SERBIAN PATRIOTIC FRONT

WHAT WAS JASENOVAC?

From August 1941 to April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Romas, as well as anti-fascists of many nationalities, were murdered at the death camp known as Jasenovac. Estimates of the total numbers of men, women and children killed there range from 300,000 to 700,000. And yet, despite the scale of the crimes committed there, most of the world has never heard of Jasenovac.

Following the Nazi invasion and dismemberment of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the "Independent State of Croatia" was established as a pro-Nazi government. It was dedicated to a clerical-fascist ideology influenced both by Nazism and extreme Roman Catholic fanaticism. On coming to power, the Ustashe Party dictatorship in Croatia quickly commenced on a systematic policy of racial extermination of all Serbs, Jews and Romas living within its borders.

Jasenovac was actually a complex of five major and three smaller "special" camps spread out over 240 square kilometers (150 square miles) in south-central Croatia. Along with hundreds of thousands of Serbs, some 25,000 Jews and at least 30,000 Romas were murdered in these camps. The names of some 20,000 murdered children of all three nationalities collected thus far by historians provides only a hint of the scale of the crimes committed there against children. Jasenovac is also known for having been one of the most barbaric death camps of the Holocaust for the extreme cruelty in which its victims were tortured and murdered. Jasenovac was not the only death camp in fascist occupied Yugoslavia, but it was by far the largest and the one in which a majority of the some one million victims of racial genocide in World War II fascist Croatia were exterminated.

But its significance also lies in the way in which the crimes have been concealed. Historians have called Jasenovac "the dark secret of the Holocaust" and "the suppressed chapter of Holocaust history." Public recognition of the tragedy that occurred there has been suppressed either partially or completely by governments and institutions for a variety of reasons. Today Jasenovac is located in the newly created state of Croatia, whose government has vandalized the site and refused to acknowledge the horrors that took place there. The failure of some leading Western academic and humanitarian institutions to fully recognize the historic dimensions of Jasenovac is a shameful omission that will tarnish their reputations forever.

But the enormity of the crimes committed at Jasenovac, the fact that the majority of the victims were Serbs who were killed simply for being Serbs, and the fact that the perpetrators included the Catholic Church, have made it an extraordinary and explosive issue that Holocaust deniers and historical revisionists cannot successfully manipulate for long should we focus all of our energies on bringing the truth to light. In doing so, we shall also unravel the whole ball of lies told about the history of Yugoslavia.

From the Brochure of the Jasenovac Research Institute, written by JRI Research Director Barry Lituchy, (c) 2000.

JASENOVAC

Entry in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edited by Israel Gutman, vol.1, 1995, pp.739-740

JASENOVAC, the largest concentration and extermination camp in CROATIA. Jasenovac was in fact a complex of several subcamps, in close proximity to each other, on the bank of the Sava River, about 62 miles (100 km) south of Zagreb. The women's camp of Stara Gradishka, which was farther away, also belonged to this complex.

Jasenovac was established in August 1941 and was dismantled only in April 1945. The creation of the camp and its management and supervision were entrusted to Department III of the Croatian Security Police (Ustashka Narodna Sluzba: UNS), headed by Vjekoslav (Maks) Luburic, who was personally responsible for everything that happened Some six hundred thousand people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, Jews, GYPSIES, and opponents of the USTASA regime. The number of Jewish victims was between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand, most of whom were murdered there up to August 1942, when deportation of the Croatian Jews to AUSCHWITZ for extermination began. Jews were sent to Jasenovac from all parts of Croatia from Zagreb, from Sarajevo, and from other cities and smaller towns. On their arrival most were killed at execution sites near the camp: Granik, Gradina, and other places. Those kept alive were mostly skilled at needed professions and trades (doctors, pharmacists, electricians, shoemakers, goldsmiths, and so on) and were employed in services and workshops at Jasenovac. The living conditions in the camp were extremely severe: a meager diet, deplorable accommodations, a particularly cruel regime, and unbelievably cruel behavior by the Ustashe guards. The conditions improved only for short periods during visits by delegations, such as the press delegation that visited in February 1942 and a Red Cross delegation in June 1944.

Three slaughterers and a commandant of the Jasenovac camp: Stipe Prpic, friar Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, and Jerko Maricic

The acts of murder and of cruelty in the camp reached their peak in the late summer of 1942, when tens of thousands of Serbian villagers were deported to Jasenovac from the area of the fighting against the partisans in the Kozara Mountains. Most of the men were killed at Jasenovac. The women were sent for forced labor in Germany, and the children were taken from their mothers; some were murdered and others were dispersed in orphanages throughout the country.

In April 1945 the partisan army approached the camp. In an attempt to erase traces of the atrocities, the Ustashe blew up all the installations and killed most of the internees. An escape attempt by the prisoners failed, and only a few survived.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Romans, J. Jews of Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: Victims of Genocide and Freedom Fighters. Belgrade, 1982.

Sindik, D., ed. Secanja Jevreja - Jasenovac, Belgrade, 1972.

from the JASENOVAC EXHIBITION CATALOGUE OF THE MUSEUM OF THE VICTIMS OF GENOCIDE, BELGRADE, (Belgrade, 1997).

Memorial Day for the Victim's of Genocide was established in the Law founding the Museum of the Victims of Genocide (Article 2), on the day which commemorates the day when the prisoners of the Ustasha camp Jasenovac broke out (April 22, 1945), as a memorial to the Serb, Jew, and Romany victims of genocide.

This exhibition has been prepared for the United Nations, because in the Archives of the Concentration Camps and War Criminals in New York, there is no mention either of Maks Luburic or Andrija Artukovic, and in the register there is no mention of the Jasenovac camp. In the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva there are only 20 photographs of "potemkin villages", which show the Ustasha death camp at Jasenovac as a labor camp.

On the Day of Human Rights, December 11, 1991, at the time when the Jasenovac camp was desecrated by the Croatian Armed Forces, the exhibition named Auschwitz: A Crime Against Humanity was opened, where it was stated that Auschwitz was the last of the large death camps which was evacuated, functioning at full capacity to the end of November, 1944.

At the last moment, in January, 1945, more than 50,000 prisoners who were able to walk were led from the camp. The Ustasha camp of death Jasenovac, worked at full capacity all the way to the end of April, 1945.

Belgrade was liberated on October 20, 1944. The corpses of Jasenovac's victims, which floated down the Sava River to the shores of Belgrade, have not been excavated and no requiem sung for them, not even after fifty years.

The Ustasha death camp Jasenovac was in fact, a system of death camps covering 210 square kilometers from the Dubica lime pits to Stara Gradishka, a road of death along the Sava River.

In the discussions about a political solution to the Yugoslav crisis, about the maps dividing Croatia, the Serb Republic and Republic of Serbian Krayina, the question of the status of Jasenovac must be asked - Jasenovac, the Ustasha death camp.

It must not be allowed that Jasenovac the Ustasha death camp - is destroyed by the transformation of administrative borders into international borders.

