HERE IS THE HISTORY: JUST INFRONT OF YOU( TAMILS)
''
Greater SERBIA without National Democracy!''
HERE IS THE HISTORY: JUST INFRONT OF YOU( TAMILS)
A CLEAR WARNING FOR THE ''PONGU THAMIL'' TAMILS
Path of Kosovo type Tamil Eelam, and its Ultimate destination will end up with HAND OVER PIRAPAKARAN to The -INDIAN-Hague.
Greater SERBIA without National Democracy!''
HERE IS THE HISTORY: JUST INFRONT OF YOU( TAMILS)>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A CLEAR WARNING FOR THE ''PONGU THAMIL'' TAMILSPath of Kosovo type Tamil Eelam, and its Ultimate destination will end up with HAND OVER PIRAPAKARAN to The -INDIAN-Hague.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
HERE IS THE HISTORY: JUST INFRONT OF YOU( TAMILS)
July 30, 2008
Thousands Gather for Karadzic Rally
By DAN BILEFSKY
* “Long Live Radovan!” and “Uprising! Uprising!”
* “Karadzic is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s,”
* “Srebrenica is the product of a media war against Serbia and the Serbian people. Karadzic was fighting to defend Serbia.”
* “Nobody has proved that a massacre took place,”
* “Srebrenica is not taught in our history books in schools, it is not widely shown in popular culture,”
BELGRADE, Serbia — Stone-hurling nationalists clashed with the police in central Belgrade on Tuesday night at a rally to protest the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on war crimes charges and his likely extradition to stand trial in The Hague.
Mr. Karadzic is charged with engineering Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, but is celebrated by his supporters as a hero. About 15,000 of them, some bused in from across Serbia and Bosnia by the far-right Radical Party, gathered to protest the new government that arrested him.
Protesters wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Karadzic’s image waved Serbian flags and chanted “Long Live Radovan!” and “Uprising! Uprising!” while about 100 ultranationalists wearing masks who had separated from the group, burned flares, attacked traffic lights with clubs and hurled stones at storefront windows. The police responded with tear gas and blocked off several neighborhoods. The Serbian news media said more than 45 people suffered minor injuries.
“Karadzic is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s,” said Elena Pavovski, 24, a supporter of the Radical Party, whose members sang patriotic songs next to a banner on Republic Square that threatened Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic.
“Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free.”
The rally was seen as a test of the new government, which is made up of Mr. Tadic’s Democrats and the Socialist Party of the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, which controls the Interior Ministry and the police.
Before the rally began, Mr. Tadic implored the protesters to remain peaceful, determined to avoid a repeat of demonstrations last February, when thousands of radicals rampaged through the streets of Belgrade to protest Kosovo’s declaration of independence, looting shops and setting part of the United States Embassy on fire.
The embassy warned American citizens to stay away from central Belgrade on Tuesday night, while the embassy itself was heavily guarded by troops wielding machine guns.
Mr. Karadzic, a former psychiatrist, is accused of masterminding the 1995 massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. He also has been indicted in connection with the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, from 1992 to 1995, in which he is accused of
authorizing the killing of civilians.
He had evaded arrest for more than a decade, living openly in Belgrade for at least part of that time disguised as an ascetic New Age guru with a bushy beard, a mistress and a fake family in the United States.
It remained unclear on Tuesday night whether Mr. Karadzic’s lawyer had filed an appeal against his extradition, but government officials said the former leader was likely to be whisked by the end of the week to The Hague, where he will be turned over to the international war crimes tribunal.
Ivana Ramic, spokeswoman for the Serbian war crimes court handling the case, said the court had not yet received an appeal. On Tuesday, Mr. Karadzic’s nephew Dragan Karadzic was seen delivering several suitcases to the prison where his uncle is being kept.
Belgrade is determined to send Mr. Karadzic to The Hague as swiftly as possible to prevent an escalation in tensions and to satisfy the European Union, which considers handing over war crimes suspects a prerequisite for Serbia to join the union. Diplomats for the European
Union said Brussels had postponed a trade deal with Serbia on Tuesday to wait for Mr. Karadzic’s transfer to take place.
