The Legacy of the War to End All Wars

The Great War, the war to end all wars, was fought between 1914 and 1918 and created the greatest carnage in world history. Its unprecedented violence provided the foundation for the Second World War, which was the horrible continuation of the first. With the war came colossal battles whose names will live decades if not centuries to come: Verdun, Ypres, Gallipoli, Somme. [1] Sixty-million soldiers, sailors, and airmen were involved with an average of 15,000 men killed every day during the duration of the war. Disease killed one-sixth of the soldiers. [2] There were 8 million military deaths, 6 million civilian deaths, 21 million wounded at a cost in early twentieth-century dollars of almost 282 billion dollars.[3] Another account of the losses put the known military dead at 10 million with a cost of 337 billion dollars.[4]

"In essence," historians Burg and Purcell wrote, "the [Great] war had come about because a handful of politicians thought they could improve the lot of their nations by means of a short, decisive conflict." The Great War became "a paradigm case for thinking about what is the very essence of history: the weight of the dead on the living." [6] The central paradox of the war, wrote Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker, was that it was waged by each side believing that it would "bring a new and radiant world in the future" and rid the world of its most horrible flaw: war, thus the war to end all wars. The terrible and catastrophic consequences of the war were the "combination of military technology and the culture of the peoples who fought it."[7] The difficulty in accepting such a tremendous, unprecedented loss of life created a rise of spiritualism, especially in England. Celebrated writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lost his son, brother, brother-in-law from his first marriage and three brothers-in-law from his second marriage. Rudyard Kipling lost his son and devoted much of his time to a memorial dedicated to his son. Both writers tried to communicate with the dead through séances; Doyle devoted much of his time to the pursuit of understanding various aspects of the occult.[8]

Turks and Armenians

In August of 1915, the Turks found the chaos of the war a perfect cover to attack their hated neighbors the Armenians. Though Turks and Armenians had lived as friendly neighbors for centuries, Turks dreamed of a Pan-Turkish empire, while Armenians longed for the ideal Christian-based autonomous state. The Turks "solved" the Armenian problem by exterminating as many Christian Armenians as possible, most through "relocating" the Armenians in what amounted to a death march. This was the first great genocide of the twentieth century, an outrage that cost the lives of more than 1.4 million Armenians. The plight of the Armenians inspired American international aid as early as 1894 to deliver millions of dollars. When the Allies learned of the atrocities in 1915, they announced that Turks would be held responsible for "crimes against humanity," the first use of the term.

In 1915, Americans responded with one of the greatest humanitarian efforts in the history of the world when they sent more than $100 million dollars of aid through the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities. This was a time when a nickel would buy a loaf of bread. The Armenian genocide of 1915 motivated author Peter Balakian to write that no history of the Great War can be understood without understanding what the Turks did to the Armenians.[9] Ex-President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Theodore Roosevelt called the extermination of the Armenians "the greatest crime of the war." Various Armenian terror organizations have struck back at the hated Turks throughout the following decades. One group, the Armenian Genocide, was created in 1975 and claimed responsibility for the murder of Turkish diplomats.

The Great Horrors of the Great Battles of the Great War

On July 1, 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme, more than one hundred thousand British and French soldiers formed three lines fifteen miles long, jumped from their trenches and walked in columns slowly and coolly into a technical horror that no army had ever faced: German machine guns firing at one hundred rounds per minute. The soldiers continued to march as the guns mowed them down by the thousands, while their compatriots standing in reserve cheered the British movement as if they were at a football game. By the end of the day the British Army alone had 57,470 casualties, the biggest loss ever suffered by any army in a single day. A million and a half soldiers for all armies died at the Somme. The British and French armies gained five miles of captured land, which led historian Norman F. Dixon to note that to see the ground gained one needed a magnifying glass and a large-scale map. This horrific scene was repeated at the battles of Verdun, Ypres, Passchendaele, Gallipoli, and on the Russian and Italian fronts.