In the name of the victims of genocide - the Serbs, the Croat-Yugoslavs, the Jews and Romanies, the antifascists - the proposal of Franjo Tudjman, the head of the HDZ and president of Croatia, must be rejected. He proposes that the memorial area of Jasenovac should be turned into a general memorial center for all the Croatian victims in the Second World War - and that would mean the victims and war criminals alike.

The exhibition "Jasenovac - The Ustasha Camp of Death" carries with itself a message, an appeal to the international protection of the United Nations to save the Memorial Area of the camp system, the structures and the burial places, as a pail of world cultural heritage, in accord with the resolution of the European Council in 1993.

Dr. Milan Bulajic

Director

Museum of the Victims of Genocide

I. THE CREATION OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA- 1941

After the short-lived war in April of 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was divided among the aggressor countries: Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Horti's Hungary and Boris III's Bulgaria. In the meantime, while the war was still being fought, the founding of the Ustasha's Independent State of Croatia (abbreviated as NDH from the Serbo-Croatian "Nezavisna Drzhava Hrvatska") was proclaimed on April 10, 1941; territories besides those which were traditionally settled by the Croats were grafted into this state, including all of Bosnia- Herzegovina and parts of Serbia.

There were more than two million Serbs living in the newly created puppet state, who made up one third of the entire population of the NDH. There were also significant numbers of Jews, Romanies and members of other national groups. As soon as the NDH was proclaimed, the leader of this Italo-German fabrication, the head of the Ustasha named Ante Pavelic, began to carry out the Ustasha's program of the creation of a "purely Croatian area for living " and a " pure Croat nation". Namely, since the Ustasha were extreme nationalists, chauvinists and racists, they began to build their own state and institutions which reflected those of Nazi Germany. According to their ideologists, the condition for the creation of a purely Croatian state would be the expulsion of the Serbs ("Greek- Easterners"), the Jews ("Zhidovi") and the Romanies ("Gypsieso"). Claiming that the Serbs were both racially and religiously different from the Croats, they killed them, deported them or forcibly converted them. The Jews and Romanies were to be completely annihilated as they were considered to be lower races. The Ustasha government and its jurisdiction passed a series of laws, orders and regulations by which Nazi-fascist methods of terror and ethnic genocide were made legal (the Regulation on the Outlawing of the Cyrillic Alphabet, the Regulation on Racial Affiliation, the Regulation on Citizenship, the Regulation on Conversion from One Religion to Another, and so on). Yet, the most massive crime against the Serbs, Jews and Romanies was carried out outside the framework of those laws and legal documents. The Ustasha acted on their racial, religious and national intolerance without regard for any kind of laws or norms. The Ustasha government was supported by the greater part of the Catholic clergy and the Muslim religious community, and the Croatian Peasant also pledged their allegiance to the Ustasha government.

II. THE BEGINNING OF THE GENOCIDE OF THE SERBS, JEWS, AND ROMANIES IN THE NDH

The Ustasha's organization was a typically fascist organization and its military strength was an instrument for the implementation of the Ustasha's Nazi ideology.

The Ustasha army (>>Ustashka vojnica<<) was organized by Slavko Kvaternik, the >>second in command<< and it was made up of Ustasha units (filled out with volunteers) under the direction of the Central Ustasha Headquarters, of special police units (>>redarstvo<<) and the Home Guard (>>domobrani<<), and in August of 1941 the Ustasha Secret Service (abbreviated UNS after the Serbo-Croatian (>>Ustashka Nadzorna Sluzhba<<) was formed, with Eugen - Dids Kvaternik at its head. With the aid of these organizations, the greatest kind of genocide was carried out against the Serbs, Jews and Romanies in the NDH. In order to make it possible for only Croats and Muslims to live in the NDH, the mass physical destruction, expulsion and forcible conversion of the Serbs was carried out, along with the systematic extermination of the Jews, and the almost complete destruction of the Romanies. The mass murder of the Serbs began already at the end of April, 1941, with the massacres in the villages around Bjelovar, in Banija in May, in Lika in June, in Kordun, in Bosnian Krajina and in Herzegovina. It is thought that just in the period from April, 1941, to the middle of August, 1942, over 600,000 Serbs were killed in the most brutal ways imaginable, and during the entire war over 180,000 Serbs were deported to Serbia proper.

Jewish children being sent to Jasenovac

The terror of the NDH government was especially aimed at the Serbian Orthodox Church. Three Orthodox bishops and most of the Orthodox priests were murdered by the end of 1941 in the cruelest of manners. During the war, 450 Orthodox churches were demolished. The exact number of Serbs forcibly converted to Catholicism has never been established.

III. CONCENTRATION CAMPS IN THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA

According to the example of their protectors, Nazi Germany and the other fascist regimes, concentration camps were founded in the NDH for the purpose of >>purifying the nation<< of undesirables. The Ustasha called them >>collection<< or >>work<< camps, and they were designed for the mass internment and systematic total destruction of Serbs, Jews, Romanies, and >>objectionable<< Croats. The so-called >>Ustasha Secret Service<< (or rather its) >>Department III<< which was also called the >>Ustash Guard<< was in charge of the founding, organization and management of the concentration camps in the NDH. Although they were actually the same, >>Department III<< took care of the founding, organization and management of the camps, while the >>Ustasha Guard<< was assigned to forming military units which guarded the camps and carried out the task of transporting the Serb and Jewish people from the surrounding territories to the camps, and they were also those who killed the prisoners.

The first camps in the NDH were founded on the island of Pag at the place called Slano, on Mount Velebit near Gospic at a place called Jadovno, and in Bosnia at Krusica near Travnik. Besides Jasenovac, the larger camps were: >>Danicao in Koprivnica, Kerestinec, Lobograd, Stara Gradishka, Lepoglava, Jastrebarsko and Sisak. In the beginning there were no legal regulations about sending people to camps or the length of sentences. Such things were decided by Pavelic's emissaries, district prefects, deputy prefects, camp supervisors and other Ustasha commanders. Such practices remained even later, and when the regulations were finally passed no one obeyed them.

The first commander of >>Department III<< (the >>Ustasha Guard<<) and thus of the camps as well, was the Ustasha Mijo Babic alias >>Giovani<<, who was followed by Vjekoslav Luburic alias >>Maks<<. On the orders of Pavelic and Kvaternik, Luburic spent time in Germany as a guest of the Gestapo at the beginning of October, 1941, at which time he visited several German concentration camps. Upon returning to the NDH, he carried out a re-organization of the existing camps and founded new ones modelled after those in Germany, and formed a powerful military unit of the >>Ustasha Guard<< who carried out mass crimes directly under his command.

IV THE FOUNDING OF THE JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP

The Ustasha camp called Jasenovac was founded according to the model of camps in Nazi Germany, on August 21, 1941. it was the largest place of torture and execution which ever existed in Yugoslavia. With its horrors it was the largest concentration camp, and it was the third in the number of victims in all of occupied Europe, during the war years 1941-1945. With their sadism and pathological crimes, the Ustasha outdid even their Nazi German masters.

