Loving the Enemy and Other Outrages

Much as I would want to follow Jesus and love my enemies, God gave me me brains that tell me that it is an unrealistic demand. One cannot love one's enemies for if one loves them one would not call them enemies, and if one calls them enemies it is not because one loves them. This does not seem obvious even though it should be.

It follows then that one cannot prosecute a killing on a battlefield as murder. One cannot cannot invent a valid legal process for an idea which is not of this world. Whether one agrees with the US position that Geneva protocols do not cover the type of fighting in Aghanistan, one thing is clear.  People make mistakes in firefights and they cost lives.  That one side stops shooting does not obligate the other side to stop. To take a pause in a combat as a sign the enemy is surrendering is foolishness. To lie in wait and to lob a grenade at an opportune moment cannot become murder as a way of exonerating the commanding officer of the opposite side who let his guard down and exposed his men. It is one thing being chivalrous and another thing being stupid. In war, one gives no quarter except if the enemy asks to surrernder. One needs to appreciate the difference between a civilized conduct of war in which passion is restrained by decency, and the newly politicized quasi-Christology which imposes idiotic formulas and rules that encourage the very terrorist insurgency that the politicians promise to extirpate and to which professed aim they put young men and women in harm's way.

An army that is serious about its mission would not spare an enemy soldier who just exacted a savage, purposeless blood tax on its troops. Not even even if its personnel were to find that the gravely injured enemy soldier was very young and apparently spoke English. True soldiers would have to kill him for this reason: on a battlefield such acts are unpardonable. Briskly dispatching an enemy fighting in unlawful manner reassures to one's own soldiers that they are respected and valued and their leadership will not tolerate their being treated as disposable refuse. There is no other way to communicate to the troops the idea that they are there to win a war, and not, as I hinted, engaging the enemy in silly-bugger playing-at-war designed to waste not just horrendous sums of taxpayers' money but their lives as well. As the veteran Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters (Looking for Trouble) said about Omar Khadr "[they] should have killed that punk on the battlefield" after he demonstrated that despite his yound age he was a "hardened killer". They didn't kill him and they restored him to health. Perhaps they hoped he would become an informer. But he didn't turn a traitor like his brother. Evidently he is one tough cookie.

Loving Omar....

The obsessive defending of Khadr, and its handling of facts, is a thing to behold. Despite his own repeated admission to lobbing the grenade which killed Christopher Speer, and his written apology to the widow of the US Army medic, the Khadr truthers have all sorts of ways to deny that is what happened. Typically, they will begin by denying he engaged in any kind of hostility in the skirmish. If that fails, then they deny he threw the grenade that mortally wounded Sgt. Speer. This theory was bolstered for a while by the discovery there was a second survivor in the compound at the time of the explosion. However, the prosecutor admitted the testminoy of the mysterious unnamed witness OC-1, and the Stipulation of Fact signed by Omar Khadr in the deal with the US government in October 2010, duly registered a second combatant in the compound at the time of the grenade throwing incident. It changed nothing on the finding that the grenade was thrown by Omar. But no matter that Khadr admitted to throwing the grenade in a signed statement while represented by a lawyer, i.e. without being coerced to it - in fact he boasted about the act in the early days of his detention. This, in the eyes of the enemy-loving legal experts, means nothing. The Melbourne law professor, Kevin Jon Heller, a specialist in international law (i.a., a defender of Lynne Stewart, the condemned counsel of the Blind Sheikh, and a consulting member of Radovan Karadzic' defense team), opined that Khadr's admission was a move calculated to get him out of Gitmo faster. Well, great ! The problem is: how does one prove a theory, if everyone in it, starting with the one it exculpates, is presumed to lie through their teeth to get what they want ? I am sympathetic, as I have made clear at the start, to the view that the indictment of Khadr is at odds with elemental principles of justice, and the case of "war crimes" against him is phoney baloney. If the facts are as presented, he should have been killed on the spot. The case cooked up against him stinks.  But professor Heller's opinion is clearly over the top as it would make a legal sport out of mind reading. For as Chief Justice Brian observed already in the15th century, "the thought of man shall not be tried, for the devil himself knoweth not the thought of man".
  
The next favourite defense of Omar Khadr is to portray him as a child soldier. Of course there is no running away from the fact that at the time of his capture he was fifteen and his age would be a consideration in any legal proceedings against him by a civilized court. On the other hand, attempts to portray him as an Disney-loving child abducted into service by his fanatical father strike me as naive in the extreme. It misses two important factual points. Despite Senator Romeo D'Allaire's representations, he was not a child soldier by the standards of UN Convention on the Rights of a Child. Despite the document general definition of a child being a person under eighteen years of age, Article 38 (3) permits the recruitment of adolescents at the age fifteen.

States Parties shall refrain from recruiting any person who has not attained the age of fifteen years into their armed forces. In recruiting among those persons who have attained the age of fifteen years but who have not attained the age of eighteen years, States Parties shall endeavour to give priority to those who are oldest.

Even though Al-Qaeda is not a signatory to the convention, there have not been complaints about child soldiers in their ranks as was the case in the civil wars of Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan and Uganda or for a while in the PLO of Yasser Arafat. It seems to be  a different military culture.

Two, adolescent hard dicks like Khadr have long been celebrated in martial cultures around the world as a promise of better fighters to come. The idea that a boy of fifteen is a child incapable of executing acts of vicious, calculated violence on his own seems at best ill informed (the great Musashi killed man in a duel at the age of thirteen !) and owing to a distorted sense of reality produced by a life of security and comfort. Often, and the former Canadian general seems himself to be a textbook example of this, the nervous system shaped by our privileged circumstance will not find a competent way to cope with the stresses of the world which rejects the Western idea of civilization. The fact is, and the cited convention recognizes it better than the senator, that some adolescents can become war criminals before they would be allowed to drive a car and drink beer in countries like the US or Canada.  Article 37(a) of the Convention cited above clearly recognizes that some acts of adolescent youths need to be sanctioned severely,  prohibiting only the penalties of death and life imprisonment without parole to be imposed on persons younger than eighteen.

...and Loving to Hate Him

For their part, the commentators on the Right seem to be just as snake-bitten in assessing Omar's crime and punishment. Their spite expresses itself in the initiative to bar Khadr from re-entering Canada. It is a bad tactic because it has "loser" written all over it. There is no legal complaint that Canada has with Omar Khadr. He was born here and he has the right to reside here unless he did something that takes that right away from him. The view that Khadr has forfeited his citizenship has to be demonstrated.  From what I have read and seen, the idea of denying him entry is a gut reaction, not a principled stance.

      The fact of the matter is, the government allowed itself to be played for a fool by the Obama administration in pledging to repatriate Khadr with his US murder sentence not fully served. Given the circumstance, i.e. the Military Commissions Act of 2009 being an instrument allowing the US authorities to conceal evidence on grounds of national security, it was nothing if not foolish for the minister to agree to take Khadr without full disclosure and a negotiated quid pro quo effected in advance of giving assent to the agreement. Interestingly, Coren, Levant, Steyn, etc. have not touched on this "ommission" of Harper's foreign ministry under Maxime Bernier which may be as grave as Major Watt allowing his men to approach the compound at Ayub Kheil without adequate reconnaisance. (And this even after witnessing two of their interpreters shot in cold blood by men in the compound !)

Vic Toews' insisting he wants to see additional tapes and the full record of the Khadr interrogation by Michael Welner, the prosecution psychiatrist, would under normal circumstances be due diligence and perfectly in order. The problem is the Bernier agreement with the US did not stipulate conditions under which it would refuse entry to Khadr prior to serving his full sentence in the U.S. To look for issues now looks bad. What can the records reveal that the government did not know in 2009 ? Why did not the Minister ask for access to Khadr to get a balanced report from a Canadian expert prior to binding itself to early repatriation ? Don't we have any experts on terrorism of our own ? All big questions to me.

