Team Uzunov

BULGARIA'S HOLOCAUST DENIAL

2011-11-11T21:50:00.007+11:00

Unsung heroes: Macedonian Partizans who fought Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Bulgaria (1941-45) enter the southern Macedonian town of Bitola, after liberating it from the Germans during fierce battles in November 1944.

Estreja Ovadija - Mara : Macedonian-Jewish Partizan Hero killed during World War II. (photo: Yad Vashem)

On Remembrance Day - 11 November– Lest We Forget

BULGARIA'S HOLOCAUST DENIAL

by Sasha Uzunov

In a shameful episode, the European Union's newest member Bulgaria has kicked up a stink about an upcoming Macedonian film which deals with Bulgaria's extermination of Macedonian Jews during World War II.

Bulgarian Members of the European Parliament, who seemed to have forgotten their country's well documented Nazi collaboration, have in effect resorted to blackmailing the EU's Enlargement Commissioner Stefan Fule in putting pressure on The Republic of Macedonia, which has applied for EU membership.

The film, “The third half time,” is a Macedonian production with international funding about a soccer match in 1942 between two teams in the Bulgarian soccer league, Levski and Makedonia. Makedonia is made up of ethnic Macedonians living under Bulgarian wartime occupation and coached by a Jew, who in the film, is being targeted for death by Bulgarian fascists.

see links: www.euractiv.com/enlargement/macedonian-film-infuriates-bulgaria-news-508639

Macedonian film infuriates Bulgaria

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/18997/45/

'Third Halftime' filming kicks off

In 1941 Bulgaria under Tsar (Emperor) Boris became an ally of Nazi Germany and his armies invaded Macedonia, which had been under Serbian and Greek occupation. Ethnic Macedonians looked upon the Bulgarian Army as occupiers. On 11 October 1941 a Macedonian Partizan resistance uprising took place in the town of Prilep.

As Bulgarian occupation became more brutal, more and more young Macedonians joined the resistance and took to the mountains and engaged in guerilla, hit and run, ambush style warfare. Macedonian Jews fared worst. In 1943, over 7,000 Jews were rounded up by the Bulgarian security forces and sent to Nazi death camps. Ninety-eight percent of Macedonia's Jewish population was wiped out, even though Bulgaria managed to save its own Jews.

For decades Bulgaria had been boasting of its humanitarian record during World War II over its treatment of Jews. But the genocide in Macedonia has put a huge stain on that record.

In September 1944, with Nazi Germany losing the war, a communist coup led to Bulgaria, conveniently, changing sides and joining the Allies.

Macedonia later became a constituent republic within Marshal Tito's Federal Communist Yugoslavia in 1945 until 1991, when it became an independent state during the break up of Yugoslavia. Bulgaria, ironically enough, recognised the new state but not the ethnicity or language of Macedonians. Bulgarian nationalists, both on the left and right, deny the existence of a separate Macedonian identity, as does Greece, as do some Serbian nationalists.

Macedonians maintain they are a separate people, and who during World War II began a resistance movement against Bulgarian, Italian and Nazi German occupation of their homeland.

By the end of the war, over 80,000 Macedonians, including a small group of surviving Jews, were in the People's Liberation Army of Macedonia (NOV na M), which later was forcibly merged with Tito's Yugoslav Liberation Army (NOVJ).

Ethnic Macedonians in Greece established an anti-Nazi resistance movment known as NOF, which Greek writers refer to as SNOF (Slavo-Macedonian National Liberation Front). NOF linked up with NOV na M in operations against the Germans.

The Macedonian Partizans in an uneasy alliance consisted of communist and non-communists. One of the leaders of the resistance was Metodija Andonov-Cento, a non-communist who later was imprisoned on trumped up charges by Marshal Tito in 1946.

Estreja Ovadja-Mara, a young Macedonian Jewish Partizan was proclaimed a national hero and has a statue in her honour in her home town of Bitola (Monastir).

According to the Yad Vashem website:

www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/communities/monastir/partisans.asp

"In March 1943, on the eve of the deportation of the Jews from the town, Ovadja and some of her friends went underground, and a short while later joined the ‘Goce Delchev’ partisan unit, where she became the company's political commissar. Despite her non-combat role, she joined her unit for the majority of their battles, claiming her right to fight.

“With the establishment of the Seventh Macedonian Brigade, Ovadja was appointed regiment political commissar. In the early hours of the 26 August 1944, she was killed in a battle near the Greek border while attacking, as head of her unit, the last German fortresses in the Kaymakchalan Mountains.”

Considering Macedonia's tiny population, over 25,000 soldiers from the NOV na M were sent to assist the NOVJ at the Syrmian Front (Sremski Front) in North-Eastern Serbia in early 1945, one of the last major battles in the Balkans as the German Army were order to fight to the bitter end. This was to allow the retreat from the Eastern Front by other German forces back to Greater Germany and stop the Soviet Union entering German territory.

My great uncle Mitre Vrckovski was killed at the Syrmian Front serving with the NOV na M. He has a street named in his honour in Bitola.

Links:

http://israeljewishnews.blogspot.com/2011/02/bulgarian-holocaust-atrocities-revealed.html

Israeli Jewish News, February 11, 2011

Bulgarian Holocaust ATROCITIES Revealed: 13,000 Ladino Speaking Jews Deported By Bulgaria Remain Dirty Secret Until Now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Liberation_War_of_Macedonia

National Liberation War of Macedonia

OUR FUTURE AUSTRALIAN LEADERS?

2011-11-07T13:16:00.001+11:00

OUR FUTURE AUSTRALIAN LEADERS?

By Sasha Uzunov

The Occupy Wall Street movement and its Australian franchise have generated fear and criticism from leading commentators but if history or human nature is any guide, then we could see a future Australian Prime Minister or state Premier emerge from that movement in the years to come.

We all know Winston Churchill’s famous quote that if a man was not a socialist by the age of 17 and a conservative by 40 then there was something wrong.

However, we now live in the “era of eclectica.” This means that old labels of left wing, right wing are no longer accurate. We find middle-aged male stockbrokers who follow the Dalai Lama and wear an earring in one ear. Or conservative mothers with tattoos. In other words, people pick and choose bits and pieces of political ideology and the clothing that goes with it.

The Occupy Melbourne franchise, critics allege, degenerated from a peaceful protest against the abuses of capitalism to a full on brawl with Victoria Police. Accusations and counter-accusations have been made about “police brutality” in evicting protestors and “professional protestors” deliberately creating mayhem against the police.

So how should we view these types of anti-establishment movements? I would argue that the mainstream political parties, the ALP, Liberal-National Coalition, and the Greens should take a scientific approach, much in the same way that the Australian Football League (AFL) does with its draft system and talent scouting.

I would have talent scouts from the political parties fully badged or wearing photo ID cards, so as not to be confused with protestors or police during a confrontation, they would carry clipboards and take notes as to potential leaders or rising stars, who would be given points for charisma, speaking, organising ability and so on.

I can think of three examples of mainstream politicians emerging from what could be termed, for want of a better phrase, anti-establishment movements.

First is our own Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. In her youth, according to political news breaker Andrew Landeryou and his website Vexnews, the Prime Minister was a member of Australian Union of Students Women’s Department, and a staunch supporter of Gay/Lesbian rights in the early 1980s without embracing the lifestyle. But now has been accused of abandoning these principles for her opposition to same sex marriage.

Iron Mike Rann, Premier of South Australia for nearly a decade until being forced out recently, has made an incredible political journey from one end to the other in the political spectrum.

In the early 1970s he began as a Greenpeace activist in New Zealand and as a “Green Admiral” organized boats to breach French territorial waters in the South Pacific to protest nuclear testing.

He moved to Australia and began work for his political idol, the flamboyant Don Dunstan, ALP Premier of South Australia. Eventually, Iron Mike evolved into a middle-of the road politician and towards the end of his career embraced right-wing Greek nationalism on the issue of Macedonia.

Joschka Fischer also has an incredible story. He began as a militant German left-wing activist who once brutally beat a police officer during a riot in 1973. Fischer mellowed by becoming a Green politician and Germany’s Foreign Minister who, ironically enough, supported “imperialist America’s” invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The list is endless of u-turn politicians: Australia’s own Gareth Evans who opposed conscription during the Vietnam War (1962-72) went onto become Foreign Minister and in the early 1990s sent Australian combat troops into Somalia and Rwanda in order to win a Nobel Peace Prize and become United Nations’ Secretary General, whilst supporting Indonesia’s brutal occupation of East Timor.

Professor Robert Mann, dubbed Australia’s leading public intellectual, is in a class of his own. By his own admission he gone: “left, right, left” in terms of political views. And who knows where he will be in the near future, still in the left or back to the right? It all depends where the spotlight is? Pardon my cynicism!

(end)

Bulgarian Intelligence's ferocious reputation

2011-10-25T11:12:00.007+11:00

Lieutenant General Pavel Sudoplatov, Soviet intelligence chief who ran the Trotsky assassination in 1940, revealed in his 1994 memoirs, Special Tasks, about the workings of the Bulgarian intelligence service, KDS, during the Cold War. Photo: wikipedia.

PART 2 – : Bulgarian Intelligence operations in Western Europe during the 1990s...

Bulgarian Intelligence's ferocious reputation.

By Sasha Uzunov

Bulgaria has in two major wars chosen the wrong side but still ended up winning politically. During the Second World War Tsarist Bulgaria joined Adolf Hitler's Axis alliance in 1941, invaded Macedonia and under a brutal occupation exterminated the Jewish population as well as killing many of Macedonia's young Partizan resistance heroes. By 1944, with the Nazis on the the way out, a Communist coup led by Georgi Dimitrov, an ethnic Macedonian and one of USSR dictator Josif Stalin's henchmen, made Bulgaria change sides and throw in its lot with the Soviet Union.

During the Cold War (1946-90), Sofia stood shoulder to shoulder with Moscow as it battled the West for ideological supremacy. With the collapse of communism, Bulgaria found itself an ally of the West and eventually a member of the European Union, despite its problems with the ill treatment of ethnic minorities such as the Macedonians, Turks and Roma.

A common thread running through all the regime changes in Sofia has been a ferocious but efficient secret police and a brutal enforcement of Bulgarian nationalism, albeit for Dimitrov's brief reign.

Lieutenant General Pavel Sudoplatov, of the USSR's NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) and the man who ran the successful assassination of Stalin's rival Trotsky in 1940 in Mexico, wrote in his 1994 memoirs, Special Tasks:

“When Dimitrov returned home to Bulgaria in 1944, he allowed the czarina (tsarina) and her son, the heir apparent, to leave the country with their personal wealth and property. Sensing the danger that might come from monarchist emigres, Dimitrov decided to eliminate the entire political opposition....and...didn't face the existence of an emigre organisation in the West.”

Sudoplatov in 1970 met with Bulgaria's Defence Minister General Ivan Genarov, who worked for the Soviet NKVD during WWII. Genarov said to Sudoplatov: “we ourselves learned the lesson from you and wiped them out...”

Yugoslavia's own communist intelligence service UDBa, later to be renamed SDB, was also a student of the Soviet secret service.

In 1949 the Macedonian ethnic minority in Bulgaria had the misfortune of being caught in the middle of a quarrel between Yugoslav Communist ruler Marshal Tito and Stalin, as well as Dimitrov dying mysteriously. Overnight the Bulgarian communist regime cancelled their ethnic rights.

Under the xenophobic leadership of Todor Zhivkov (1954-89), the brutal policy of forced Bulgarisation took place. Macedonian orthodox Christians and Turkish Muslims were now Bulgarians. Ethnic Turk weightlifter Naim Suleymanoglou became Naum Shalamanov against his will. In 1986, with the help of local Turks, Suleymanoglou defected whilst competing in Melbourne, Australia.

In 1988 the “Pocket Hercules,” as he was known for his short height, won the Olympic Gold Medal for Turkey. Talking to members of Melbourne' Turkish community during the 1988 Olympics, they said emotionally with tears in their eyes that Suleymanoglou was not only lifting heavy weights but carrying the burden of Bulgaria's persecuted Turkish minority.

But Zhivkov's secret police, Komitet za Darzhavna Sigurnost, KDS, also hunted ethnic Bulgarians who did not toe the political line. In 1978 Georgi Markov, a dissident living in Britain was killed by being stabbed with a poison tipped umbrella supplied by the Soviets.

General Sudoplatov wrote: “ [KGB General] Oleg Kalugin revealed that he passed poision...to the Bulgarian Special Services in Moscow...Kalugin was awarded a medal and a Browning automatic pistol from the Bulgarian government for his services.”

The KDS, like UDBa, had special departments monitoring ethnic groups. KDS's 6^th Directorate, 4^th Department, handled pro-Turkish and pro-Macedonian nationalism.

A clever technique used to silence opposition abroad was created by the Tsarist Russian police in the late 1890s and later perfected by the Communists when when they seized power during the October Revolution in 1917.

Both UDBa and KDS would use the exact same technique, known as the TRUST operations.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Secret service, which began as the Cheka and evolved along the way as OGPU/NKVD/KGB, began to “lure emigre agents into the arms of the OGPU, including the Trust, an imaginary counter-revolutionary union of monarchists and social revolutionaries.” (Donald Rayfield, Stalin and his henchmen, Penguin Books, 2005, page 137).

In other words, Russian dissidents living in Paris were fooled into returning to fight the Soviet regime but were executed on their arrival. In the early 1970s UDBa managed to lure Croat nationalists back to Yugoslavia in a similar manner. Both UDBa and KDS' infiltrated some Macedonian organisations in Western Europe, namely Belgium.

Surprisingly, Ivan “Vancho” Mihailov, the fanatical pro-Bulgarian Macedonian leader and Nazi collaborator was allowed to die in peace in Italy many decades after the end of WWII. Neither UDBa nor KDS were successful in getting rid of him.

As I explained in part 1 of my story, I came across individuals living in Belgium, who said they were Macedonians but who strongly believed in linking up with Bulgaria. The scenario they gave back in 1992 almost echoed that of what happened in 2001, a war between Albanians and Macedonians, with Macedonians running into the arms of Bulgaria for help! One individual, as I revealed in part 1, was able to come and go into Bulgaria, despite the regime's paranoia of emigres.

With the end of the Cold War, Eastern European communists and secret police hit men transformed themselves into democrats and nationalists. Despite Bulgaria's inclusion into the European Union, it still gives its Macedonian ethnic minority a hard time by denying their right to their own identity and language. It seems old habits die hard but only the tactics change.

When the ethnic Albanian insurgency erupted in Macedonia in 2001, Bulgaria, playing the nice guy despite not recognising a separate Macedonian identity, offered tanks and well as troops. The tanks were accepted but not the troops, as this report in the British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, spelled out:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/macedonia/1325220/Balkan-war-fear-as-Bulgaria-offers-troops-to-Macedonia.html

“BULGARIA offered to send troops to Macedonia yesterday, raising fears that the fighting on the border with Kosovo could spread into a regional conflict.

“Officials in Sofia said President Petar Stoyanov told his Macedonian counterpart, Boris Trajkovski, that he was ready to send "Bulgarian armed forces if Macedonia asks its neighbours or international organisations". Later, Mr Boiko Noev, Bulgaria's Defence Minister, sought to play down the president's remarks, saying there was no need to send troops. But the offer revived fears in the West of a pan-Balkan conflict centred on Macedonia.

“Macedonia has been largely spared the past decade's convulsions in the region. But it was the object of contention in the two Balkan wars early last century, and there have long been fears that it could be dragged into the strife that has accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia.

“Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria have in the past all made territorial claims on what is now Macedonia. But the latest threat comes from Albanian militants, seeking to create a "Greater Albania", or at least a "Greater Kosovo"” (end of quote)

But this is the Balkans region, a region that is a victim of its past which it cannot let go !

DID BULGARIA PROVOKE WAR IN MACEDONIA?

2011-10-25T00:41:00.006+11:00

Map of The Republic of Macedonia during the 2001 Albanian Insurgency.
source: wikipedia

Part 1: Bulgarian Intelligence operations in Western Europe during the 1990s....

DID BULGARIA PROVOKE WAR IN MACEDONIA?

by Sasha Uzunov

The Republic of Macedonia celebrated its 20^th anniversary of independence on 8 September 2011. This year also marked a decade of the short-lived ethnic Albanian insurgency in that tiny Balkan state. Did neighbouring Bulgaria, for its own strategic ends, light the fuse to long standing tensions between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians?

Is Bulgaria's long term strategic goal in creating instability in Macedonia! That is making the new state non-viable and absorbed by a Greater Bulgaria, a century old aspiration of ultra Bulgarian nationalists?

The Balkans region of South-Eastern Europe has throughout history been a political powder keg. Not surprisingly, conspiracy theories have become the past time in many of the Balkan states. You will find crackpots blaming the CIA, Henry Kissinger, ex-KGB, the Vatican, Zionists, Islamic fundamentalists, the Freemasons for whatever misfortune occurs, including the current economic collapse in Greece and natural disasters such as earthquakes.

