Was Dubrovnik ever shelled?

Wed Jun 2 18:53:11 CEST 2004

I was already afraid that the author of this incredibly unintelligent 
piece of propaganda was Peter Maher of Politically Incorrect - 
otherwise a very bright individual. But it appears that this is 
another "Maher" (in Zagreb slang "maher" means a succesfull con-
artist). This guy says that there was no destruction of Dubrovnik and 
that pictures we saw were fake - of another city! He writes that 
Germans and Croatian fascists returned to the city in 1991 and 
expelled Serbs and non-fascist Croats. I've never heard that one 
before. Most of the rest are old fabrications. Particularly 
hillarious is his description of Yugoslav Army:
"That was the legal army of a regular state. It was a
multi-ethnic force, not Serbian, nor Serb-dominated. There were
Slovenes, Albanians, Macedonians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs from all the
Serb lands - and Croats. Many were killed. The Commander in Chief was
a Croat, not Slobodan Milosevic." First I thought this deserves Feral 
Tribune's 'shit of the month' award, but the inclusion of Czechs and 
Slovaks in the Yugoslav Army, prompted me to think that the old 
professor is mixing up Yugoslovakia and Czechoslavia, hence deserving 
of the 'shit of the year' award.

ivo 
------- Forwarded message follows -------
--------------------------- Originalna poruka
---------------------------- Naslov: [Fwd: Peter Maher's Response to
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Articleon Dubrovnik "Destruction"] Od:    
"minja m." <minja at vlada.ca> Datum:  Pon, 31 Maj, 2004 02:26 Prima: 
undisclosed-recipients:;
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Peter Maher's Response to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Article on
Dubrovnik "Destruction"

Subject: to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on "Dubrovnik Destruction &
Restoration" Date: Fri, 28 May 2004 12:19:54 -0500
From: John Peter Maher <jpmaher at n...>
May 28, 2004

Mr. Clarke Thomas
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Dear Mr Thomas,
Your columns at first blush give the impression of a decent and
open-minded man. But your column on Dubrovnik (May 12, 2004) re-runs 
a
scenario that is fake from curtain to curtain. I went TO Dubrovnik,
unconvinced by the PR being pushed in the media a la "WMD". I took a
professional cameraman. This was just three months after the
"destruction". The Old City was whole and entire. Your column
perpetuates and propagates a hoax.

You momentarily signaled your incredulity about a the reports of
destruction, since you could discern no signs of damage such as you
had seen in post-WWII Germany, but you nonetheless recited the
mendacious lessons you "learned" from your handlers. You and I are
only a few years apart in age. I turned twelve just a couple weeks
before V-J Day. I took an MA in Greek & Latin at The Catholic
University of America [Washington DC] I taught English, French and
Latin in 1956-57. In 1957 I enlisted in the USA, for assignment to 
the
CIC; I volunteered to study Serbo-Croatian at the US Army Language
school at the Presidio of Monterey. Then off on a two-year hitch at
the Yugoslav desk of a spook unit in northern Italy. It was all a
beautiful chapter in my life. In the following forty some years I've
kept up with the languages, taught or done research in the US,
England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia,
Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Now retired I am engaged in following the
Yugoslav wars, with particular attention to war propaganda.

I have traveled through Slovenia, Serbia, including Kosovo, Croatia,
Bosnia, Herzegovina, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. (My sons' uncles served
in the US and German armies; their maternal grandfather served in the
In the Austro-Hungarian army in both world wars).

Now to Dubrovnik. As you may be aware, old Ragusa was a city state 
for
750 years, when Napoleon turned the place over to Austria. The
Austrians never incorporated Dubrovnik into Croatia. That narrow
region, around Zagreb, was within the Hungarian Kingdom. Only in 
1939,
a big year for Hitler, was Dubrovnik hitched to the Croatia that had
been tailored for political reasons, in violation of ethnic 
settlement
patterns, and without consent of the governed, by the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia, then fearing German designs on the Adriatic.

