croatia – Jefe's House

War in Europe

US Department of Defense post-strike bomb damage assessment photo used by Joint Staff Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy Maj. Gen. Charles F. Wald, U.S. Air Force, during a press briefing on NATO Operation Allied Force in the Pentagon on May 5, 1999. Photo via https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2001238761/

I keep hearing intelligent, well-informed journalists and commentators referring to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as some version of “the first war in Europe since the end of WW II.” This is mindbogglingly false. Do we have collective amnesia? I hope not.

Here are some trigger words to jar our memories: rape camps, ethnic cleansing, Srebrenica, Milosevic, Karadzic, Slovenian War, Croatian War, genocide, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatian paramilitaries massacring Serbian Orthodox Christian civilians, Serbian paramilitaries massacring Croatian Catholic civilians, Yugoslav Muslims being hit hard by all of them, UNPROFOR, Kosovo War, Balkans Conflict.

It culminated in the US, under the auspices of NATO, bombing Belgrade, the first time a European capital had been bombed by another country since the end of WW II, and Russian tanks rolling into Kosovo with the blessing of the US and NATO. The circumstances at that time were very different than they are in the present conflict. During the entire period of the breakup of Yugoslavia, about 150,000 people died and the wars created millions of refugees.

I am not suggesting a question of whether we should or shouldn’t have bombed Yugoslavia. Opinions run wild on that and I’m not trying to spark a debate. I’ve had enough of those to last me a lifetime. I’m pointing out that to call Russia’s Ukraine invasion the first war in Europe since the end of WW II is to shamefully disregard the many thousands of civilians who suffered and died during what are now collectively called The Yugoslav Wars. Let’s not erase these victims from history.

I would have liked to see at least one news article these past five days that began with something like, “Not since the wars in Yugoslavia have we seen such a…” or “Not since the US-led NATO bombing of Serbia, albeit under markedly different circumstances, has there been a…” But not one. The Associated Press’ description of the present horrific invasion of Ukraine is the only accurate one I’ve stumbled upon so far: Putin’s invasion is “the largest land invasion in Europe since the end of WW II.” That is true, even though it seems crafted to circumvent any mention of the US and NATO as being the first to bomb Europe since the end of WW II. Right or wrong, for or against, the Yugoslav Wars need to be acknowledged instead of wiped from our collective memories.

I am very opposed to Russia’s Ukraine invasion and proud that the world is standing up to Putin, much to his surprise, but I’m seeing that often our messaging is not accurate and erases this tremendous loss of lives that only ended about 22 years ago.

Will we have forgotten about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 20 years from now? We might not think so right now but I fear we will forget. As an American, this saddens me.

I was in Serbia and Croatia just before the period of our 1999 bombing campaign, thanks to receiving an award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and was inspired to write the anti-war play Tesla’s Letters. I later returned to Croatia to teach at a summer film and theatre workshop sponsored by the Soros Foundation and Zagreb University. Tesla’s Letters premiered in New York in April of 1999 during the NATO bombing campaign. Here is the New York Times review of it for further context.

Thanks,

Jeff

Kentucky Premiere of Tesla’s Letters

I was flattered to hear that my play Tesla’s Letters is in production at Eastern Kentucky University.

Paige Neeley as Daisy and Brandon McCoy as Zoran. Photo via The Richmond Register.

I was flattered to hear that my play Tesla’s Letters , which world premiered Off Broadway to rave reviews in 1999, is in production at Eastern Kentucky University, directed by Jeffery Boord-Dill. Break a leg, y’all.

Sydney Marks at Biljana And Baxter Wilhelm as Dragan. Photo via the Eastern Progress.

Beautiful Zion: The Interview

http://insidemind.repradio.org/2011/08/11/108-jeffrey-stanley/
Interviewer Kristen Scatton of Rep Radio in Philadelphia wound up deftly getting me to talk about some things that weren’t even on my agenda, like my feelings about NYU Tisch School of the Arts, being taught and strongly encouraged by David Ives, my adventures with Tesla, Ouija Boards, death and why everything is not going to be okay, reflecting on why I never moved to LA, and a call-to-arms to Philadelphia filmmakers. Oh and there’s also my upcoming Philly Fringe show Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead directed by Dan Student.

Interviewer Kristen Scatton of Rep Radio in Philadelphia wound up deftly getting me to talk about some things that weren’t even on my agenda, like my feelings about NYU Tisch School of the Arts, being taught and strongly encouraged by David Ives, my adventures with Tesla, Ouija Boards, death and why everything is not going to be okay, reflecting on why I never moved to LA, and a call-to-arms to Philadelphia filmmakers. Oh and there’s also my upcoming Philly Fringe show Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead directed by Dan Student.