Macedonia managed to break away from the then crumbling Serb dominated Yugoslav federation in 1991 without bloodshed, unlike Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bulgaria, under its president Zhelyu Zhelev, was one of the first states to recognise Macedonia's independence but not its language or ethnicity. Intellectual circles in Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, regard Macedonians as misguided “Western Bulgarians” who need to be coaxed gently back into the fold. Bulgaria tried unsuccessfully with brutal force during two world wars to achieve this objective.

In 2001 an ethnic Albanian insurgency erupted in the western part of Macedonia and, fortunately, it was short lived. But its legacy engendered mistrust on both sides.

Before the conflict, there had been an awkward but peaceful co-existence between the Macedonians, predominately Orthodox Christian and comprising 70 to 75% of the population, and the Albanians, largely Sunni Muslim, and about 20% of the population. But with simmering ethnic tensions just below the surface, ready to bubble over.

Macedonian nationalists were alarmed at the high birth rate of the Albanians and their alleged unwillingness to assimilate and their support for a Greater Albania. Moreover, as Macedonia had never been independent for over a millennium, there was a fear of losing territory.

The Albanians on the other hand complained of being marginalised in public service jobs and education, and their basic rights denied.

Since its independence in 1991, ethnic Albanian parties have been a coalition partner in successive Macedonian governments in order to allay these fears. Under Yugoslav rule, the communists were hard on Macedonian nationalists or those with mild patriotic aspirations as well. Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) spent years silencing dissent abroad with assassinations or scare tactics.

Into this volatile mix came the 1999 Kosovo War. Macedonia permitted NATO to operate on its territory to launch attacks and push the Serbs out of the region. Consequently, tiny impoverished Macedonia was swamped by thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing the war.

Two years later, a group calling itself the National Liberation Army launched an uprising in Western Macedonia claiming to be fighting for Albanian human rights. Initially, the West labelled this group as a terrorist or organised crime element but realising that it may have been aligned to the Kosovo Liberation Army, and a de-facto ally of NATO, changed its tune, according to Canadian journalist and award winning war reporter Scott Taylor. In other words, the KLA warriors were accused of going from freedom fighters against the Serbs to territorial expansionists in Western Macedonia.

So if Macedonia had opened its door to NATO and Western media scrutiny in 1999, then how was it that war, purporting to be fought for Albanian human rights, was permitted to erupt in 2001? Were both Albanians and Macedonians manipulated into a conflict?

Up until 1998, a United Nations peacekeeping force (UNPREDEP), including US troops, was deployed on Macedonia's borders to stop aggression at the hands of Slobodan Milosevic in his quest for a Greater Serbia or weapons smuggling by Kosovo Albanian separatist.

UNPREDEP managed the job well. But for some crazy reason, Macedonia's Foreign Minister Vasil Tupurkovski recognised Taiwan and all hell broke loose in the UN Security Council. Security Council permanent member the People's Republic of China in an act of retaliation withdrew support for the UNPREDEP mission. Macedonia's border now became a sieve: with criminal gangs or terrorists able to come and go.

But why did the Macedonian government at the time, headed by Prime Minister Ljupco Georgievski of the nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE ignore the threat?

Edward Joseph in his in-depth study: MACEDONIA’S PUBLIC SECRET: HOW CORRUPTION, DRAGS THE COUNTRY DOWN, 14 August 2002, for the think tank, International Crisis Group, wrote:

“The see-no-evil posture of the Macedonian police allowed smuggling villages like Tanusevci (which lies on the border, 36 kilometers north of Skopje) to become, in effect, “free territories”. The village not only became the transit point for contraband, it also served as a recruiting and training base for Albanian radicals active in the nearby Presevo Valley of southern Serbia.”

However, Joseph dismisses the conspiracy theory, largely popular in Macedonia, that there was collusion between Georgievski's VMRO-DPMNE and its coalition partner Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) to start a war in order to divide territory.

“Despite the evidence to the contrary, the notion that there was a “deal” to divide Macedonia persists. Even many of those who concede that the conflict was not the result of a grand conspiracy believe that the ruling parties colluded at least to manipulate public opinion during its course.”

However, in the footnotes he cites:

The notion of a VMRO – Albanian deal to divide the country dates back to the interwar period, and as well, the Fascist Bulgarian and Albanian period during World War II.

The 2001 Albanian insurgency was brought to a quick end and a deal known as the Ohrid Framework Agreement was signed by the Georgievski's government, DPA and the Albanian insurgents under Ali Ahmeti's command.

In what appears to be a case of sour grapes at Macedonia not being partitioned and with racist overtones, Georgievski called for a Berlin-style wall. But it was criticised by a leading expert:

“...a wall [to] be built if necessary to divide ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian populations accepts the possibility of considerable violence in realising the proposed territorial division. Even were such a division to occur without bloodshed, however, it would generate a new set of problems likely to further threaten the already tenuous stability of the region. On the one hand, cession to Albania of an artificially created ethnic Albanian enclave could upset the country’s (sub-)ethnic balance between Ghegs and Tosks.

"On the other hand, the loss of territory and population from the Republic of Macedonia would call into question the country’s existence not only for reasons of size, but also because such truncation could lead to clashes between serbophile and bulgarophile elements of the ethnic Macedonian population intent on union with neighbouring states already short on administrative capacity. Thus, while ethnic partition might promise to ethnic Albanian and ethnic Macedonian populations an escape from deadlock over the Framework Agreement, such an arrangement would pose a greater danger than does wrangling on implementation.”

(THE SPECTRE OF TERRITORIAL DIVISION AND THE OHRID AGREEMENT, by Eben Friedman, European Centre for Minority Issues, Brief # 9 July 2003).

Before we go any further or even dip back into history, we have to mention that Georgievski left VMRO- DPMNE, some say he was pushed out, to set up his own political party. He has taken to the Macedonian media with all sorts of controversial statements about Macedonian identity, allegations that his previous party was pro-Serbo-Yugoslav, the danger of Greater Albania, and calls for closer links to Bulgaria.

He told Milenko Nedelovski of Macedonian TV station Kanal 5 in 2009:

“In the Republic of Macedonia from 1945 and again from 1990, it's no secret that to be considered a Macedonian patriot you had to spit on Bulgaria...”

On the allegation of Georgievski holding dual Macedonian and Bulgarian citizenship, the former Prime Minister mentioned his cabinet colleague at the time, the bombastic Ljube Boskovski having Croatian citizenship.

Nedelovski's response: “the Croats don't deny the existence of our [Macedonian] name, language, nation, church [as the Bulgarians do].”

Georgievski's “Berlin War” solution is nothing new. However, the startling thing about it was back in the early 1990s, shadowy emigre groups in Western Europe with possible connections to Bulgarian intelligence were calling for the same solution !

In 1992 I had the good fortune of meeting Mr Goce Vidanovski, a long time Macedonian community leader and activist in Belgium. Vidanovski had spent decades trying to keep out Yugoslav and Bulgarian interference within his community. In doing so he lived with the possibility of being on the end of an assassin's bullet.

Belgium, because of its small size and lax policing, was a hub for UDBa operations in the 1970s and 80s against emigre political opponents living in Western Europe. Zeljko Raznjatovic-Arkan, the Serb warlord began his career as a petty criminal and bank robber in Belgium before graduating to UDBa hit man.

Likewise, Macedonian groups and individuals with pro-Bulgarian affiliations were active in Belgium as well. Vidanovski introduced me to them. One such individual strongly believed that Macedonia's salvation lay with the country being partitioned along the river Vardar, with the west going to Albania and the east linking up with “Mother Bulgaria.”

His reasoning was that Bulgaria needed a buffer zone against the Albanians. He also made the outrageous claim that the Bulgarian authorities had established camps for refugees fleeing from Macedonia into Bulgaria should war erupt. This individual was also free to travel to Bulgaria before and after the communist period in that country. A remarkable feat considering Bulgaria was one of the Soviet Union's staunchest allies during the Cold War (1946-90) and kept a close watch on who entered or left the country.

As I began to examine closely Bulgarian intelligence operations in Western Europe, I received a number of threatening phone calls during my stay in Belgium...

Coming soon: PART 2 – Bulgarian Intelligence's ferocious reputation.

Melbourne Airport Security concern

2011-08-21T18:21:00.003+10:00

TEAM UZUNOV beat Sunday Herald Sun over Airport Security story by 7 months !

It has taken major Melbourne newspaper The Sunday Herald Sun 7 months to realise there is a parking problem at Melbourne Airport.!

See our story below on 25 January 2011 and Sunday Herald Sun's on 21 August 2011.

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2011/01/melbourne-airport-security-concern.html

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

MELBOURNE AIRPORT SECURITY CONCERN

TEAM UZUNOV INVESTIGATION.

In light of the recent terror attack on Moscow Airport, Russia, you would think that Melbourne Airport authorities would enforce their own security measures...But over the past couple of months, motorists, to avoid expensive parking at Melbourne Airport, (Victoria state, Australia) or to simply watch aeroplanes fly over, have been parking in the emergency stopping lane or roadside on the Tullamarine Freeway, about 1 to 2 kilometres from the Airport entrance.

By law this is forbidden, as the above photograph demonstrates. Photograph taken on Monday evening, 24 January 2011.

Drivers may not necessarily pose a direct security threat or even be members of Al Qaeda !

Heaven forbid should any attack happen but should an incident arise then the potential is there for clogging the freeway or simply creating an obstacle for emergency response teams.

No regular security or police patrols have been observed in keeping the emergency stopping lanes clear on the Tullamarine Freeway. Perhaps, Melbourne Airport officials should lower the expensive parking fees to get motorists off the freeway.

link:

www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/25/3120757.htm

ABC News - 25 January 2011

Carnage as bomber targets Moscow airport

Posted by TEAM UZUNOV at 5:53 PM

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www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/parking-fee-dodgers-blamed-for-maccas-mayhem/story-fn7x8me2-1226118796324

21 August 2011

Parking fee dodgers blamed for Maccas mayhem

Hamis Heard and Alice James
From: Sunday Herald Sun
August 21, 2011 12:00AM

Workers construct barriers on the Tullamarine Freeway Picture: Rob Leeson Source: Sunday Herald Sun

NEW moves to fortress off the roadside on the approach to Melbourne Airport have been blamed for creating fast-food parking havoc.

Staff at the McDonald's airport outlet have complained that parking fee dodgers are clogging the restaurant carpark as they wait for flights to arrive.

One said the problem had grown worse since VicRoads began installing permanent fencing along the Tullamarine Freeway as part of a $4.5 million "safety upgrade" this year.

"The carpark is always full and customers and sometimes even staff can't get a park," the staff member said.

Angry motorists, including Ferntree Gully's Robyn Key, complained the works were about forcing people to pay $12 an hour for short-term parking.

"They are just trying to force people into their ridiculously priced parking," Ms Key said while waiting at McDonald's for her daughter to fly in from Tasmania. "It's totally a money grab."

Christine Cook, of Lancefield, said stopping people from parking on roadsides was "pretty shameless".

But Melbourne Airport spokeswoman Anna Gillett said the practice was a traffic hazard.

"(The fencing) is to stop people from parking on the side of the road when they are waiting for a plane to arrive," Ms Gillett said.

"That's actually really dangerous, so as part of a safety initiative they are erecting safety barriers along there."

In the 2009-10 financial year, Melbourne Airport reaped close to $90 million from its carparks.

An Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report released this year was scathing about the airport's parking.

Former ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel, who retired last month, accused the airport of price gouging by not allowing any alternative to its own carparks.

"By reducing the ability of alternatives to compete, Melbourne Airport can increase demand for its own car parking services, charge higher prices to consumers and, therefore, earn monopoly profits," Mr Samuel said.

The Sunday Herald Sun last week saw several cars pulled up on the freeway reserve, despite signs warning of $73 fines.

VicRoads metropolitan northwest regional director Nial Finegan said the works, which included installation of a wire rope safety barrier, guard fence and other "hazard removal", were purely to prevent accidents.

"The road safety project is not related to parking issues," he said.

heardh@sundayheraldsun.com.au

THE CROATIAN SIX MASTERMIND?

2011-07-22T00:32:00.011+10:00

Why did Australia's domestic spy catchers ASIO keep Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (1975-83) in the dark over a foreign diplomat's true identity?

PART 5 – THE FIGHT AGAINST YUGOSLAV INTELLIGENCE IN AUSTRALIA

Fifth part in a series on Yugoslav intelligence activities on Australian soil from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

A twenty year investigation…TEAM UZUNOV on the trail of a Yugoslav master spy…London, Brussels, Skopje, Belgrade, Zagreb, Melbourne...who managed to fool ASIO twice...

TEAM UZUNOV cracks open the Croatian Six Case…

WHO WAS THE CROATIAN SIX MASTER MIND?

By Sasha Uzunov

One of Australia’s worst miscarriages of justice, the Croatian Six terrorism case in 1979-80, may have been perpetrated by a Yugoslav master spy posing as a diplomat and who, would you believe it, not once but twice managed to outsmart Australia’s domestic spy catchers, ASIO, and even shook hands with an unsuspecting Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser.

Intelligence sources in Washington and in the Republic of Macedonia, one of the successor states of the former communist Federal Yugoslavia, have confirmed that Dr Georgi Trajkovski, the Yugoslav Consul General in Melbourne, Australia during 1978-79 was “hardcore UDBa (Yugoslav intelligence) and a key player in the Croatian Six set up.”

In 1988, Trajkovski with the same modus operandi, the use of agent provocateurs and exaggerated claims of anti-Yugoslav subversion, had a fellow Yugoslav diplomat removed from his post in Melbourne right under the nose of ASIO. This story, told for the very first time, will be detailed in part 6.

In 1991 legendary ABC TV investigative reporter Chris Masters dropped a bombshell on the Four Corners program about The Croatian Six case.

An agent provocateur set up members of Australia's Croatian community in 1979. Six Croats were imprisoned on false charges of wanting to plant bombs in Sydney.

Masters tracked down the agent provocateur, Vitomir Visimovic, who was an ethnic Serb living in Bosnia but had passed himself off as a Croat.

In fact, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police (successor of the Commonwealth Police) and the infamous and corrupt New South Wales Police Special Branch were all aware that Visimovic was an UDBa operative but suppressed the information during the trial of the Croatian Six. Moreover, the alarming thing was the Australian authorities let the man depart the country. This was during Malcolm Fraser’s tenure as Prime Minister (1975-83).

An UDBa hitman Vinko Sindicic was arrested in Scotland in 1988 after a failed assassination attempt on Croat dissident Nikola Stedul. At Sindicic's trial it was revealed he “had been in Australia in 1978, working with another Yugoslav agent on a plan to link Croatian political activists with terrorism.”

In all probability co-ordinating with Trajkovski the Croatian Six set up.

The irony is that two months after NSW Police arrested the Croatian suspects in early 1979, Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser paid a visit to the Yugoslav Consulate General in Melbourne to offer his condolences at the death of Yugoslav leader Edvard Kardelj, and shook hands with Trajkovski.

We know this because a book "Art Treasures of Yugoslavia" with a special annotation was offered on the web by the prestigious auction house Downies:

www.downies.com/aca/Auction303/Catalogue_031.html

“Inside the book is an inlaid letterhead dated 18th April 1979 addressed to the Honourable J.M.Fraser MP, Prime Minister of Australia with typewritten message "With this small token,we wish to express our thanks that you found the time to visit this Consul General (which represents the Yugoslav community) to express your condolences. Please accept this book in appreciation of your thoughtfulness" and hand signed by Consul General Dr Georgi Trajkovski.”

The question remains why did ASIO keep Fraser in the dark over Trajkovski's true identity?

Trajkovski, an ethnic Macedonian, was regarded as a fanatical Titoist and a specialist on foreign affairs. He authored Diplomatski Protokol, regarded as a text book on international relations in the then Yugoslavia.

Having pulled off the Croatian Six set up in 1979, Trajkovski repeated his shtick in 1988 with the removal of a fellow Yugoslav diplomat right under the nose of ASIO.

BACKGROUND -

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modelled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivalled the old Soviet KGB and Mossad in liquidating opponents. In Munich, West Germany, a whole section of a cemetery was set-aside for Croats assassinated by UDBa.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

A number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy.

We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa.

TOP JOURNALIST ON THE TRAIL - Hamish McDonald (pictured above)

One of Australia's most distinguished investigative reporters and authors, Hamish McDonald of the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, has told TEAM UZUNOV in a filmed interview that he became interested in the Croatian Six case after following the Balibo Five story, the murder of five Australian based newsmen at the hands of the Indonesian military during its invasion of neighbouring East Timor in 1975.

According to McDonald, vital evidence in proving the innocence of the Croatian Six and Indonesian culpability in the murder of the Balibo Five was suppressed by the Australian federal government on the grounds of "national security."
Next - PART 6 – ASIO fooled twice. Trajkovski's removal of a Yugoslav diplomat from Australia – 1988. THE FULL STORY.

SBS TV & that Commando "scandal"

2011-07-07T12:42:00.005+10:00

Reality show proposal: Dibb's Deli. Australia's premier Arm chair General Professor Paul Dibb and his views on Army cooks.

