Serbian Underground Railroad by Michael Sells, 6/27/96

Serbian Underground Railroad

by Michael Sells, 6/27/96


I don't know why you are asking about newspapers. The majority of my sources have been posted throughout and are quite detailed: several thousand pages of data collected by human rights organizations and war crimes investigators. I will be documenting each element of the Christoslavic ideology here, with resources available on the Web and elsewhere for further corroboration. I have a detailed note on sources above under the title "How Can we Know What to Believe." Obviously, in each posting, I will not give hundreds of citations, but I will offer the essential information needed to check my claims.

Why do you assume that the criticism of a particular militant ideology among some Serbs is a criticism of the Serb people as a people?

That is Radovan Karadzic's position: Any criticism of Karadzic is a criticism of the Serb people, he claims.

Similarly, when I have published information shedding unfavorable light on the radical religious nationalists among Serbs, I am called "anti Serb" by various posters, as if those religious nationalists represented all Serbs.

Not all Serbs support the ideology of Christoslavism, not all Serbs support the brutal "ethnic cleansing" that was carried out under that ideology, not all Serbs support the acts of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, for which they have been indicted for genocide.

There was fascinating recent testimony by Vladimir Srebrov, a Serb dissident who opposed the "ethnic cleansing" and was put by Karadzic forces in the Kula prison and severely tortured. Srebrov and other Serb dissidents said that there was an underground railroad of courageous Serbs who helped save Muslims and Croats from persecution by the religious nationalists, at great risk to their own life. I know of other Bosnian Muslims whose lives were saved from Croat militias by Croat families who risked their lives to shield them.

Generic blame is always wrong. For that reason I do not use locutions like "Serb aggression" or "Croat aggression" or "Muslim aggression" but specify the particular individuals or groups that are responsible for atrocities,and the specific ideologies under which they operate. That a tragically large number of Serbs were forced or seduced into supporting the "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia is simple a fact now. But a tragically large number of Americans have supported genocidal policies in Guatemala, a tragically large number of Indonesians support repression in East Timor, a tragically large number of Hutus supported the attack on Tutsis in Rwanda. But there were always a signficant, very significant group, sometimes a minority, that refused to support persecution and by doing so helped preserve the honor of their people as a whole.

Michael Sells