text:
17 March 1937
Birth control is an accepted part of modern life by all except the most religiously conservative. Competing brands of condoms in garish packages jostle for attention on the druggist's shelves, while contraceptive pills, easily obtained by prescription, are covered by health insurance plans. It might therefore come as a surprise to learn that as recent as 1969 contraceptives were illegal in Canada. Even the dissemination of basic information about birth control was prohibited unless it could be shown to be "in the public good." One of the big steps along the long road to repealing the law took place in Ottawa in the 1930s. However, the landmark legal decision that set change in motion had little to do with a woman's right to control her body. Far more important were efforts to control the size of Canada's poorer classes.
On 14 September 1936, Dorothea Palmer was arrested after visiting a welfare mother in the community of Eastview, now called Vanier. A week before her arrest, Palmer, who had received some training as a nurse in her native Britain before immigrating to Canada in 1928, had taken a part-time job in Ottawa with the Parents' Information Bureau (PIB). The PIB, started in 1930 by Alvin Ratz Kaufman, a wealthy, Kitchener-based industrialist and philanthropist, provided poor families with pamphlets about birth control, as well as sample contraceptives. PIB workers would make house calls on poor mothers, typically by referral of a doctor or friend. After a mother filled out an application form, which asked a slew of questions, including her race, the number of pregnancies she had had, her husband's occupation and salary, she could acquire contraceptives through mail order from the PIB for a small fee, or for free, if she were destitute.
Palmer was arrested by Constable Emil Martel and brought to the police station where she was questioned by Chief Richard Mannion. Believing she was not going to be charged, Palmer freely told the police what she was doing in Eastview, adding that "A woman should be master of her own body." Mannion called the Crown Attorney who charged her with three counts under Section 207(c) of the 1892 Criminal Code for selling, advertising, and disposing of contraceptives. Although Palmer figured she would get in trouble with the Catholic Church, she was surprised to have been arrested. PIB workers had been told that what they were doing was legal as their actions were covered by the "public good" clause of the Act. However, the broad applicability of the clause, which was intended to protect doctors, was untested in court. Eager to set a legal precedent, Kaufman provided the $500 bail for Palmer's release, and paid $25,000 for a top-rate legal team for her defence.
The trial, one of the longest in Canadian history, lasted six months. Witnesses, included social workers, clergy, and doctors, as well as twenty-one poor, francophone women visited by Palmer in Eastview. Judge Lester Clayton quickly dismissed two charges against Palmer, those of selling and disposing of contraceptives devices, due to lack of evidence, leaving the trial focused on whether or not the distribution of pamphlets on birth control fell under the "public good" clause of the Act.
The prosecution relied on medical opinions to show that birth control was unnatural, or dangerous, and that the distribution of birth control literature by lay people was not in the public interest. One obstetrician-gynaecologist called by the Crown argued that the control of a woman's organs was above man's law, and that birth control would lead to a woman experiencing "pathological conditions." Another, a professor of gynaecology at the University of Montreal, spoke against all forms of birth control other than the rhythm method. On cross examination, he admitted that his objection was religious. Some doctors, while supporting birth control for existing mothers who wanted to space future pregnancies, argued that it should be handled solely by medical professionals. However, the testimony of medical experts was undermined when they acknowledged that they actually knew little about birth control; the subject was not taught in medical school.
Palmer's defence team focus its arguments on the supposed sociological and economic virtues of birth control rather than human rights. Although the directors, both women, of the Toronto and Hamilton birth control clinics spoke about a woman's reproductive rights, and the welfare of mothers, as did the Eastview mothers who didn't want more children, their testimony was overshadowed by eugenic views expressed by male witnesses.
Prior to World War II, eugenics was a respected scientific theory, based on Darwinism, that aimed to improve mankind through selective breeding for beneficial human characteristics (positive eugenics) and the discouragement of negative traits through birth control or sterilization (negative eugenics). The Eugenics Society of Canada, established in the early 1930s, lobbied for the establishment of a national policy of "race betterment" by enacting legislation to "safeguard racial progress." Many respected progressive Canadians were eugenics supporters, including Tommy Douglas and Nellie McClung. Both Alberta and British Columbia enacted legislation permitting the sterilization of unfit and feeble-minded individuals that wasn't repealed until the early 1970s. Unfortunately, the terms "unfit," and "feeble-minded" were open for interpretation. For many, racial improvement meant advancing the white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant "race" at the expense of others. Eugenics supporters also argued that the upper and middle classes were being outbred by the poor and mentally ill, leading to genetic, social, and economic disaster. To correct the birth differential, birth control should be made available to the masses. The reputation of eugenics crashed during World War II when Nazi Germany used the theory as justification for its racial policies that led to the death of millions in its concentration camps.
A number of prominent Canadian eugenicists testified at Palmer' trial, including Alvin Kaufman, Treasurer and founding member of the Eugenics Society of Canada, Dr. William Hutton, the Society's president as well as the Brantford Medical Doctor of Health, and the Reverend Dr. C.E. Silox, the Secretary General of the Social Service Council of Canada. Both Kaufman and Silox testified that since poor, unemployed workers were having large families, the only alternative to birth control was revolution or communism. Silox raised the Malthusian spectre of uncontrolled population growth requiring state intervention, or the "invention of new deadly diseases, more terrible famines, and bigger and better wars" to stop it. If that wasn't controversial enough, Silox argued that French Canadians were deliberately outbreeding English Canadians while driving down their standard of living. By giving poor francophone families access to birth control, he claimed that Anglo-French tensions would be eliminated, and English dominance maintained. Le Droit, Ottawa's French language newspaper, angrily retorted that the trial was all about killing French Canadians in the womb.
Dr. William Hutton presented dubious statistics purporting to show that the average intelligence of Canadians was declining due to a higher fertility rate of the less intelligent, a view supported by a University of Toronto psychiatrist who argued that Canada faced a biological crisis as a consequence. Further testimony by a Toronto economist underscored the burden to society of supporting the unemployed of Eastview, noting that the community's unemployment rate was more than double the national average, and that births in the town outnumbered deaths by more than 150 per year. Similarly, the Secretary of the Toronto District Labour Council argued that birth control should be used to "govern the level of the nation's population" until surplus workers were absorbed, or the economic system changed.
On 17 March 1937, Judge Clayton, swayed by the economic and social arguments made by the defence, ruled that Dorothea Palmer's actions were indeed in the public interest. In his summing up, there was no mention of women's rights. With the subsequent appeal by the Crown dismissed, Clayton's ruling opened the door a crack for birth control in Canada.
Sadly, for all her courage, Palmer received little support from her husband, relatives and Church who disapproved of her stand. During her trial, a stranger, passing on the street, slapped her face. Palmer received obscene phone calls at all hours, and was sexually assaulted by a man who told her "I'll show you what it's like without any birth control." Fortunately, a knee in the groin and a punch in the face stopped her assailant. After the trial, she quit the PIB, saying her work was done, and faded into obscurity. Palmer, a pioneer for women's rights, died in 1992.
Annau, Catherine, 1994. "Eager Eugenicists: A Reprisal of the Birth Control Society of Hamilton," Social History, Volume XXVII, Number 53, p. 111-133, http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/hssh/article/viewFile/16541/15400.
Bonikowsky, Laura, 2011, "It's About Control: Dorothea Palmer and Contraception," Historica Canada Blog, 13 September, http://blog.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/blog/posts/it%E2%80%99s-about-control-dorothea-palmer-and-contraception/.
Dodd, Dianne, 1983, "The Canadian Birth Control Movement on Trial, 1936-37," Social History, Volume XVI, Number 32, p. 411-28, http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/hssh/article/viewFile/38282/34685.
Jasmin, Olivier, 2012. Eugenics in Canada, http://rimstead-cours.espaceweb.usherbrooke.ca/IntercultH2012/eugenics.html.
Martel, Marcel, 2014, Canada The Good, A Short History of Vice since 1500, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo.
National Post, 2012. "Canadians airbrush the truth Tommy Douglas's enthusiasm for eugenics: MD," 14 March.
Revie, Linda, 2006. "More Than Just Boots! The Eugenic and Commercial Concerns behind A. R. Kaufman's Birth Controlling Activities," Canadian Bulletin of Mental Health, Volume 23:1, p. 119-143, file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/1269-1271-1-PB.pdf.
The Globe, 1936. "Palmer acquitted on one birth control count," 21 October.
—————, 1936. "Public Good, Is Defense Point in Palmer Case," 2 November.
—————, 1936. "Birth Control or Red Regime, Pastor States," 3 November.
—————, 1936. "Rabbi, Pastors, Doctor Defend Birth Control," 6 November.
—————, 1937. "Deny Charge of Obscenity," 2 February.
The Globe and Mail, 1937. "Birth Control Case Dismissed," 18 March.
———————–, 1978. "Did Dirty Work for men at trial, pioneer of birth control says," 30 November.
Image: http://www.intlawgrrls.com/2010/09/on-september-14.html.


text:
Lead GP - Same-Day Team
- Employer
- Menlo Park Recruitment
- Location
- Bournemouth
- Salary
- £40,000 - £90,000 per annum + Indemnity paid + BMA model + 7 weeks leave
- Closing date
- 1 Jan 2023
View more
- Contract Type
- Permanent
- Hours
- Full Time
- Function
- Leadership
- Sector
- Benefits
- BMA Contract, Indemnity paid
Job Details
Background -
An ever-popular opportunity to join an ever-popular practice in an affluent part of Bournemouth.
This well-known Training Practice is stable, well-thought of and well-Doctored for a practice of their size.