EXPERTS WITH EGG ON THEIR FACES?

By Sasha Uzunov

Lance Corporal Andrew Jones was first and foremost a trained Australian soldier who was also an army cook. His tragic death at the hands of a rogue Afghan soldier in May of this year highlights the dangers that support troops face in the Afghanistan War and also hammers home how out of touch our highly paid defence experts are.

The irony of it all is that you the Australian taxpayer, not once but twice, have to pick up the tab every time an “expert” comes up with a harebrained scheme or a journalist from the state owned media chases a “boutique defence scandal” in the hope of winning an award.

Let us start proceedings with the Lord High Priest of Australian defence experts, Professor Paul Dibb. In 2008 I wrote:

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/aussie-defence-becomes-old-canadian.html

“Let us not forget some of the hair-brained schemes to save money from the Defence budget. Highly paid academic and a former Secretary of Defence, Professor Paul Dibb, proposed in 2006 to "civilianise" some trades within the Army. He complained that there were too many Army cooks.

“But what he failed to understand is first and foremost cooks are trained soldiers who can be used to patrol bases, and secondly how many civilian cooks are prepared to work in a warzone. Maybe if we hired many Gordon Ramsey styled chefs, they could hurl abuse at the Taliban!

“Maybe we need to employ some unorthodox methods to beat the Taliban. Here is a suggestion to the Defence Minister why don’t you commission Professor Dibb to go to England and recruit these foul-mouthed cooks who would strike terror into the terrorists.

“Let us call it Dibb’s Deli. It would also be televised. Great reality television.”

Dibb together with his disciple, Hugh White, a former Fairfax newspaper journalist turned defence expert, came up with the “brilliant idea” of cutting back our frontline combat troops, such as infantry, in the mid 1990s. When the East Timor crisis erupted in late 1999 the Australian Army did not have enough infantry “gunslingers” and was forced to canabalise reserve units for soldiers.

In 1998 the then Chief of Australia's Army Lieutenant General Frank Hickling was so concerned that our army was run down at the hands of Dibb-White that he issued his famous back to basics directive ordering all soldiers sharpen up their war fighting skills. A year later his move had potentially saved the lives of many young Australian soldiers engaged in a conflict with pro-Indonesian militia in East Timor. General Hickling had to fight off opposition from some of Canberra's desk warriors and self-appointed experts who "knew better."

Moving right along here…The Australian My Lai Massacre that never was story, being pushed by the taxpayer funded Special Broadcasting Service’s (SBS TV) Dateline program, and aided and abetted by the other state owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC TV) as well as Fairfax newspapers.

In February 2009 Australian Commandos entered a Taliban compound in the Oruzgan province of Afghanistan and were fired upon. And in the fog of war a grenade was thrown into a room to subdue the Taliban but instead six civilians were tragically killed.

The Australian newspaper’s Rory Callinan and Jeremy Kelly summed up the dilemma for the soldiers involved:

www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/fateful-oruzgan-grenade-was-part-of-training/story-e6frg6nf-1225911089567

“A source said the troops came under fire from a building in the compound and they responded with a grenade. When the firing continued they responded with another one as their training required, the source said. "What were they supposed to do?"

“The source said there was anger among the troops about what they would do if prosecution for a possible manslaughter went ahead. "Every time someone goes into a compound and gets shot at they will be thinking will we get charged with manslaughter if we use a grenade."

SBS TV’s Dateline program reporter, the self-styled media tough gal, Sophie McNeill, broke the story, which initially got off to a false start, and Tom Hyland and Rafael Epstein, self-appointed defence experts, have followed it for Fairfax.

In 2010 I predicted that the McNeill story would win an award, simply because it had the media template of “bad” Australian soldiers, a controversial war and an obstructionist Defence Department. But as we shall see the story simply had no legs. Why it won an award is hard to fathom:

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/search/label/Afghan%20war

“The ABC TV’s Media Watch program, hosted by Jonathan Holmes, revealed that SBS Dateline on 8 March 2009 with such haste put together a story by McNeill, which ended up quoting Zahir Khan, a survivor of the commando raid. But it turned out he was an imposter.

www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2853029.htm

“A year later McNeill went to Afghanistan and finally tracked down the real Zahir Khan. SBS Dateline threw the blame on wily Afghan media fixer Fazel Reshad “Arshad” Wardak for the mistake in the first story. If all else fails, blame the hired help!

“You can see Wardak boasting about his services to SBS in 2008 on this youtube clip. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-5TaNvLsrk

“Jonathan Holmes then smacks naughty Sophie McNeill on the hand with the full force of a feather duster: as if the second story somehow redeems the first big mistake, a sack able offence. Great spin by Holmes. If only all journalists got such second chances.

“Holmes:

““Sophie McNeill's second report is compelling. It includes film of the surviving family, and the graves of the victims, in their village in Oruzgan. And it poses serious questions about the ADF's original account of the incident, and why a year later it has said nothing more, and not even interviewed this family.”

““You’re now beginning to get the picture: a boutique scandal which has Walkley Award, Australia’s version of the Pulitzer Prize, written all over it.” “

As a consequence, taxpayer dollars were spent in prosecuting some of the Commandos involved in the raid. But the charges against two were thrown out this year.

The honourable thing for McNeill to do is to apologise and return her Walkely Award and for the Executive Producer of Dateline Peter Charley to fall on his sword and resign. The media expects politicians to be accountable, why not journalists?

There is a public perception that journalists have become a law onto themselves that is they have a special media sheriff’s badge they can flash, whilst the rest of us cannot even ask a question.

Let us take Rafael Epstein, former ABC TV reporter and now with Fairfax.

In 2010, the taxpayer funded journalist got up to some shenanigans and tied up valuable court time:

www.theage.com.au/national/police-wont-charge-bushfire-reporter-20100203-ndlm.html

“Victoria Police will not prosecute a former ABC journalist accused of breaching police roadblocks after the Black Saturday bushfires.

“Rafael Epstein and a cameraman were stopped by officers in the main street of Kinglake on February 24 last year.

“Mr Epstein, who now works at The Age, admitted to deliberately entering an area restricted by the coroner. Mr Epstein's lawyers and the Office of Public Prosecutions agreed charges would not proceed, no conviction be recorded and that the matter would be dealt with through the Magistrates Court diversion program.

“Under diversion, Mr Epstein donated $2000 to Strathewen Primary School and admitted wrongdoing. He said: ''I apologise to local residents and police. I do wish to stress that my intention was to provide constructive and responsible coverage.''

I am trying to come up with a nick name for Epstein: Rafael “Roadblock” Epstein or Rafael “Smokey and the Bandit” Epstein:

I can just picture Epstein with a Burt Reynolds moustache and cowboy hat in a car with Sophie McNeill, as the Sally Field character, and the former Victoria Police Chief Simon Overland playing the role of Buford T. Justice.

Perhaps Epstein did not have a media sheriff’s badge but simply a note giving him permission to breach the roadblock “signed Epstein’s Mother!”

Would the law have been lenient with a 17-year-old boy or girl, acting as a citizen journalist, with a video camcorder wanting to shoot a youtube clip?

(end)

BRAVE COP WHO KEPT VICTORIA SAFE

2011-05-21T17:18:00.013+10:00

PART 4 – THE FIGHT AGAINST YUGOSLAV INTELLIGENCE IN AUSTRALIA

Fourth part in a series on Yugoslav intelligence activities on Australian soil from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

BRAVE COP WHO KEPT VICTORIA SAFE

The full story can now be told…

By Sasha Uzunov

International terrorists must be rubbing their hands with glee at the news that the Australian state of Victoria’s Police Force will abolish its highly effective counter terrorism unit, the Security Intelligence Group (SIG).

Why you would tamper with something that has been successful is hard to fathom? In comparison, the United States has learned its lessons after the initial 9/11 intelligence gap and recently after a decade has finally taken out terrorism mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Australia is a federation of six states and two territories, each with their own police force. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) is a separate entity. The domestic spy service is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

In light of this, a little known Victoria Police operation 20 years ago helped to stop the flood of illegal weapons getting onto the streets and into the hands of home grown terrorists. The impact it had was to send a message--loud and clear-- that overseas linked crime and terror were not going to be tolerated in the state of Victoria, Australia.

That story can now be told because one of the leading figures behind that operation passed away early last year after a long illness.

Detective Senior Constable Geoffrey Ian Gardiner, who retired in 1998, was part of the PSG (Protective Services Group) within the Victoria Police at the old Russell Street complex in Melbourne’s city centre. His office was situated on the 5^th floor, East Wing. He was a clean, honest, hard working cop.

Det Snr Const Gardiner was tasked with investigating terrorist organisations including the Tamil Tigers, and ethnic-linked crime. He was very knowledgeable about the activities of Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) on Australian soil and even knew some of the key agents of influence!

As detailed in a previous scoop article: www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00021.htm

Tuesday, 2 March 2010

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modelled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy.

We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa.

Even though he passed himself as a member of PSG, Det Snr Const Gardiner no doubt would have worked side by side with SIG.

I got to know Det Snr Const Gardiner in 1989 as a young cadet reporter working for the Australian Macedonian Weekly newspaper, who was interested in ethnic-related crime. My parents are Macedonian migrants.

He in fact tracked me down. He was a canny operator who would pump you for information and would never reveal anything unless it was in his interest to do so.

When he got wind of me investigating a leading UDBa agent of influence based in Melbourne with links to the Australian Labor Party’s (ALP) Socialist Left faction and the national multicultural broadcaster The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), he offered some fatherly advice by warning me that the agent of influence was “being protected by people high above.”

But then to my surprise Det Snr Const Gardiner proceeded to reveal to me that the agent of influence had between 1968 and 1979 amassed criminal convictions in the state of Victoria for stolen goods, illegal gaming and financial deception. The last conviction was obtained for passing off a bogus cheque in the name of Red Star Belgrade, an overseas Yugoslav soccer team, at a pub in the Melbourne western suburb of Footscray.

The UDBa agent of influence was permitted to work as a state public servant despite their criminal record. ASIO had sealed their rap sheet from ordinary police access. The inference being that the agent of influence may have been cultivated as a “double agent.” But questions remain as to why an employee police check was never conducted by both the Victorian Public Service or SBS?

In a visit to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia in 1993, a year after it declared independence from Yugoslavia, I met with Mr Aleksandar Dinevski, a former Interior Ministry Officer, who confirmed the above-mentioned individual was an UDBa informer in Australia. The Interior Ministry is responsible for policing and the secret service

Another name supplied by Det Snr Const Gardiner was an individual who was a member of a Balkan mafia group based in Melbourne. In 2002 when I mentioned this name to another Macedonian Interior Ministry Officer, he confirmed that the individual was involved in drugs and illegal weapons.

One of Gardiner’s favourite warnings was" If you write anything about me, I'll chop you! Wait till I’m long gone." I kept my end of the bargain for 20 years!

In 1990 he telephoned me out of the blue asking for some information on a stolen weapons racket and if I had heard anything. He said he was deeply concerned about weapons getting into the hands of the wrong people. I told him I knew nothing and asked if he would elaborate.

But being the loyal policeman he did not go into detail. Months later, the story unfolded about a Police operation targeting stolen weapons. One of those unexpectedly caught in the dragnet was Oliver Bubevich (aka as Bubev, Bubevski), also the son of Macedonian migrants, and a Vic Roads (vehicle licensing office) employee and the then owner of a pub (bar) in Fitzroy, a Melbourne’s northern inner suburb. Bubevich was an obsessed illegal gun collector without links to organised crime or Yugoslav intelligence.

According to a Herald Sun newspaper report, dated 22 March 1991, "A MAN who hid a gun in his stove and ammunition in his kitchen cupboards was fined $2500 yesterday for possessing 15 unregistered firearms. Magistrate Mr David McLennan also ordered Oliver Bubevich to perform 300 hours of unpaid community work.

"Melbourne Magistrates' Court heard on Wednesday that Bubevich was fascinated with guns and had 23 weapons - all with serial numbers drilled out or stamped over. The weapons, hidden throughout his Thomastown house, were found when police raided the property last year. Bubevich, 36, of Winamarra Cres, pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawful possession, one count of possessing silencers and 15 counts of possessing unregistered and unlicensed firearms.

The court was told police raided Bubevich's house after finding two unregistered handguns in his car and another two unregistered weapons in a second man's car after Bubevich had sold them to him.

"Bubevich denied supplying guns to the underworld and said his fascination with guns had led him to disregard the fact the serial numbers had been deleted. He told the court he had bought two of the guns from a man at a Fitzroy hotel and had found the rest on the site of a demolished Preston house.

" On 21 March 1991, the Herald Sun wrote: "Prosecutor Sen-Constable Maurice Lynn told the court Bubevich was arrested after police found two guns in his car on November 7, 1990. "They found two more guns, a .38 Rossi revolver and a .32 Webley and Scott pistol in a second man's car after Bubevich had sold them to him, he said. Sen-Constable Lynn said police then raided Bubevich's house and found 23 unregistered guns, two silencers and a large quantity of ammunition in kitchen cupboards.

"Bubevich's lawyer, Mr Peter Finkelstein, said his client was a "gun collector gone wrong". Magistrate David McLennan said he was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Bubevich had supplied guns to crime figures."

Mr Aco Talevski, a long time Macedonian human rights activist and former Orthodox Church leader, gave an interview filmed on camera last year. Freeze frame photo by Sasha Uzunov.

Mr Aco Talevski, a long time Macedonian human rights activist and former Orthodox Church leader, gave an interview filmed on camera last year.

He revealed:

“I met Geoff Gardiner in the early 1980s through my friend Stojan Sarbinov (another long time Macedonian activist). Geoff Gardiner was a member of the Victorian Police anti-terrorism squad.

“I had numerous meetings with Geoff Gardiner as a representative of the Macedonian community (in Melbourne) because in the past we organized a lot of protests…He was assigned to communicate with the ethnic groups.

“As a democratic society here in Australia everybody has the right to express their opinion…but it has to be conducted in a civilized and peaceful manner.”

Mr Talevski said that Gardiner had confirmed to him that a number of individuals who were saboteurs of Macedonian community events were connected to the Yugoslav government.

“These people were well connected and protected by certain forces. He (Gardiner) didn’t go further in saying…” Mr Talevski said.

Police of the calibre of Geoff Gardiner are very rare. It was because of his attention to detail, the willingness to be flexible that the shenanigans perpetrated by UDBa in the state of New South Wales, and aided indirectly by the incompetence of NSW Police Special Branch and ASIO, in the 1970s, such as the Croatian Six case did not happen in the state of Victoria.

Infamous ex-NSW Police Detective Roger Rogerson, freeze frame image from a video interview with Sasha Uzunov, May 2011. Rogerson was one of the arresting officers in the Croatian Six case. He has called ASIO "amateurs." Photo by Sasha Uzunov.

Infamous ex-NSW Police Detective Roger Rogerson, now an author, was involved in two of Australia’s highly contentious cases, the Ananda Marga-Hilton Hotel bombing and the the Croatian Six case. In February 1979 Rogerson led the raid on the Sydney home of Mile Nekic, one of the Croatian Six.

In 1991 legendary ABC TV investigative reporter Chris Masters dropped a bombshell on the Four Corners program.

Masters filed a story about The Croatian Six case. An agent provocateur set up members of Australia's Croatian community in 1979. Six Croats were imprisoned on false charges of wanting to plant bombs in Sydney.

Masters tracked down the agent provocateur, Vitomir Visimovic, who was an ethnic Serb living in Bosnia but had passed himself off as a Croat.

In a filmed interview last month, Rogerson revealed to me that ASIO were “amateurs.”

Victoria Police's motto is Uphold the Right...Tenez Le Droit...It certainly did that back in 1990-91 in keeping our streets safe from weapons falling into the hands of the bad guys. But we should never remain complacent.

(end)

If you have any information about UDBa activities on Australian or New Zealand soil, then I would like to hear from you. We can talk on or off camera and confidentiality is assured - Sasha Uzunov. You can contact me on sashauzunov8@gmail.com

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

links:

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2010/06/part-3-fight-against-yugoslav.html

The Fight against Yugoslav Intelligence in Australia, parts 1, 2, 3

Part 1 - PART 1 – published in scoop.co.nz

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00021.htm
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
ASIO’S POOR RECORD

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

CROATIAN SIX CASE - 4 Corners, ABC TV, 1991 Report by Chris Masters.

Part 1 - www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2v4118TV8c

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

Obtain your DVD copy of TIMOR TOUR OF DUTY - A Luke Leon Media production in conjunction with SASHA UZUNOV

go to the film link at:

http://timortourofduty.blogspot.com/

TALIBAN'S NEW SURPISE ATTACK?

2011-04-27T10:33:00.020+10:00

Taliban prisoner, Kandahar, Afghanistan, 2007. Photo by Sasha Uzunov.

TALIBAN'S NEW SURPISE ATTACK?

by Sasha Uzunov

Could the recent mass break out of Taliban inmates from Kandahar prison in southern Afghanistan using a tunnel be a sign of something more sinister

and deadly to come? That is surprise attacks on NATO bases, causing many casualties.