Another issue which no-one wishes to touch is Khadr suing the Canadian government for compensation. The Supreme Court of Canada took the position that the Canadian government  breached Omar Khadr's Charter rights by adopting aggressive interrogation style when CSIS agents interviewed him in Guantanamo. At the same time, the justices agreed that the government is under no obligation to repatriate Khadr from US prison. The rulings in effect separates the issue of Khadr's "frequent flier" mistreatment in prison from his right to be in custody of the Government of Canada. I have seen very little in the way public outrage (from the Right) at the nature of this ruling, which in effect asserts that Khadr's rights are being violated continuously by Canadian officials, even though he is not in a Canadian prison. The decision makes the Government of Canada complicit in advance in whatever allegations of mistreatment are claimed on Omar Khadr's behalf. It is saying de facto, "bring him home now or pay him bigger bucks later !" The inability of the high court to gauge the circumstance of Khadr's capture, and appreciate his age development in light of the culture in which he was brought up, is greatly disturbing. Omar Khadr was not deprived of sleep in a case of juvenile swarming of a shopper in a suburban mall.

Be it as it may, to my mind the energy spent in trying to prevent the return of Khadr is misdirected. For one, as noted, it only postpones the inevitable. The delay in acting on the commitment to repatriate Khadr makes look the Conservatives bad, which would not be as much of a problem if they had some good card to play, which of course I don't think they have at the moment.

What Needs to Be Done

We are a secular society governed by laws. By and large, the profound changes in our circumstance due to rapid advances in science and technology, have been reflected in legislative innovations which tackle previously unknown stratagems in the new playing ground. This regrettably has not happened in the parallel dramatical shifts in the social sphere. In the last decade and a half, a new global movement has arisen that seeks to dominate the world under the edicts of a religious faith, a movement whose core values are largely at variance with the traditional values of democracy and the rule of law (as practiced in the West). There are many adherents of this new political creed of islamism in Canada. There are those who do not break Canadian laws in advocating the rule of Islam in the world and of course they should be allowed to advocate any political goals within the established political framework of the country. However, it has become clear over the past decade or so that the islamist political proponents rely on a small groups of militants bent on wreaking havoc and instilling terror into the populace at large. Whether the mosque preachers publicly disown them or not, their goals are identical: to impose the rule of Islam and shariah on everyone, and these goals themselves are a reliable indicator of an ideology which is at sword's point with our traditional governance.  The terrorism in the belief of a caliphate dispensing sharia rulings to everone is implied !

Vic Toews' resources would be much better spent in legislating rather than filibustering. First, the flow of foreign money for building centres of anti-Western agitation, whether mosques or universities needs to be stemmed. And the Saudis and Iranians make that very easy for us to implement. The government should demand full disclosure of financing for Islamic projects and tie the acceptance of them to the reciprocal willingness of the donor's countries to allow the promotion of Western values including unrestricted Christian proselytizing. Is there any other reasonable solution ? I don't see any !

With respect to Khadr, the best way to love the enemy is to forget Khadr, except as an example of our collective incompetence to deal with a clear and present danger to our way of life.
We can't scheme to prevent Khadr from re-entering the country because we would open ourselves to the charge making up rules as we go along, that is abuse of power. That is not smart if you are in power !

What is needed is something like an Act for the Protection of Canada's Interests Abroad, which would spell it out clearly that it is illegal for a holder of a Canadian passport to use the document as a cover, or get-out-of-jail-free card for militant subversion of foreign governments, and/or the planning and execution of terrorist acts on behalf of other states or organizations claiming sovereign rights. Persons convicted of participating in, or planning, insurgency or attacks at large in the acts of terror abroad, would be required by law to serve full term of their incarceration in foreign jurisdictions and be subject to a review of their Canadian citizenship/residency status at the end of their detention. If such person indicates belief in a caliphate and duty as a Muslim which trumps the requirement to behave in a civilized, unprejudiced manner when under protection of Canadian state outside of its territory, then the position of the state should be:  we are ever so sorry but this is not what Canada will tolerate; we are dedicated to an idea of a civilization which allows the freedom of believing and worshipping whatever one wants, as long as one remains a decent human being !

This would be the way to love Khadr, the enemy. Remove our contribution to his schizophrenic sense of identity ! Tell him: you cannot believe as a Canadian that you, as a Muslim, have a duty to fight the infidel, except in demonstrating to the infidel your superiority not just in your courage but also your sense of fairness and generosity. The understanding of, and commitment to the idea that others have rights too even if they disagree with what you believe, is a first step to acquiring that sense.

Anything else we have to consider hopelessly at odds with being a Canadian !

Testament in the Throes of Death

Christie Blatchford got herself into hot water last week over her remarks on the death of Jack Layton . Her Tuesday’s (23/8) column in National Post took issue with the CBC lack of sense of measure in covering the opposition leader’s passing and the letter to Canadians composed either on Jack Layton’s deathbed by himself or near it with his collaboration and consent. Her inbox quickly became flooded by email with assorted abuse, demonization and laments from Jack’s worshippers who either never read the letter or quickly forgot what was “better” despite the Peace Tower in Ottawa chiming John Lennon’s Imagine while the great sage laid in state on the Hill.

I like Christie’s writing a lot. Like Jack, she has spunk and calls them as she sees them. And she has a keen sense in smelling humbug which of course makes her a comrade-in-arms. I agree with Christie that the letter was extraordinary sample of bad taste though the question remains on the timing of her column. My sense tells me it could have waited until Jack was in the ground. At any rate, what the column said definitely needed to be said.

Someone should have had the sense to try to talk Jack – presumably not as sharp in his dying hours - out of addressing all Canadians. It would be read as vainglory (yes, Christie is right), an essentially undemocratic pining for a one-party perfect society. What about other people, other Canadians, whose politics were not Jack’s ? Would they not feel that this upsizing of Jack post-mortem was going a tad too far and that the sense of tragic loss was being cynically misused for partisan ends ? It was poor judgment to think that perhaps all would be shamed into silence.

Stephen Lewis said in his eulogy of Jack Layton that the “testament in the throes of death” was really a manifesto for social democracy, which earned rousing applause and all the guests in Thompson Hall stood up to pay respect. One could hardly believe this was a funeral. It is sad to see the NDP so hard off it can’t think of the death of its leader in terms other than its political utility. But in one sense Lewis had it right: Jack Layton’s testament is a political manifesto. It was simply misaddressed to all Canadians instead to the rank and file of his own party, where it belongs. Surely, it would have been read by many other Canadians. Surely, some of them would have been inspired to sign up for Jack’s vision.

Of course, there is always the loony element which idealist dreamers seem to have a great success in awakening. The sad news about Jack spread fast in Ottawa last week. But one unforgettable moment that describes everything about the ueber-grief-fest for me were two well-fed women in their twenties tearing up over the letter which one of them read aloud at a local Tim Hortons. When I walked in they were in the middle even though no-one around them seemed to be interested in more than their daily dose of caffeine and sugar. But as the reciter went “love is better than anger, hope is better than fear, …..”, the manager who evidently knew the mood of the Canadians in the joint better busted the sermon “….and two donuts are better than one…..girls can you take this out some place else ?”

Fretting Fuelishly

I take it that by now everyone knows gas prices are a joke. A butterfly fluttering its wings in Chongzhou will cause volatility in light crude futures in Chicago. A cellphone call to a buddy who owns a gas pump kitty-corner from you, and who forgot to adjust his price sign this morning will instantly remedy the anomaly in the market. Only make sure that you do not say what the market price is, because that would be participation in price-fixing cartel, subject in Canada to 14 years of jail and a fine up to $25 million. So to stay on the right side of the Competition Act, do not say fuelish things on your cellphone or leave paper trail. It is not an offence under the act to consult price boards of competition and make your own deduction of what the fair market price of gasoline in your neck of the woods should be at 7 am this lovely morning. I am not making this up, friends, this is the cuckoo-conomy you and I live in these days.

