----------------------------------------------------------------------------

All messages in English are on :
Beaucoup d'autres informations, en anglais, sont accessibles sur :

http://fr.groups.yahoo.com/group/eur-engl/messages

----------------------------------------------------------------------------



-------------------Transmission-------------------

De: "Julie Wornan" <juliewornan@...>  Afficher infos contact 

À: chomsky@...

Objet : Srebrenica and honesty

Date : Tue, 4 Jan 2005 23:04:53 +0100


Dear Mr Chomsky,

I am always happy to read the sensible things you say about US policy,
Iraq
and Palestine. But your position on some other subjects leaves me
frankly
bewildered.

In an interview conducted by Junaid Alam and published in Left Hook,
December 17, 2004
(http://chomsky.info/interviews/20041217.htm )

you wrote,

"Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was
being
used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that
there's
going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious.
They
trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and
apparently slaughtered them. ...."

Surely, you know that the attacks on the Serb villages were themselves
retaliation for the Serbian siege of Srebrenica. Thousands of Bosnian
Muslims from the surrounding villages had been driven from their homes
by
Serbian terror squads. They fled to Srebrenica, whose population was
multiplied several times and subject to siege resulting in much hunger
and
deprivation. If "retaliation" sweetens or almost-condones or at least
explains the Serbian atrocities, why don't the Bosnian Muslim attacks
on
Serb villages deserve the same perspective? Moreover, if "retaliation"
accounts, in part, for the Serbian impulse to murder Muslims, why do
you
neglect to mention the "ethnic cleansing" that was Serbian policy from
the
start of the war - from the first Serbian attack on peaceful protesters
in
Sarajevo? Does that motive suddenly disappear when "retaliation" can
be
blamed? (It makes me think of the way Israeli attacks on Palestinian
populations are usually billed as "retaliation" for some incident,
although
in the global context it's clearly Israeli policy to terrorize these
people
so as to reduce their will to resist the occupation, or incite them to
pack
their bags). - And when you say "*apparently* slaughtered them", you
seem to
imply that there are grounds for doubt - despite the mass graves and so
many
survivors' accounts. Have 8000 men and boys been hiding in the woods
for 9
years?

I cannot believe you are ignorant of the facts about Srebrenica and the
Yugoslavian wars. You've devoted your life to uncovering hypocrisy and
dispelling ignorance. So how am I to understand your bias in this
matter?

Sincerely,
Julie Wornan
(member of Americans Against the War, France - website:
http://www.aawfrance.net/ )