The Guardian newspaper, UK, revealed in a report by Jon Boone, 25 April

2011 that:

"Afghan and Nato forces have launched a huge operation to try to recapture 475 prisoners, nearly all of them Taliban insurgents, who staged an

extraordinary mass prison breakout using a tunnel.

" Officials said the inmates had escaped through the tunnel, dug from a

house to the wing of the prison where political prisoners are detained in

Kandahar.

"In an email, Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said the tunnel was

1,050ft (320 metres) long and had taken five months to construct,

"bypassing enemy check posts and Kandahar-Kabul main highway leading

directly to the political prison".

"He said just three insurgents inside the prison had known about the plot.

They helped ferry the prisoners out of the jail in an operation lasting four

and a half hours."

If the Taliban can come and go as they like in and out of jail, what is to stop them from having a suicide team tunneling into a NATO base and causing

carnage as well as political embarrassment to NATO?

Canadian military expert Scott Taylor makes the following point about the

Kandahar NATO airfield:

"If they can tunnel into the prison, they could tunnel under the airfield

security fences as well.....As you know, all 27,000 NATO troops inside the

wire carry a weapon, but NONE of them carry live ammunition (only the

perimeter guards are fully armed)....a single Taliban suicide squad could do a lot of damage if they tunneled in..."

(end)

Obtain your DVD copy of TIMOR TOUR OF DUTY

go to the film link at:

http://timortourofduty.blogspot.com/

ANZAC DAY 2011 -Leslie Farren 5RAR

2011-04-24T10:14:00.001+10:00

ANZAC DAY 2011 - This year will mark the 45th anniversary of the first National Serviceman / conscript from the state of Victoria, Australia to be killed in the Vietnam War on 10 June 1966...His name is Leslie Thomas Farren of Reservoir. Read his story.

He was killed 19 days short of his 21st Birthday by a Viet Cong mortar barrage.

A memorial plaque was unveiled in 2006, honouring Private Farren's sacrifice. The story was covered by the Herald Sun newspaper, the Preston Leader newspaper and Channel 9 news Melbourne (17 August 2006 by reporter Wayne Dyer) and Channel 7 news Melbourne (28 August 2006).

His 86 year old mother Lillian Farren was on hand to unveil the plaque. Sadly she passed away a few years ago.

Dr Frank Donovan, a well respected psychologist, author, former Western Australian Member of Parliament (ALP) was an Army medic in Vietnam and he nursed Private Farren during his last moments.

Mr Frank Donovan, 10 Platoon, D Coy Corporal Medic, the man who held Pte Les Farren as he died and uttered his last words...

"Don't let me die doc, don't let me die," he (Les) whispered.

source: 5RAR Association website: www.5rar.asn.au/tributes/farre
n_plaque.htm

A First Angry Shot Remembered

(The Melbourne Herald Sun, page 20)

by Sasha Uzunov
August 24, 2006 12:00am

Bank teller Les Farren did not live to hear Prime Minister John Howard's apology for the reception his mates received from a disillusioned public when they returned home from Vietnam.

This little-known soldier from the Melbourne suburb of Reservoir was the first Victorian National Serviceman to die in that controversial war.

But he will be remembered when his 86-year-old mother, Lillian Farren, unveils a plaque on Monday at the Reservoir Cenotaph.

Forty years after his death, Mrs Farren still grieves for her son. "It was awful to see Les go and never see him again", said Mrs Farren. This way he will be remembered."

Les was always in the shadow of another Melbourne suburbs boy when he went to Vietnam. The 1960s Australian pop legend, Normie Rowe, was one of his schoolmates at the Northcote High School before they were called up for Vietnam.

Les, two years older than Normie, was quietly spoken and looking forward to being an accountant in the suburbs. Normie, in the era of Beatlemania, was being mobbed by screaming hysterical teenage girls and had the music world at his feet.

But Vietnam changed their lives. Pte Leslie Thomas Farren was conscripted in 1965 and posted to 10 Platoon, Delta Company, 5th Battalion, the Royal Australian Regiment, Infantry Corps.

He was also a keen amateur photographer and the only son of Thomas and Lillian Farren.

On June 10, 1966, while on patrol in South Vietnam, Pte Farren was severely wounded by Viet Cong mortar fire. He was 19 days short of his 21st birthday. Cpl Frank Donovan was the army medic who tried to help Les.

"Les Farren actually died in my arms from massive lower body wounds," said Cpl Donovan. The extent of his wounds and loss of blood made survival impossible.

Trooper Norman J. Rowe got the call up in 1968 and went to Vietnam in 1969 with A Squadron, 3rd Cavalry Regiment, Armoured Corps.

He survived but it almost ended his musical career.

I took an interest in Les Farren after reading about him in a newspaper more than 15 years ago. I was surprised no one had acknowledged his service. Les was one of the unsung people who do their duty without fuss or fanfare.

Len Barlow, secretary of the Victorian branch of the Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia helped me to lobby Darebin Council for the commemorative plaque that will be unveiled by his mother.

To its credit, the council quickly approved the proposal.

Les Farren has not been forgotten but it has taken too long to acknowledge his service.

Following the Prime Minister's words on Vietnam Veterans Day last Friday, the sacrifice of these veterans' might now be better remembered.

Memorial Plaque Ceremony for Private Leslie Farren (10 Platoon, D Company, 5 RAR) First Victorian National Serviceman to be killed in Vietnam War on 10 June 1966.

MONDAY 28 August 2006, Reservoir Cenotaph, Reservoir, City of Darebin, Victoria.

VIDEO HIGHLIGHT

Mr Bob Elworthy, President of the Victorian Branch, Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia, speaking at the commemorative plaque ceremony for the first Victorian National Serviceman to be killed in Vietnam, Private Leslie T. Farren, D Company, 5 RAR. Date: 28 August 2006, marking the 40th anniversary of his death on 10 June 1966. Reservoir (City of Darebin), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Part of Mr Elworthy's moving speech:

Leslie Farren ... for he was young once and he was a soldier. Vietnam was his time and he did his duty ...

Lest We Forget.

(View the video clip Here- 1.2Mb).

Mr Frank Donovan, 10 Platoon, D Coy Corporal Medic, the man who held Pte Les Farren as he died and uttered his last words...

"Don't let me die doc, don't let me die," he (Les) whispered.

(View the video clip Here- 920Kb).

The Politics of Procurement

2011-04-23T10:55:00.002+10:00

www.cpac.ca/forms/index.asp?dsp=template&act=view3&template_id=1418&hl=e

Canadian journalist Scott Taylor's new doco about the F-35 fighter jet: The Politics of Procurement

Canada needs a new fleet of fighter jets to replace the decades’ old CF-18s, but which aircraft at what cost? The government has already decided that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the only one that can meet the military’s needs. The opposition is fighting the purchase because it's being made without a competition from aircraft makers. When completed the acquisition will be the largest military equipment purchase in Canadian history. Respected military journalist Scott Taylor will hear from all sides of the debate and gets exclusive access to some of the most advanced aerial fighter machines on the planet as he examines F-35: The Politics of Procurement.

SCOTT TAYLOR LOOKS AT THE F-35 To buy or not to buy? For Canadian defence, this has been key procurement question over the past year. And it’s caused a political firestorm on Parliament Hill and along the campaign trail.

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN IN COMBAT

2011-04-23T10:46:00.001+10:00

The story TEAM UZUNOV reported 2 years ago, now back in the news...

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN IN COMBAT

There are those who strongly oppose it. Both sides present strong arguments. Women in combat will probably become a reality more by default than by a political commitment to equal opportunity or grandstanding.

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/09/australian-women-in-combat.html

read on...

RONALD REAGAN'S FOREIGN POLICY

2011-04-14T17:08:00.007+10:00

Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States of America, 1981-89

Was Reagan's policy of taking a gun to a gunfight the right one after all?

On Line Opinion: Australia's e-journal of social and political debate.

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11872&page=0

Was Reagan right?

By Sasha Uzunov - posted Thursday, 7 April 2011

As a teenager growing up in 1980s Australia, my generation was constantly bombarded by the media that the world was destined for nuclear holocaust because of the Cold War showdown between the United States and the Soviet Bloc. The then US President Ronald Reagan, a former B-grade Hollywood actor, was painted as a loopy politician who could not differentiate between reality and an old film script.

But with hindsight, was the 40^th President of the United States (1981-89) correct in his handling of world events, namely the dismantling of Communism and confronting Middle East and North African “mad dog” leaders?

Teddy Roosevelt, US President from 1901-09, believed in “speak softly and carry a big stick” in foreign policy. But could we summarise Reagan’s doctrine as “speak loudly and carry a medium sized stick?”

Some have credited Reagan with “winning” the Cold War (1947-89) by draining the Soviet Union’s resources with his elaborate but science fiction Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), commonly known as “Star Wars.” Star Wars would see the US use satellites to block Soviet Nuclear missiles from hitting the US. In order to counter Star Wars the Soviets would have to spend billions in acquiring the technology.

In a 1983 speech with Biblical overtones, Reagan preached:

So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride - the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.

Moreover, Reagan supported covert aid to Islamic resistance fighters or Holy War warriors (mujahaddin) in Afghanistan, which was invaded by the Soviets in 1979. The Soviet’s Afghan War lasted nearly a decade and finally ended when the reform minded Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the plug on a disastrous intervention.

The downside of US support to the mujahaddin was the inadvertent growth of Al Qaeda, now fighting a war by terror against Washington. America as well as its two allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, provided money, training and weapons to those groups whom later evolved into Al Qaeda.

Reagan came unto the political scene when an America was perceived as being impotent on the foreign stage, after the debacle of the Vietnam War (1962-72), the 1979 kidnapping of US diplomats in Iran during the Shiite Islamic revolution led by cleric the Ayatollah Khomeini, which overthrew the Shah, and the subsequent but failed US military attempt to save the diplomats.

To shake off the Vietnam syndrome, Reagan authorised the military invasion of neighbouring Caribbean island of Grenada in October 1983 to overthrow a ‘Marxist’ government aligned with arch nemesis Cuba, an ally of the Soviet Union.

No doubt the former actor would have appreciated how this was reflected in popular culture at the time. In a 1987 war movie, Heartbreak Ridge, Clint Eastwood plays US Marine Gunnery Sergeant Highway, who bemoans the fact he has a 0-1-1 record. That is one draw in Korea and a loss in Vietnam and would want to retire with one victory, Grenada, under his belt.

Days before Grenada, the President’s act tough foreign policy backfired when 241 US Marines were killed by a suicide bomber in Beirut, Lebanon. Despite pledging to stay on, Reagan later withdrew the troops. The spectre of body bags from an earlier Southeast Asian war would have played on his mind.

Pulitzer prize winning American journalist Steve Coll, in his book Ghost Wars, reveals that Ramzi Yousef, an Islamist terrorist, had “come to the conclusion that only extreme acts could change the minds of people and the policies of nations. He cited as one example the suicide bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon.”

But behind the sledgehammer approach, Reagan had a subtle, cunning plan, bordering on the illegal. During his Presidency, the Ayatollah’s Iran and the Soviet Union were regarded as America’s main enemies.

So much so, that this, once again, permeated popular culture of the time. The World Wrestling Federation (WWF), professional wrestling shown on American and international television had an enormous following in the mid 1980s. To reflect the political currents, two bad guy characters appeared: The Iron Sheik and Nikolai “The Bolshevik” Volkov. The Iron Sheik wore traditional Persian pants and shoes and would wave the Iranian flag as he came to the ring. He would shout to the hostile crowd “Iran number one, America, haaak p-too (simulate spitting). “

Volkov would wave the Soviet communist flag of hammer and sickle and then sing the Soviet national anthem. Eventually, both bad guys would get their comeuppance when a “Corporal Kirchner” a Vietnam veteran would defeat them in the wrestling ring during pure ideological theatre.

But Reagan saw through the good guy, bad guy rhetoric. From 1980 to 88, the US gave covert aid to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as it waged a war with neighbouring Iran. In 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal came to light, when two US officials close to the White House, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Admiral John Poindexter, were caught illegally selling arms to arch enemy Iran and using the proceeds to fund a covert war in central America. However, no direct link was ever established to Reagan and North and Poindexter’s subsequent criminal convictions were later overturned on appeal.

In the current crisis affecting Libya, the dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi is ruthlessly trying to put down a popular rebellion. Both the US and its allies have launched air strikes against the Qaddafi regime. At one time the Libyan strongman was a darling of the radical left in the west. But now is seen as a bad guy by these very same elements.

However back in 1986 in response to Libyan sponsored terrorism against US targets, Reagan bombed Qaddafi. Heexplained:

'Colonel Qaddafi is not only an enemy of the United States, his record of subversion and aggression against the neighboring states in Africa is well documented and well known. There is no security, no safety in the appeasement of evil.
'This mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution... I find he's not only a barbarian, but he's flaky.'

Reagan’s doctrine of “talk loudly and carry a medium sized stick” was with hindsight the correct course of action in an imperfect world. Bearing in mind he had to shake off the shackles of Vietnam, avoid nuclear holocaust with the Soviets and navigate unchartered waters to deal with middle-east terrorism.

(end)

MELBOURNE AIRPORT SECURITY CONCERN

2011-01-25T17:53:00.005+11:00

TEAM UZUNOV INVESTIGATION.

By law this is forbidden, as the above photograph demonstrates. Photograph taken on Monday evening, 24 January 2011.

Drivers may not necessarily pose a direct security threat or even be members of Al Qaeda !

Heaven forbid should any attack happen but should an incident arise then the potential is there for clogging the freeway or simply creating an obstacle for emergency response teams.

link:

www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/25/3120757.htm

ABC News - 25 January 2011

Carnage as bomber targets Moscow airport

BEATING WIKILEAKS TO THE PUNCH ON AFGHANISTAN

2011-01-16T12:11:00.006+11:00

Canadian reporter Scott Taylor (left) and Sasha Uzunov (right) in Kandahar, Afghanistan to film a documentary in 2007 for Canadian television. Uzunov does a Jim Waley impersonation by donning a flak jacket and helmet.

It has has taken The Sunday Age's (Fairfax newspapers) self-appointed

defence expert, Tom Hyland, three years to reveal, courtesy of wikileaks,

what TEAM UZUNOV reported back in 2007 about Australia's mission in

Afghanistan, in particular the difficult relationship with our ally the Dutch.

Here's Hyland's story:

www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/bickering-warriors-in-coalition-of-unwilling-20101225-197es.html

Bickering warriors in coalition of unwilling

December 26, 2010

Mistrust, indecision and hostility undermined Australia's alliance with the Dutch and Americans in what was supposed to be a united front against the Taliban and in restoring stability to Afghanistan, writes Tom Hyland.

We squabbled with our allies, yet in public we talked of close co-operation. We frustrated the Americans with unfulfilled promises. Our politicians big-noted in public, but dithered in private.

Our bamboozled bureaucrats tried to make sense of the details. All along, the public was kept in the dark. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we now have an insight into the diplomatic and political skirmishes behind the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year and which has cost 21 Australian lives.

Cables from 2007 reveal intense distrust between Australian and Dutch forces in Oruzgan province, where Australia was part of a Netherlands-led force....

In February 2007, Australian officers, concerned that the Taliban were preparing a do-or-die offensive, started planning to send special forces back to Oruzgan.

This was just five months after the Howard government pulled them out, in September 2006, when it argued Oruzgan was ''relatively stable''.

The government and defence chiefs defended the withdrawal at the time, saying Australian reconstruction troops remaining in the province were well-protected, with their own forces and 1400 Dutch soldiers.

But their claims of stability and their stated faith in the Dutch were undermined by early 2007, when intelligence reports warned of a Taliban resurgence....

http://newmatilda.com/2007/06/06/news-front

AFGHANISTAN

6 Jun 2007

News from the Front

By Sasha Uzunov

Australian journalist Sasha Uzunov reports from the Afghan front

The Forgotten War

Sometimes it takes an outsider to tell us the most uncomfortable truths.

Last week, Defence Minister Dr Brendan Nelson took a swipe at critics who question the pace at which Australian troops are securing their designated province in Afghanistan, saying:

Any suggestion Australian troops are not pulling their weight in southern Afghanistan is beneath contempt. Australia is steadfastly committed to Uruzgan as shown by the recent decision to deploy a Special Operations Task Group of approximately 300 people to the region.

However, the recent decision to send Special Forces back to Uruzgan could also be read as a tacit admission that not all is well with the mission. (Who was the genius who decided to remove our Special Forces soldiers from Afghanistan late last year?)

When I asked the Defence Minister if a rift had developed between Australian troops and the Dutch Army engineers they are serving alongside, over who was doing the most to secure Uruzgan, Nelson would not comment.

The controversy was sparked by prominent German journalist, Ulrich Ladurner, who claimed, in an interview he gave to me at Kabul airport on 14 May, that both the Australians and Dutch were being slow in establishing security in the province.

Canadian film on Afghanistan

2010-11-23T23:50:00.004+11:00

Scott Taylor (left) & Sasha Uzunov (right): filming in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2007.

