Rajko Dolechek: I Accuse! — Chapter 14

When the journalistic sensation of the alleged “death camps” started to lose its “appeal”, when it was finally realised that the unbelievable figures quoted by Muslims and Croats and by sensation-hungry journalists for the numbers of Muslims and Croats imprisoned by Serbs did not correspond to the truth, when even the CIA were unable to find any extermination camps, a new news sensation turned up. The Serbs were accused of systematically raping Muslim women as part of their war strategy. Politicians from the European Community (later European Union) and the USA used the fantastical disinformation spread by Muslims and Croats and the western media which supported them, some knowingly, others out of ignorance, about planned mass rapes. Several times the commissioner of the European Community Hans van den Broek spoke out almost hysterically about the Bosnian Serbs. The raping of women is one of the horrendous crimes of war, but it is sad when it becomes a significant and exploited element of propaganda and disinformation.

The hysteria broke out in full after the war in BH had been going on for halt a year, in November 1992, although reports of rapes had appeared earlier (the BBC was citing Muslim sources in September 1992). At peace talks in Geneva in autumn 1992 the foreign minister of the Sarajevo government Hans Silajdzic caused a shock when he stated that 30,000 Muslim women had been raped. Then the world media, and mainly the western media, raised the numbers of rape victims to fantastical dimensions. In the first few months of the war in BH “nothing happened” in this sense and then Muslim and Croat government sources and various organisations started to spew out ever increasing numbers of rape victims and the western media started to write about “rape camps”. In the Czech Republic the record for the number of rape victims was achieved by the Czech reporter from BH Jitka Obzinova, who as early as on 5th December 1992 told us in the TV programme “Don't Divide Up Bosnia” that 100,000 Muslim women had been raped; and to cap it all she said that the Serbs had admitted to raping 30,000 Muslim women, which was absolutely untrue. And so the tragedy of the rape victim started to become a propaganda hit.

The terrible numbers of raped Muslims cited also reached the European Community summit in Edinburgh in December 1992. Without verifying the truth behind the flood of horrendous media reports the European Parliament declared on 17th December 1992 that “In the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina itself there are several thousand women and girls being detained who are systematically raped and many of them are already pregnant. These camps are outright rape camps and death camps, where rape is used as a tactic of war.” The Dutch professor of state law at the University of Leiden, Fric Kalshoven, declared: “Look what happened in Edinburgh. First they vehemently condemn the atrocities committed and only then do they send their people to investigate whether the things have even happened. People tell horrible stories because someone has told them to tell it for propaganda objectives — or because everyone else is telling horrible stories”. Professor Kalshoven wanted proof, not propaganda.

And so the European Community sent off the former English ambassador to Denmark Ann Warburton to former Yugoslavia with a commission to investigate the matter. During two visits she spent several days in Zagreb and Sarajevo, had countless interviews with the local authorities there and interviewed four victims. Somehow, using a method that is completely unknown and was never published, the commission made a calculation and on 8th January 1993 stated that 20,000 (Muslim) women had been raped. A few weeks later Ann Warburton admitted that it would have been better to give a figure of 10,000-20,000 women, or maybe not to put a figure on it at all. A member of her commission, Mrs. Simone Veil, a former minister of the French government and former president of the European Parliament, left the commission because she disagreed with its conclusions — she was shocked by the paltry number of victims who had been heard (4) and that the main information was simply obtained from the Muslim and Croat authorities. The commission later said that Serb and Croat women were also being raped. At that time the European Community prevented a delegation of Serb women from going to Brussels, where they intended to talk about being raped.

In January 1993 Tadeusz Mazowiecki investigated the rape phenomenon for a UN commission. He spoke to 30 rape victims and 19 women who were pregnant as a result of alleged rape. Through some calculation his report gave a figure of 12,000 rape victims. Nevertheless, Newsweek was happy to give a figure of up to 50,000 raped Muslims on 4th January 1993. Tom Post, who was involved in giving these figures, based this 50,000 on information from 28 (!) interviewed women. Newsweek's “advisor” was a German journalist Alexandra Stiglmayer, who wrote, for example, about the north Bosnian town of Doboj as a “town of rape”, without checking this information from anything other than hearsay. There, in a camp in the Djuro Pucar school, a Muslim women called Besina was allegedly being held, who spoke about her horrible experiences from the rape camp in the school during interviews with A. Stiglmayer in the magazines Stem, Weltwoche and others. But journalist Martin Lettmayer did not believe it and went to look at the other side of the story — and he found nothing resembling a camp in the school (Weltwoche, number 10 — 17. 3. 1994). His article also discloses other pieces of disinformation about Doboj and its non-existent brothels, as they were publicised by E. Rathfelder in Tageszeitung (Berlin) on 2nd December 1992. Mrs. Stiglmayer was almost a “bible” for the rape question in BH; she even received some journalistic prize for this. It is clear that her articles influenced German politicians (it was evidently what they wanted?) and EC politicians.

