Romania does not seem to be specialized in bureks. Yesterday I bought one for breakfast but it didn't taste very good. So today I decided to do what I haven't done yet during my whole trip: eating breakfast in a restaurant.
The waiter did not talk much English and the available breakfast items were not in the menu, only in his head. Fortunately, he suggested "omletă" which I understood, and "şuncă" which is very close to "šunka", the Serbian word for ham. So I was able to ensure I wasn't going to be allergic to whichever he was about to bring me! It was so delicious, I realized it's been a very long time since I ate eggs and now I really have a craving for hard-boiled eggs :)
The weather was horrible in Romania today, pretty much just as bad as yesterday, so really I only have one picture worth showing and here it is:
By looking at my map and also checking on the Internet, I came to the conclusion that there isn't any major awesome buildings I had not seen in Timișoara so I decided to stay at the hostel most of the day. I ended up doing something I rarely do at home, I watched a movie!
Angelina Jolie directed a film called "In the land of blood and honey", the action is taking place during the war in Sarajevo. I personally enjoyed the movie but I looked at the reviews afterward and there was a lot of bad comments about the fact that the dialogs are not good, the story doesn't always make sense, the actors' English is bad... But a big part of the blame toward Angelina Jolie was that she showed a very biased view of the war by portraying all the Serbs as bad people and all the Bosnians as victims.
Which made me remember that I wanted to check online to see if really only Serbs are to blame. I haven't found anything horrible yet done by Bosnians, but it seems like Croatian also did their share of mass killing against Serbs and Jews during World War II: Link
I also stumbled upon something that I thought was interesting, it seems like some people are under the belief that the market bombings in Sarajevo was actually commited by the Bosnian government and not the Serbian army.
Link
I was absolutely convinced that in my previous posts, all the information I was giving you was based on recognized facts. And now I'm not too sure anymore. Apparently there are some "facts" that are not agreed upon by everyone. And since I am only little Claudie from Canada who doesn't really know what she's talking about, I have decided it is probably safer to stay out of that subject from now on. It is obviously much more complex than I originally thought. I also want to avoid offending anybody (if I have offended someone today or in the past, I sincerely apologize, this was not my intention at all). I don't want to misinform anybody either. So the comments you have read about the war in this post are probably the last ones I'm going to make about that topic.
I was going to write to you a little longer but the owner of the hostel just informed me that they are going to watch the movie "The untouchables" and I promised the two French people I met at Plitvice Lakes that I would watch that movie eventually, so I have to go!
Talk to you tomorrow!
"I haven't found anything horrible yet done by Bosnians"
ReplyDeleteI guess you haven't heard or researched Naser Oric and the 28th Brigade he commanded. He was the commander of Srebrenica and was carrying out a scorched-earth policy on the Serbian villages all around there. The Bosnian Muslims were taking films of their killings and destruction and Naser ORic even showed video and bragged about his killings to at least 2 western reporters who visited him in January 1994, as part of the press corps. They were veteran reporter John Pomfret of the Washington Post, and Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star. Both talk about images of burnt out houses, dead Serbs - one of them mentioned headless Serb men in a pathetic heap. Also Naser would describe how he killed Serbs with explosives during one raid and how he had to used "cold weapons" on another.
Here is what your Canadian reporter Bill Schiller said of Naser Oric:
Oric is a fearsome man, and proud of it.
I met him in January, 1994, in his own home in Serb-surrounded Srebrenica.
On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his living room watching a shocking video version of what might have been called Nasir Oric's Greatest Hits.
There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads, and people fleeing.
Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork.
"We ambushed them," he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on the screen.
The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives: "We launched those guys to the moon," he boasted.
When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: "We killed 114 Serbs there."
Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices chanting his praises.
_______________
Also Canadian soldier, James R. Davis, wrote a book "The Sharp End: A Canadian Soldier's Story"
In which he details what he witnessed: the Bosnian Muslims staged attacks for PR. He describes how they mortared their own children in front of the Canadian soldiers. The kids were on the street below a building and talking to the soldiers and the soldiers threw some candy to them. Then suddenly a mortar hit which killed the kids and sent body parts all around - (many of your Canadian soldiers are very traumatized and still suffering from what they witnessed in the Balkans, but it is keep silent because it was witnessing crimes against Serbs which the western media muted.) He says their observers/monitors reported that nothing had been fired from the Serb positions and they calculated it came from Bosnian Muslim positions. But the next day the Bosnian Muslim newspapers screamed blame against the Serbs and the UN for that crime.
