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Wednesday, August 24, 2005

IN PRISON FOR OPPOSING AL QAEDA (imprisoned by NATO)

With recent events in mind perhaps now would be a good time to consider whether the conviction & 20 year sentence of Fikret Abdic for opposing al Qaeda's press gang is not unjust. If we are seriously going to ask moderate Moslems to stand & be counted we have a duty not to imprison those who do.

Abdic was the most popular politician among Bosnian Moslems but was a moderate committed to free marketism & the Yugoslav Union. As such he was inconvenient to our leaders. They funded Izetbegovic, a fundamentalist former SS member so openly committed to the genocide of Christians & Jews as to make bin Laden look moderate, & eventually flew in al Qaeda members to make up the non-conscript part of his army (this was back when bin Laden was a heroic fighter against communism). Eventually Abdic became the leader of a popular Moslem rising against Izetbegovic & particularly his Afghan pressgang.

After the Dayton agreement the NATO funded War Crimes Commission indicted Abdic for opposing al Qaeda, apparently at the behest of Izetbegovic who wanted him excluded from standing in any election. Paradoxically immediately Izetbegovic died the Commission claimed they had been just about to indict him.

Abdic was finally "tried", with the Commission's approval, by the genocidal Croatian Nazi Tudjman (immediately Tudjman died the Nato's Commission claimed they had been just about to indict him). This obviously brings an entire new meaning to the phrase "Nazi War Crimes trial". Abdic was, unsurprisingly found guilty & sentenced to 20 years for opposing al Qaeda & remains in a Nazi prison today.

For people allegedly waging a "war on terror" in the form of al Qaeda the continued imprisonment of a man whose fault was, in the words of Lord Owen to be ""forthright, confident and different from the Sarajevan Muslims. He was in favor of negotiating and compromising with Croats and Serbs to achieve a settlement, and scathing about those Muslims who wanted to block any such settlement." & according to Foreign Affairs Magazine "one of the few examples of successful multiethnic cooperation in the Balkans."

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that he was imprisoned purely because, when we were trying to destroy Yugoslavia the last thing we needed was a moderate Moslem leader.

It is equally difficult to escape the conclusion that, by supporting the continued imprisonment of the only Moslem leader who ever had a following among Christian Serbs & indeed the only one not implicated in their genocide Gauletier Ashdown & his supporters are acting to maintain divisions (which keeps them in a job with fringe benefits not legal here).
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig

reference http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j072001.html
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PS The fringe benefit is that his staff have been able to keep child sex slaves (a couple of years ago a UK court decided that a women had been improperly fired for making this public which didn't help the kids much) but I thought you might find the details to embarassing to print.
______________________________________________________________________

This went out as a letter to all the major newspapers in Britain & many in the US & they didn't print it (or at least a search of Google News shows no mention of Abdic.

May I assure you that everything in there is true & in fact as the linked article shows, given space one could say worse.

Basically there is a good man imprisoned in a Nazi jail, at our government's behest, for reasons of political convenience. Perhaps he is not the worst off (depending on how our Nazi allies are treating him). In the same way Milosevic is not as badly off as the Kosovo Albanian whose recently gave evidence for him & whose 16 year old daughter was kidnapped & we may hope, murdered by the KLA with the evident support of the occupiers. The worst off will be the civilians of Bihac, thousands of whom were murdered (this was not a war crime) & who still live in a situation where "bandit gangs" engage in casual murder, rape etc. Another thing to which Nazi Ashdown does not object.

If there were any intention whatsoever of building a genuine state in Bosnia Abdic would inevitably have to play a major role - indeed it was for that reason that he was originally labeled a "war criminal" since in a free Moslem only election he would very probably win.

I wish to labour the point that the world's media have so completely rendered Abdic an un-person. Even during the war the BBC NEVER referred to him by name but merely as "a local warlord" which is exactly the same as them refering to Blair never as Prime Minister but merely as "a war criminal employed by Bush as local military commander of Downing St" (ie technically defenceable but misleading) which I will admit I would enjoy hearing.

The fact that they all refused to publish my letter may prove that it wasn't any good - but I think not. In fact the last article on this blog is a later letter published by the Scotsman on a different subject - it has 2 faults which I would have polished up before submission had I not been distrustful after the paper's refusal to publish my several previous letters on Srebrenica, Krajina & Abdic. I can tell a good letter from a bad one if my last was accepted then none of these letters were rejected for literary reasons.

Another really nasty part of this is that we are getting these same papers regularly attacking Moslem leaders for insufficiently loudly attacking al Qaeda. To say that while censoring the support al Qaeda got from Nato leaders & is still getting in Bosnia as this case proves, is pure racism designed to incite unjustified hatred.

No paper, broadcaster or politician who helps keep Abdic an un-person can ever, under any circumstances claim the fight against al Qaeda owes anything at all to principle.

Monday, August 22, 2005

ECONOMIC GROWTH - SCOTSMAN LETTER

2nd letter here. After a number of letters about genocide, war crimes etc which the world's press, except the Morning Star, declined to allow. A couple of lines have been edited out, removing the example of wind as politically directed investment & the suggestion that we seek specific advice from Singapore/Taiwan. this may make the letter more acceptable but, I believe, weaker. Originals are in <> :

It is good to see that<, under George Reid's guidance,> Holyrood is going to examine the question of how to achieve a growing economy (18th Aug).

Economic growth is achieved, as in the Irish example, by low business taxes & light regulation which make investment attractive.

That's pretty much it. Sometimes intelligently directed government investment can help, though much more often governments choose to invest either in industries chosen for political rather than economic motives <(politically powerful windpower in Scotland, the President's brother-in-law's sure fire scheme in much of Africa)> & such investment is largely wasted.

I am also slightly concerned that a specific part of their remit is "looking at how other devolved areas in Europe have developed their economies" since, with the notable exception of Ireland, economic progress in the EU has & is still severely lagging the rest of the world, even much of Africa. It would be better to ask how Singapore or Taiwan, both small states, have been so successful

George Reid must be congratulated for his success in, winning over the Executive to looking at this vital question. That it is necessary to make such an effort proves how very far we have to go.

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