There were two reasons for my visit to Belgrade last fall. His Beatitude, the Serbian Orthodox patriarch Lord Paul (82 years old), invited me to his official residence to honor me for “my endeavour to interpret objectively the all-Serbian tragedy.” I was decorated with the Order of St. Sava I, the highest decoration of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The soft-spoken Lord Paul welcomed my wife and me very cordially. He expressed his sadness about the events in Yugoslavia: “I experience the suffering not only of our Serbian people, but of our Muslim and Croat brothers as well.”

From Belgrade, we traveled as the official guests to the Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We were surprised by the relatively good quality of the road from the frontier town of Zvornik to Pale. The gas stations were well supplied, their prices were much lower than in Germany, or in our republic. Soon after leaving Zvornik, we saw many burned-down, mostly Muslim houses, on both sides of the road. It was the response to the massacres of Serbs by the Muslim militia, mostly from Srebrenica, which razed to the ground, during less than one year (1992-93), more than 30 Serbian villages. The less damaged houses were occupied by the Serbian refugees from Sarajevo. Instead of roofs, plastic sheets were used, anchored by stones. Windows—except for one, which was typically covered with plastic sheets to let some light inside—were covered with planks. Glass is almost nonexistent here. It was raining, with a lot of fog and mud around. At Sokolac, we stopped for a while in a nice café— the pizza there was among the best we ever had.

One can get from Belgrade to the municipality of Pale in four to five hours. It is approximately ten miles east of Sarajevo, whose inhabitants used to spend their weekends there before the war. There are many summer residences and bungalows, a few hotels, restaurants, small cafes. Before the war. Pale had about 15,000 inhabitants; now there are 40,000 or more. Their numbers increased markedly after the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Sarajevo, as a consequence of the Dayton Peace Accord. There are still craters here from the NATO bombing of civilian targets, after the Muslim-staged explosion at Markale II on August 28, 1995.

We arrived at Pale just before nightfall, and our driver drove us to the mountain hotel Bistrica near the top of Jahorina mountain, built for the winter Olympic games in 1984. In spite of the four years of fighting near Sarajevo, the hotel was still in very good shape—clean, warm, and with a lot of lights. That evening I received the medal of Njegos, for organizing the humanitarian aid to Republika Srpska and for my fight against the flood of disinformation.

We were welcomed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Republika Srpska, Mr. Aleksa Buha, a university professor from Sarajevo before the war. To save his life, he had to leave his home hastily in 1992, losing all his property. He introduced us to Mr. Luka Popovic, the president’s Chief of Protocol. The ceremony was short and cordial, and both Serbian television and radio covered the event. During the dinner that followed, Mr. Buha talked about the Dayton dictate, imposed on the Bosnian Serbs in the same way as the Munich dictate was forced on Czechoslovakia in 1938. The loss of the Serbian parts of Sarajevo meant a loss of 30 to 40 percent of the industrial capacity of Republika Srpska. The plight of the Serb inhabitants (70,000 to 100,000) who had to leave their homes and all their property was immense. Before the war, Sarajevo was the second largest Serbian city, with only a slight Muslim majority. The Dayton dictate took away the almost ethnically pure areas around Drvar, Clamoc, Bosansko Grahovo, where the Serbs represented 80 to 90 percent of the whole population. There, in the Dinara mountains, the United States army established its shooting ranges and training camps. The Germans are also there—they committed many crimes here half a century ago, and nobody is embarrassed. The Dayton Accord absolutely forgot about the expelled Serbs from Mostar—they constituted one third of its inhabitants.

Republika Srpska desperately needs capital investments. The Yugoslav dinars and the German marks are used there. “The only things we export now are the timber and electricity,” said Luka Popovic:

For one cubic meter of timber you get 150 marks. If it is in planks, it brings 300 marks. We have large deposits of bauxite, zinc, lead, and iron. We need just the industry and the transport system to start. We’ve got some financial help from our Serbs in Diaspora. From your Czech government and from your various government-sponsored humanitarian organizations, we did not get anything—all the help went just to the Muslims. During 1993, it was mainly their army that took most of the humanitarian aid. We admire the patience and the ability of our people to survive the catastrophic circumstances and the shortage of almost everything. How to employ the demobilized young men, what to give to the refugees, invalids, to the old people? Where could we get money to buy the indispensable medical supplies? You cannot realize how many people, especially children and the elderly, died in our republic as a consequence of sanctions, especially when we were expelled together with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from the World Health Organization [in 1993].

The next day, we went to the modest one-story government building in the center of Pale. There I received a phone call from the dean of the new medical school at Srbinje (previously Foca). It was Professor B. Starovic, the famous plastic surgeon who used to live in Sarajevo before the war. I promised him a few lectures for his medical students the next spring. In the courtyard we met Mr. V. Vucurevic, the living legend of Herzegovina, where he successfully defended his town Trebinje against Croat aggression.