This is a unique role within a practice that has a unique set-up with two teams of GPs - one list-holding and one same-day. Following the promotion of their current same-day team Lead GP to the Partnership, they are now looking for a replacement to lead the small team of GPs, Paramedic and ANPs.
The role will oversee the same-day GPs as well as supporting the ANPs with their queries and though you will have slots for 15-18 patients, your role will mostly be oversight and management with a day of say, five appointments in the morning and nine in the afternoon a typical example. The GPs, Paramedic and three ANPs all have their clinics fully booked before any patients are booked in to the Lead GP's clinic.
All patients are same-day with no follow-ups as these then go back to their named GP. Admin is solely what is self-generated unless you particularly wish to see the results of any tests/referrals you arrange, most likely in the event that said follow-up then resolves that case.
Salary - £10,000 per session plus indemnity
Location - Bournemouth
The surgery -
- GP Training Practice with two Trainers
- Pleasant population in desirable setting
- Geared towards reducing GP workload
- Action Team intercepting documents and actioning tasks and referrals
- Meds team handling the medication and prescription workload
- Happy, stable team of Doctors
- Coffee break every morning
- SystmOne practice
Your role -
- Duty Team Lead GP
- 4 or more sessions - full-time available
- Typical day -
- 30-09.30 - Oversight
- 30-11.35 - Lead GP's clinical hours if needed
- 20-minute coffee meeting to discuss cases
- 55-15.00 - Self-generated admin and any visits plus lunch break
- 00-17.30 - Lead GP's clinical hours if needed
- 30-18.30 - Oversight
- Opportunity to step into list-holding role during sabbaticals, holidays etc
- Minimal home visits as mostly done by Paramedic
The benefits -
- Excellent opportunity to get a taste of management whilst still a Salaried GP
- Contract in line with BMA
- Indemnity fees paid
- 6 weeks' annual leave
- 1 week study leave
- NHS pension
Next Steps
For further details on this exceptional role, please click the Apply Now button. If you can specify the best time to talk, please do; we will get in touch when it suits you best. You will then be contacted by one of our specialist consultants, who will provide you with further details about the role.
If you would like to talk ahead of sending us your CV, please give us a call on 0113 350 1308. Please note, any contact is in the strictest confidence and we will not send your details to any practice without your expressed consent to do so.
Is this role almost right for you, but not quite ticking all the boxes? If so, we have hundreds of other roles available and can also work proactively to find you your perfect post.
For the past two years running, we have been voted as Recruitment Company of the Year at the General Practice Awards, and we were Highly Commended in the Best Public Sector Agency at the Recruiter Awards, so in dealing with us you'll be in safe hands!
For every placement we make, Menlo Park plants two trees! We plant one on your behalf and the other on the surgery's behalf. By planting two trees we offset 0.6 tonnes of CO2, the equivalent of driving 1,466 miles in a standard car. We want to contribute towards helping save the planet!
Matthew Okey
We are the only consultancy to focus solely on permanent recruitment within UK Primary Care. Our work focuses on the breadth and variety of clinical roles that you find in a modern GP Practice.
Our values are at the core of everything we do. We have a unique ethical stand point; we're the only consultancy that can proudly say, we are not compounding the shortage of permanent clinical staff in the UK by promoting locum work, or taking UK trained clinicians overseas.
Our focus is on working with GP Practices and Clinicians that are serious about promoting quality in General Practice and that recognise the importance of investing in the recruitment process.
- Website
- https://menloparkrecruitment.com/
- Mini-site
- Menlo Park Recruitment
- Telephone
- 01133501308
- Location
4220 Park Approach
Menlo Park Recruitment
West Yorkshire
United Kingdom
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
BORGH Family Tree and BORGH Genealogy Records
Register yourself as a BORGH researcher
BORGH wiki
This is the surname research page for BORGH. This section is designed to contain general information about BORGH genealogy research. Please consider adding some of your own research, either as an editor or with journals below.
2010 US Census data for BORGH
This surname is in the top 162,000 names in the US Census from 2010. (There must be at least 100 to make the list).
There are 128 BORGH records listed in the 2010 US Census, and it is the Number 132206 ranked name. A BORGH makes up 0.04 of every 100k people in the population.
Other US Census data for BORGH
91.41% are White Alone (Non-Hispanic)
~0% are Black Alone (Non-Hispanic Black or African American Alone)
~0% are Hispanic or Latino origin
~0% are Asian Alone (Non-Hispanic Asian and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Alone)
~0% are American Indian (Non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native Alone)
4.69% Non-Hispanic Two or More Races
BORGH Family History and BORGH Family Genealogy Journals
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text:
Table of Contents
Entrepreneurs can now make money through private labels because of the growth of e-commerce giants like Amazon. As an individual seller, you can create your own brand with private labeling. All it takes are generic products.
A generic product is all that is needed. You can also make a lot of money if your brand becomes well known. Creating a successful Amazon private label takes a lot more effort than it appears. One such thing is getting approval for that particular category which kills your time. Beyond this, you'll have to face a few problems, but private labelling on Amazon is worth the efforts you make.
The key to creating a successful Amazon private label is to follow these steps!
Amazon Private Label – A Brief View
There is nothing complicated about private labeling. Your products are purchased from a manufacturer, but they are branded and marketed under your own brand. Amazon Basics is a successful example of a private label.
Why Should You Create A Private Label On Amazon?
It is not easy or quick to make money with a private label on Amazon. When a seller does not need to go to the trouble, why should he?
- No Brand Restrictions
Other brands cannot be sold on Amazon due to certain restrictions. This is not something you have to worry about when creating your own brand.
- Less Competition
Private label sellers don't compete with the same brand's products. Other sellers won't be able to undercut your listing and steal your customers as a result.
- A+ Content
Enhanced Brand Content, also known as Amazon A+ Content, is available only to brands that are registered on Amazon. You can add multimedia content to your listings with Amazon EBC. By enhancing the user experience, more traffic and conversions are generated!
- Higher Starting Cost
Private labeling requires a large amount of capital up front. Bulk orders are demanded by manufacturers, and to be competitive, you need to keep your product costs low. You can expect to spend a few thousand dollars on a private label early on. It is a long-term investment to create a private label.
How to create a private label on Amazon?
You cannot make quick money with a private label. Establishing a brand takes time, and seeing results takes even longer.Creating an Amazon seller account is the first step to selling on Amazon or setting up a private label. Let's look at how each option differs and how you can leverage each option to your advantage when creating an account.
Individual Seller Account
An individual seller's account is actually free to create. For every sale you make on Amazon, you must pay a commission of $0.99. You can only sell 40 products as an individual seller and will be charged a 15% consolidated fee on those sales.
Professional Account
In addition to some referral fees and variable closing fees, a professional account will cost you $39.99 per month. Amazon does not charge a fixed amount for each item you sell, and you can list more than 40 items.
It is recommended that you start with an Individual Account before you start actively selling. You can upgrade to a Professional Account once your products are listed and ready to ship. Before you can even request approval to sell restricted products, you need a professional accountant!
Conduct A Product Research!
There's no doubt you've heard it a million times, but success on Amazon depends on finding niche markets and finding great products.
You can start your research by checking Amazon's best-selling products list. As a result, we will be able to get a better sense of what customers are looking for on our platform. I find that information to be extremely valuable.
Picking a product should take the competition into account. In a saturated category, you're unlikely to succeed. Finding a niche product with high demand is key. Product ideas can be viewed in real-time using SellerApp's feature.
Private labeling is not an easy task. Expanding your brand requires constant innovation and alertness. It is a good idea to run PPC campaigns early on in your brand's lifecycle.
Private label sellers need not get any approval for brands! However, they need to get approval for the specified categories if their product category falls under restrictions. Get your approval right now and start earning great profits for the long term.


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text:
Study Presented on Autism and Vaccines Using Cells From Babies From Abortion
by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
June 3, 2010
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A controversial study into the possible link between the use of cells form babies victimized by abortions in vaccines and an increase in autism rates was presented late last month to the International Meeting for Autism Research in Philadelphia.
Dr. Theresa Deisher, the founder and lead scientist of the Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute (SCPI), which conducted the study, presented the paper touching on the apparent link found in childhood immunizations with Autism and Austim Spectrum Disorder.
The study, which Deisher said was "met with both shock and gratitude," focused on "improper integration of the residual DNA as a possible contributor to autism, particularly in genetically susceptible infants."
"It is known from gene therapy studies that injected naked DNA can be transported to the brain, that improperly integrated therapeutic DNA has caused cancer in young children, and that shorter DNA fragments have a higher probability of entering the nucleus," Deisher said.
Deisher, along with physicist Marissa LaMadrid, PhD, authored the paper investigating whether improper insertion of DNA into the vaccine recipient cells can cause autism.
"Changepoint analysis of autism disorder demonstrates a temporal correlation with events associated with human DNA residuals in vaccines. The levels of residual DNA are well over FDA-recommended limits", stated Dr. Deisher.
While research has been conducted in the past on a possible link between thimerosal and autism, no one has ever looked at the contaminating DNA, something requested for years by Children of God for Life, a pro-life watchdog focused on the use of aborted fetal material in vaccines, medicines and other consumer products.
"Until the advent of AVM Biotechnology and their non-profit arm SCPI we had little hope that anyone would invest the time and money to do this study", stated Children of God for Life's founder, Debi Vinnedge.
A separate study published by the Environmental Protection Agency in February in the publication Environmental Science & Technology, confirms 1988 as a change point in the rise of Autism Disorder rate.
