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Damning evidence against Croatia unearthed at The HagueTribunal - Magda Hassan - 27-04-2009
But of course they sat on this. Now, if it had been Serbia we would never have heard the end of it.
DAMNING EVIDENCE AGAINST CROATIA UNEARTHED AT THE HAGUE TRIBUNAL
www.slobodan-milosevic.org - April 24, 2009
Written by: Andy Wilcoxson
Recently the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague started an online database of court documents. In this database you can find witness statements, trial exhibits, and other documents used by lawyers arguing cases at the ICTY. Although the database is not as complete as it could be, it still contains some very interesting material.
One document that I unearthed while perusing the Tribunal’s new online database was a transcript of a meeting that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had with his top military and police commanders on July 31, 1995 -- just days before Operation Storm.
In the transcript Tudjman is planning the operation together with his top military brass, and the things they said at that meeting are absolutely damning to Croatia.
At the end of this article I will give you a link where you can download the whole transcript to read it for yourself, but before I do that I would like to draw your attention to some selected passages.
On page 2 of the transcript Tudjman explains the goal to his generals. He says, “We have to inflict such blows that the Serbs will to all practical purposes disappear.”
On page 15 Tudjman makes it clear that he means ethnic cleansing. He says, “it is important that those [Serbian] civilians set out, and then the army will follow them, and when the columns set out they will have a psychological impact on each other.”
Expanding on Tudjman’s remarks general Gotovina says, “if we continue this pressure, probably for some time to come, there won’t be so many civilians just those who have to stay, who have no possibility of leaving.”
The most damning remark that Tudjman makes with respect to the ethnic cleansing campaign is on page 29 of the transcript. Tudjman explains that, for the benefit of propaganda in the international community, leaflets should be given to Serbian civilians saying, “We are appealing to you not to withdraw, we guarantee … This means giving them a way out, while pretending to guarantee civil rights etc…” That’s right he said “pretending to guarantee civil rights” with the operative word being “pretending”.
Tudjman was very conscious of propaganda. He said on page 1 that “every military operation must have its political justification.” For Tudjman and his generals this meant staging fake Serbian attacks. On page 19 Tudjman says that the Serbs “should provide us with a pretext and provoke us.”
Chief of staff Zvonimir Cervenko replies, “We should ask Markac to do that.”
Mladen Markac, a high ranking official in Croatia’s interior ministry, interjects saying, “… and we accuse them of having launched a sabotage attack against us and of heading towards Maslenica, of intending to go over Mt. Velebit to the road from Karlobag to Starigrad, that they want to cut it off, and that’s why we were forced to intervene.”
General Davor Domazet responds, “I think it would be best to do it in the following way. They are using Udbina airport, we can organize an explosion as if they had struck with their air force and in this manner we can disguise all our axes.”
The fact that Croatia is prone to staging fake attacks against itself raises some disturbing questions in the context of its recent admission to NATO – especially given that Article 5 of the NATO charter says, “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
This is hard evidence of a conspiracy that goes straight to the top of the Croatian political and military structure, and it gets worse. To gain time to prepare their ethnic cleansing campaign, Croatia participated in the Z-4 peace negotiations in bad faith and the Germans knew it.
On page 2 of the transcript Tudjman explains that he will agree to send a delegation to the Z-4 negotiations in Geneva “as a mask.” On page 32 he expands on that remark saying, “I am going to Geneva to hide this and not to talk … I want to hide what we are preparing [so] we can rebut any argument in the world about how we didn’t want to talk.”
The transcript contains strong indications that Germany, which apparently hasn’t taken the right lessons from its Nazi past, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Croatian ethnic cleansing campaign. On page 1 of the transcript Tudjman says, “We have a friend, Germany, which consistently supports us.” On page 32 of the transcript Tudjman says that Germany supports the planned operation. He says, “Kinkel has promised that Germany will support us, but we have to inform them ahead of time.”
If the Tribunal had this kind of evidence against any Serbian leaders you can bet that we never would have heard the end of it in the media. According to the date-stamp at the end of the document, the ICTY prosecutor’s office has had this transcript in its possession since 2003.
You can read the whole transcript for yourself at:
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/documents/tudjman_transcript.pdf
Damning evidence against Croatia unearthed at The HagueTribunal - Jan Klimkowski - 27-04-2009
Magda - I'm not easily shocked any more.
However, that the butcher Tudjman would be willing to commit his ethnic cleansing and false flag attack (Gladio "strategy of tension"-style) policy to writing is shockingly stupid.
For once, the neo-fascist gun is smoking.
But MSM's preposterous narrative of the Balkan Wars is that the Serbs are monsters and everyone else is on the side of the angels.
So MSM will ignore this. As MSM has ignored the ethnic cleansing and murder of Serbs so that their organs could be "harvested" and sold. As MSM has ignored Operation Storm, the US/NATO mercenary (MPRI) and Croatian neo-fascist/Ustasa-led ethnic cleansing of c200,000 Serbs in Krajina. As MSM has applauded the Idiot Milliband's statements about the "uniqueness" of Kosovo's case for a unilateral declaration of independence. And as MSM forever ignores the creation of a US sovereign state in Camp Bondsteel, with Halliburton cleaning up on the costs-plus contracts, and the KLA running drugs, guns and women for American intelligence.
