The United States, Britain, the European Union, the Vatican and a grossly perverse mass media machine will have a lot to answer for when the full extent of their anti-Serb bias is revealed. That’s not going to happen soon. The minds of a gullible public are being shaped to demonize one individual and the ethnic group he represents and, through him, to heap upon them the collective sins of opposing political forces still seeking their own selfish gain from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Believe it or not, it was the revival of the old German dream of European hegemony that started the fracture of Yugoslavia into its present independent nation states in a classic divide-and-conquer move. It occurred within a year of the unification of West and East Germany, and it was all legitimized under the European Union/nato nexus, with Serb “nationalists” marked down as the scapegoat.

In the words of British political economist Rodney Atkinson, “The grossest calumny in the continuing anti-Serb bias in the British press is the myth that it was the Serbs who were ‘nationalists.’ In fact, they (and many Croats, Bosnians and Kosovans) were the multi-ethnic federalists seeking to preserve Yugoslavia, and the extreme nationalists were those who now govern the statelets of Croatia, Muslim Bosnia and Albanian Kosovo. The EU supported and funded that nationalism which they condemn within the EU but which they exploit in order to undermine nation states outside the EU! Germany’s interest in destroying both Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia was to reverse the results of the First World War which established those states” (Freenations).

There you have in a nutshell an explanation of how Marshall Tito’s united Yugoslavian nation became a multi-state Balkan appendage to the European Union.

As to the present media furor surrounding the capture of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, foreign affairs editor for Chronicles magazine, Srdja Trifkovic, sums it up quite succinctly: “The spirit of the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 is based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serbs willed the war, Muslims wanted peace; Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated, Muslim crimes are understandable” (July 22, emphasis mine throughout).

That the U.S. was an all-too-willing pawn in supporting the combined aims of the German leadership under Chancellor Helmut Köhl, and the Vatican under the papacy of John Paul ii, in the breakup of Yugoslavia is a matter of documented history. With the ussr having imploded by 1991, the sole superpower left at the time was the U.S. The American administration fell into the trap of aiding in playing out—and largely paying for—Germany’s foreign policy for acquiring control of the strategic Balkan Peninsula under its European Union umbrella.

In his exposé, Trifkovic shows how the U.S. materially contributed to the instigation of the illegal Balkan wars by submitting to pressure from a combination of self-interest groups. “Washington’s motives were not rooted in the concern for the Muslims of Bosnia as such, or indeed any higher moral principle,” he wrote. “Their policy had no basis in the law of nations, or in the notions of truth or justice. It was the end result of the interaction of pressure groups within the American power structure.”

In addition to the strongest of Vatican and German lobbies, these pressure groups included, among others, the cashed-up Saudis and other Muslims with an agenda to extend Islamic political interests in Europe. The result was “a virulently anti-Serb agenda-driven form of realpolitik that was to dominate America’s Bosnian policy. Just as Germany sought to paint its Maastricht diktat on Croatia’s recognition in December 1991 as an expression of the ‘European consensus’ … Washington’s fait accomplis were straightfacedly labeled as ‘the will of the international community’” (ibid.). A gullible media took the bait and ran with it. The truth as to what actually triggered the Balkan wars was largely ignored.

The reality is that, in terms of Germany’s continuing drive for its domination of an imperialist union of European states (progress toward that goal being twice interrupted in the 20th century—by World Wars i and ii), we can hardly underestimate the importance of the first foreign-policy initiative of the unified German nation following the fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989.

The unilateral recognition of Croatia and Slovenia by Germany, supported shortly after by the Vatican, was the spark that set off the Balkan powder keg. As Trifkovic explains, “The truth is that there was no internal, Bosnian threat to peace at the beginning of 1991 … yet once reunited Germany was committed to the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo knew both that the old Yugoslavia was dead and that historic opportunities beckoned” (ibid.). War, plus the carve-up of the Balkan nations into political entities slated for EU domination, was the result.

In the process, the Serbs were demonized.

Former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia James Bisset, in a speech given in June 2003 to a group of Canadian Serbs on the anniversary of the historic battle of Kosovo, stated that during his tenure in Belgrade in the 1990s, he was “an eyewitness to the subsequent violence and breakup 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.”

Ambassador Bisset was scathing in his remarks on the effects of this betrayal of the Serbian peoples by the leaders of those nations with whom they were previously allied. He declared that “The break up of Yugoslavia was a disaster for the Serbian people. Thousands killed and many more thousands forced to flee their ancestral homelands. … 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!”

Placing these falsehoods into their proper perspective, the ambassador declared, “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.” That has undoubtedly been the case with the mass condemnation of the Serbs.

