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Back to index to Milosevic statement
THE ROLE OF GERMANY During the signing on the 12th of September, 1990, in Moscow, together with the foreign ministries of the Democratic Republic of Germany at that time, also France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, of the treaty on the definite order of Germany, Genscher stated, "We do not want for anything else other than to live with all other nations in freedom and democracy. State unity represents for us a greater responsibility but it does not at the same time represent our aspirations for having greater power." Chancellor Kohl, on the 3rd of October, on the day of the reunification of Germany, sent a message to all world governments, including the Yugoslav government, in which, amongst other things, he said, "In future only peace will emanate from German territory. We are aware that the inviolability of borders, the respect of territorial integrity and sovereignty of all states in Europe are the basic condition for peace, and we also have moral and legal obligations which arise from German history." Big words and big promises given to the rest of humanity and in particular Europe at the point when the German nation finally was allowed to remove the burden of its division which was imposed on it precisely as a result of the darkest period of German history. Yes, this was a big promise, but at the same time an empty promise, because how did the German top leadership view the moral and legal obligations arising from German history, which they cited, and what is their relation to the inviolability of borders and respect of territorial integrity and sovereignty of all states in Europe, as they said themselves as the main condition of peace. You could practically at the same time see very well in Yugoslavia how this was. In the territory of that state which German history -- at that point of the 20th century inflicted the cost of 3 million lives, 1.247.000 victims in First World War, and 1.700.000 in World War II. Precisely in that month of German reunification, security services of the Yugoslav People's Army uncovered and managed to tape secretly activities pertaining to the illegal import of weapons by Croatia aimed at facilitating the armed secession of Croatia. So actually, we're talking about the break-up of the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. This import of weapons went through Hungary but also went through some units of Germany, which made it ironical that Chancellor Kohl said in his message that only peace would emanate from German territory. The arming of the secessionists was not the only or the first kind of involvement of Germany in the break-up of Yugoslavia and in the creation of the Yugoslav crisis. The entire activities of Slovenia and Croatia in their violent achievement of independence was not only aided by Germany but to a considerable degree was encouraged by the top state leaders. Within the efforts to prevent the conflict or to stop the conflict in the territory of Croatia as well as to stop attacks on the JNA, the Presidency of Yugoslavia and the leaders of the Yugoslav republics gathered in Belgrade at a meeting on the 20th and the 21st of August, 1991, and then adopted several decisions for the purpose of stabilising the situation. A small programme of political and economic cooperation was adopted. A commission was formed to develop agreements on the future form of the multi-ethnic states, and there was an agreement also reached between the leadership of Croatia and the officials of the JNA. On the 20th of August, there was an extraordinary ministerial session in which the foreign ministers of European Community member states concluded that they welcomed the readiness of all parties to embark on negotiations about the future of Yugoslavia and requested all the sides to conduct the negotiations in goodwill amongst themselves. On that very same day, Genscher held a consultative meeting with the foreign ministers of Slovenia and Croatia. On the 24th of August, 1991, he called Boris Filic [phoen], the Yugoslav Ambassador to Bonn, who happened to be a Slovene, which was a guarantee that the message directed to the Yugoslav authorities would also be directed to Ljubljana and Zagreb, and told him if the bloodshed continues and if the policy of violence with the support of the JNA is not stopped immediately, the federal government will seriously have to consider the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia within the existing borders. It will also conduct the review on these matters within the European Community. The question is the following: Was more impetus needed, was a greater impetus needed to those who had already proclaimed secession and who had already resorted to weapons in order to carry this through? Was a greater impetus needed in order to violate the cease-fire? Was any greater impetus needed than this message that continued bloodshed will lead to the recognition of those states? Unfortunately, that's what happened. The message did yield the desired effect because the Croatian paramilitary forces gave up on the cease-fire that had already been agreed upon and the conflict escalated ... Lord Owen speaks about this too. You have admitted into evidence this -- his book here. He says: "I remind you Genscher's letter to Perez de Cuellar, written in German, invoked public statements that led to greater tensions in Yugoslavia and invoked the Paris charter. But as Perez de Cuellar reminded him in his reply, Genscher forgot to refer to the EC declaration adopted in Rome on the 8th of November, 1991, which said that the prospects for recognising the independence of those republics that so wished could only be looked into within the overall environment." I end the quote I referred to from Owen's book.