During the war Adolf Hitler served as a messenger, rose to the rank of corporal and won six medals, including the first and second-class Iron Cross. At one time he served in trenches directly opposite those held by the battalion commanded by future British Prime Minister Churchill. Churchill served on the Western Front for sixth months in close proximity of exploding shells.[10] Hitler survived the horrendous carnage of the Somme, as did the British author J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien said of the war ". . . by 1918 all but one of my close friends was dead." What Tolkien experienced and witnessed in the trenches and battlefields would fuel his imagination in a profound manner. While in the trenches of the Somme, Tolkien kept a notebook that would eventually become The Book of Lost Worlds, the foundation of The Lord of the Rings, one of the most read pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.[11] Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein served in the trenches of World War I where he wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that was eventually published in 1921. Wittgenstein would later teach philosophy at Cambridge University and have as one of his pupils Alan Turing,[12] the brilliant mathematician who worked successfully at Bletchley Park[13] as a principal character in breaking the Nazi's secret code machine, Enigma.[14]

On the night of October 13, 1918 Hitler was the victim of a mustard gas attack. Mustard gas can leave the victim hoarse and blind and cause an effect called "latent hysteria." The hysteria causes the loss of speech or temporary blindness, leaving the victim unable to encounter bright light but often recovering after a period of time, usually from one to four months. At the end of the war the German civilian population was tired of war, their supply of food was low. They went on strike and demanded an end to the war, food, and democracy. Hitler suffered temporary blindness and learned of Germany's defeat in this state while recovering from the gas in a hospital. It was there that he felt the most stinging rejection of his life.

After recovering his sight from the gas attack, Hitler stayed in the army and was assigned to "educational" duties, which amounted to spying on political parties and secret societies that could cause trouble for the government. As a spy for the German Army, Hitler investigated a small group called the German Workers' Party on September 16, 1919. He joined the party, which met in a dinghy beer hall called Alte Rosenbad in Munich. He soon became its leader; his wild, hoarse voice matched with his impassioned political rhetoric quickly elicited a following of political admirers. Hitler described the first time he sat with the group in his autobiography Mein Kampf: "The tavern in which the meeting was to take place was the Alte Rosenbad . . . a very run-down place . . . in the dim light of a grimy gas lamp four young people sat at a table . . . Terrible! Terrible! This was club life of the worst manner and sort. Was I to join this organization?"[15]

Assassination as a Political Tool

"When the twentieth century began," wrote historian Martin Gilbert, "assassination was regarded as one of the evils of the nineteenth century that would not be perpetuated in 'modern times.' The handiwork of a discredited ideology -- anarchism -- assassination was thought to have no place in the new century."[16]

Terrorist acts were legion at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the destructive and impossible movement of anarchy raised its ugly head in hopes of dissolving all authority and power of governments. A rash of anarchist[17] bombings and assassinations of the 1890's made their mark: 1894 an Italian anarchist assassinated French President Sadi Carnot; 1897 anarchists again assassinated Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Antonio Canovas, the Spanish prime minister; 1900 the Italian King Umberto I was killed by an anarchist. Umberto's murder inspired the assassination of American President William McKinley by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz. McKinley's murder in September of 1901 ushered in the presidency of the inimitable American President Theodore Roosevelt.[18]

From 1903 to 1913 there were 33 assassinations of major political figures throughout the world, three happening in the Balkans (1907, Prime Minister of Bulgaria Nikola Petkov; 1909, Albanian politician Fehmi Effendi; 1913, King George of Greece). Though there was much talk among the survivors of the "Great War" that there was a felicitous time of a "Long Peace" during the beginning of the twentieth century, when the war started British citizens in their sixties had already seen 24 wars throughout the world, though they were brief and peripheral to the British citizenry.[19]

The IRA, IMRO, and Dadaism

A secret organization created in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1893, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), was devoted to "creating political, economic, and social chaos," which would make the country unsafe for European investment and force the Ottoman Empire to grant the region autonomy. The IMRO's first enemy was the Ottoman Empire. Like the pro-Serbian terror group Black Hand (aka Crna Ruka the group that would have an influence in Ferdinand's assassiantion in Sarajevo), the chaos created by the IMRO never led to an autonomous Macedonia. Though the Black Hand would fade away, the IMRO would align itself with Italian Fascists and German Nazis and prosper into the twenty-first century, while assuming the reputation as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) of the 1920's and 1930's. 21] When secret societies like the Black Hand faded into obscurity, the IMRO flourished into the twenty-first century [22] with killers swearing allegiance over a gun and an Orthodox Bible and attacking, among others, Serbs, in some cases murdering entire staffs of schools in the 1920s and 1930s. A strong contingent of the IMRO worked in Bulgaria after World War I. They were dedicated to recapturing from the Yugoslavs and Greeks what they perceived as their part of Macedonia. In the 1930's an assassination could be ordered through the IMRO for $20. The most famous chieftain of the IMRO was Ivanco Mihailov. He agreed to marry his wife only if she killed his rival, which she did, paving the way to their marital bliss.[23]