So what is new in all of this hullabaloo ? Actually, it is kind of getting even weirder than useless laws designed to catch a dozen idiots among thousands of petro pickpockets. President Obama created an Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group headed by the Attorney General to investigate the ever more brazen robberies at the gas pump. The administration designated hound dog is Eric Holder, the man having trouble identifying the Fort Hood shooter who describes himself as Soldier of Allah as a terrorist inspired by radical islam. Of course it produced nothing of newsmaking note in four months. But we know there are some really interesting data out there. A couple of days ago, the US Senator Bernie Sanders released the names of major traders with their share of oil futures in the summer of 2008, i.e. the names of people who drove the price of oil through the roof at the time. The data comes directly from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. "This report clearly shows that in the summer of 2008 when gas prices spiked to more than $4 a gallon, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and other speculators on Wall Street dominated the crude oil futures market causing tremendous damage to the entire economy,"Sanders said in a statement. "The CFTC has kept this information hidden from the American public for nearly three years. That is an outrage."

The effect of the disclosure was predictable. The president of the Futures Industry Association John Damgard denounced the outing of this information, as threatening “derivatives trading” (oh Lord !) and jeopardizing the Commission's ability to gather such information in the future. But he does not seem to understand the basic thing: Energy commodities speculation which directly causes rapid cost escalations across the whole economy, cannot be good…..for the economy. And indeed, where the governments of the booming economies of the world protect the stability of energy supply by regulation (and subsidies), the US and Canada suffers volatility which now all but assures their GDP will continue to stagnate or tank. So it would be good - as a first thing - to separate concepts like market and criminal conspiracy.

Oh No, not ANother Hurricane..(Aug 27.)

Predictably, the news of Irene drove up the gasoline price by 10 cents yesterday. Usually, this kind of a jump in the past was occasioned by a spike in the spot price of crude, but noone seems to care about this sort of protocol these days. The price of crude may be the only truly variable cost in the production and distribution of gasoline, but the oil companies don't care. The will not be hogtied to the price of crude because in times of high prices the demand for gas is falling, and with it the total revenue. So to protect the aggregate revenues of big oil the price of gasoline will need to be re-adjusted until you pay $1.30 a liter on a $85/barrel, where you paid the same amount for $135/barrel just a little while back. The The graph showing the price relationship between crude oil and wholesale price in Canada in the last six months graphically illustrates the new pricing paradigm. (click on the graph to enlarge). The trend is closely parallel to the US which gives lie to the assertion that the fluctuations in wholesale prices (outside of crude oil) are to regional issues of distribution, currency exchange, quality of crude(!), different refinery maintenance standards and whatever other nonsense industry advocates can dream up. There is a marked push upwards for the gasoline price which faithfully follows peaks and valleys of the US development. The price of gas, in the disintegration of any semblance of market is now simply dictated by the oil and gas cartels. Unlike the rapidly developing economies of the world, Canada does not show political will to do the things necessary to counter the effects of this push to higher production costs and inflation across the board - i.e. tax the windfall profits and/or fix the allowed profit in the pricing of gasoline.

Rivers of Bloody Nonsense

Much to the chagrin of the Tehran zealots , the UK riots of August 2011 will not be turning to an Islamic revolution any time soon. For a number of reasons which are not obvious to political fanatics, the unrest in Britain over the last week were not of the type that topples governments. These were calculated forays by hoods beating up on whomever looked unwilling to fight back, looting and torching and boozing merrily in the streets because, like Thomas the Little Engine, they could. It looked ugly for mostly two reasons. One, because the police was obviously unprepared to apply full force of the law to anyone other than the EDL whose civil disorder tactics are different. Two, the aerial tapes of burning blocks of buildings made it look like London was blitzed again. Disgusting as the riots were, they were simply nowhere near the levels of lethal violence recently visited in places like Hama, Benghazi or Bombay….sorry, Mumbai, (ever so sorry), places free of the brutal British cops deplored by the brothers in Cairo and students in Tehran. There were not dozens or hundreds of dead or maimed in Tottenham, Clapham, Brimingham or Manchester. So first, thank God for that !

From my perspective, much of the rioting was played up by the media to aggravate the shock and the sense of unreality, extend them as it were beyond the areas immediately affected by the riots to create a national political crisis of what was essentially a hard-to-grasp breakdown of effective policing. (The hapless BBC, realizing finally the dangers of this upsizing, renamed the “UK riots” to “riots in England” on the third or fourth day) . Again, we are not talking tens or hundreds of thousands of protesters but several hundred at a time operating in half a dozen non-contiguous areas. A swift, energetic action in dispersing the mob on Saturday, effectively televised (!) and documented in the papers, would have surely gone a long way to preventing the rampage from repeating the next few days.

Instead, what: not just incompetent arguments against time-proven, effective and non-lethal methods of crowd control, but totally idiotic tangents claiming the state is in competition for services with a vicious thug sub-culture in the chavs’ neighbourhoods, and failing to deliver on that score. It is beyond belief that a major daily would print crass psychobabble that unwittingly legitimizes (or takes as a given, at any rate) the existence of a criminal underworld in urban Britain. That mind-boggling drivel appears on the dailies’ pages on days when swift, effective restoration of civil order is called for is perhaps the most telling of all the items on the riots.

Unfortunately, it is not just the Leftist idiocies. David Starkey’s comments last Friday on BBC’s Newsnight earned him an instant label of racist and provoked the inevitable avalanche of petitions for his dismissal as a BBC commentator. I am not sure what the historian was up to: there is no doubt a gangsta culture of mostly Caribbean blacks in the working class neighbourhoods in England which dominates and terrorizes the black community and has sway over many young white yobs. This cannot be denied. It cannot be denied that the rioting has been orchestrated by this criminal underclass: it was an opportunity to loot and test the will of the establishment. So what does one do with this - essentially correct but trivial - finding ? Do we become transfixed by silly rhetoric and talking through the hat assuring everyone there is not only one version of ineffectual tattle? There were no rivers of blood or cry for rivers of blood in the riots that justified Starkey pulling out the Enoch Powell’s speech from 1968, especially since evidently had no follow-up line to a messed up metaphor for cultural pollution. He himself indicated that the motivation for the riot was a rather banal joy of looting and lawlessness (btw, common in England in advance of Robert Peel, metro policing and immigration from Jamaica or Trinidad,) and not the sort of racial dominance that Powell had in mind. There is no need to go into racially divisive apocalyptic imagery if one intends to approach the issues with a clear head and resolve to fix what needs to be fixed.

No wonder then that Starkey's half-baked ideas were immediately attacked, and he was lectured to by the two interlocutors, Owen Jones and Dreda Say Mitchell, (among other things on the value of rap in the cultural advancement of Britain). Predictably, Mitchell dressed down Starkey a day later in a column written for The Guardian. With the condescending style so dear to Jesse Jackson’s imitators, she suggested his opinions would have earned him a time-out in a school where she was a teacher. Strange idea coming from someone complaining of cultural exclusion. And surely, this would not have been a school teaching democratic principles of respecting plurality of opinions. But I guess that is part of the problem: there is no respect for the traditional ways and no workable model of something to replace them. In some quarters that dilemma can be actuated by a tweet: Lets loot & see! What gives ?

Colonel Jekyll, Mr.TypicalMale

Nowhere does our doomed culture show the advanced state of dilapidation as in the view of male sexual function. The former normative model of mature male sexuality is gone and no viable successor has been allowed to enter. In the current paradigm, women rule hetero males and anything goes in homosex.

The mainstream culture (if one goes by CBC standards) has been into femdom S&M big time. The protagonists may be be somewhat off the edge of Tarantino’s vicious vixens but all the same: as long as she cracks the whip and he licks her boots, we are well within the new normal. The paradigm has - you guessed it - a low threshhold of tolerance for women in the masochist role, unless they are pushy bottoms. But even that has become questionable since the fiasco of Karla Homolka as a feminist martyr.

It is easy to see that in a disordered gender-identity culture like ours some fairly ordinary deviance patterns will be particularly difficult to grasp and handle. Take Russ Williams, the fallen commander of Canada's largest air-force base. The press had a front-page heyday with the exhibitions of his trophies, yet it remained clueless as to why this paraphilia appears to have been so very private. The picture of Russ in women's undies was top secret: for Russ' eyes only. Why ? I understand this is quite unusual in criminology. One's sexual deviance is usually validated through one's mate (if one has one). I say usually, but the statistics will likely show a large preponderance of dominance sexual displays as having some inside audience. Not with Russ. Hmmm...