Canadian film on Afghanistan

View the complete film at this link:

www.cpac.ca/forms/index.asp?dsp=template&act=view3&pagetype=vod&hl=e&clipID=4759

Canadian documentary film, "Afghanistan: outside the wire," 60 minutes long, camerawork by Scott Taylor (host/producer), David Pugliese and Sasha Uzunov.

CPAC Special
"Afghanistan: Outside the Wire"

Join respected military journalist Scott Taylor on a journey outside the protective walls of NATO bases into the heart of Taliban country.

This one-hour documentary examines how the war has affected the people of Afghanistan. It reveals efforts by Canada and its international partners to rebuild the country while dealing with political corruption. Come face-to-face with aid workers, diplomats, warlords and would-be suicide bombers in this exclusive CPAC special program.

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

Created by Cable for Canadians

CPAC, the Cable Public Affairs Channel, is Canada’s only privately-owned, commercial free, not for profit, bilingual licensed television service. Created in 1992 by a consortium of cable companies to preserve an independent editorial voice for Canada’s democratic process, CPAC provides a window on Parliament, politics and public affairs in Canada and around the world. Since 1992, the cable industry has invested close to $50 million in CPAC, and today CPAC programming is delivered by cable, satellite and wireless distributors to over 10 million homes in Canada, and worldwide via 24/7 webcasting and podcasts available on this website.

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

TAYLOR & PUGLIESE: THE REAL McCOY - GENUINE MEDIA TOUGH GUYS

Sasha Uzunov, an Australian cameraman/ independent film maker/ freelance journalist and former Australian soldier, talks to the New Zealand media about his involvement in an up-coming documentary film on Afghanistan, produced by award winning Canadian journalist Scott Taylor,

Money shot Quote:

Uzunov has praised Scott Taylor, the producer of “Afghanistan: outside the wire ,” and fellow cameraman on the project, David Pugliese, an award winning print journalist with Canada’s national newspaper, The Ottawa Citizen.

“Taylor and Pugliese are genuine media tough guys, there’s no pretense. They are the Real McCoy! The focus is on the story not on cheap theatrics or clichéd war reporting poses such as wearing a flak jacket and acting tough in front of camera... But unfortunately we now get celebrity style of war reporting on Australian TV screens.”

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

- New Zealand Press Association (NZPA) wire story -

www.voxy.co.nz/national/aussie-cameraman-inspired-kiwi-courage/5/71620

Friday, 12 November 2010.

AUSSIE CAMERAMAN INSPIRED BY KIWI COURAGE

An Australian cameraman whose work features in an upcoming Canadian documentary film about the Afghanistan War says he drew inspiration from tenacity and bravery shown by the average New Zealander (Kiwi).

Sasha Uzunov, an independent film maker, freelance cameraman, and former Australian soldier who served in East Timor, is featured in the Canadian documentary film: “Afghanistan: outside the wire,” which will be broadcast on Canadian Cable TV news network, CPAC -the Cable Public Affairs Channel, on Sunday 20 November 2010, produced by award winning Canadian journalist Scott Taylor.

Uzunov said that New Zealand, with a small population of over 4 million, punched well above its weight on the international stage.

“Take a look at film director Peter Jackson and his conquering of Hollywood or humble bee keeper Sir Edmund Hillary conquering Mount Everest in 1953,” he said. “Recently, there was the New Zealand national soccer team, The All Whites, fighting like uncaged wild lions against the might of Italy at the 2010 World Cup.”

“I see myself in the same boat, that of underdog fighting against the odds,” Uzunov said. “Unfortunately, some sections of the Australian media do not believe that a film maker or journalist who is an ex-soldier has a democratic right to voice an opinion on defence/national security issues.”

“But that makes me more determined to get my point of view across.”

Uzunov said he cannot understand why Australia’s top war reporter John Martinkus is not being used by the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS TV) to cover that conflict.

“Martinkus is a heavy hitter who understands the Afghan war inside out and for the life of me, I can’t understand why SBS TV Dateline program isn’t using him,” Uzunov said.

“It would be like having legendary Australian leg spinner Shane Warne at his peak as 12th man and carrying the drinks during a cricket test match.”

Martinkus, a former SBS TV Dateline reporter ,is now an academic at the University of Tasmania.

Uzunov, who has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan, made his comments in response to SBS TV Dateline’s controversial story about Australian commandos and the accidental killing of Afghan civilians in a raid last year.

“In their haste to get the story out, the powers that be at Dateline were inadvertently fooled by a group of imposters claiming to be relatives of those Afghanis killed during the Australian commando raid,” Uzunov said. “Eventually the real relatives were tracked down. This is a huge mistake, something that Martinkus would’ve avoided.”

Uzunov has praised Scott Taylor, the producer of “Afghanistan: outside the wire ,” and fellow cameraman on the project, David Pugliese, an award winning print journalist with Canada’s national newspaper, The Ottawa Citizen.

“Taylor and Pugliese are genuine media tough guys, there’s no pretense. They are the Real McCoy! The focus is on the story not on cheap theatrics or clichéd war reporting poses such as wearing a flak jacket and acting tough in front of camera,” Uzunov said. “That is why Martinkus was devastatingly effective when he was on Dateline. But unfortunately we now get celebrity style of war reporting on Australian TV screens.”

Uzunov said he wanted to report on Afghanistan without military assistance.

During his two trips to that country in 2007 and 2008, he dressed in local outfits and toured the country to interview locals with fellow journalists Scott Taylor and David Pugliese from Canada.

“A lot of the reporters go embedded,” he said. “That is, they go with the military, so their movements are largely confined to what the military allows them to do.

“We decided that we had to go what they call ‘outside the wire’ and basically take a look for ourselves what was going on.”

Uzunov, an Australian of Macedonian heritage and is olive skinned with dark southern European features, was often mistaken for being an Afghan.

He said appearing like a local and showing the people from Kandahar, the heartland of the Taliban insurgency, some respect helped grant them access to locals’ stories.

“As unembedded journalists we were able to go to villages (which embedded journalists couldn’t go to),” he said.

“A trickle of fund money was being used (in these villages) to give them water, and to help them build a bakery and so on,” he said.

“But a lot of the problems aren’t being solved. There’s lots of corruption.”

Uzunov has also praised Australian reporters Paul Toohey of News Limited, ex-ABC-TV legend Chris Masters for their in depth understanding of the Afghanistan War.

He has also singled out Mark Corcoran, of ABC-TV. “Mark is the ABC’s only badge-qualified war reporter, having served in the Royal Australian Navy and later in the super-secret Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). I find it strange that the ABC don’t use him more, especially as an expert comments man as well as war reporter,” Uzunov said.

Uzunov released his first documentary film in 2009, TIMOR TOUR OF DUTY.

Aussie-Dutch rift on Afghanstan back in 2007

2010-10-22T10:13:00.003+11:00

A new book by an ex-Australian SASR special forces soldier tells of the lack of support from Dutch allies in the Afghanistan War.

link:
www.heraldsun.com.au/news/australian-solders-left-for-dead-in-afghanistan/story-e6frf7jo-1225941976825

Australian solders left for dead in Afghanistan by Ian McPhedran
From: Herald Sun October 22, 2010

extract:

AUSTRALIAN special forces troops were left for dead by two Dutch attack helicopters during a deadly ambush in Afghanistan.

Three years ago, I was one of the first to reveal the rift in the following stories
...
http://newmatilda.com/2007/06/06/news-front

NEW MATILDA news website

Afghanistan
6 Jun 2007

News from the Front
By Sasha Uzunov

Australian journalist Sasha Uzunov reports from the Afghan front

The Forgotten War
Sometimes it takes an outsider to tell us the most uncomfortable truths.

Last week, Defence Minister Dr Brendan Nelson took a swipe at critics who question the pace at which Australian troops are securing their designated province in Afghanistan, saying:

Any suggestion Australian troops are not pulling their weight in southern Afghanistan is beneath contempt. Australia is steadfastly committed to Uruzgan as shown by the recent decision to deploy a Special Operations Task Group of approximately 300 people to the region.

However, the recent decision to send Special Forces back to Uruzgan could also be read as a tacit admission that not all is well with the mission. (Who was the genius who decided to remove our Special Forces soldiers from Afghanistan late last year?)

When I asked the Defence Minister if a rift had developed between Australian troops and the Dutch Army engineers they are serving alongside, over who was doing the most to secure Uruzgan, Nelson would not comment.

The controversy was sparked by prominent German journalist, Ulrich Ladurner, who claimed, in an interview he gave to me at Kabul airport on 14 May, that both the Australians and Dutch were being slow in establishing security in the province.

Ladurner, who is the foreign editor of the German weekly Die Zeit and co-author with Gero von Randow of The Iranian Bomb, spent weeks as an embedded journalist with Dutch Army engineers in Uruzgan Province at the Tarin Kowt base they share with Australian troops. ‘The Dutch and Australians are making a big effort but it is too slow in bringing stability to the province,’ Ladurner said. ‘The local people are not happy with the progress made. It is still not safe. The region is still wild.’

One of the reasons it takes a non-Australian to provide this insider’s view of the situation around Tarin Kowt is the Defence Department’s obsession with controlling media access to our troops.

Captain Brendan Maxwell, Australian Army Public Relations officer in the Afghan capital, Kabul, said it was impossible for a journalist to turn up in Afghanistan and demand to see the Australian soldiers at Tarin Kowt. ‘Journalists have to be embedded and that takes weeks, maybe even months to organise,’ he told me, when I arrived in early May hoping to report on our soldiers’ Afghan mission. ‘Journalists who are embedded are required to stay on base and are taken on some patrols.’

Defence’s secretiveness will prove counter-productive in the long run. Giving journalists access eliminates distrust and suspicion. The excuse that it’s too dangerous just does not wash. War journalists understand the risks and are not interested in putting soldiers’ lives on the line for a cheap story.

On 15 May, Prime Minister John Howard, farewelled a task force made up of elite SAS and Commando soldiers who are returning to Uruzgan Province (after a break of six months) in preparation for major operations against Taliban insurgents.

Their previous battles against the Taliban were some of the most ferocious fought by Australian troops since our involvement in the Vietnam War.

The Afghan people need our help. By keeping Australia’s defence debate a closed shop among a select few, we are not getting a broad view of what is actually happening in Afghanistan. And that’s of no use to anyone.

Tangling with the Taliban
They call Kandahar in southern Afghanistan the most dangerous place on earth. This is the Taliban’s stronghold. Roadside bombs regularly explode here, and a number of western journalists and aid workers have been kidnapped and murdered since the war began in 2001.

On 10 May, I flew from the Afghan capital, Kabul, to Kandahar with two Canadian journalists, Scott Taylor and David Pugliese. We’d been invited by the Afghani authorities to inspect a detention centre there that holds Taliban suspects.

We’d grown the customary beards before arriving in Afghanistan and, as a further precaution, we wore local clothes we did not want to stick out. Crazy thoughts crossed my mind about Douglas Wood, the Australian contractor kidnapped in Iraq. Taylor had also been kidnapped and tortured in Iraq.

When we entered the city I noticed a white ute with two men inside pull up close to our 4-Wheel Drive. One of the men was rubbing a Kalashnikov rifle, resting on his lap, as he watched us closely.

I was in the front passenger seat next to our crazy, hard-drinking Turkish driver. Behind us were the two Canadians. I hid my camera between my legs, not wanting to blow our cover.

The white ute then dropped behind, and followed us for about five minutes. Alarm bells really began to ring every driver in Afghanistan wants to get in front of you, not behind you.

Our driver hit the accelerator and swerved into on-coming traffic, barely missing 10 cars with the white ute pursuing us. It was a car chase straight out of a Hollywood cop movie.

Eventually, we lost the ute, and drove to the detention centre. This was the first time that Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) the equivalent to the United States’s FBI and CIA combined had given access to its Kandahar detention centre. They had done so in an effort to counter allegations that Taliban suspects were being picked up by Coalition forces, handed over to Afghani authorities without proper supervision, and then tortured.

Colonel Noor Mohammed Balak Karzai, Deputy Director of NDS in Kandahar Province, said the allegations about mistreatment of detainees and Taliban suspects were not true. ‘We have good relations with the Canadian, American and Australian forces,’ he said.

The Canadian Armed Forces have the responsibility for security of the Kandahar Province, which is the epicentre of the Taliban insurgency. Australian forces are based in neighbouring Uruzgan Province, but some detainees captured by the Australains have ended up in Kandahar. Colonel Karzai said detainees are held for 72 hours and then released, if there is no evidence against them.

However, if more time is needed, the suspect is held for another 15 days. A court order is required for an extension of detention. The relatives of the detainees are permitted to visit and bring food once a week. If a suspect goes to court and is then convicted, he is sent to the central prison in Kandahar or the main jail in Kabul, depending on the length of sentence handed down.

With the story and photos in the bag, we focussed on getting back to Kabul. When we’d flown in, we šd been told there were no return flights for over a week. Taylor had to get back in time for a plane to Canada, so our first plan was to hire a local driver (the Turk was staying behind) and a make a run for it six hours through Taliban territory.

I would sit in front because I look Afghani, while Taylor and Pugliese would sit in the back wearing burquas, the traditional female clothing which covers the whole body. The impression would be of ordinary Afghanis travelling to Kabul on business. Our driver would carry a 9mm pistol and a Kalashnikov rifle as back up.

But what if we were stopped at a Taliban roadblock? Would we journalists have to use guns to save ourselves from kidnapping and possible murder?

Fortunately we didn’t have to find out at the last minute, a contact managed to get us on a British C-130 Hercules transport plane from Kandahar to Kabul.

These are the split-second events that can put reporters’ lives on the line. The key is adaptability and a willingness to go outside the wire, un-embedded, to get the real story.

The sad truth is war reporters are no longer treated as independent observers but as targets to be killed or taken hostage for financial gain.

http://slaggedoff.blogspot.com/2007/09/dutch-oven-dutch-surrender-monkeys.html

YOUTUBE EXPLAINED

The Youtube video is of an interview of Urlich Ladurner by Sasha Uzunov in Kabul back in May 2007 where he explains that Australians and Dutch forces were slow in establishing security in Uruzgan province... video clip can be viewed at http://slaggedoff.blogspot.com/2007/09/dutch-oven-dutch-surrender-monkeys.html

Andrew Wilkie, Iraq, WMD & Paul Moran

2010-09-14T19:59:00.003+10:00

"The Fairfax Press and SBS TV, aided by the ABC, have been obsessed with the story of Australian Commandos involved in a botched raid that resulted in the unintentional killing of five Afghan civilians last year - but that is another story. Meanwhile, it would appear that ABC cameraman Paul Moran’s role in selling the Iraq war that has caused so much death and destruction has slipped under the radar."

The Australian public, including Mrs Shelley Kovco, the widow of Australian soldier, Private Jake Kovco, have a right to know about Moran's activities.

Extract:
www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/library/wf-202.htm

The Man Who Sold the War
Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war
Rolling Stone/Nov. 17, 2005

James Bamford's November 17th, 2005 profile of John Rendon, "The Man Who Sold the War," (RS988) won the 2006 National Magazine Award in the reporting category.

For the worldwide broadcast rights, Sethna contacted Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer who frequently worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "I think I've got something that you would be interested in," he told Moran, who was living in Bahrain. Sethna knew he could count on the trim, thirty-eight-year-old journalist: A former INC employee in the Middle East, Moran had also been on Rendon's payroll for years in "information operations," working with Sethna at the company's London office on Catherine Place, near Buckingham Palace.

------------------------------------------------
STORY:

You are welcome to leave your comments or feedback, either positive or negative, about this story at www.onlineopinion.com.au

Unlike the Fairfax Press, SBS and ABC, we welcome an open debate on Australia's defence and national security issues.

On Line Opinion - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate
www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10968&page=0

Wilkie or Wilkie not ask for an ABC inquiry?
By Sasha Uzunov - Tuesday, 14 September 2010 !

Ex-Australian Army officer turned independent politician Andrew Wilkie is regarded as a brave man who resigned as an intelligence analyst over the 2003 Iraq War. He is now in a unique position as a member of the newly formed ALP-Green-Independents-federal coalition government to call for an inquiry into the controversial ABC TV camera man Paul Moran who was killed in Iraq.

Wilkie resigned as an analyst with the Office of National Assessment (ONA), an intelligence organisation that directly services Australia’s Prime Minister, disagreeing with claims made by the then Howard government about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and the reasons for going to war.

One of those killed in that war was Paul Moran, who helped to publicise the WMD story, which we now know was a complete fabrication. Wilkie has the opportunity to press for a parliamentary inquiry into the ABC’s employment of Moran and possible conflict of interest.

Moran, 39, was killed on March 22, 2003 by a car bomb while covering the war in Northern Iraq for the tax payer funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC TV). He was an Adelaide-raised freelance cameraman who worked on and off for the ABC as well as US public relations firm Rendon, which had ties to the CIA and the Bush Administration.

Walkely Award winning Australian journalist, Mr Colin James, of the Adelaide Advertiser newspaper, was the first to break the story about Moran’s shadowy past when he attended Moran’s wake in Adelaide.

