Original subtitles

MUSIC

NEWS REPORTERS

I am glad there is an absolute commitment to advancing the

goal of European integration. We have very ambitious plans!

We are very ambitious country, we are very ambitious

government! We have a special Minister

for European integration in our cabinet.

We are changing the face of our country to become

member states on the end of the day of the European Union.

LAUGHS

EU member is our goal, is our vision.

We want to be part of Europe.

We want to be colony and open society.

Who in their right mind would actually want to be a colony?

MUSIC

MUSIC

MUSIC

I don’t think my early childhood in Yugoslavia was bad at all

I always got a lot of presents, the family was close

and close friends were the extended family.

It’s a very close culture, people really care

about each other other in so many ways.

You just don’t see that here in the same way,

people are very isolated from each other. They work and

they go home and just watch television in the evening.

We liked to watch TV as well and even had a camcorder,

which I, being the cinematically gifted child that I was,

always tried to get my hands on.

What I really wanted was the camera he was holding.

When mom took over the camera so dad could come,

I changed my story.

I was a clever child. Clever like a fox.

Which was one of the characters of my

favourite show, Goodnight kids.

Sometimes my parents would flip the channel to the Parliament

where there were more bedtime stories.

As I was getting a little old for those kinds of stories,

I did what every Yugoslav did in the Summer.

One month free vacation with pay!

When was the last time I had a month vacation…

We Yugoslavs had it, every single year.

But I never noticed,

I was too young during the times of Communist Yugoslavia.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Communism?

It’s an international criminal conspiracy!

Well, for two decades prior to 1980

Yugoslavia was prospering with its annual

GDP growth averaging 6.1 percent.

A decent standard of living, free medical care and education,

guaranteed right to a job,

affordable public transportation and housing and utilities,

literacy rate over 90%,

life expectancy was 72 years.

Most of the economy was in the public, not for profit sector.

Yugoslavia was a different case because it had

established it’s own form of a socialist model

of economic activity, which was a mixed economy

with private capitalist enterprise, with

state-run industry and with worker cooperatives.

It was considered to be a success story

of market socialism.

It had higher rates of growth

than most of the countries of Western Europe,

it had an advanced welfare state,

it was a multiethnic society

which lived in harmony,

and in many regards it was a model of development.

I guess you could say there really is

something special about this land.

So, why have people spilt so much blood over this land?

Who was to blame here?

Before I continue, where are we?

Yugoslavia was located between Greece, Italy and Romania

and it was populated by Serbs, Croats,

Bosnian Muslims, Slovenes, Macedonians,

all of which are Slavs, and Albanians,

Hungarians and others.

Their country was the result of a long fight

to unite the people,

to show the world what they can achieve if they work together,

regardless of what happened in the past.

MUSIC LEPA BRENA, ZIVELA YUGOSLAVIA

Throughout history, this idea has been a thorn

in the eye of many Empires and world powers.

The idea was that the Southern Slavs would not remain weak,

divided people falling out among themselves

or falling prey to some imperialist outsider.

Serbs lost their freedom after the Ottoman Turks

attacked them in 1389 on the Field of Blackbirds,

which is called Kosovo.

With the Serbs, the loss of statehood

that lasted several centuries, for instance,

produced a strong anchorage in the myth of Kosovo.

Journalists come to Serbia and say,

Why are you Serbs so darn crazy

that you celebrate a battle that you lost?

When you talk about the Battle of Kosovo.

And you always talk about a battle and how great it was,

that you fought to the death but you lost?

Aren’t you guys masochistic?

Isn’t there something wrong with you?

And I said, Ever heard of the Alamo?

Remember the Alamo?

Ever heard of Masada?

In which the Jews defended to the death

and then committed suicide, rather then to be captured.

For standing up against the Turks,

Serbs were persecuted

and inventive torture devices were implemented.

We lived under terrible persecution.

We were whipped,

we were lynched,

except the manner in which we were lynched was by impalement.

We were impaled.

If you don’t know what impalement means,

impalement means a sharpened stick is put up your anus,

driven through your body and exits through your back

without going through your vital organs.

They were experts, Turkish Ottoman experts who did that.

So you were impaled, like Christ was put on the cross, to suffer.

There was, however, a way to avoid all this

- Convert to Islam!

And many did, many had no choice.

This made a part of the Slavic population Muslim

while the rest was Christian Orthodox.

On the other hand, the State Religion of the Austrian Empire

was Roman Catholic, with a large Croatian population

greatly influenced by this.

When the Austrians illegally took over Bosnia and it’s large

Yugoslav population in 1908, the Yugoslav dream

had never been more threatened.

So, a group of Yugoslav nationalists, Young Bosnia

which included Serbs, Muslims and Croats,

decided that enough was enough.

A young man, perhaps you’ve heard of him, Gavrilo Princip,

shot and killed the Austrian archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Afterwards he was quoted as saying

I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification

of all Yugoslavs, we must be free from Austria!

Although the assassination of their archduke did kinda make

make the Austrians mad and heck, now they had a reason to attack

attack the last Slavic stronghold – Serbia.

This was, however, not the real reason for the attack

the Austrians and Germans had a plan to expand

their Empire to the East.

War was the only way they’d achieve this.

CANNON FIRING

During the early period of World War I.

A bunch of Yugoslav politicians fled the Habsburg Empire

and formed the Yugoslav Committee in London

to raise funds and realize the Yugoslav dream.

Towards the end of the war, the Committee met up in

Corfu, Greece, with the Serbian government and declared

that Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were ,the same by blood,

by language, by the feelings of their unity, by the continuity

and integrity of the territory which they inhabit undividedly,

and by the common vital interests of their national

survival and manifold development of their

moral and material life...

It was what the Austrians and Ottomans had feared

The Old World Order was gone

Yugoslavs finally got a country of their own!

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was, sadly, short lived,

because another war was brewing soon, the likes of which

the world has never seen. In hopes of keeping Yugoslavia out

of the war, Yugoslav Prince Paul signed the Tripartite Treaty

with Nazi Germany in 1941.

But the British didn’t like this, so they encouraged

a coup d’etat and mass rebellion against the pact.

The British were happy, but now Hitler wasn’t.

In fact, he was so angry that he wanted to wipe

Yugoslavia off the map.

Yugoslavia was attacked from all sides.

Yugoslavia at that time was divided up into 12 pieces

and some of it went to fascist Hungary,

some of it went to fascist Italy.

Macedonia went to the Bulgarians and the Albanians,

and Serbia was occupied by the Wermacht and ruled by

the Germans. Croatia and Bosnia were united into a

Croatian fascist state under the Ustashe regime.

This was called the Independent State of Croatia.

The idea, of course, in 1941 was that Croatia would be a

condominium for German power in the Balkans.

The Croatian fascists were quick to start eradicating all

non-Croatian elements elements in the state.

You know what that meant?

Serb hunting season started!

Yes, Hitler’s final solution was applied here as well,

and hundreds of thousands of Serbs but also Jews, Roma

and others were killed, most of them at the 4th largest

concentration camp in Europe, Jasenovac.

A total number of 600,000 were killed at Jasenovac.

The Croatian fascist regime, the Ustasha regime,

had one aspect that was very distinctly different,

and that was that it was a clerical fascist regime.

It integrated into its political dictatorship

the Catholic clergy.

They were at the top of the government,

in the leading councils of government, and they were also

in the military and they were in the concentration camps.

They were at Jasenovac.

Some of the actual camp directors were priests.

The Croatian inquisition, which took place in World War II,

makes the Spanish inquisition just look like child’s play.

Pope Pius supported this fascist regime, the top leadership of

the Vatican was fully cognisant of what was going on there.

On the other hand, Royalists loyal to the crown,

called Chetniks, decided to act.

The Chetniks were the resistance movement

which even though proclaimed itself The Royal Yugoslav Army

in the Fatherland was composed almost exclusively of the Serbs.

However, after the bloody German reprisals in

Serbia in the fall of 1941, the Chetniks

realized that continuing resistance at any cost, when

the Germans were killing 100 Serbs for a single dead German

was self defeating and suicidal.

This didn’t matter to the West though,

they just wanted dead German bodies.

So, all aid to the Chetniks was cut and shifted towards another

group of fighters who managed to neutralize all other groups.

The Yugoslav Partisans!

The communists, made up of members of all ethnicities,

were lead by a guy called Tito.

In 1943, Tito declared the new Yugoslavia

which was finally liberated two years later.

Tito, if nothing else, was brilliant at playing

political games with big powers for his own interest,

which is just what Yugoslavia needed to gain

complete independence. It’s important to say that Tito

wasn’t just a leader, he was a brand, recognized in the world.

MUSIC

He was one of the founders of the Non-Aligned movement.