Serbian analysts said the emotional and violent outpouring of support for Mr. Karadzic showed that Serbia had yet to reckon with its role in Srebrenica, 13 years after the massacre took place.
“Since Milosevic fell, few in our government have confronted the war crimes perpetrated in Serbia’s name,” Brankica Stankovic, one of the country’s leading television journalists, said on Tuesday. “Our elites refuse to confront openly what Serbia did for fear of being branded as traitors.”
The demonstration coincided with an announcement by Bosnia’s war crimes court on Tuesday that it had sentenced seven Bosnian Serbs to prison terms ranging from 38 years to 42 years for taking part in the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, in which men and boys
were herded together and executed. Many bodies were later found in mass graves with their hands tied behind their backs.
Ms. Pavovski, the Radical Party supporter, said she was unmoved by what happened at Srebrenica. “Nobody has proved that a massacre took place,” she said. “Srebrenica is the product of a media war against Serbia and the Serbian people. Karadzic was fighting to defend
Serbia.”
An opinion poll published three years ago by Belgrade-based Strategic Marketing Research showed that more than half of respondents either did not know about war crimes in Bosnia, or did not believe they had taken place. The poll was conducted by telephone and surveyed 1,200
people.
The failure to grapple with the past, analysts said, has been exacerbated by the skepticism among some Serbs that the United Nations tribunal in The Hague is an unjust entity intended to prosecute Serbs.
According to legal experts, as of early this year, 45 Serbs, 12 Croats and 4 Muslims have been convicted of war crimes in connection with the Balkan wars of the 1990s. More Croats than Muslims have been indicted for war crimes, but several were acquitted because of insufficient
evidence, the experts said.
Mr. Karadzic’s supporters said they were incensed by the recent release of high-profile suspects accused of war crimes against Serbs, including Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim indicted for failing to prevent the murder and torture of Serbian captives in Srebrenica during the Bosnia war of 1992-1995, and Ramush Haradinaj, an ethnic-Albanian former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who was indicted on charges that included the murder of Serbs, Albanians and Gypsies during the 1998 conflict in Kosovo.
Western diplomats said public perceptions of war crimes in Serbia would be critical to the country’s drive to rejoin the Western fold by demonstrating a willingness to cooperate with the United Nations international tribunal.
Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, which has played a critical role in bringing war crimes into the public eye, said the Serbian public had been graphically confronted with the facts of Srebrenica for the first time in June 2005, when Serbian
television broadcast a video of the killing of six Muslim men by members of a Serbian paramilitary unit.
But while the video showed irrefutable evidence that Serbia’s police forces took part in the massacre, she said there remained public amnesia about the killings.
“Srebrenica is not taught in our history books in schools, it is not widely shown in popular culture,” Ms. Kandic said. “This country needs to have a historical reckoning about the past.”
Marlise Simons contributed reporting from The Hague.
BELGRADE, Serbia — Stone-hurling nationalists clashed with the police in central Belgrade on Tuesday night at a rally to protest the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on war crimes charges and his likely extradition to stand trial in The Hague.Mr. Karadzic is charged with engineering Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, but is celebrated by his supporters as a hero. About 15,000 of them, some bused in from across Serbia and Bosnia by the far-right Radical Party, gathered to protest the new government that arrested him.
Protesters wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Karadzic’s image waved Serbian flags and chanted “Long Live Radovan!” and “Uprising! Uprising!” while about 100 ultranationalists wearing masks who had separated from the group, burned flares, attacked traffic lights with clubs and hurled stones at storefront windows. The police responded with tear gas and blocked off several neighborhoods. The Serbian news media said more than 45 people suffered minor injuries.
“Karadzic is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s,” said Elena Pavovski, 24, a supporter of the Radical Party, whose members sang patriotic songs next to a banner on Republic Square that threatened Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic.“Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free.”
The rally was seen as a test of the new government, which is made up of Mr. Tadic’s Democrats and the Socialist Party of the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, which controls the Interior Ministry and the police.
Before the rally began, Mr. Tadic implored the protesters to remain peaceful, determined to avoid a repeat of demonstrations last February, when thousands of radicals rampaged through the streets of Belgrade to protest Kosovo’s declaration of independence, looting shops and setting part of the United States Embassy on fire.The embassy warned American citizens to stay away from central Belgrade on Tuesday night, while the embassy itself was heavily guarded by troops wielding machine guns.
