and seven, were found in a cellar of a
school in Borovo Naselje, a
Croatian village near Vukovar. The bodies were so
badly mutilated that the, "Serbian soldiers were weeping when the children
were brought from the cellar." The Reuters journalist related that he saw
the body of a young man sprawled at the top of the cellar steps with the severed
head of a young woman cradled in his arms. At the foot of the steps lay a
woman's corpse, while next to it was a dead seven year old child.
Although what
Reuters reported was horrific, it was, in actuality, a hoax. The journalist
admitted it was a fabrication. Yet other newspapers picked up the story and
published it without question, helping to perpetuate the notion that "all
sides were guilty of atrocities." The story ran on Serbian television, and
Reuters as its source gave it great credibility throughout the world. The Serbs
who saw it believed it, and so did the rest of the Western media. CNN, which
had ignored numerous verifiable massacres of Croatians, choose to believe the
Reuters fabrication to a degree that they ran the story every hour. Reuters’
story played a major role in inciting acts of revenge against Croatians by the
Yugoslav military.
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Dra. Adriana Smajic – Abogada y
Traductora pública de idioma croata – Attorney at Law – Odvjetnica – Abogado croata
– Traductor croata
www.adrianasmajic.blogspot.com adriana.smajic@gmail.com
Joza Vrljicak
– Master in Economics
(Concordia U, Montreal)
(+54-11) 4811-8706 (+54-911) 6564-9585 (+54-911) 5112-0000