"Although the debate about the nature of increasing autism continues, the potential for this increase to be real and involve exogenous environmental stressors exists," the study says.
The 1988 date is significant because SCPI indicates that's when the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices added a second dose of the MMR vaccine, containing fetal cells from aborted babies, to its recommendations.
The study found two other change point dates: 1981, two years after MMRII was approved in the United States with fetal cells, and 1995, when SCPI says the chickenpox vaccine using aborted cells was approved.
Two pro-life advocates seized on that study and said it shows a correlation between the use of cells from babies in abortions in vaccines and an increase in autism rates.
But the study's author, Mike McDonald, and others, questioned that claim.
McDonald responded to an email from the Opposing Views web site, and said the claims "incorrectly represent, and far overreach, our study findings."
And Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, an Assistant Professor of Biology at Providence College, told LifeNews.com the study "suggests a link between exogenous environmental stressors and autism" but "does not say that this stressor was the vaccine."
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News Report Receive a free daily email report from LifeNews.com with the latest pro-life news stories on abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research. Sign up here. Receive a free twice-weekly email report with the latest pro-life news headlines on abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research. Sign up here.


text:
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originally posted by: Dr UAE
a reply to: SoulSurfer
have you seen this one
originally posted by: Dr UAE
a reply to: CornishCeltGuy
you should watch this video when you have time, its an eye opener, i watched it 7 years ago
originally posted by: buddha
but if I go to a English Chip shop.
she will eat Any thing I bring back.
originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
the trailer split open on the bridge and dumped the entire load of french fries into the river below. It was considered a toxic waste spill and even required environmental agencies to oversee the cleanup effort. Just think about the irony of that one!! One agency sees the product as a toxic waste, not okay even for fish to eat, while another agency feels it's perfectly fine for people (not fish) to eat it, yet both agencies report up the very same food chain.


text: Welcome to my first ever gear review. To kick things off I'm going to give an assessment of my tent; the MSR Hubba Hubba. Just to make things clear, I bought this tent myself and all opinions are my own. I will mainly be reviewing the tent for the purpose I have been using it, bike touring, but a lot of the points will be relevant to other likely uses, primarily hiking.


text:
Serving the greater Tulsa area for 80 years.
Obituary of Charles Bruce Stebbins
Please share a memory of Charles to include in a keepsake book for family and friends.
Charles Bruce Stebbins was born at home in Tulsa, Oklahoma on October 2, 1929 to the late Melvin Franklin Stebbins and Joanna (Brady) Stebbins, joining big sister, Frankie. He lived in Tulsa his entire life. Graduating from Central High school in 1947, Charlie was passionate about flying. As a young man working for Sinclair in Tulsa, he would wake up and ask his mom if she could see Turkey Mountain. If the hill were visible, he would fly to work that day from the Stebbins Airport in Turley, Oklahoma. Charlie, a private pilot, and daredevil loved gliders, small aircraft, sailing, jet skiing, and mastering anything that moved. He deeply loved computers and technology and was truly gifted in these areas. He was well-read and loved learning. Charlie travelled extensively for work and pleasure. He participated in four Tiger cruises with his son in the US Navy. He and his bride, Betty have travelled to Guam and Hawaii, across Europe, England, and Iceland. He especially enjoyed the Caribbean and its festive lifestyle. He always loved a good party and was an accomplished swing dancer, even joining Tip Toppers. He attended Oklahoma Baptist University on a track scholarship and graduated from Tulsa University with a Mathematics degree. He served in the 45th Division National Guard at Fort Sill. Not only an aviator, but a superb mechanic, he joined American Airlines with his Airframe and Power Plant license. He retired from American Airlines after 41 years, serving in various positions, Operations Research being his favorite assignment. As an early computer and mathematics pioneer, he was one of the original computer programmer developers on the world-class SABRE airline ticketing system. Charlie also trained the pilots and mechanics on all operation and maintenance of AA's first Boeing 767. Raising his children and stepchildren, Charlie left a legacy of mechanics, leaders, managers, technicians, carpenters, engineers, and computer geeks. He is survived by his loving wife, Betty, with whom he has shared many happy memories. He is survived by sons, Jeff, Ralph, William and daughter, Cathie, and stepdaughters Jean and Linda, and stepson Sam, 10 grandchildren and 8 great grandchildren. He loved his blended family. He is also survived by his beloved sister, Frankie Jean Lantz. Charlie will be missed for the twinkle in his eye and his mischievous grin that made you think he had been up to something. The most important achievement in his life was being a kind and loving husband, father, and friend. In lieu of flowers donations may be made to Restore Hope Ministries, 2960 Charles Page Blvd, Tulsa, OK 74127, www.restorehope.org. Psalm 8
Family Will Recieve Friends
5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
Monday, April 12, 2021
Ninde Brookside Funeral Home
3841 S. Peoria
Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
Funeral Service
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Christ United Methodist Church
3515 S. Harvard Ave.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
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2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Memorial Park Cemetery
51st & Memorial Drive
Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
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In Loving Memory
Charles Stebbins
1929 - 2021
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To this day, Ninde Funeral Directors is owned and operated by the Ninde family, making it one of the only remaining original family owned funeral companies in Tulsa. Founded on a commitment to family service, Ninde continues to provide unparalleled funeral excellence... and have for over seventy-five years.
Location Info
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Tulsa, OK 74105
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text:
May 09th 2011 03:38:55 AM
A Non Serb-hater in UK Writes a Letter to his MPPosted by Julia Gorin
I got the following email from a source:
Dear Julia,
Are the talking heads on US news shows using Kosovo to justify Libya? [Yes, they were.] The Brits sure are. It is disgusting.
Below is a note I sent to the MP representing the constituency I reside in. I doubt that it will make much difference, but maybe. He has a very small majority (about two thousand votes), and there is a substantial British Serbian population in East Oxford. He might pay some heed. I live in hope. Unfortunately, many Serbs in Oxford do their best to avoid being identified as Serbs. This, of course, diminishes their political clout. The Albanian immigrants Tony Blair blessed Oxford with have a rather higher profile — not just for voting I should add.
———- Forwarded message ———-
Date: 20 March 2011 13:06
Subject: British Serbs in East Oxford
To: Andrew Smith
Dear Andrew,
As you no doubt know[,] East Oxford has a large and vibrant British Serbian community, but you may not be aware of the prejudice that these East Oxford residents frequently encounter.
Here's an example, several years ago residents in Iffley mounted a sustained effort to prevent a British Serb from taking up residence in "their" village. They failed, but the racist rumours spread about this man and his family by the residents were vile, and the slurs they made against Serbs in general offend me to this hour. Now I see anti Serb propaganda being reintroduced into the public discussion.
Over the past 48 hours I have been listening to commentator after commentator (e.g. Col. Bob Stewart, MP) justifying actions taken against the Libyan regime by making comparisons to what happened in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. By in large these comparisons have tended to demonise the Serbian people, and to celebrate Bosniaks and Albanians.
These rants typically describe all Balkan atrocities as Serbian atrocities: they never mention KLA or Bosniak atrocities committed against the Serbs. (Such reporting and commentary unjustly portrays the Serbian people as an ethnic SS. This is especially galling given the heroic resistance of the Serbian people to German aggression.)
On 13 April 1941 Churchill broadcast the following statement to the Serbian people, 'Serbs we know you. You were our allies in the last war, and your arms are covered with glory. . . . Your fame as warriors spread far and wide on the Continent.' According to Lord Owen, as many as 750,000 Serbs may have perished in concentration camps, and 1.7 million Yugoslavs in total were killed in Second World War. It is estimated that somewhere between 6 and 36 German divisions were tied down by predominately Serbian guerilla fighters in WW2.
Britons of Serbian heritage are rightly proud of the contribution that the Serbian people made to that war effort.
In more recent times the Serbs have been unjustly vilified.
When the Balkan civil wars are discussed there is seldom a reference made to what happened to the Krajina Serbs. (I recommend Brendan O'Shea's balanced account found in Crisis at Bihac. Dr. O' Shea was a serving officer in the Irish Defence Forces (Army), and an EC Monitor in the Former Yugoslavia (1994-5).)
Few outside of the British Serbian community seem to recall, and none outside that community reference[,] Madeleine Albright's admission [to BBC in late 2000 or early 2001] that she knew that the KLA was a "terrorist organisation" and that she "crossed her fingers" hoping they would not commit any atrocities that made headlines before she could get authorisation to bomb Serbia. I was with a number of East Oxford Serbs when I first saw that interview: to a person, they were angered by Sec Albright's admission [at a time when Albanians were next trying to seize southern Serbia and western Macedonia]. Oddly, no one outside of the Serbian community seems to care that Albright misled the public.
More recently the former chief prosecutor of the UN's Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, has indicated that rather unspeakable crimes were committed by the KLA against [mostly] Serbian prisoners. Her allegation is supported by a report prepared by the Swiss senator Dick Marty for the Council of Europe. According to Marty (as reported by [pro-Albanian writer] Tim Judah):
"In a report for the Council of Europe which took two years to compile, he has accused Hashim Thaci, the prime minister of newly independent Kosovo, not only of being a mafia boss, a murderer and a drug dealer – but of having been involved with a group that in 1999 killed prisoners to sell their kidneys."
I have a copy of the Marty report and would be happy to forward it to you, if you would like to see it. If such allegations had been made against the Serbian people, they would no doubt be used to justify our actions in Libya today. As it is[,] the commentariat seems happy to portray people of Serbian heritage as uniquely having Nazi criminality in their DNA. However, it is the KLA that stands accused of slaughtering people like cattle for their organs.
