Save Western Civilization > Save Serbia

To my brother Serbs with love from Greece

<< < (2/2)

Boyana:
Journalist sued for exposing Greek paramilitaries in Bosnia
Submitted by WW4 Report on Sun, 08/09/2009 - 16:31. On July 27, Stavros Vitalis, representing the Panhellenic Macedonian Front, filed a libel suit against Greek journalist Takis Michas, author of Unholy Alliance: Greece and Milosevic's Serbia. Michas' book and work in the daily Eleftherotypia accuse Greek mercenaries in Bosnia of participating in the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre. In a media statement, Vitalis said that the Greek volunteers who fought in Bosnia under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic were there to help the Serbs, "who were being slaughtered by international gangs that were also stealing their houses, their country and their dignity."

The Panhellenic Macedonian Front is a Greek nationalist organization that up to now has propagandized against the independence of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia on the grounds that the name and historical legacy of "Macedonia" are exclusively Greek.

Vitals acknowledges his own role in Bosnia. Michas told interviewer Daniel Toljaga for Bosniak.org, Aug. 5:

First of all, Vitalis explicitly admits that Greeks (i.e. himself) took part in the planning and execution of the Serb "re-occupation" (as he calls it) of Srebrenica. As he says in his press statement "I was present with a group of senior Serb officers in all the operations for the re-occupation of Srebrenica by the Serbs."

Secondly, Mr Vitalis admits that the recruitment of Greek volunteers for the war against the legitimate government of Bosnia took place with the implicit approval of the leading Greek politicians Andreas Papandreou and (to a lesser extent) Constantine Mitsotakis.

Michas sees the case against him as part of a propaganda campaign in response to the war crimes trial against Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic now underway at The Hague:

Bearing in mind that Karadzic’s trial will also be taking place next year, what they will be hoping is to create an alternative debate in which the substance of what happened at Srebrenica will be called into question. In other words, while the world is trying the war crimes perpetrated at Srebrenica, in Greece they will be putting the critics of the war crimes at Srebrenica on trial

Boyana:
IN CYPRUS, EVEN PIZZA IS PRO-SERB (CYPRUS GOVERNMENT'S SUPPORT OF SERBIAN POSITION IN THE MATTER OF KOSOVO, YUGOSLAVIA
New Statesman
31 May 1999
Colin Smith in Nicosia is surprised by the extent of Orthodox solidarity with Serbian brothers.

As I emerged the other day from the Yugoslav embassy in Nicosia, where I had been checking on the progress of my application for a press visa, I collided with a party of young Greek Cypriots going in. One of them was carrying an open envelope bulging with cash, and they all wished to shake my hand. There was an awkward moment while I explained why I was unworthy of their largesse, and then they hurried on inside.

"We, the Serbs, are blessed to have God in heaven and Hellens on earth. You the Hellens have us Serbs as your friends. We will continue the struggle you undertook in 1974 against the Muslims until Constantinople becomes a centre for Orthodoxy."

Thus spake Bishop Nicolas of Sarajevo when he visited Cyprus in July 1994, the 20th anniversary of the Turkish invasion that has left the island partitioned between its Muslim Turk and Orthodox Greek inhabitants ever since.

For those of us unaware of the bonding power of the Orthodox faith across language and national barriers, the success of Bishop Nicolas's visit came as a surprise. Greek Cypriots are a well-educated and prosperous bunch. They are westernised in appearance and as hedonistic as the average citizen of the EU, an organisation most Greek Cypriot politicians are anxious to join as soon as possible. There is an abundance of churches, but not much visible piety about the place. They are certainly not religious fanatics.

Yet the hosannas that greeted the Bishop of Sarajevo gave early warning of unspent passions aroused by a quarrel that is older than Christian-Muslim rivalry. It is the visceral anti-westernism dating from the split between the true church of Byzantium and its Roman schism that is now breaking through the centuries like grass through concrete. It is the prejudice of the Orthodox hierarchy who, shortly before the fall of Constantinople in 1453, consoled themselves with the thought: "Better the Ottoman turban than the Latin mitre." It is the hatred for Rome that the Russian Orthodox church retained after 70 years in the communist deep-freeze.

In Greece, a member of both Nato and the EU, a recent poll revealed that 95 per cent of those canvassed were against the Nato air strikes - by far the largest number of dissenters in any EU country.

Ever since the Nato bombing started, the solidarity displayed by the Greek Cypriots for their Serbian brethren has come as a revelation for those of us who live among them. While the world listens to the shocked survivors of Milosevic's Einsatzgruppen relating their tales of murder and rape, in Cyprus "bundles for Belgrade" and schoolchildren bussed to demonstrations outside the US embassy have become the norm. A pizza chain has added "Viva Serbia" to its billboards. After the Chinese embassy was hit, a jeweller in Limassol received a gratifying amount of publicity by putting up a notice in English: "No Americans will be served today."

Almost all the media seem to have been convinced by Serbian claims that the Kosovar Albanian refugees have fled their homes because of the bombing; TV news pictures are of Serbian survivors sitting in the rubble of Nato's collateral damage.

As soon as the bombs started to fall, Archbishop Chrysostomos, primate of the Orthodox church in Cyprus, set the tone by announcing he had established a fund for the Serbs.

This makes no sense at all. If anybody has ever been the victim of premeditated ethnic cleansing it is the Greek Cypriots, of whom at least 170,000 were terrorised out of the northern part of the island when the Turkish army arrived in 1974.

Archbishop Chrysostomos, a septuagenarian whose grasp on earthly affairs sometimes appears a bit hazy, seemed to imply that the Nato assault on his Serbian brothers was all a Jewish plot. Later, after a meeting with the Israeli ambassador, His Beatitude said he had been misunderstood.

One of the first to respond to a call from a football club for volunteers to fight alongside the Serbs was Dr Marios Matsakis, a London-trained coroner and deputy in the House of Representatives. Matsakis, who during his time in Britain served in the Territorial Army as a medical officer in the Parachute Regiment, explained that it was a "symbolic gesture".

Others took more direct action. The director of a private college decided to strike back at the "enemy" with his own version of ethnic cleansing - by suspending 50 American and British students.

Then we had Spyros Kyprianou's Amazing Yellow Ribbon Caper. Kyprianou, the first foreign minister of independent Cyprus and its president between 1977-88, was one day the main speaker at a "No to Nato barbarism" rally and the next rushing off to Belgrade to bring home the three American soldiers captured on the Macedonian border. Inevitably, Milosevic did not consider Kyprianou, a sick man in his mid-sixties, important enough to award him the prize that three weeks later he would give to the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

But perhaps Kyprianou's trip did do some good for the Greek Cypriots, reminding the government that countries, like people, tend to be judged by the company they keep. An attempt is being made to follow the example laid down by the Greek prime minister Costas Simitis, who asked the electorate to "put Greece first".

"We are inclined in Cyprus to see only one side of the tragedy," admitted the foreign minister Dr Ioannis Kasoulides.

A small step for mankind, but a large one for Byzantium.


Back to Articles

sonja_yu:
Long live the Greeks!

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page