While trench warfare raged on the European continent, Irish Catholic organizations took the opportunity to start a rebellion during the Easter week of 1916. Taking the advantage of Britain's pre-occupation with the horrors of war in France, armed Irish men occupied government buildings in Dublin. British troops eventually quelled the riot but not before 1300 people were killed, an outrage that galvanized Irish radicals into the Irish Volunteers and eventually the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1919. A significant figure in the Easter week uprising and the subsequent fight for Irish independence was Michael Collins, an Irishman born in West Cork. He was second in command under Joseph Plunkett during the Easter Week uprising. In 1917 Collins became part of Sinn Fein, the so-called first political party of Ireland. Within the Sinn Fein network Collins helped create an intelligence network, a national loan to fund a rebellion, an assassination squad ("The Twelve Apostles"), and an arms-smuggling operation. The first recruits were warned that their "work would not be suitable for anyone who had scruples about taking a life." The Twelve Apostles, also known as The Squad, targeted British agents and their sympathizers.[24] The Squad was officially founded September 19, 1919. The IRA, like the previously mentioned IMRO established in the late eighteenth century, is one of the oldest terror organizations in Europe finding its uniqueness in longevity and use of violence coupled with the use of legitimate political affairs.[25]

Social changes of the war were profound: the war ended the ancient Hapsburg, Romanov, Hohensollern, and Ottoman dynasties - empires that ruled Europe for centuries. While the war raged in 1917, Russia's political scheme was drastically altered with the Bolshevik Revolution. In November of 1917 the Balfour Declaration[26] committed Britain to help establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, an act that has had profound impact on the world ever since.[27] One of the first champions of a Jewish state was journalist Thomas Herzl who tried to garner international support at the First Zionist[28] congress in August 1897.[29] The irony that Herzl was an Austrian cannot be overlooked considering the impact that the Hapsburgs of Austria had on World War I and the influence that another Austrian named Adolf Hitler would have in the Second World War and the future of the Jewish people in Europe and Palestine.

From the need to express the horror and futility of the war came a unique body of expression in the form of Dadaism. George Grosz, a German artist, became swept up in the call for duty and enlisted in the German Army in 1914. Quickly he learned what all other soldiers learned in the new European horror. Instead of being bathed in the shining light of heroic deeds and easy victories, Grosz was engulfed in what he called the filth, idiocy, and deformity of the war. Grosz was medically discharged, recalled to service, went seemingly mad, accused of being a deserter, and eventually admitted to a mental hospital. He began drawing his hatred and disillusionment of the war: men cursing the moon, soldiers without noses, war cripples with crustacean-like steel arms, a skeleton dressed as a recruit. In major European cities like Zurich and Paris, Grosz, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Andre Breton and many others began working in the "Dada"[30] movement staging "demonstrations" that consisted of readings and drawing exhibitions as well as Dada magazines (Every Man His Own Football, The Bordello, Rose-Colored Glasses). Dadaism, once claimed by Tzara as the "ism of isms," first became a reflection of the horrors of war on the human psyche, then anti-war, then anti-manifesto, then an inspiration for new European abstract painters (Klee and Kandinsky), a voice for anarchism and pure nonsense, an inspiration for the surrealism art movement, and finally an "ism" declared dead and meaningless by its own inventors. [31]

