The
real story:
How Milosevic was much more evil
than you ever knew # 1
By
Jan
Oberg, TFF director
Lund, Sweden - March 12-13,
2006
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Here at his death, I think CNN, BBC
and all the rest paint a much too flattering picture of
Slobodan Milosevic. OK, they say that he was the butcher
of the Balkans and that he was widely regarded as the
architect of the Balkans carnage. CNN points out that he
was responsible for 170.000 dead in Croatia, 250.000 in
Bosnia, for the misery of today's Serbia and for the
800.000 refugees running when NATO began bombing Kosovo
in early 1999. And, yes, Sweden's radio listeners were
informed about a dozen of times that he started four wars
and lost them.
All fine and good and true too, as
you will see - but they never explain to us
how
he actually did it all.
I still think these excellent media
people should offer the world some background to this
Hitler replica instead of just sounding as if they were
sour because he did not grant them the scoop interview
they hoped for back then.
I think his death is the right
moment to tell you how I believe he, he alone,
caused all the troubles. The evil of Milosevic is grossly
understated by Western politicians, diplomats and media,
even by the millions and millions whose lives he
single-handedly ruined. Indeed, there are reasons to
believe that he can be tied also to the genocides in
Rwanda and Burundi.
I know a bit about it because I met
him eye to eye in 1995 and I've been in and out of former
Yugoslavia some 80 times since 1974 first as a student,
then as a conflict analyst and I have served as
conflict-mitigator to Milan Panic's various ministers -
Panic and President Cosic were the alternatives to
Milosevic in the early 1990s. And, for four year I was a
goodwill advisor to another dead President, Dr. Rugova of
Kosovo. So, I've been a witness. I can no longer keep
silent.
Here is what my personal experience
and objective research lead me to believe is the
well-documented truth about him.
How
Milosevic destroyed the YU economy
It was already in the early 1970s,
at the age of 30, that Slobo started working on his
devilish plan: to destroy old Yugoslavia in order to
build a new Greater Serbia. He began working secretly
with Western transnational corporations - remember he was
trained in financial affairs through his relations with
the Rockefeller family and knew how to exploit its
network. At his advice they closed down their
shipbuilding, textile, military, electronics and car
industries in YU and set up shop instead in low-wage
countries in Asia. "Destroy the industrial base and
everything else will fall," muttered this sly Marxist
Communist to himself. The oil crisis that happened
simultaneously was like a God-sent gift; he became
director of a gas company in 1973.
Signs of economic crisis soon
surfaced and YU ran into debt for the first time. So,
while in the U.S., Slobo made friends with people in the
IMF and the World Bank who agreed to come over and advise
the unsuspecting politicians in YU. Little did they know
who Slobo-the-Trickster was and how his inviting these
great aid organizations was meant to cause disaster. The
IMF and the World Bank ordered immediate privatisation,
structural adjustment and they told YU not to have an
ethnically balanced National Bank board.
Sooner rather than later,
unemployment rose immediately to 40-60 percent here and
there; the YU economy went further down the drain,
inequality rose, and so did the foreign debt, and people
began to see "the others" as the main cause of their
deepening daily misery. He masterminded this economic
destruction hiding as leader of a Belgrade bank between
1978 and 1983.
Then Tito died, what a chance!
Having set in motion the destruction of YU's economy
Slobo now turns to his political destruction. Ruthlessly
- what did you expect? - he begins to manipulate Serbia's
Communist Party from 1982.
If you are a nationalist and want a
Greater Serbia all over the place, the old thing has to
die first and be reborn in a new shape. That's also how
he thought he would become a Saviour and so he builds his
plan with good-hearted allies who just don't see the
intrigue and stab-in-the-back drama he is directing. His
manoeuvring leads to enormous socio-economic disparities.
He knows how to play on the traumas of WW 2 that Tito had
swept under the carpet.
How he
made the Slovenes and Croats nationalists
Slovenia is just a detail, a
stepping stone to invading Croatia. You may have heard
that Alois Mock, Austria's foreign minister, argued his
best to get YU divided. That's not true, of course, it's
just a nasty rumour. In fact he supported the U.S. at the
time which argued for YU remaining a unified country.
This irritated Slobo so much that he went straight for a
military solution. With quite some sadism, he
deliberately chose to send a Slovene general from the YU
Army, JNA, to simply invade his own country.
