Milosevic on Trial

[VetLegion]

hi player1. I have seen you on ctp and civ3 forums but not in the OT yet. wellcome


anyway, LaRusso, from what I hear Badinter (sp?) commision pondered the issue of 74 constitution and concluded that states (croatia and slovenia and later bosnia and macedonia) HAD the right to go away, althought the text of the constitution is confusing as hell and can be interpreted in different ways.

I ll get myself a copy from a library as soon as I have time, and I see same accusations on franjo tudjman and croatia over and over. Losts of things here that need proper discussion, but OFITG will have to handle it without me for now , although I dont hesitate to discuss ex yu stuff.
see you around

[Comrade Tribune]

New Sig

By now everybody is aware of the fact that CivIII has the simplicity of CivI without the elegance. A change of my sig is therefore in order. My new sig is going to focus on the two most relevant political priorities in 2002.

Everybody who wants to make my sig into a sticker can do so without me charging a fee for copyright.

[Goingonit]

We could call this one :georgeban:

[Natan]

So Comrade, I guess you think that the tens of thousands of men sent to Serb camps just magically dissapeared and that the photos of their skulls are just doctored? Or that tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims just left the face of the Earth?

[Bereta_Eder]

no proof. These were killed by KLA and NATO bombings for all we know.

And everything the west says is lies since it is the US which orchastrated the whole deal so it can «intervene» amd continue to hold europe by the balls.

[Natan]

Originally posted by paiktis22
no proof. These were killed by KLA and NATO bombings for all we know.

And everything the west says is lies since it is the US which orchastrated the whole deal so it can «intervene» amd continue to hold europe by the balls.

I am not talking about Kosovo at all here. I am talking about Bosnia.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Goingonit
Let's review facts:

-There was a Serbian army in Kosovo

There is an American army in Florida. Does this give me the right to start a terrorist group and start killing solider, police officers, and fellow Floridians who dieagree with my desire for an independent Florida?

-The KLA was not there prior to the appearance of said army (IIRC)

Kosovo was part of Serbia since Serb independence from the Ottomans. Why shouldn't there have been a Serb army there? The KLA has been opperating since the early 90s.

-There are mass graves filled with people in Albanian villages

To date, not one single mass grave has been found in Kosovo.

Yes, I know that the KLA kills Serbs. But the Serbs also kill Albanians en masse.

That statement is unsupported by the evidence. If mass graves had been found, they would have shown the evidence on TV already, rather than have all the investigators slink out of Kosovo. The FBI declared they had found no evidence. The UN declared there had been no genocide. It simply did not happen.

Also note that the number of people found in mass graves outnumbers the KLA. They weren't all combatants.

Before the war, there was an attempt to make it appear there had been a massacre at Racek, where a number of Kosovars had been killed in a battle with Serbian police. After the battles was over, the KLA stripped their casualties of weapons and placed them in a ditch outside of town and brought the media in. After teh war, when investigating the ditch, no bullets were found, which means that no one was excuted there.

[Fidel]

Originally posted by Natan
So Comrade, I guess you think that the tens of thousands of men sent to Serb camps just magically dissapeared and that the photos of their skulls are just doctored? Or that tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims just left the face of the Earth?

Yes, and those 50,000 raped women.
This is an interesting piece to read

http://www.balkanpeace.org/press/prs07.shtml

you also have a collection of war crimes to ponder on
here

http://www.balkanpeace.org/wcs/wct/index.shtml

Also this if from a BBC site
Q & A: Counting Kosovo's dead






How many were killed in this year's bitter conflict in Kosovo? The recent figures announced by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Carla del Ponte, are the most accurate given so far, though only partial.
She said United Nations investigators had so far exhumed over 2,100 bodies, though the actual number of ethnic Albanian victims of the conflict may be much higher.

The figures follow controversy in the western media, with some reports claiming the number of victims was much less than Nato sources claimed during the war.

The BBC's South-east Europe analyst, Gabriel Partos, tries to separate fact from fiction over the killings in Kosovo:



How many bodies have been found?

In her 10 November report to the UN Security Council, chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte said 2,108 bodies had been found so far. That figure relates to about one third of the 529 grave sites notified to the ICTY. The remaining two-thirds, along with possible fresh sites, will be investigated in the spring when conditions on the ground make resumption of the work possible.

How much higher is the final death toll likely to be?
It is not possible to make any accurate estimates on the basis of what has been found so far because some of the mass graves yet to be opened up may contain many more - or many fewer - bodies than those exhumed so far. Besides, the ICTY says the investigators have found evidence of tampering with the graves, including the burning or apparent removal of the victims' remains.