He talked to relatives who revealed that Moran had a James Bond other life.

“For a freelance cameraman, Moran sure had some incredible access to US State Department officials in Washington,” Mr James said. “How many freelancers get to play games of social tennis with US diplomats?”

Moran had worked for Rendon for more than a decade in places like the Middle East and Kosovo, pushing US government spin while doing freelance work for the ABC TV as a combat cameraman.

On November 17, 2005 prominent American journalist, academic and former US Navy intelligence analyst James Bamford wrote in the influential American magazine Rolling Stone a detailed account of Moran’s work with Rendon and its link to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its selling of the Iraq War to the American public.

The controversy surrounding Moran stems from his exclusive story about an Iraqi defector who had knowledge about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program. A Rendon colleague gave him the scoop which turned out to be false, but was a pretext for the US invasion of Iraq, according to Bamford.

The Australian cameraman also helped to set up a television station for the Iraqi National Congress (INC). The INC was established by the US as an opposition group to the Saddam Hussein regime.

In 2006 the then ABC’s Managing Director, Mr Russell Balding, was approached and asked if he would launch an internal inquiry into the Moran allegations. Mr Shane Wells, his spokesman, said there would be no comment. The Moran story remains a hot potato.

Feisty, tough Maltese-Australian journalist, Monica Attard, host of the ABC’s Media Watch, dared to criticise then ABC TV news boss Max Uechtritz in his refusal to answer questions about Moran.

"The story was followed up by some parts of the media, but not by the ABC. It should have been." ("Death in Baghdad", Media Watch, April 14, 2003.)

The irony of all this is Uechtritz, now with Al Jazeera network, complained to The Age newspaper on June 30, 2003 about freedom of speech after coming under attack from the then Communications Minister, Senator Richard Alston, for alleged biased reporting by the ABC over the Iraq war.

“It is the duty of independent journalists in a robust democracy to question everything,” Uechtritz wrote. “The senator seems to think the media's duty in time of war is to fall meekly into line with the government of the day.”

Uechtritz was contacted at his Al Jazeera email address for comment on Moran but after many months there has been no response.

Last year, Sally Neighbour, a self-appointed national security expert who was employed as an ABC reporter while working for The Australian a commercially owned newspaper, ran a story about Moran without any reference to the CIA allegations and quoted fellow ABC journalist Mark Corcoran, a hugely respected journalist and genuine media tough guy who previously served in the Royal Australian Navy and super secret Defence Signals Directorate.

Neighbour wrote:

"Why has there been no investigation into the murder?" asks Mark Corcoran, presenter and veteran reporter with ABC TV's Foreign Correspondent program. "As of December 2009, I have still not seen any evidence of an investigation, either formally or informally, by any Australian official."

Mr Chris Warren, the Federal Secretary of the Media Entertainment Alliance of Australia (Australian Journalists Association) has asked Australia's Federal Attorney-General to investigate Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad, better known as Mullah Krekar, and his links to UN-listed terrorist organisation Ansar al-Islam, as the mastermind who allegedly ordered the car bomb that killed Moran..

The Moran case has been linked by some ABC reporters to the highly emotive Balibo Five, Australian-based newsmen and crew killed by Indonesian troops during the 1975 takeover of East Timor. But the Balibo Five had no links to a foreign intelligence agency and launching a war crimes trial against Mullah Krekar could backfire.

It could open up a can of worms. Under the Geneva Convention, journalists in war zones are afforded some protection as non-combatants. However:

Article 29 - A person can only be considered a spy when, acting clandestinely or on false pretences, he obtains or endeavours to obtain information in the zone of operations of a belligerent with the intention of communicating it to the hostile party.

Thus, soldiers not wearing a disguise who have penetrated into the zone of operations of the hostile army, for the purpose of obtaining information, are not considered spies. Similarly, the following are not considered spies: soldiers and civilians carrying out their mission openly, entrusted with the delivery of despatches intended either for their own army or for the enemy's army. To this class belong likewise persons sent in balloons for the purpose of carrying despatches and, generally, of maintaining communications between the different parts of an army or a territory.

The definition of a spy given in this Article remains completely valid since the Geneva Convention contains no similar provision. However, a spy is also a protected person in so far as he conforms to the definition given in Article 4 of the Fourth Convention. Under Article 5 of the Convention, the spy may nevertheless be deprived temporarily of certain rights, particularly the right of communication.

Article 30 - A spy taken in the act shall not be punished without previous trial.

Moran was “killed in action” by a car bomb; he was neither surrendering nor was he captured. The next question is do we prosecute enemy combatants who have killed Australian soldiers during the heat of battle, ranging from the Boer War to the present Afghanistan conflict?

Should we now ask that the Vietnamese communist government hand over the Viet Cong guerrillas and hard core NVA soldiers for prosecution over the 18 Australian soldiers killed in action during the legendary Battle of Long Tan in 1966?

Furthermore, critics call the Iraq War launched by the United States in 2003 “illegal”. Wilkie resigned from ONA because of his opposition to that war. Assuming that the Iraq war is illegal, does Moran’s involvement in “selling” that war which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as well as US/Coalition troops being killed, constitute a crime?

Under the Nuremberg Principles established in the wake of Nazi War Crimes Trial of 1946, Principle VI states:

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

a)Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

If you believe that the Iraq War was justified, then Moran deserves to be honoured as a hero killed in action in the global war on terror; he should have been given a state funeral just like any other Australian soldier, police officer or intelligence operative killed in action in a warzone.

The irony is that if Eric Campbell, the ABC reporter who was wounded during the car bomb that killed Moran, had been the one killed, the case of a war crime for killing a journalist could be justified.

The Fairfax Press and SBS TV have been obsessed with the story of Australian Commandos involved in a botched raid that resulted in the unintentional killing of five Afghan civilians last year - but that is another story. Meanwhile, it would appear that Moran’s role in selling a war that has caused so much death and destruction has slipped under the radar. Attard was brave in airing on Media Watch the Moran story.

Wilkie has the power to call for an inquiry into Moran’s activities.

(end)

About the Author

Sasha Uzunov graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, in 1991. He enlisted in the Australian Regular Army as a soldier in 1995 and was allocated to infantry. He served two peacekeeping tours in East Timor (1999 and 2001). In 2002 he returned to civilian life as a photo journalist and film maker and has worked in The Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. His documentary film Timor Tour of Duty made its international debut in New York in October 2009. He blogs at Team Uzunov.

Other articles by this Author - online opinion
» Scrutinising the media's scrutiny of defence - March 30, 2010
» Reporting on the reporters - February 4, 2010
» Scotland the brave, Ulster the unsure? - December 23, 2009
» Greens win the war but lose defence - November 24, 2009
» Afghan dress code - September 30, 2009

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

Recent story

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1008/S00486/commandos-pay-political-price.htm

Commandos Pay Political Price? Scoop News
www.scoop.co.nz

COMMANDOS PAY POLITICAL PRICE? By Sasha Uzunov

Australian commandos involved in a botched raid which resulted in 5 civilian deaths in Afghanistan could face courts martial because of intense political pressure from the media... read on...

AUSSIE COMMANDOS PAY POLITICAL PRICE?

2010-08-28T16:42:00.003+10:00

Australian commandos in Afghanistan face political pressure from media over incident.

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1008/S00486/commandos-pay-political-price.htm

AUSTRALIAN COMMANDOS PAY POLITICAL PRICE?
28 August 2010

By Sasha Uzunov

Australian commandos involved in a botched raid which resulted in 5 civilian deaths in Afghanistan could face courts martial because of intense political pressure from the media, as TEAM UZUNOV writing for www.scoop.co.nz warned last year.

The Fairfax press, which together with the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS TV) have been ferociously investigating the incident, reported on 27 August 2010 that:

www.theage.com.au/national/diggers-may-be-charged-over-deaths-20100826-13u5j.html

“In an unprecedented move that has angered some senior military officers, Brigadier Lyn McDade has told the army she is preparing to lay charges in connection with a deadly raid involving Australian troops near the village of Surkh Morghab in Oruzgan province.”

But both Fairfax and SBS TV have for reasons unknown not taken the story further. The focus has been on the soldiers, not the politicians or the highly paid defence experts.

A scoop article titled “Commando Regiment in Firing Line,” on 7 December 2009, revealed:

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0912/S00060.htm

“The Australian Army’s elite reservist unit, 1 Commando Regiment, is being made a scapegoat over allegations of misconduct in Afghanistan, a former unit member has told TEAM UZUNOV [blogsite].

“The experienced ex-Commando said that he was deeply concerned over claims that poorly trained and led members had breached rules of engagement during a raid on house in Afghanistan which resulted in the deaths of 5 local children after grenades had been thrown last February.

“My concern is the unit has been left out to dry by the Defence Department even before judgement has been passed. Let due process of law take place,” he said. “If people were innocent then that should be shouted from the rooftops but if people were guilty then throw the book at them.”

“Whatever the outcome of the investigation, the responsibility is with the government of the day as well Defence Department bureaucrats. It is they who send troops to war.”

It boils down to an unfortunate incident which saw Commandos entering a Taliban compound and being fired upon. And in the fog of war a grenade was thrown into the wrong house. Now it has been blown up, pardon the pun, into My Lai Massacre proportions.

The Australian newspaper’s Rory Callinan and Jeremy Kelly have summed up the dilemma for the soldiers involved:

www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/fateful-oruzgan-grenade-was-part-of-training/story-e6frg6nf-1225911089567

“A source said the troops came under fire from a building in the compound and they responded with a grenade. When the firing continued they responded with another one as their training required, the source said. "What were they supposed to do?"

“The source said there was anger among the troops about what they would do if prosecution for a possible manslaughter went ahead. "Every time someone goes into a compound and gets shot at they will be thinking will we get charged with manslaughter if we use a grenade."

“The former governor of the province where the incident occurred, Asadullah Hamdam, described the night raid as a mistake but one largely attributable to the behaviour of the raid's alleged target, who was killed while shooting back at the commandos.”

SBS TV’s Dateline program reporter, the self-styled media tough gal, Sophie McNeill, broke the story, which initially got off to a false start, and Tom Hyland, self-appointed defence expert, has followed it for Fairfax.

McNeill back in 2008 asked not to be contacted to discuss media issues, including Afghanistan. It would appear taking no for an answer only applies to those who do not scrutinise SBS or Fairfax journalists!

McNeill’s advice for young journalists ( Walkely Magazine, issue 62, Aug-Sep 2010, page 37):

“Don’t take no for an answer. And once they actually let you in the building refuse to leave. Just quietly take over a desk and become part of the furniture...”

The ABC TV’s Media Watch program, hosted by Jonathan Holmes, revealed that SBS Dateline on 8 March 2009 with such haste put together a story by McNeill, which ended up quoting Zahir Khan, a survivor of the commando raid. But it turned out he was an imposter.

www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2853029.htm

A year later McNeill went to Afghanistan and finally tracked down the real Zahir Khan. SBS Dateline threw the blame on wily Afghan media fixer Fazel Reshad “Arshad” Wardak for the mistake in the first story. If all else fails, blame the hired help!

You can see Wardak boasting about his services to SBS in 2008 on this youtube clip. www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-5TaNvLsrk

Jonathan Holmes then smacks naughty Sophie McNeill on the hand with the full force of a feather duster: as if the second story somehow redeems the first big mistake, a sack able offence. Great spin by Holmes. If only all journalists got such second chances.

Holmes:

“Sophie McNeill's second report is compelling. It includes film of the surviving family, and the graves of the victims, in their village in Oruzgan. And it poses serious questions about the ADF's original account of the incident, and why a year later it has said nothing more, and not even interviewed this family.”

You’re now beginning to get the picture: a boutique scandal which has Walkley Award, Australia’s version of the Pulitzer Prize, written all over it.

While the ABC’s Media Watch, quite rightly criticises the Australian Defence Force (ADF) over a lack of information on the commando story, an ever sceptical Australian public is still waiting for any more information about the controversial life and death of ABC cameraman Paul Moran who had alleged links to the CIA and was killed in Iraq in 2003. It seems the ABC is reluctant to open up its own scandals. Link:

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0912/S00083.htm

A source, former Australian Special Forces soldier who served in Afghanistan, has revealed to TEAM UZUNOV that there are far worse incidents involving Australians in Afghanistan and cannot believe they have been buried and ignored.

“I can’t understand why they’re picking on the Commandos?” he said.

There could be three reasons why a court martial could be held. First, there is enough evidence of misconduct. Second, there is not enough evidence but a court martial would appease the media but find the soldiers eventually were not in the wrong. Third, and dare we even mention it, someone within Australia’s Defence Department, has a grudge against Commando reservists and wants them out of the frontlines.

The Sydney based 1 Commando Regiment is largely a reservist Special Forces unit, and has a high number of New South Wales State police officers who serve within the ranks.

Hyland, flashing his Fairfax Media Sherriff’s Badge, wrote on 21 March, 2010.

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2010/03/fairfax-crusade-against-1-commando.html

" Along the way, it has exposed a rivalry almost as old as the army itself, between full-time troops and part-time reservists - chocos, some regulars call them, chocolate soldiers who can't take the heat."

"The regiment's experiences have triggered an intense debate within army ranks - about Special Forces tactics, and wider questions about a political and military preference for sending Special Forces, rather than large infantry units, to conflicts like Afghanistan."

Hyland, after picking up the correct scent, pardon the military pun, then pulls back and does not take another step forward, likewise SBS TV’s Dateline. But why?

Here is a key point that has been missed: why is it Australian Defence Policy to use Special Forces in an infantry role in Afghanistan, as well as throwing Army reservists in the deep end? Who caused this dramatic shift in defence thinking?

The change came about in Defence policy when two key “experts” Professor Paul Dibb and ex-Fairfax journalist turned government advisor Hugh White decided to cut back the number of full time infantry soldiers with the consequences of using reservists in combat roles.

Mr Bruce Haigh, a former diplomat, in an interview which slipped under the radar, told SBS TV’s Dateline program on 27 September 2000 that:

“Defence is the department that’s divided amongst itself, as far as I can gather, and there are certain people inside Defence who’ve taken a certain line for a long period of time - the Paul Dibb line, if you like, which is high-tech, US-alliance - and you’ve got others who are saying, "No. We’ve got the situation to the north- we need to have more people in uniform, we need to have them trained, we need to have night-vision equipment provided for them. “… the Australian Army can see what needs to be done, but many of the civilian Defence personnel, who’ve built their careers on playing up to this particular line, are arguing the other case, and feeling increasingly isolated, because they are not facing reality. That’s the problem.”

Respected Brigadier Jim Wallace, former Special Forces Commander, wrote in 2003:

“Unfortunately, Australian defence policy has been mainly wrong for the whole of this period. Even after we committed troops to East Timor, Professor Paul Dibb, the policy's chief architect, was standing in front of parliamentary committees vowing that Australia would not be conducting what he called "expeditionary" operations out of the region. This was despite a series of major UN deployments over many years to places as far afield as Rwanda and Somalia. Afghanistan and Iraq have hopefully now discredited this logic.

“At the same time, Dr Hugh White was arguing in initial drafts for the 2000 white paper to reduce the size of our army to about 19,000, on the basis that, like Professor Dibb, he didn't see the Government needing options for deployment out of the region, particularly for sending the army. The result has been an incredible demand on the dedication and professionalism of our special forces as they have again been thrown into the breach that our supposedly expert defence planners couldn't predict.”

McNeill and Hyland now need to take their story all the way and not just take aim at sitting targets—soldiers. But we seriously doubt if failed defence theorists and ex-Fairfax journalists will be scrutinised.

(end)

Now on Twitter

2010-08-23T23:18:00.000+10:00

TEAM UZUNOV now on Twitter

http://twitter.com/UZI9mmmm

TIM LESTER: MEDIA TOUGH GUY?

2010-08-19T13:08:00.006+10:00

Fairfax Press's poorly disguised attempt at taking down Independent Senator Steve Fielding.

With an Australian federal election around the corner, the Kiwi media examine Tim Lester's media tough guy shtick...

Scoop - New Zealand's top independent news website.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1007/S00246/aus-fed-election-journo-takes-down-senator.htm

Australian Federal Election: Journo Takes Down Senator?
By Sasha Uzunov

In what can only be described as a bizarre and poorly disguised takedown, Fairfax newspapers’ reporter Tim Lester has belittled Independent Senator Steve Fielding over a trip to Afghanistan to visit Australian troops, which coincided with the Federal Labor government announcing the next election to be held on August 21 this year.

Lester, formerly a television reporter with the ABC and Nine Networks, is a self styled "media tough guy" and “defence expert” who made a name for himself covering the conflict in East Timor (Timor Leste) in 1999.

MARTINKUS SIDELINED?

2010-07-05T14:53:00.008+10:00

Why is Australia's top war reporter John Martinkus not being used to cover the war in Afghanistan?

