New book, video defend Yugoslavia

Although U.S.-NATO forces ended their aggressive air war against Yugoslavia six years ago, their propaganda war to demonize Serbs and their leaders continues. However, despite great material disadvantages, Yugoslavia’s defenders are countering this propaganda assault.

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark.

That was the message of a meeting and video showing at the International Action Center office in Manhattan June 4.

The meeting featured the New York premier of the English version of Michel Collon and Vanessa Stojilkovic’s video documentary, “The Damned of Kosovo.”

The IAC also launched an appeal to support its new book, “The Defense Speaks--for History and the Future.” This is an English translation of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s opening defense argument before NATO’s anti-Yugoslav court (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, which he delivered last Aug. 31-Sept. 1.

To continue propagating the “Big Lie,” on June 2 NATO's court released a videotape showing alleged atrocities by Serb forces in Srebenica in Bosnia in 1995. Two speakers at the IAC meeting, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and Kingsborough Community College Professor Barry Lituchy, exposed the ICTY’s bias on this issue. They had reiterated these arguments during an earlier interview by CNN international as well.

According to Lituchy, the video was "just a smokescreen" to cover up the ICTY's failure to bring out any credible evidence against Milosevic during two years of prosecution. The ICTY claimed the videotape would implicate President Milosevic in mass deaths at Srebenica. Lituchy stressed that "the video doesn't link any officials in Serbia to those events in Srebenica." He added that the official charges, and Milosevic’s defense, are now limited to 1998 and 1999 in Kosovo.

IAC Co-coordinator Sara Flounders said that the excuse behind the NATO occupation--that there were mass graves in Kosovo--has long since been proven to be a fraud. Forensic teams from 17 NATO countries spent the entire summer of 1999 in Kosovo and did not find one mass grave.

“The media just continues to repeat the Clinton administration's now-disproved lies,” she concluded.

Close to half the people filling the IAC meeting room June 4 were from the Yugoslav community in New York. They volunteered labor and material support for the new book. Radmila Milentijevic, a New York resident who was information minister in Milosevic’s government in 1997-1998, and Milo Yelesiyevich of Serbian Classics offered to review the English translation.

Milentijevic called Milosevic's opening defense talk "a concise and complete history” showing how the big powers tore apart Yugoslavia from 1990 to 2000.

Flounders thanked IAC intern Jovana Ruzicic for her hard work organizing the book’s text. She also called attention to Milosevic's strong statement as he ended his presentation to the ICTY: “[Y]ou cannot imagine what a privilege it is, even in these conditions that you have imposed on me, to have truth and justice as my allies.”

Collon and Stojilkovic’s powerful documentary video, "The Damned of Kosovo," brought out another truth. U.S. President Bill Clinton argued that the U.S.-NATO intervention was aimed at helping the people of Kosovo against supposed Serb oppression, and would prevent ethnic cleansing. Instead, NATO’s occupation of the Serb province of Kosovo and Metohija has brought ethnic cleansing against all the minorities of the province: Serbs, Roma, Egyptians, Muslims, Goranis, Jews and Turks.

And it has brought misery to the majority of ethnic Albanians. And it has left the province in the hands of the terrorist NATO-backed "Kosovo Liberation Army" and organized crime.

The filmmakers show interviews with representatives of each of these groups and graphically reveal the criminal destruction of Kosovo’s many Orthodox churches and homes on NATO's watch.