And why were they so important?

They were able to play a middle ground for the great powers

that allowed the great powers to potentially talk to each other

and discuss certain issues

that could not be talked about openly.

He hopes to perform the difficult feet

of walking both sides of the street

East and West!

Tito’s strong arm kept the country together.

When he died on May 4, 1980,

many in Yugoslavia were crying…

maybe not so much for him as much

they were crying for Yugoslavia itself.

MUSIC

His funeral was the largest funeral for a statesman

in recorded history.

MUSIC

Then things started to fall apart

when Yugoslavia began to get into debt to

international creditors shortly after Tito’s death.

In 1984, while the eyes of the world were pointed at

Sarajevo where the Winter Olympic Games were being held

held the Reagan administration was specifically targeting

the Yugoslav economy in a secret memo,

National Security Decisions Directive 133,

which stated that: U.S. policy will be to promote the trend

toward a market-oriented Yugoslav economy.

And it was in line with previous decisions directives

which advocated expanded efforts to promote a quiet revolution

to overthrow Communist governments and parties.

It triggers a whole series of other initiatives,

most of which are not published.

The Decisions Directive simply states

that what the US would want to achieve

is that Yugoslavia ceases to be a market socialist economy

and becomes a free market economy, modelled on the West.

As the Soviet system was on its last legs in 1988,

Washington wasted no time in sending advisers to Yugoslavia

from a non-profit organization with a high-sounding name,

the National Endowment for Democracy,

or NED.

Good morning and welcome.

It’s good to have you all here to help

celebrate the launching of a program with a vision and a

and a noble purpose,

the establishment of the National Endowment

goes right to the heart of America’s faith in

democratic ideals and institutions.

However, Allen Weinstein, who planned the NED

told the Washington Post in 1991 that:

a lot of what we do today was done covertly

25 years ago by the CIA.

This basically means that the NED was really

a sort of CIA spin-off.

Instead of having just the CIA going behind the scenes

and trying to manipulate the process by inserting money here

and instructions there and so forth.

They have, now, a sidekick

– which is this National Endowment for Democracy. NED.

Thus the NED started handing out generous bribes in every corner

of Yugoslavia, financing opposition groups,

buying up hungry young journalists with

dreams of a new life,

and financing trade union opposition,

pro-IMF economists and human rights NGOs.

The National Endowment for Democracy also controls

and pays for the Center for International Private

Enterprise which in turn funded the G-17.

Who were the G-17?

They were an NGO made up of 17 free market economists,

with three of the leading members being

Washington-based staff members of the International

Monetary Fund and World Bank - Dusan Vujovic,

Zeliko Bogetic and Branko Milanovic.

G-17 coordinator Professor Veselin

Vukotic worked closely with the World bank,

and, as the Minister of Privatization

under Yugoslav Premier Ante markovic,

he was in charge of the World Bank

bankruptcy program in Yugoslavia

during 1989-1990, which led to the

devastation of the Yugoslav economy.

Other members of the G-17 consult for the

World Bank and attend World Bank-organized meetings.

In 2002, they formed a political party

in Serbia, and since then, despite

the fact that in every election they’ve

gotten between 7% and 11% of the popular

vote, G-17 controlled the Ministry of

Finance and Ministry of Economy of Serbia.

This is not simply a group of economists.

It is a network. The IMF and World Bank

use this network to impose their policies

on Yugoslavia. And how do they do it?

First, they force governments to do away with any

social protections subsidized food or rent, free

transportation, free medical care. You know, all

those things you don’t really need. Out the window.

You cut back public sector spending, you cut

wages, you cut employment, you abolish worker

management enterprise, in other words, you

force your people to work harder for less.

Second, they use economic manipulation and new laws to

force businesses, public and private, into bankruptcy.

The World Bank describes this mechanism

as a trigger, as a trigger mechanism, they use that term.

They say we need to trigger the bankruptcy of Yugoslav industry.

Then these businesses are taken over by a small

clique of leveraged buyout speculators and

other powerful foreign economic interests. They

purchase the businesses at rock bottom prices.

Creditors could simply take hold of

these enterprises within a 45 day

period and either the enterprise had

to close down or it was privatized.

This is called Privatization through Liquidation

World Bank data confirms that under

Vukotic’s direction from January 1989

to September 1990, more than 1100

industrial firms were wiped out.

The standard of living declined 18% between

January and October 1990. This downturn

raised unemployment to 20 percent and thus

increased tensions between the republics.

Impoverish the population through

these sweeping IMF reforms, which

in turn contributed to heightening

social and ethnic strife.

So you had dissatisfaction of everybody and

everybody’s looking for a guilty party.

In desperation, Prime Minister Markovic

visited Washington to meet with President

George H. Bush. He said that rising

tensions among nationalities would

be a consequence of his austerity privatization

plan, so he asked for a billion

dollars in aid, and said that, if aid

didn’t come, there would be trouble.

And we all know the Americans didn’t want any trouble.

In November of 1990. President George Bush

went to the U.S. Congress and pressured them to pass the

Foreign Appropriations Law that called for the

cutting off of all aid and credits to Yugoslavia.

The law also demanded that if any republic

in Yugoslavia wanted further U.S. aid, it would have to break

away from Yugoslavia and declare its independence. OK?

It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s not my speculation, it’s

not my analysis, it’s a public law! It’s a public law!

It required the U.S. State Department approval of election

procedures and results in every one of the republics! It

required that the republics not hold national elections,

but hold elections only in their own republics. And that

the aid would only go individually to these republics,

and when the aid did go, it went to those groups which the

U.S. defined as democratic groups, which meant small,

right-wing, ultra nationalist and even fascistic parties.

This fracturing of Yugoslavia was not the

result of pre-existing internal divisions.

Those internal divisions were heightened

as a result of an outside intervention.

By 1991, the inflation was 200% and

the Yugoslav federal government

was unable to pay the enormous interest on its foreign debt

or even to arrange the purchase of

raw materials for its industry.

Credit collapsed and recriminations

broke out on all sides.

Cooperation between the republics and the

Belgrade central government virtually ceased.

The republics were not getting any

money from the federal government,

they weren’t transferring any tax revenues,

so the whole federal fiscal structure had collapsed and

the republics were left to their own devices

and then came in the new form of nationalism.

As the Americans demanded, multi-party

elections were held and economic policy was at

the center of the political debate as nationalist

and separatist coalitions ousted the

Communists in Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia.

And with the republics at one another's'

throats, both the economy and the nation

itself embarked on a vicious downward spiral.

Of course, the local political figures

did their best to calm the people down.

The people needed a hero to save them, someone

with their interest at heart. Instead,

they got these guys.

In 1991, elections were held in the

Bosnian republic of Yugoslavia. Alija

Izetbegovic, a former Nazi collaborator in World

War II, was a candidate who had an Islamic

vision for the mainly Christian Bosnia, as

professed in this little book he wrote,

There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic

religion and non-Islamic social and political institutions.

Alija lost the elections to the moderate

Muslim leader Fikret Abdic. Losing the elections

didn’t stop our Alija though, so he madea a deal

with Fikret, where Alija would be President,

but would quit a year. So, faster than you can

say Islamic Declaration, Alija made sure his

Presidency was extended due to the crisis, as

you can’t have a power struggle in such tragic times.

In fact, there was a moment when Alija could’ve

prevented the war, when he signed the Lisbon

Agreement in 1992, which would’ve made Bosnia

a confederation of three regions. Alija

didn’t like this, he wanted all the power.

Luckily for him, the Americans didn’t like this

peace idea either. So, the American ambassador

to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, stepped in.

So, my cabinet was in this meeting

with Zimmerman and Izetbegovic.

Izetbegovic had just come back from

Lisbon and Zimmerman says to him well,

you know, you could get a lot more from

U.S. recognition if you just waited.

And my cabinet told me his jaw just hit the floor.

If you don’t like it, why sign it?

Alija took the American advice and withdrew his signature,

fortified his power, and the Americans recognized it.

Another guy who just loved his power was the

one, the only, Slobodan Milosevic! Slobo,

as the masses liked to call him, knew how

to use those masses to get what he wanted.

With a little luck and help from his close

friend Ivan, the President of Serbia, he got

sent to Kosovo in 1987 where Serbs felt threatened

by the Albanians. During a scuffle with

the police, one Serb asked Slobo why the police

were beating them. Slobo then rightfully proclaimed

He became an overnight star, as the protector

of all Serbs! However, the incident with the

police was fairly localized. This guy needed

a bigger stage. So, because he was so thankful

to his friend Ivan, he booted him from

the Presidency. He also got him killed a decade later.

You’d think that after Slobo became

the new President of Serbia, he’d calm down,

but no. He still needed a bigger stage,

and what luck, a big anniversary was coming up.