Unlike the German camps where industrialized genocide was conducted, in Jasenovac that genocide was done in a way never recorded in the history of the human race. All which was negative, pathological and criminal, which characterized the Ustasha movement as a whole, reached its peak in Jasenovac.

The Jasenovac camp spread out over 210 square kilometers, along the Sava River from Stara Gradiska in the east to the village Krap1je in the west, and from Strug in the north to the line between Draksenic to Bistrica in the south.

The choice of the wider region of Jasenovac for such a monstrous camp was made for several reasons. One of them was certainly the suitable geographic position. The Zagreb-Belgrade railway was in the vicinity and was important for the transport of the prisoners. The terrain was surrounded by the rivers Sava, Una and Velika Struga, in the middle of the swampy Lonjsko poije area, so that escape from the camp was almost impossible. On the other side of the Sava, the Gradina region was hardly accessible and often flooded by the river, uninhabited and far from all witnesses. It was the ideal place for hiding mass murders. The other possible reason for the choice of this place were the existing factories there; these were workshops for the making of chains, blacksmith shops, locksmith shops, brick factories, lumber mills and so on, so the camp was easy to present in public as a work camp.

V THE JASENOVAC CAMP SYSTEM

The Jasenovac concentration camp encompassed a system of camps along the Sava River, on the flood plain of the Lonjsko polje area.

The Ustasha's newspapers announced to the public, on August 23, 1941, that the first barracks for prisoners had been built near the villages of Brocice and Krapje, and that the camps would be used for the draining of Lonjsko po1je. In fact, that was the founding of the Jasenovac camp, or more precisely, Camp II called Brocice - >>Versajev<< and Camp 11 called >>Krapje<<, to which the first prisofters were brought, Jews and Serbs from the Ustasha camps of Slano and Jadovno. In the beginning the prisoners actually worked on building the dike, but under indescribably hard conditions and terror. Those who did not die from the exhausting work and hunger, being immediately buried in the dike, were killed when the camp was liquidated. In November of 1941, Camp III >>Ciglana<< (which means >>brickyard<<) was opened - the so-called III which quickly became the camp with the central management function for all collection and concentration camps in the NDH. The center of the camp lay beneath the village Jasenovac in the area of the industrial complex where the brickyard actually was, and that is how it got its name. Three-fourths of Camp III were surrounded by a wall 3 to 5 meters high, into which seven concrete bunkers were built and which had several guard towers. In front of the wall were three lines of tangled barbed wire, and in some places they were electrified. The fourth side of the camp faced the River Sava. As an integral part of Camp 111-C there was a special Ustasha Secret Service prison for specially selected prisoners.

Camp IV >>Kozhara<< (which means >>tannery<< was found in the village of Jasenovac, and prisoners worked in the tannery there under the most difficult of conditions. Camp V - Stara Gradiska belonged organizationally to the Jasenovac camp system. In the overall area of the Jasenovac camp three other special camps were organized. In the village Ustica, on the delta of the Una and Sava, an improvised >>Gypsy camp<< was located, where mainly Romanies were brought and killed, and the villages Mlaka and Jablanac were turned into collection camps for women and children.

VI THE PLACES OF EXECUTION IN JASENOVAC

The system of mass murder in Jasenovac was already in place in the fall of 1941, as soon as the larger transports of people began to arrive. The men, women and children arrived here by rail, truck, horse-drawn cart, or simply running at the insistence of the Ustasha with rifles. Places of mass execution were found all over the Jasenovac camp. Most of them were located on the right bank of the Sava from the Dubicki limepits downriver, and especially in the village Gradina. According to forensic science research, over 360,000 people were killed here. Murder of the prisoners was also carried out in the forest near the Krapje Camp, near the >>Versaj<< Camp and >>Ustica<< Camp on the whole left bank of the Sava, downriver from Jasenovac to Jablanac and Mlaka. Furthermore, within the complex of Camp III there was also a crematorium which was actually an oven for baking bricks; the Ustasha converted it according to the plans of Hinko Picili so that they could bum the prisoners in it. Within this circle, besides >>Picili's Furnaceo, there were also other places where people were tortured and killed and they were called >>Lancara<<, >>Tunel<<, >>Granik<<. >>Zvonara<<, >>Sablasno jezero<<, and so on.

In the Camp of Stara Gradishka, torture and murder were done in the cellars of the old Austrian Fortress, in the tower of the fortress and on the banks of the Sava.

The extent to which the system of killing was developed is witnessed to by a memorandum from the Headquarters Chief on April 27, 1942, directed to all Ustasha units and institutions, stating >>the collection and work camp at Jasenovac can receive an unlimited number of prisoners<<.

VII METHODS AND MEANS OF THE MASS EXTERMINATION OF PEOPLE IN JASENOVAC

From the summer of 1941 to the spring of 1945, death in Jasenovac took numerous forms. The prisoners and all those who ended up in Jasenovac had their throats cut by the Ustasha with specially designed knives, or they were killed with axes, mallets and hammers; they were also shot, or they were hung from trees or light poles. Some were burned alive in hot furnaces, boiled in cauldrons, or drowned in the River Sava.

Here the most varied forms of torture were usedfinger and toe nails were pulled out with metal instruments, eyes were dug out with specially constructed hooks, people were blinded by having needles stuck in their eyes, flesh was cut and then salted. People were also flayed, had their noses, ears and tongues cut off with wire cutters, and had awls stuck in their hearts. Daughters were raped in front of their mothers, sons were tortured in front of their fathers. Said plainly, in the concentration camps at Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska, the Ustasha surpassed all that even the sickest mind could imagine and do in terms of the brutal way people were murdered.

People in Jasenovac were no longer human beings, but rather objects which were available for the every whim of the Ustasha.

Even the Nazi generals were amazed at the horrors of Jasenovac. Thus, General von Horstenau, Hitler's representative in Zagreb, wrote in his personal diary for 1942 that the Ustasha camps in the NDH were >>the epitome of horror<<, and Arthur Hefner, a German transport officer for work forces in the Reich, wrote on November 11, 1942 of Jasenovac: >>The concept of the Jasenovac camp should actually be understood as several camps which are several kilometers apart, grouped around Jasenovac. Regardless of the propaganda, this is one of the most horrible of camps, which can only be compared to Dante's Inferno<<.

VIII WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE JASENOVAC CAMP

Many women, often with their children, were brought to Jasenovac. The whole village of Mlaka was turned into a women's work camp. Women were forced to do exhausting agricultural work in the vicinity. Executions were performed in the very close proximity of the villages of Mlaka and Jablanac.