He also writes how they had to dodge staged attacks from the Muslims when diplomats and foreign politicians were in town:
"At the Bosnian Presidency the TDF (the Muslim Territorial Defense Forces) mortared their own people again as Hurd arrived. He had just dismounted from Kevin's track when several mortars slammed into the square across the road, killing several civilians. It had been staged by the Muslims to impress Hurd. They told him the Serbs did this to them everyday, when in fact they killed their own people again for political reasons."
Here's more:
ReplyDeleteAlso the Muslims had many hardened criminals in charge of their paramilitary and military - especially at the beginning of the war.
For instance, Mušan "Caco" Topalović, who was commander of the 10th Mountain Brigade in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was killing and decapitating Sarajevo Serb civilians and throwing them into the Kazani gorge in the area.
They had Jusuf "Juka" Prazina, who was a gangster, and during the war he had torture prison camps for Serbs in Sarajevo. Later though, he had a fallout with the President Alija Izetbegovic (ex-con who wanted an Islamic state "Islamic Declaration"), and then escaped and fought in Mostar with the Croats. He was later assassinated in Belgium on orders of Izetbegovic's son, it is claimed.
There was Ismet "Ćelo" Bajramović another gangster warlord who was raping Sarajevo Serb women during the war - this was in documented testimony sent by Serbian women to the UN Security council in the fall of 1992 (and of course it was not reported by the western news) -often they were kept in the basement areas of apartments.
There was Ramiz Delalić "commander of 9th Mountain Brigade in Sarajevo, and also as main suspect who stood trial before a local court for the killing of Nikola Gardović on March 1, 1992 during a Serb wedding in front of the old Orthodox Church in Sarajevo. He is the one Serbs blame for initiating the ethnic killings.
And the Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) police and military police were terrorizing and killing Sarajevo Serb civilians. For instance, they barged in a house and killed several as they were eating lunch. Google search "Last lunch of the Ristovics" for the full account.
"This crime took place at the very beginning of the war, on July 8 1992 in Gornji Velesici and, according to all assessments had wide ranging consequences, above all influencing accelerated departure of Serbs from that part of Sarajevo. The cruelty of the crime was especially surprising, because six persons were murdered in the middle of the day, in their own house, while having a lunch. The victims were: Radosava Ristovic (61) and her sons Pero (born in 1951) and Obren (born in 1955), their sister Bosa (born in 1961), Danilo Ristovic (14) and Mila Ristovic. Dusko Ristovic was wounded. Stojanka Mastilo, a friend of Mila Ristovic was also in the house at the time of the crime. She hid behind a couch and was not hurt."
Even the reporter researching/writing that piece was told by the military police commander: "I don't want you hanging out with Chetniks [derogatory term for Serbs]. People die easily these days."
The mainstream and western media does suppress what happened to the Serb to make the Bosnian Muslims appear innocent, but it's an enormous lie.
And they definitely did have an army - the largest within Bosnian numbering 200,000. And in Sarajevo it was 40,000!
As for being "regular people" fighting - the fact is that virtually all the men were required to do military service in the Yugoslav army: "All male citizens were subject to conscription, regardless of nationality. The ethnic breakdown of YPA conscripts closely approximated the ethnic composition of the population as a whole."
And a woman who worked with settlement of Balkan and other refugees in the U.S., noted it was the Bosnian Serbs who had the visible signs and disabilities which came from torture. They were needing surgeries, face beaten in (and still showing):
"... This young man was captured back in early 1990s by the Bosnian muslims and
tortured, starved and had all his teeth knocked out. He has scars and had to
have several operations on his feet when he got here because all the bones that
the Bosnians broke in feet never healed well. HE WAS NOT a soldier at the time.
He was a teenager taken prisoner from a small Serb village. His family was
murdered. He has never married. He is bald like an OLD man. He looks 45. ..."