By the way, what do we know of the rebels we are indirectly supporting in Libya?
Judah continues:
"There are, however, other allegations that are very real and very current. A courthouse in Pristina heard last week how seven Kosovars were part of an elaborate international 'organs for cash' network, in which donors from poor countries such as Moldova, Turkey and Kazakhstan donated their body parts to wealthy patients on the promise of payments of up to EU 15,000 at a time…While no connection has yet been found between the current trafficking allegations and the "organ harvesting" claims of a decade ago [indeed it has], some doubt whether it can be purely coincidence. Defending his report on Thursday, Mr Marty added that he [has] often seen "terror" in the eyes of witnesses he had talked to…"
Andrew, shouldn't humanitarian interventions protect all innocents, and not merely some favoured few? And, shouldn't we take care not to vilify a people for the crimes of the very few? [As has been the general insistence, in contrast, on behalf of the Albanians and their ill-gotten Kosovo — despite their far more gruesome, more confirmed, and more widespread and iron-fisted terror.]
I want to provide you with one last illustration of how hatred against the Serbs has been stirred in the past. Tony Weymouth (University of Central Lancashire) has written an excellent analysis in his "The Media: Information and Deformation". Weymouth writes:
". . . the front-page headline of the Independent of 12 April 1999 asserted that, 'Nato hits Serbs as fears rise for 100,000 "disappeared" . . .' On 18 April 1999 an American government official claimed on ABC television that: 'Tens of thousands of young males have been executed . . .' On 19 April 1999 the US State Department announced that: '500,000 Albanian Kosovars . . . are missing and feared dead.' Western television and radio also put out what in retrospect appear to be grossly inflated figures of Kosovo Albanian casualties from Serbian violence. . . .Sometimes the politicians led the way with exaggerated and ill judged references to 'genocide'. Prime Minister Blair, two weeks into the bombing campaign, spoke of the Serbian situation thus: 'I pledge to you now, Milosevich and his hideous racial genocide will be defeated . . .' In the aftermath of the conflict, such assertions were found to be significantly exaggerated . . . ."
I hope that you will encourage your colleagues to find better examples to use to justify their support for actions taken against Libya, and that I can assure my Serbian friends in East Oxford that you understand their concerns, and will do your best to protect them from unjustified condemnation.
With warm regards,
Thomas Tait
There is exactly one subject, and one place, whose narrative is immune to evidence — no matter how much of it accumulates, no matter how recently, no matter how prominently. That subject and place is the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, even in the face of daily — nay, hourly — reports of the badness that Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, and the unreformed Nazi populace of Croatia are up to (and were found to be up to at the time), the dated and debunked but still designated villain is trotted out on cue for utilization in whatever current context requires him. And the obsolete official truth is always left unperturbed and untainted.
Regardless of more recent findings, testimonies, hard evidence, and anecdotal evidence provided by clear world trends, none of it ever causes a questioning — from ANYONE, EVER — of the original Western premises, positions and policies, still in effect and still wreaking havoc. Only the fast-fading organs story came close. The Balkans chapter is to remain suspended out of context, uninterpretable by trends or rationality which apply to all other subjects and places; no critical thinking (i.e. obvious thoughts) allowed. Or else Bosnia and Kosovo won't have been "successes"; the Muslim genocide industry would be jeopardized; policy would have to be reevaluated; prominent journalists would be exposed and Pulitzers would have to be revoked; and a lot of Western politicians and generals alike would have to be brought up on war crimes charges. And lost would be the following refuge of Islam-critical pundits: "I'm not anti-Muslim! Look — I supported the Muslims against the Christians in the 90s!" (Clue to the clueless: It'll still serve if you revise to "But I supported the Muslims against the Christians in the 90s, even though I was wrong.")
No matter what we learn about what these people are — whether an Albanian kills U.S. soldiers in Frankfurt, a Bosnian massacres Americans in Salt Lake City, or Croatians brandish swastikas at the Australian Open while punching and spitting at a photographer and menacing fans with flares — all the world complies in not questioning whether we didn't get something backwards along the way.
To cite just one random example, here is an excerpt from an article published in the days following the release of Dick Marty's organ report:
Hilmi Gashi, a member of Switzerland's 200,000 strong Kosovan diaspora…said the Kosovo community was "a little bit annoyed" about the report, especially coming shortly after a survey showing the unpopularity of Albanians in Switzerland and the vote on deporting foreign criminals… "They say [the report] is trying to change the roles of victim and perpetrator…" Gashi added, referring to crimes committed by the former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic against ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 war.
So in the 12 years since the intervention, which have allowed Europeans to get a more intimate sense of Albanians, the latter have proved "unpopular." But whatever the traits and activities causing their unpopularity, don't let them cause you to invert the inverted roles of good guy and bad guy.
As for Albanians being unpopular in the Diaspora, one wonders why the Serbs whom they originally invaded were supposed to get along with them so much better — though they did. And still do.
MP Andrew Smith, of the Labour Party, was decent enough to send the following response to Thomas:
Dear Thomas,
Thanks for this. I do well understand your concerns. Over the years, I have had a number of contacts with local people from the Serbian community, and do believe I understand their perspective and experience.
Before the whole Yugoslav tragedy unfolded, I met a number of constituents of Serbian background at Westminster, and it was all too clear what was likely to happen following the precipitate recognition of Slovenia. (If Slovenia can unilaterally secede from Yugoslavia, why can't Srbska secede from Bosnia-Herzegovina? Etc). Now, many awful things, war crimes indeed, were carried out in the wars that followed, and some Serbs were amongst the worst perpetrators; but the brutality and criminality was as you say also carried out by others, including Croatians and Bosnians, but because of the way Milosevic exploited the situation, a disproportionate share of blame became associated with Serbia, when in fact of course ordinary Serbs had few ways of exerting influence; then there was the whole issue of Kosovo, where again a very one-sided perspective took root in the western media and political establishment. So I hope you will appreciate I do have some understanding of this and can sympathise with how people of Serb origin must feel as a result of the "demonization" you describe. I agree with you that it is wrong to brand whole people for the crimes of a few.
I suppose the best hope for the future is that over time there will be a new generation of leaders in the Balkan states, closer co-operation between them, closer relations in Europe, as well as the bringing to justice of war criminals. An important part of the reconciliation will need to be at the people-to-people level – as happened between French and Germans after the Second World War; this is the way to try and ensure the enmities of the past do not contaminate the future.
I will do what I can. If there are any specific points on all of this which you would like me to put to government ministers, I should of course be happy to do so.
Best wishes
Thomas and I are still trying to find the transcripts from the program where "Not-at-Albright" said the bit about keeping her fingers crossed that the KLA wouldn't commit any headline-making atrocities before she could get Serbia bombed, but Thomas adds that in the same interview she "described how she used bobbles and fashion to impress other diplomats — it was hard not to wretch when listening to her." In the meantime, another BBC transcript of interest came to our attention. I close with an abridged version of it, my comments and bolding interspersed.
A BBC2 special, 9pm Sunday 12 March 2000
Reporter Allan Little
It is almost a year since NATO went to war in Europe.
Kosovo, November last year. Five months after NATO won its war to end the oppression of one group by another, a Serbian family drove, by chance, into a crowd celebrating Albanian Independence Day.
Anonymous woman
This group flipped over the car, set the gas tank on fire, the car started to burn, so my parents had a choice either to burn alive in the car or to get out. These bunch of people just grabbed them and started to hit them with fists, punched them, with metal bars with everything … the rest were just standing watching and cheering. It was a lot of people, it was a big crowd. They were determined to kill them. And then somebody shot my father.
Her father died instantly. His wife and her mother were beaten to unconsciousness. One British UN police officer saw the mob make murder part of their festivities.
It was like a victory for them, the fact that this - they were celebrating their independence [sic] for the first time for so many years - this was like the icing on the cake for them and you could see it in their faces.
Vengeance has been unleashed in Kosovo - in streets patrolled by NATO troops.
That night I just thought these are three innocent Serbian people. Just how could they do that to three innocent people?
Just how? Just the way they'd been doing it all along. Indeed, when a designated victim kills so easily, and with relish, one might question whether they hadn't been practiced in the art all along. But no. No questions allowed.
Dragoslav Besic was a professor of civil engineering who'd taught at the Universities of Oxford and Berkeley.
Anonymous woman
It was basically a highlight of their celebration. It was a lynch. It was not an ordinary killing.
They were chanting UCK! I found out, later on, through one of the interpreters, that they had
been chanting: "three more Serbs dead".
UCK is Albanian for KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. The KLA hold the whip hand here now. There is a state of lawlessness that grew directly out of the manner of Kosovo's liberation. The KLA sprang from the desperation of a brutally oppressed [sic: ambitious] people for whom peaceful resistance had failed. The war in neighbouring Bosnia taught them the value of a resort to the gun. Even the children understand it. [And even the children are armed.]
There is a message that is being sent to the Kosovars - if you want to draw international attention you have to fight for it. That is exactly it. You need to use violence to achieve your goals.
From the remote wooded hillsides of rural Kosovo, they embarked on a strategy to draw the world's most powerful military alliance into their struggle. They began in the villages from which they sprang, a shadowy civilian militia force emerging from - and melting back into - the civilian population that sustained them. They aimed to make the roads that held Kosovo together too dangerous for the Serb forces to control them. [As they've now made the roads too dangerous for NATO and UN to patrol.]
It was a hit and run strategy, done usually by very small groups of three to four people and the aim of these ambushes was to promote themselves.