Children at Jasenovac

In the process of >>purifying the Croatian nation<<, Serbian children were the first to be executed, together with the adults, even if they were still on their mothers's breasts. During the four years between April, 1941 to May 1945, more than 74.316 children were killed in the Ustasha's NDH. The youngest were still in the cradle, while the oldest were about 14 years of age. During the Second World War, the only place where there were special camps for children was Croatia.

From December, 1941, to April, 1945, in Jasenovac, the Ustasha killed 19.544 boys and girls of Serbian nationality, and their identities were later established. They were executed in atrocious ways and also died, more than the adults, from illnesses, famine, thirst, and frost. The Ustasha would drown small children in the Sava by tying up several of them in a sack and throwing them into the river. Many children (about 400 of them) were slaughtered in Jasenovac in mid-September, 1942. The children taken in 15 horse-drawn carts to the brickyard and burnt. A very similar fate befell the 300 kids who executed in Gradina on the afternoon of October -N. 1942.

IX PUBLIC PRESENTATION OF THE JASENOVAC CAMP

To the outside world, Jasenovac was presented as a work camp. The Ustasha's propaganda tried to present the concentration camps both to their own people and to the world as places of useful work and reformation.

The wider area of the camp was strictly guarded. Only the confirmed Ustasha with specific tasks were allowed in. Even the Germans, as >>allies<< and friends, were not allowed to enter the camp freely. However, under pressure from abroad, especially from the Germans, on February 6, 1942, an >>International Committee<< visited the Camp to see the way of living and working in it. In that delegation, the Pope's emissary was also included, Monsignor G. Massuci.

Three days before that, Ljubo Milos, the commandant of the Jasenovac camps, had summoned all the prisoners and ordered them to clean the camp, tidy the dining room, kitchen, and hospital. The prisoners were given the sort of food that they had never had, or would have. After this visit the photographs of >>the workers at their machines<< in well-equipped workshops, and of the camp clinics with the staff in immaculately clean white uniforms, were sent to the world from Jasenovac. The camp was presented in such a way that it seemed desirable to be in Jasenovac in that war time of general uncertainty, death, and poverty, without the slightest premonition of what was, actually hidden behind those photographs.

X THE BREAKOUT OF THE PRISONERS AND THE LIBERATION OF THE CAMP

At the beginning of April 1945, the Ustasha were preparing the liquidation of the Jasenovac camp in order to remove the traces of their crimes before escaping. The ultimate liquidation of the Camp was begun on April 20, when the last large group of women and children was executed. On April 22, 1945, under the leadership of Ante Vukotic, about 600 people armed with bricks, poles, hammers and other things, broke down the doors, shattered windows and ran out of the building. About 470 people were sick and unable to fight barehanded with the armed Ustasha, so they did not take part in the rebellion. The 150 meter long path to the east gate of the camp was covered by the crossfire of the Ustasha mashine-guns, and many prisoners were killed there. A large number of them was killed on the wires of the camp. A hundred prisoners managed to break through the broken gate of the camp. Only 80 prisoners survived while 520 of them died in the first assault. The remaining 470 within the camp were later killed by the Ustasha.

The captives, 167 of them, from the so-called >>Kozhara<< part of the Jasenovac camp, about 8 p.m. on April 22 also began mortal combat under the leadership of Stanko Gacesa and Zahid Bukurevic. 150 of them managed to break through, but they were surrounded and fired at so heavily that only 11 prisoners survived.

The Jasenovac camp was not liquidated until the very last battles were being fought. The Yugoslav Army forces entered the Stara Gradishka camp on April 23, and Jasenovac on May 2, 1945. Before leaving the camp, the Ustasha killed the remaining prisoners, blasted and destroyed the buildings, guard-houses, torture rooms, the >>Picili Furnace<< and the other structures. Upon entering the camp, the liberators found only ruins, soot, smoke, and dead bodies.

XI THE INVESTIGATION OF THE USTASHA CRIMES IN JASENOVAC IN 1945

It is difficult to establish the number of victims killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp, since many documents were destroyed. The prisoners' files were destroyed twice (at the beginning of 1943 and in April, 1945) and even if they had been preserved, they would have been of little help discerning the truth, because the Ustasha often killed the newly arrived prisoners immediately, without, putting their names into the files. This is particularly true of those who arrived from Slavonia, Srem and Kozara, because it was only noted down that 9,83, or 155 wagons had arrived. For instance, a very small number of Gypsies was filed, only a few hundred, while it is known that all 25,000-35,000 of them from the NDH were killed in Jasenovac. The Jewish community in Yugoslavia has established the number of 20,000 Jews that were killed, in Jasenovac. The numbers of killed Serbs are truly varied. The sources from abroad mention numbers from 300,000 to 700,000. Be that as it may, most of the people killed in Jasenovac were Serbs. Exact number being still unknown, but it surely amounts to several hundreds of thousands.

The National Committee of Croatia for the investigation of the crimes of the occupation forces and their collaborators stated in its report of November 15, 1945 that 500,000-600,000 people were killed at Jasenovac.

XII THE JASENOVAC MEMORIAL AREA

After the end of the war, the burial of the victims and cleaning up of the camp area were begun. The inhabitants of Jasenovac and the nearby villages used the bricks and other building material in the reconstruction and building of their houses. In that way, almost all material evidence disappeared from the place of the biggest crime in the former Yugoslavia, as if there had not been any camp in that place. It seems that the state and the authorities of that time, especially certain individuals in Zagreb, wanted it to be like that in Jasenovac. Under the >>Brotherhood and Unity<< motto, with the aim of creating tolerance between the nations, the crime had to be forgotten as soon as possible.

It was only 20 years later, in 1965, under pressure of the victims' families and relatives, that the building of a monument was begun - a stone flower of which its author, engineer Bogdan Bogdanovic, said that >>it suggests the idea of overcoming suffering and insanity<<. A few years later, the Open Memorial Museum was built, the graveyards were put in order, and the labor organization named Jasenovac Memorial Park was formed, which functioned until the beginning of the next war in 1991.

No matter how hard the authors of the memorial Park tried, often stating that the memorial complex would not resemble a >>city park<< or an >>artificial structure<<, that is exactly what happened to it.

Looking at it from the outside, Jasenovac Memorial Park, with its modern Museum building and its stylized stone flower really resembled a nice park more than a former concentration camp of the worst possible kind. If it had not been for the obvious museum material and films, the visitor would have hardly understood what had really happened there, or grasped all the horrors. The authentic buildings were not preserved or renewed. The monuments and the memorial plates were only inconspicuous marks of the biggest execution places and the places of other camps which constituted the Jasenovac complex of concentration camps, while some of them, Brocice and Jablanac, were not even marked. In spite of that, the site of the crime in Jasenovac was visited after the war by countless numbers of relatives and friends, and since the memorial area has been opened, hundreds of thousands of visitors have come who wished to pay homage to the innocent victims.

