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KNIFE, WIRE, SREBRENICA
During the game, Rad’s fans shouted slogans such as “Knife, wire, Srebrenica” and “Serbia for the Serbs, out with the Turks.”
Among those arrested there were 47 Rad supporters who are under the age of 18.
Vuksanovic told B92 that he is concerned by this behavior shown by young people and that they have gone astray or have been disregarded at some point in their upbringing.
Vuksanovic said that the state institutions must react strongly to this racist behavior seen frequently at sporting events.
“Without strong reactions from the judicial institutions, quick processes and strict punishments, you cannot expect to have order. We should not make up and guess what the cure will be – we need to do what everyone in the world is doing in the fight against the same exact type of occurrences, which are obviously a problem in many societies.” Vuksanovic said.
Police arrest 152 Belgrade fans for racism
Belgrade police arrested 152 fans for racist insults at a Serbian second division match between local team Rad and Novi Pazar late on Wednesday .
“Police officers have arrested 152 Rad supporters, including 47 juveniles,” police said.
“The offenders shouted slogans inciting racial, ethnic and religious hatred and intolerance.”
The home fans shouted anti-Muslim slogans at Novi Pazar players and police moved in to remove them from the stadium.
Novi Pazar is a Bosniak-majority town in western Serbia. Some ultranationalist Serbs are hostile to Muslims, often glorifying the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of over 8,000 Bosniaks by Bosnian Serbs.
It was a second outbreak of racism at Serbia’s soccer grounds in four days after a black player was abused during a first division match on Saturday.
Borac Cacak’s Zimbabwean striker Mike Tawmanjira was insulted by the club’s fans who wore white hoods with Ku Klux Klan insignia, did a Nazi salute and held a banner saying the player was unwelcome in Serbia.
Eight of them face charges of spreading racial hatred and prison terms up to five years if convicted.
Serbia’s sports and education minister Slobodan Vuksanovic strongly condemned the incidents and said “decisive action must be taken to deal with these people who have lost their way.”
“There will be no order unless the judicial authorities react swiftly and impose harsh penalties on the offenders,” he told B 92 television.
“We don’t need to invent any new solutions, we just have to implement what the whole world already has in order to combat this deviation many societies are obviously prone to.”
Mosque goers threatened in Niš (Serbia)
The Niš police have arrested two individuals from Pirot for threatening and insulting mosque goers in Niš.
Željko C. (21) and Saša Đ. (19) from Pirot, according to the police, “urinated on the walls of the Hadrović mosque building in a visibly intoxicated state” at around midnight last night. After several mosque goers confronted them, the two began to insult and threaten the Muslim individuals and threw stones at the mosque.
The two youths were taken into custody by the Niš police.
SREBRENICA GENOCIDE SURVIVORS RECEIVE THREATS
THREATS AIMED AT SREBRENICA MASSACRE SURVIVORS
Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica war crimes have been receiving vicious threats on their lives recently
The threats have come as a reaction to the published list of police officials who are suspected of having been involved in the Srebrenica massacre, according to Sarajevo daily
Oslobođenje.One woman from Srebrenica was threatened that she would be killed with pleasure the same way in which her sons were killed, according to the daily, which released some of the 810 names located on the list of those suspected of aiding and abetting the Srebrenica war crimes.
President and Vice President of the Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Association, Munira Subašić and Kada Hotić, said that they received such threats from the Republic of Srpska (Serb entity in Bosnia) directly after the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but that it has not happened recently; not until this list was published.
“We were threatened by a 065 number again. However, we are getting the angriest calls from hidden numbers. I am not afraid because I have nothing left to lose, so that is why I have not reported the threats to anyone.” Subašić said.
She said that at one time, she regularly received threatening calls from the wife of Republic of Srpska military general Radislav Krstić, who was convicted of genocide in Srebrenica before the Hague Tribunal.
Republic of Srpska Police Chief Uroš Pena said that police officials of the RS that participated in the 1995 war crimes will be criminally prosecuted and released from the police force immediately.
