By Ted Belman
Canada barred Dr. Srdja Trifkovic from entering Canada last week to speak at the University of British Columbia after being invited by the Serbian Students Association. Trifkovic is a hero to Serbs because he was a staunch supporter in their fight against NATO and the Muslims in Kosovo.
This is all the more surprising because Canada’s Maj Gen General Lewis Mackenzie has long said “We Bombed The Wrong Side – Kosovo’s Independence Immoral”. Here is a video interview that was done three years ago.
Dr. Trifkovic has posted an account of what happened at the Chronicles website:
Banned From Canadistan
by Srdja Trifkovic
Srdja TrifkovicOn Thursday, February 24, I was denied entry to Canada. After six hours’ detention and sporadic interrogation at Vancouver airport I was escorted to the next flight to Seattle. It turns out I am “inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights for being a proscribed senior official in the service of a government that, in the opinion of the minister, engages or has engaged in terrorism, systematic or gross human rights violations, or genocide, a war crime or a crime against humanity within the meaning of subsections 6 (3) to (5) of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.”
It appears that my contacts with the Bosnian Serb leaders in the early nineties make me “inadmissible” today. As it happens I was never one of their officials, “senior” or otherwise, but the story has been told often enough (most recently in one of my witness testimonies at The Hague War Crimes Tribunal). The immigration officer at Vancouver decided that what was good for The Hague was not good enough for Canada; but her decision evidently had been written somewhere else by someone else well before my arrival. (She was so out of her depth that she asked me if President Vojislav Koštunica had been indicted for war crimes.)
I’ve visited Canada some two dozen times since the Bosnian war ended; ironically, one of those visits, in February 2000, was to provide expert testimony before the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa. Why should the Canadian authorities suddenly decide to keep me out of the country now, and for transparently spurious reasons? Well, because the Muslims told them so. The campaign started when a Bosnian-Muslim propaganda front, calling itself The Institute for Research of Genocide of Canada, demanded to have me “banned” from speaking at the University of British Columbia on February 24. The ensuing campaign soon escalated into demands to keep me out of Canada altogether. The authorities have now obliged.
Dr. Trifkovic goes on to remind us of what Ambassador James Bissett said last week:
During the war in Bosnia, the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo became furious when General Mackenzie—who was representing the UN—was not deceived (as many journalists were) by the blatant propaganda generated by the Muslim side and by his insistence at remaining impartial. In an attempt to have him replaced, the Muslims concocted false charges of rape and misconduct against him. These charges were so obviously fabricated they were summarily dismissed by responsible authorities. As the general was able to prove, he was not even in Bosnia when many of the alleged offences took place. Despite the facts, the “Genocide Institute” continues to slander the good name of General Mackenzie. Its web site contains a long list of so-called rape victims who relate in lurid detail how they were raped … by the Canadian officer. They even claim that during some of these rapes the general was “protected ‘— not by UN troops but by heavily armed “Chetniks.” The stories are so obviously fabricated that to those who know the General personally—as I do—can only wonder at the seriously psychotic nature of individuals who would repeat these lunatic charges.
Jihad Watch also commented.
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I strongly believe that we have to reply energetically to all such charges; the “hate speech” weapon is increasingly used by the thuggish Leftist/Islamic supremacist axis to silence its opponents, and if we ignore the false charges made, they will be assumed true by those who are naive and unaware of what game is being played.
Something has gone terribly wrong in Canada. I pray that it comes to its senses and values and reverses this ban.
Being that my wife Stefanija (Stefi) Prasnjak Harris was born and bred in Zagreb, Croatia, in former Jugoslavija, I busied myself for almost two years making English-language commentaries on Croatian-language radio programs produced in Chicago and broadcast on short-wave radio. The Serbs, of course, were Croatia’s national enemies throughout most of the life of the Jugoslav state, and it came to a white heat by the late 1980s and into the 1990s.
Most of the relatives on her father’s side of the family fought World War II on the side of Tito’s Communist-led Partisans. Most of the relatives on her mother’s side of the family found World War II on the side of the Croatian Home Guard, and some as part of the blackshirt Ustashka Vojnica, sort of a Croatian version of the German Waffen-SS. Much of the leadership of the Ustashi state, including dictator Ante Pavelic, had Jewish relatives, and as such, survived the war despite their government’s Nazi/SS connections. But that’s a true story for another day.
In late 1990, before serious fighting began involving the Serb-controlled Jugoslav National Army and, in turn, Slovenija, Hrvatska (Croatia) and Bosna-Hercegovina, Croatian nationalist president Franjo Tudzman and Serb/Jugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic held informal and semi-scret talks which involved, essentially, the carve-up by Serbia and Croatia of Bosna-Hercegovina. The problems were that the Serbs also wanted parts of Croatia (Lika, Kordun, Western Slavonija) inhabited by Serbs since the time of Austrian empress Maria Theresa; the Croats wanted control over these territories and had claims on all western and central Bosna-Hercegovina eastward to the Drina River. (Hercegovina is solidly populated by Croatian Vlachs, central Bosna by Turkecized Moslem Slavs who had been members of the Bogomil sect until the Turkish conquest in the 15th century. But large parts of Bosna also had significant Serb populations. Croats are mostly Roman Catholic and use a Latinic alphabet. Serbs are almost entirely Serbian Orthodox (“Pravoslavci”) and use a version of the Cyrillic alphabet used also by the Greeks, Bulgars, Russians and eastern half of the Ukrainians. In any case, the Serbs had the organized armed forces, including the air force and navy, and Milosevic thought he could get all the Serbs wanted without bargaining.
The Balkan war of the early 1990s happened. The Bosniaci got their independence. In came first and Arab version of the Afghani Mujahadin. These later transmogrified into agents of Al-Qaida and problly European offshoots of the Moslem Brotherhood as well.
Were there atrocities in the Balkan war of the 1990s? You can all bet your collective asses there were. One of my Stefi’s family ancestral villages were on the receiving end of some of this from the Serbs So too was the city of Vukovar, where the Serbs murdered wounded Croatian prisoners in a hospital they captured at the end of a long siege. But the Croats took their opportunity kick shit out of the Serbs when the ran off the whole Serbian population of Lika, Kordun and Western Slavonija when their captured these territories in 1995. Ethnic cleansing, the Serbs first called it when they had the upper hand. Which, by the way, is exactly the way Israel ought to have handled the local Arabs of Shomron, Yehuda and Gaza right from the get-got. But that too is another story for another time.
Now, such as matters stand, I’m sure the time has really come for the Croats and Serbs to get together and smash up the little anti-European and anti-Christian nest growing in their midst. Enemies of 20 years earlier frequently become allies in latter day quarrels. Especially so in the Balkans. Would the ethnic cleansing of Bosna be a good idea from the standpoint of the Serbs and Croats? You can count on it. What about the long-term interests of the rest of Europe? Even more so.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI