Serbia Revisited

Yesterday I came across a tweet that featured a video clip from an interview with a former Canadian ambassador, who directly blamed the war in Bosnia on the United States.

Before I go there, I want to add my recommendation to commenter Cassander’s—Glenn Greenwald’s two and a quarter hour long review of the Russia Hoax. It actually provides useful background to the Russia Hoax that can also be trace back to the original sin following the end of the Cold War—the NATO assault on Serbia. Because of the close cultural ties between Serbia and Russia I would also argue that the motivations for the wars on Serbia and Russia share common characteristics—as well as a common cast of characters. For those who are, understandably, daunted by the length of Greenwald’s presentation, I would suggest that you could get a pretty good overview by listening from 1:31:00 to the end, 2:15:00. That section embraces the discussion with Aaron Maté, which is quite good. I would argue, as previously, that there’s even more that was going on, but two important areas (out of several) in which Greenwald and Maté hit home runs:

• Greenwald, a smart lawyer, puts huge emphasis on the issue that I did for so long: the utter—and conscious—lack of predication behind the entire legal and investigatory apparatus that was set up in pursuit of Trump. This marked a fundamental—and as we’re now seeing—irreversible breakdown in our constitutional order. This can’t be stressed highly enough, and Greenwald shows how this runs through the entire storyline of this overthrow of our constitutional order. I would only criticize his failure to indict Bluto Barr for his role—but, hey, even two and a quarter hours isn’t sufficient to plumb the depths of personal and institutional evil on display in the Russia Hoax. As GG says at one point, “it’s astonishing.”

• Both Greenwald and Maté cogently present the incredible and cynical recklessness on display in the Russia Hoax—for foreign policy, and obviously for Russia policy. They argue, plausibly, that without the Russia Hoax America would not now be at war with Russia. In doing so they go fairly deep into post Cold War history. Again, more could be said, but this is like a tangled ball of yarn with one loose end sticking out.

Now, here we go with Serbia. As usual, I can’t embed the video from X, but I’ve provided an exact transcription:

Aleks Djuricic @AleksDjuricic

James Bissett—former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia during its breakup—reveals the true historical context and events that led to the Bosnian war in the 1990s.

This will shock those only familiar with the false and deceptive mainstream narrative.

"The people that started the war, the government that started the war, was the United States. There was a referendum in Bosnia about independence, and that was defeated. My neighbor, who was the US ambassador in Belgrade--he lived across the street from me--when an agreement was signed by all three religious groups [Serbian Orthodox, Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats] that there would be peace in Bosnia and no declaration of independence without all three representatives being part of that, my neighbor, the US ambassador Warren Zimmerman, went to Sarajevo and convinced the Muslim leader, Izetbegovic, to declare unilateral independence. And that he did, of course, and that was what started the war, because the 39 or 40% of the Serbian population there refused to accept the idea of living under Muslim law or Sharia law by the Muslim leadership. So the story goes back in history, of course, because those Serbs had been subject of the Islamic Turkish [Ottoman] Empire for many centuries and had fought to free themselves from that. They did not want, in the middle of the twentieth century [and after being devastated in two world wars featuring the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Nazi Germany], to once again have to live under Muslim rule. And that meant war. And everybody in the Balkans knew that meant war, if the Muslims' Declaration of Independence was declared. So who really started the war?

6:30 PM · Feb 3, 2024

The ambassador’s remarks raise, of course, the typical American failure to appreciate historical factors. This stems from 1) typical American ignorance of history, and/or 2) the fact that such history as most Americans may be familiar with is of little use in understanding the problems the American Empire has blundered into around the world. Instead, the usual response on the part of the minority of Americans who pay attention to foreign affairs is that the problems we cause are to be blamed on the benighted foreigners who don’t know how to get along with one another, like proper Americans gifted with a divinely gifted Constitution do.

On the other hand, Warren Zimmerman was not your typical American. On the contrary, he was a highly experienced diplomat who had previously had two tours in Moscow—among other places—and surely understood the consequences of his actions, which were surely done at the express order of Clinton. And here I can’t help but recall Lawrence Wilkerson’s (not my favorite guy) characterization of Clinton as the most despicable—he may actually have used the word “evil”—president in US history. At any rate, an internet search re Zimmerman is revealing with regard to the current crises as well as Serbia. It all hangs together.

