Lets talk about the truth.

Please invite me to speak to your students about my war experiences, free speech, British libel laws, etc. I am sure I can do it better than you. I am not being malicious, I mean it as a friend. I have lived it and learned lessons from it.

I survived one of those camps called Omarska, mainly because of the story reported. Now then, how can anyone in their right mind put an issue of a particular ‘image’ before the lives of the very people behind that ‘image’? Don’t my fellow humans beings want to know who those people were, and why they were in there, who brought them in there, and what happened in there? Aren’t those lives more worthy than the ‘image’ itself, and what it may or may not ‘represent’. Isn’t that the real issue? We are talking about human beings, family people, innocent civilians. There were no court trials in Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje. There were brutal, cold blooded, summary executions. And I have known most of those executioners personally for most of my life. We once shared school desks. Why don’t people want to know about that? Where does the issue of freedom of speech fits in here? We are talking about murder. We are condoning murder. What’s wrong with us?

By (ab)using the smokescreen of the freedom of speech all those denialists turn my guts upside down every single time. Why? Because I am just human. When will they realise that their callousness easily matches the one displayed by my torturers. They dehumanise me all over again.

Kemal

The distorted and revisionist version of the facts of what took place have to be continually challenged. There is a whitewash under way, led by dishonest intellectuals.

I have not had had time to follow up on the Cockburn citation of Knightley, but if he simply fabricated it no one should be surprised. He has been one of the most virulent deniers of Bosnian Serb nationalist war crimes in Kosova and Bosnia, and actively promoted a variety of deniers to claim that the Bosnians bombed themselves, etc. and ad nauseam.

To throw doubt on the reports of Serb atrocities during the 1999 war over Kosova, Cockburn smugly repeated Karadzic’s canard that “the Bosnian Muslims”—a formulation misrepresenting the multiethnic Bosnian government in the same way that cynical Western diplomats and UN bureaucrats do—“kept Western sympathies aflame with contrived incidents, culminating—almost certainly—in the lobbing of that shell into that marketplace” in Sarajevo in 1994 (“The Progressive’s War,” The Nation, May 10, 1999). In a subsequent column, he reiterated his claim that the 1995 market massacre, and two other similar shelling massacres—and presumably many more—were contrived, and expressed surprise that fellow Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, who had challenged him, would “affect such outrage at the notion that the Bosnians would have engineered these lethal provocations.” After all, the Bosnians “wouldn’t be the first to decide that the higher good—in this case, NATO intervention—justified the sacrifice of some of their own. The fate of the Lusitania and Pearl Harbor testify to that.” Cockburn cites a previous Nation article by former New York Times reporter and well-known Serb nationalist apologist David Binder (“Bosnia’s Bombers,” The Nation, October 2, 1995). Though Binder’s seriously misleading article only treated the second and third shelling incidents, Cockburn continued to insist that there is “no shortage of serious sources” that suggest the first also was also a Bosnian government job (“Those Marketplace Bombings,” The Nation, June 21, 1999).

Of course, Cockburn was only following a family tradition of willingness to bend the truth for the cause. His father, Claude Cockburn, who was a correspondent for the English weekly The Week and the Communist Party Daily Worker during the Spanish Civil War, wrote as an open supporter of the Spanish Republic and particularly the party, and was not averse to fabricating stories for the cause, for example reporting on a completely fictitious battle to present the Republic in a positive light. He also slandered as fascist fifth-columnists the anarchists and others (including the independent Marxist party with which Orwell had fought as a volunteer) who resisted the Stalinist-engineered counterrevolution against the workers collectives in Barcelona in May 1937, backing up his calumny by citing the fabricated confessions from Stalin’s infamous Moscow Trials—thereby helping to ensure that those honest militants who stood in the way of Stalinist power in Spain would suffer the same fate as the people executed in the Soviet Union.

In an argument with another correspondent over whether readers had a right to know the truth about the war, even if it looked bad for the side they supported, the elder Cockburn retorted, “Who gave [them] such a right?” And here another level of irony: according to Phillip Knightley’s, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), “Cockburn remained unrepentant,” arguing later, “There seem to be two pieces to this problem … The extent to which I myself totally believed what I said, and the extent to which I was, more or less consciously, trying to get other people to believe it. But I don’t think there is really such a clear line of division” (192-97). (See Kevin Keating, “Like Father, Like Son?,” Alternative Press Review, Spring/Summer 1999.) For Spain, see Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and his later essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War”; for the 1937 “May Days,” see Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution (Freedom Press, 1972).

The fascists on the right and the commissars on the left lied about Spain. In many ways familiar to us all, the catastrophe in Yugoslavia and particularly in Bosnia was similar to the Spanish revolution and civil war, with many terrible consequences, both for world politics, and for the fundamental questions of justice and truth.