As Serbs were marking the 600th anniversary

of the Battle of Kosovo, which is the crux

of their historical culture, waving Serbian,

Yugoslav, American and, wow, Canadian flags,

singing patriotic songs, Slobo took the

stage and what the West described as a

nationalist call to arms, inflamed the audience!

Alright, maybe it wasn’t that inflammatory, but at

least the opera singers afterwards were pretty cool.

OPERA SINGING

But if you think this guy had high ambitions,

what about a guy being compared to Jesus Christ?

Holy *bleep*. The saviour of the Croatian

people, Franjo Tudjman. No pressure, eh?

Now, Franjo won the elections fair

and square, but the people around

him weren’t really good at hiding

what was going to happen next.

Even these guys aren’t buying it. Franjo’s

government was quick to arm themselves, illegally.

Yeah right, what about this?

It seemed like war was the only option. Thankfully,

there were many citizens who just said NO.

All we are saying is give peace a chance

MUSIC

Yugoslavs stood a lot to lose if Yugoslavia broke up

For 50 years, they grew

up together, lived together, married

each other and at the centre of all

this was Bosnia, with a mixed population

of Muslims, Serbs and Croats a

sort of mini-Yugoslavia in itself. Massive

anti-war rallies were held in its

capital Sarajevo, which had the largest

number of ethnically mixed marriages,

with a message to the politicians:

Don’t sacrifice peace for political ambition!

But with little higher interest in

keeping Yugoslavia together, the

politicians decided to send a message

of their own to the demonstrators.

GUN SHOTS

POLICE SIRENS

Slovenia and Croatia were the first who

decided that peaceful negotiations weren’t

working out for them. So, they unilaterally

declared independence in 1991.

Bosnia followed in 1992. All of them

were quickly recognized by the West.

When the White House announced that we would

be recognizing Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia,

we at the State Department had no idea what

that decision would be before it was announced,

which is a very peculiar state of affairs.

I was a desk officer, office director,

nobody at the working level had any

idea what the White House would decide.

So, you can say just that the decision

was a political one, it was not

based on a careful consideration

of what recognition might entail.

It was, in essence, a dependable way of making conflict

inevitable. The question was, would the people buy it?

MUSIC

Of course, as history has shown, there was one sure-fire way

to mobilize public opinion in favour of a conflict and

bring them back to the WWII mentality where all Serbs became

Chetniks and all Croats Ustashe. Hardcore propaganda!

Yup,

they were pretty much all the same.

There was no official military mobilization,

it all worked on a voluntary basis.

One man, though, who could make a difference, realized

where this madness was heading. His name was JOSIP KIR.

As rebel Serbs had put up road blocks to

control passages towards Serb-populated areas,

Josip Kir, who was a Croat, decided to

resolve these issues in a peaceful manner.

Kir was quickly becoming an obstacle to the aspirations

of the Croatian HDZ and had to be taken out.

Who ordered the assassination, however, remains unresolved.

Yes, the war had started, best characterized by two words!

Ethnic cleansing, ethnic cleansing...

Ethnic cleansing. The term, however,

was nothing new in the Balkans, as it

was first used in WWII to describe how

the Croatian Ustashe were cleansing

Croatia of unwelcome ethnic elements

such as Serbs and Jews. In the minds

of Serbs during the 1990s, this was

very much engraved in their national memory.

Franjo didn’t care because he knew

he had the support of just the right people.

German Foreign Minister

Hans-Dietrich Genscher, in almost daily

contact with Zagreb, gave his go-ahead

for Croatian secession and actually pressured

its Western allies to recognize Slovenia and Croatia.

The German Serbophobia it was geopolitical

in the sense of 1914 and 1941.

And that continuity also reflected itself in the almost

visceral preference for the Croats and the Slovenes,

who after all had belonged to the German cultural

and state structures for hundreds of years.

There was, however, one problem in this plan.

The Serbs – who were now

a constitutional people of Croatia!

That pretty much meant that no decisions about Croatia

could be made without the Serbs, while

Serbs and Croats had an equal status.

Now, Serbs were facing increasing

discrimination by the Croatian government.

A lot of people were killed outright and threatened.

People lost their jobs. It wasn’t just

Serbs, even say Croatians who’s married partner

was Serbian faced similar discrimination.

Franjo knew this all too well. So what

did he do? He wrote a new Constitution.

The constitution says that Croatia is a country of Croats.

That’s automatic ethnic cleansing. Constitutional.

By creating such a Croatian constitution, Franjo

violated the Yugoslav constitution which he considered

invalid, but he still wanted to keep the internal

Yugoslav borders. The Serbs had a different idea.

What the Croatian Serbs wanted was to have

control over the lands they populated,

their own self-government, their schools,

a right to preserve their language,

culture and national identity.

The Croats really wanted the same, feeling

threatened by what was now being described

by Zagreb as the Serbo-Yugoslav giant.

The Serbs thought, well, if Croats can

separate from Yugoslavia, why can’t the Serbs

separate from Croatia? After all, the same

thing happened in America back during the civil war.

When Virginia seceded from the U.S.

the Northwestern part of the State

seceded from Virginia to form West

Virginia that was loyal to the Union.

When I got there, when we inspected the

lines these guys all told me their

heroic stories of how they were just

simple peasant Croats that had been,

you know, patriots. And the JNA was

this formidable fighting force they had

overcome. All the weapons that they had,

they said that they had to

capture from the JNA.

well , that might have worked on someone else.

I looked around and I did my in-training,

I mean, and I knew who made various Kalashnikovs.

Every single one of the weapons carried

by these guys, everything from machine guns

to sniper reiffles, was all made in East Germany.

Even though Croatia never officially admitted

that Germany was arming them, they decided to

thank the Germans with a song. In German, you

know, so only the Germans would understand.

If you follow that bouncing ball, just recently, just

last summer, Croatia donated surplus, 4 or 5 thousand

Kalashnikovs to the Afghan National Army.

Those aren’t surplus,

what they’re doing is hiding essentially a murder weapon

The Serbs had more than enough weapons and they

were too eager to crush the Croatian Army.

LAUGHS

The Croatian town of Vukovar was under siege for

87 days, which later brought a phyric victory

to the Serb forces. Why phyrric? Well, because

they actually destroyed the entire city!

A horrific example of how territory suddenly became

more important than the people living on it.

Even though they were brainwashed

into thinking they were doing the

right thing, some people woke up and

realized what was really going on.

Mialian Levar, a Croat who was determined to protect his

town of Gospic from the Serbs, was among the first

to join the newly established Croat Army, but quickly

became disillusioned after an order he received.

His fight brought him all the way to the

International Criminal Court where he testified.

After that, however, extreme elements in

Croatia decided to silence Milan Levar.

Instead of building peaceful and trusting relationships

between the warning sides in Croatia, in 1992, the Pentagon

was busy proclaiming its imperial hegemony over the world

in its defense Planning Guide. According to the New York times.

of 1992 this document asserts that the only possible course

for the U.S. to pursue is complete world domination,

and it adds that no other country has the right to aspire

to the role of leadership, even as a regional power

It simply looked upon itself now as the supreme power in a

unipolar world and that they could

do whatever they wanted to do.

Yugoslavia had to be broken down. And there

was no better symbol for Yugoslavia than it’s

central republic of Bosnia. War erupted into the

worst bloodbath in Europe since World War II.

MUSIC

Civil war. Civil war is the worst kind of war.

It involves brother versus brother,

family member versus family member and it

is one of the ugliest kind of conflicts.

MUSIC

GUN FIRES

The Serbs wanted to have control over lands mainly

inhabited by Serbs, including lands that were

of strategic importance to them, the Croats

wanted the same for themselves, while the Bosnian

Muslims, or Bosniaks as they’re called today, wanted

it all. To achieve this, the Bosnian government,

now increasingly representing the Bosniak

voice, started getting help from the Americans.

AIR CRAFT FLYING

Secret flights started arriving at Tuzla

The Americans started to approve the

delivery of arms to the Bosnian Muslims.

American President Clinton later admitted in a book that

the Americans didn’t enforce the arms embargo. Heck,

but that’s not all. Alija was also offered the help

of hundreds of Mujahadeen! Come on, who can say no

to these guys. Serbs, on the other hand, relied heavily

on aid from Belgrade. As the Yugoslav Army was the

fourth largest in Europe, the West moved to stop

Belgrade from helping the Serbs in Bosnia.

So, in May of 1992 sanctions were imposed on what

was left of Yugoslavia - Serbia and Montenegro.

By October 1993, 90 percent of Yugoslavia's

domestic drugged production stopped.