US fingerprints:

Aleks Djuricic @AleksDjuricic

Feb 3

“Who really started the war?”

The globalist neocons.

Aleks Djuricic @AleksDjuricic

Here’s something interesting about the Bosnian War: On March 18, 1992, Serbs, Croats, & Bosniaks signed the Lisbon Agreement—a peace agreement that would have prevented the war. On March 28, 1992, Bosniaks withdrew their signature after a meeting with US Ambassador Warren Zimmermann. The war began a week later.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

“‘At the peace negotiations in Istanbul in March 2022 with [the now Defence Minister of Ukraine] Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans,’ Schroeder told the German newspaper.” https://intellinews.com/former-german-leader-schroeder-divulges-more-on-russia-ukraine-peace-deal-that-seemed-within-reach-297990/?source=russia

Aleks Djuricic @AleksDjuricic

Oct 24, 2023

What happens next?

• Al Qaeda is born, trained, armed, and organized;

• Europe opens its borders; 9/11 occurs;

• and the Empire’s entire globalist nation-building project is set into motion.

Aleks Djuricic @AleksDjuricic

Time to pull this article out of @amconmag archives:

The Bosnian Connection: The civil war that inspired both liberal hawks and Islamist jihadis

“It is striking how many al-Qaeda attacks were facilitated or carried out by veterans of the Bosnian jihad.”

7:14 PM · Oct 24, 2023

What follows are Djuricic’s excerpts from the linked article. The article attempts to link the motive’s for liberal anti-Serb hatred with that of the jihadis that the West imported to Bosnia:

Aleks Djuricic @AleksDjuricic

“It is widely known that the Mujahideen first emerged during the Afghan-Soviet War of the 1980s, when they were armed and trained by American, British, Pakistani, and Saudi intelligence. Less well reported is the fact that Western forces later facilitated the movement of Mujahideen into Bosnia… The Clinton administration, which encouraged the arming of the Bosnian Muslim Army by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and various dubious Islamic charities, helped to open a gateway.”

“How did two polar opposite forces—Western liberals and Eastern Holy Warriors—come to be on the same side in the Balkans 15 years ago? I believe that both camps adopted Bosnia as a special cause in response to their own crises of direction and legitimacy. In his book Divided Europe, Adam Burgess explains why the liberal Left was so fervent about punishing the Serbs: ‘Deprived of the traditional staples of left-wing politics [after the Cold War], the search for an alternative became increasingly pronounced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The left embraced new causes. It is in this context that sense can be made of the readiness of the left to embrace the anti-Serbian ‘cause’ with less restraint and qualification than even the rest of society.’

“The Mujahideen also embraced the anti-Serbian cause because they had lost direction. In the early ’90s, Afghanistan was becoming bogged down in civil war after the withdrawal of the Soviets, and governments in the Middle East and North Africa were persecuting veteran Mujahideen as they returned from the Afghan theater. Bosnia was a godsend (or perhaps an ‘Allah-send’) for the Mujahideen. The civil war occurred at a ‘propitious’ time for the ‘stranded foreign fighters,’ writes Kohlmann. For both Western leftists and the Mujahideen, Bosnia became a refuge from their harsh realities—a place where they could fight fantasy battles against evil to make themselves feel purposeful and heroic, rather than having to face up to the problems in their movements.

...

Also see:

https://twitter.com/AleksDjuricic/status/1744937855649223111

I personally don’t see it this way. The fact that Christopher Hitchens—a radical liberal and atheist—and most other liberals should hate Orthodox Serbia is, in my mind totally of a piece with their hatred of Orthodox Russia—Serbia’s protector. We are witnessing not a new crusade on the part of the left but a continuation of the same old war on the West’s historical roots in Christian faith. It’s the same mentality that has no problem with arming and training radical jihadis—al Qaeda, ISIS—and turning a blind eye to their butchery of Yazidis, Christians, Shiites, more moderate Sunnis, etc. My assumption is that the Neocons whose schemes are supported by these liberals believe that, once the jihadis and the migrants and the survivors of the pandemics have done their job, the whole mess will sink into a contented secular globalism—happy, but owning nothing. They always think their next latest and greatest plan will be the key.

If you read your history, after Serbia most everything follows logically. Russia, of course, with its keen understanding of historical dynamics and of liberalism in the West, understood at the time exactly what was going on and what to expect—and began taking measures to defend itself.