We saw the KLA as a serious threat as something which could endanger the Yugoslav army.
They began to ambush Serb patrols, killing policemen, then disappearing as rapidly as they had struck, an invisible Commando force. Serb casualties mounted. Would the West see them as victims of terrorism, or of legitimate peoples' uprising?
Killing postmen or killing Serb civilians in cold blood - those are terrorist acts that we do believe were wrong and unfortunately that was what the KLA was pursuing at the time.
It was a calculated but dangerous gamble. The KLA's political leader Hashim Thaqi now admits that he knew the Serbs would retaliate against innocent civilians.
Any armed action we undertook would bring retaliation against civilians. We knew we were endangering a great number of civilian lives.
Their desperate calculation was to draw the world into Kosovo's feud.
The more civilians were killed, the chances of international intervention became bigger, and the KLA of course realised that. There was this foreign diplomat who once told me 'Look unless you pass the quota of five thousand deaths you'll never have anybody permanently present in Kosovo from the foreign diplomacy.
[Similarly, recall the Bosnian-Muslim police chief of Srebrenica "telling a Dutch TV station that Clinton had promised [Bosnian president] Izetbegovic NATO military intervention against the Serbs as far back as 1993 if at least 5,000 Muslims could be killed in Srebrenica."]
The western world was still haunted by a profound collective guilt: it knew it had waited too long to intervene [sic: to help kill infidels] in Bosnia. Now one woman resolved not to make the same mistake again.
I believed in the ultimate power, the goodness of the power of the allies and led by the United States. We were dealing which such a basic evil, that could not be tolerated.
…In the west, many came to believe that the lessons of Bosnia could now be applied to the very different circumstances of Kosovo…On March 5th 1998, Serb forces began an action that illustrated that very point of view. They attacked the home of a leading KLA commander called Adem Jashari, in the stronghold of Prekaz. The Serbs regarded this as legitimate anti-terrorist policing. It was the start of a brutal campaign that would lose them Kosovo.
About six o'clock or seven o'clock in the morning we just saw about two thousand or two hundred soldiers or police, they were coming up…
As their home was being destroyed even the Jashari children understood the value of appealing to the world. As though heirs to an ancient tradition of epic tale telling. [And this tall tale was EPIC.]
There was a standard police operation in that village, I don't know all the details. I know it involved the arrest of a notorious criminal, someone condemned for criminal offences. And that it was successfully executed. I don't remember the other details.
These are the details he doesn't care to remember. Fifty three members of the Jashari family were killed. What were KLA ambushes compared to this? Albanian leaders appealed to the wider world.
"Fifty three members" of a prominent Muslim-Albanian terrorist family were killed. Doesn't that just pull at your heart strings? "What were KLA ambushes compared to this?" I think one might call them the reason. What's better, Americans: Dead police, or 53 dead members of a terrorist cop-killing family? Take your time figuring that one out. Let's not even go into the number 53, demonstrating the simultaneous demographic war that was in progress to help take over the area.
As Kristian Khars, a Norwegian former NATO officer in Kosovo who recently apologized to the Serbs, admits: Not only does even Wikipedia no longer accept that there was a massacre in Račak (it's now called "Operation Račak" instead of the "Racak Massacre," but "the operation against Adem Jashari was also legitimate…" (See "The first KLA armed groups in the region of Drenica were led by Adem Jashari of Donji Prekaz, and the membership was composed mainly of his close and distant relatives, usually persons prone to violent behavior and petty crime.") Check out some of these Jashari family members!
And what were 53 family members doing at the Jashari "home"? Here's a clue: the "home" was a compound, a veritable fortress, with guns blazing — guns being something that, as the reporter explained above, "even the children" understood the value of. Which helps explain some of the "civilian" deaths that occurred:
As soon as we got the photographs we put them on the internet because that was the most horrendous thing we had seen until then. Kids, shot dead, were images of a war that people needed to see. We were shocked and we thought that other people needed to see this because this was getting out of control.
Four days later, foreign ministers from allied countries met at Lancaster House in London: The ghosts of Bosnia were there too. [Whatever.]
Not only was it a deja-vu about the subject generally, but we were in the same room that we had been in during Bosnian discussions. I thought it behooved me to say to my colleagues that we could not repeat the kinds of mistakes that had happened over Bosnia, where there was a lot of talk and no action and that history would judge us very, very severely.
She was very vigorous in making it clear that we had to prevent Milosevic from repeating in Kosovo what he had attempted to do in Bosnia. [i.e. that we had to repeat in Kosovo the war propaganda we did in Bosnia.]
I think I probably seemed quite harsh to my colleagues. But I decided it was worth it.
…Milosevic regarded the KLA as a terrorist organisation funded by drug barons. [sic: The KLA was a terrorist organization founded on and funded by drugs.] But the US wanted to reach out to them. Richard Holbrooke - the US envoy who'd brokered Bosnia's peace deal - went to seek them out.
We got into this Albanian village, we met with the village leader and as we were meeting with him seated in his living room upstairs, on the floor , Albanian style a guy sat down, wedged himself in between him and me cradling his Kalishnikov. This guy was very good at photo ops and he got photographed with me. He understood how to handle the world media beautifully and this photograph became the first official photograph of an American official with a member of the KLA. Snap!
When the official ambassador of another country arrives here, ignores state officials, but holds a meeting with the Albanian terrorists, then it's quite clear they are getting support.
Albanians were very encouraged.
With renewed confidence that the world was now at last taking heed, the KLA made astonishing advances[.] From countryside strongholds they now held major cities in their sights. In the city of Pec, half the population was Serb. The rise of the KLA terrified them. Pec is the home of Serbian Orthodox Christianity. They call it the cradle of Serb identity.
They were terrified because they, in contrast, did know what the KLA are, and had been their victims all along. Today, about 40 remain, huddled in a 12th-century monastery, plus a few token families that were returned in a 2006 project, whom the KLA were instructed to protect to show how Kosovo allows Serbs back.
Serbs could not move around freely during the day, let alone at night. Our youth couldn't stay out after 10pm. We panicked if they weren't back on time.
…We had just sat down when Milosevic leaned forward without any small talk or breaking of the ice and leaned forward and said 'So you are the man who is going to bomb me'. And I will admit that I was stunned.
Milosevic agreed to an immediate cease-fire. He agreed to allow international observers into Kosovo and to limit his troop numbers. It seemed that the threat of force had worked…
…A senior American diplomat was summoned to the State Department. The head of the political office made him an offer that surprised and offended him.
I remember thinking to myself he can't be serious sending me to Kosovo. I'm a very senior career officer. How could Kosovo be important enough to require my services?
The cease-fire agreement made it important enough. In October Walker was received by Milosevic. His job was to make sure that Milosevic's forces complied with the cease-fire. He set up the headquarters of the Kosovo Verification Mission in the capital Pristina. It was conceived as an independent, international body. But Walker had spent a life time loyally serving the US State Department. He saw the world from Washington's perspective.
The selection of Bill Walker was made by the Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright. She knew him.. and made the choice herself.
Ambassador Walker was not just working for the OSCE. He was part of the American diplomatic policy that was occurring which had vilified Slobodan Milosevic, demonised the Serbian Administration and generally was providing diplomatic support to the UCK or the KLA leadership.
Walker's cease-fire monitors drove round Kosovo in brightly-coloured orange vehicles. Their job was to watch as Milosevic withdrew his police and returned his troops to barracks. In the beginning, he complied. The German General Klaus Naumann had helped broker the cease-fire deal[.]
He really did what we asked him to do, he withdrew within 48 hrs some 6,000 police officers and the military back into the barracks. This was also confirmed by the OSCE Verification Mission.
…Where the Serbs withdrew, the KLA moved forward, filling the vacuum. For the cease-fire agreement had a fatal flaw. It was one sided. It had required nothing verifiable from the KLA.
The cease-fire was very useful for us, it helped us to get organised, to consolidate and grow.
They were really growing ever stronger from day to day, and there was nobody to really stop them.
We aimed to spread our units over as much territory as possible, we wanted KLA units and cells across the whole of Kosovo.
At Podujevo, in the north of Kosovo, the KLA now filled the very positions the Serbs had vacated. The pattern was repeated across the province. William Walker's Deputy was a British General. He and his colleagues could see what the KLA was doing, but had no means of stopping or even discouraging it.
The Kosovo Liberation Army infiltrated forward.
The KLA basically came back into its old positions that they held before the summer offensive.
And this started to be a factor in dealing with the Serbs. Because the Serbs said to us, well hang on, the deal was that we withdrew from these things, and you were going to police the agreement. So can you just get these Kosovo Liberation Army out of the trenches that we were in a month ago?
But they couldn't. At NATO headquarters there was growing disquiet. We've obtained confidential minutes of the North Atlantic Council or NAC, NATO's governing body. They talk of the KLA as "the main initiator of the violence and state…" It has launched what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation". This is how William walker himself reported the situation then, in private[.]
Ambassador Walker stated in the NAC that the majority of violations was caused by the KLA.
Walker didn't admit that in public at the time. He still doesn't.
Q: You told the North Atlantic Council that it was the KLA side who were largely responsible.
A: I would have to go back and re-read my notes. I don't remember. Most of the briefings I gave to the North Atlantic Council was that both sides were in non-compliance. Both sides were doing things that were wrong. Obviously it was easier to point at the government.