Hitler, Milosevic, and bin Laden

Decades after the Black Hand's monumental decision to kill Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which would come by the hand of the nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip in June of 1914 and be a catalyst for the opening hostilities of the Great War, Hitler would return German forces into the Balkans and perpetrate a unique set of pogroms and ethnic atrocities little known outside the Balkans.[32] At the end of the century Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic[33] inflamed the region again with a challenge to expand old Serbian ambitions of a pan-Serbian Balkans by attempting to seize or partition Macedonia to his own liking, as well as creating conflicts with ethnic Hungarians, and planning attacks on Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians that lasted throughout most of the 1990's.[34] Milosevic rose to power as the President of Yugoslavia in 1987 as a Communist sympathizer. In 1990 Communism crumbled in Yugoslavia, which led Milosevic to become a Serbian nationalist. In his 13 years of rule, violence tore Yugoslavia apart. The Balkans were plagued by the 1991 Croatian War, 1992 Bosnian War, and 1999 Kosovo War before elections in September of 2000 helped topple Milosevic by placing opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica in power. Milosevic was put on trial for crimes against humanity and accused of killing more than 900 Kosovo Albanians among other charges.

In an effort to fight Serbian attacks, the Muslim Army of Bosnia was strengthened with the Islamic guerilla force, the Mujahedeen,[35] and Islamic fundamentalist volunteers from various Muslim countries, a number that could have gone as high as 10,000 men. NBC News reported that Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader, had fought with the Bosnian Muslim Army against Bosnian Serbs. Bin Laden may have been issued a Bosnian passport and had a headquarters in Bosnia. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though eventually linked to Egyptian Islamic cleric Omar Abmad Abdel Rahman and henchmen like Ramzi Yousef, was initially blamed on Bosnian Muslims by ABC News. The FBI had leads that showed a mysterious organization called the Serbian Liberation Army was responsible.[36]

In July of 1995 Srebrenica, Bosnia was the victim of the most brutal case of ethnic cleansing since World War II. Serbs attacked the city and forced 20,000 Muslims to flee the city; those who were not fortunate enough to leave the city quickly became incarcerated in camps where 8,000 men were killed and 2,000 women and children were listed as missing. Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia signed an agreement in Paris in December of 1995[37] to end three years of fighting, but not before 200,000 people had died in three countries and 12,000 killed in Sarajevo, some of whom were children killed by Serb snipers. "For many people," wrote Balkan Diary author Greg Campbell, "Sarajevo was the Bosnian War. Any city under siege is a dramatic story, but a European city full of starving rich white people being bombed by bumpkins from the country was too unique for the media bosses to believe."[38] At the height of the war the Serbs dropped 4,000 shells a day in Sarajevo.

During 1992-99 Islamic extremists followed the Serbian attacks on Muslims in Bosnia with attacks on Christian minorities in Sudan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Believing the Serbs were rightful heirs to the Kosovo region of Albania, Serb leader Milosevic lead the 1999 battle against Albanian Muslims of the region. Due to the Battle of Kosovo Polje of 1389, Serbs still believed that Kosovo was the cradle of their Orthodox culture, a place where Muslims had no place. With a touch of Stalin and Hitler, Milosevic told his aides that he would solve the Kosovo problem once and for all in the spring of 1999; the same way the Serbs did it to the Albanians in Drenic in 1945. How would that happen asked one of the aides? "It is quite simple. We got them together and we shot them."[39]

In February of 2002 death threats were addressed by a phantom Serbian terrorist organization that promised to liquidate the Serbian Prime Minister and the former head of the Party for Bosnia-Hercegovina because they were not sufficiently radical in their efforts to create a Serb nation, and "protecting Serbs and the Serb homeland." The terrorist group blamed the current status of Serbia on NATO, the European Union, the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France. The name of this secret underground terrorist group was Gavrilo Princip.[40]

End Notes

[1]The Book of 20^th Century Essays, 2000, Fromm International, 2000, p. 11. A British soldier would write about July 1^st, "By the end of the day both sides had seen in a sad scrawl of broken earth murdered men . . . No road. No thoroughfare. Neither race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on winning."Hamilton, Ian ed. Baigent, Michael and Leigh, Richard. Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler, Penguin, London, 1994.

[2] Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane, Becker, Annette. 14-18 Understanding the Great War, Farrar, Strause, and Giroux, New York, 2002, pp. 21-47. In March of 1918 the Spanish influenza spread from soldiers at Fort Riley, Kansas. Due to soldiers being transferred throughout the country and the world the deadly disease quickly spread into the battlefields of Europe and was believed to infect every known corner of the world with the exception of the tiny Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha. Military camps in the U.S. reported a death every hour by October of 1918. Only when the Versailles Treaty ended the war did the deadly flu stop as quickly as it started but not until it had killed 21.6 million worldwide, a stunning 12.5 million killed in India alone.