The average daily intake of calories had fallen

by 28 percent compared to 1990 and 1.5 million

people were classified as undernourished.

Two months later, over 60 percent of Yugoslavia's

work force was unemployed and the average

monthly income had dropped from $500 to $15.

The markets and stores were close to empty.

As usual, sanctions merely hurt the

people at the lowest run on the ladder.

People at the top benefit from them.

They forced the Serbs into what would happen anywhere, it was a

criminal economy. The criminals

became King, because we made it so.

If you go to Belgrade now, what used to be the

diplomatic areas are now all the thugs and goons that made

tons of money from the war, on the black market,

War profiteers?, Big time!

Slobo’s government hijacked the country’s financial

system, while Serbia’s citizens were dooped

by several pyramid schemes, most notably by

those of Dafina Milanovic and Jezda Vasiljevic.

For themselves, of course. Because both Dafina

and Jezda got the hell out

of the country with the people money.

The economic tragedy triggered by the

sanctions was reaching it’s peek.

The effect was quite severe. Especially in 1993,

actually, the inflation rate in Yugoslavia was the

highest in recorded history.

As I recall, it was something like

1.8 billion percent inflation rate.

They even printed a 500 billion dinar note.

The lawlessness was intensifying

and the Mafia was taking control.

In spite of the catastrophe around them,

the Serbs would not heel to the will

of the West, so one man decided to use

this opportunity to save an organization

that no longer had a purpose.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or

NATO, was a system of collective defense

whereby its member states agree to

mutual defense in response to an attack

by any external party, founded in 1949.

The purpose, really, became to protect

the West from the Soviets, a counter-balance

to the later formed Warsaw Pact.

President Eisenhower saw NATO as a defensive

Alliance that eventually the Europeans would

take over. Instead, the US has turned it into

an instrument of power and Eastward expansion.

But then the Soviet Union went bust.

The US explicitly broke the agreement

that was made with Gorbachev about

not surrounding Russia with hostile

militarily armed states.

The colonization of Serbia is the bottom or

or second step on the staircase to Russia.

We must be colonized because NATO learned

Hitler’s lesson, Don’t have a two-front war

when you’re attacking the Russians,

you have to neutralize Yugoslavia the way Hitler did.

But to do that, you’d need to create a case where you had to

intervene against an enemy in Yugoslavia.

Enter Joe Biden.

We face a blatant act of Serbian expansionism and aggression

This is no more a civil war than Germany, Austria

and Czechoslovakia had civil wars in the 1930s. This,

as then in my view, is fascist thuggery on the march!

He was calling

Serbs horrific names and at the same time

he had a very influential position on the Foreign

Relations Committee of the Senate.

Biden was also emphasizing the

importance of a new role for NATO, as

seen in February of 1994 at the

Senate hearing on the future of NATO.

Last month, while the allies reassured

themselves in Brussels that NATO remains at the

bedrock of European security, crimes of a

kind that were tried at Nuremberg a half a

century ago continued unabated in Bosnia.

Without a common enemy to unite us,

we may find that our conceptions of what constitutes

national interest may very well divide us

He found the common enemy in the Serbian people,

who were already previously demonized by US

Public Relation firms such as Ruder & Finn, hired

by various separatist groups from Yugoslavia.

They not only demonized the Serbian leadership,

they demonized the Serbian people.

The problem for the Serbs was that they

were a little slow off the mark. They did

not understand what was being done to

them, and by the time they did, the whole

Balkan region had collapsed into a state

of conflict, in which the Serbs were

made out, clearly, from propaganda at the

time, to be the enemy of everybody else

Thus, the US quickly set out to act against the Serbs,

stirring up a storm in Croatia. Operation Storm, that is.

They came up with a plan where the

Croatian Army would launch an attack down into the Krajina

and occupy the area that was

manned by the Serbian minority

that had been there for 4 or 5 centuries,

but it was declared that they

were much too radical to permit to

continue within the borders of Croatia.

And at a meeting on the Brijuni islands,

Franjo gave his go-ahead to general Ante

Gotovina for the single largest act of

ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav wars,

An operation that lasted 84 hours in August of 1995,

resulted in the death of around 2,000, and

a quarter of a million ethnically cleansed Serbs.

Slobo and his generals, the protectors

of all Serbs, had abandoned them.

Operation Storm was an American inspired,

by some of my colleagues, because..

the people that were advising the Croatian Army.

were retired American general officers

and who operated just outside of Beltway in Washington.

Franjo was very happy.

With the Serbs gone from Croatia,

the Americans moved on to Bosina.

Simply pushing out the Serbs from there

was not so easy, so a different strategy was implemented.

Presenting the conflict in Bosnia as a civil war,

which it was, instead of a war of Serbian aggression,

meant that the Western public would be

confused, and the water would be muddied.

To intervene, the Americans needed to make

clear who they had to intervene against.

The Serbs started the war.

The Serbs are the original cause of the war.

They are the complete aggressors and wrongdoers

NATO was used to militarily continue the colonization

process, but Clinton knew it had to be somehow

justified to the wider public.

Perhaps the best example of what we’re

talking about here is Srebrenica.

Srebrenica, a village in Bosnia, was

declared a UN safe zone for Bosniaks

seeking refuge, but was never really dmilitarized,

which allowed Bosniak forces to

attack neighbouring Serb villages.

Serb commander Ratko Mladic overran Srebrenica, with

thousands of Muslims killed

and ethnically cleansed.

What happened in Srebrenica was a

stage managed fall of the enclave

to the Serbian forces, which never expected to conquer it.

The United Nations declared that this

was genocide, even though UN observer

Philip Corwin estimated that the number

of killed Muslims in Srebrenica was

no larger than the number of Serbs killed

in villages around Srebrenica.

But that didn’t matter, Srebrenica was

to be used for a much greater agenda

There are trustworthy witnesses on the Muslim side who claim

that Alija Izetbegovic told them that Bill Clinton had

indicated to him, Izetbegovic, that 5,000 dead Muslims would

be the price of NATO intervention

on the Bosnian Muslim side.

They believe that Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by

Izetbegovic in order to provide this burnt offering

to the White House that would be

the justification for intervention

and indeed, the proof of the pudding is in the eating

The Bosniak government had no choice.

Mr Silajdzic, speaking for his government said,

We have no choice and our Presidency had no choice but to

appeal for a military intervention

in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

You can not go this alone, the American public will

not tolerate it, the Alliance can not stand it.

AIR CRAFT FLYING

And intervention ensued.

EXPLOSION

Here was NATO, an organization formed

for the sole purpose of defense of its

member states, attacking a country that

has not attacked or threatened any of its member state.

Lewis Mackenzie, who was the

Major General of the UN Army in charge

of Sector Sarajevo, tried to warn the

Americans of what they were embarking upon.

I appeared in front of Congress and they asked me my opinion.

And I said, Start training your grandchildren

to be peacekeepers in Bosnia,

because you’re going to be there for generations.

And a lot of them are still there.

As heavily-armed US and NATO

troops enforced the peace in Bosnia,

the press and politicians alike portrayed

Western intervention in the former Yugoslavia as a noble,

if agonizingly belated, response to an outbreak

of ethnic massacres and human rights violations.

A lot of the so-called liberal or

left-wing or progressive media were

themselves cooped by the mainstream

viewpoint regarding the Balkans.

In other words, they had bought into

this paradigm that was presented to them

by the arms of the Government of the

United States and of the EU powers.

Only the journalists who towed the line and found new ways

to attack the Serbs, other than the

ones their editors sent them to tell,

other than the stories that were pre-written

before they came to the Balkans those guys excelled.

Of course, the bombing campaign forced

the Bosnian Serbs to surrender.

At the peace accord signing, which internally divided Bosina

into a Serb entity and a Muslim Croat entity, all those

responsible for intensifying the war were praising peace.

This is the village of Vrhbarje, near

Sokolac in Bosnia, inhabited mainly by Serbs and Muslims.

After the imposed Dayton peace accords,

the villagers were aware of what this meant to them,

and as the town became a part of the Serb entity,

Muslims decided to collectively leave to their own entity.

This video footage has never been

shown anywhere before. It just didn’t

fit the image the Western media had

tried to hard to project, the tidy

melodrama of the evil Serbs destroying

everything non-Serb in sight.

Do you think this would mobilize

Western public opinion to intervene?

What?

Serbs not behaving like genocidal maniacs?

Human beings?

Them?

MUSIC

Human compassion was something that was completely.

normal to a young Serbian man from Trebinje in Herzgovina

called Srkdjan Aleksic

Srdjan’s father recalled how his son noticed that the

Serb police were arresting a man on an ethnic basis.

This is one among many stories of true heroism

that never made it to the Western media.

The West was more focused on escalating the conflict so they

could have the excuse for jumping

in for their own interests.