Pena said that those who did not participate in the war crimes have no reason to fear for their status and protest the appearance of their names on the list.
SREBRENICA MASSACRE BUTCHERS STILL ADMIRED IN SERBIA
BELGRADE, Serbia – The general still has his admirers.
In the musty headquarters of the Center for the Investigation of War Crimes Against Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, his portrait is prominently displayed on the wall behind Ljubisa Ristic’s desk. There were about 2,000 Serb civilian casualties in the war which Serbia waged against Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995 [source – as of Dec 15, 2005 data].
“My personal opinion is that he is a true soldier and a hero of the Serbian people,” Ristic said.
It is not clear how many other Serbs feel that way about Gen. Ratko Mladic, the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb army and chief executor of its ethnic cleansing campaign.
“I’d say 75 percent of the Serbs see him as a war hero,” said Aleksandar Tijanic, who heads the state-run television network in Serbia. “But if you ask them if he should he go to The Hague to save the Serbs from more suffering, 75 percent would say yes.”
Mladic, who has been charged with genocide by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, has been on the run since the collapse of Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in October 2000.
Last month, the European Union broke off talks with Belgrade aimed at preparing Serbia for EU membership after President Vojislav Kostunica’s government missed another deadline for delivering Mladic. The United States followed suit this month, canceling a $7 million aid package to the Serbian government.
Carla Del Ponte, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, has claimed repeatedly that Mladic is in Serbia and within the reach of Belgrade authorities. She says the government simply lacks the political will to arrest him.
That appeared to be the case in February when there were feverish media reports that the general had been cornered at a hiding place near the Bosnian border.
“But instead of arresting him, they started negotiating with him,” said Bratislav Grubacic, a political analyst who publishes a widely respected newsletter.
The negotiations came to nothing. “And now they really don’t know where he is,” Grubacic said. “For this government, I think they prefer not to know.”
Vladan Batic, the former Yugoslav justice minister who ordered the extradition of Milosevic to The Hague in June 2001, agrees with Del Ponte that the present government lacks the political will to deliver Mladic.
“Kostunica was hoping that Mladic would surrender himself,” said Batic. “He knows Mladic is our ticket to Europe, but he’s afraid that if he gives up Mladic, he’ll lose a lot of votes and won’t be seen as a so-called patriot.” Batic, who heads a small opposition party and who retains good police and security contacts, believes Mladic is holed up at the Topcider military base, a large complex amid a forest outside Belgrade that has an elaborate network of tunnels.
State TV boss Tijanic, who is close to Kostunica, disputes the Topcider theory and also the suggestion that Kostunica is afraid of arresting Mladic.
“Today, Kostunica’s government is willing to send him to The Hague, but they don’t know where he is hiding,” Tijanic said.
Citing the recent arrests of about a dozen people thought to be part of Mladic’s support system, Tijanic claimed that Mladic has cut all of his contacts with the military and security forces and is hiding on his own.
The international community’s focus on Mladic has diverted attention from Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime political leader, also charged with genocide and still on the run.
There are three explanations.
The first is The Hague’s experience in prosecuting genocide cases, which argues that it is much easier to obtain a conviction against military officers, who answer to a clear chain of command, than it is against their political bosses. A second explanation is that Karadzic, who is believed to be in Bosnia, has done a better job hiding himself.
The last, based on a persistent rumor echoed by nearly every diplomat and expert in the Balkans, is that at the time of the Dayton peace agreement, Karadzic cut a deal that he would completely withdraw from politics if authorities would not try too hard to find him. Little has been heard from him since.
A year ago, public opinion in Serbia was shaken by a video recording that came to light during the Milosevic trial. It shows members of an Interior Ministry death squad known as the Scorpions executing six handcuffed Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were massacred in 1995, allegedly on orders from Mladic.
The video [source], shot by one of the participants, was shown on Serbian television and the government, for the first time, acknowledged that Serbs were guilty of atrocities. The killers, who were identifiable on the video, have been arrested and are being tried in Serbian courts.