A member of the Parliament of Republika Srpska invited us to a cafe just opposite the government building. He was from Doboj, from the purely Serbian Ozren hills range. The Dayton dictate gave half of it to the Muslim-Croat federation. The town of Doboj, severely damaged by Muslim and Croat artillery, was overflowing with refugees from Ozren. The Bosnian Serbs do not like the troops of the French Foreign Legion, who engaged in black marketeering, the smuggling of arms to Muslims, and the illegal transferring of Mujaheddin and Turkish officers through the Serbian lines. They respect the Spanish soldiers.

Luka Popovic explained how the Muslims cheated during the last elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina. From the registered Muslim voters, just 103 percent voted! And

the American, Mr. Frawick, did not argue at all. If we [the Serbs] did it, he surely would declare the results invalid. When we voted for our president, Mrs. B. Plavsic got 59 percent of the votes, the Muslim candidate, A. Djozie from the Izetbegovic SDA party, got 17 percent. In our Serbian parliament, a sixth would be represented by Muslims. In the Muslim-Croat federation, no Serbian candidate achieved anything similar, no Serbian political party was there. . . . The officials from Sarajevo are trying hard to prove the existence of the nonexistent ‘Bosnian language.’ It is really funny, because it is just the Serbo-Croat language, with a few Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, often quite garbled words added, to prove the 500 years of Turkish reign.

The most popular personalities of the Republika Srpska are still Dr. Radovan Karadžic and General Ratko Mladic, symbols of the Serbian fight for survival. We met many people, and almost all of them had the same opinion. The War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague is considered a political affair, an extended arm of American interests, supported by a totally one-sided database of the Tribunal. Most of the documents about the crimes against Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina were repeatedly “lost” on their way to The Hague Tribunal. Such a Tribunal cannot be fair. The unlawful detention of two high-ranking Serbian officers, released after many weeks, proved it. One of them. General Djukic, died of cancer a few days later. When in jail, he was without any proper medical treatment.

People find the Tribunal similar to the monstrous trials during Stalin’s era. Mr. Goldstone is seen as similar to the Soviet prosecutor general, A. Vyshinski, who “according to law and justice” sent thousands to death. Fighting, destruction, and deaths are the consequences of this civil-ethnic-religious war, where nobody is innocent. Why did The Hague Tribunal not indict Mr. Izetbegovic, who did not hesitate to kill his own people in three staged explosions in Sarajevo, whose men killed thousands of Serbian civilians all over Bosnia, all around Srebrenica? Mr. Tudjman’s armies exterminated thousands of Serbian civilians in Krajina, in western Bosnia and Herzegovina; they repeatedly overran the U.N.-protected UNPA zones and expelled 200,000 Serbs from Krajina—and nobody indicted him. During the war almost one million Serbs were expelled from their homes—who did it? Whose money destroyed the multiethnic Yugoslavia? Many Western diplomats (e.g., Albright, Holbrooke, Kornblum, etc.) practice the purest form of “gunboat diplomacy”; they are often arrogant when dealing with their opposite numbers from Republika Srpska.

“Welcome to Pale, to the Serbian Sarajevo!” Dr. Karadžic greeted us cordially during a private visit to his study, with a map of Yugoslavia behind the desk, along with two or three icons. Why, he asked,

have we not the right of self-determination, so aggressively given to others? It is just unbelievable how the Western media portrayed us in their absolutely one-sided, biased approach—out of ignorance and for money. For this reason, we appreciate the courage of those who dared to tell the truth.

Dr. Karadžic is a well-known, prizewinning poet as well, and he gave us two autographed books of his poetry.

At Han Pijesak, deep in the woods, is the supreme command of the army of Republika Srpska. General Milan Gvero, General Mladie”s deputy, welcomed us cordially. During our discussion with the general and his staff officers, coffee and plum brandy (slivovica) were served. Americans, he explained,

have over Bosnia and Herzegovina two spy satellites continuously— they “see” even the license plates of ears. During the four years of flight controls, the NATO planes carried out more than 100,000 flights and supplied all the information to the Muslim and Croat military. Nevertheless, our resourceful men managed to outwit them repeatedly. . . .

 

There is one fact that I must stress to you. Do you remember the massacre at Markale II on August 28, 1995? It was staged by the men of Izetbegovic. Our intelligence had reported two days before that explosion that something terrible was going to happen in Sarajevo. And within two days the trigger-happy Americans and their NATO servants started their attacks on our military and civilian targets. They must have known that all that was just a provocation, but still they used it as a pretext to attack us, in collaboration with the ground forces of Croats and Muslims. The anti-Serbian disinformation made monsters out of us again, and changed the course of war. NATO became a direct ally of Muslims and Croats—and the mighty America started a cowardly full-blown war against a handful of Bosnian Serbs.

The Americans are bringing huge quantities of sophisticated new weapons into Bosnia and Herzegovina, and they are training both the Muslim and Croat troops. Isn’t a new war being prepared? Retired elite American Army generals play the role of mercenaries. . . . It is not the way peacemakers behave. Why must we and our civilians keep the war industry in full swing?”

I remembered again the soft-spoken voice of his Beatitude the patriarch; “I experience the suffering not only of our Serbian people, but of our Muslim and Croat brothers as well.”