As two Danish journalists, N. Krause and M. Hartz, stated (Jyllands Posten, 28th February 1993), 117 various groups interviewed a total of just 20 rape victims, the same ones every time.

In October 1993 the UN commission for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia gave a total figure of 330 (!) documented cases of rape by all three warring sides. In a discussion of the results of A. Warburton's commission on 17th and 18th February 1993 Professor F. Kalshoven said that her proofs to date would not stand up in court as evidence. The aforementioned bandying about of figures, invented, from hearsay, without conclusive materials, sometimes for money, was well illustrated by the French TV journalist Jerome Bony in the programme “Special Envoy” (4th February 1993): “When I was 50 km from Tuzla I was told: Go to the grammar school in Tuzla, where you will find 4000 rape victims. 20 km away the figure shrank to 400. 10 km away it was only 40. When I was there, I found only four women who wanted to give an account”.

If the reports of mass rapes were true, a mass occurrence of pregnancies and births could have been expected. Anglo-Saxons call the children of raped mothers “diabolic children”. In various countries in Europe, including the Czech Republic, preparations were made for this inundation of these wretched children — but nothing happened, there was no inundation of “diabolic children”. What nonsense made its way into prestigious western newspapers is shown by the case of Judy Darnell, allegedly a nurse from New Jersey, who presented herself as an “instant expert on Bosnia” On 13th January 1993 she told the American Today magazine the convincing story of a five-month-old baby, the fruit of the systematic rape of Muslim women by Serb soldiers (chetniks).

Immediately afterwards the prestigious New York Times (15th January 1993) published a photograph of a two-month-old girl called Emma who was born to a very young Muslim girl, raped in one Serb detention camp. The editors-in-chief failed to realise that pregnancy lasts 9 months and that the war in Bosnia started in April 1992, so the first baby would have been born in the fourth month of pregnancy and the second in the seventh month. Everything is possible for the western media. (Are they badly informed? Stupid? Do they do it for money? Or out of hatred?) And the media informed the public, politicians, in America and in Europe. Almost nobody tried to put the unbelievable disinformation onto the right scale. What can less deeply thinking people think when they read the German Stern, or the British Mail on Sunday or French Elle and see there a poor baby whose father is “...one of the countless drunk, coarse Serb chetniks” and his mother was “...a virgin when the chetniks took her captive on 20th April 1992” and so on. Except that the baby, not born prematurely, was born in November 1992 and was conceived in February or at the end of January .

The tireless Judy Darnell continued with her invented stories in February 1993, when on CBS (5th February 1993) she responsibly stated that 47 Serb rape camps are known of in BH. Nevertheless, the Red Cross declared at this time that it had no information about the existence of this kind of camp in BH, neither in the present (1993) nor in the past. No one from UNPROFOR found one, not even the CIA itself. But, somehow, around this time someone discovered some even more ridiculous disinformation. It was a member of the German Bundestag, Mr. Stephen Schwarz, who brought a report from Croatia that mad Serb doctors were implanting dog embryos in Muslim women. The “intelligent” Schwarz obtained this report from Croatian doctors in Bosanski Brod, or at least that is what he said. The unbelievable thing about this, as a demonstration of anti-Serb hysteria, was that this report came out in serious newspapers (e.g. in the English Daily Mirror on 4th January 1993). The Dutch journalist Gert van Wijland visited Croatia and Slavonski Brod and spoke to doctors who were all astounded by this nonsense. Van Wijland then published this in De Gelderlander (16th January 1993). Where did this propaganda for the mentally inferior came from — from a PR agency? Schwarz's story was not recognised, even by a society numbed by disinformation, and it disappeared soon after. One has to hope that the Bundestag does not contain more of these Schwarzes. But what to think of the newspapers which printed this terrible canard (Daily Mirror, Bild am Sonntag etc.)? Here it is worth quoting one Italian journalist, Remo Urbini (Epoca, Milan, 30th March 1993), who was in turn quoting one BBC journalist: “The editors-in-chief of some newspapers should be condemned as war criminals.”