What are we to make of it ? First, I think we need to admit that even if we knew everything about Russ Williams, his personal history into the smallest detail, his actions would still be a mystery. As the celebrated medieaval judge Brian observed, not even the devil knowest the heart of man ! But that is not what I am after; I do not search for some foolish legal calculus of his motives. I am simply at a loss to understand our cultural selectors not registering the obvious clues that are all over this case.

Look at the picture above and ask yourself: is that a portrait of an alpha male in the prime of his life capturing his domestic idyll ? Why does the killer look so sheepish on the declaration of superiority and ownership of him by his mysteriously sexless madonna ? Isn't that because he has no (culturally approved) way of dominating himself, that he knows of, and can show on a photo that may be seen by others ? Like a couple of kids, or something. Isn't that what the start-up rage of raiding the dressers of women in his madonna's immediate neighbourhood was mostly about? Isn't that what may account for the filling up the basement of my wife's house (as Williams refered to the couple's Ottawa property) with bras and panties of women who would do sex with Russ on top ?

Dr. Duncan Scott, a forensic psychiatrist from Queens U., who was assigned to Williams during his pre-trial detention said on the CBC Williams' Confession documentary that Williams was a bungling kind of a killer who did not plan his criminal forays. Well, yes, it is kind of obvious that his passion got quickly the better of him once he found the expression of his rage against his beloved wifey, with whom he had dinners while raping and killing women in his neighbourhood. But is Doctor Scott right in saying there is "no sample group" for the Russ Williams kind of deviance ? I am skeptical on that score.

An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Moderate Islam

First off, I hope I am not breaking any news when I say that to learn something about Islam one must not get one’s schooling from American television networks. Especially not ABC's The View.



Further, I assume I need not expand on the observation that certain forms of debate (eg where one argues by appeals like 'Oh My God !') do not admit reason and therefore are not in any way informative. For example, it was plainly incorrect for Bill O’Reilly to say ‘Muslims killed us on 9/11’ as the pronoun grammatically includes the speaker himself who, by all appearances, was still alive as he delivered the line. Similarly, it is not an argument for the mosque in a building damaged by the Islamic terrorist attack on WTC to say, as Whoopi Goldberg did, there were seventy Muslims among the victims. It is not because such finding does not alter the religious affiliation of the attackers, nor the fact that two thousand and eight hundred of the other victims – the ones specifically targetted - were Non-muslims. So it would be, to an intelligent woman, plain and clear that if a New York Muslim cleric acts with a callous disregard of the wishes of the majority of those victims, he is not what he purports to be: a moderate Muslim. Further, in the uncivilized debate, Joy Behar challenged the figure of seventy percent of Americans being opposed to the mosque. Interestingly, her CNN employer’s poll in early August quoted the figure of 68%, slightly off the CBS poll’s 71% . So this figure by all appearances does not originate with a shady right-wing pollster for hire, as Ms Behar intimated.

On both sides, then there is bizarre spin-doctoring, either unnecessarily broad-brushing of all Muslims, or denying that state-sponsored, radical forms of Islam exist and are actively engaged in attempts to undermine and dismantle the civilizational foundation of the West. Unfortunately, the debate is all too typical on what passes for brains and civility on the major networks these days. There does not seem to be any common-sense, middle ground to be found anywhere. The sitting US Attorney General does not seem to know there is radical Islam, or so he would like us to believe. One can only wonder if Eric Holder would have had the same difficulty identifying the Baader-Meinhof Gang as radical Marxists.

On the other extreme, Pamela Geller, the NYC blogger who stirred up the opposition to imam Rauf’s Cordoba House project, does not believe there is such a thing as moderate Islam. Selon elle, there are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam.

Well, she is wrong. Until the house of Saud started to export Wahhabism in the 1970’s, and the US allowed itself to be shanghaied by the ayatollahs and chased away from Beirut, the Islam in the world was by and large mild. Moammar Gaddafi’s brand of revolution might have had an Islamic flavour, but its political vectors pointed elsewhere (pan-Arabic nationalism rather than jihadi pan-Islamism). There were of course strands and pockets of more conservative, stricter adherence to traditional Islamic precepts, but the belief in toppling the civilization of the West and replacing it with a world-wide caliphate, was as fringe view of Islam as Terry Jones’ baptist gospel is of Christianity today. Modern radical Islam then is a new phenomenon. It came about unexpectedly as a by-product of the petro pricing revolution in the 1970’s. Huge monetary surpluses from oil were used to export the Saudi version of Islam, first to Pakistan and Malaysia and then practically wherever the dollar is recognized as currency. The Shia response to the radicalization was soon realized in Iran, in Khomeini's Islamic Republic. Iran’s ample oil revenues also started to project politically abroad : first in Lebanon, and now in Gaza and Turkey.

So, moderate Islam continues to exist, even though it has been overshadowed lately by the politically militant forms. Tayyip Erdogan, the PM of the latest major arrivals on the Islamic political scene, Turkey, may scoff at the ‘ugly and offensive’ idea of moderate Islam . But all he is saying is that his allegiances no longer lie with the U.S., NATO or Europe. (As a matter of fact, it looks a lot like the APK, Turkey’s ruling Islamist party widely reported to have been ‘created’ by Saudi oil money is now switching allegiances to Tehran.) It is a way to say to the Muslims: the balance of power has shifted. We, the Islamic radicals, now hold the economic trump cards. The U.S. can’t do anything; the country is bankrupt, morally and money-wise. You better march with us.

Luckily for the West though, things are never simple in the Muslim world. Traditional societies have traditional views of themselves. Saudi Arabia and Iran will forever be at loggerheads. Egypt sees itself as the centre of the Arab civilization. Its intellectuals ridicule the upstart desert primitives in Riyadh. Syria will not cede its influence in Lebanon to Iran. Malaysia and Indonesia will be tied economically much more closely to the East Asian markets than the Middle East. The long term smart play for Muslims around the world would be to stay with moderate Sufism. A lot of them in the West are happy with the lives they lead and do not like the negative attention the islamist radicalism creates for their communities. But unfortunately, many Muslims remain passive in their politics, coming as they do from places ruled by brutish despots. They are frightened by the fiery sermons of the Saudi-trained clerics (for a closer look, here is a BBC documentary from 2007 as a primer). They see the mosques openly preaching sedition and separation from the state, and the authorities not stepping in and dealing with the outrage in a just, competent, effective way. In consequence, most Muslims will not step forward and confront the fanatics themselves.

How to Identify moderate Islam

The test is actually quite simple. If a person proclaims that sharia should replace the secular laws of the West, if he or she believes in a world-wide caliphate, and Islam as the only valid religion of the world, then this person is not a moderate Muslim (= a believer in moderate Islam), whether or not the believer publicly renounces terrorism. The terrorism in this position is implied. One cannot claim, as either material or spiritual need, the right to the trashing of other people’s beliefs. All true religions believe themselves unique and superior to all other religions. Islam is no exception in this. The fact that this religion spread in the world initially by military conquest is irrelevant. The fact that the Quranic idiom often points to martial valour as the truest expression of faith is irrelevant. All religions live by hyperbole. What is relevant is whether the contemporary Muslim believer grasps that hatred breeds hatred, insincerity breeds mistrust, supremacist ideology breeds resistance in fair-minded and intelligent people. What is relevant is whether the contemporary Muslim believer grasps that he only way a civilization may show its superiority is by an example in laying the groundwork for its people to lead a secure, productive, satisfying life. If this is the way of Allah, we can live side by side peaceably.

But, the intelligent woman will ask, is there such Islam anywhere ? Isn’t it just what you would like to believe ?