No one understood why, because the
Slovenes wanted so much to stay in YU. But as my analysis
show, Slobo needed to destroy it all to build a new
Greater Serbia. So he pretended that the JNA was the Army
of all YU and that it's job was to hold the country
together. In reality, he used JNA to split and ravage it,
saying one thing and doing the opposite while baselessly
accusing Mock and the Slovenes of conspiracy against the
State. Well, that invasion was anyhow a nice little tea
party so let's move on.
He calls up his friend Franjo
Tudjman in Zagreb and suggests that he declare Croatia
independent and begin to import weapons illegally. "You
see, Franjo, I know from your participation in the
nationalist Croatian Spring in the early 1970s that we
can work together," he argues. "Don't worry about the
Constitution, just go for independence. Use the memory of
the old-fashioned Serbs over there and clamp down on them
as much as you please. Your Croats will love you for it
and it'll give me a pretext to start a war on behalf of
all Serbs. I'll let you win it later, I promise, but it
will make me a hero too that I tried!
This was an offer Tudjman could not
refuse. As a typical Western democrat who had no trace of
East European authoritarianism - he was a good Catholic
too - he loathed any type of nationalism and personality
cult. But he had a little weak spot and thought he could
go along with it for a short while, much against his
principles of course. So he invents a nationalist and
semi-fascist rhetoric that scares the hell out of
Croatia's Serbs - and sends his interior minister on a
shopping tour to Western arms dealers. Poor Franjo
doesn't see that he is just a pawn in Slobo's sinister
game, of course.
Then
he gets the EU to recognise Croatia and
Slovenia
Slobo keeps at least part of his
promise to Franjo. Always ahead of the rest, he begins to
persuade the EU to recognize Croatia and Slovenia before
they have the faintest understanding of YU as such or the
faintest idea about what to do with the rest of YU. He
knew Franjo would love him for it. What he also knew was
that that would lead to war in Bosnia. Here is how he did
it.
Slobo contacts Germany's foreign
minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and tells him that he
ought to spearhead Croatia's independence in the EU.
"We'll share it without consulting Franjo," says Slobo
the fox. "You get the coast for your German tourists, I
make a contiguous Greater Serbia where the Serbs live.
Step two, dear Hans-Dietrich, is that you and I know that
that move will make life impossible for Alija
Izetbegovic, but you don't like Muslims anyhow, do you?
Tudjman is a fool and he will probably try to get control
over those parts of Bosnia where Croats live. See - what
an arms sales potential for you, other EU countries and
the U.S.! And while Tudjman falls into our Bosnian trap,
I take Vukovar behind his back and you turn a blind eye;
to him half of Bosnia is much more important than Eastern
Slavonia. Keine Hexeri and Nema problema!"
Genscher was very interested in
that coast, as was his predecessor Klaus Kinkel who,
before serving as foreign minister, had headed the West
German intelligence service, BND. And Slobo knew how to
appeal to the old German-Croatian ties during the 2nd
World War. Genscher's united Germany could need that
coast and a divided YU.
Perhaps more important, he hoped
that the EU could run this backyard so the Americans
didn't get there. It was time for big thinking now the
Soviet Union had fallen apart and Europe - Maastricht
Europe - was on the move under what he hoped would be
German leadership.
YU didn't fit, could not be neutral
and certainly not orthodox and socialist. It had to be
changed and take part in Western globalisation. Good to
have at least some of it linked to Germany and the
Vatican.
Slobo almost overdid it when he
said that "After all, you know, we Serbs and you Germans
can work together. But don't listen to Lord Carrington or
to UN's Butros-Ghali and please don't listen to your
Ambassador here in Belgrade. I know they all tell you not
to recognise Slovenia and Croatia. Just don't listen to
them. They are Yugo-nostalgics. Both Serbs and Germans
can play a new role in new Europe, can't you see?
The otherwise most experienced
Genscher here met his Waterloo or Sloboloo. He was too
good for this eloquent but cunning Balkan dictator and
didn't understand that Slobo only used him too: Start
wars here and there, lose some and gain some, play one
European against another (France/Britain), and all of
Europe against the U.S. - what a strategist he was at a
time when Europeans focused on the huge changes under
Gorbachev and the fall of the Wall and turned their backs
to the Balkans!
Slobo was a Master in teasing and
timing. Genscher fell for him. And later he fell also as
a Foreign Minister.
So, in that fateful December night
in 1991, the EU - totally innocent as it were - carried
out Slobo's plan with the naïve Genscher as its
agent. It recognized Croatia and Slovenia and thus served
Slobo, on a silver plate, the third war he had already
fomented in his sick mind: the war in Bosnia.
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TFF & the author 2006
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