As the world celebrated peace in Bosnia

international financial institutions were busily

collecting former Yugoslavia's external debt

from its remnant states, while transforming the

Balkans into a safe-haven for free enterprise.

In late 1995, the West unveiled a reconstruction

program that stripped Bosnia of sovereignty to a

degree not seen in Europe since the end of World War II.

It was pure colonialism,

consisted largely of making Bosnia

a divided territory under NATO military

occupation and foreign administration.

This pattern of intervention was so successful,

that the West just had to replicate it in Kosovo.

I think that the region is important

in geostrategic terms. They saw Kosovo

as a very potential country to actually

secure their presence in the region.

But the West underestimated the importance

that Kosovo has to the Serbian people.

SIRENS

My fellow Americans, today our armed

forces joined our NATO allies in air

strikes against Serbian forces

responsible for the brutality in Kosovo.

On March 24, 1999, on the order of Javier

Solana, in an act of pure aggression,

NATO had violated international law and the UN

charter by launching an air assault on Yugoslavia.

The people of Yugoslavia, however, decided

to show their true spirit, by going outside,

singing songs and having fun on their bridges

in spite of the catastrophe around them.

We thought the Serbs should last 5

days under the bombing and then

No one expected them to run on the bridges,

put on target T-shirts

The declared mission was to stop the

violence in Kosovo and topple Slobo.

Yugoslavia had the opposite affect, as

the conflict in Kosovo only intensified,

and the public rallied behind Slobo.

The reality of the war, however,

was far too gruesome.

Schools, hospitals, bridges, TV stations,

and even foreign embassies, were all

legitimate military targets for NATO.

The things that they bombed, I mean, the power grid.

Night after night they would hit the power grid,

knock it out so that they couldn’t pump water and,

you know , the bakeries couldn’t fire up in Belgrade.

So denying millions of people access to daily bread and water.

How does that affect the counter insurgency efforts of

the Serbian security forces in the province of Kosovo?

These were attacks on the Serbian people.

When civilians die, they call them collateral damage.

That’s what makes you feel bad,

because they’re humans, you know, they have their

names and they’re everything for their families.

But, for the rest of the world, they’re just collateral damage.

They hit the cigarette factory in Nis three times.

And it ended up being purchased by Phillip Morris.

Well if I walk into a supermarket with a

hammer and start smashing stuff and then say

look, I’ll pay you a pittens for the remains,

I’m a Viking and a vandal.

Apparently the cigarettes made in Nis were also killing

Albanians in Kosovo, so they needed to be taken out.

Obviously Phillip Morris had an issue

with the cigarette factory in Nis,

it was one of their main competitors

in the European market.

The real purpose of the war was to

economically colonise the country.

To replace the whole non-compatible domestic

infrastructure with German-compatible,

American-compatible economic systems.

So, bomb the car factory, the Yugo car factory,

the car that managed to make it into the U.S market,

bomb that to the ground.

Bomb the cement factories, bomb the oil industry,

bomb all of the telecommunication systems

so you can sell them the new ones,

much more expensive, but not any better.

If this was NATO’s job, it had to have

been well coordinated in advance.

In fact, almost a year prior to the war,

the World Bank carefully analysed the

consequences of an eventual military intervention

leading to the occupation of Kosovo

and conducted relevant simulations

which anticipated the possibility of an emergency

scenario arising out of the tensions in Kosovo.

This suggests that NATO had already briefed the

World Bank at an early stage of military planning.

The plans for occupation started before a

good enough pretext to intervene was found.

But hold on,

occupation?

Weren’t we told that Kosovo was to be liberated

from the Serbian aggressors who invaded it?

Well, I have yet to find someone who can

explain how a country can invade itself.

History was twisted in a way that would give

the West a believable pretext to intervene.

After 5 centuries of Turkish rule, Kosovo legally

became a part of Serbia in 1912.

By then, a lot of the Serbs were long gone,

and those that were left were again

under persuasion during World War II,

when the Albanian fascists took over Kosovo.

Mustafa Kruja, the Prime Minister of Albania,

was in Kosovo in June 1942,

and at a meeting with the Albanian leaders of Kosovo,

he said, we should endeavour to ensure that the Serb

population of Kosovo be, the area

be cleansed of them and all Serbs

who had been living there for centuries

should be termed colonialists

and sent to concentration camps in Albania.

The Serb settlers should be killed.

The terror against the indigenous Serbian

population reached significant proportions

with over 10,000 being killed

in cold blood and twice that number being expelled.

MUSIC

Here’s Tito with Enver Hoxha, the

Albanian dictator during communist times.

MUSIC

You see, one thing I didn’t mention about Tito is that

he didn’t just want to be ruler of Yugoslavia,

he wanted most of the Balkans,

a federation including parts of Greece and Italy,

Bulgaria and Albania as well.

This meant that the Albanian dictator Hoxha was to be shown

just how much the Albanians were well treated in Yugoslavia.

So, the Yugoslav Albanians, living mostly in Kosovo,

got a better living standard than in Albania!

Their own University, schools,

newspapers, political institutions,

cultural centres, everything in the Albanian language.

Albanians from Albania were flooding into Kosovo

with ease, and the Serbs were being pushed out.

Western media failed to mention any of this.

The official story was that Kosovo Albanians wanted

independence because of Slobo’s actions in the 1990s,

which ignored the fact that Albanians

demanded for Kosovo the status of a Republic

quickly after Tito’s Yugoslavia was formed,

around the time Slobo was born, and

even held mass demonstrations in 1968.

In 1974, Tito gave Kosovo, still a province of Serbia,

all the traits of a Republic and this

effectively helped the Albanian leaders

to continue what was started in World War II.

You had a lot of low level intimidation.

Attacks on individuals that are not dealt with by the police,

in that sense, effectively.

There are no arrests that follow.

A New York Times article published on July 12th 1982,

many years before Slobo came to power said that,

the exodus of Serbs is admittedly

one of the main problems

that the authorities have to contend with in Kosovo.

Regarding the Albanians who want to

separate from Yugoslavia, Becir Hoti,

an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo

stated that the nationalists have a two-point platform

first to establish what they call an

ethnically clean Albanian republic

and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.

And they were desperate for help,

they needed it at any cost.

Any cost you say?

MUSIC

There are a lot of little girls in

Kosovo whose first name is Madeleine.

MUSIC

If you want, we can talk here or we can go outside

MUSIC

Mr. Clark, this is your group,

they’re all KLA, former fighters.

MUSIC

Thank you for the enormous amount

of money you’ve raised tonight!

MUSIC

I must say,

I never expected that anywhere someone

would make such a big statue of me.

MUSIC

You gotta hand it to the Albanians, they

really know how to flatter the Americans.

Trouble is the Albanians didn’t know

what they were getting themselves into.

In 1998, the KLA was still classified

by the U.S. State Department as

a terrorist organization bankrolled by the proceeds

from the heroin trade and by Osama bin Laden

As it became more evident that the

KLA was driving events in Kosovo,

the U.S. realized it could use them for their own interests.

The whole northern Albania region was

actually under the control of the KLA,

not the Albanian government and U.S. cargo planes

were landing at a rate of two a day

bringing supplies and arms shipments.

British special forces, CIA, U.S. military

forces were providing training to the KLA

this was before the war.

Germany was shipping ex-East German military arms to Albania,

with the understanding that Albania

would provide it to the KLA.

The goal was to provoke a harsh response from the Serbian army,

so the West could pretend it’s jumping in to stop

war and impose its policies.

Slobo sent in the military and a

full blown conflict erupted in 1998.

Certainly everything the United States

have done in Afghanistan and Iraq,

is far worse than what the Serbian

military ever did in Kosovo.

If you’re gonna colonize a territory,

might as well put it on paper.

US State Secretary Madeleine Albright,

masterminded the so-called Rambouillet

agreement which was modelled on the

Dayton Accords imposed on Bosnia.

Here NATO outlined how it will occupy and colonize Yugoslavia,

Yugoslavia, in Annex B of the Rambouillet agreement

NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with

their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment

and equipment, free and unrestricted passage

and unimpeded access throughout Yugoslavia

Of course they took us to Rambouillet to drown us

We intentionally raised the bar too high,

we knew that they could not accept this

Addendum to the Agreement and the intention was

to go ahead and bomb.

In fact,

this Annex

was secret!

That’s right,

it was not revealed to the public until several

months after the beginning of the war.

The document also went a step further and

basically promised Kosovo secession in 3 years.

The Kosovar leaders signed that agreement last week.

Even though it does not give them all they want…

Nope, they have to wait 3 more years to get it.

They saw that a just peace is better

than a long and un-winnable war.