Ristic, from the center for war crimes against Serbs, said the trials were appropriate, but insisted that the Scorpion tape has not shaken his faith in Mladic’s innocence.
“I was not there (Srebrenica), so I can’t tell you whether he ordered anything or not. But after our clear-cut victory, it was not in Serbia’s interest to do something like that,” he said.
Milan Protic, a historian who served as Yugoslavia’s first ambassador to the United States in the post-Milosevic era, said that only “stupid minds” in Serbia continued to view Mladic as a hero, but that it also is wrong for the EU and the United States to hold all of Serbia hostage to his arrest.
“He is an obsolete symbol, this dirty little Serbian commander from Bosnia,” he said, “but the West is using him to complicate all kinds of things for Serbia.
SERBIAN SONG PRAISES SREBRENICA MASSACRE
NEW SERBIAN SONG PRAISES SREBRENICA GENOCIDE
PETER HANDKE – SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIER
Srebrenica Genocide Denier and Milosevic’s Darling Kicked from French Theatre
… and then Awarded $50,000 EURO Literary Price – guess where? – in Germany (country with rich Nazi past, never-ending Holocaust denial, incurable Anti Semitism & Islamophobism). To award Srebrenica Genocide denier with $50,000 is same as awarding Adolph Hitler with Nobel Prize for Peace.
Handke, who lives in France, said in an essay in the French newspaper Libération: “Let’s stop laying the massacre … on the backs of the Serbian military and paramilitary. And listen — at last — to the survivors of the Muslim massacres in numerous Serbian villages around Srebrenica.”
On April 29, 2006, the daily Libération reported that Marcel Bozonnet had decided to scrap the play after having read a snippet published on April 6, 2006 in the Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine published every Thursday. The snippet called a sifflet (a “whistle”) — by the journalist Ruth Valentini read: Peter Handke in Pozarevac
“I am happy to be close to Slobodan Milosevic, who has defended his people,” said — in Serb — Peter Handke on March 18 on Liberation Square, in Pozarevac. The guest flaunted his grief along with 20,000 fanatics. Loyal to the “Butcher of the Balkans” and to his own revisionist position, the Austrian writer, author of Justice for Serbia, had come as a “truth seeker.” Thus Handke, for whom “to be pro-Serb is a honorific title,” persists in his defense of “Slobo,” considers that the Serbs are “the real victims of the war,” approves the Srebrenica massacre and other crimes done in the name of ethnic cleansing. Waving the Serbian flag, squeezing forward to touch the hearse and lay his red rose, Handke looks a sorry sight. With his tribute to the despot, the poet has definitively dug the grave of his lost honor.
“This is not censorship. It is one theatre director who has decided not to put on a play, but all the others can stage it. [Handke] is allowed a lot of freedom, so give me some too,” he added.
Those who, unlike Handke, were eyewitnesses to the horrors of Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia, like an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Roy Gutman, called these camps concentration camps and death camps.
Following his warped logic, Handke appealed to the wider public to stop making connection between Serbian military and paramilitary forces and slaughters of innocent civilians in Bosnia, including the most notorious one in Srebrenica, where at least 8000 Bosniak civilians, were killed by regular Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic.
For three weeks, I reviewed European history, from 1990 to date. I reviewed this terrible film! I reviewed it in my mind, ladies and gentlemen! I plunged back in this horror that ethnic cleansing was, the planning of these facts, of these crimes. I learned about all that Peter Handke had said, which I did not know . . . . I was scandalized by what Peter Handke said. In part I knew it but I did not know the extent: the work of historians systematically questioned, of war correspondents, of your papers, ladies and gentlemen, that have admirably informed us for years, that thanks to their work, their courage, pierced the wall of indifference. This is I found out what Peter Handke ridiculed….These are no longer suppositions, one cannot doubt Milosevic’s actions….it’s unbelievable, he does not know where is the world, he does not know where is the truth, he does not know where is history, he does not believe in the accounts from witnesses: that’s what he said on Milosevic’s grave!
Srebrenica Massacre 