SCOOP - Independent news - New Zealand's premier news website

www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1007/S00040.htm

Top Australian War Reporter Sidelined?
Monday, 5 July 2010, 12:37 pm
Opinion: Sasha Uzunov

Top Australian War Reporter Sidelined?
By Sasha Uzunov

No doubt many who have been watching the 2010 Soccer World Cup from South Africa have been puzzled by some of the tactics used by a number of coaches, namely Australian boss Pim Verbeek. Equally puzzling is one Australian media boss’s stubborn refusal to change his tired game plan.

I am referring to Peter Charley, the Executive Producer (coach) of Dateline, flagship current affairs program on Australian public broadcaster the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS TV).

Is Peter Charley the Pim Verbeek version of Australian television journalism?

Verbeek came up with a strange plan to counter the powerful Germans in Australia’s opening World Cup match , which resulted in a 4-0 drubbing. He kept his powerful strikers on the bench and used superstar Tim Cahill out of position. By the time Australia was allowed to play its natural game against Ghana and Serbia it was too late, Australia was out of the World Cup and rueing what could have been.

In contrast, New Zealand national soccer coach Ricky Herbert (pictured above) had his players fighting like unchained wild lions against Slovakia, Italy and Paraguay and remained undefeated. The irony is that Shaun Brown, the head of SBS TV, is a Kiwi. We can only hope he draws strength and inspiration from his fellow countryman Herbert and encourages his Aussie subordinate Peter Charley!

“Team Dateline” has become a parody of its former hard-hitting best with Charley not using top “strike” reporter, John Martinkus, in covering the war in Afghanistan but instead opting for a predictable plan. Dateline had a huge gaff in one story when the identity of an Afghan man was confused relating to a botched Australian Army Commando raid last year which resulted in the deaths of civilians. Under previous ‘Team Dateline coach’ Iron Mike Carey, ironically a mate of Charley’s, this would never have happened.

Verbeek used Cahill in the role of lone striker up forward but anyone knows that the player is better suited to playing deep and then attacking from out of the blue. Likewise, Martinkus, one of Australia’s most respected and fearless war reporters who has worked for “Team Dateline” in the past, is not being used to cover the war in Afghanistan. He has taken up an academic job in Tasmania, Australia’s deep south state.

Martinkus’ style is similar to Cahill’s, in that he plays deep and then strikes. In media terms this means that the news story takes precedence, not Martinkus’ face on camera wearing a flak jacket and helmet in a contrived tough guy pose.

Instead, we have Dateline reporter Mark Davis, former lawyer turned war reporter, who carries his own camera into a combat zone but the camera is fixed on himself at all times, except for toilet breaks! This is ripe material for a sit-com. Why no one has satirised Davis and his “style” beats me? It is absolutely hilarious---though unintentional--and it detracts from the story being covered.

Then there is Charley’s obsession with the “media tough guy/gal” play so popular in the 1970s and 80s under American-Australian media guru Gerald Stone, who took a group of Aussie reporters and made them national heroes by sending them into warzones and playing tough for the camera. In reinventingthis game plan, Charley has reporter Sophie McNeill as the 21st century media tough gal. But this has encountered some problems, namely over the Afghan story mentioned above.

The Team Dateline website once hyped:

“Pick, arguably, the most dangerous region in the world today and that’s where you'll find Sophie McNeill.”

But not according to the Media Watch program on Australia’s other public broadcaster ABC TV, www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2853029.htm

“Sophie McNeill was in Australia when the story broke, and she stayed there. She couldn't have travelled safely to the remote village in Oruzgan (Afghanistan) where the killings took place.”

SBS TV is based in Sydney, Australia; to be fair to McNeill we can regard some of the suburbs in that city as warzones!

To top that off, we have the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper’s self appointed defence expert the Irish-Australian Paul McGeough turning up on “Team Dateline” in cameo roles, complete with flak jacket and helmet in Afghanistan. It has overtones of media mates chewing the fat on camera.

Martinkus is well known for going where angels fear to tread. He spent years covering the conflict in East Timor; was kidnapped in Iraq and has been to Afghanistan. In other words, the man is a heavy hitter but with a low key and soft spoken stage persona. There are no cheap theatrics for the camera.

Australian taxpayers who pay Charley’s wages at the public broadcaster SBS have a right to know why the best man for the job in reporting what is actually going in Afghanistan is not being used. Charley should be catching a flight down to Tasmania and getting Martinkus back into the team!

Related Stories on Scoop

Sasha Uzunov: ASIO’s Poor Record 02/03/2010
AFP Hasn't Been Asked To Investigate Moran Murder 09/12/2009

*************

Herald Sun article on Afghanistan

2010-06-22T01:15:00.001+10:00

www.heraldsun.com.au/news/as-toll-rises-in-afghanistan-so-does-spectre-of-vietnam/story-e6frf7jo-1225882478530

As toll rises in Afghanistan, so does spectre of Vietnam

by Paul Toohey
The Herald Sun newspaper, Melbourne, Australia. June 22, 2010

WITH every step forward there is one step back. The Defence Department last week said special forces had dealt a "major blow" to Taliban insurgents in Kandahar, but then came yesterday's grim news.

Defence chief Angus Houston said the chopper that crashed and killed three Diggers was not brought down by enemy fire.

He pleaded with the Australian public for time to prove that "steady progress" was being made in Afghanistan.

But with five Australians killed in the past fortnight, bringing the total to 16 in Afghanistan, the value of the investment in Australian lives will come under closer examination than ever before.

Reports from the United Nations Security Council suggest there is no cause for optimism in Afghanistan, with a dramatic increase in the numbers of roadside bombings and assassinations of Afghan officials.

And the arrival of the northern summer means a return to more deadly fighting as insurgents emerge from hibernation to engage in battle.

"They go away in the winter and when it comes to the summer they come out of the woodwork and the shadows and start attacking coalition forces," says Sasha Uzunov, a former Australian soldier who has visited Afghanistan twice as a war cameraman.

"A lot of the Taliban activity is simply giving money to illiterate and poor teenage boys, maybe giving them $US50, and giving them a Kalashnikov and getting them to take pot shots at passing troops.

"It's as basic as that, so it's very difficult to track down who these guys are. They take pot shots and disappear and hide in the villages. How do you know who these guys are?"

Days in Kandahar at this time are up to 43C and even in the depths of the night it is hot. There is no rain in the area at this time.

The crash was in the Kandahar region where Australians Special Forces have been working with their coalition partners and claimed their success of last week.

Defence Minister John Faulkner said the tragedy of the deaths would not cause him to waver.

"We remain very committed to our operational objectives in Afghanistan," he said.

"I think these objectives, these specific goals, these reasons for being in Afghanistan remain of very great importance."

Senator Faulkner insisted the mission was worthwhile.

"I think it's important to say to the Australian people that we are making progress in Afghanistan," he said.

But Mr Uzunov said it was clearer than ever that Australia was facing an enemy it could barely recognise.

"It's a very nasty counter-insurgency war, very much like what the Aussies faced in Vietnam," he said.

"Even though we're told repeatedly there is no comparison, there are strong parallels between the two conflicts.

"It's the same thing, the guerillas doing hit-and-runs, planting booby traps, IEDs, roadside bombs: they let one off and then they disappear.

"There are caves and tunnels that have been there for centuries. The Afghans fought the British, they fought the Soviets; there's a whole heap of networks and hiding places that the coalition forces just don't know about."

(end)

2010-06-09T12:15:00.000+10:00

POLICE CHIEF AND THOSE MEDIA LEAKS

Victorian State (Australia) Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland is in the wars again over leaked information to the media..

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/how-overland-dodged-a-bullet/story-e6frg6z6-1225877203685

How Overland dodged a bullet

by Hedley Thomas From: The Australian June 09, 2010

IN an article in The Age nine months ago a journalist wrote about a nugget of remarkable evidence nestled in the little-known 23-page sworn affidavit of the man who is now Chief Commissioner of Victoria Police, Simon Overland.

Overland admitted a number of facts in this affidavit, dated November 1, 2007. The Age's Melissa Fyfe focused on the fact Overland, by his own admission, had passed on secret intelligence to his colleague, then Victoria Police media chief Stephen Linnell. The intelligence was from a telephone tap during a covert murder investigation called Operation Briars.

Although The Age's article was placed well back in the newspaper, its angle was powerful: Overland's action in passing on the secret intelligence from the telephone tap had been illegal, according to Paul Mullett, former secretary of the Police Association, Victoria's registered trade union for police.

read more...

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

TEAM UZUNOV was quoted in The Australian last year over Overland's fury over a leaked raid on alleged terrorists.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/why-arrest-terrorists-when-you-can-arrest-journalists/story-e6frg71f-1225758769704

Why arrest terrorists when you can arrest journalists?

From: The Australian
August 07, 2009

"...Unless of course Cameron Stewart's leak was a national security agency, as Sasha Uzunov from Team Uzonov media suggests:

The Chief Commissioner's anger, or more like a case of protesting too much, is misplaced. Last month a leaked Office of Police Integrity (document) was published in The Australian newspaper by Stewart which alleged a shoot-to-kill culture within the Victoria Police. It was noticeable that the Chief Commissioner did not jump up and down and condemn the leak but used it for political mileage.

Did Commissioner Overland betray the real reason for his anger during Tuesday's press conference? ..."
------------------------

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/08/overland-hypocrisy-on-terror-leak.html
Thursday, August 06, 2009

OVERLAND HYPOCRISY ON TERROR LEAK

IN DEFENCE OF THE AUSTRALIAN NEWSPAPER REPORT:
Overland hypocrisy on terror raids

By Sasha Uzunov

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland is on the warpath over the publication of a story in The Australian newspaper on 4 August 2009 just hours before a major raid on suspected Melbourne based terrorists who allegedly planned to attack Holsworthy Army Barracks in Sydney. He has claimed that the leaked story had placed his officers in danger.

www.theage.com.au/national/the-australians-editorinchief-defends-terrorraids-story-timing-20090804-e80i.html

But the Chief Commissioner’s anger, or more like a case of protesting too much, is misplaced. The reporter of the article is Cameron Stewart, a well respected journalist and who according to his website profile is a former “spook” with the super secret Defence Signals Directorate (DSD). www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22653583-5014045,00.html

I am sure that Stewart would realise the magnitude of his story and I would personally as a journalist trust his news sense in running the story. www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25879554-601,00.html

The story was given the go-ahead by the Australian Federal Police (AFP), of which Commissioner Overland once served with.

If any blame is to be apportioned perhaps the Chief Commissioner should realise that the media is a double edged sword. Leaks usually occur for a number of reasons. Governments or the opposition release information in advance to test the waters. If the reaction is unfavorable, then the information is disowned.

To put it simply Commissioner Overland cannot have his cake and eat it too. Last month a “leaked” Office of Police Integrity (OPI) was published in The Australian newspaper by Stewart which alleged a “shoot to kill culture” within the Victoria Police. It was noticeable that the Chief Commissioner did not jump up and down and condemn the leak but used it for political mileage.

The Australian newspaper story ran on July 13 2009 titled 'No Tasers' for deadly police, by Stewart quoted a soon to be released report from the Victorian Office of Police Integrity (OPI):www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25770795-5006785,00.html

There is a long running battle between the watchdog OPI and the Victorian Police Association, the union, over the introduction of the Taser Gun. The Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland is opposed to the non-lethal weapon being handed out to all police.

Senior Sergeant Davies of the Victorian Police Association quite rightly has expressed skepticism at the leaked OPI report.“We do have some issues with the fact that reports are released-leaked from the OPI and then nobody butters up to answer questions about it," he said.

More to this story can be found at my article SHOOTING FROM THE LIP ,

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/07/shooting-from-lip.html

(end)

2010-06-03T20:37:00.005+10:00

PART 3 – THE FIGHT AGAINST YUGOSLAV INTELLIGENCE IN AUSTRALIA

Third part in a series on Yugoslav intelligence activities on Australian soil from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

HOW COPS STOPPED FLOOD OF WEAPONS IN MELBOURNE

By Sasha Uzunov

In 2007 Paul O'Sullivan, the then head of the Australia Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) warned that global terrorism would continue and there were no guarantees against more civilian casualties. In effect, all our law enforcement and security agencies can do is to minimise it as best as possible.

In light of this, a little known Victoria Police operation 20 years ago helped to stop the flood of illegal weapons getting onto the streets and into the hands of home grown terrorists. The impact it had was to send a message--loud and clear-- that overseas linked crime and terror were not going to be tolerated in the state of Victoria, Australia.

That story can now be told because one of the leading figures behind that operation is seriously ill and may not have long to live. Detective #####, who retired in 1998, was part of the PSG (Protective Services Group) within the Victoria Police at the old Russell Street offices in Melbourne’s city centre. He was tasked with investigating terrorist organisations including the Tamil Tigers, and ethnic-linked crime. He was very knowledgeable about the activities of Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) on Australian soil and even knew some of the key agents of influence!

I got to know ##### in the late 1980s as a young reporter interested in ethnic-related crime. My parents are Macedonian migrants. He was a canny operator who would pump you for information and would never reveal anything unless it was in his interest to do so.

When he got wind of me investigating a leading UDBa agent of influence based in Melbourne with links to the Australian Labor Party’s (ALP) Socialist Left faction, he offered some fatherly advice by warning me that the agent of influence was “being protected by people high above.”

But ###### then proceeded to reveal to me that the agent of influence had between 1968 and 1979 amassed criminal convictions in the state of Victoria for stolen goods, illegal gaming and financial deception. The UDBa agent of influence was permitted to work as a state public servant despite his criminal record because ASIO had sealed his rap sheet from access. The inference being that the agent of influence may have been cultivated as a “double agent.”

One of his favourite warnings was" If you write anything about me, I'll chop you!"

He telephoned me out of the blue in 1990 asking for some information on a stolen weapons racket and if I had heard anything. He said he was deeply concerned about weapons getting into the hands of the wrong people. I told him I knew nothing and asked if he would elaborate.

But ###### being the loyal policeman did not go into detail. Months later, the story unfolded about a Police operation targeting stolen weapons. One of those unexpectedly caught in the dragnet was Oliver Bubevich (aka as Bubev, Bubevski), also the son of Macedonian migrants, and a Vic Roads (vehicle licensing office) employee and the then owner of a pub (bar) in Fitzroy, a Melbourne’s northern inner suburb. Bubevich was an obsessed illegal gun collector without links to organised crime or Yugoslav intelligence.

According to a Herald Sun report, dated 22 March 1991, "A MAN who hid a gun in his stove and ammunition in his kitchen cupboards was fined $2500 yesterday for possessing 15 unregistered firearms. Magistrate Mr David McLennan also ordered Oliver Bubevich to perform 300 hours of unpaid community work.

"Melbourne Magistrates' Court heard on Wednesday that Bubevich was fascinated with guns and had 23 weapons - all with serial numbers drilled out or stamped over. The weapons, hidden throughout his Thomastown house, were found when police raided the property last year. Bubevich, 36, of Winamarra Cres, pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawful possession, one count of possessing silencers and 15 counts of possessing unregistered and unlicensed firearms.

The court was told police raided Bubevich's house after finding two unregistered handguns in his car and another two unregistered weapons in a second man's car after Bubevich had sold them to him.

"Bubevich denied supplying guns to the underworld and said his fascination with guns had led him to disregard the fact the serial numbers had been deleted. He told the court he had bought two of the guns from a man at a Fitzroy hotel and had found the rest on the site of a demolished Preston house.

" On 21 March 1991, the Herald Sun wrote: "Prosecutor Sen-Constable Maurice Lynn told the court Bubevich was arrested after police found two guns in his car on November 7, 1990. "They found two more guns, a .38 Rossi revolver and a .32 Webley and Scott pistol in a second man's car after Bubevich had sold them to him, he said. Sen-Constable Lynn said police then raided Bubevich's house and found 23 unregistered guns, two silencers and a large quantity of ammunition in kitchen cupboards.

"Bubevich's lawyer, Mr Peter Finkelstein, said his client was a "gun collector gone wrong". Magistrate David McLennan said he was not satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Bubevich had supplied guns to crime figures."

I lost contact with ###### when I joined the Australian Army as a soldier in 1995, serving until 2002. Recently, I heard from someone close to his family that he is seriously ill.

Victoria Police's motto is Uphold the Right...Tenez Le Droit...It certainly did that back in 1990-91 in keeping our streets safe from weapons falling into the hands of the bad guys. But we should never remain complacent.

(end)

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/

Friday, May 07, 2010
PART 2 : The fight against Yugoslav intelligence

SECOND part in a series on Yugoslav intelligence activities on Australian soil from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

PATRIOT GAMES: ONE MAN’S FIGHT AGAINST UDBa
By Sasha Uzunov

During the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, an intelligence war was waged by the communist regime of Yugoslavia to intimidate and silence Australia’s Macedonian migrant community but one man, George Kostrevski, managed to fight the good fight.

In 1991, I met the feisty and well respected Kostrevski who was President of the Australian-Macedonian Welfare Council, in Melbourne’s western suburbs and a champion of free political thought. The AMWC is now known as the Macedonian Community Welfare Association (MCWA).

Kostrevski, who was a Socialist-Left Australian Labor Party (ALP) member and an admirer of legendary ALP right-wing kingmaker George Seitz, alleged that in 1983 he had been ordered by a local Yugoslav agent of influence in July 1983 to: “hold the Yugoslav political line…or he would not be allowed to return to Macedonia to visit relatives.”

