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We get a lot of letters, and publish a representative sampling of them in this column, which is updated as often as possible by our "Backtalk editor," Sam Koritz. Please send your letters to backtalk@antiwar.com. Letters may be edited for length (and coherence). Unless otherwise indicated, authors may be identified and letters may be reproduced in full or in part.

Posted July 14, 2001

Saint Slobo

[Justin Raimondo wrote:] "There seems little doubt that Slobodan Milosevic did indeed order the killing of hundreds of civilians during the Kosovo war, and then tried to cover it up – or else what are all those bodies doing in unmarked graves on Serbian soil?"

Although Raimondo seems to have forgotten (or deliberately omitted from his piece) the hoax of the so-called "Racak Massacre," some of us have not forgotten. I would never accuse the usually astute Raimondo of deceit nor dullness, but his professed incredulity ("what are all those bodies doing...") shows that he is not bothering to consider a perfectly reasonable hypothesis regarding "all those bodies."

At Racak in January 1999, the Yugoslav authorities invited an AP
television crew as well as a team of OSCE observers to film their assault on the KLA stronghold. Having conducted the anti-terrorist action by the book with absolutely no objections from any of the neutral observers at the time of the action, the Yugoslav government was then blitzed by the KLA survivors who arranged the dead KLA guerrillas and bystanders in the infamous ditch and cried to William Walker. This widely-believed hoax set the stage for the Rambouillet ultimatum and eventually the NATO bombing.

This illustrated to the Yugoslav authorities that even if you conduct combat operations legally and in full view of witnesses, the corpses of enemy guerrillas and civilian accessories can easily be transformed by the NATOland media into "innocent victims killed because of who they were."

If the Yugoslav authorities felt that it was in Yugoslavia's best interest to act to avoid further Racak-style hoaxes by hiding every corpse (whatever the cause of death) that could conceivably be turned into a "victim of genocide" (regardless of the truth,) then I find that to be a perfectly wise and prudent action. This hypothesis may be true or it may be false, but it needs to be considered and not ignored, given what the intelligent Yugoslavs must have learned from the Racak incident.

~ Vincent Rozyczko, Ithaca, NY

Genocide?

...What is the truth behind the claims of genocide in Kosovo? I thought that the international community already combed the area and found nothing. What are they now claming to have found? All I know is that it is a much less than the 100,000 dead we were told at the beginning of the destruction of Kosovo.

~ Christine Voda

Ashamed of the Netherlands

I appreciate the articles Nebojsa Malic writes about Yugoslavia. I hope that in time more people (journalists, politicians) will share his views. I am a Dutch citizen and very ashamed of my brain-dead government – a government that consists of people that feel pride in locking up and humiliating Serb citizens.

~ I. Biemans

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