Well, I think there is a quite convincing proof that most Muslims do not mean to kill us. One of the curious items in the Ground Zero Mosque affair has been the silence of the mainstream American media on the unpopularity of the project in the Arab world. The pundits evidently don’t know what to make of the negative image imam Rauf has there. The scholars of the world’s oldest Islamic university, Cairo’s Al-Azhar, consider him a provocateur par excellence to a point of accusing him of playing a part in a devious Zionist conspiracy. They think the idea of a “call to prayer from the rubble of WTC” (a partial title of Rauf’s book printed in Malay) gives Islam a bad name and strengthens the association between 9/11 and Islam, on which many people in America will gladly jump and around which some will create their media personality. Far from a shield against Islamic extremists, the Park51 project will inevitably attract them (as did the Hamburg mosque where the 9/11 plotters gathered) as a place of pilgrimage. Nowhere is the unsoundness of Rauf and the builders of the Islamic center more apparent than in misrepresenting the Muslim majority view outside of the US. A poll in the moderate Arabic electronic paper Elaph in August showed that the Arab main street is aligned to the American main street in judging the Ground Zero Mosque to be a bad idea. 58% percent were against it. It appears that most people the project as an unnecessary and counter-productive provocation. Whether they are Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims. Most would readily agree with a Muslim view of the sharia lunatic fringe which would have had no chance in attracting followers were it not for the glut of oil money in the hands of the religiously obsessed.

A control question for Joy Behar: why does a Lebanese Liberal Joseph Bishara does not believe imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a moderate Muslim ? (answer here)

I was a Srebrenica-denier

Yes, I admit it. From the distance of fifteen years it seems hard to believe that I stayed in that political heresy for so long, but it really did make sense at the time that the media lied about Srebrenica as it lied about almost everything else in the fighting in the disassembling Yugoslavia. What finally convinced of me of my folly were the first trials in the Hague, in which the accused Bosnian Serb officers did not defend themselves by saying "it did not happen" but by saying "I really wasn't involved". It could only mean one thing: it did happen.

Four years ago I wrote to a University of Philadelphia professor whose heart, like mine, was with the Serbs but who unlike me, did not find a way to deal with their ugly propaganda and their lies.

The letter comments on professor Ed Herman's essay The Politics of Srebrenica , published on ZNet a year earlier.

The unfortunate events took place in East Bosnia in the summer of 1995.


April 17, 2006
Dear Professor Herman,

I have had a long-standing interest in the history and politics of the Balkans, and special hobby called “propaganda”. Like yourself, I do not accept the official version of what happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia and consider the distortions and untruths that have flooded the media a reflection of the deeply flawed US/UN/EU policies in the region. I agree with much of the analysis that you (and writers like Diana Johnstone) have provided, regarding the causes and effects of the Balkan wars of the 1990’s. The perspective that you bring has been invaluable to me in many respects, whether it supports my own views or is at odds with them. As my overall view of the situation significantly overlaps with yours, I would like to explore – if I may interest you – the differences that we have in our respective approach to, and conclusions about the controversial subject of Srebrenica and the “politics” thereof. (Referring to your essay, The Politics of Srebrenica on ZNET, from July 2005)

There cannot be any doubt that the unfortunate events after the fall of Srebrenica in the summer of 1995 have been used, and colored, and inflated in importance, for political purposes. The hugest canard of course is the charge of “genocide” that has been slapped on all Serbs for what appears to be a large-scale week-long murderous cabal to which a small number of Serb professional officers – some technically without a country - allowed themselves to descend to. My concern is with the historical fallacy of this accusation, and the events which such charge suggests, however has very little to do with Serbs, and the need to defend their actions. It has much to do with the historical fact of genocide, and our duty to understand the motives, the aims and the root of the diligent persistence, in annihilating a population of humans. If the word should convey the ultimate horror of inhumanity, a function for which it has been designed, it cannot become an object of legalistic football, in which it is applied liberally to any war nastiness, and to incidents of episodic wartime slaughter even if they are horrific and damnable. And even more so, “genocide” cannot become a semantic turpentine which dissolves meaningful boundaries between words and concepts in which the evidence of some Serbian helicopters flying to Bosnia in violation of a self-imposed arms embargo is easily exhibited as proof of Serbia’s president planning unbridled pillage and mayhem in all of Balkans.

The singular blame for the bloody end of Yugoslavia falls on the shoulders of the EU. I would say more specifically, Germany, who pursued aggressively its own interests in the two northern republics, but since Germany was a member of EU it is reasonable to conclude it would not have acted outside that body had it had a strong consensus around the minimal exit conditions for the new constituents in the dying Yugoslav federation. Among these, the most important were guarantees – unambiguous, effective and reciprocal – of minority ethnic rights for all the successor states. As general Boyd said (in one of the docs on the Srebrenica Research Group site), once the war started, all the ethnic entities had an identical goal, the avoidance of becoming a minority within the new frontiers. The abysmal failure of Europe to enforce its standards in this respect, led directly to the rebellion of Serbs in Croatia, and the éclat of hostilities in Bosnia. The problem with Croatia was not simply that it wanted independence, but that its nationalist leaders wanted also hegemony over the region, something that the large Serb population within Croatia made extremely difficult to realize. Hence the impetus for the unacceptable state policy of Serbian assimilation/ expulsion. The aims and means of the policy were clearly demonstrated from the start and no-one can pretend they were not there for all to see.

So far, I believe, my reading of the historical wall does not diverge from yours. However, I do have a significant issue with the Serb response, in the general sense, which you will see, projects into my reading of Srebrenica. You correctly pointed out, for example, that the JNA bombardment of Vukovar, was preceded by months of terror against Serbs in the city, the purpose of which was to intimidate first the SDS activists, and then Serbs generally, by increasing the intensity of random violence against them. The official history of the war remains silent on this undeniable fact, which prefigured the vandalizing of the city by the JNA heavy guns and the first large-scale deployment of the Serbian brand of the atrocity specialists, the efficiency of which, unfortunately, appears to be many Serbs’ special pride. (In case you are wondering, I am referring to what Milovan Djilas called the Serbs’ “love of the bandit”.)

And therein lies my problem! One cannot deny the absolutely unnecessary level of violence which the Serbs unleashed, given the military situation which was hugely in their favour. The bombardment by the JNA and outrages against civilians committed by Arkan’s, Seselj’s and Bokan’s troopers cannot be excused by the murderous spree of Mercep’s HDZ gangs. (Incidentally, the Vukovar “governor” was arrested and taken to Zagreb in a trunk of a car by Croat security to be investigated for “excesses”, in advance of the first JNA shells falling on the city.).

It may be that the JNA was utterly incompetent in utilizing its overwhelming strength against a poorly defended city, but given the known hawkishness of its General Staff, it appears that it wasn’t just being ham-handed, as the Russians were during their first Chechen war in taking Grozny. No, this looks much more like bloody mayhem exacted in retribution which fell below ‘tolerable’ on the scale of humane conduct of war ! I don’t think anyone who really has a sense of fairness can fail to acknowledge this aspect of the war chapter. Furthermore, the problem appears to have been of a generic nature. The Serb shelling of Sarajevo had for most part no military purpose. Neither had the half-hearted attempt at the defacing of the Pearl of the Adriatic. General Mladic first distinguished himself in leveling the town of Kijevo. Why would anyone who holds the strategic and material advantage the Serbs had at the start of the two wars want to behave in this fashion ? Did they not realize that the lack of judgment, discipline and often a recognizable military objective, would be used against them heavily in the propaganda war?

There may be people who might say, well look, naturally the Serbs are no angels but consider the bigger picture. By the ITCY own body counting study (Tabeau & Bijak, 2004) the total proportion of Serb (16,700) to the total civilian casualties in the 1992-95 Bosnian War (55,000) seems to be very close to that of the total prewar populations. That does not argue well for the genocidal genius of the Serbs. The cynic may even point out that even if the Serbs killed 8,000 innocents in Srebrenica, they still “only” kept up with the Hadzihasanovices. All this may be true but really misses my point. We need to know what happened around Srebrenica in July of 1995 and acknowledge the vile nature of crude revenge for terrorist acts taken on Muslim war prisoners and civilians at large, if that is what really happened. Pointing from massacres on one side to massacres on the other side just won’t do as a historical method. To find out what happened, we need to put away the blinkers and prejudices and assumptions cross-dressing as conclusions of a fair inquiry. Let the chips fall where they will.