EUROPEAN RECOGNITION OF CROATIA AND BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA So, as I said, the European Community, on the 26th of March, 1991, supported the unity of Yugoslavia but then the European Community, on the 8th of November, 1991, also called for a comprehensive solution in yet another declaration that was adopted then. Finally, the German position did prevail, and once Pandora's box was opened, once the illegal secession was recognised, even at the cost of human lives, it was difficult to stop the bloodstained process. Things did not end, in the case of Slovenia and Croatia, irrespective of the bloody consequences. A further step was made. At the end of his book, on page 384, Lord Owen says: "The mistake made by the European Union regarding the recognition of Croatia could have been redressed had the situation not been complicated by the recognition of Bosnia-Herzegovina irrespective of consequences. The United States of America that opposed the recognition of Croatia in December 1991 became a very active advocate of the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992." However, it was not logical and it was not unavoidable to recognise Bosnia-Herzegovina, a Yugoslav republic that consisted of three large constituent peoples with very different positions regarding independence." So one mistake followed the other. One impudence followed the other, and the cost was paid in human lives. And if human lives are the price that had to be paid, then this is turned into a crime, a crime against peace. And it is probably no accident that this illegal institution does not have jurisdiction over that, crimes against peace. Warren Christopher, the US secretary of state, in his interview to US Today, which was also carried by Die Welt on the 18th of June, 1993, Christopher said in this interview: "During the overall process of independence, and especially the premature recognition of independence, grave mistakes were made and particular responsibility in this respect is borne by the Germans. Many experts believe that the problems that we confront today stem from the recognition of Croatia and later on Bosnia." Roland de Mar [phoen], Christopher's French colleague, says in the Deutsche Zeitung, on 21st of June, 1993, when he was criticising the European Community for recognising Slovenia and Croatia, he says in a hasty and precipitous manner, and this speeded up the break-up of Yugoslavia. I quote: "The responsibility of Germany and the Vatican for the escalation of the crisis is enormous, obviously." Another participant in these events, the then Dutch Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, said in 1997 that German Chancellor Kohl exerted pressure on the European Community in order to have it change its position that the independence of Croatia could not -- should not be recognised in order not to fan a civil war. I quote: "Van den Broek and I could stand on our heads. The other Europeans could only look around in astonishment. The Germans did what they did, and that was a catastrophe." That is Au Courant, the 21st of December, 1997. When all this support to Slovenian and Croatian secessionists in their efforts to carry out their plan is taken into consideration, then those statements made by Stjepan Mesic should come as no surprise when he spoke about the role of Genscher and Pope John Paul II.
GERMANY'S MOTIVES But Germany's strong support to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the recognition of the independence of its break-away republics is something that is general knowledge now. However, the question remains in many people's minds what are the motives of this kind of action and this kind of obstinacy and persistence on the part of top leaders in the German state that had just been reunified. This question is answered by one of the world's leading geopolitical experts, General Pierre-Marie Gallois, a person who worked closely with General de Gaulle. And he said in an interview on the 23rd of July, 1993, the following: "The break-up of this country and the linking of Croats and Slovenians to German industry led to the emancipation of those peoples who used to be associated with the Empire in the heart of Europe and then with the Third Reich. On the other hand, that meant punishment of the Serbs, who, in both world wars, stood by the allies. Thirdly, this led to the disappearance of the last remnants of those treaties that punished Germany twice for their defeats." Although many would not be willing to support these views of the old French anti-fascist general, believing that the ambitions of Germany are just a thing of the past and that the catharsis that the German state went through would be a sufficient guarantee to believe the assurances given by German politicians during these events that took place during the reunification of Germany, it is sufficient to look at Klaus Kinkel's article entitled 'German Foreign Policy in the World in the light of The New World Order' published on the 19th of March, 1993, in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In this article, the task of the German foreign policy is expressed as follow: "Something has to be carried out now and we failed in doing so twice in the past." It is quite clear what this means. I believe there is no one in the world who does not understand where it was that Germany failed twice vis-a-vis the outside world. So according to the foreign minister of Germany himself, the foreign policy of this country was to use its potentials to achieve what it did not achieve through two world wars, and the question remains whether this will be resolved through new means or old means. On the day of the recognition of Croatia's secession, Kohl himself said in a TV programme, "There is a particularly intensive relationship between Croats and Germans which has a great deal to do with history." This historical vertical line that Kohl pointed to in Germany's foreign policy, the one that was pointed out by Kinkel as well, and finally also what their Croatian cronies did through their own policy is shown by many things that were said during the two world wars and during the war against Yugoslavia, the third war. So there were anti-Yugoslav pressures constantly in all three wars. First there was bloodshed in order to prevent the creation of the Yugoslav state, and later on every effort was made to wipe it out altogether.
