THIS WAS CHRIS HEDGES IN 1997 WHEN HE ALONG WITH THE NEW YORK TIMES WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY TO PRACTICE OMISSION JOURNALISM, TO PERPETRATE DISINFORMATION AND OUTRIGHT LIES ABOUT THE SERBIAN PEOPLE AND LED THE BANDWAGON OF DEMONIZING THE SERBS WITH COLLECTIVE GUILT...THE ATTACHED IMAGE IS A MOCKERY BY THIS TWO FACED JOURNALIST WHO RESORTED TO ALL OF THESE DISGUSTING TACTICS WHEN IT SERVED HIS WRITING AGENDA. SUDDENLY THIS IMAGE WOULD IMPLY THAT HE IS NOW GOD PREACHING TO THE GOONS AND THUGS HE ONCE DEFENDED IN BOSNIA AND KOSOVO.
Chris Hedges, "In Bosnia's Schools, 3 Ways Never to Learn From History SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina", New York Times, November 25, 1997,
- On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in a Sarajevo street, an act that set off World War 1. So what Sarajevo does that make him in Journal Bosnia?
"A hero and a poet," says a textbook handed to high school students in the Serbcontrolled region of this divided country.
An "assassin trained and instructed by the Serbs to commit this act of terrorism," says a text written for Croatian students.
"A nationalist whose deed sparked anti-Serbian rioting that was only stopped by the police ice from all three ethnic groups," reads the Muslim version of the event.
When the Muslims, Croats and Serbs belonged to Yugoslavia under Communism, they were all exposed to the same set of history books. In them Princip was a hero.
History, confusing enough these days in Bosnia, is becoming even more unwieldy as students are segregated into ethnically distinct classrooms to be taught different versions of history, art and language.
The Dayton agreement envisioned Bosnia as one country with one government. But in fact, it has been partitioned into a Serbian republic and a Muslim-Croat federation. Largely dysfunctional, this federation ostensibly governs both groups, but each has its own enclave and power base. The principal ethnic groups - Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats - therefore have control over their own most important cultural institutions.
"This is the end," said Senad Pecanin, editor of the independent news magazine Dani. "We are creating in our schools a system of apartheid."
Many students, especially those Serbs, Croats and Muslims who live in the dwindling mixed, areas in Bosnia, seem bewildered by the efforts to define and educate pupils by ethnic background.
"I was sitting in my classroom the other day," said Branko Babic, 19, a Serbian high school student in Sarajevo, "and the teacher handed out a form where we had to write down whether we were a Serb, Muslim or a Croat. We were told that we would be segregated into different classrooms according to our ethnicity. It's not what any of us asked for."
Before the war many of Bosnia's villages, though internally homogeneous, coexisted harmoniously in ethnically mixed clusters. But the years of violent "ethnic cleansing" wiped away those areas where different groups lived, if not together, then at least side by side. Ethnic expulsions and flight also drastically changed the extent to which people now intermingle in the larger and traditionally more diverse cities -- even in Sarajevo, where before the war the three groups lived in relative harmony.
Now the Bosnian Serb republic, which has few remaining Muslims or Croats, has adopted new textbooks published by Serbia's Ministry of Education in Belgrade. And in the often rancorous federation of ethnic Croats and Muslims, the Croats use textbooks printed by the Education Ministry in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, while the Bosnian Government in Sarajevo has printed separate texts for the Muslims, complete with Islamic religious symbols on the front page.
And rather than take steps to assure integration of the students in mixed urban areas, the Education Ministry in the Muslim-Croat federation is now proposing that Muslim and ethnic Croatian students be offered either separate schools or separate classrooms within the same school - or, at a minimum, separate classes in "national subjects."
This is about basic human rights," Education Minister Fahru din Rizvanbegovic told the weekly Ljiljan. "We have to offer all nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina the right to choose, and whether they make use of that right is up to them."
But the federation plan has no provision for children from mixed marriages or for ethnic Serbs who live in federation territory.
In schools where segregated classes have already been established, students say there are growing disputes between ethnic groups.