Wallechinsky, David and Wallace, Irving. The People's Almanac, Doubleday, Garden City, N.J., p. 547.

[3] Axelrod, Alan. The Complete Idiot's Guide to World War I, Alpha Books, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2000, p. 3.

[4] Stallings, Laurene. The First World War - A Photo History, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1933. The French lost nearly two million soldiers and the Germans a little over two million soldiers. Serbia's pre-war population was five million. Conservative estimates for deaths of Serbians were 775,000, which included soldiers and citizens that died due to disease and starvation - 15 percent of the Serbian population (some estimates go as high as 1.3 million Serbian casualties, or approximately 28% of its population). The smaller nations were proportionally most affected. Austria-Hungarian soldiers seemed to reserve the most heinous forms of terror for the populace of the Balkans, disemboweling private citizens by saber and attacking victims' face and genitals. Where the French lost 16% of their soldiers and the Germans lost 15.4 %, Serbia lost 37%, Turkey, 27%, Romania 25%, Bulgaria 22%.

[5] Burg, David and Purcell, L. Edward. Almanac of World War I, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1998, p. 10.

[6] Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane and Becker, Annette. 14-18 Understanding the Great War, Farrar, Strause, and Giroux, New York, 2002, p. 1.

[7] Howard, Michael. The First World War, Oxford, New York, 2003, p. 1.

[8] Audoin-Rouzeau, Stephane, Becker, Annette. 14-18 Understanding the Great War, Farrar, Strause, and Giroux, New York, 2002, p. 159.

[9] For an in-depth examination of the Armenian genocide of 1915 see Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Awakening to International Human Rights, Harper Collins, New York, 2003.

[10] Jannen, William. The Lions of July, Presido, Novato, Ca., 1996, p. 12. Gilbert, Martin. The First World War, Henry Holt, NY, 1994, pp. 224-5.

[11] See Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War -- The Threshold of Middle-Earth, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston/ New York, 2003.

[12] Turing was a key figure in creating Colossus, the first programmed electronic digital computer used to decode the Nazi Enigma machine. Depressed over police intimidation over his homosexuality, Turing coated an apple with prussic acid and ate it, dying shortly after at the age of 42.

[13] A mansion 50 miles north of London in Buckinghamshire was purchased by British Secret Intelligence Service to house its Government Code and Cipher School in 1938. An original staff of 200 ballooned to 7,000 by 1944.

[14] The Enigma machine, a Nazi ciphering device used by the Germans during WWII, carried most of the German armed services classified communications. With the basic appearance of a typewriter, the machine used a series of moving rotors that were set to the same rotor position before transmission. When a key was punched a corresponding letter would appear on a lighted, battery-powered panel. A receiving operator would key the ciphered letter into his machine and have it converted into the original letter. The breaking of the code was called the Ultra Secret.

[15] Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Fawcett, New York, 1992, p. 63.

[16] Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century, Harper Collins, 1977, New York, v. 1, p. 915.

[17] Anarchists look to a time when there will no longer be masters and servants, leaders and followers, rulers and ruled. Anarchy seeks to create a society without political authority. Anarchists are principally concerned with the way in which organizations and individuals have acquired power over people's lives. Anarchism as a philosophy seeks to dissolve all forms of authority and power, and if possible, wishes them complete abolition. Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible - A History of Anarchism, Harper Collins, London, 1992.

[18] The philosophy of anarchism was taken seriously and explained by Johannes Most in his work Philosophy of the Bomb written in the 1880's. Most's view of anarchism, its use of violence, and how it could create a positive effect on society was clarified. Most wrote that anarchism's "outrageous violence will seize the public imagination; its audience can thus be awakened to political issues; ultimately the people will reject the government and turn to the terrorists." Townshend, Charles. Terrorism - A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, New York, 2002, p. 13.

[19] Robson, Stuart. The First World War, Longman, London/New York, 1995, pp. 1-2.

[20] Gerolymatos, Andre. The Balkan Wars - Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twelfth Century and Beyond, Basic Books, New York, 2002, p. 192.

[21] Kaplan, Robert. Balkan Ghosts, A Journey Through History, St. Martins, 1933, New York, pp. xxvii.