Mr. Karadzic, a former psychiatrist, is accused of masterminding the 1995 massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. He also has been indicted in connection with the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, from 1992 to 1995, in which he is accused of
authorizing the killing of civilians.
He had evaded arrest for more than a decade, living openly in Belgrade for at least part of that time disguised as an ascetic New Age guru with a bushy beard, a mistress and a fake family in the United States.
It remained unclear on Tuesday night whether Mr. Karadzic’s lawyer had filed an appeal against his extradition, but government officials said the former leader was likely to be whisked by the end of the week to The Hague, where he will be turned over to the international war crimes tribunal.
Ivana Ramic, spokeswoman for the Serbian war crimes court handling the case, said the court had not yet received an appeal. On Tuesday, Mr. Karadzic’s nephew Dragan Karadzic was seen delivering several suitcases to the prison where his uncle is being kept.
Belgrade is determined to send Mr. Karadzic to The Hague as swiftly as possible to prevent an escalation in tensions and to satisfy the European Union, which considers handing over war crimes suspects a prerequisite for Serbia to join the union. Diplomats for the European
Union said Brussels had postponed a trade deal with Serbia on Tuesday to wait for Mr. Karadzic’s transfer to take place.
Serbian analysts said the emotional and violent outpouring of support for Mr. Karadzic showed that Serbia had yet to reckon with its role in Srebrenica, 13 years after the massacre took place.“Since Milosevic fell, few in our government have confronted the war crimes perpetrated in Serbia’s name,” Brankica Stankovic, one of the country’s leading television journalists, said on Tuesday. “Our elites refuse to confront openly what Serbia did for fear of being branded as traitors.”
The demonstration coincided with an announcement by Bosnia’s war crimes court on Tuesday that it had sentenced seven Bosnian Serbs to prison terms ranging from 38 years to 42 years for taking part in the mass killing of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, in which men and boys
were herded together and executed. Many bodies were later found in mass graves with their hands tied behind their backs.
Ms. Pavovski, the Radical Party supporter, said she was unmoved by what happened at Srebrenica. “Nobody has proved that a massacre took place,” she said. “Srebrenica is the product of a media war against Serbia and the Serbian people. Karadzic was fighting to defend
Serbia.”
An opinion poll published three years ago by Belgrade-based Strategic Marketing Research showed that more than half of respondents either did not know about war crimes in Bosnia, or did not believe they had taken place. The poll was conducted by telephone and surveyed 1,200
people.
The failure to grapple with the past, analysts said, has been exacerbated by the skepticism among some Serbs that the United Nations tribunal in The Hague is an unjust entity intended to prosecute Serbs.
According to legal experts, as of early this year, 45 Serbs, 12 Croats and 4 Muslims have been convicted of war crimes in connection with the Balkan wars of the 1990s. More Croats than Muslims have been indicted for war crimes, but several were acquitted because of insufficient
evidence, the experts said.
Mr. Karadzic’s supporters said they were incensed by the recent release of high-profile suspects accused of war crimes against Serbs, including Naser Oric, a Bosnian Muslim indicted for failing to prevent the murder and torture of Serbian captives in Srebrenica during the Bosnia war of 1992-1995, and Ramush Haradinaj, an ethnic-Albanian former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, who was indicted on charges that included the murder of Serbs, Albanians and Gypsies during the 1998 conflict in Kosovo.
Western diplomats said public perceptions of war crimes in Serbia would be critical to the country’s drive to rejoin the Western fold by demonstrating a willingness to cooperate with the United Nations international tribunal.
Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, which has played a critical role in bringing war crimes into the public eye, said the Serbian public had been graphically confronted with the facts of Srebrenica for the first time in June 2005, when Serbian
television broadcast a video of the killing of six Muslim men by members of a Serbian paramilitary unit.
But while the video showed irrefutable evidence that Serbia’s police forces took part in the massacre, she said there remained public amnesia about the killings.
“Srebrenica is not taught in our history books in schools, it is not widely shown in popular culture,” Ms. Kandic said. “This country needs to have a historical reckoning about the past.”
Marlise Simons contributed reporting from The Hague.
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