The Serbian leaders, on the other hand, refused even

to discuss key elements of the peace agreement.

Gee, I wonder why.

Hey, do you want us to occupy you this way or that way?

Of course while the true details were hidden,

the story was presented that the Americans

wanted to protect the Albanians.

Maybe we could show some refugee pictures,

you know what, they break my heart,

America’s been responding to this terror,

these pictures that have been going

on and all these atrocities.You look at all the atrocities,

all the misery and mayhem and insanity

there’s an incideous evil that permeates this Earth.

Many Albanians didn’t buy it.

I consider that the intervention of the West in 1999 against

Serbia was made possible

by the geostrategic interests

that the Western countries might have

had and especially the United States of America.

This had nothing to do with the Albanians,

or the Americans caring about them.

That’s right, NATO killed Albanian civilians too.

Lots of them. If they cared about Albanians,

or Serbs for that matter,

the West wouldn’t have aided the KLA which was directly

linked to organized crime and the narcotics trade.

You don’t help anyone by aiding the Mafia.

After the highly publicized Racak massacre

which was later to be revealed by Finnish

forensic Helena Ranta as staged,

NATO bombed Yugoslavia, but failed

to destroy the Yugoslav military.

By the end of NATO bombing, only

13 Yugoslav tanks were destroyed

and a lot of those were old models that

were left out deliberately as decoys.

The Serbs had ingenious methods of

protecting their military defences.

They built wooden tanks, painted them

to look like a real tank and put an old

heater or microwave oven inside it and turned it on.

NATO goes by with hyper-high technology,

sees the target and bombs it.

OK, those bombs cost several hundred thousand dollars per go,

and the tar paper tank costs about 200 bucks.

LAUGHS

So why did Slobo give in to NATO?

At the June 2nd meeting when Marti Ahtisaari and Viktor

Chernomyrdin came to Belgrade to meet with Milosevic,

Ahtisaari read me those terms.

And Milosevic asked them: What

would happen then if I don’t sign?

There was a table between them

with a flower vase and Ahtisaari moved the vase to the side

and said Belgrade will be like this table.Then he

repeated the gesture of his arm sweeping across the table.

He said in a weeks time there will be half a

million dead, it will be carpet bombing Belgrade.

Faced with Ahtisaari’s monstrous threat,

Slobo had no choice and signed the agreement,

while Ahtisaari went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

This is a CBS News Special Report, part of our

continuing coverage of the Crisis over Kosovo

Earlier today, Serb forces began withdrawing from Kosovo

and NATO suspended its 11 week bombing campaign.

The first step of the Western geostrategic interests

was fulfilled in 1999 being that NATO troops

entered Kosovo and they remain still in Kosovo.

Along with U.S. troops which established Camp Bond steel,

the second largest foreign

military base outside of Germany,

an army of lawyers and consultants was

sent into the now occupied Kosovo under

World Bank auspices to create an enabling

environment for foreign capital.

And how was this done?

They set up an organization to manage the

privatization of socially owned enterprises

and after a certain period of time they determined

that they would do this without any regard to legal ownership,

that they wouldn’t have to pay any attention

to who actually legally owned this,

they just basically confiscated it and

privatized it, sold it to whom they chose.

Yugoslav State banks in Kosovo were closed down

and the Deutschmark was adopted as legal tender.

Almost the entire banking system in Kosovo was

handed over to Germany’s Commerzbank A.G.

which gained full control over commercial

banking functions for the province.

One second though.

Think about this for a little bit. Human rights violations.

War crimes.

Those are the reasons the West went in to Kosovo,

we’ve been told by the media, right?

So why was the head of the UN mission of Kosovo most

obsessed with taking over a coal mine from the Serbs?

MUSIC

Prior to the bombings, Western investors

already had their eyes riveted

on the massive Trepca mining complex which constitutes

the most valuable piece of real estate in

the Balkans, worth at least 5 billion Dollars.

The Trepca complex not only includes copper and large

reserves of zinc but also cadmium, gold, and silver.

The International Crisis Group, a think

tank supported by Financier George Soros,

issued a paper on Trepca

Making Sense of the Labyrinth

which told UNMIK to take over the Trepca mining complex

from the Serbs as quickly as possible

and that handing Trepca over to the Kosovars is ruled out

And in August 2000, UNMIK Head Bernard Kouchner

sent in heavily armed peacekeepers wearing

surgical masks against toxic smoke to occupy the mine.

This was done on the pretense that it was creating

an environmental hazard through excessive air pollution.

Of course, a healthy environment had

always been a top priority of the West in Yugoslavia,

even during the bombing campaign nicknamed Merciful angel

After NATO used depleted uranium

munitions here during the 1999 bombing,

military experts from Belgrade have

registered an increased radiation level

Dr. Sedlak was the first to raise the alarm.

There is no other place in the modern world where so

many people and so many young people die from cancer.

In this animal hospital in the South of Serbia,

there is evidence of something going wrong.

As it takes billions of years for uranium to decay,

the shadow of the ghost of the merciful angel

will hang over the region virtually forever.

See, that’s perfectly fine.

Meanwhile, the United Nations had handed over the

management of the entire Trepca mining complex

to a Western consortium.

With a stake in the Trepca deal was

Morrison Knudsen International.

The new conglomerate was the Washington Group,

one of the World's most powerful engineering and construction

firms as well as a major Defense contractor in the US.

Are any of the Western politicians,

businessmen or lobbyists facing charges

for stealing from the Yugoslav people,

for crimes against the people of the former Yugoslavia?

Nope. Not a single one of them.

Instead, to escape any persecution,

they set up a tribunal in the Hague,

the Netherlands, to try the

Yugoslav people involved in the war.

The Hague Tribunal was founded in 1993

on the basis of the Security Council Resolution,

rather than General Assembly Resolution,

which means that it is an ad hoc body created on the

basis of political rather than legal principles

When you’re creating a colony, you only lock up the dissidents.

Back in Belgrade, Slobo, who was declared a man of peace in 1995

when he handed over Bosnia to the West,

after he was being stubborn about doing the

same for Kosovo, got indicted for war crimes.

I think every major world leader knows that

if they don’t go along with the system,

that they’re likely to be taken out one way or another.

After an extensive anti-Slobo campaign

readily financed by Western wallets,

The EU and the USA have spent millions of Euros in

equipping opposition movements inside Yugoslavia

with the necessary resources to fight in election campaign.

Slobo lost the elections in September of 2000,

but wouldn’t heel to his opponent, Vojislav Kostunica.

Vojo decided that enough was enough.

CHEERING

Victory, victory shouted the crowd,

Slobodan, Slobodan save Serbia and kill yourself, cried others.

Slobo fell.

But what next?

The politicians were all back to

quarrelling over insignificant nonsense,

in the hottest TV reality show AKA

the Serbian National Assembly.

MUSIC

Instead of focusing on the really important things,

they allowed the further fragmentation of Yugoslavia.

In 2003,

the name Yugoslavia

officially ceased to exist thanks to the

genius prescription of Havier Solana.

However, one man didn’t want to give up his country

and its system so easily.

Blasko Gabric, from my home town of Subotica,

decided to make a radical move.

Yugoslavian socialism was much much better

socialism than any other socialism,

alright, comparing to the Russians

or comparing with Chinese.

We had a Heaven.

If you can imagine a Heaven in the Earth, that was Yugoslavia.

Blasko explains who took away his piece of Heaven.

The Western world, they want to talk

You will go to Heaven when you die.

They don’t want afford you Heaven when you’re alive.

So, he turned his property of 15

hectars into a new, fourth Yugoslavia

If they destroy your factory,

if they put everything on private.

Whatever we had we don’t have any more, what do you call that?

The West said this was democracy.

We have a very very nice joke.

When Muslim people ask their priest

how can he explain democracy to them,

to be capable to understand.

Well,

very simple I can explain that to you.

See, when I go in top of minaret

and you are down below me

and I piss on you guys,

even you can piss on me too.

That’s democracy.

Well,

jokes aside,

taking away Yugoslavia’s name had a more malevolent motive.

When they take Yugoslavia away, when

they call Serbia and Montenegro

West promised to the Montenegro

Leave the Serbia alone

Come 2006,

after a controversial referendum Montenegro

became the newest country of the world.

55.4% of citizens voted for the independence of Montenegro

However, another part of the former

Yugoslavia still wanted that title.

You guessed it, Kosovo.

In the same year,

negotiations began between the Belgrade government

and the Albanian minority over the status of Kosovo.

However, the so-called negotiations

were a farce from the beginning,

as almost all the Western powers were promising

Kosovo independence regardless of the negotiations.

Sooner rather than later, you gotta say enough is enough

Kosovo is independent.

That’s the position we’ve taken.