[22] The IMRO, also known as VMRO in Bulgaria, flourished from its humble beginnings in the 1890's into the twenty-first century and has various Internet Web pages devoted to "striving to obtain civil rights for the Bulgarian population of Macedonia and Thrace regions."

[23] Sulzberger, C.L. A Long Row of Candles -- Memoirs and Diaries,1934-54, MacMillan Co., 1969, p. 64.

[24] Coogan, Tim Pat. The Man Who Made Ireland. Roberts Rinehart Publishing, Niwot, Colorado, 1992, p. 116.

[25] Currie, Stephen. Terrorists and Terrorism Groups, Lucent Books, San Diego, Ca., 2002, pp. 42-56.

[26]Balfour Declaration 1917 - Addressed to Lord Rothschild, November 2, 1917 reads in part "I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations . . . His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object . . ."

[27] Britain's successes in the Middle East gave it bargaining power to keep a foothold in the region, yet show compassion for Jewish people.

[28]Zion and Zionists - Zion was the name of the ancient citadel of the Jebusites in Jerusalem, which King David conquered from them in about 1000 B.C. It is often used as a synonym for Jerusalem. Jebusites were the original inhabitants of Jebus. Jebus is the name of the Canannitish city that stood on Mount Zion. Joshua defeated the Jebusites and later they were entirely driven out of Jebus by David, who then made it the capital of his kingdom. This city is identified as the City of David and Jerusalem.

The Zionists, who wanted to return the Jewish people to the land of their fathers, naturally looked back to the old religious dream of a Jewish return to Zion.

[29] For details concerning Herzl's role in the origins of the Zionist movement and an excellent overview of Palestinian-Zionist problems see Cohn-Sherbok, Dan and Dawood, El-alami, Oneworld, Oxford, 2002, p. 11. The U.S. had no soldiers as organized units in the Palestine or Arabian campaigns, activity that has been called sideshows of the main conflict, but the British had exercised considerable expense in the area and acted alone and unchallenged in its certainty that it could spend its spoils of war as it saw fit.

[30] The origin of the word "Dada" is as controversial as the movement. For more details see Friedrich, Otto. Before the Deluge - A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920's, Harper and Row, New York, 1972 pp. 37, 51, 148-9.

[31] Huelsenbeck would declare in 1970 that the Dada movement was "against the war Before the Deluge - A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920's, Harper and Row, New York, 1972, pp. 37, 51, 148-9.

[32] Craig, John S. Peculiar Liaisons, Algora, New York, 2005. See the chapter five, The Dirge of the Black Orchestra, "The Balkan Holocaust."

[33] UN Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said in 2002 that Milosevic was "responsible for the worst crimes known to humankind."

[34] The six republics of Yugoslavia (Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro) split apart in 1991-2. Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina declared themselves independent. In 1995 war ended with Dayton Peace Accord but the status of Kosovo, a former autonomous Yugoslavian region, remained unresolved. With the abolishment of Kosovo's autonomy Muslim Kosovars were forced under Serbian rule, which led to attacks by Milosevic's army. NATO launched an attack that led to a Serbian military withdraw in June of 1999.

[35] The Mujahedeen (holy warriors) fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 and was known as a significant power in overthrowing the Shah of Iran in 1979.

[36] Savich, Carl K. Internet Library of Serb Culture, "Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy: The civil War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1995," http://www.rastko.org.yu/istorija/iii/cksavich-religions.html

[37] The Dayton Peace Agreement was drafted at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio on November 21, 1995 and signed in Paris on December 14, 1995. The agreement was known as the Dayton Peace Accords, which established two autonomous regions - a Serbian republic and a Muslim-Croat federation - separated by a demilitarized zone monitored by NATO. http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/icty/dayton/daytonaccord.html

[38] Campbell, Greg. The Road to Kosovo -- a Balkan Diary, Westview Press, Boulder, Co. 1999, p. 106.

[39] Fourteenth Report of the House of Commons Select Committee on Defense, The Lessons of Kosovo, October, 23, 2000. Quote from General Klaus Naumann, former Chairman of NATO's Military Committee.

[40] "Serbian 'Secret' Group Threatens Bosnian Serb Civic Council Leaders," BBC Monitoring International Reports, January 5, 2002.