In 1945 the dictator Tito finalized the incorporation of the old
Republic of Dubrovnik into Greater. In 1991, the Germans and their
proxies, the Croatian fascist, were back. Non fascist Croats, Serbs
and others were driven out of "the Pearl of the Adriatic". That took
place on 1 October, 1991, the exodus hidden under the smoke screen of
the PR war to which you are a contributor. Now to Dubrovnik and me. 
In
summer 1990 I ran into a Croatian-Hungarian student of mine in
Chicago, who a year earlier had been positively glowing with happy
expectation of returning as an English teacher to her home town in
Serbia, Yugoslavia. Subotica, on the Hungarian border. The city has a
big Croatian and Hungarian population. Serbia is the only multi-
ethnic
state left over from Yugoslavia.

Her plans were now ashes: "My parents just came home from a vacation
near Dubrovnik, and they said I shouldn't come back home: there's
going to be." She went on: "fascist Croats have been trashing cars
with license plates from Serbia, even pushing them into the sea."

Over a year before the war hit page 1, in spring 1990, I had read in
Yugoslav newspapers, while I was on a Fulbright in Slovenia, that
Croat militants were torching vacation houses on the Adriatic
belonging to Serbs AND Slovenes.

The next summer, in 1991, the only "tourists" in Dubrovnik were
Croatian irregulars toting German weapons provided illegally by
Germany. Check the hotel record for tourist records. In August 1991,
Croatian irregulars attacked a Yugoslav Army base at the approach to
the Bay of Kotor, a couple dozen miles south of Dubrovnik. The Croats
murdered unarmed recruits of the Yugoslav Peoples Army, a multi-
ethnic
force. That was the legal army of a regular state. It was a
multi-ethnic force, not Serbian, nor Serb-dominated. There were
Slovenes, Albanians, Macedonians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs from all the
Serb lands - and Croats. Many were killed. The Commander in Chief was
a Croat, not Slobodan Milosevic. A naval intelligence officer told me
that this action was filmed from start to finish by the
Counter-Intelligence Service of the Yugoslav Peoples Army (YNA). They
stood by and watched. Orders is orders.

>  From October to December 1991, Croat "militants" repeatedly forayed
>  out
from the walled Old City to attack YNA forces, who answered their
fire. There are your "150 Croatian dead." In fall 1991 Croatian
newspapers (read them, if you can) were full of obituary notices for
their fallen. One fallen hero was listed as a member of the "3rd
Genocide Platoon". You can find it in the Zagreb daily Globus. Would
you like a photocopy of his obit?

Everyone now knows that the story, so often drummed into our heads, 
of
Saddam's WMD was a phony as LBJ's Tonkin Gulf crisis. So were Bill
Clinton's "Serb atrocities".

The Ruder Finn PR firm in Washing orchestrated a campaign which
included a "Buy a Tile" scheme. The Croatian-American weekly
"Zajednicar" published photos purportedly showing Dubrovnik "before"
and "after" the "destruction. When I showed the newspaper to Pippa
Smith, she remarked: "it's two different cities. Look at the roof
lines. I studied architecture."

The story that art historian K. Bagoje handed you is contradicted by
Croatian art librarian Lejla Miletic-Vejvozic in an article in
"Special Libraries". She documents that water-proof. containers were
procure from Germany. Treasures were shipped overseas, in first line
to Italy. Where are the treasures now? Did they include Serb Orthodox
icons?

The only building in Dubrovnik's Old City that was destroyed, the
interior gutted by fire, housed a collection of Serb Orthodox icons.

The "Dubrovnik Destroyed & Restored" hoax has been exposed by Captain
Michael Shuttleworth (UK's EEU representative to Yugoslavia at the
time), journalists Stephen Kinzer (NY Times), Michael Steiner
(National Review), Bruno Beloff, Austrian writer Peter Handke, as 
well
as by myself. I'll be sending you and the Pittsburgh P-G a chronology
of this deception. Feel free to call on me for more information.

Your own reputation and that of your newspaper is in jeopardy if you
do not retract the fraud and print the facts.

Sincerely yours,

John Peter Maher Ph. D.
Professor Emeritus

Chicago

Clarke Thomas: The lesson of Dubrovnik
International opinion is a force when countries commit outrages
Wednesday, May 12, 2004 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

DUBROVNIK, Croatia -- A dozen years ago an assault on this
picturesque, medieval-walled city on the Adriatic Sea opposite Italy
aroused the conscience of the world alongside names from the past 
like
Guernica, Coventry and Hiroshima.

Clarke Thomas is a Post-Gazette senior editor (clt34 at p...).