XIII THE DESECRATION OF THE MEMORIAL AREA

Jasenovac Memorial Park is the largest graveyard in the Balkans. It has been believed for a long time that the Ustasha's crimes committed in Jasenovac presented an eternal warning to the people from these areas. However, that was not true. >>The young Croatian democracy<<, as the new nationalistic Croation authorities called themselves, under the leadership of Franjo Tudjman, immediately after coming to the scene took the Ustasha symbols, and took a series of concrete further steps (seceeding from Yugoslavia, adopting laws with racist characteristics very similar to those of 1941, organizing state terror against the Serbs and so on), thus showing clearly that it accepted the politics of the Ustasha's Independent State of Croatia.

Even before the beginning of the new war in 1991, the Croatian authorities reduced the financing of the Jasenovac Memorial Park and declared >>Lonjsko polje<< a natural protected area, probably in order to turn the attention from the victims to the flora and fauna of the region. Croatian propaganda and Franjo Tudjman himself tried to minimize the crime with numerous articles, >>studies<< and statements, asserting that there were >>not more than<< 20,000-50,000 victims in Jasenovac.

At the end of September 1991, the Croatian Army entered the Jasenovac memorial park by force. According to the Hague Convention on the protection of historical and cultural monuments, the Croatian Army severely broke the agreement by entering the protected area. Although the international public informed about desecration of the memorial park. there was not much of a response.

The Serbian forces liberated Jasenovac Memorial Park on October 8, 1991. During the withdrawal the Croatian Army placed explosives blew up the bridge on the Sava River which connected the two parts of the Memorial Park; they also blew up the graves, destroyed the Museum artifacts and stole the Museum equipment. Due to the courage and enthusiasm of individuals who worked at the Memorial Park, some historical materials and objects were saved.

Text taken from website of "Srbija zemlja heroja" (http://www.srbijazemljaheroja.com). Photo arrangement by Vladislav B. Sotirovic

Serb Demonization as Propaganda Coup

Edward Herman

(Global Research, April 9, 2009)

The successful demonization of the Serbs, making them largely responsible for the Yugoslav wars, and as unique and genocidal killers, was one of the great propaganda triumphs of our era. It was done so quickly, with such uniformity and uncritical zeal in the mainstream Western media, that disinformation had (and still has, after almost two decades) a field day. The demonization flowed from the gullibility of Western interests and media (and intellectuals). With Yugoslavia no longer useful as an ally after the fall of the Soviet Union, and actually an obstacle as an independent state with a still social democratic bent, the NATO powers aimed at its dismantlement, and they actively supported the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Kosovo Albanians. That these were driven away by Serb actions and threats is untrue: they had their own nationalistic and economic motives for exit, stronger than those of the Serbs.

Milosevic's famous speeches of 1987 and 1989 weren't nationalistic - despite the lies to the contrary, both speeches called for tolerance of all "nations" within Yugoslavia. He also never sought a "Greater Serbia," but rather tried to maintain a unified Yugoslavia, and when this failed - with the active assistance of the NATO powers - he tried, only fitfully, to allow stranded Serb minorities to stay within Yugoslavia or join Serbia, a matter of obvious "self-determination" that NATO granted to Kosovo Albanians and everybody but Serbs (for documentation on these points, see this Monthly Review article I co-authored with David Peterson in October, 2007). Biased Reporting

Many well-qualified observers of the Bosnia wars were appalled at the biased reporting and gullibility of mainstream journalists, who followed a party line and swallowed anything the Bosnian Muslim (and U.S.) officials told them. The remarkable inflation of claims of Serb evil and violence (and playing down of NATO-clients' violence), with fabricated "concentration camps," "rape camps," and similar Nazi- and Auschwitz-like analogies, caused the onetime head of the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, Lieutenant Colonel John Sray, to state back in 1995 that America has not been so pathetically deceived since Robert McNamara helped to micromanage and escalate the Vietnam War.Popular perceptions pertaining to the Bosnian Muslim government.have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine. A strange combination of three major spin doctors, including public relations (PR) firms in the employ of the Bosniacs, media pundits, and sympathetic elements of the US State Department, have managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals.

Numerous others made the same point: Cedric Thornberry, a high UN official who investigated atrocities in Bosnia wrote in Foreign Policy in 1996 that By early 1993 a consensus developed - especially in the United States, but also in some Western European countries and prominently in parts of the international liberal media - that the Serbs were the only villains.This view did not correspond to the perceptions of successive senior UN personnel in touch with daily events..[and one kindly soul at UN headquarters] warned me to take cover - the fix is on.

The same point was made by Canadian General Lewis Mackenzie, who insisted that "it was not a black-and-white picture and that 'bad' buys had not killed 'good' guys. The situation was far more complex" (Globe & Mail, July 15, 2005). The same was said by former NATO Deputy Commander Charles Boyd, former UNPROFOR Commander Satish Nambiar, UN officials Philip Corwin and Carlos Martins Branco, and former U.S. State Department official George Kenney. But anybody who parted from the party line was ignored or marginalized.

When George Kenney changed his mind from anti-Serb interventionist to critic, he was quickly dropped by the mainstream media. Journalist Peter Brock, who wrote "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," in Foreign Policy's Winter 1993-1994 issue, which documented systematic bias and errors, was viciously attacked and driven into multi-year silence. A reporter like David Binder of The New York Times who refused to adhere to the party-demonization line was soon taken off the beat.

An important part of the fix was dishonest demonization, as with the famous August 1992 picture of Fikret Alic, an emaciated prisoner behind barbed wire in a Serb "concentration camp." But the UK journalists had pushed forward a man who was sick and quite unrepresentative: the barbed wire was around the journalists, not the camp, and it was a transit camp, not a concentration camp. Western journalists went berserk over these alleged camps, but failed to report the Red Cross finding that "Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all run detention camps and must share equal blame." John Burns' Pulitzer for 1993 was based heavily on his interview with an alleged Serb killer-rapist, Borislav Herak, who later confessed that after torture he had recited lines forced on him by his Bosnian Muslim captors.