THE MYTH OF THE GREATER SERBIA The red thread through all the rhetoric of the German bloc, that is to say Austria, or rather Austro-Hungary, and Germany in the Balkans is the thesis of a danger of creating some kind of Greater Serbia. This danger, this key thesis took a central place in this false indictment against me; a Greater Serbia. This thesis, this myth, was created by Austro-Hungarian propaganda as far back as the second half of the 19th century. It is an integral part of efforts made by a rotting empire to keep its occupied Southern Slav territories. As for this fear that the Southern Slav people still occupied by the Austro-Hungarian empire and this was this broad wave of emancipation in many European nations who wished to free themselves and also they wished to integrate into one state, as was the case in Germany itself, the fear that this might be carried out although there was a historical legitimacy involved and a natural legitimacy involved as far as the unification of the Southern Slavs was concerned. Yet another German, Ambassador Ralf Hartman, in his book The Honourable Mediators, on page 31 says as follows, and this illustrates the depth of this fear and how far back it goes into the past. I quote: "Already in 1876 when the Serb Prince Milos supported the rebellion of the Christian population of Herzegovina and Bosnia against the Turkish rule and declared war on Istanbul, the Russian Prince Gorchakov, German Chancellor Bismarck, and the Austro-Hungarian Prime Minister Andraszy exerted Habsburg pressure on the so-called memorandum that in case the Serbs won" - this is his quotation - "the powers will not tolerate the creation of a large Slav state. For Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Russians and everybody else this was an understandable right, the right to live in a single state. The Southern Slavs should be deprived of this right forever. It was a heresy, that is what they declared it, and they were not allowed to unite. The name of the heresy was a Greater Serbia. So although the Serbian Kingdom, in spite of all its aspirations, was small and weak compared to the European powers, and also the Serb population never exceeded 10 million, for decades this remained in Vienna and Berlin and this spectre continues to live until the present day." [not clear where the quote ends - PB] This indictment is the best proof of how correct all of this is, because it is spectres that are referred to here. What is particularly striking is that as far as back as in the Austro-Hungarian propaganda, the freeing of the people from the Austro-Hungarian yoke and the unification of the Southern Slavs, not only the Serbs, was called the expansion of the Serbian state, or a Greater Serbia. And this formulation means that there should be some kind of expansionist tendencies, tendencies of conquest among the Serbs. It is a fact that this would then mean that part of the Southern Slav peoples were under foreign rule.
ORIGIN OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR However, that is not true. It is among the Croatian people that the idea of a single state for a Southern Slavs was born. In spite of that, when the Serbs espoused this in order to help their enslaved brothers, their brothers who were enslaved under Austro-Hungary, each remained as an idea of a Greater Serbia. And there are two ideas that were always considered to be identical and they are absolutely not identical, that is to say Yugoslavia on the one hand, the joint state of the Southern Slav peoples, and on the other hand some kind of Greater Serbia which is actually the product of anti-Serb and anti-Yugoslav propaganda. So then and now, somebody's tendency to dominate the territories populated by Southern Slavic peoples and keeping them enslaved had to be kept under the guise of a propaganda smokescreen that it was primarily the Serbs who had such intentions and that they wanted to spread into territories that belonged to others. And this is a sheer lie. I have another quotation. This comes from German archives. The German ambassador conveyed to his government what he talked about with the Count, the foreign minister of Austro-Hungary. I'm quoting from the archives. "The minister said that he considered it his obligation to familiarise the German government with the position of the monarchy, the Southern Slavic issue, and that is to say the unhindered keeping of Southern Slav populated provinces is a vital issue for the monarchy, and Serbian supremacy in the Balkans could not be allowed. If Serbia defeats Bulgaria and extends its boundaries beyond the old Serbia, they would have to intervene. When I asked how this would happen, the minister said that a good psychological moment could be found." [not clear where the quote ends - PB] A pretext came soon, the well-known assassination in Sarajevo, when Gavralo Princip, a member of the organisation Young Bosnia, assassinated Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian archduke and heir. No one says what the truth was and that is that about 20 young men were part of this conspiracy. That was this Young Bosna. Ethnic Serbs and Croats and others alike. Although it was never established that the government of Serbia was involved in the assassination in any way, accusations were immediately levelled against Serbia, the Serb people, the Serb government, and war happened. In this mentioned book, Ambassador Hartman says: "In Austro-Hungary and Germany, a fierce anti-Serb campaign was initiated and the German ambassador in London, Lichnovsky, was charged with notifying Gottlieb von Jagow that the entire Serbian nation has to be branded as a people of evil-doers and criminals." And this is obviously something that challenges the authorship of these accusations. The meaning of this evil above all evils, Greater Serbia, is something that nobody wanted to consider or go into. It has been used here in a very facile manner, very arrogantly. Nobody has investigated its origins. Had they done so, this entire propaganda exercise would have burst like a soap bubble. It is well known that on the 23rd of July, 1914, the Serbian government was given an ultimatum by Austria Hungary after false accusations of Serbia's involvement in this assassination and a number of demands were made on Serbia which no sovereign country in the world could have accepted. The failure to meet this ultimatum was expected, and the only role of this ultimatum was to cause war, to be a pretext for war, just as happened in Rambouillet. The British foreign minister, Sir Edward Grey, described this text, and I quote Grey: "The most astonishing document ever engendered by diplomacy." "The most astonishing document ever engendered by diplomacy." Grey probably never even dreamt that in that same century the Serbian people and the Serbian state would be exposed to a number of similar and even more arrogant and amazing ultimatums and that, together with Germany, Austria, and some other Western countries, and even some Serbian allies from that time such as France and a little later the USA, his own country, Great Britain, would share the authorship of such new ultimatums just as it would share the authorship and participation in the implementation of murderous assaults on the Serbian people in the late 20th century carried out by means of unscrupulous lies, and this will be shown very clearly here before the public. There were merciless economic sanctions as well as bestial attacks against people whose chief sin was that they tried to protect their country and their people and preserve what they had acquired with great difficulty with the help of allies in two world wars. It is hard to imagine the shame Sir Edward Grey would have felt had he known of the role his country would play in completing this crime against the Serbian people at the end of the 20th century, and this is taking place here before this institution with the flagrant violation of international law because the resolution establishing this illegal Tribunal is part of what Sir Edward Grey defined as the most astonishing document ever engendered by diplomacy.
ORIGINS OF YUGOSLAVIA It is general knowledge how the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was established, later renamed Yugoslavia, as the common state of the Southern Slav peoples. The German bloc wanted to prevent this and this state was to vanish from the face of the earth. However, the old myth of Greater Serbia remained as a smokescreen to conceal their own crimes and their own evil deeds. It is in this institution that the lie of Greater Serbia found its natural foundation and grew into a monstrous construction of unprecedented magnitude. To make the irony and absurdity even greater and to make the lies and injustice against the Serbian people even worse in contrast to their Balkan neighbours, it is only the Serbian people who, although they had ample opportunity and much greater opportunity than others, tried to create their own extended state, because it is well known that in 1915, the allies of Serbia, in the so-called London Treaty, offered Serbia, after winning the war, an extension of its territory to Bosnia and Herzegovina, parts of Dalmatia, parts of Slavonia, and so on and so forth. There are documents to show all this. But Serbia did not do this. Serbia instead embraced and espoused Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes alike from the former territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and this is how the Kingdom of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes was created, later on to be called Yugoslavia. This option taken by the Serbian state to create a common state of Yugoslavia rather than their own state provided protection to our Croatian and Slovenian brothers. We protected them from territorial fragmentation. And also, after they had been part of a defeated state, they became part of the winning camp.