With US backing for the KLA now barely concealed, Milosevic sent the army back into action to clear the KLA out of Podujevo. The doomed procession to war with NATO had begun. The KLA continued to smuggle arms over mountain passes from Albania. Albanian civilians were press ganged into service. Before dawn on the fifteenth of December, they walked into a well prepared Serbian ambush. Most of those taken by surprise fled back into Albania. But 31 Albanian men were killed. Later on the same day in an apparent act of revenge, what remained of ethnic co-existence in the city of Pec nearby, was to be torn apart. A group of hooded, masked men drove up to this bar which was popular with young Serbs.
The doors opened and then we heard the machine gun fire.
Lazar's teenage son, Ivan, was in the bar. He was a bright and promising school boy, who'd come top of his class..
It was a horrifying sight. We tried to help those that were still moving. There was blood everywhere. Ivan didn't stand a chance. He was sitting right by the door. So he was the first one to be hit.
The situation in Pec became unbearable. The Serbs couldn't stand the Albanians because they had killed 6 children. And the Albanians couldn't stand the Serbs. Nobody knew what would happen next.
Walker condemned both the ambush on the border and the killings in the bar in equal measure.
It really looked like this was a tit for tat again. KLA hearing about their people being killed up on the border had done this in Pec.
Q: There is a huge difference, isn't there, between people killed in a legitimate military exchange and a bunch of hooded unknowns walking into a bar and killing some teenagers..?
A: I think the point is, we really didn't know what had happened in Pec. Yes the government was saying it was KLA gangsters who had come in and sprayed this bar. When you don't know what has happened, it's a lot more difficult to sort of pronounce yourself.
One month later Walker was to break this rule to spectacular effect. He pronounced himself with absolute certainty about a massacre that occurred here, in the village of Racak. Even now, more than a year on, important questions about what happened here remain unanswered. This is the story of that massacre, of the political uses to which it was put, of how it galvanised the west to go to war, and of the pivotal role played by William Walker. There is nothing remarkable about Racak. Except that by January 1999, the KLA had moved in, most of the villagers had fled, and trenches had been dug on the edge of the village.
We encountered many villages where the villagers themselves told us in very clear terms that they would prefer to be left completely alone. Often times they felt that if a KLA group were to come into their village, that would put them under greater threat.
From camouflaged positions near Racak the KLA launched well prepared hit and run strikes against Serb patrols. In early January, they killed four Serb policemen.
International observers watched from safe high ground as Serb forces took control of the village. They moved from house to house. Most were empty. The KLA had gone. When the Serb forces pulled out in the afternoon, they announced they'd killed 15 KLA men in action. The international monitors entered the village and reported nothing unusual. Only next morning did the full force of Serb retaliation become apparent [sic: staged]. William Walker went to see for himself.
We progressed up the hill and about every 15 or 20 yards there was another body as we kept going up the hill, and I don't know how many bodies we passed before we got to a pile of bodies.
By the time Walker arrived the KLA had retaken control of Racak[.]
Walker [archive]
The facts as verified by KVM include evidence of arbitrary detentions, extra-judicial killings, and the mutilation of unarmed civilians [sic: forensics found that mutilation was done post-mortem; staged] of Albanian ethnic origin in the village of Racak by the MUP and VJ.
In other words, he blamed the Serbian police and the Yugoslav army. Walker was supposed to be an independent international official. But did he seek direct instruction now from the Americans?
Without calling any of my capitals I told what I thought I had seen, which was the end result of a massacre.
William Walker, the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, called me on a cell phone from Racak.
Q. But you don't remember calling Washington at all?
I got a call from Bill Walker. He said there's a massacre. I'm standing here. I can see the bodies.
(No reply to question)
Q: And you didn't speak to Gen Clark or anybody like that?
Walker's comments gave America the green light to enter Kosovo's war. The KLA had pulled in it's mighty ally.
With Racak, and with lots of others, the Serbs were playing into KLA hands. It will remain I would say an eternal dilemma whether the KLA initiated these battles in the civilian inhabited areas because it knew that the Serbs will retaliate on them…
Clearly, after Racak, extraordinary measures had to be taken.
It clearly is a galvanising event, and the President really felt that we could then move forward, make clear that the US was going to be a part of an implementing force.
But Albright knew that the galvanising effect of Racak would not last long. She had to get her European allies on board. She insisted there could be no more diplomacy without the credible threat of force. The Europeans agreed. There would be one last diplomatic effort. The mesmerising splendour of the Chateau Rambouillet near Paris became the most luxurious last chance saloon in diplomatic history? Would the grandeur of Rambouillet beguile and seduce old foes to reconciliation?
We became used to rare wines. We became used to delicious and I suspect tremendously expensive French specialities. We became used to a luxury which the main aim was to see us taking up a pencil and signing a piece of paper. So luxury was there, everything was there: you just sign the damned document.
As the delegates arrived, the last ditch nature of the talks became clear. The atmosphere was tense, it was the first time these old enemies had sat in the same room. The Europeans, some reluctant converts to the threat of force, earnestly pressed for an agreement both the Serbs and the Albanians could accept. But the Americans were more sceptical. They had come to Rambouillet with an alternative outcome in mind.
If the Serbs would not agree, and the Albanians would agree, then there was a very clear cause for using force.
The Europeans clung to the formal purpose of the talks - an agreement by both sides.
Obviously, publicly, we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement, but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing were quite small.
The Serbs did not object to the political aspects of the peace plan - including wide ranging autonomy for Kosovo. But their delegation refused even to consider the military part - a NATO peace implementation force. [Occupation.]
They would have unlimited rights of movement and deployment, little short of occupation. Nobody could accept it.
Focus now shifted to the Albanian delegation. They'd elected the young and inexperienced KLA man [sic: former petty thief and budding mobster] Hashim Thaci as their leader. The entire delegation urged him to accept. But he refused because the agreement on offer did not include a referendum on independence.
Thaci was really blunt to the delegation stating that look this document this actual presentation is completely unacceptable.
He used language which could be threat.. could be understood as threatening.
And whoever signs it now, I would treat him or consider him as the enemy of the nation. [Paraphrasing Thaci]
The following sentence in a summary of a BBC documentary film elaborates: "A KLA commander tells how he threatened to blow up his own delegation to the Ramboulliet peace conference if they signed an agreement which didn't secure Kosovo independence."
It was a graphic illustration of the power the gun now wielded among the Kosovar Albanians. Thaqi's intimidation of his fellow delegates did not stop a warm relationship developing between him and his international sponsors.
He was somebody who was a younger member of the delegation more my age and so there was a certain natural rapport. I think I used to tease him a little bit about how he might look good in a Hollywood movie and I think he appreciated that sort of basic teasing back and forth.
Thaqi did not respond to this flattery. The Americans sent for their diplomatic big gun. Madeleine Albright arrived on St Valentine's Day. She was absolutely focussed on getting a yes from Thaqi. She spent four days wooing him…Deadlines came and went, Thaqi still held out[.]
I must say I was unbelievably frustrated. We needed clarity then and there.
She was saying you sign, the Serbs don't sign, we bomb. You sign, the Serbs sign, you have NATO in. So it's up to you to say. You don't sign, the Serbs don't sign, we forget about the subject[;] it was very explicit.
It took three weeks, but America's chief diplomat got there in the end. The Serbs said no. The Albanians, finally, said yes…
There was a lot of disquiet as our very lengthy convoys of international orange vehicles motored out of the province. I guess foreboding of what was coming next. I personally felt frustration, betrayal? Yes to some extent.
We [Milosevic and Holbrooke] sat alone in this vast white palace surrounded by Rembrandts or fake Rembrandts who knows, and we were totally alone and I said "You understand what will happen when I leave here?" and he said very flatly, no emotion, Milosevic said "Yeah, you're gonna bomb us, you're a big powerful country, you can do anything you want". And I said "Well that's it Mr President I have to go now". And there was dead silence in this room where there had rarely been silence. And he said as we walked out "I wonder if I'll ever see you again". And I said "Well that depends on your actions Mr President". And we shook hands and that was it. The bombing started twenty nine hours later.
[Fast-forward to mid-hostilities…]
It wasn't a War. There was no declaration of War. It wasn't legally a War…And I don't think there was a single member government of NATO that sought to go to war with Slobodan Milosevic.
All out war came to Belgrade on April 3rd - Day 11. NATO hit the Interior Ministry, the campaign headquarters of Kosovo's ethnic cleansers. For the head of the air campaign, the real war had finally begun. But it was to prove a false start.
That difficulty came from France. Paris claimed not to have been consulted. President Chirac was furious to learn of the attack only afterwards. He and his foreign minister determined they would be consulted from now on.
For strategic reasons and, quite frankly, for signal reasons, I wanted to strike what had become called the rock 'n roll bridge, the bridge that the Serbs were dancing on during the campaign to demonstrate their defiance. I wanted to bring that bridge down, and by one country we were denied the ability to strike that bridge. And in fact, what was relayed to me was that, the leadership of that country had said "Don't even ask".
Q: Which country?
A: It was France.
We tried hard to avoid targets affecting the economic life of the country, in other words people's day-to-day lives in the most fundamental sense.
Nations beginning to ask us, in the region, said please get rid of Serb Television it's just a huge propaganda weapon for Milosevic, its the way he maintains command and control. It's a legitimate military target you need to disable this. And so we looked at a number of different techniques that could have been used to disable it. We finally concluded that the best way to do it was to bomb it.
RTS pictures were beamed around the world. Western television journalists in Belgrade used them too.
The American network CNN was based in the RTS building itself.
When these pictures hit western television screens they became a real threat to NATO's ability to sustain the war. Whenever NATO made mistakes Western journalists were taken to film civilian casualties. At Djakovica, the allies bombed a convoy of Albanian refugees, wrongly believing it to be a Serbian military column, RTS pictures had an impact around the world.