The joint Pulitzer winner in 1993 was Roy Gutman, who specialized in hearsay evidence and handouts from Croatian and Bosnian Muslim propaganda sources. Gutman never got around to Croat and Muslim camps. His and other journalists' claims about "an archipelago of [Serb] sex-enslavement camps" were spectacular and wrong - ultimately, there were more credible affidavits of Serb than Bosnian Muslim women rape victims. (For an excellent discussion of the wild news reports versus ascertainable facts, see Chapter Five of Peter Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting [GM Books, 2005]). All these journalists portrayed the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic as a devotee of ethnic tolerance; none ever quoted his Islamic Declaration, which proclaimed that "there is neither peace nor coexistence between the 'Islamic religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions." For an extensive discussion of Izetbegovic's close relations with Iran and commitment to an Islamic state, see John Schindler's Unholy Terror (Zenith Press, 2007), which I reviewed in Z Magazine. Retaliation Another part of the fix was the failure to pay any attention to crimes that preceded brutal Serb actions. This was frequent, although there certainly were cases where the Serbs (mainly paramilitary forces) struck first. But the tit-for-tat was common and much of it, and many of the mutual fears, were traceable back to the mass murders - disproportionately of Serbs - of World War II, the Nazi occupation, and Croatian fascist Ustasha. This background of truly mass killing was blacked out in the mainstream propaganda system. Most important in recent tit-for-tat was the Srebrenica case, where the background to the Serb behavior in July 1995 was (and remains) ignored. You won't read in the U.S. press the claim by veteran British journalist Joan Phillips that by March 31, 1993, "out of 9,300 Serbs who used to live (in the Srebrenica municipality), less than 900 remain.only three Serbian villages remain and around 26 have been destroyed." ("Victims and Villains in Bosnia's War," South Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992 - published in 1993). Many more were destroyed after that, and a 1995 Serb monograph entitled The Book of the Dead listed 3,287 Serbs from the Srebrenica region who were killed in the three years before July 1995. Serb forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic and his team uncovered over a thousand Serb bodies in the Srebrenica area well before July 1995, and General Lewis Mackenzie has stated that "evidence to date suggests that he (Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim commander in Srebrenica) was responsible for killing as many Serb civilians outside Srebrenica as the Bosnian Serb army was for massacring Bosnian Muslims inside the town." Stankovic and the Serb authorities could never get the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or Western media interested in these massacres.

A microcosm of the bias of the ICTY can be seen in its treatment of Naser Oric. When a video turned up in 2005 showing an alleged Bosnian Serb execution of six Bosnian Muslims (its provenance and authenticity uncertain), this received widespread and indignant attention in the West, and was alleged to be a "smoking gun" proving the 8,000 executed at Srebrenica. But there are more clearly authentic videos that Oric showed to Toronto Star journalist Bill Schiller and Washington Post reporter John Pomfret, in which Oric brags about the Serb killings and beheadings displayed for them, and claims to have killed 114 Serbs in just one of these incidents. Pomfret had a single back page article on this, Schiller two, and otherwise silence reigned. Nobody said this was a "smoking gun" proving that Serb victimization in the Srebrenica area was massive and that the supposed "demilitarization" of that "safe area" was a fraud. There was no comment when it took the ICTY till 2002 to indict Oric, charging him not with killing but failure to control his subordinates in six cases, and ultimately throwing out the case on a technicality. The ICTY never took evidence from Schiller or Pomfret, and failed to use the videos they had seen as part of the evidence.

The ICTY also failed to take the evidence of Ibran Mustafic, a Bosnian Muslim official in Srebrenica, who in his recent book, Planned Chaos, declares Oric to be "a war criminal without par," and describes personally observed gruesome murders by Oric. French General Philippe Morillon, was also not called, although he had testified in the Milosevic trial, claiming that Oric "took no prisoners," and that his mass killings from the "safe area" had been the key factor in explaining Serb vengefulness in their takeover of Srebrenica.

The ICTY wasn't an instrument of justice - it was a faux-judicial arm of NATO, created to service its aims in the Balkan wars, which it did in numerous ways. But a key role was to focus on, demonize, isolate and condemn Serbs, who were the NATO target. Whenever NATO needed a lift, the ICTY was there to help - indicting Karadzic and Mladic explicitly to remove them as negotiators at Dayton; indicting Milosevic in May 1999 just as NATO was starting to draw criticism for its bombing of Serbian civilian facilities (war crimes). For crushing analyses of the ICTY and its role, see Travesty by John Laughland (Pluto Press, 2007) and Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away with Murder (Pluto Press, 2004).

Inflated Killings

Inflating Serb killings was institutionalized early in the Yugoslavia conflict, crucially helped by media and liberal-left gullibility. There was huge dependence on Bosnian Muslim and U.S. officials, who lied often, but were never doubted by the press. In the case of the infamous Markale Market massacre on August 27, 1993, timed just before a NATO meeting at which bombing the Serbs was approved, key experts and observers on the scene - UK, French, Canadian, UN, even U.S. - were convinced that this was carried out by the Bosnian Muslims. But this could make no headway in the mainstream media. The Bosnian Muslims claimed 200,000 dead by early 1993 (and of course, exclusively Serb concentration and rape camps) and it was swallowed, along with the alleged drive for a "Greater Serbia."

The same inflation took place regarding Kosovo both before and after the bombing war, with an alleged pre-war genocide and a more wildly claimed bombing-war genocide (with the State Department estimating as many as 500,000 Kosovo Albanians murdered). These were all big lies. The 200,000 (later, up to 300,000) has shrunk to 100,000, including about 65,000 civilians, on all sides in Bosnia. The prewar Kosovo toll was diminished to some 2,000 in the year before the bombing, a majority of them victims of the KLA rather than the Serbs (according to British Defense Secretary George Robertson), and the body-plus-missing total for Kosovo during the bombing war contracted to some 6,000-7,000 on all sides. But there were neither apologies nor reassessment from the mainstream media or liberal apologists for the "good war."

They still have Srebrenica. But like the other inflated or untrue elements of the demonization process, they have it by cheating. There's no doubt that there were executions at Srebrenica, but nothing like 8,000 and very possibly not any more than the number of Serb civilians killed by Naser Oric in the Srebrenica areas, as suggested by General Lewis Mackenzie (who in my opinion was conservative on this point). The morality tale rests heavily on failure to acknowledge that Srebrenica wasn't a demilitarized "safe area" but a protected Bosnian Muslim military base that had been used to decimate the local Serb population. It also rests on the failure to see that the massacre was immensely useful, like the Markale Market massacre, with the hope and expectation that it would produce a NATO military response. Bosnian Muslim leaders were crying "genocide" even before the Serbs captured Srebrenica.

It also rests on numbers manipulation. There were only about 2,000 bodies found near Srebrenica after intense searches over the next six years, not all Bosnian Muslims and those that were not necessarily executed. There had been intense fighting outside Srebrenica, but it was convenient for numbers inflation that these deaths could be ignored and any "missing" could be assumed executed.

The idea that the Serbs moved several thousand bodies en masse has never been plausible: Trucking them would have been easily caught by satellite surveillance - no such pictures have been produced - and some of the alleged new graves were closer to Srebrenica than the alleged places of removal. The belated grave findings after the year 2000 have been under the control of the Bosnian Muslim leadership, which has provided disinformation from 1992 on a very consistent basis. Their post-2000 findings and DNA identifications have been further compromised by their very unscientific handling of the body remains (in the ground five or more years), their inability to distinguish between bodies killed in fighting and executed, or those that may have died before or after 1995, and their frequent timing to reinforce political events.

The continuous publicity over Srebrenica, like its initial surge, has been hugely political - this selective and inflated victimization has political payoffs for the victims and their patrons, along with psychological rewards in inflicting pain on longstanding enemies and targets. And in this case, the imperial rulers aren't only able to point to an allegedly justified "humanitarian intervention" to help cover over their larger plans in a global projection of power, but they have been able to transform the Balkans into a staging ground for NATO's post-Cold war expansionist order.

Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, is the author of many books on economics, foreign policy, and the media, including Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (with Philip Hammond, eds., Pluto, 2000).

On the ruins of Yugoslavia

Elena Guskova, Russia

2009-04-18

At the end of the 20th century the fate of Yugoslavia was being determined by numerous international organizations rather by Yugoslavs. The nation did not want to obey and was punished. In 1992-1995 they were forced to accept ultimatums and support military offensives. The aforesaid organizations launched information wars, established coalitions and alliances and imposed peace deals in Dayton and Ramboia. Nowadays there is hardly anyone on the post-Yugoslavia territory who could oppose to such policies.

NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia in March-June of 1999 (the whole operation mainly led by the U.S.) marked another step toward a managed world pattern. NATO made an attempt to use force against 'disobedient' states without UN sanctions and then watched the reactions of all European institutions and countries. In the Balkans NATO acquired not only big military experience and an opportunity to exhaust old and use new weapons but also managed to enhance its activities, making its way to a global organization.

Ten years have passed since the NATO aggression against a sovereign European state. What did these years bring to those who threw bombs and those who were attacked? What goals did NATO pursue and whether it managed to cope with its tasks in the following years? I would like to make it clear in the very beginning that NATO did not achieve a military victory. They failed to destroy the army of Yugoslavia and tame the soldiers` morale. However, they got the right political atmosphere for destroying Serbia and, first of all, for imposing their conditions on the Serbian government, including the rules of cooperation with the EU, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and with NATO. After the 1999 Serbia lost almost all opportunities to control its sovereignty and national security. After long years of injustice and punishment the Serbs lost the will to fight, to resist as they were practically alone when tried to repel the attack of the powerful Western military alliance. So, after 1999 it became easier for NATO to continue destruction of Yugoslavia and carry out power shifts.

In 2000 Slobodan Milosevic, who had been ruling the country for quite many years, was ousted. At first sight, the move came as unexpected, easy and legal, in other words-Yugoslavia's home affair. In fact, it had been very thoroughly prepared by special divisions. The method proved to be so successful that it was later used in Georgia and Ukraine. The Georgian opposition were taught in Serbia, while their Ukrainian 'colleagues' were drilled also in Serbia and in Georgia.

This is how they changed power in a country they had long failed to destroy. But Yugoslavia remained as a symbol of independence and disobedience. However, the new authorities obeyed and everything went smoothly. Having arrived in Belgrade in February 2003, Javier Solana suggested to a group of officials from Serbia and Montenegro to admit that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ceased to exist, and adopt the Constitution charter, written somewhere in Europe, its text proclaiming the appearance of a new country. Solana did not face any resistance. The Republic was renamed to the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, and officially abolished the name ''Yugoslavia''. In 2006 Montenegro and Serbia declared independence, thereby ending the Yugoslav state. And it was Javier Solana who did it-he who remains a war criminal for Serbs, who bombed their country in 1999.

After the 1999 it was easier to implement the plans which seemed fantastic under Milosevic. Yugoslavia was undermined, its integration slowed down, its strength exhausted. What they failed to achieve in Ramboia in 1998 and through the 1999 bombings, they got on July 18th, 2005, when Serbia and Montenegro signed a deal with NATO "On Lines of Communication". This is a technical agreement which allows NATO personnel and equipment to transit through the country. Under the deal, the Alliance could enjoy such opportunities for quite a long time- "until all peacekeeping operation in the Balkans are over". Thus NATO was given the green light to enlarge its presence in the region and control the army of Serbia and Montenegro. Today the Balkans are NATO's permanent base. In October 2008 Serbia's Defense Minister and NATO officials signed a deal on information security, which allows the Alliance control everyone who deals with their documents or just cooperates with them. They insisted on secrecy of the negotiations with Serbs.

The aftermath of the 1999 aggression for NATO was the most favorable. Nobody condemned NATO and they felt even more confident. In recent years the world has witnessed NATO making several attempts of expansion. Currently the bloc is occupying its position on the Balkans, using old and building new camps. It ignores all demands to stop enhancing its security at the cost of others. The level of regional security on the Balkans is lowering, and, of course, Moscow is aware of this. NATO camp Bondsteel is being illegally operated in Kosovo. In the center of Skopje the U.S. is said to build an embassy, but its architecture is more likely to resemble a military base or a CIA office.

Although NATO's role on the Balkans is officially described as a peacekeeping mission, it is not a secret to anyone that the Alliance deals with suppression of the Balkan Slavs. The process yet is not over. We can see this happening in Kosovo and Metohija, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia (Vojvodina, Sandjak and southern provinces). In February 2008 Kosovo received Washington's permission to proclaim its independence. It happened later than expected due to the positions of Russia,China and some other states. At the Security Council Moscow said 'no' to Kosovo`s independence. Russia respects interests of Serbia and condemns all attempts to impose decisions on other members of the international community. Russia understands that if extremism is not stopped, Macedonia and then Montenegro will have to say goodbye to a part of their territories. Europe will have to decide how to discuss the issue of borders revision and how to recognize a new enlarged state of Albania or the enlarged and independent Kosovo.

Russia seems to have found enough strength to stop being a mere observer, as this role undermines its national security. Moscow gives it to understand it is going to help the nations which confide their future to Russia. Only Russia may bring stability to the Balkans. The Serbian authorities should not miss the chance. They must remember that Vojvodina is in jeopardy, that new rebellions are very likely in southern Serbia.

Albanian Narco-Terrorism: The Columbian Syndrome in the Balkans and Around

Anna Filimonova, Russia

April 28th, 2009

Reality crosses out all attempts of Washington and Brussels to present Kosovo, as Barack Obama says, as a "multi-ethnic independent and democratic formation."

Euro-officials echo with Obama repeating the same old tune of "achievements of democracy and progress of democratisation in Kosovo." All in vain: the Albanian criminal organisations are running full speed ahead to achieve both the Albanisation of the Balkans with a prospect of further segmentation of the states in this region, and unification of Albanian territories. Their design is much larger in scope. They think of transforming the Balkan Peninsula into a stronghold of the Albanian mafia controlling the drug trafficking routes to Europe and extending criminal activities of Albanians to cover the entire European continent.

Lately, the policical, military, diplomatic and financial support of the "Pristina authorities" by the USA and EC has enabled criminal Albanian clans to challenge law and order on a larger than ever scale. Another scandal involving activities of the Albanian emigres is flaring up in Britain. A criminal group of professional killers from Albania openly proposed their services to the British capital: "Any target - 5,000 using any weapon - cold steel or fire-arms". The London Daily News called Albanians based in London (mostly former militants of the Kosovo Liberation Army - KLA) the most sophisticated professional killers in the British capital. One of the kingpins of the Albanian criminal group said in an interview that his men know how to use arms, they control prostitutes in Soho, so they make their sizeable investment in London, fearing no one. He added that the law could not stop them.

