Jeffrey T. Kuhner
These two letters are in response to the latest Serb-bashing propaganda piece by Jeffrey T. Kuhner, a/k/a the Sour Croat at Washington Times. This dude is a truly shameless Nazi sympathizer. But don’t expect to hear a word about this from the mainstream media, or even from most of the blogosphere.
yourletters@washingtontimes.com
7:08 p.m., Tuesday, April 19, 2011
The late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had every reason to think that he could get way with ridding Croatia of its pesky Krajina Serbs (“U.N. court convicts Balkan wartime hero to Croatians,” Web, Friday).
Tudjman was an apologist for the World War II Ustasha regime that was responsible for the butchery of hundreds of thousands of civilian Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. The Serbs’ only political ambition in 1941 was to lie low given that Serbia proper was under brutal German occupation and their only crime was their national and religious identity.
When the Krajina Serbs objected to being railroaded into a Tudjman-led Croatia, most Western observers and governments accused the Serbs of unnecessarily dredging up the past.
Tudjman’s 1989 book, “Wastelands of Historical Truth,” a revisionist whitewash of the Ustasha, was dismissed as an unfortunate slip of the pen, and his proud boast during Croatia’s first free elections that his wife was neither Serbian nor Jewish was deemed a mere indiscretion. His subsequent withdrawal of the Serbs’ constitutional status as one ofCroatia’s two historical nations was brushed aside as a petty detail. No wonder the Krajina Serbs took up arms.
The Krajina Serb nation was “ethnically cleansed” in 1995. It is owed an apology, and not just by Zagreb.
YUGO KOVACH
Dorset, England
7:32 p.m., Tuesday, April 26, 2011
I would like to thank The Washington Times for publishing Yugo Kovach’s April 19 letter, “Croatia owes Serbs an apology.” However, in order to fully understand why the Serbian people deserve an apology from the government of Croatia, consider several facts.
It is a fact that 14,000 Serbian men, women and children were killed in August 1995 by Croatian forces during Operation Storm in the Krajina region of Croatia. Commanding the operation with massive U.S. support was Brig. Gen. Agim Ceku, an ethnic Kosovo Albanian warlord who was later arrested for war crimes. In 1999, journalist Charles Krauthammer described Operation Storm in Newsweek as “the largest ethnic cleansing of the entire Balkan wars. Investigators with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague have concluded that this campaign was carried out with brutality, wanton murder and indiscriminate shelling of civilians.”
As The Washington Times reported on Sept. 5, 1995, Croatian soldiers were given heroin or cocaine twice daily in order to help them face the expulsion of Croatian Serbs from Krajina. A Croatian soldier, identified only as Davor, stated in news reports, “To attack villages, to cut throats and to kill in cold blood you need a strong anesthetic – a shot of heroin or cocaine was ideal.” This report was also substantiated in the Guardian on Sept. 1, 1995.
According to a June 1997 Washington Times story: “A German tank rolls through a small village, and the peasants rush out, lining the road with their right arm raised in a Nazi salute as they chant ‘Heil Hitler!’ Mobs chase [Serb] minorities from their homes, kicking them and pelting them with eggs as they flee into the woods.”
As his loyal ally, Adolf Hitler declared Croatia an independent state in 1941. Today Croatia, through Operation Storm, achieved the pure ethnic Croatian state that Hitler could only promise.
Unfortunately, I don’t think Mr. Kovach nor any other Serb can expect an apology from the government of Croatia any more than we can expect an apology from Turkey for the genocide of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians in Asia Minor during the World War I era.
STELLA L. JATRAS
Camp Hill, Pa.
Here is an excerpt from another response to this same article:
[Note: By “Century,” Caleb clarifies, he means the past 100 years.]
April 20, 2011
by Caleb Posner
Yesterday, the Washington Times (yes, the Moonie cult founded newspaper) ran an absurd editorial by Jeffrey T. Kuhner defending Croatian military leader Ante Gotovina, and decrying the ICTY for its prosecution of him. Kuhner seems to be of the belief that Croatia was a victim of Serb nationalism, that Slobodan Milosevic would have destroyed said country if left unchecked, and that the only individuals who deserve punishment for the events of the Wars of Yugoslav Secession are Serbs. His view doesn’t much differ from that of the average American, who being fed a steady 90′s diet of CNN and the New York Times, sees the Serbs as the bloodthirsty butchers of Europe, heir to the legacy of brutality once associated with Adolph Hitler. But, such a belief has little basis in the facts…
Read the rest.