A Serbian sociologist in Sarajevo, Dusan Sehovac, said his 17-year-old daughter "came home in tears because of comments made in her class about the Serbian aggressors."
"She would not return to school for 10 days," Mr. Sehovac said. "Many of her friends now cross the line at the edge of the city to take classes in schools run by the Bosnian Serbs to avoid ridicule and harassment."
There are different interpretations of every momentous event in Bosnian and Yugoslav history in the textbooks, often accompanied by elaborate conspiracy theories about the dark role of opposing ethnic groups.
The Muslim books, for example, portray the Ottoman Empire's rule over Bosnia, which lasted 500 years, as a golden age of enlightenment; the Serbs and Croats condemn it as an age of "brutal occupation."
The formation of the Yugoslav Kingdom after World War I is recorded in the Serbian texts as a moment of "liberation" and in the Croatian texts as "a plot by the Serbs to create Greater Serbia," which reduced Croatia "to the status of a colony." The Muslim texts say Bosnian Muslims were "pressured against their will" by Serbian and Croatian leaders to join the Yugoslav union.
The Muslim high school history text on the period between the world wars has chapter headings like "Evictions and Violence Directed Against the Muslims in Sandzak," a region in southern Serbia, and "The Abolition of the Autonomy of the Islamic Community in Bosnia."
The Croatian history text, like the Serbian text, never even treats Bos I nia as a distinct region, and its headings for the same period tell a different story: "The Loss of Croatian Territory"; "The Croatian People Resist the Dictatorship."
The Serbian text describes the kingdom, which ended with the German occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, as "an open, tolerant democracy." It explains to students that Croatian nationalists, backed by the Vatican, "adopted as their goal the destruction of Yugoslavia"; Muslims of the time are portrayed as trying "to divide Yugoslavia."
The Croatian history text acknowledges the slaughter of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in World War II by the quisling regime that the Nazis set up in Zagreb. But it also devotes pages to the attacks carried out by royalist Serbian irregulars called Chetniks.
The Muslim text, in a glaring omission, fails to detail the brutal role of a Muslim army division that was organized by Muslim religious leaders in Sarajevo and fought alongside the Axis forces in Bosnia.
The Serbian books, meanwhile, go into great detail about the war crimes committed against the Serbian people by the Muslim and Croatian "fascists," while skipping over the atrocities committed by the Chetniks and their collaboration with the German and Italian occupiers.
The texts have at least one thing in common: a distaste for Tito, the Communist leader who ruled the country from 1945 to 1980 and was a staunch opponent of the nationalist movements that now hold power.
The Croatian history text says he "lived the easy life and imprisoned all his political opponents." Serbian students are taught that he was "the prison warder of the Serbian people. " The Muslims condemn him for his atheism and for thwarting the establishment of a Bosnian state.
What the books might also say is that Tito was as guilty as the ethnic leaderships of propagandizing education. In his day, school texts glorified the ruling Communists, left out large chunks of history that did not fit with their ideology and fostered a huge personality cult that saw schoolchildren tested on minute and often mythical events of Tito's life.
Indeed, many experts believe that the Communist education system helped set the stage for today's ethnic rage by failing ailing completely to tackle the deep ethnic conflicts that figure in Yugoslav history. Instead, it denied that such problems existed an approach as divisive as the new effort to nurture students solely on the three groups' simultaneous and contradictory - recollections of grievances.
By the time today's books reach recent history, the divergence takes on ludicrous proportions; each side blames the others for the Bosnian war and makes no reference to crimes or mistakes committed by its own leaders or fighters.
The Muslims are taught that the Serbs "attacked our country" and started the war.
The Serbs are told that "Muslims, with the help of mujahedeen fighters from Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, launched a campaign of genocide against the Serbs that almost succeeded."
The Croatian students learn that Croatian forces in "the homeland war" fought.off "Serbian and Muslim aggressors."
As for Bosnia, young Croats and Serbs are repeatedly reminded in their texts that it does not exist as a separate nation and never has.
The Croatian students in Bosnia are instructed that their capital is Zagreb, while ethnic Serbs are told that their capital is Belgrade, in neighboring Serbia.