A great number of "Albanian refugees from Kosovo" have found shelter in many European countries, where they can apply their "skills". In reality they have nothing to do with refugees rather being members of a widely ramified network of the criminal organisation, whose principal activities include manufacturing and supplying heroin and cocaine to the European and other countries.

According to a number of estimates the Albanian mafia controls about 75% of supplies of heroin to the West European drugs market and up to 50% of the total amount of heroin sold in the USA. Albanian drug cartel "Camilla" is among the world's top five drug cartels. About 30 drug clans are responsible for heroin's supply to Europe, each controlling their own segment of drug traffic.

Almost all of the Kosovo territory serves as the base of the drug traffic, becoming the principal transit mainline of drug supplies to Europe. One of the key links in this chain is what is known as the "Drenitza segment" including Prizren, Klina and Istok that connect Kosovo with Montenegro and Macedonia. Aside from heroin, the principal source of income of the Drenitza group is smuggling arms, stolen cars, cigarettes, alcohol and slaves. The Albanian criminal clans are connected with Macedonian, Bulgarian and Czech mafias; they are on the threshold of taking under their control a number of European capitals, starting with London, Berlin and Prague.

The monthly trade turnover of Albanian clans amounts to 4 tonnes to 6 tonnes of heroin with the annual turnover of heroin amounting to $2bln. More than 200 private banks and money-changing outlets controlled by the Albanian drug clans plus beauty salons, perfumery shops, cafes and so forth, do the laundry in Italy, Spain, Britain and other European countries.

Behind the backs of Albanian drug traffickers are two US military bases, Bondsteel and Minor Bondsteel in Kosmet, as well as the entire US and EU support complex ranging from mass media to military assistance, making them more than secure. For example following the deployment of NATO troops Albanian criminals wanted by law enforcement agencies found a safe shelter in Kosovo. Albanian "mafiosi" are easy to recognise: they move around in black Mercedes cars or Jeeps without licence plates and with toned windows. The KFOR troops ignore the cars without licence plates, but local residents know that these cars are stolen and smuggled into Kosovo. The suspects of crime will not be extradited to Albania as the KFOR does not have a relevant agreement with that country.

After Kosovo the strike can be targeted at Serbia's southern parts of Presevo, Buyanovatz and Medvezhiya with an eye at gaining control of the strategic direction to the link of Kosmet, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria and farther still - Greece and Central Europe.

Albanian drug criminals have great aspirations. Controlling the quasi-state of Kosovo they are approaching implementation of the project of division of Macedonia to grab control of its greater part. For example, Macedonia's western parts are controlled by the Taci clan. M.Taci, the chairman of the "Democratic party of Albanians" has direct connections with the mafia that controls supplies of heroin, cocaine and automobile. Before the 1999 bombings of Yugoslavia, the Paris Anti-Drug Group published information about the Albanian drug mafia in Kosovo and Macedonia that had been selling heroin and arming their kinsfolk in Kosmet, with drugs bases in Skopje, Skadar and Pristina from where drugs had been taken to Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Greece. A major heroin factory is located in Kumanovo, a place near Macedonia.

As a matter of fact, the entire region including Albania, Kosovo and western Macedonia is a huge drug warehouse storing tonnes of heroin. Sales figures amount to billions of dollars, but no information has been available about Albanian drug barons taken into custody.

Right from the start the Albanian separatist movement in Yugoslavia was based on the activities of drug mafias. However, until early 1980s the issue of Albanian smuggling of drugs from the Middle East via the Balkans to Europe and the USA was raised but occasionally. Albanians then acted as traffickers controlled by the Turkish drug mafia and Bulgarian criminal organisations. The growth of involved in the implementation of the "Great Albania" project.

The dramatic change of the status of Albanian drug clans happened in late 1990s when the US States Department began implementing its geostrategic plans deciding to use Albanian criminal groups as a tool in achieving its goals. They gave Albanians all-round assistance complete with bombing Yugoslavia for 78 days. Besides, Bill Clinton's democratic administration is responsible for the establishment in northern Albania of special camps in Kosmet and Macedonia to train Albanian militants in sabotage and acts of terror.

Supported by the USA in the first years of the 21^st century the Albanian underworld turned into a "state within a state" with heroin and arms as their principal political arguments.

The leaders of Kosovo Albanians, Taci, Haradinai and Ceku are not only the kingpins of the illegal armed groups, they are the bosses of the Albanian drug mafia that financed KLA, the terrorist Albanian army (now changing its name to the "Kosovo Security Force"). The drug money they grabbed in different parts of the word returns to Kosovo in the form of investments in separatism of "The Republic of Kosovo (a.k.a. "The Republic of Heroin").

The Berish clan is the most influential in Albania. It also controls several districts of Metohia. The clans of the Kula family that controls drug traffic, and supplies of arms and illegal migrants from Turkey, the Abazi clan (drugs and prostitution in cooperation with Italian criminals), the Brokai clan (whose backbone is made of people who previously worked for special services and politicians now engaged in drugs, arms and prostitution).

About 80% of the Hungarian heroin market is controlled by the Albanian mafia. The bulk of the money is spent on Italy for the purchase of arms. The Albanian narco-mafia succeeded to oust Turks out of that country. The former messengers, Albanians turned into organisers of the drug network and partners of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Naples-based Camori and the Calabrian N'dragenti. Italy is now one of the bases of the Albanian criminal structures handling 50 kilograms of heroin DAILY! Milan is their business centre, and the province of Calabria is the centre of drugs and arms trade.

Albanians also control drug traffic on the Italian-Swiss border. Switzerland is their major "base" in Europe. The centres of the arms trade "black exchange" are in Bern and Basel. During the recent visit to Switzerland of the Serbian foreign Minister V. Eremic the 4th degree safety measures were taken because of the open threat of his physical destruction by the Albanian crime. The principal suspect was the Osmani clan, headed by someone Casim ("Felix"). This clan is funded by the biggest Albanian "businessman" Bejet Pakkoli from Kosovo.

Kosovo Albanians also control 80% of drug trade in Sweden and Norway, being the principal distributors on the Greek cocaine, heroin and marijuana markets. Albanians rely on the Greek transfer to supply Albanian migrants and outcasts from Turkey, Pakistan, Sri-Lanka, China and other countries who also act as messengers for the delivery of drugs. The Adriatic Sea that connects the shores of Italy and Albania is another corridor they use.

According to information posted by the Slovakian police almost 100% of heroin arrives from Afghanistan via the "Balkans traffic" through Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania. Lately the Albanian groups began to grab control of Romanian ports.

The FBI, Interpol and Europol unanimously evidence that the Albanian mafia has become the most serious criminal organisation. Defending its interests it is ready to stand to the last man, turning into a threat to the fundamentals of security of the United States and the states of the European Union.

http://en.fondsk.ru/article.php?id=2091