CANADIAN AMBASSADOR AND CANADIAN KOSOVO COMMANDER EXPLODE MYTHS OF YUGOSLAV WAR

1. AN EYEWITNESS TO THE BREAK UP OF YUGOSLAVIA
James Bissett, Former Canadian Ambassador to Belgrade

A Speech to 5,000 Canadian Serbs on the anniversary of the historic battle of Kosovo. Niagara Falls, 29th June 2003

Honored guests ladies and gentlemen: I want at the outset to thank Bora Dragasevich for inviting me to speak to you this afternoon. It is a privilege and a sincere honor for me to be with you and to share your Vidovdan celebrations. I recall that it was thirteen summers ago that I set off to Belgrade to take up my post as the Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was then a strong and united country- more prosperous than most of the Eastern Bloc countries. Yet there were emerging signs of trouble. Urged on by the former Central Powers (Germany, Austria and Hungary) Slovenia and Croatia were already planning to separate from the Yugoslav Federation.

I became an eyewitness to the subsequent violence and break up of the country. I also was a witness to the "historical amnesia" suffered by the political leaders of France, Britain, the United States and my own country, Canada. These countries were Serbia's old traditional allies in two world wars yet they shamefully stood by and joined in the betrayal of Yugoslavia.

The break up of Yugoslavia was a disaster for the Serbian people. Thousands killed and many more thousands forced to flee their ancestral homelands. Serbs have been humiliated and many have lost their self-respect. Yet the greatest tragedy of all is that the Serbs have been blamed for everything that has happened since the breakup. They have been blamed for the breakup itself. They have been blamed for starting the violence. They have been blamed for the ethnic cleansing that occurred. They have been blamed for the massacres. They have been blamed for genocide. Finally they have been blamed for the NATO bombing of their own country!

These are lies! Lies! Lies! Hitler's propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels said if you tell a monstrous lie people will believe you because they cannot imagine anyone making up such an outrageous falsehood. Then if evidence is shown to contradict the lie, you dismiss it as irrelevant or misguided. Finally when the truth is disclosed it is too late. Nobody cares or wants to know.

So it has been with the dreadful lies told about the Serbs. President Clinton and Tony Blair talked about genocide taking place in Kosovo. The US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, said there were over a hundred thousand young Albanian men missing in Kosovo. Robin Cook the British Foreign Minister and Clare Short his cabinet colleague both made outrageous charges against the Serbs about non-existent rape camps. Later it was reported by the UNHCR and even the anti-Serb, (George Soros financed) Human Rights Watch, that these stories had no foundation. Can you believe that these two hypocritical British Cabinet Ministers actually resigned over the war against Iraq!

However, there is a striking difference between Kosovo and Iraq. Despite all of Milosevic's faults he didn't compare with Saddam Hussein. Milosevic, after all, obeyed all of the UN Resolutions - including allowing troops from the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) into Kosovo. He was no threat to his neighbors. He did not aspire to, nor did he possess weapons of mass destruction.

Although not a democrat he was not a psychopathic killer like Saddam (nor a religious bigot like Croatia's Tudjman or Bosnia's Izetbegovic - ed) nor was Serbia under his regime a totalitarian state, as was Iraq (nor had he invaded another country like Saddam had attacked Kuwait and Iran - ed). In reality he was trying to suppress an armed rebellion in his own territory - a rebellion led by a Muslim terrorist organization - and for this the NATO countries bombed his country.

I believe now that it is generally accepted by most of the informed public in the West [with the exception of the main stream media in Canada Britain and the United States] that the bombing of Yugoslavia was deliberately contrived. It served as a means of providing NATO with a reason for existence and President Clinton with a distraction from his sexual embarrassments. The truth is gradually emerging from a variety of reliable sources.

One of the most revealing has been the admission by the former British Defense Minister, Lord Gilbert, who told the British House of Commons in July 2000 that the terms that NATO sought to force upon Milosevic at Rambouillet were deliberately designed to provoke war.

(Note the same strategy when Austria demanded terms from Serbia in 1914 as an alternative to war but then informed its ambassador in Belgrade that he was on no account to accept the Serb response - whatever it was! - ed)

So the truth is slowly coming out. Regretfully it is too late in itself to restore to many Serbs their sense of pride and self-respect. This is left to the Serbs as a people. However, knowing them as I do - and mindful of their historic courage and heroism - I am confident you will overcome this historic setback as you have done before. The main thing is to ensure that your young people remain proud of their heritage and do not accept the simplistic and biased accounts of the North American media's account of the Yugoslav breakup. I want to end my speech today on a positive note.

There are, believe it or not, some encouraging signs of reconciliation and hope in the former Yugoslavia. A recent agreement signed in Lake Ohrid by representatives of five Balkan countries: Serbia/Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania will translate, if all goes well, into a free trade agreement to become effective in 2007. Moreover, Croatia and Serbia/Montenegro have agreed to declare both countries "visa free" so that citizens of each country can travel back and forth without visas. There is even some hope that under EU pressure (ironic and cynical given the EU roll in the destruction of what they now seek to sew together again! - ed) property rights might be restored to those who have been displaced by the wars. The circle will become closed - and once again in a different form - the former Yugoslavia will emerge.

I will conclude on this upbeat note but not before adding a personal warning. The history of Serbia has recorded heroic victories and terrible defeats. The victories have come when Serbs have relied on their own resources and inner strengths. The defeats have come when their allies have betrayed them or let them down. There is a lesson here that you must not forget. Do not put all of your trust or faith in others, especially in multilateral organizations or in politicians. And remember history does sometimes repeat itself as the Serbs know only too well. Now not only Serbs have seen all too well that the horrors that took place in the spring and summer of 1941 in Croatia and Bosnia have repeated themselves in the 1990's.

PS I am happy that finally Naser Oric the Muslim commander at Srebrinica has been indicted by the Hague Tribunal. Oric was responsible for the killing of many elderly Serbs living in villages around Srebrinica. He actually video taped some of the victims who had been beheaded and the showed the video to a number of journalists...one of whom was from the Toronto Star newspaper but I have not been able to find out the reporters name. James Bissett in letter to Freenations 27th September 2004

September 14, 2004

The third witness to testify in what is being called "Slobodan Milosevic's defense" took the stand at the Hague Tribunal on Tuesday.

The witness, Roland Keith was the commander of the Kosovo Polje field office in the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM). Mr. Keith served for 32 years in the Canadian armed forces where he obtained the rank of Captain. Keith is a veteran of UN observation missions. Before coming to Kosovo, he served as a UN military observer and a UN troop commander in the Middle East.

Keith arrived in Kosovo in the first week of February 1999, and he remained in Kosovo all the way up until the KVM was withdrawn on March 20, 1999, four days ahead of the NATO bombing.

In his testimony, Keith described the training program that the OSCE monitors underwent. According to Keith, the training was inadequate and left the observers unprepared to competently carryout their mission. According to Keith most of the observers had little or no military background and couldn't understand, or properly report what they were witnessing. Keith said that the structure of the OSCE observation mission was flawed. He said that the observers were road bound, and unable to see what was going on outside of the beaten path.

Keith described the KLA as a guerilla terrorist organization, and said that the KVM's confinement to the roads kept them from being able to effectively monitor the KLA's activities.

In direct contradiction of almost all of the prosecution's Kosovo-Albanian witnesses, Keith said that the KLA had a detachment or what he called a "home guard" in every village. He said that the KLA even manned check-points at the entrances to the villages, which makes it all the more amazing that so many the prosecution's Kosovo-Albanian witnesses never saw the KLA.

Keith said that he never saw the MUP or the Yugoslav Army (VJ) mistreat anybody, and that the MUP and VJ forces cooperated with him fully.

Keith said that the KLA was a different story. He said that the KLA refused to cooperate with the KVM on many occasions. He also said that the KLA violated the cease fire agreement regularly. Keith said that the MUP and VJ abided by the cease-fire, and that the VJ mainly stayed in its barracks. According to Keith's testimony, the format followed in Kosovo was for the KLA to initiate an attack and for the authorities to retaliate.

