THE HANDSTAND

august 2005

yugoslavia purposefully maligned:

Jared Israel Editor Emperor's Clothes:
February 2004, Francisco Gil-White is Deputy Editor of Emperors Clothes. Following the publication of the remarkable document below, the directors of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict launched an effort to silence Francisco which has now culminated in an effort to prevent his reappointment. For a documented chronology of the attempt to force Francisco to change the conclusions of his research, go to http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~fjgil/open.htm

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Milosevic Maligned
Francisco Gil-White Philadelphia, PA
[ www.tenc.net ]

A couple of months ago I chanced upon the Emperor's Clothes Website because of their coverage of 9-11.

I noticed their startling claim that we have been systematically lied to about Yugoslavia, including Slobodan Milosevic. As they told it, he was not guilty of racist incitement and genocide; rather he advocated multiethnic peace. Since their views sharply contradicted my own, I started systematically checking their references by obtaining the relevant original documents. I have yet to find a single claim in error.

This was particularly surprising regarding the famous speech that Slobodan Milosevic delivered at Kosovo Field in 1989 at the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. According to what I had read, this was an ultranationalist diatribe in which Milosevic manipulated memories of a famous defeat to stir mob hatred of Muslims, especially Albanians.

Emperor's Clothes posted what they claimed was the official U.S. government translation of that speech, http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/milosaid.html which they attributed to the National Technical Information Service, a dependency of the Commerce Department.

The posted speech was certainly not hateful.

But was this the real speech? The text contradicted everything I had been led to expect from Slobodan Milosevic and everything I had read about this speech.Through my university library, I obtained a copy of the microfilm of the BBC's translation (which is a translation of the live relay of the speech). I compared this text to the one posted at Emperor's Clothes. Except for a few words that the BBC translator was not able to hear, they match almost exactly.

The speech is not devoid of a certain poetry and, given what I had been led to believe about Milosevic, I was amazed to find that it was *explicitly tolerant*. In other words, the entire point, structure, message, and moral of the speech -- in all its details -- was to promote understanding and tolerance between peoples, and to affirm the unity of all those who live in Serbia, regardless of
their national origin or religious affiliation.

But if a speech such as this had been falsely reported as a viciously hateful speech, then what about the rest of my information about Yugoslavia? After all, it came from the same sources which had misrepresented this speech...

I began to read voraciously, to see how academics, politicians and the media had reported what happened in Yugoslavia. I have found an enormous amount of misinformation, and it is hard to dispel the impression that much of this is *deliberate*. This is quite important for my field because students of ethnic conflict, like myself, need to know what it is that we are supposed to explain. Our case data often comes from historians and journalists who describe ethnic conflicts for us. Until recently, I was assuming that those who wrote about Yugoslavia could at least be trusted to try to report things accurately.

I have changed my mind. What I now know suggests that the problem is not merely that reporters and academics are misinformed. I have observed that a source may report the facts accurately and then, in another place, usually later, *the same source* will report them completely inaccurately. How can one explain this as a result of ignorance? It suggests a conscious effort to misinform.

That obviously raises the question: why?

Many articles on Emperor's Clothes explore that question. Here I am primarily concerned with showing that Slobodan Milosevic was, in fact, systematically and willfully misrepresented. As an example of what has been done, I have assembled excerpts from various sources regarding Milosevic's famous 1989 speech at Gazimestan (the location is often referred to as Kosovo Polje or Kosovo Field). I compare these excerpts to Milosevic's words so that you can see what was done.

I have provided Emperor's Clothes with a pdf version of the microfilm of the BBC translation so my readers can compare the US government and the BBC versions for themselves.

To see the pdfs of the BBC microfilm visit these links:

http://www.icdsm.com/milosevic/milosevic1.pdf
http://www.icdsm.com/milosevic/milosevic2.pdf and
http://www.icdsm.com/milosevic/milosevic3.pdf

For an easy-to-read text version of the BBC translation, go here:
http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/milosaid2.htm

To compare this to the US government translation, go here:
http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/milosaid.html

Finally, you may look at further instructions I provide in the footnote for those who may wish to track down this text on their own.[1]

As you read the compilation (certainly not complete) of misquotations, misrepresentations, misattributions, and mischaracterizations of Milosevic's speech in the media and by academics, it is important to keep something in mind. If Milosevic really *was* a hate-monger, the evidence would not be hard to find. As Jared Israel wrote in his introduction to the speech: "It is impossible for a society to engage in genocide unless the population is won to hate the target group. This has to be done in a systematic way. That is, political leaders must support hate in deeds but also in words."
http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/milosaid.html

Incitement to hatred, after all, is a *public behavior*. One cannot become an ultra-nationalist populist politician without making ultra-nationalist speeches -- the masses cannot be incited *in secret*. Thus, if Milosevic really was the man portrayed in the media, nobody would have to slander an explicitly tolerant speech in order to make the case. They could just use a genuinely hateful public statement, written document, radio interview, letter -- anything. It would make zero sense for the media to fabricate all sorts of things about a tolerant speech if anything hateful by Milosevic really existed.

In the first part of my analysis below I report the misrepresentations of the speech. Following that, I quote reports in the media made on or immediately after June 28, 1989, the day Milosevic spoke. These accounts, published immediately after his speech, *were accurate*, and this demonstrates that the truth was easily available if someone had wanted to report it later on. Not only that, I go further to demonstrate that the same media services which reported the speech accurately in 1989, then went on to lie about the speech eight years later, when NATO needed to demonize Slobodan Milosevic, in preparation for the bombing of Yugoslavia and takeover of Kosovo.

Most of my examples deal with media coverage of the Milosevic speech but government officials are also on record lying about it. For example, on June 28, 1999, Robin Cook, then the Foreign Minister of the UK, said the following about the speech:

Milosevic used this important anniversary not to give a message of hope and reform. Instead, he threatened force to deal with Yugoslavia's internal political difficulties. Doing so thereby launched his personal agenda of power and ethnic hatred under the cloak of nationalism. All the peoples of the region have suffered grievously ever since." [1b]

As the excerpts from Milosevic's speech which I have quoted below demonstrate, Robin Cook was lying. This powerfully suggests that the Western media and the highest officials worked together in a campaign to sell the public a falsified version of this speech, in order to justify war.

Francisco Gil-White Philadelphia, PA

a new bureaucratic scandal emerges
Re. Finance for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague

This Tuesday, the German section of the ICDSM was attacked for the secondtime. This time, the tax police entered the apartment of Peter Betscher in his absence. Betscher, who is the person responsible to administer donations for the defense work at The Hague, was informed by phone on his working place. When he arrived, the police already took out his PC and several documents. After he insisted that police should wait for his lawyer, the police told him that he has no right to say anything and that they are in control.

In a written document that gave the police the permission to enter the flat,the purpose of the operation was outlined as: to investigate the use of the money and to find out the names of the donors!

Asked for the basis of the investigation, a police officer responded that it was based on "an EU regulation". Mr. Betscher was also informed that the donations' bank account was frozen. Roughly one and a half years ago, the donations account as well as the personal account of a member of the German section of the ICDSM were frozen on basis of "an EU regulation": the EU sanctions against President Milosevic, his family and closest associates. At that time, the judge decided in favour of the ICDSM: it is the basic right of any accused to have a defense.

When Mr. Betscher mentioned that court decision, the police said they acted on order.