FOR THE RECORD... CHRIS HEDGES WAS ONE OF THOSE IN THE MEDIA THAT "DESTROYED INFORMATION" THAT OMITTED FACTS THAT WOULD SUPPORT SERBIAN VICTIMS AND WAS AT THE FOREFRONT OF DISINFORMATION AS HE KISSED ASS AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT. WHAT AN ASSHOLE...
Chris Hedges, "In Bosnia's Schools, 3 Ways Never to Learn From History SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina", New York Times, November 25, 1997,
- On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in a Sarajevo street, an act that set off World War 1. So what Sarajevo does that make him in Journal Bosnia?
"A hero and a poet," says a textbook handed to high school students in the Serbcontrolled region of this divided country.
An "assassin trained and instructed by the Serbs to commit this act of terrorism," says a text written for Croatian students.
"A nationalist whose deed sparked anti-Serbian rioting that was only stopped by the police ice from all three ethnic groups," reads the Muslim version of the event.
When the Muslims, Croats and Serbs belonged to Yugoslavia under Communism, they were all exposed to the same set of history books. In them Princip was a hero.
History, confusing enough these days in Bosnia, is becoming even more unwieldy as students are segregated into ethnically distinct classrooms to be taught different versions of history, art and language.
The Dayton agreement envisioned Bosnia as one country with one government. But in fact, it has been partitioned into a Serbian republic and a Muslim-Croat federation. Largely dysfunctional, this federation ostensibly governs both groups, but each has its own enclave and power base. The principal ethnic groups - Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats - therefore have control over their own most important cultural institutions.
"This is the end," said Senad Pecanin, editor of the independent news magazine Dani. "We are creating in our schools a system of apartheid."
Many students, especially those Serbs, Croats and Muslims who live in the dwindling mixed, areas in Bosnia, seem bewildered by the efforts to define and educate pupils by ethnic background.
"I was sitting in my classroom the other day," said Branko Babic, 19, a Serbian high school student in Sarajevo, "and the teacher handed out a form where we had to write down whether we were a Serb, Muslim or a Croat. We were told that we would be segregated into different classrooms according to our ethnicity. It's not what any of us asked for."
Before the war many of Bosnia's villages, though internally homogeneous, coexisted harmoniously in ethnically mixed clusters. But the years of violent "ethnic cleansing" wiped away those areas where different groups lived, if not together, then at least side by side. Ethnic expulsions and flight also drastically changed the extent to which people now intermingle in the larger and traditionally more diverse cities -- even in Sarajevo, where before the war the three groups lived in relative harmony.
Now the Bosnian Serb republic, which has few remaining Muslims or Croats, has adopted new textbooks published by Serbia's Ministry of Education in Belgrade. And in the often rancorous federation of ethnic Croats and Muslims, the Croats use textbooks printed by the Education Ministry in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, while the Bosnian Government in Sarajevo has printed separate texts for the Muslims, complete with Islamic religious symbols on the front page.
And rather than take steps to assure integration of the students in mixed urban areas, the Education Ministry in the Muslim-Croat federation is now proposing that Muslim and ethnic Croatian students be offered either separate schools or separate classrooms within the same school - or, at a minimum, separate classes in "national subjects."
This is about basic human rights," Education Minister Fahru din Rizvanbegovic told the weekly Ljiljan. "We have to offer all nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina the right to choose, and whether they make use of that right is up to them."
But the federation plan has no provision for children from mixed marriages or for ethnic Serbs who live in federation territory.
In schools where segregated classes have already been established, students say there are growing disputes between ethnic groups.
A Serbian sociologist in Sarajevo, Dusan Sehovac, said his 17-year-old daughter "came home in tears because of comments made in her class about the Serbian aggressors."
"She would not return to school for 10 days," Mr. Sehovac said. "Many of her friends now cross the line at the edge of the city to take classes in schools run by the Bosnian Serbs to avoid ridicule and harassment."
There are different interpretations of every momentous event in Bosnian and Yugoslav history in the textbooks, often accompanied by elaborate conspiracy theories about the dark role of opposing ethnic groups.