When Keith first arrived in Kosovo he was sent to the village of Glogovac, where he witnessed a KLA sniper attack on the MUP (MUP means Ministarstvo Unutrasnjih Poslova, Ministry of the Interior including the police and other security).

One week later he was sent to Kosovo Polje where he established the KVM's field office.
The village of Grabovac was in his area of responsibility and according to Keith, a platoon of KLA terrorists was occupying a wooded area in the environs of that village. He said that those KLA members were armed with rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, machine guns, and various other weapons. He said that this KLA platoon would engage in sniper attacks against workers at a mine that operated in the vicinity of the village.

Keith spoke of another instance of KLA violence when the KLA ambushed a MUP patrol on the Pec-Pristina highway. According to Keith one Serb police officer was killed and another was gravely wounded in the attack.

Keith said that in this instance the VJ came to assist the police, and that a tank was used. But according to Keith the VJ showed restraint and only used machine-guns and not the main armaments of the tank to deal with the KLA attackers.

Keith repeatedly asserted the willingness of the Yugoslav authorities to cooperate. He said that he had been working together with the Serbian police to facilitate the return of Albanian villagers, who had fled amid fighting in 1998, from the village of Donji Grabovac.

Keith said that the police had even offered to provide these villagers with small arms so that they could defend themselves from whoever might try and harm them. Unfortunately, he was evacuated from Kosovo before he could see this effort bear fruit.

Keith said that the KVM's leadership had certain political objectives and that it did not really seek the normalization of the situation in Kosovo. It would appear that he had more to say on this topic, but neither Mr. Kay nor Mr. Nice was particularly willing to discuss it and so it went by the way side.

Keith also said that the villagers would wildly exaggerate claims of displacement of population. He said that they would claim that hundreds of people were chased from a given village, when in reality only a handful of displaced persons would have left the village.

Of course that didn't stop Mr. Nice from reading out lengthy passages from the OSCE's "Kosovo-Kosova: As Seen, As Told" book which relies heavily on the accounts of the same unreliable villagers that Keith was talking about.

Mr. Nice took great pains to waste as much time as possible. He read out even more lengthy passages from the OSCE's "blue book." Nice asked Keith to comment on things that were alleged to have happened in Prizren and in other parts of Kosovo which were outside of his zone of responsibility.

Mr. Keith behaved like the military professional that he is and confined his testimony to places and events that he had direct knowledge of.

Being unsuccessful in drawing Mr. Keith into a hypothetical discussion, Mr. Nice tried insinuating that Keith had written irresponsible and inaccurate articles about the Kosovo war, but Mr. Nice never quite got around to actually challenging the veracity of any specific part of Keith's work. Even though Mr Nice he has taken more time than Mr. Kay with all of the witnesses, all three of the defense witnesses have defeated him.

Slobodan Milosevic again demanded to have his right to self-defense returned to him, and again Mr. Robinson turned off his microphone, and in an added twist resorted to name-calling and accused Milosevic of being "petulant and puerile."

For his part Milosevic responded by saying, "I wish, Mr. Robinson, to say something to you in relation to the observation you made in view of my attitude and position. I think that the right to defending oneself is a right of principle -- " and again Robinson cut off the microphone.

Things are not going well for the tribunal. Mr. Kay announced that he couldn't find any more witnesses who would agree to testify. The witnesses have banded together and are boycotting the proceedings to protest against the draconian conditions that the tribunal has imposed though its denial of Milosevic's right to self-defense.

Mr. Kay is asking that the so-called "trial" be suspended until the appeals chamber has made its ruling on the appeal that he has made against his own appointment as Milosevic's defence.

There will be a hearing tomorrow to consider the future conduct of the trial, but one thing is clear the tribunal has made this so-called "trial" into a total farce. By denying Milosevic the right to self-defense, they have brought all of these problems crashing down onto their own heads.