What are the estimates?
More than 11,000 deaths have been reported to the ICTY - but only a fifth of these have been confirmed. Other reports are of around 5,000 Kosovar Albanians still missing, now presumed dead. So it may be conjectured that the total numbers - or whatever figure can be established - may be somewhere between 5,000 and 12,000.

What was Nato saying during the conflict?
Nato officials during the conflict were doing their best to drum up public support for the campaign of air strikes against Yugoslavia which was meant to halt and reverse the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians. They made tough attacks on Belgrade's policies in the region - often using Kosovar Albanian reports which could not be independently verified. But Nato never claimed to have accurate figures for the number of victims.

What about the hundreds of thousands of victims mentioned at Nato briefings?
These figures related to those believed to be missing - some of whom were assumed to be dead. Nato estimates of those missing ranged from 100,000 to more than 400,000 Kosovar Albanians. Many of them were indeed "missing", hiding in forests. But it appears it was closer to a few thousand who were actually killed.

Why does the number of victims matter?
For Nato member states it is important to justify the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds - especially since Nato's own air raids killed civilians, both Kosovar Albanians and Serbs, mostly as a result of pilot error or rockets and bombs going astray. According to Belgrade, hundreds were killed in the Nato strikes. By contrast, opponents of Nato's action want to downplay the level of Serbian atrocities in an attempt to show that the campaign was unnecessary.

Meanwhile, have the killings stopped?
The Nato-led K-FOR peacekeepers have failed to stem the violence since they moved into Kosovo in June. Nato says that of the known victims among the 379 murders over the past five months, ethnic Albanians and Serbs account in almost equal numbers for 270 victims. But given the huge discrepancy between the size of the two communities - Albanians make up over 95 per cent of the population - Serbs now represent a disproportionately high share of the victims. Though on a much smaller scale, the revenge attacks on Kosovar Serbs have taken on the form of ethnic cleansing in reverse

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_517000/517168.stm

[Roland]

"There is an American army in Florida. Does this give me the right to start a terrorist group and start killing solider, police officers, and fellow Floridians who dieagree with my desire for an independent Florida?"

Well, under the states rights doctrine, as interpreted in 1861...

"Kosovo was part of Serbia since Serb independence from the Ottomans."

Independence: 1804/1878.
Kosovo to Serbia: 1912/13

Just couldn't resist...

Would love to get in on the other stuff here, but it's just too much. Good entertainmanet value, anyway...

[Jack the Bodiless]

LaRusso:

Did you check out the witness testimonies page of www.balkanpeace.org?

There are five headings:

UN War Crime Testimonies
Serbian War Crime Testimonies
Croatian War Crime Testimonies
Bosnian War Crime Testimonies
Kosovo War Crime Testimonies

...And yet none of them address crimes committed by Serbs. The "Serbian War Crime Testimonies" section, like the others, addresses alleged crimes against Serbs.

If I was designing a Serbian propaganda website disguised as an impartial source, I would make it look more plausible than this.

[Fidel]

now testifying - mahmut baqali
ex comunist head of kosovo
instead of being in the jail he is 'testifying'

[Fidel]

Originally posted by Jack the Bodiless
LaRusso:

Did you check out the witness testimonies page of www.balkanpeace.org?

There are five headings:

UN War Crime Testimonies
Serbian War Crime Testimonies
Croatian War Crime Testimonies
Bosnian War Crime Testimonies
Kosovo War Crime Testimonies

...And yet none of them address crimes committed by Serbs. The "Serbian War Crime Testimonies" section, like the others, addresses alleged crimes against Serbs.

If I was designing a Serbian propaganda website disguised as an impartial source, I would make it look more plausible than this.

i never said it was balanced
neither is cnn propaganda
you have to read MORE in order to understand more

as for roland's little history lesson:
do you know how it happened that albanians 'got' kosovo? we stupidly supported austrians in a war against turks. once austrians withdrew, expedition corpus headed for kosovo (then a center of serbia. massive exodus to the north, and they settled in vojvodina. not a bad tradeoff, but you see, austrians started it all

[Roland]

"we stupidly supported austrians in a war against turks."

Yes, how could you support us against your best friends ?

"... and they settled in vojvodina."

And Krajina. Pretty much the entire military border zone.

"not a bad tradeoff, but you see, austrians started it all"

We started everything, somehow...

[Fidel]

Originally posted by Roland
"we stupidly supported austrians in a war against turks."

Yes, how could you support us against your best friends ?

beats me

[Comrade Tribune]

Originally posted by Natan
...and that the photos of their skulls are just doctored?

Tribunal Judge: "...And then the skull told you it was the skull of a Muslim who was murdered by a Serb?"

Natan: "Yes, your honour."