…It was also a time when NATO started making the first mistakes, hitting civilian areas, and RTS was obviously prominently showing that… they were concentrating 99.9 per cent of their coverage on the mistakes or so-called mistakes that NATO would do…..and of course we were using those pictures because they were the only pictures that we had available.
This was one of the problems about waging a conflict in a modern communications and news world…we were aware that there would be pictures coming back, the convoys were the, in many ways the worst of the refugees, that were hit by NATO bombs. We were aware that those pictures would come back, and there would be an instinctive sympathy for the, for the victims of the campaign.
RTS journalists openly taunted the west.
Let Clark take a shot, we are waiting for him. Our address is 10 Tarkovska street, I wont give you the co-ordinates, you'll have to work them out yourselves.
And then at some point we were told that it was better to just leave the building altogether, because the risk of staying there, even during the day was too high because NATO had started 24-hour bombing, and that there was no way to find out when exactly RTS may get bombed.
Although the foreign journalists had pulled out local technicians continued to work their nightshifts. Kasenja Bankovic was among them. She believed that if the building was to be bombed the RTS bosses would warn the staff in advance.
I had the crazed look of a person searching through a crowd. Someone asked, Madam, was someone you know working here tonight? I said yes, my daughter.
Ksenija Bankovic and fifteen others, mostly technicians, died. When Belgrade woke the next morning, RTS was triumphantly back on the air. They were re-running the interrupted Milosevic interview. RTS had made a contingency plan in the event of bombing. It did not include evacuating their own staff [which of course would have required knowing when one was to be bombed].
We knew that when we struck it there would be an alternate means of getting out the Serb television. There's no single switch to turn off everything. But we thought it was a good move to strike it and the political leadership agreed with us[.]
This was an outrage. I can't just condemn RTS and say NATO was right, because NATO killed my child and RTS were accomplices. NATO is the murderer.
American stealth bombers flew missions directly from bases inside the united states. The French government accused the Americans of flying unilateral bombing raids of their own outside the NATO command structure.
All the countries in the Atlantic Alliance acted as part of NATO, with full discussion about what to target, but the US was also carrying out a separate American operation. They deployed national forces, with a national decision-taking mechanism commanded from the US, and the European allies did not know about these other actions.
With all due respect the French foreign minister that's incorrect.
Q: Why would he say it?
A: It's incorrect I am not going to speculate on his motives. I can simply tell you it's not correct. I commanded all assets and all assets were integrated into the NATO plan.
NATO had sent twelve thousand troops to neighbouring Macedonia, to go into Kosovo only once Milosevic had agreed to a peace deal. Britain now argued that they could be turned into a ground invasion force.
I became convinced that we had to have that option there, and I became convinced even more so once I had visited NATO and sat down and talked to the guys who were fighting the campaign.
Clinton told Blair that NATO would not be allowed to lose. Blair took this to mean that US troops would be committed if needed.
But in the Pentagon there was intense opposition. When General Clark took a ground invasion plan to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was cold shouldered.
The American military was closing off Blair's ground option. Instead, the alliance stepped up the bombing campaign. Graphite bombs cut off the electricity. The targets were no longer purely military.
NATO, led by the USA, was flouting all the principles of international law. These principles had been in place since World War Two.
[Fast-forward to the Russian-brokered peace plan]
Both [Chernomyrdin] and I didn't believe for a moment that we could get agreement in Belgrade…We went to the guest house where [Milosevic] was waiting….I actually read the peace offer, and he said "can we have a copy?". They got it, and then they asked me if they could start improving the proposal. I said, unfortunately not, that this is as good as we can come up with, and if we can't agree on this, then the next offer will be worse than this, from your point of view.
NATO had agreed [to] two key compromises.
For them I think the important points were the whole thing would happen under UN auspices and secondly that Kosovo would remain a part of Yugoslavia. That made the deal acceptable to the Russians. It also gave Milosevic something that had not been on offer before the bombing started: a UN mandate. There was a sort of sigh of relief, and I congratulated Chernomyrdin, and hugged him in a brotherly fashion.
But the relief was premature. The Russian military had expected their own sector of Kosovo, independent of NATO. They now felt double crossed.
I felt as if I were the defeated one. That was the feeling I had, as if I myself had been defeated. I felt that evil was triumphing over good.
They decided to try to take what they had been denied. Russian troops stationed in Bosnia rolled towards Kosovo.
They had informally conveyed information that they might be an advance party for an airborne operation that would go into Pristina Airfield and potentially partition the country.
There was a way to stop the Russians. In a Macedonian cornfield, Clark put five hundred British and French paratroopers on immediate standby to launch an air-borne assault. But Clark's British subordinate told him the plan risked sparking World War Three.
We were standing into a possibility - let me put it no more strongly than that – a possibility of confrontation with the Russian contingent, which seemed to me probably not the right way to start off a relationship with Russians who were going to become part of my command.
British and French objections thwarted Clark's plan. The two hundred Russian troops passed through Kosovo and were greeted as liberating heroes by local Serbs. They took the airport unopposed. The world watched nervously. The Russians were planning to fly in thousands of paratroopers, who would then cut Kosovo in half, leaving Milosevic in control of the North…Clark asked neighbouring countries to try to stop Russian aircraft flying towards Kosovo. The Rumanian defence minister took great pleasure in warning Moscow not to try to fly over his country.
June 12th 1999, Force Entry Day, with the agreement of Slobodan Milosevic, fifty thousand NATO troops entered Yugoslavia at last. They went more in relief than in triumph…
The Kosovo Liberation Army recruited NATO to its cause. An old injustice [sic] was defeated here. But NATO's moral war rewarded those who took up arms.
I don't believe that any of the liberation forces, or guerrilla forces of our lifetime moved more rapidly, or more successfully, from total obscurity to international standing and recognition than the Kosovo Liberation Army[.]
The Serbs that remain live in ghettos now. At Gorazdevac, near Pec, six hundred Italians stand between them and the vengeance [sic: continued violence] of their old neighbours. The war started as a moral
crusade to end such intolerance. But in the end it wasn't about morality. It wasn't even about Kosovo. It was about saving NATO from collapse.
The bottom line was we couldn't lose. If we lost, it's not just that we would have failed in our strategic objective; failed in terms of the moral purpose - we would have dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of NATO and the world would have been less safe as a result of that.
Of course, as we all know, the war itself is what dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of NATO, and the world is far less safe as a result of that war, and of NATO's designs for this world.
And NATO's leaders did not know, when they led us into it [the war], that [NATO's credibility] is what they were jeopardising. How closely they courted catastrophe, or how hollow the moral victory amid the ruins of a Kosovo where the oppressed, once liberated, themselves oppress.
But, like Glenn Beck said in February 2008 upon Kosovo's illegal secession flouting the international agreements cited herein, "Who cares about Kosovo?!"


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One year ago today I wrote about the lesson I learned from the beautiful peach rose at the end of our walkway. Today, the post, which I shared on my blog, showed up in my Facebook feed and I read my own words from exactly one year ago. Ironically, I had just come inContinue reading "What The Rose Knows"
Tag Archives: Soul weariness
When You Are Screaming on the Inside
I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety –Continue reading "When You Are Screaming on the Inside"
A Midsummer's Day Dream (Soul Weariness)
Hear my cry, O God; Give heed to my prayer. From the end of the earth I call to You when my heart is faint; Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. Psalm 61:1-2 I'm sitting here at this keyboard today, facing sunshine streaming in my windows. Facing the end ofContinue reading "A Midsummer's Day Dream (Soul Weariness)"


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Steps 1-3. Sunderland will be aiming to continue their push for a top-two finish in League One on Friday when they host Oxford United at the Stadium of Light.. An incredible run of … Sunderland defender Ollie Younger may be in line for a League One debut after catching the eye of Lee Johnson with his 'really impressive' performances in training, as reported by the Chronicle. Live Football Scores, League Tables, Form Guides, Attendances, Latest News and other stats from the Premier League, Football League and Non-League football ... League. League One. Sunderland welcome Oxford United to the Stadium of Light this afternoon (3pm kick-off). Going up The battle for the two automatic promotion places in League One looks to be between three teams — Hull City, Peterborough United and Sunderland… As things stand, Sunderland sit third in League One with games in hand on the top two. The season covers the period from 1 July 2020 to 30 June 2021. Premier League Sky Bet Championship Sky Bet League One Sky Bet League Two. SUNDERLAND continued their march to promotion as they came from behind to beat Oxford 3-1 ahead of the crunch trip to Peterborough. Champions League Europa League. The 2020–21 season is Sunderland's 142nd season in their history and the third consecutive season in EFL League One, Along with League One, the club will also participate in the FA Cup, EFL Cup and EFL Trophy.. Summary; Matches; Tables; Players; Venues; Archive ... Sunderland View events: Saturday 27/03/2021: FT. Lee Johnson's men stretched their unbeaten run in League One to 11 as Lynden Gooch, AIden McGeady and Max Power struck after James Henry's opener. League One News American Lynden Gooch nets trophy-winner for Sunderland Sunderland wins the EFL Trophy, its first silverware since 2007, thanks to this goal from USMNT's Lynden Gooch. (Photo by Bryn Lennon/Getty Images) Sunderland's latest win came on Friday, a 3-1 triumph over Oxford United at the Stadium of Light, with the Ibrox loanee putting in a superb performance. Sunderland form stats indicate an average number of goals conceded per game of 0.38 in the last 8 matches, which is 49.3% lower than their current season's average. Defeat means Sunderland, relegated in each of the past two seasons, are resigned to a second year in League One after a second Wembley final defeat in the space of 56 days. Sunderland have won 6 of their last 8 matches in English League One.Sunderland have conceded an average of 0.75 goals per game since the beginning of the season in the English League One.