I learned the story in detail during an Elderhostel study trip last
month of the Dalmatian coast of the former Yugoslavia. I believe it
will be of especial interest in Pittsburgh with its sturdy Croatian,
Serbian and Slovenian ethnic groups. During the visit we first looked
down from the heights above Dubrovnik from which Serb militants for
seven months in 1991-92 shelled some of Europe's finest monuments
during the so-called Homeland War. To tell the truth, at first it was
difficult to understand the extent of the assault until one noticed
the crazy-quilt pattern of the tiles on the houses -- alternating
patches of fresh replacement tiles among the subtler patina red of 
the
originals. Certainly, this was nothing like the crumpled cities I had
seen as a World War II soldier. But as lecturers provided by
Elderhostel unfolded the history, the account of the Dubrovnik siege
and its impact on world opinion became clearer. It has particular
significance in an era in which some go-it-alone American leaders 
have
derided the idea of a "world community" and "international opinion."
Art expert Kate Bagoje outlined the grim statistics for what she
called an "unexpected" assault for which this major Mediterranean
tourist city was "totally unprepared." She cited a total of 824
buildings damaged, with 563 directly shelled, and nine palaces burned
for a total of $30 million in damages. More than 150 people were
killed and 1,000 wounded in the bombardments. After that, Bagoje was
put in charge of the restoration of the architectural treasures of
Dubrovnik, the modern name for Ragusa, a city so prosperous in the
14th to 16th centuries that it competed with Venice in the
Mediterranean trade. What aroused the anger of the international
community was the fact that the Serbian forces seemed to be singling
out specific symbols of the Croatian/Dalmatian culture in a city 
which
the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
in 1979 had placed on its World Heritage list. For example, there 
were
51 hits on the landmark Franciscan Monastery alone. The heart of the
story of 20th-century Dubrovnik was the response of the world to the
Serbian assault. First, there was an outpouring of money and 
technical
help from around the world to restore the city. Grants came in from
United Nations agencies, from America, Britain, Germany and Japan;
from Croatians living abroad, and from corporations and private
foundations. UNESCO money was used for repairing the huge city walls
that give Dubrovnik such character. France sent substitute roof 
tiles.
U.S. money went to repair pavements and the "Spanish Stairs," named
for their famed counterpart in Rome. A crew from Dusseldorf, Germany,
showed up to repair a priceless fountain. Indeed, Bagoje said wryly,
so good a job has been done that people don't realize how much damage
was inflicted. The second major result was the impact on world
politics. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the war -- Croats as well
as Serbs committed atrocities -- the siege helped turn world opinion
against the Serbs. When the war spread into Bosnia and Kosovo, the 
end
result was the NATO-led U.S. bombing of Belgrade and other Serbian
centers. Vjekoslav Vierda, head of the Institute for the Restoration
of Dubrovnik, explained to our Elderhostel group: "Everyone thought
you could solve old problems by killing each other." The difficulties
date back centuries to strained relations among Orthodox Christian
Serbs, Roman Catholic Croatians and Muslim Bosnians, exacerbated in
World War II when the Croatians in the Ustache movement sided with
Nazi Germany, opposing the Serbian Chetniks, with the Communist
partisans under Josip Tito coming out ahead in the end. After Tito's
death in 1980, the disintegration of Yugoslavia a decade later
coincided with the collapse of Communism in Europe. For a time, 
Serbia
held the best card of all, the Yugoslav army, then the third-largest
in Europe. The Croatians managed through underground arms merchants 
to
build up their army -- particularly with weapons from the former East
Germany -- to the point where it began to reconquer territory from 
the
Serbs. Vierda provided the disheartening contention that those arms
merchants now own 80 percent of the wealth in Croatia -- industries,
hotels, etc. The international community finally managed to fashion
the Dayton Accords of 1995. Sadly, democracy didn't gain a foothold
until, in Croatia, its autocratic leader, Franjo Tudjman, died in
1999. The situation still is touch and go in Serbia, although its
wartime leader, Slobodan Milosevic, is now on trial in The Hague for
war crimes. A happy exception is Slovenia, which has gotten its
affairs so well in order that it joined the European Union on May 1.
In any event it's clear that the international community has been the
key to peace and progress in the Balkans, dating to the Dubrovnik
siege.

------- End of forwarded message -------------------------------------
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Ivo Skoric
19 Baxter Street
Rutland VT 05701
802.775.7257
ivo at balkansnet.org
balkansnet.org