I consider it unfortunate that you began your analysis of the political uses of Srebrenica by asking the cui bono question. As a disinterested historian, I would prefer to ask first what happened, and how I know it happened, before asking – if I need to ask - who benefits from the exercise. You state, off the bat, that the “claims” of a massacre at Srebrenica were “extremely helpful” to Izetbegovic, Tudjman, and Clinton. To which I would reply, that I don’t care a hoot, and that the historical truth of an event does not at all depend on how it will be used or who will find comfort in it. The truth about the Katyn massacre, for example, was extremely unhelpful to the Allied cause and presented a propaganda windfall to the Nazis. Does it in any way help us to understand what happened and why ? The answer is, no, of course not.

You state that the Clinton officials rushed to Srebrenica to confirm the atrocity just as William Walker did later at Racak. I do not accept the link. The best I can make of it is that you seek to dismiss the reports of the earlier event off-hand, by pointing to the later one, in which a strong case for a fraud has been made. Be it as it may, the two incidents are unrelated, in the sense that nothing that happened in one can be assumed automatically to have happened in the other. The disappointment with the US officials’ curiosity should be only that it was not equally whetted by reports of atrocities in which the Serbs were the victims. Their investigating allegations against Serbs (if that is what Walker actually was doing) was correct and called for ! As for the two incidents, Racak , I believe, was demonstrably a fraudulent manipulation of corpses for the purpose of manufacturing an event. Srebrenica, on the other hand, appears overwhelmingly (on the undisputed evidence available to us all at this point) to have been a large scale massacre of unarmed or disarmed Muslim men taken prisoner by the Serb Bosnian army and security police.

There is a good historical example of the dangers of making conclusions about Srebrenica on the basis of Racak.

The 1939 invasion of Poland came after a series of diversions by the Abwehr and SS (the post office bombing in Danzig and assault on the radio-station in Goerlitz most famously) and Goebbles’ propaganda milked them as the incontrovertible proof of the Poles’ blood lust. Scores of stories of mass rapes, killings and assaults by Poles on Germans living in Poland filled the Nazi papers. In the end, the Fuehrer had no choice but to put stop to the outrage against his people and defend German interests in Poland.

In the first days of the war, another of those stories of blood-curdling, sprawling atrocity appeared in the press. It was quickly dubbed ‘der Bromberger Blutsonntag’. Thousands ethnic Germans were allegedly murdered in Bydgoscz by the retreating Polish army and the fleeing criminals who disturbed the peaceful Volksdeutsche in Silesia abducted to Poland by Versailles. Now, given the elaborate hoaxes of special SS commandos, which simulated large scale assaults by uniformed Polish soldiers (concentration camp prisoners were dressed up and then shot), the news was greeted in the West by skepticism. The Times accused the Germans of fabricating atrocities as they had done in the campaign against the Czechs. (Oddly, the British government commission of inquiry credited those as genuine before Munich). The Polish government vehemently denied that massacres took place. But they did take place, and the murders were on large scale as the city exploded into an orgy against the German ethnics. The historical chapter on the events of Sep3-4. 1939 has still not closed. The neo-nazis claim 58,000 were dispatched (as the killings spread into the countryside) , adjusted for inflation from the 10,000 that Goebbles counted. The Polish philistines seek their refuge with the figure of a few hundred Germans dead as a result of their shooting at the Polish Army out of their house windows. Some smaller incidents seemed to have happened in other places as well, and the respectable historians from both sides have been converging on the number of 5,000 as the total civilian casualties suffered by the German ethnics during the invasion. But the historically big questions to this day, is how far the massacres have been spontaneous breakout of mass psychosis of revenge for the German attack, and how far it was organized by the Polish army and intelligence, in a bizarre and crazy plot to intimidate the German-speaking population seen as Poland’s fifth column.

The lesson learned here I think is clear – one cannot use one wrong as a license for another wrong, and one cannot fairly conclude that a staged massacre in one instance is a guarantee that a real massacre did not occur in another, especially if we are talking wartime. The undisputable wrong done to the Germans of Bydgoscz cannot be excused by invoking the large context which gave rise to the lawlessness against them, Germany’s unprovoked all-out assault on Poland. And just like the case of Blutsonntag in Bromberg will not go away until the Poles find the decency to admit that the Nazis did not have monopoly on atrocities during WWII then the spectre of Srebrenica will not go away until the Bosnian Serbs will likewise find their way to owning up to the nastiness their army leaders unleashed on their prisoners in July 1995. For that exercise, what happened later in Racak, or how Croats behaved in Krajina, or why Fikret Alic smiled on the Trnopolje picture, become wholly redundant issues.

Your long preface about the political bonanza of false claims of massacres and the serial lying by the West about Serb aims and misdeeds fails to convince me, and no doubt will be seen by those whose attitude to the Serbs is much less friendly than mine as a calculated deception. For my own part, I am writing to you with in the sincere hope that you are not familiar with many of the concrete charges against the VRS (the Bosnian Serbian Republic Army), the substance of which has not been legally challenged by the defendants in the Hague proceedings in the eight years they have been presented there. Be it as it may, the purpose of your speculations seem clear – to deny that a large-scale massacre did take place and to deny that by now it has been established beyond reasonable doubt. This, I believe, is regrettable not only from the point of view of moral hygiene; it also has the effect of enabling and strengthening the anti-Serb propaganda.

The imperial court in Hague claims that not only there was a large-scale massacre which is undeniable, but one that was ‘carefully planned’ and executed as part of a concerted genocidal plan, which is a lie ! That lie, I am convinced could have been handled fairly easily had the Serbs and most of those who are in sympathy with them acted with integrity in the aftermath. But they did not and countered with a lie of their own. They fashioned a tale in which only minor and unauthorized excesses happened amid otherwise peaceful and orderly transfer of the Srebrenica population. The individual acts of retribution, we are told, were due to large atrocities the enemy army had previously inflicted on Serbs in the city and villages nearby ! Unfortunately, the facts of the events do not support such a view, and they are handily available through the media and on the Internet. The masses and even intelligent people will be much more inclined to accept the false, larger representations made by the ITCY than to conclude that Srebrenica was essentially a blood libel on the Serbs. Moreover, because it is clumsy and childish, the Serbian lie is much more easily tackled:

So, you are telling us that these crazy Oric hudlums were killing and burning your villages, even on Christmas, and when they accuse you of taking a big blood tax on the men of his town for what the goons had done to you, you are saying, no, we only killed a few of the guilty ones and we regret the excess !

And the longer such nonsense is repeated, the more it looks like the Serbs wanted to kill all the Muslim males to grab as much their land in Bosnia as they could, and lied about Oric’misdeeds (the poor guy, Wikipedia says, is also being tried by the ITCY but only for some police station beatings), as they are lying now about shooting max 100 men, expecting people to believe that took care of the “revenge on the Turk” the puffed up Mladic gleefully promised in front of the Bosnian Serb TV cameras during the roundups. The Srebrenica ‘deniers’ tales are self-contradictory and offend common sense. Worse still, compared to the ‘no-organized-massacre’ lie, the ‘genocide’ lie looks not just more probable and internally consistent, but more humane. In the competition of untruths, the defenders of Mladic and his cronies do not stand a chance.

I shake my head when I see that some people still want to believe that the VRS behaved honourably in the hour of its greatest temptation. They blind themselves to the obvious. Is it not strange that the two army groups involved in taking Srebrenica and securing their new lines did not produce the minimum credible number of live POWs in the pursuit of leaderless and disoriented enemy fighters ? I ignore the naive, and frankly odious, mendacity of the “Forbidden Report of 2002” from Banja Luka, in the explanation of the pathetically low numbers of male survivors and claims that hundreds of soldiers “cleared” of war crimes and kept in camps were later exchanged. It appears that many of the 164 prisoners from Srebrenica counted by the ICRC at the Batkovic camp in July 1995 were transported there directly from the city hospitals. Scores of them were amputees. The pathetic POW “deficit” itself all but annihilates the assertion that the nastiness were isolated incidents of ‘spontaneous retribution’. Sadly, the obduracy only reinforces the perception the believers want to combat – that the Serbs are irrational, vicious killers without conscience !