The Muslim books, for example, portray the Ottoman Empire's rule over Bosnia, which lasted 500 years, as a golden age of enlightenment; the Serbs and Croats condemn it as an age of "brutal occupation."
The formation of the Yugoslav Kingdom after World War I is recorded in the Serbian texts as a moment of "liberation" and in the Croatian texts as "a plot by the Serbs to create Greater Serbia," which reduced Croatia "to the status of a colony." The Muslim texts say Bosnian Muslims were "pressured against their will" by Serbian and Croatian leaders to join the Yugoslav union.
The Muslim high school history text on the period between the world wars has chapter headings like "Evictions and Violence Directed Against the Muslims in Sandzak," a region in southern Serbia, and "The Abolition of the Autonomy of the Islamic Community in Bosnia."
The Croatian history text, like the Serbian text, never even treats Bos I nia as a distinct region, and its headings for the same period tell a different story: "The Loss of Croatian Territory"; "The Croatian People Resist the Dictatorship."
The Serbian text describes the kingdom, which ended with the German occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, as "an open, tolerant democracy." It explains to students that Croatian nationalists, backed by the Vatican, "adopted as their goal the destruction of Yugoslavia"; Muslims of the time are portrayed as trying "to divide Yugoslavia."
The Croatian history text acknowledges the slaughter of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in World War II by the quisling regime that the Nazis set up in Zagreb. But it also devotes pages to the attacks carried out by royalist Serbian irregulars called Chetniks.
The Muslim text, in a glaring omission, fails to detail the brutal role of a Muslim army division that was organized by Muslim religious leaders in Sarajevo and fought alongside the Axis forces in Bosnia.
The Serbian books, meanwhile, go into great detail about the war crimes committed against the Serbian people by the Muslim and Croatian "fascists," while skipping over the atrocities committed by the Chetniks and their collaboration with the German and Italian occupiers.
The texts have at least one thing in common: a distaste for Tito, the Communist leader who ruled the country from 1945 to 1980 and was a staunch opponent of the nationalist movements that now hold power.
The Croatian history text says he "lived the easy life and imprisoned all his political opponents." Serbian students are taught that he was "the prison warder of the Serbian people. " The Muslims condemn him for his atheism and for thwarting the establishment of a Bosnian state.
What the books might also say is that Tito was as guilty as the ethnic leaderships of propagandizing education. In his day, school texts glorified the ruling Communists, left out large chunks of history that did not fit with their ideology and fostered a huge personality cult that saw schoolchildren tested on minute and often mythical events of Tito's life.
Indeed, many experts believe that the Communist education system helped set the stage for today's ethnic rage by failing ailing completely to tackle the deep ethnic conflicts that figure in Yugoslav history. Instead, it denied that such problems existed an approach as divisive as the new effort to nurture students solely on the three groups' simultaneous and contradictory - recollections of grievances.
By the time today's books reach recent history, the divergence takes on ludicrous proportions; each side blames the others for the Bosnian war and makes no reference to crimes or mistakes committed by its own leaders or fighters.
The Muslims are taught that the Serbs "attacked our country" and started the war.
The Serbs are told that "Muslims, with the help of mujahedeen fighters from Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, launched a campaign of genocide against the Serbs that almost succeeded."
The Croatian students learn that Croatian forces in "the homeland war" fought.off "Serbian and Muslim aggressors."
As for Bosnia, young Croats and Serbs are repeatedly reminded in their texts that it does not exist as a separate nation and never has.
The Croatian students in Bosnia are instructed that their capital is Zagreb, while ethnic Serbs are told that their capital is Belgrade, in neighboring Serbia.
FOR THE RECORD... CHRIS HEDGES WAS ONE OF THOSE IN THE MEDIA THAT "DESTROYED INFORMATION" THAT OMITTED FACTS THAT WOULD SUPPORT SERBIAN VICTIMS AND WAS AT THE FOREFRONT OF DISINFORMATION AS HE KISSED ASS AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT. WHAT AN ASSHOLE...
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