The extent to which many of today’s national leaders are prepared to sell any degree of honor or integrity down the drain for political gain is reflected in the resounding condemnation delivered by Ambassador Bisset against a number who were in office at the time of the Serbian sellout: “President Clinton and Tony Blair talked about genocide taking place in Kosovo. The U.S. 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.”

Thus it was that Slobodan Milosevic was arraigned by the International Court of Justice at The Hague (a body not recognized by the U.S.) in an illegal trial, during which he eventually succumbed to prevailing illness and died, denying his accusers the opportunity to render their predetermined verdict of guilty.

Meanwhile, the chase for a Serbian scapegoat continued, consummating in the arrest of Radovan Karadzic last week, setting the scene for the next costly show trial at The Hague.

Well before the case is heard, as Srdja Trifkovic observes, “Karadzic personally and the Serbs collectively were severely damaged by the Western media handling of their mistreatment of Muslim prisoners and by their expulsion of non-Serb civilians in the summer of 1992. Similar atrocities by Croats and Muslims against Serbs and against each other, while no less common, were less conspicuous and deemed unworthy of attention. The Western elite class chose its sympathies at the start and kept up an agitation in favor of military intervention against the Serbs” (op. cit.).

With such overt manipulation of public opinion having been promulgated by the mass media, Karadzic is hung, drawn and quartered well before he sets foot in the dock. As Trifkovic writes, “The judgment against Karadzic at the U.S.-sponsored and largely U.S.-funded tribunal at The Hague will be built on this flawed foundation. It will be neither fair or just, and therefore it will be detrimental to what America should stand for in the world. It will also give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as ‘war on terrorism.’ The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake” (op. cit.).

For centuries, the strategic Balkan Peninsula has featured as a slice of Europe over which wars have been fought, treaties made and broken. It became a vital pawn in the carve-up of nations after World War i, had the boundaries of its ethnic enclaves confused under Tito’s regime, then its various nationalist feelings taken advantage of and played against each other in the latest push for its colonization by the EU.

Now, as a post-Milosevic charade is about to be resumed at The Hague with the arraignment of Radovan Karadzic, one thing is for certain. The foremost casualty will be the truth, the most condemned will become the Serb per se. In the words of Srdja Trifkovic, “The strange truth is that … great powers pay a fee for entering the Balkan casino. They consent to someone’s story, not ‘the truth’” (ibid.).

The story that has set the tone for Karadzic’s trial was splashed across page A15 of the Washington Post last Wednesday under the headline, “The Face of Evil.” There, under the byline of former Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, unfolds as rounding condemnation of Karadzic as could ever be penned. This view of Holbrooke’s, that Karadzic is inherently evil, was further underlined by him in an interview on National Public Radio on the same day that his piece was published in the Washington Post.

The problem with giving such high-profile, pre-trial coverage to one man’s opinion—especially one who was so deeply involved in enacting EU/nato Balkan policy against Bosnian Serbs—is that it just feeds what Trifkovic termed (as quoted above) “the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic … based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992.”

Of Ratko Mladic (Bosnian Serb military leader) and Radovan Karadzic, Holbrooke wrote, “I hated these men for what they had done.” That being the case, should not an equal proportion of Holbrooke’s hatred be reserved for Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman’s thugs for the atrocities they perpetrated against the Serbs in Croatia? Well, no, for it does not fit his agenda, nor the agenda of those pressure groups that influenced the negotiations of Holbrooke and his cohorts in constructing the Dayton Accords that ended the Balkan wars.

In the penultimate paragraph of Holbrooke’s Washington Post article, he states, “Karadzic’s arrest … removes from the scene a man who was still undermining peace and progress in the Balkans [while he dispensed natural remedies at a health clinic in Belgrade?] and whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history.”

So, what about Franjo Tudjman’s practice of ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars? Does it not rate a special mention in history as but a resumption of similar practices carried out under Croatia’s puppet Nazi regime during World War ii? Why aren’t Tudjman’s henchmen—those still at large—subject to a similar manhunt as that mounted for Karadzic?

What about the Muslims who enacted atrocities against Serbs in those same Balkan wars? Where’s the condemnation of the U.S.- and German-backed Albanian terrorists, the kla, for atrocities committed by them against ethnic Serbs and especially their overt ethnic cleansing of Serbian Kosovars?

Why must Holbrooke single out Karadzic as one “whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history”?

It’s simple. It all fits an overarching agenda to which the greater public remains oblivious. It’s revealed in one short sentence in Richard Holbrooke’s Washington Post article: “Karadzic’s arrest is no mere historical footnote …. It also moves Serbia closer to European Union membership.”

For the truth on the Balkans, read our booklet The Rising Beast—Germany’s Conquest of the Balkans.