IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES TODAY
William Dorich
I personally took great exception to this unbridled racism since I lost 17 of my relatives
during the Holocaust who were burned to death in a Serbian Orthodox church in the
village of Vojnic in 1942 by Croatians and their Nazi Catholic priests. I lost the last 5
relatives of my name during Operation Storm in August of 1995 when 200,000 Serbs
were “ethnically cleansed” from Croatia. My relatives were too old and too sick to flee.
They were found a month later with their throats slit.
Dateline 23rd February 2007
INTRODUCTION BY RODNEY ATKINSON We reproduce here a letter written by the distinguished Serb author and academic William Dorich to the Director of the Hoover Institution in California, complaining about the publication of pro Albanian and virulently anti Serb propaganda in their “Policy Review”. Dorich is right in seeing this and other examples at eg Stanford University as proof of a re-writing of European history in US academic life which is favourable to those sundry fascist powers whom the USA helped to defeat in 1945.
The Hoover has had a high reputation for political economic and foreign policy research, based on its past ability to attract distinguished retired academics, among whom was the Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. I knew the late Milton Friedman who praised some of my work and I know (having expressed his worries to me after reading my book Fascist Europe Rising) that he would not have accepted the use of a Hoover Policy Review by Albanian propagandists.
In the early 1990s the Clinton White House – like the French Government – remembered the role of Serbs in the defeat of fascism during the Second World War and the role of Croatian Catholicism and Albanian and Bosnian Muslims in their collaboration with Nazism and Italian Fascism. But the Roman Catholic Madeleine Albright and the kind of personnel in the US Foreign Policy Establishment who provided safe havens for “former” Nazis and Fascists from the Axis powers after the war (plus the perennial Catholic corporatist influence of Boston Democrats who see Croatia as the “Jewel in the Crown” of the Vatican) managed to “turn” the US Government (strongly lobbied by Germany) against the Yugoslav Government.
As a result the US, German and British Governments went to war against Yugoslavia ostensibly to prevent ethnic cleansing and the rise of ethnically and religiously pure states only to see their allies in that war – Kosovo Albanians , Croatia and Bosnia drive out a million Serbs and establish just such statelets, politically and ethnically turning the clock back to Fascist Europe of the 1940s.
We are pleased to reproduce William Dorich’s letter to The Hoover Institution. No other author whom we have published on this website has had such a cruel family history at the hands of German Nazism and Croatian fascism as William Dorich. He lost 17 of his relatives during the Holocaust who were burned to death in a Serbian Orthodox church in the village of Vojnic in 1942 – by Croatians and their Nazi Catholic priests. He lost the last 5 relatives of his name during Operation Storm in August of 1995 when 200,000 Serbs were “ethnically cleansed” from Croatia – as NATO troops looked on. His relatives were too old and too sick to flee and were found a month later with their throats slit.
Mr. John Rasian, Director
Hoover Institute
434 Galvez Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
Dear Mr. Rasian:
I write in response to The End of Balkan History by Fatos Tarifa and Peter Lucas featured in the Policy Review of the Hoover Institution – an astonishing attempt to rewrite Balkan history by two Albanians which should have no place in an institution of higher education. But this comes as no surprise as Hoover and Stanford have demonstrated an ugly and biased assault on the Serbian people for many years.
During the Bosnian Civil War when hundreds of Bosnian Forums were organized on university campuses across the country, Serbs were always denied participation. At such a forum at Stanford, Provost Condolleesa Rice, was contacted by this writer to offer my participation in the forum along with a number of prominent Serbian scholars including Dr. Alex Dragnich, recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award for Outstanding Scholarship at Vanderbilt University, and author of ten books on Balkan history and politics.
Ms. Rice ignored our telephone calls and correspondence. Instead, she made the opening statements for this student-sponsored Bosnian Forum in which Serbs were denied a right to participate.
At a Stanford University dinner party in 1992, the former president of the Hoover Institute Glenn Campbell (died 2001) said publicly: “All Serbs are Nazis…….It was too bad if the Croats killed the Jews, but they should have exterminated the Serbs, so that they would have no trouble with them today”.
The Hoover Institution never made a public apology to the Serbian community for this immoral and outrageous outburst. I personally took great exception to this unbridled racism since I lost 17 of my relatives during the Holocaust who were burned to death in a Serbian Orthodox church in the village of Vojnic in 1942 by Croatians and their Nazi Catholic priests. I lost the last 5 relatives of my name during Operation Storm in August of 1995 when 200,000 Serbs were “ethnically cleansed” from Croatia. My relatives were too old and too sick to flee. They were found a month later with their throats slit. The insults, bigotry, slander and lies leveled at the Serbian people in this country – and which led to US support of that war and those massacres were led by morons from your institution.
Serbs came to this country before the turn of the century settled in the gold country of California where they built the first Serbian Orthodox Church 1896 (a church still in use) and have built a dozen churches throughout California since. The first woman (a Serb) elected to the California State Legislature, Roseanne Vuich, was from Fresno, California – a freeway is named in her memory. The Balkan Chair at your teaching institute is sponsored by the Rados Family of Southern California who have contributed handsomely to Stanford for decades. And yet Serbs have been so vilified with collective guilt that the Hoover Institution reveals that no level of conscience or restraint is necessary in attacking us. The editor of this diatribe should be fired for the contempt shown for Balkan history and for the eagerness with which this publication allow Albanians to rewrite history.