For Cockburn junior, who has written at times admirably about other issues, there is apparently no such clear line between truth and propaganda either—only a willingness to lie. This makes everything he writes suspect. In this case, however, the result is much worse, because he is lying not to defend the victims but to exonerate the executioners.

In his statement Knightley drew attention to his credentials as an expert on the way wars have been reported, photographed and filmed. If Knightley considered that the image had had sufficient impact to change the course of the war, why was it so long after the rest of the international public that he first came across the picture of Fikret Alic?

As far as I know you’re the first person who’s raised that question. He doesn’t seem to offer any explanation.

Chomsky presents himself to RTS Online as an authority on the “fraudulent photograph”. He justifies himself with vague references to Knightley. He has a deep structure of suspicion that generates an infinitie

As a side note, Living Marxism was the journal of the British Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). It was later rebranded as LM Magazine. In practice, Communism is a form of brutal dictatorship (variant of totalitarianism). What kind of reputation/credibility do people who advocate this type of ideology have?

Of course, Knightley never examined a role of Serbian media in the Yugoslav wars. For that purpose, I highly recommend the expert report of Professor Renaud De la Brosse, Senior Lecturer at the University of Reims, France, titled: “Political Propaganda and the Plan to Create ‘A State For All Serbs:’ Consequences of using media for ultra-nationalist ends.”

Noam Chomsky’s offensive allegation that this torture camp was somehow a “refugee camp” where “people could leave if they wanted” is far from any reality. Chomsky never spent a day at the Trnopolje concentration camp, how would he know?

According to the testimony of Idriz Merdzanic, the Trnopolje camp was not a centre for people driven from their homes, but an internment camp where people were tortured, raped and murdered. Merdzanic was the doctor interned in Trnopolje who had risked his life to photograph badly beaten inmates.

Dr. Merdzanic testified that upon arrival to the camp, men would be separated from the women, with most of the men being held in the school building, while the women and children were put in the community center. People slept on the floor; camp authorities provided no food. Guards were posted around the Trnopolje camp, and it was surrounded by a fence. There were machine guns in various locations, and they were pointed towards the camp. Serb soldiers would select women and girls they like and then rape them.

Doesn’t look like a “refugee camp” after all, does it?

Daniel Toljaga
The Congress of North American Bosniaks
Board of Directors (www.bosniak.org)

Interesting post, though.

UN Document S/1994/674/Add.2 (Vol. I) of 28 December 1994, “FINAL REPORT OF THE UNITED NATIONS COMMISSIONS OF EXPERTS ESTABLISHED PURSUANT TO SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 780 (1992) – ANNEX V THE PRIJEDOR REPORT”can be consulted at http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/V.htm

Throughout the report on Prijedor reference is made to the concentration camps of Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje.

As far as the justification for describing them as “death camps” is concerned, PART ONE – VI CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEPORTATIONS states at para. 22:

“22. As the “informative talks” or interrogations basically took place in the Omarska and Keraterm camps, it can be concluded that more than 6,000 adult males were taken to these concentration camps in the short period they existed (from the end of May to the beginning of August 1992). Since only 1,503 were moved on to Manjaça camp according to Mr. Drljaça, a limited number transferred to the Trnopolje camp, and almost none released, it may be assumed that the death toll was extremely high, even by Serbian accounts. The concentration camp premises were sometimes so packed with people that no more inmates could be crammed in. On at least one occasion, this allegedly resulted in an entire bus-load of newly captured people being arbitrarily executed en masse. Some 37 women were detained in Omarska, whilst no women were kept over time in Keraterm.”

Shortly after, at para. 27, under VII THE STRATEGY OF DESTRUCTION there’s an explanation of the purpose of the concentration camps – the reason why the camps were used to “concentrate” key members of the Muslim and Croat communities.

“27. Despite the absence of a real non-Serbian threat, the main objective of the concentration camps, especially Omarska but also Keraterm, seems to have been to eliminate the non-Serbian leadership. Political leaders, officials from the courts and administration, academics and other intellectuals, religious leaders, key business people and artists – the backbone of the Muslim and Croatian communities – were removed, apparently with the intention that the removal be permanent. Similarly, law-enforcement and military personnel were targeted for destruction. These people also constituted a significant element of the non-Serbian group in that its depletion rendered the group at large defenceless against abuses of any kind. Other important traces of Muslim and Croatian culture and religion – mosques and Catholic churches included – were destroyed.”

The .pdf version can be downloaded from
http://www.law.depaul.edu/centers_Institutes/ihrli/downloads/V_a.pdf

More information about Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje can be found in PART TWO – VIII. THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS (paras. 337-505).

This was published in 1994.