The people of Kosovo need to know that it is a solid,

firm position, even though there is diplomacy and talks

but if it’s apparent that that’s not going to

happen in a relatively quick period of time,

in my judgement, we need to put forward a resolution!

Think about it.

If you had some of the world’s largest powers

telling you that you can get what you want,

why the hell would you settle for any less

and try to reach a compromise?

As anticipated, the talks broke down and

Kosovo, unilaterally, declared independence.

MUSIC

It has been an honour to welcome the President and Prime Minister

of an independent Kosovo to the Oval Office.

I’m proud y’all are here. I welcome you.

I'm a strong supporter of Kosovo’s independence.

MUSIC

I pledged that the United States would continue to work

with those nations that have not recognized an independent

Kosovo to convince them to do so as quickly as possible.

Contrary to what Bush had hoped,

the majority of world countries didn’t recognize Kosovo,

and it didn’t even become a UN member state.

Thus Kosovo failed to become a country.

What was absurd in this story is that

the Albanian minority, which in all

fairness did suffer greatly throughout the 1990s,

thought that they actually got independence in 2008.

Big day for Kosovo people. Albanians, yeah.

How do you feel?, - Ooh, I feeling

very very good. This is like a dream.

As a Serb,

I feel sorry for the Albanians.

Because they have been dooped even more than we have.

They think they have an independent state.

Kosovo is a U.S. military base.

It happens to have some local colour called Albanians.

Some local foliage like leaves on the trees.

Whether they could decide to do something not

consisted with U.S. wishes

Impossible.

Do you think the Kosovo government could do

anything without the Americans agreeing with it?

No.

We just we listen Americans.

America, there are 50 countries... States. Yeah, so,

why Kosovo not be a part of America?

You would support that?

Yes, why not.

They are just administrating everything in Kosovo.

The Americans are in control?

Yea, they are pretty much in control here.

We are not independent from European Union and from America

The formal channel

whereby the international missions

of Kosovo have the absolute power over all

walks of political and economic life in Kosovo are represented

through International Civilian Representative

who has the right to expel any

elected official or annual any laws that

are passed by the Assembly of Kosovo.

At the same time, there is an informal

channel whereby the international

community meddles within the politics

and economics of Kosovo through

the Ambassadors of the powerful countries

that have been seen or presented

itself as sponsors of the independence of Kosovo.

The wishes of these Ambassadors are

kind of like orders to Kosovo’s politicians.

Kosovo still remains a colony and this colonization has

actually degraded the life

or the standard of living of Kosovo.

On the other hand, the people of Serbia’s

other province were unaware of what

was being prepared for them.

Smack dab in the middle of the Pannonian plain,

Vojvodina has always been an attractive chunk of real estate,

exploited for its fertile farmland.

After Kosovo’s declaration of independence,

the West turned their sights northward.

Towards the end of 2009,

in an article published in The Economist,

the situation in Serbia’s northern

province was described as being on

the thin end of a wedge leading to Vojvodina’s independence.

After all, Kosovo and Vojvodina had equally extensive autonomy.

And why did nobody take action?

What’s with the silence?

You see, there’s a way to

get people to do something in Serbia,

or any other Yugoslav country for that matter

just tell them it’s another step towards

bringing them closer to the European Union.

The EU, a unique political and economic

partnership of European countries,

provides states with an exchange of goods,

people and ideas on a market that

includes around a billion inhabitants.

Apart from the official definition,

there’s more to it than the eye can see.

European Union is a project of the elite class in Europe

that denies the value of the genuine heritage of European

civilization and seeks to replace it with politically

correct dictate of the ideology of

post modernism and post nationalism.

First, your country has to open its market to EU products

and sell all its banks, which is like giving

away your queen and rooks in a game of chess.

Then, your country’s domestic industry,

agriculture and money market goes bust,

which allows foreign companies to get a good

purchase price on your most valuable assets.

If we continue the chess analogy, your government

is playing as a beginner against the EU

who is ten steps ahead of you.

You may know how to move the figures, but your opponent

knows how to draw you to thin ice and get what he wants.

Check-mate.

In the Czech Republic,

the EU forced the sugar industry to close their factories,

because the EU had too much sugar it

was importing from Cuba that made them bigger profit.

Instead, the Czechs got a little gift from the Germans

their dirty industry which they couldn’t

keep in Germany due to the Kyoto protocol.

In Hungary,

vineyards were first destroyed by French dumping prices,

which then caused the Hungarians to

not be able to pay back their loans

to the banks, and foreigners bought

their property at low prices.

This is why the most famous Hungarian vineyars

such as Tokay, are owned by the English.

There is no work, says this man, just poverty.

The situation has become worse since the sugar

factory nearby Szerencsi closed down last year.

80 people from Meszozombor lost their jobs.

The factory’s been torned down.

I think you can see a pattern here.

These places like the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe

were not supposed to be colleagues and equals

in a brotherhood of nations, but rather they were supposed

to be markets for Western industrial goods.

They were supposed to be markets for cheap labour.

Bear in mind it takes a while to join the EU.

You won’t hear about these things in the media though.

The European Union spends over 2 billion

Euros per year for its representation in the media.

They sponsor shows on television, on

radios, they sponsor programs and so on.

They organize conferences, especially

just for the journalists.

It’s a massive industry, you hardly ever hear criticism about

the European Union from the journalists.

In Serbia there has never been a

true debate about the European Union

and any attempt to even initiate such a debate was

condemned upfront as anti-European

Those who try to open up such a debate are simply cut off.

I remember that guy,

the neoliberal guy from the party G17+,

he told me Yea but you are criticizing the European Union,

but hey, you live in European Union,

Slovenia is doing well in Europe!

No, it just doesn’t work like this.

This is a standard propaganda,

you understand?

We are not better off because we are in European Union.

It’s vice versa.

We are in European Union because we did better off

than other, for example,

republics of the former Yugoslavia.

After the death of Yugoslavia, every single former Yugoslav

republic wanted to become a member of the EU.

Slovenia was the first to actually join in 2004,

but wasn’t dazzled much.

We are no more a country,

we are just a region of European Union.

Why do I claim that?

We have no monetary policy,

we have practically no fiscal policy,

because we are very much restricted with

the rules of European Union or EU area.

Are things better off now that

Slovenia is in the European Union?

No, I don’t think so.

I don’t think it’s better

No, I don’t think so.

The prices have just doubled, everything

is more expensive then it used to be.

The clothes are more expensive

LAUGHS

I voted no when we had a referendum

for joining European Union.

Basically, if you are part of the European Union,

you are giving something into the common wallet EU.

A lot of social rights that we had

in the past are now being shrinked.

I believe, and that’s my personal opinion,

that European Union is more of a corporation than like

a political establishment that secures human rights.

Right across the street from Slovenia,

Croatia was giving up enforcement of the Ecological

and Fisheries Protection Zone towards EU states,

as one third of all Italian fishing

activity came from that zone.

It also flushed away it’s banking sector.

On the other hand, people in Serbia find it hard to stop

trusting everything that comes from the West,

often readily believing their propaganda

that the West really loves them,

and that even when they’re bombing Serbs,

they’re doing it for the Serbs’ own good.

I think the situation that we’re in today is the

result of something that I call predatory capitalism.

And it really got under way in the

70s when I was an economic hitman,

we used predatory capitalism in the third world a lot.

The first principle is that the only responsibility of

business is to maximize profit regardless

of the social and environmental cost.

As Yugoslavia broke up,

the federal debt was distributed between the successor states.

At the end of the 2000s,

the prosperity everyone was promised clearly kicked in.

Montenegro, from a debt of 416 million,

had acquired a debt of 4,7 billion dollars,

Macedonia had jumped from 890 million to 6,7 billion dollars,

and Bosnia went from 2,1 billion to 16,5 billion dollars.

Serbia’s debt increased from 5,5 billion to 38 billion dollars.

Slovenia from 2,6 billion to a shocking 56,3 billion dollars.

And Croatia, the absolute debt acquiring winner, jumped

from 4,6 billion to a dizzying 69 billion dollars.

In 1988, two years before the breakup of Yugoslavia,

Heh, Yugoslavs love to say how

they lived off foreign debt during

Tito’s Yugoslavia. And now they don’t?

Okay, so, they were bought by foreigners.

What’s so bad about that?

On the other hand, here’s one example of how they robbed

the reduced Yugoslavia with loans.

First, they enforced heavy sanctions.

Miroljub Labus was, by the way,

a member of G17+, those so called pro-IMF experts.

In 2008, Croatia earned 9,3 billion dollars from tourism,

which amounts to some 20% of Croatia’s overall GDP.

And this would’ve been great, had the

money actually stayed in Croatia.