The question of how many people actually perished as prisoners of the VRS is a complex one and by no means settled by some self-validating assertions. You are free to disagree with the figure of 8,000 and the methods it was arrived at. However, you may not ignore a number of important revelations that have not been challenged even by the Serbs themselves. The formula of “three and five”, i.e. three thousand Bosniaks captured and five thousand unaccounted for and presumably dead at the hands of the hajduks was questioned again and again while back and the objections were repeated at the 10th anniversary (here in Canada by general MacKenzie and ambassador Bassett). But much has happened in the last five years that shifted focus in the numbers game. New grave sites were discovered. No “forgotten” survivors showed up. Most importantly, the Krstic/Blagojevic/Obrenovic trials in the Hague produced some hugely damning evidence which simply cannot be talked around. Intercepted VRS radio communications confirms large haul of male prisoners indicating between 4 and 5 thousand were in Mladic’ “care” in the first five days after the city’s fall. General Krstic’ appeal did not question the transcript or the interpretation (of the coded phrases) of an intercepted conversation between himself and colonel Beara (the man alleged to have been the chief co-ordinator of the effort), in which the latter requests ‘help’ with the execution of his remaining 3,500 prisoners. Krstic’ lawyers argued only that the conversation should have been interpreted as his refusal to help. The call was made on the 15th of July, i.e. two days after the mass shootings began. The Dutch government study of Srebrenica, whose facts have not yet been refuted, says the only hard number of prisoners in VRS custody - 6,000 - apparently originated with VRS itself (Col. Jovanovic to Major Franken), although even that tally looked like an estimate. The intercepts themselves, the Dutch concluded, support a claim of between 4 and 5 thousand prisoners killed by July 18. The study estimates the total losses of uncaptured Bosnian soldiers (through combat, suicide or exhaustion) at 1,500 which would present a credible ceiling for all Srebrenica casualties at about 7,500. Since records were not kept by either side, the investigators conclude that we will probably not known ever the exact number.

Likewise, the claim that there is no proof of the Serbs’ opening the graves and relocating the bodies will not hold water. Contrary to what you say the one “known” to the US intelligence (Konjevic Polje) was photographed and the tampering with the site was widely publicized (in newspapers) in comparing the aerial photos. As to the “mysterious” delay in the VRS order to relocate the bodies from the other sites, it was suggested - plausibly – that the VRS General Staff did not realize there were survivors who could locate the “northern” killing fields. It was when people like Rohde started to poke around that the VRS brass realized they needed to cover their tracks. Even though the ITCY has not yet heard an eyewitness who participated in the exhumations (Obrenovic’ testimony was second-hand knowledge), the prosecution facts have not yet been disputed in the trials that concluded. But despite the efforts to hide the bodies, a significant number of them was discovered and the total estimate by the 2002 Dutch report was 4,600 in mass graves, some of them still not opened. The present ITCY estimates, adjusted for commingling, hover still around that figure, even after the discovery of a new mass grave near Bratunac in 2004. Naturally not all the remains relate to casualties from July 1995, but the take is significant. While the KLA claims of mass graves in Kosovo never produced anything of note, the survivors from Srebrenica led the investigators to sites of real horrors.

The factual evidence before the ITCY and data collected by the Dutch investigatotrs, while inculpating the VRS leadership, and Mladic personally (-he is referred to in the army intercepts as the “boss” -), still looks very unfriendly to the thesis of a meticulously executed genocidal plan. From what is known and not seriously disputed, it appears Mladic and his staff took a decision (or confirmed an earlier one) on the morning of the 12th to “prosecute war criminals” among the prisoners, which was then (perhaps as early as that afternoon) quickly replaced by orders to disperse the prisoners and shoot every one of them. What exactly determined the change in policy remains unknown, but one can guess. The idea of trials seems like a non-starter for an army engaged in combat. Besides, the paperwork would have given the game away.
In a nutshell then, while the orders for the shooting and its co-ordination came without question from the General Staff, the whole process gives the impression of makeshift happenings not planned in advance, and which simply began to be improvised on a large scale after a small Serb reconnaissance detachment entered the city on July 11 and, against all expectations, found it undefended.

Several factors seem to have influenced the decision to shoot the prisoners :

The largest consideration that dominated everything in the background, should go to the historical reasons that you are familiar with. Everyone who was conversant with the issues on the ground knew, that the Serbs’ thirst for revenge far exceeded individual personal accounts to settle. Almost all the prominent military UN personnel, and a number of politicians commented in advance on the bad blood that existed between the fighting sides in Eastern Bosnia. The Dutch report noted that the hatred between the two armies facing each other was well in excess of other places. Everywhere else in Bosnia the enemies kept lines of communication open. No line to Oric existed – the first attempt at talking was made by the Serbs immediately before their offensive. They learned Oric was not there. (BTW, I am entirely ok with the thesis that Izetbegovic had a devilish plan in the pullout of the garrison, as he knew the Drina army would go berserk with the survivors. If he in fact had such a plan, my sole concern would be – and I am sure you can guess by now - with the origin of his clairvoyant powers.)

What the Dutch failed to mention in their generally fair analysis is that, on the Serb side, the inventory of wrongs did not start with the mayhem wrought by Oric. It just so happens that the region between Bosna and Drina also figured prominently among the areas where the Serb population was decimated during WWII. In many ways, Oric’ raids were simply a repeat of the assaults that the Serbs endured two generations prior and which then were still in living memory. The area quickly became a partisan territory, and, inevitably, also the Cetniks bored in. For the Ustashe, the land had a special significance, as the river Drina was the frontier of Greater Croatia (“sve do Drine”). The problem was in that there was a majority Serb population in the territory. Pavelic dispatched his most distinguished band of butchers, called “Crna Legija” (Black Legion) to fix the unfriendly demographics by cleansing the place of the “bivshi Srbi” (“former Serbs” which is how the Ustashe state officially referred to them - the double meaning in that intended !). The black shirts sacked Srebrenica in April 1942 murdering thousands of Serbs in the city and the villages around in one of the revolting mass killings in that war. “Srebrenica” then became a battle cry for the Serb nationalists. Unable to exact their revenge on the spot, the Cetniks produced an able replica of the horrors (if not one better !) taking Foca in the south as their stand-in prize in January 1943.

When Lewis MacKenzie, the UN commander in Bosnia was asked in early 1993, what he thought of creating a “safe” zone around Srebrenica, he replied he would need one hundred thirty thousand men to protect the area effectively. Commenting on the events in 2005, the former general unfortunately omitted to mention the evidence before the ITCY which inculpated the army command in thousands of deaths and which was not disputed by the defense lawyers. Equally, he did not seem to be aware that Oric operated in the vicinity well before a “safe area” was declared and that Mladic’ Drina Corps, as an army unit, was created practically out of scratch, specifically to suppress the large-scale Muslim terrorism in the Bratunac area which dated back to spring of 1992.

By mid 1993, with Mladic closing in on the pocket, even Milosevic was alarmed and leery of great bloodletting. It also appears (on Lord Owen’s word) that his personal intervention dissuaded Mladic and Karadzic from going in that year.

The psychology of the VRS highest-ranking officer needs to be taken into account as a factor. What exactly prompted Mladic to renew his push for the enclaves in 1995 is still open to debate. Without a doubt, the reasons above played a big role, even if Oric’ actions were rather subdued compared to his punitive expeditions two years prior. The most likely immediate impetus for Krivaja 95, was the relative ease with which the Croats overran the SAO pocket of Western Slavonia in May 1995 (Operation Flash). Indeed, the maneuvering of Mladic forces suggested a quick reduction and then strangulation of the Srebrenica enclave, much like the Varazdin brigade did with Okucani. Given that his relationship with Karadzic was at an all-time low, he might have concluded a decisive military victory on the ground would be treated as a fait-acompli by the politicos, as was the case with the Croats. Srebrenica and Zepa were seen as large bargaining chips for the post-war carving of Bosnia, and since the end-game was near, their possession improved the Serbs negotiating position. All indications so far (except the highly controversial testimony of Deronjic against Karadzic) point to Mladic acting alone, basically informing Pale about his decisions after the fact. Karadzic’ and Krajisnik’s fortunes were fading fast, having been fingererd by Siladzic as scoundrels who would offer Serb land for quick cash in their Swiss accounts, had to lie low for a while and accept Mladic’ rule as warlord.
The Dutchbat officers recalled that the general became extremely belligerent when the UN threatened his forces with air strikes for overrunning the “protected area”, given that UN just said “hello”, packed their bags and went home when the Croat tanks arrived in Okucani. What the Ottoman Turks knew, but evidently not the UN, is that “you never threaten a Serb”, to control him or as a way of assigning to him a role of an inferior. Mladic’ ordering cold-blooded murder easily falls into a classical stereotype of Serb reaction to injustice, real or perceived, which the psychologists describe as “victim’s rage”. Mladic, forever the macho-man, despised the UN and NATO forces as cowards who would not fight (him) like real soldiers, instead killing his men from planes they knew he could not attack. Similarly, he despised Oric as low-life, a security thug who would not face what was coming to him. Hell, if they can kill defenseless men at will, why can’t Mladic ? How can he hold his own, if he allows scruples to creep into his confrontation with sissies and degenerates ? Did the Ustashe spare his father when he fell into their hands at a time the fighting was over in May 1945 ?