Shocking? Yes.
A tragedy? Absolutely.
Damning evidence against Croatia unearthed at The HagueTribunal - Jan Klimkowski - 29-05-2013
Sigh.
The butcher Tudjman arrogantly states his commitment to ethnically cleanse Serbs, but gets found guilty of ethnically cleansing Bosnian Muslims.
Quote:Bosnian Croat leaders convicted for ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia breakup
Hague court hands out 10- to 20-year sentences for 1990s wartime chiefs' terror campaign to seize Muslim territory
Ian Traynor, Europe editor
The Guardian, Wednesday 29 May 2013 17.13 BST
Bosnian Croats convicted at The Hague, 29 May 2013
Bosnian Croat leaders at The Hague war crimes tribunal on 29 May before conviction. From left, standing, Jadranko Prlic, Bruno Stojic, Slobodan Praljak, Milivoj Petkovic and Valentin Coric. Photograph: Jiri Buller/AP
Croatia's wartime leaders of 20 years ago have been found guilty of orchestrating a campaign of terror and atrocities to drive Bosnian Muslims away and to seize their territory.
On Wednesday, during a landmark trial at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague, six Bosnian Croat leaders received sentences of 10 to 25 years for leading the campaign to carve an ethnically pure Croatian mini-state out of Bosnia, through violence and terror, with plans for Croatia to annex the territory.
The trial, which has lasted seven years, amounted to the first close judicial examination of the Bosnia policies of Croatia's first president, Franjo Tudjman, an extreme nationalist.
The verdict was damning. The judges stated: "All six were found guilty for their participation in a joint criminal enterprise with the objective to remove the Muslim population from the territories on which the Bosnian Croat leadership, with the leadership of Croatia, wanted to establish Croat domination.
"These crimes were not committed in a random manner by a few undisciplined soldiers. On the contrary, they were the result of a plan put together by the JCE [joint criminal enterprise] members to remove the Muslim population."
The six guilty included the political, military, and police chiefs of the Croats in Bosnia. The judges also named Tudjman, his defence minister, Gojko Šušak, and his army chief of staff, all now dead, as co-plotters in the brutal land grab of 1993-94.
The land grab triggered a Muslim-Croat war-within-a-war in Bosnia, the main conflict being between Serbs and Muslims.
It was the first time the leadership in Zagreb had been found responsible in court for what, to many, including one of Tudjman's successors, the former president Stipe Mesić, was a disastrous policy.
The most spectacular and dramatic episode of the systematic campaign came in November 1993 when Croatian forces in Herzegovina shelled Mostar's 16th century Ottoman bridge spanning the Neretva river.
The destruction of the architectural masterpiece, known as the "stari most" or old bridge, was condemned globally as an act of cultural barbarism. The officer held responsible for directing the attack, Slobodan Praljak, a former assistant minister of defence, received a 20-year sentence on Wednesday.
The Croats forced Muslims out of their homes on the west bank of the city into the ancient Ottoman quarter on the east side, then shelled and besieged them for months.
The city remains ethnically divided until this day. The Croats erected a soaring Roman Catholic cross to dominate the skyline above the mainly Muslim eastern side.
Before the Croatian then Bosnian wars erupted in 1991-92, Tudjman met the late Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević at a hunting lodge near the Serbia-Croatia border to plot dividing up Bosnia between them.
At that time, in January 1991, during a break one day from a tennis game in Zagreb, Tudjman told the Guardian the aim was to replicate the arrangement of 1939 when Belgrade and Zagreb split Bosnia between them to create Greater Serbia and Greater Croatia.
In a whirlwind of violence against civilians in the first months of the Bosnia war from April 1992, the Serbs seized more than half of Bosnia.
In early 1993 the Croats then moved on their land grab, encouraged by the efforts of Lord Owen whose territorial division awarded tracts of ethnically mixed central Bosnia to the Croats.
The Croats torched Muslim villages, massacred hundreds of elderly peasants, set up a string of camps where inmates were tortured, conducted night-time roundups in the towns to evict non-Croats, and prosecuted the siege of east Mostar.
The aim was to establish the mini-state called Herceg-Bosna in the south-west of the country bordering Croatia proper.
Croatian forces, the court found, "exercised extreme violence, Muslims were woken up in the middle of the night, beaten and forced to leave their apartments, often still in their pyjamas. Many women, including a girl of 16, were raped".
One of the three judges dissented from the verdicts.
The tribunal concluded: "The ultimate purpose was to create a Croat entity, to unify the Croatian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later these areas were to be either joined with the Republic of Croatia, or remain in close association with it."
Read the full article at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2013/may/29/bosnian-croats-convicted-ethnic-yugoslavia#ixzz2Ui2DTrau