Of those 9,3 billion, Croatia was

left with small waiter salaries,

wage taxes, the goods and services tax of 19%,

and a handful of Euros from restaurants,

cafés and private accommodation,

while the profit went to Germany.

With the macro economic stability

at stake in all the republics,

the IMF and World Bank step in to save the day.

And how to they do it?

Let’s say the IMF and World Bank give

you a loan of 300 million dollars,

to which you have to pay interest of 5,5 to 7%.

But the money doesn’t go anywhere, no no,

it stays in big American or German banks,

as well as the republics foreign exchange

reserves, to which you get 2 to 2,5 % interest.

Then, those same banks, with essentially

the republic’s money,give investment loans to the

republics through different development funds,

which again increases their debt that

they can repay only with fresh new loans.

Thus, the cycle continues.

What does this mean to the people?

If we divide up every country’s debt by it’s population,

this is how much every citizen would have to pay.

Yet, many people still think that

foreign factors want to help them.

Foreign banks used the desperate state of the Yugoslav

population for their own gains, sometimes by criminal means.

The dire situation was made worse

by the world financial crisis,

so Croatia looked at what else the

country had a lot of that it could sell.

That’s right, islands!

In 2009,

Britain’s Independent newspaper

announced that Croatia wants to sell

the Brijuni Islands, which is also a national park

and, located on it, Tito’s luxurious former residence.

Meanwhile, in the colony of Bosnia,

the IMF added Article 7 to Bosnia’s new constitution,

drawn up in Dayton, Ohio.

They decided that the Governing Board

of the Central Bank shall consist of

a Governor appointed by the

International Monetary Fund and that

The Governor shall not be a citizen of Bosnia

and Herzegovina or any neighbouring state

Therefore, the government does not

have control of its country’s economy.

But it wouldn’t be fair to say that all the money

invested in Bosnia was used to repay its loans.

Nope,

a lot of the money did go to the Bosnian people.

Except that it went to a very few Bosnian people.

Very… very few.

In fact,

according to anti-fraud unit set up by

the Office of the High Representative,

one billion dollars disappeared

from public funds and international

aid projects from 1995 to 1999.

Where did all this go, one might ask?

Well, for example, in the town of Sanski Most,

money went to a horse racing track,

rather than developing the economy, infrastructure.

If you're going to steal public and aid funds,

you may as well go all out, and gamble it too,

right?

The same mayor of this town also gave 450,000

provided by Saudi Arabia to his brother,

so the guy can open a new bank.

He also faces 358 charges of corruption.

On the other hand,

Montenegro relied on cigarette smuggling to

keep the country afloat during the war years.

It’s leaders, Bulatovic and Djukanovic, claimed

they never personally benefited from the smuggling.

Which is really odd, considering that Prime Minister Djukanovic

was the 20th richest statesmen in the

world in 2010, more than 3 times richer

richer than Nicholas Sarkozy and Barack Obama combined.

Milo Djukanovic has been more successful

than most in turning his entire

country into a personal fiefdom operated

on the basis of cosa nostra principles.

In fact, I think his personal net worth is

much greater than the one officially listed,

that in reality he can claim to own

everything there is in Montenegro.

Since these elites couldn’t care less about anyone else

the people at the bottom of the food

44 year old Samir was born in Bosnia

and he is convinced that under these layers of dirt

is the largest pyramid in the world.

Many youths realized what was going on and

started fighting against what their

countries were being turned into.

Our band’s name is Beogradski Sindikat,

which would translate in English like Belgrade Union.

Belgrade Union is a Serbian rap band famous for it’s critical

views towards society’s elite and criminal elements.

Bosko Cirkovic from Belgrade Union explained why not

many people were taking action against the injustice.

A lot of young..

Serbians and youth of the

world just think about material stuff and,

you know, going into politics, they do

it just to get more material stuff.

If I was in the same room with the guys running this country,

and the main guy is my

ex-high-school psychology teacher.

I would conduct the real revolution on them.

How that would turn out,

I don’t know, but some of us would

probably not leave the room.

Dubioza Kolektiv is a Sarajevo-based band

with a similar message to the one Belgrade Union had.

As long as people think that their impact on the democratic

processes ends up when they put the ballot in the box,

then nothings gonna change, because

that leaves four years gap to whoever

is elected to do whatever he wants.

The ruling elites don’t listen to anybody.

That’s the thing ..

they learned the best.

because They even ignore mass protests

Sadly, the elite in power, even when the

majority was against them, still didn’t listen.

One of my very close and very trusted friends was at a dinner,

a private dinner

at which the American Ambassador Cameron Munter was present.

That dinner was held between the election,

in which the Radical party,

which is much more independence

oriented than the democratic party,

had apparently won the election,

had the most votes of any party.

And we were all expecting that , well, the people have spoken,

there’s been an election and the biggest party

is going to form the government.

And my My friend asked Cameron Munter

Well, Mr. Munter,

it seems that your mission here has been a failure.

The mission to bring Serbia under the

imperial tutelage.

He said..

I wouldn’t speak so soon...

In fact, I’d watch the television tomorrow

and see what the results of the meeting

between Mr. Tadic and Mr. Dacic are.

And as the government itself was formed by Washington,

the policies and laws were also dictated from abroad.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is writing

laws for the Government of Serbia

and telling them these are the laws we want you to pass.

Thus, the former Yugoslav countries

started becoming NATO member states.

Do you know what it means to join NATO?

You have to get rid of all your weapons

systems which are domestically produced,

domestically designed, domestically developed,

designed for your terrain

to reequip yourself with F16s, F18s,

F22s, at a cost of hundreds and hundreds and

hundreds of thousands of dollars per plane.

And your sons and daughters have to go and fight.

And where do they want us to fight?

They want us to put on the night vision goggles

and go to Afghanistan and kill them dang

rag-heads, who never did anything to us.

Profits and military gains were again being acquired

from these economic and geopolitical colonies.

The people were completely unaware of what was happening to

them and thought that they were finally free and independent.

What happened in Yugoslavia could be considered

like a classic example of colonization.

It’s sort of a new flavour, but it’s still colonization.

Rather than trying to colonize

the unsettled areas of the world,

why not just create a mess and fix it.

Then you basically own a chunk of the world

which was already developed and consuming.

They wanted a Yugoslavia whose rich natural resources

would be at the disposal of multinational corporations,

whose populations would work at subsistence wages,

whose economy offered no competition

with existing capitalist producers,

only new investment opportunities.

They wanted a Yugoslavia whose petroleum, engineering,

mining and automotive industries would be undone and

deindustrialized and they wanted to abolish

Yugoslavia’s public sector services and social programs.

And. they did it.

Furthermore, the harmony that the people of Yugoslavia

had been building for the greater good was crushed.

It is a stereotype that the hatred between the

populations in Yugoslavia was always there.

The South Slavs travelled together to arrive

these lands from the North and found their

piece of heaven around the 6th century.

Hatred was later manufactured for greater powers,

who saw it appropriate to teach the Slavs

how to be civilized and democratic.

Consider that for the better part of the 20th century,

black people weren’t even allowed to sit

at the front of the bus in the U.S.

while the Dubrovnik Republic actually

abolished slavery back in 1642,

when the U.S. was still a British

colony and didn’t exist as a country.

The Western hypocricy was obvious.

Why would a Croat really hate a Serb,

or a Serb hate a Muslim? hmm

Because of what someone somewhere did in who knows when?

Because of what TV says? Hasn’t history shown that

these people were in fact able to live together?

Or is this all irrelevant the moment

someone starts arguing about who did what

to whom how many times worse.

There is no such thing as biological hatred,

that a certain group is predestined to hate another.

Anyone who says any different, has an agenda, trust me.

I know what you’re going to say.

Boris, all you do is criticize,

without offering a solution.

Well, for the solution,

all you need to do is look at the stories

of those who said no to this madness,

who decided to act as human beings during inhuman times.

Corrupt politicians, army generals or war profiteers

were to blame for the colonization of Yugoslavia

just as much as the colonists from the West.

Nobody could’ve done this to us if we were not as weak as

we are in defining ourselves and defending our own history

If we, as a nation, stand up, no one can keep us down.

There is no cruise missile, there is no imperial power,

there is no spying network,

there is no media domination that can crush our people.

Yugoslavs must become aware that their

countries are Western colonies,

victims of rampant and merciless globalization,

bound by economic, social and political chains.

If they don’t, the weight of chains

will slowly get unbearable.

The land of the South Slavs, whatever you call it,

has great potential shared by some of the most

diverse and enigmatic people in the world.

The East thought they were the West,

the West considered them the East.

Some of them misunderstood their place in the clash of currents,

so outside powers exploited them for centuries.

Enough.

MUSIC