Among the secondary, immediate, concerns in the decision to kill the captives, probably the most important was the VRS’ lack of intelligence about the size and intentions of the enemy fighting force which was on the loose and inflicting casualties. Mladic’ offer of “safe corridor” for the Bosniak columns made on the 19th has been taken by most analysts as sheer propaganda. Yes, but I think the motives need to be understood better. I believe that Mladic, and his Zvornik brigade commander Obrenovic, knew of the large prominent vulnerability that the prisoner situation aggravated. Their forces were now engaging around Zvornik and Zepa. They knew they were running a risk with the Bosniak forces retreating across their lines that they could be re-deployed by an energetic action from Tuzla. If the moving men met with re-inforcements, received supplies and reversed their march, they could quickly wreak havoc in the Serbs’ rear. In the scenario, the prisoners represented a prize of several thousand fighting men. Likely Mladic preferred not to take such risks, especially when the bulk of Bosniak fighters failed to materialize at an intercept point on the 12th. The offer of the “corridor” could be read as a probing maneuver delayed after the prisoner liability was dealt with and VRS lines were consolidated to a point where the general felt confident no big harm could come from the enemy calling his bluff.

Finally, given the sudden, unexpected turn of events which produced the influx of prisoners, the order to execute them quickly, probably was also a convenient way out of a logistical crisis they created. The lack of food and drink the surviving Bosniaks complained about testifies not as much to the captors’ exceptional brutality (though I have no illusions on that score) but to the lack of supplies available. The logistical woes had also to do with the local Serbs civilian population, in the area which suffered heavy casualties from Oric’ raiders. Indeed, there were reports by both sides of “spontaneous” attacks on the prisoners, from among the soldiers and civilians. The situation quickly became critical in Bratunac where the civilian authorities were in open rebellion against the army demanding the immediate removal of the prisoners. With both the Zvornik and the Bratunac brigades engaged, the number of soldiers and MPs available to guard the prisoners was inadequate. Alternately, the “shortage” may be explained as reluctance of the commanders to get involved in an atrocity and a gross violation of war conventions. Much of Krstic’ and Obrenovic’ legal posturing at the Hague would suggest that the senior officers, outside Mladic’ personal retinue, would fall in the second category. (We will see if this hypothesis holds in the coming trial). All of this naturally created dangerous internal tensions and a risk of mass break-outs of prisoners. The first large-scale killing in the warehouse at Kravica almost certainly came about as a result of a disturbance among the prisoners, and not as a scheduled execution. The Serbs reported that their soldiers started to lob grenades from the outside when a group prisoners overpowered a guard, took his submachine gun and started shooting. The Kravica incident bespeaks of lack of provisions, manpower, and administration for the new POWs which with the hostility of the locals were powerful factors in the regrettable events that followed.

You say that justice cannot be one-sided or it ceases to be justice, and of course I agree. The ITCY record has been abysmal, both in administering justice and its custodial care. Nothing speaks of the incompetence of the court as the (late) judge May dismissing as “irrelevant” the evidence of the Jasenovac camp in 1940’s as important in shaping the Serb Krajina’s view of the regime in Zagreb in 1990. The obscenity of such a ruling whether made through ignorance or sheer ill-will cries to heaven. The case of Milosevic being deprived of the results of his health-report, especially given what was in it, also shows a pitiful lack of integrity and equity in the court’s operation. Even if there was compelling evidence the noxious substance was self-administered, the court had an absolute duty to inform Milosevic instantly and take appropriate measures to stabilize his health. As it was known to the jailers that the prisoner had a history of depression, a thorough exam should have taken place to ascertain the motives for his endangering his health.

But whatever the woes, something needs to be done.

I can’t help but notice the generally poor record of most of the Serbian leadership in the post-Titoist times in defining and executing policy initiatives. Instead of allowing the army to march directly into Zagreb (which was undefended) and send the Tudjman policy architects to prison or back to exile, Milosevic let it get bogged down in a crazy demolition job in Vukovar and suffer a huge black eye in public relations as a result. The lack of initiative, and meaningful objective, led to a loss of vital JNA garrisons and the momentum in Croatia, creating a Sitzkrieg which effectively stripped the Serbs of their military assets. On the political front, Milosevic, could not effectively control the Knin and Pale local agendas, and tipped his hand in dealing with a U.S. State Department underling, who he knew was hostile and intent on blackmailing. His legacy of hedging, missing opportunities and atrocious PR skills vis-à-vis the Western media has been passed onto the current Serbian leadership.

Carla del Ponte, on her last visit to Serbia, should have been publicly challenged for Milosevic, and invited – as a gesture of goodwill and compromise - to prosecute Mladic in Belgrade. Have Tadic and Kostunica not realized how much has changed in the Franco-, and German-US relations since 1999 and the silly relic that the ITCY has become of past European complicity in the hapless US 1990’s intervention in the Balkans ? Would France and Germany not be warming to the idea that Serbia appears to be a threat to Europe only in Washington’s late edition of global strategy, now disjointed and self-defeating to a point where it can be held in check by provincial satraps who can control a few dozen suicide bombers ? Instead, Kostunica in Paris appeared on the defensive, bobbing and weaving, forever pledging to “respond to his obligation” to deliver Mladic to the Twisted Swiss Sister in the Netherlands.

As for the Bosnian Serbs, their idiotic “Srebrenica report” of 2002 , followed by a pathetic apology in 2004 are again nothing if not the wrong responses to pressure. They should have gathered the best they have (including English translators) and put together a cogent, truthful account of what happened, carefully going through all the evidence with the historical background of the animosities.

So opportunities have been lost, but Belgrade still can come to the rescue and put together something solid and dignified for all Serbs. It is absolutely imperative that the Serbs produce an authoritative version of the events in East Bosnia by themselves and for themselves, across the current borders. No chest beating, no hair pulling - just the truth ! They and only they possess still undisclosed facts which will help to shed light on the end of the much abused “UN safe area” of Srebrenica. The Dutch report opened a beam on a little known, but absolutely critical side view – the shock and panic that the initial reports of Srebrenica ‘liberation’ created in Belgrade among the senior politicians and the military. Stories like the ‘Cosic’ mission’need to be presented in order for the outside world and posterity to grasp the complex relationships between the Serbian political entities and their leadership. I am heartened by the public revulsion in Serbia the Kandic’ videos have produced. And again, it does not matter what her ulterior motives were (or if there were any), because this wound of Srebrenica needs to be kept open until it is properly treated and has a chance to heal. Otherwise it will continue to fester, in a society dominated by fear, lies, corruption and murder.

So professor, here are my two cents worth for the debate. Next month, the Srebrenica Mega-trial of Nine is scheduled to begin at the Hague, and the media circus will start again. I thought, perhaps you might want to look at this again and update yourself on the developments. If you want to discuss further, by all means, I am yours. Fare well !

Best regards,



Afterword: Professor Herman never responded. The trial of the remaining Srebrenica officer was concluded in June 2010, after many delays, and resulted in the conviction of two Mladic lieutenants (Vujadin Popovic, Ljubisa Beara) for ‘genocide’. No credible evidence was presented from the Serb officers’ defense to dispel the accusations of organized mass killings.