We now know that Operation Storm was aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence with cover from the US Airforce who turned off the radar system to allow Croatia to violate the “No-Fly Zone”. The Croats bombed and strafed fleeing Serbs, a war crime by every definition.
Operation Storm was led by Agim Ceku, a convicted Albanian war criminal who massacred Serbs in Croatia in 1992 and 1995 and went on to massacre entire Serbian villages in Kosovo. (This is well documented by the Dutch whose troops were on the ground and by Canadians like General MacKenzie who commanded UN troops in the area).
How immoral that the Hoover Institute now pays tribute to Ceku, a convicted criminal who anointed himself Prime Minister over Kosovo before any statehood had been internationally considered or granted.
During the Holocaust Nazi Croatians, Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Nazis helped to liquidate over 1.2 million Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in Yugoslavia. Many of the war criminals responsible for these unspeakable crimes were brought into the United States through a secret project called Bloodstone. Thousands of these war criminals were on the payroll of the CIA. Bloodstone became more than an umbrella organization that converted Nazi criminals into U.S. agents for sabotage and assassination operations in exchange for U.S. citizenship. One of the ring leaders of this ugly policy was none other than Evron Kirkpatrick, the late Ambassador’s husband.
These efforts were directed by Robert Lovett, who later became the Secretary of Defense and Frank Wisner, who headed the lobby effort for Bloodstone within the National Security Council. Wisner’s memos to the Department of State, PPS 22/1, March 4, 1948, March 17, 1948, and May 26, 1948, are registered documents marked “secret” and clearly indicate Wisner’s activities.
Further evidence and documents indicate that in the original group of emigres some 250 such experts were brought to the United States, 100 of them to work for the Department of State, primarily at Charles Thayer’s Voice of America, while the remaining were disbursed in the armed forces.
In one original Bloodstone document it reads: “Unvouchered funds in the amount of $5,000,000.00 should be made available by Congress for the fiscal year 1949 to a component of the National Military Establishment. Upon receipt, the component should immediately transfer [the] funds to the Department of State… (which) should be responsible for the secret disbursement of these funds in view of the fact that the problem is essentially one of a political nature… as to conceal the fact that their source is the U.S. Government.” This proposal was approved on June 10, 1949 by SANACC, which stands for “State Army, Navy, Air Force Coordinating Committee.” This initiative was originally promoted by George Kennan (a post war apologist for and a promoter of “German civilisation” helped to end the Denazification programme) and Franklin Lindsay.
Franklin Lindsay served during the war as OSS Liaison to Tito’s guerrillas in Yugoslavia. He later became the chief of the Office for Policy Coordination in charge of behind-the-lines guerrilla actions in Eastern Europe between 1949-51. In 1968 President Nixon named Lindsay head of a secret task force on CIA reorganization. Lindsay published a book entitled Beacons in the Night, his recollections of the time spent with Tito’s forces. The book was published by Stanford University Press, an institution in which many of these war criminals were warmly welcomed.
In the list of Bloodstone’s top officials you will find individuals who engineered U.S. cold war strategy for every administration from 1945 to 1963. That list included three U.S. ambassadors to Moscow; George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and Llewellyn Thompson, a director of the Voice of America, Charles Thayer, a director of Radio Free Europe, Howland Sargeant and two directors of the State Department Intelligence section specializing in East Block affairs, W. Park Armstrong and Evron Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick mentioned Nikolai N. Poppe in particular as one of the scholars he was most proud to assist in placing in the CIA. Poppe was the Soviets head of intelligence for the whole of Asiatic USSR before he came to the U.S. and had supposedly defected directly from the USSR to the U.S. However, Evron’s version of this story WAS A LIE. Poppe had been one of the Nazis senior intelligence analysts and had spent considerable time working for the Germans in Berlin before striking a deal with Kirkpatrick and Bloodstone. Bloodstone’s ability to circumvent U.S. immigration law existed for a good reason. Coming through legal channels the majority of these Nazi war criminals and collaborators would have been denied entry into the United States.
While Poppe was an intelligence expert and Hilger a high-ranking diplomat, a large number of Bloodstone recruits were from pro-Axis emigre organizations. At least six high-ranking Albanian emigres had backgrounds as leading Nazi collaborators. Midhat Frasheri was the head of the Albanian Nazi collaborationist organization, Balli Kombetar.
Stanford University’s Marc Truitt, in his doctoral thesis, disclosed the relationship of Albanians and the CIA. Some of these individuals included Xhafer Deva, minister of the interior of the Italian Fascist occupation regime in Albania, Hasen Dosti, minister of Justice in the pro-Fascist government, and Mustafa Merlika-Kruja, the Albanian premier from 1941-43.
It was more than apparent the Kirkpatricks did not discriminate about the company they kept. Once inside the United States, Deva, Dosti, and Frasheri, along with several others, established the National Committee for a Free Albania, which was substantially financed by the CIA with funds laundered through Radio Free Europe.