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This cemetery was built in 1879 by the British army for the dead of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The cemetery contains around 150 graves. Most are from members of Kabul's international community from before the war. Only a few of the original British Army headstones remain, now mounted in the south wall. They have been joined by newer memorial stones added by the British, Canadian, German and Italian ISAF contingents. The cemetery's most famous resident is Aurel Stein, the acclaimed Silk Road archaeologist of the early 20th century. Stein spent much of his career obsessed by Alexander's campaigns in the east, but his British citizenship meant that the Afghan authorities always refused him permission to dig in the country. In 1943 he got the go-ahead at the age of 82, only to catch the flu and die a few days after arriving in Kabul. His grave is marked with a large cross and frequently a wreath. More recently, the cemetery saw the burial of the French aid worker Bettina Goislard, murdered in Ghazni in 2003. The cemetery has been maintained since the 1980s by Rahimullah, supported by a small stipend from the British Embassy. His story of meeting a disapproving Mullah Omar (the Taliban had a guesthouse next door) is worth the hearing, and always popular with journalists.
European Cemetery


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One Month to Go – LIFI22 is almost here
With September on the horizon, Leeds International Festival of Ideas (LIFI22) is shaping up to be a must-see event in the city.
Building on the success of last year which saw our evolution to present a diverse programme of inspiring talks and debates, the appeal of and interest in the festival is certainly growing, with tickets selling fast for all 12 events – an array of music, keynote speeches and debates packed into just five days!
Continuing to explore new ideas in our own innovative way and looking to address issues and topics of the day, our aim is to introduce the brightest minds to the city and the city to the brightest minds.
In 2022, we present an incredible lineup of 36 speakers, delving into everything from discussions on the impact of social media and the metaverse, how we talk about mental health and the social duty of sport to what's wrong with climate activism and what can you laugh about now. Joining these debates are actors David Harewood, comedian Rosie Jones, TV personality Gail Porter, author Bryony Gordan, presenter Lara Lewington, environmental activist and advisor Judy Ling Wong CBE, comedian Jamali Maddix, former Paralympian Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson, and Christopher Wylie, best known for his role in setting up – and taking down – Cambridge Analytica, among the extensive list.
While we have Kevin McCloud MBE, best known for the internationally acclaimed Channel 4 show Grand Designs, restauranteur Yotam Ottolenghi, award-winning stand-up comedian, writer and actor Aisling Bea, historian David Olusoga and Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, all taking centre stage for keynote speeches ranging from the (built) environment, the universal language of food, and art and culture to Britain and the history wars, and the contemporary voice of screenwriting.
A special addition to the bill is the late announcement of a warm-up show of the UK-only performance of Jon Hopkins' Polaris. This must-see performance has been a firm favourite for festival goers while an overwhelming demand for Mary Beard's sell-out talk has seen us upgrade the venue, with additional tickets now on sale.
We can't wait to present this year's festival, hopefully presenting something special to shine the spotlight on Leeds, enhancing the cultural offering and providing that added appeal for audiences to come and enjoy.
Don't miss out – explore the full line-up and buy tickets here.


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Metanet's creative director and co-founder, Mare Sheppard, announced at GDC that after much trepidation the Toronto-based independent developer has decided to develop the final game in the N series. Sheppard told Polygon that the decision to develop N++ was more of a "gradual realization," than a "lightning strike."
"Over the years, we always felt 'finishing N' nagging at us, but that was accompanied by a fairly strong resistance to doing it — we were completely burnt out on N many, many times," Mare said. "But recently, we started making levels just for fun again (it's actually a pretty enjoyable thing to do), and when the opportunity to make N++ started to materialize, we realized that thinking about finally finishing N felt like the right thing to do, rather than something that would almost certainly be a mistake."
First released in 2005 for Windows PC, the critically acclaimed N was a Flash-based puzzle platformer where players bounded through killer robot-infested halls as a ninja. Metanet self-published and co-developed the title with Slick Entertainment for Xbox Live Arcade. The studio licensed the N+ IP to Atari to publish the Nintendo 3DS and PSP versions. All three ports were released as N+ in 2008. While the Toronto-based studio hopes to announce a release date and platform for this sequel soon, the decision to return to their classic wasn't an easy one.
"We realized that thinking about finally finishing N felt like the right thing to do, rather than something that would almost certainly be a mistake."
During her GDC talk, Sheppard expressed concern that it would be a devolution for the team to take on another N title. Besides N burnout and fear of stagnation, Sheppard said the team didn't want to be perceived as resting on their laurels.
"There's tremendous pressure for creative people to continue to learn and grow and evolve, which is best demonstrated through working on new projects, rather than rehashing old ones," she said. "In earlier years, thinking about returning to N felt like a step backward because we worried we'd just be repeating ourselves, which we resented and didn't want to do — we wanted to grow and change and make new games."
Sheppard went on to say that they were excited about some other ideas and put N on the back-burner to work on new projects. These projects didn't work out as well as Metanet had hoped for a "variety of reasons completely normal in game development", she said, but that unfortunately left them with less confidence in themselves.
"We eventually regrouped, and matured, and are coming at N++ from a new angle, so, it doesn't feel like a step backward anymore — and moreover, at this point in our lives we've realized it's a step we need to take so we can get over it and continue to move forward and evolve," Mare said. "We aren't going to run away from N like we did for so many years, we're going to try running towards it instead. Wholeheartedly!"
What inspired them to shuck the self-doubt that plagued them everyday and spear the development of N++, was talking to other developers and the support they received from the N community.
"Especially our friends in Toronto, helped us realize that we weren't alone with our struggles and failures," she said. "Also the support from fans of N and N+ has really helped, especially certain people we can't yet name but who have been pivotal in encouraging us to do this."
In the years since the studio's founding in 2001, Metanet have learned valuable lessons. Sheppard said that development-related lessons are not the issue; the big lesson is to not fall into the trap of sizing themselves up against other studios who outwardly maintain a veneer of effortless prolificacy.
"... You might not be seeing the whole story there: more than likely even the most talented/creative/genius people aren't breezing through life with zero problems either; we all struggle," she explained. "Everything about making games is hard, but for a while we mistakenly believed that the fact that we were not churning out a blockbuster game every year meant we weren't good enough, or that we were just stupid. But that was stupid."
On the development angle, Mare assented that there were a lot of things that they could have done better, including the realization that player testing is an aspect that they should have grasped in the past; however, they have taken it on for the development of the new game.
"For years we resisted this, and we definitely don't want to go too far and get really hand-hold-y, but at the same time we recognize that there are many subtle aspects to the movement in N (such as the rhythm of wall-jumping) which we never actually communicated, and as a result many players never understood," Sheppard said. "There are lots of things we can do better."
Sheppard was unable to elaborate on the new modes and new ideas that they been experimenting with, which was hinted at in their blog post, but she did expand on how "N++ is an aspirational re-interpretation of the game." She reassured that doesn't mean it'll be a huge departure from the core N style and gameplay.
"The gameplay is not going to change, there are minute tweaks to the feel to make it as smooth as possible, and we're trying some new things in terms of level design, but the core of the game will remain more or less unchanged," Mare said. "The way it feels to play N is the core/focus, and we've carefully tuned it over the years so it feels just right. We think that's really what sets N apart from other platformers, so that's staying.
N++ will feature new graphics and with the help of a new artist, they were able to unlock the art style that was sitting in their heads for so long and push it to new previously unattainable boundaries.
"In the style and graphics of the game, we have a lot more leeway and can really take it somewhere special," Mare said. "We're working with an artist to finally make the graphics match what we always saw in our heads (or ideally something we never even conceived of but is incredibly awesome) — we were just not skilled enough to make them that way in N."
"We mistakenly believed that the fact that we were not churning out a blockbuster game every year meant we weren't good enough, or that we were just stupid. But that was stupid."
Mare confirmed that local multiplayer is a definite and that online multiplayer is "definitely an aspiration," and noted that as with N+, it can be a "gigantic can of worms."
"We're going to do the best we can to figure out a way to implement it without lag, and we will definitely support local multiplayer (which is kind of the best way to play the game - then you can berate the friends who aren't pulling their weight immediately and in person!)," she said.
The team are four months into the development of N++ and are working with Dyad developer Shawn McGrath.
"He's an amazing programmer and has already ported the core game code," Mare said. "We have a lot to add on top of that, but it's a pretty great foundation."
Metanet weren't ready to lock down which platforms N++ would launch on, but Sheppard was able to hint that all will be announced in a few months.
"We have several platforms in mind, but things are still up in the air, so we can't say at the moment. We should know for sure by May!" She went on eliminate one platform: smartphones.
"People keep asking us for an iOS version of N, but it doesn't work without the immediate haptic feedback of proper buttons," she said.
The latest iteration of the N series isn't the only title being worked on by the studio. The game that started it all, N, received an re-invigoration as N v2.0. The team plans on launching the revamped classic on the "old-school web" rather than bring it to other web gaming platforms such as Google Plus or the Firefox Marketplace, although the team did consider bringing it to Facebook.
"We attempted to make a Facebook integrated version of N v2.0 but ran out of time," Mare said. "We may look into that still, but right now we need to focus on N++."
Top image: Metanet co-founders Mare Sheppard and Raigan Burns.