Three NY Times articles that were a partial exception to the rule

By Jared Israel and Andy Wilcoxson, Emperor's Clothes, 16 August 2004

By and large, the media has an abysmal record (not) reporting the facts about the Croatian secession from Yugoslavia and the renewed Croat war against Serbian civilians. There are a few partial exceptions. We've posted three of them below.

The first is a 1993 article by David Binder. Binder has been unique in that he has tended to buck the tide regarding Yugoslavia. Sometimes his stories were not published and we know that sometimes they have been edited, even reversing his intent, but he has covered events nobody else even tried to write about. While the general media line was that the Serbs were brutes and the Croatian secessionists were reincarnations of George Washington, Binder wrote the first article in our collection, actually discussing Croatian terror.

The second article is surprisingly sharp, correctly identifying Franjo Tudjman's 'nationalists' as a rebirth of the Ustashe clerical-fascists who ran Croatia during World War II. But look at the date: 1997! The fascist terror began in Croatia in 1990 or before. When Ivan Zvonimir Cicak told David Binder in 1993 (see the first article) that the fascists had dynamited 10,000 homes (!) he was making an accusation about *what had already happened.* Where was Chris Hedges in 1993? Where was the NY Times in 1990 and 1991?

By the time Hedges wrote about them in 1997 the fascists had driven the entire Serbian population—about 600,000 people—from Croatia and the neighboring Serbian Krajina. The chlorine smell was long gone from the roads in Western Slavonia: [f1]

Excerpt from the Washington Post starts here

On Saturday, a CBS News team witnessed Croatian authorities, in all-white jump suits, spraying chlorine on an area that U.N. investigators picked over today, removing much of the forensic evidence that might have remained. Croatian police also removed the bodies, said Natasha Rajakovic, spokeswoman of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. Most of the witnesses are gone, too, having fled to Serb-held Banja Luka in northern Bosnia.

[...]

Almost exactly in the center of this devastated village, a rusty red Polski Fiat, pockmarked with bullet holes and shrapnel, sat in a rut by the side of the road littered with the detritus of fleeing people. The car's windshield wipers appeared caught in midstroke. A half-eaten ham hock emitted a stench from the back. Blood stained the furry white cover of the driver's seat.

Nearby, a light blue Soviet-made Moskvich compact car appeared to have been flattened by a tank. The identity card of Dzuro Kesic of Belgrade, a member of the 18th Corps of the Croatian Serb army, lay on the driver's seat.

[Excerpt from the Washington Post ends here]

Like the Chris Hedges article, A. M. Rosenthal's piece is good, as far as it goes, but again it's seven years late. Rosenthal asks:

Or has the West become so sick itself that it will permit Croatian Fascism to live on beyond the grave?

That would have been an honest question in 1990. [Will] the West....permit Croatian Fascism to live beyond the grave? Is Mr. Rosenthal a sleep walker? In 1997 this will has the ring of hypocrisy.

Perhaps just as the (reborn!) Croatian Ustashe used chlorine to wash away the stench of their murders, so, after the Ustashe performed their assigned tasks, the Western media let a little truth through, in order to remove the stench of lies. Hence the articles by Hedges and Rosenthal. Maybe they wrote stories like these earlier but the Times wouldn't publish them until the Krajina Serbs were no more.

There are several statements in these articles with which we disagree, but for now we will only point to one. In the third article, A.M. Rosenthal writes:

The West cannot evade responsibility for the rebirth of Fascism in Croatia. Peter Galbraith, U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, told me he had denounced Croatian ethnic cleansing of Serbs last year, and considered the glorification of the Ustashe an insult to Croats who fought Nazis, and to American veterans of World War II.

Ambassador Galbraith's comments, if reported accurately, combine hypocrisy and an outright lie. We will explain why in an article on Galbraith which is preparation.

The three articles follow.

Jared Israel, Editor
Andy Wilcoxson, Research Associate
Emperor's Clothes