What is shocking about the two writers of this ugly assault on the Serbs is the skill with which they rewrite history with impunity and how it seems to have the blessing of the Hoover Institute.
When Albania was formed as a country after the First World War, and The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed in 1918, Albanians represented less than 5% of what became Yugoslavia. Now Americans are being told that the 1,500 Serbian churches built in Kosovo since the 12th century were Albanian Catholic churches, seized by the Serbs and converted into Orthodox churches.
After 9/11, and over a four-year trial at The Hague disproving “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians in Kosovo (something the murdered reporter Daniel Pearl uncovered as early as 1999 – see Wall Street Journal 31. December 1999), the Albanian lobby has managed to align American interests with the al Qaeda-trained Kosovo Liberation Army, well known as a terrorist organization. Americans are being spoon fed into believing these Albanians are interested in ethnic harmony, multi-culturalism and democratic principles.
Albanians have displayed their real feeling about independence this past weekend in violence in Kosovo that left two dead and dozens injured. In March, 2004 in 4 days of this same brand of mob violence these same Albanians destroyed 43 ancient Serbian churches, some listed by UNICEF as World Treasures, they razed 500 Serbian homes and murdered 14 innocent Serb victims. Their own Albanian web site showed a map of the region that not only included Kosovo, but parts of Montenegro, Macedonia and northern Greece.
Is the Hoover Institution really this naive to not face the fact that Albanian ambitions point directly to a Greater Albania? The comment “Nobody wants to cohabit with Belgrade,” is disgusting and insulting considering the Serbs were the majority of Kosovo for a thousand years until the Holocaust when over 10,000 Serbs were liquidated and more than 150,000 were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo. (And considering that Albanians were in the Milosevic Government! )
Tito forbade their return, giving Serbian land to Nazi collaborators. When Tito granted “autonomy” to Albanians in 1974 without a single vote of the Serbian people, Albanians began their assault on the remaining Serbs by banning the use of the Serbian language.
The Albanian authorities removed over 2 million books on Serbian religion, history and music from Kosovo schools and libraries and burned them. From 1974 to 1989 more than 125,000 Serbs were forced from Kosovo by the rape of Serbian nuns and Serbian girls which your writers cleverly ignore.
In 1989 a gang of teenage goons and thugs nearly beat to death the 79-year-old Serbian bishop of Kosovo. They led animals into his church to defecate on the altar and they urninated on the walls where they scribbled obscenities over the 12th century frescoes. Today that bishop is the Patriarch of the Serbian church. In spire of the fact that he spent three months in intensive care from this beating he refused to press charges.
As a person involved in higher education I end with the final example of the level to which Albanians stoop in their hatred of the Serbs. (although their murders do not stop at Serbs, Jews and gyspsies being equally unacceptable to them) Not only have Albanians destroyed 150 Serbian churches in the past six years but their behavior under “autonomy” speaks volumes about what they will do to achieve their goals of an ethnically pure state.
And let us not ignore the fact that 40% of the Albanians in Kosovo are illegal aliens who crossed the border from Albania into Kosovo as easily as Mexicans cross our border each night in San Diego.
In the 1970s, Albanologists spread rumors that they were on the verge of finding archeological evidence that the Albanians were direct descendants of Illyrians. Millions of dollars came in from Tirana, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. But, no such evidence was found. During the construction of the dam on the Fierza River project, which flooded parts of Metohija, in the archeological remnants were discovered remains of flooded Vrbnica. The Kosovo Albanian “experts” were ready to believe it a godsend that they had finally found their traces of an Illyrian settlement. The money came pouring in for additional research.
Meanwhile, the discovery turned out to be remnants of Slav culture and suddenly all financial assistance was discontinued and the project was abandoned. Albanian authorities in control and people like Professor Ismajli of Pristina University who did not believe the Serbs deserved enlightenment of these discoveries made sure the site was sunk in the newly created lake.
I would think that Stanford University and the Hoover Institute would be appalled at such anti-intellectual behavior but apparently there is no depth to which you will not stoop to further demonize the Serbs who were our allies in two World Wars as you defend Albanians, the majority of whom were Nazi collaborators and would not know a democratic principle if it smacked them in the face.
Striving for an ethnically pure Albanian Kosovo state in the heart of Europe is repugnant especially when a major American teaching institution provides the means to achieve such a goal through unbridled propaganda and hate speech.
Shame on you Mr. Rasian and shame on the Hoover Institution.
William Dorich
Los Angeles, CA 90024
The writer is the author of 5 books on Balkan history including the 1992 book, Kosovo, co-written with Dr. Thomas Emmert; Right Rev. Bishop Atanasije Jevtic; Dr. Alex Dragnich; V.
Rev. Mateja Matejic; Archimandrite Dositei Obradovich; Dimitrije Djordjevic and Slavko Todorovich.
William Dorich is the recipient of The Order of St. Sava, the highest recognition given to a lay person by the Holy Synod of Serbian Orthodox Bishops and an Award of Merit from the Serbian Bar Association of America.