FRIEDRICH NEUMANN, THE DESTRUCTION OF SERBIA AND THE GERMAN LIBERAL PARTY However, in the last throes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Serbs have been branded with this lie of Greater Serbia, and this is still being maintained. In order to understand the whole matter it is useful to look on the other side of the front, World War I. In 1915, the German theoretician Friederich Naumann published his book 'Middle Europe', Mittel Europa, in which he set out a project for the reorganisation of Europe. It was then expected that the Germans would win the war, of course. And the reorganisation of Europe would imply the creation of a greater Germany encompassing all of Central Europe surrounded by small and weak states which Naumann in this book calls Trabant states. ... Naumann never mentioned Serbia, not even as a satellite state because, according to him, "Serbia as a fortress that is in the way in this area has to be wiped off the map." Let me mention that this creator of the greater German project which implies the wiping out of Serbia from the map of Europe, in accordance with the anti-Serbian propaganda waged at that time and the well-known slogan of the time "Serbia must die," "Serbia must termia," for the sake of rhyming, this theorist is considered the ideologue of the Liberal party in Germany, a party which has long served to balance the German political scene and which was in charge of German foreign policy during the time of Genscher and Kinkel. The same Kinkel who in 1993 felt the need to publish the idea of German revision of historical processes and who said that "something has to be done externally that we have twice failed to do." The importance attached by German Liberals, especially the two above-mentioned leaders of German diplomacy, that they attach to the ideas of Naumann is best seen in the fact that the foundation for the Liberal Party is called the Friederich Naumann Stichtung or the Friederich Naumann Foundation, and the same name is borne by the headquarters of this party while its followers are best seen in the crazily destructive efforts of these two towards Yugoslavia who wanted to fragment the Central European and Eastern European territories, and this in fact happened. You have the example of Czechoslovakia, not to mention the USSR, one of the winning powers, the leading powers that won World War II.
GERMANY, SERBIA AND THE SECOND WORLD WAR When Serbia was sentenced to death in this deformed view of the exponents of greater German aspirations, when it was drowned in the Southern Slav state, the propaganda on Greater Serbian aspirations was continued in relation to the newly established state of Yugoslavia. It is well known that in Serbia there were protests against the government decision to forge links with Hitler's alliance, and Churchill then said, "Yugoslavia has found its soul again." This was stated on one of the opposed sides. On the other side, Hitler, on the day Yugoslavia was attacked, stated that "This military coup was directed against the same criminal clique, the same creatures who, through the assassination in Sarajevo, pushed the world into an unprecedented misfortune." This reminds us of what a new theorist stated on the eve of a new bombing of Yugoslavia. Clinton, the then president of the USA, on the night of the 24th of March, when explaining to the American public via television the beginning of the air campaign, as he called it, against Yugoslavia, he said, "The Serbs did not cause only World War I. Without them, there would have been no Holocaust." So much for the knowledge of history of these two criminals. The rest is contained in the German archives. The Fuhrer, Hitler, was determined to destroy Yugoslavia through military means and destroy it as a state. To destroy Yugoslavia as a state, this can easily be linked up to the message given in the notorious report by the president of the Presidency until that time of Yugoslavia, Stjepan Mesic, to the Croatian parliament on the 5th of December, 1991. He said, "Thank you for entrusting me with fighting for the interests of Croatia in the segment entrusted to me. I think I have performed my task. Yugoslavia is no more." When speaking of these efforts and this crime which was perpetrated against Yugoslavia and other countries, before the attack on Yugoslavia, in Germany there were directives given as to propaganda. Ambassador Ralf Hartman speaks of well-known traditional lines of German Balkan propaganda as follows: A, it is only the Serbian government that is the opponent of Germany which fanned the flames of struggle against Germany. B ... "As the Serbs implemented a ruthless dictatorship against the other peoples of Yugoslavia, primarily the Croats and the Macedonians, and this is an absurdity, we can clearly tell them that the German Wehrmacht is not entering Yugoslavia as enemies of the Croats and Macedonians. They will in this way be protected against slaughter by the Serbian chauvinists." In the German puppet state of the Independent State of Croatia, this resulted in genocide against the Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. On the territories of this monstrous state a million Serbs were wiped out, over half of them being expelled and then driven to their death amid the most grievous sufferings. This monstrous activity was certainly contributed to by the directive of Joseph Goebbels, which remained alive and topical in German practice, political practice, to toady up to the Croats in order to work against the Serbs, and this is evident in the German relationship to the Balkans in the 20th century, the late 20th century. But this is best illustrated by the next quotation, a statement by the Croatian leader Ante Pavlic, "The independence of Croatia is due to the Fuhrer and to the German Reich." And we can compare this to the song Danke Deutschland, "Thank You, Germany," sung in Croatia in 1991 and 1992 and the role of Stjepan Mesic and what he said about the role played by Genscher and Pope John Paul II, in the break-up of Yugoslavia.
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