Many thanks to Kristen for joining me in the Blue Grotto for the interview during a rehearsal break. Listen now.

All’s Fair in Love and War

If you can’t beat ’em, harvest their organs. I was already appalled that Bill Clinton decided in 1999 to have the US serve as Osama Bin Laden’s air force and support the Kosovo Liberation Army (AP/USA Today, 1999), a terrorist organization which funded its arms and training through the heroin smuggling trade (FAIR, 1999) and which forcibly recruited some of Kosovo’s young men (The Independent, UK, 1999) to take up arms and join them in their war of secession from Yugoslavia, and I was appalled that Clinton had used as his pretext for bombing Europe for the first time since WW II the KLA-faked “mass grave” at Racak (Toronto Sun/Centre for Peace in the Balkans, 2001) . I was equally appalled by the US media’s one-sided coverage of the Kosovo conflict because it suited our own geopolitical plans in Europe. With the USSR gone, Yugoslavia was the last of the Eastern Bloc, and communism in Europe simply had to go.

On the other hand one can hardly blame any Albanian or Bosnian Muslim or Croatian Catholic for wanting to break free of violent Serbian Orthodox Christian ultra-nationalism under gangsters like Milosevic and his immediate predecessors, but I didn’t know just how ugly the fundraising had been within the KLA’s so-called liberation movement. Often in war it’s hard to choose the “good” side and justify in your heart which innocent civilians are the most expendable, eh? (see Tesla’s Letters).

But that’s what the media’s for, to get us all whipped up and cheering for “our” team like the whole thing’s a big football game, and to keep us from examining matters too closely. Even now the US and its Western European allies are bent on suppressing some dirty little truths about the Kosovo conflict, and once again the mainstream media has gone missing, aside from the Washington Post so far. To bad Julian Assange wasn’t around in ’99. And now here’s the story from Julia Goren at the Huffington Post…

Coverup on Serbian-Organ Harvesting: ‘Pro-American’ Kosovo Prime Minister Thaci Oversaw the Scheme

by Julia Goren, huffingtonpost.com

Switzerland has gagged one its Ambassadors from promoting a controversial [2008] book about war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. Carla Del Ponte, who prosecuted crimes at The Hague [and authored the 2009 book Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with Humanity’s Worst Criminals and the Culture of Impunity], claims some current Kosovo leaders once sold vital organs from Serb prisoners…

The book, The Hunt: Me and War Criminals, was due to be launched in Milan. It details atrocities committed by Albanians against Kosovo Serbs in the late 1990s and says that some of those currently in power in Kosovo made money selling Serb organs.

…Del Ponte’s book tells, in particular, about the obstructions she had to surmount “in her attempts to prosecute people guilty of the war crimes, committed during the armed conflicts in the Balkans in the nineties”… “Carla Del Ponte’s book on her work as Chief Prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal contains statements which are impermissible for a representative of the government of Switzerland,” Spokesman for the Swiss Foreign Department Jean-Philippe Jeannerat stated…

Kosovo’s Prime Minister/alleged organ harvesting entrepreneur Thaci

The Kosovo Liberation Army’s veteran leader, Hashim Thaci, now Kosovo’s prime minister, in the mid-1990s spent time in Switzerland, a centre for radical Albanian emigre circles, where he mysteriously acquired funds for the KLA.

Serbian press reported the organ scheme worth about four million euros was Continue reading “All’s Fair in Love and War”

Tesla’s Letters Now on Kindle

The cool kids in the programming department at amazon.com have come up with a unique way for authors whose works are available on the Kindle to share their opening pages, so here’s an excerpt from Tesla’s Letters. You don’t need to own a Kindle to view it. This new app for reading Kindle-formatted books right in your browser without owning a Kindle is, understandably, a marketing

A word to the wise — *do not* buy a hard copy of Tesla’s Letters from one of the resellers on amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com listing it for exhorbitant amounts like $43.00, $100, etc. There are some unscrupulous jackasses operating through those websites trying to rip you off. You can buy this script directly from Samuel French or download the Kindle version from amazon.com for just $7.50, and at a similar price in Euros from amazon.co.uk. Enjoy.

If you’re not familiar with the play, it’s a semiautobiographical wartime drama set in the late 1990s Balkans with unfortunately Continue reading “Tesla’s Letters Now on Kindle”