Carl Bildt - Photo: AP
Communists used to (and still do) attack people, instead of sticking to truth or having to answer complaints against them. Perhaps he learned this trade from Slobodan Milosevic whom he called a nice man.
Carl Bildt, Sweden’s foreign minister, decided to reply to Florence Hartmann’s condemnation of his presence in Sarajevo’s commemoration of 20th anniversary of the city’s siege.
The Swedish News in English Local writes that Bildt rejected her criticism, accusing her of inaccuracies.
“She should read my books instead of telling lies,” the minister wrote on his blog, adding that the French journalist had exhibited a “customary carelessness with the facts”.
He noted that she was “in conflict to such an extent” with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) that a warrant for her arrest had been issued.
Hartmann was wartime Balkans correspondent of French daily Le Monde and later spokeswoman for the former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.
She was found guilty by the court, her former employer, of contempt for disclosing confidential details of Milosevic’s trial, but has refused to pay a €7,000 ($9,000) fine.
She was also sentenced to seven days in prison and an arrest warrant was issued but France has said it will not arrest her.
As Sweden’s prime minister between 1991 and 1994, Bildt played an important role during the 1992-1995 inter-ethnic Bosnian war.
From 1995 to 1997 he was also the first high representative of the international community after the signing of the Dayton peace accord that ended the conflict.
Milosevic was considered by many a key culprit of the war due to his political and military support of the Bosnian Serbs”.
How pathetic can a person get! Bildt, instead of replying to Hartmann, he attacks her by regurgitating the fact that she had a judgment against her by ICTY. The whole world knows about that ICTY judgment, the whole world knows about other brave journalists with ICTY judgments against them – for revealing to the world that which the world has a right to know.
But Bildt would like us to think that because of that ICTY judgment against her, she’s not credible. WRONG! She did tell the truth about Bildt and that he did not do anything to stop the carnage in Sarajevo in 1992, nor elsewhere in the Balkans during that war.
He calls upon Hartmann to read his books! He would have had no trouble publishing a book, and certainly, the writings of his that I have come across clearly show that he does not always show the truth.
So why read them at all.
E.g. in his book “Peace Journey: The struggle for peace in Bosnia” he reduced the 8,000 men and boys massacred in Srebrenica to about/not more more than 3,000!
“In five days of massacres, Mladic had arranged for the methodical execution of more than three thousand men who had stayed behind and become prisoners of war. And probably more than four thousand people had lost their lives in a week of brutal ambushes and fighting in the forests, by the roadside and in the valleys between Srebrenica and the Tuzla district, as the column was trying to reach safety,” writes Bildt in his book!
To add insult to injury he calls all the victims of Srebrenica “prisoners of war”! They were not all prisoners of war and Bildt knows it only too well; over 500 children were massacred there.
And he has the hide to say that Hartmann is “careless with the facts”!
In his book, Bildt employed a great deal of malice and political hypocrisy and called for Croatia’s president Franjo Tudjman to be charged for war crimes with regards to Operations Flash and Storm that liberated Serb occupied regions. Yet, he did not call for Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to be charged with war crimes, in particular to do with Srebrenica massacres. He mentioned that ICTY had charged the latter two butchers but he himself did not call for that himself.
Bildt has demonstrated that he practices double standards. The darkness of this for humanity is harrowing.
Bildt is about equating the victim with the aggressor in the Balkan War so he and those like him (the hopeless, hypocritical diplomats) could justify their own actions and inactions that saw so many people killed. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps.(Syd)
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What a pathetic man. How do people like him succeed in life and are able to get to such high and influential positions? The worst part of it is that there is nothing we can do – he cannot be tried as amoral. Unfortunately there are no laws against being an idiot, even if it causes the suffering and death of thousands of people.
To much SPAM here to comment anything!
It was allowed as subject attracts spam, many deleted. Thank you
Shamefull for someone who calls himself a diplomat!