Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In the Balkans, your friends may be your toughest foes., April 7, 1999
Fighting in the Bihac Pocket of northern Bosnia pitted not only the usual antagonists against one another but also saw one Muslim warlord fight in tandem with Serbs against the regular Muslim army. The result was havoc on a scale remarkable even for the war in Bosnia. Brendan O'Shea was present as a UN military observer and uses his firsthand knowledge and special access to original sources to document the startling and terrible effects of a civil war within a civil war. O'Shea also gives us an insight into the perils of demonizing any group (read the Serbs). Like any corruption of the truth, this behavior allows other, equally reprehensible types to get away with the very same atrocities without condemnation (read the Croats). The book further reminds us that hope can come from the most bizarre quarters, especially in this most bizarre part of the world. In December 1994, at a small cafe in Plains, Georgia, a waitress with a southern drawl interrupted a group at a table. She had a long distance call for one of them, who happend to be a representative of former President Jimmy Carter. The call was from Radovan Karadzic and he was putting an offer for a cease fire on the table (literally). And the cease fire held, at least for a time. Only in the Balkans.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Dubrovnik Deception, January 9, 2009
Brendan O'Shea's sub-title is apt. Throughout the 1990s the world was fed massive doses of disinformation. The designated bad guys were the Serbs. If there was ever a CNN war, this was it. I can add my own direct observations. I was a Fulbright lecturer in Ljubljana (Slovenia) from February to July 1990 and I followed developments before the press declared war in 1991. But the war had really already begun in 1990 and the propaganda mills were then revving up in Yugoslavia. I went on my own nickel to Sarajevo. Things were still calm there. I took a room in a Muslim house in the old Turkish center, Bas Carsija. In Herzegovina I visited Mostar, where the beautiful old Turkish bridge stood, before Croatian artillery pulverized it. My hosts were Muslim. There were 30 000 Serbs living in Mostar then, but not now. They were expelled or fled for their lives -- "ethnic --cleansing" -- in 1992.
O'Shea has a good chapter on Dubrovnik. What I personally know is that in summer 1990 Dubrovnik was empty of tourists, but was swarming with Croatian irregular soldiers. They were in sedition against the recognized, sovereign state of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav press was regularly reporting on arson and demolition of non-Croatian houses on the Adriatic coast, not only Serbian, but those belonging to Croatian communists and even to Slovenes. Back in Chicago a Croatian student of mine told me in summer 1990 that her parents warned her that war was coming and to stay in Chicago. Unreported in "the West" was that Croatian chauvinists were attacking cars with Serbian license numbers, sometimes pushing them into the sea. In one such car sat the Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett, who told me the same story. Yet another Croatian student told me her family came to safe haven in Chicago: "they (Croatian fascists) blew up our house." The world press reported nothing.
O'Shea's chapter on Dubrovnik mentions my 1992 walk-about there. In September 1991 Croatian papers, in unison with the world press, were beating the war drums. German and Austrian papers were the worst, claiming that the "Pearl of the Adriatic" -- Dubrovnik -- was reduced to rubble by the Yugoslav navy. The navy commander of the "Serb-dominated" navy was Admiral Stane Brovet, a Slovene. If the "port of Dubrovnik" was being shelled, as a translator I had to ask myself "what's being destroyed? -the whole city (which is a port) or the port area of the city?". Only one way to find out. Go there. I did, on 25 March 1992, three months after the alleged destruction of Dubrovnik, I found the place intact. Christmas and Epiphany decorations were still up. Blue paint marked for repair a pothole-sized impact zone of a mortar round. The sparse damage was mostly from Croatian armed forces who were everywhere in the city the day I walked through, with my cameraman. The day after my visit, an air raid alarm sounded and Dubrovnik citizens headed into their air raid shelters. Thus they didn't see what Yugoslav military intelligence observed: a German freighter docking at the industrial port at Gruz, off-loading a consignment of tanks from the stores of the defunct East German army. New red or pink roof tiles feature in insipid travelogues and Voice of America broadcasts. Travelers may tell you they saw roofless buildings, but it was years after the guns fell silent that they were in Dubrovnik, when renovations were in progress. The tiles I saw in 1992 were old and weathered, as my films recorded.
Outside Dubrovnik's Old City at the so-called "Little Belgrade / Beogradsko Naselje, or "Belgrade Settlement" I saw 19 substantial vacation houses of masonry construction all blown up by explosive charges in a regular pattern. I photographed a tiny Serb Orthodox chapel at a little known locality called "Bosanka" (Bosnian Woman) stood, burnt out. Its icon screen, we saw, had been hacked to pieces. A steel barrel that had contained acid stood next to a heap of burnt organic remains. A powerful stench lingered in our nostrils.
Dubrovnik is architecturally very Italian. The only razed building I saw in Dubrovnik's Old City was the palazzo belonging to the Croat artist Ivo Grbic. His house, several storeys high, was gutted. Adjacent buildings were unscathed. We photographed the site. Prominent was a shingle advertising Mr Grbic's business: in English ICONS and IKONE in Serbian Cyrillic capitals. He had a clientele of Yugoslavs interested in owning an Orthodox icon. The artist was summoned to testify at the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the Hague. That was in December 1993. At that time my videotape made in March 1992 was screened. The justices and prosecutors were perplexed: "Who is this person?". Ivo Grbic's health, ICTY transcripts record, did not permit the rigors of travel to the Hague. Mine did. In February 2006 I was summoned to the Hague to testify in the trial of President Slobodan Milosevic regarding what I had seen in Dubrovnik in 1992.
Minimal damage is what I saw. Which was also reported by Serbophobe journalist Maggie O'Kane, by NY Times Stephen Kinzer (September 1992), by EU (the EEC) observers and many others. I saw damage to the railing in front of St Blaise's church which had been hit not from direction of the sea, but from the direction of Croatian positions, by September 1991. I saw graffiti urging -- "Lynch the Serbs, Jews Against the Walls (Firing Squad): Srbe na vrbe, zhidove na zidove". The mass of journalists "covering" the war largely parroted what their minders told them (as Sylvia Poggioli documented) and what they read in the propaganda hand-outs. A veteran of US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC), trained in Serbo-Croatian, I read the language and I talked in Dubrovnik with various Yugoslavs. A young Dubrovniker told me at lunch (risotto) how he and his neighbors -- Muslim, Croat, Serb -- had tried unsuccessfully to put out a fire to prevent Croatian fascists from destroying the car of a neighbor. "Why did they do this to him?--" I asked. His answer: "Because he's Serb. And I am a Muslim." -- I didn't get to testify in the Hague. Not many days after Slobodan Milosevic and I conferred he was found dead in his cell.
Page 25 of O'Shea's book
... Professor JP Maher of Northeastern University, Chicago, who states that he actually walked through the old city on March 1992 and found only evidence of 'slight damage'. The city had certainly not been destroyed. (59 perhaps this explains the failure of the Croatian authorities to lodge any serious claim that the JNA shelling was not justified by military necessity and therefore constituted a grave breach of the Geneva conventions!
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Bihac, April 24, 2000
I found Mr.O'shea's book interesting,especially the objective parts of it; interviews,letters and case stories. Several times though the objectiveness faltered and one had to read about the author's personal views and insignificant problems for ECCM personel, compared to what the Bihac people had to live thru. Accounts of how life in Bihac town was, stories from and about local people, and their views on how life in Bosnia might have ended had the US not broken the weapons embargo, were missing.And then perhaps a subjective epilog from the author on how to survive an onslaught by an army, which is supported with men and material from the JNA.
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