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modeled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states of Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America and Australia, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivaled the old Soviet KGB in liquidating opponents.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

In the 1970s and 80s, a number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy. We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa agent provocateurs.

Mr David Perrin, a Liberal Victorian (Australian) State Member of Parliament for Bulleen, in 1990 accused in parliament the Melbourne-based and tax-payer funded Australian Yugoslav Welfare Society (AYWS) of being a front for Yugoslav intelligence.

Kostrevski, despite the fear generated by Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa), refused to be silenced. He had tried to raise this issue with his comrades within the ALP Socialist Left but it fell on deaf ears. In frustration he met with the Liberal Perrin at the MP’s electoral office in June 1991. Kostrevski invited me to sit in on the discussion and asked I keep this quiet whilst he was alive in case his family was targeted.

Kostrevski named names, dates, places and extraordinary detail as to the activities of UDBa in Melbourne, in particular how Macedonian community organisations had been infiltrated.

He passed away in 2002 and was granted a posthumous Victorian State Award for Excellence in Multicultural Affairs.

Kostrevski was a humanitarian who believed in non-violence to combat UDBa as well as proving welfare services to his community. It would be fitting if The Republic of Macedonia, which broke away from communist Yugoslavia in 1991, awarded him a high state order posthumously for his services in defending human rights and freedom of speech.

PART 1 – published in scoop.co.nz

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00021.htm
Tuesday, March 02, 2010

ASIO’S POOR RECORD
By Sasha Uzunov

The alleged use of Australian passports by Mossad--Israeli intelligence—agents in a recent Middle East assassination suggest an impotent Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which is responsible for our domestic safety. But ASIO has a poor record in tracking down the bad guys.

In 2006 The Australian reporter Cameron Stewart revealed that Chinese communist spies were running rampant in Canberra so much so that ASIO increased it recruitment of agents.
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/spy-drive-to-tackle-chinese/story-e6frg6nf-1111112747905

Columnist John Birmingham has taken the mickey out of ASIO’s slick new job ads in search of nosey, latte-sipping spies. www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/the-man-with-the-golden--cufflinks-and-matching-tie-pin/20100224-p39q.html

It is both tragic and comical but ASIO has a poor record in catching the bad guys. The 1970s infiltration of Australia by then Yugoslav communist spies is a classic case.

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modelled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America and Australia, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivaled the old Soviet KGB and Mossad in liquidating opponents. In Munich, West Germany, a whole section of a cemetery was set-aside for Croats assassinated by UDBa.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

A number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy.

No doubt this was not helped by the fact that a sizable number of Croats during World War II had collaborated with the Nazis. However, a large number had also fought against the Nazis as Partizans, including Franjo Tudjman later to become President of independent Croatia in 1991. But UDBa began to target the émigré Macedonian community in Australia, which had no history of large-scale Nazi collaboration, in fact the opposite.

Then there is Federal Attorney General Lionel Murphy’s infamous ASIO raid on 16 March 1973.

So much has been written about Murphy’s raid on ASIO. The controversial politician used the pretext that he was being kept in the dark by ASIO about alleged émigré Croatian terrorism on Australian soil aimed against the Yugoslav government. ALP Prime Minister Gough Whitlam said the Murphy raid was a mistake which hurt his government.

On 27 June 2007, I applied under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the media briefing notes of George Negus, Murphy’s Press Secretary and later celebrity war reporter, hoping if they could throw more light on the raid. But I ended hitting a bureaucratic brick wall.

We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa. In 1991 legendary ABC TV investigative reporter Chris Masters dropped a bombshell on the Four Corners program.

Masters filed a story about The Croatian Six case. An agent provocateur set up members of Australia's Croatian community in 1979. Six Croats were imprisoned on false charges of wanting to plant bombs in Sydney. Masters tracked down the agent provocateur, Vitomir Visimovic, who was an ethnic Serb living in Bosnia but had passed himself off as a Croat.

In fact, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police (successor of the Commonwealth Police) and the infamous and corrupt New South Wales Police Special Branch were all aware that Visimovic was an UDBa operative but suppressed the information during the trial of the Croatian Six. Moreover, the alarming thing was the Australian authorities let the man depart the country. This was during Malcolm Fraser’s tenure as Prime Minister.

Masters’ older brother, fellow journalist and Rugby League Legend, Rugged Roy Masters wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on November 25, 2005:

“It is fashionable now to be a Croatian Australian, what with nearly half the Socceroos, including captain Mark Viduka, of Croatian background, plus Tony Santic, the owner of Makybe Diva, the triple Melbourne Cup-winning horse, and Andrew Bogut, the basketballer making a big impression in the United States.

“But when a young Scottish-born girl named Shirley, raised in north Queensland, started going out with Nikola Stedul, a Croatian-born cane cutter, in the early 1960s, her sister was horrified, asking, "Does he carry a knife?"

"Croatians were the bogymen then," Shirley, who married Stedul in 1965, said. "Like Muslims are today."

The Steduls, who live in the Melbourne suburb of Altona, after being adrift in Europe for 30 years because the Australian government would not renew Stedul's passport, warn the new anti-terrorism laws will create more problems than they are likely to solve. They claim a possible outcome is a society divided into the privileged and the proscribed, creating fertile ground for home-grown terrorism.

"Paradoxically, the police and security agencies will be more efficient but the population will be less secure," Stedul, 68, says.

“The Steduls accuse ASIO of conspiring with the Yugoslav secret police to prevent them returning to Australia and co-operating with a paid assassin, Vinko Sindicic, who fired six bullets into Stedul as he leaned through a car window outside their Edinburgh [UK] home on October 20, 1988.

“Two bullets entered his mouth and four were fired into his body, one nicking his spinal cord, causing a slight limp.

“Sindicic was arrested at Heathrow Airport after a neighbour had recorded the registration number of the hire car from which he had shot Stedul.

“The assassination attempt and the resulting trial, where Sindicic was sentenced to 32 years' jail, were given widespread publicity, and a film was produced for Scottish television. At the trial it was revealed that Sindicic had been in Australia in 1978, working with another Yugoslav agent on a plan to link Croatian political activists with terrorism.”

Television reporter Sarah Ferguson, the wife of ABC TV Lateline host Tony Jones, rehashed some of the discredited claims of Croatian terrorism on the now defunct Channel Nine program Sunday:

“The post-war migration boom brought not only cultural diversity, it brought ethnic divisions and old-country politics and foreign agents. It also spawned the first manifestations of domestic terrorism, a threat ASIO failed to deal with because the offenders were anti-communist Croatian nationalists.”

(The Spying Game, 2 April 2006, Sunday program)

Ferguson did not interview Chris Masters about his 1991 expose nor did she speak to anyone from the Croatian community.

Because my parents were Macedonian migrants to Australia, I naturally developed an interest in UDBa’s activities. I began to investigate the infiltration of the local Macedonian community by UDBa. My quest took me to Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia in 1993, which broke away from Yugoslavia together with Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991. I spoke to Aleksander Dinevski, a former high-ranking official within the Interior Ministry, responsible for both the Police and Security Services.

Dinevski revealed he had read a number of files that confirmed UDBa had monitored and infiltrated Australia’s Macedonian community.

On 6 January 2006 I received a curious email out of the blue from Dr John Schindler, Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy, United States. Naval War College:

“I encountered your recent article discussing UDBa terrorism and was intrigued. I'm doing research into the topic of Yugoslav state security (UDBa, later SDB) anti-émigré operations during the Cold War, including assassinations.

“I've found some information you cite, including the ASIO scandals of the 1970s, but as an American I must confess some of the cases you cite (eg Croatian Six) were new to me. Have you published anything else on this topic? Any thoughts on where I ought to be looking for more info on UDBa operations in Australia?”

I explained to Dr Schindler that the Australian authorities, in particular ASIO, had turned a blind eye to UDBa operations on Australian soil or had tried to hush things up.

In 1974 Dr Blagoja Sambevski a Macedonian dissident living in West Germany was assassinated by having his skull smashed in ala Trotsky style by an UDBa hit man in a Munich train station. In 1981the hit man entered Australia on an unknown task but was quietly told to leave by immigration officials.

Mr David Perrin, a Liberal Victorian State MP for Bulleen, in 1990 accused in parliament the Melbourne-based and tax-payer funded Australian Yugoslav Welfare Society (AYWS) of being a front for Yugoslav intelligence.

Professor Nikola Zezov, an academic at Saints Kiril and Metodi (Cyril and Methodius) University in Skopje, has bravely explored Macedonia’s controversial communist past within Yugoslavia.

He is co-author of the 2005 ground-breaking book “The repressed and repression in contemporary Macedonian history” (Represijata I represiranite vo sovremena Makedonska istorija). He was given access to 14,000 intelligence files. He concluded that one in five Macedonians living in communist Yugoslavia (1945-91) were paid informers for UDBa. This is an alarming figure on par with East German communist intelligence, the Stasi, and its hold on the population.

In March 1993, Stevce Pavlovski, Macedonia’s Public Prosecutor told me in an interview he would not open an investigation into communist crimes because he would end up having to imprison fifty per cent of Macedonia’s old communists.

It is surprising that no Australian big name investigative reporter or scholar has ever bothered to access the old UDBa files held in the newly independent states of Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro (Crna Gora), and Kosovo. They must contain a goldmine of information on Australian politicians and journalists!

(end)

The fight against Yugoslav intelligence

2010-05-07T11:38:00.002+10:00

SECOND part in a series on Yugoslav intelligence acitivities on Australian soil from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

PATRIOT GAMES: ONE MAN’S FIGHT AGAINST UDBa
By Sasha Uzunov

During the 1970s, 80s and early 90s, an intelligence war was waged by the communist regime of Yugoslavia to intimidate and silence Australia’s Macedonian migrant community but one man, George Kostrevski, managed to fight the good fight.

In 1991, I met the feisty and well respected Kostrevski who was President of the Australian-Macedonian Welfare Council, in Melbourne’s western suburbs and a champion of free political thought. The AMWC is now known as the Macedonian Community Welfare Association (MCWA).

Kostrevski, who was a Socialist-Left Australian Labor Party (ALP) member and an admirer of legendary ALP right-wing kingmaker George Seitz, alleged that in 1983 he had been ordered by a local Yugoslav agent of influence in July 1983 to: “hold the Yugoslav political line…or he would not be allowed to return to Macedonia to visit relatives.”

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modeled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states of Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America and Australia, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivaled the old Soviet KGB in liquidating opponents.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

In the 1970s and 80s, a number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy. We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa agent provocateurs.

Mr David Perrin, a Liberal Victorian (Australian) State Member of Parliament for Bulleen, in 1990 accused in parliament the Melbourne-based and tax-payer funded Australian Yugoslav Welfare Society (AYWS) of being a front for Yugoslav intelligence.

Kostrevski, despite the fear generated by Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa), refused to be silenced. He had tried to raise this issue with his comrades within the ALP Socialist Left but it fell on deaf ears. In frustration he met with the Liberal Perrin at the MP’s electoral office in June 1991. Kostrevski invited me to sit in on the discussion and asked I keep this quiet whilst he was alive in case his family was targeted.

Kostrevski named names, dates, places and extraordinary detail as to the activities of UDBa in Melbourne, in particular how Macedonian community organisations had been infiltrated.

He passed away in 2002 and was granted a posthumous Victorian State Award for Excellence in Multicultural Affairs.

Kostrevski was a humanitarian who believed in non-violence to combat UDBa as well as proving welfare services to his community. It would be fitting if The Republic of Macedonia, which broke away from communist Yugoslavia in 1991, awarded him a high state order posthumously for his services in defending human rights and freedom of speech.

PART 1 – published in scoop.co.nz

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00021.htm
Tuesday, March 02, 2010

ASIO’S POOR RECORD
By Sasha Uzunov

The alleged use of Australian passports by Mossad--Israeli intelligence—agents in a recent Middle East assassination suggest an impotent Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which is responsible for our domestic safety. But ASIO has a poor record in tracking down the bad guys.

In 2006 The Australian reporter Cameron Stewart revealed that Chinese communist spies were running rampant in Canberra so much so that ASIO increased it recruitment of agents.
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/spy-drive-to-tackle-chinese/story-e6frg6nf-1111112747905

Columnist John Birmingham has taken the mickey out of ASIO’s slick new job ads in search of nosey, latte-sipping spies. www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/the-man-with-the-golden--cufflinks-and-matching-tie-pin/20100224-p39q.html

It is both tragic and comical but ASIO has a poor record in catching the bad guys. The 1970s infiltration of Australia by then Yugoslav communist spies is a classic case.

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modelled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America and Australia, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivalled the old Soviet KGB and Mossad in liquidating opponents. In Munich, West Germany, a whole section of a cemetery was set-aside for Croats assassinated by UDBa.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

A number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy.

No doubt this was not helped by the fact that a sizeable number of Croats during World War II had collaborated with the Nazis. However, a large number had also fought against the Nazis as Partizans, including Franjo Tudjman later to become President of independent Croatia in 1991. But UDBa began to target the émigré Macedonian community in Australia, which had no history of large-scale Nazi collaboration, in fact the opposite.

Then there is Federal Attorney General Lionel Murphy’s infamous ASIO raid on 16 March 1973.
So much has been written about Murphy’s raid on ASIO. The controversial politician used the pretext that he was being kept in the dark by ASIO about alleged émigré Croatian terrorism on Australian soil aimed against the Yugoslav government. ALP Prime Minister Gough Whitlam said the Murphy raid was a mistake which hurt his government.

On 27 June 2007, I applied under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the media briefing notes of George Negus, Murphy’s Press Secretary and later celebrity war reporter, hoping if they could throw more light on the raid. But I ended hitting a bureaucratic brick wall.

We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa. In 1991 legendary ABC TV investigative reporter Chris Masters dropped a bombshell on the Four Corners program.

Masters filed a story about The Croatian Six case. An agent provocateur set up members of Australia's Croatian community in 1979. Six Croats were imprisoned on false charges of wanting to plant bombs in Sydney. Masters tracked down the agent provocateur, Vitomir Visimovic, who was an ethnic Serb living in Bosnia but had passed himself off as a Croat.

In fact, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police (successor of the Commonwealth Police) and the infamous and corrupt New South Wales Police Special Branch were all aware that Visimovic was an UDBa operative but suppressed the information during the trial of the Croatian Six. Moreover, the alarming thing was the Australian authorities let the man depart the country. This was during Malcolm Fraser’s tenure as Prime Minister.

Masters’ older brother, fellow journalist and Rugby League Legend, Rugged Roy Masters wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on November 25, 2005:

“It is fashionable now to be a Croatian Australian, what with nearly half the Socceroos, including captain Mark Viduka, of Croatian background, plus Tony Santic, the owner of Makybe Diva, the triple Melbourne Cup-winning horse, and Andrew Bogut, the basketballer making a big impression in the United States.

“But when a young Scottish-born girl named Shirley, raised in north Queensland, started going out with Nikola Stedul, a Croatian-born cane cutter, in the early 1960s, her sister was horrified, asking, "Does he carry a knife?"

"Croatians were the bogymen then," Shirley, who married Stedul in 1965, said. "Like Muslims are today."

The Steduls, who live in the Melbourne suburb of Altona, after being adrift in Europe for 30 years because the Australian government would not renew Stedul's passport, warn the new anti-terrorism laws will create more problems than they are likely to solve. They claim a possible outcome is a society divided into the privileged and the proscribed, creating fertile ground for home-grown terrorism.

"Paradoxically, the police and security agencies will be more efficient but the population will be less secure," Stedul, 68, says.

“The Steduls accuse ASIO of conspiring with the Yugoslav secret police to prevent them returning to Australia and co-operating with a paid assassin, Vinko Sindicic, who fired six bullets into Stedul as he leaned through a car window outside their Edinburgh [UK] home on October 20, 1988.

“Two bullets entered his mouth and four were fired into his body, one nicking his spinal cord, causing a slight limp.

“Sindicic was arrested at Heathrow Airport after a neighbour had recorded the registration number of the hire car from which he had shot Stedul.

“The assassination attempt and the resulting trial, where Sindicic was sentenced to 32 years' jail, were given widespread publicity, and a film was produced for Scottish television. At the trial it was revealed that Sindicic had been in Australia in 1978, working with another Yugoslav agent on a plan to link Croatian political activists with terrorism.”

Television reporter Sarah Ferguson, the wife of ABC TV Lateline host Tony Jones, rehashed some of the discredited claims of Croatian terrorism on the now defunct Channel Nine program Sunday:

“The post-war migration boom brought not only cultural diversity, it brought ethnic divisions and old-country politics and foreign agents. It also spawned the first manifestations of domestic terrorism, a threat ASIO failed to deal with because the offenders were anti-communist Croatian nationalists.”

(The Spying Game, 2 April 2006, Sunday program)

Ferguson did not interview Chris Masters about his 1991 expose nor did she speak to anyone from the Croatian community.

Beacause my parents were Macedonian migrants to Australia, I naturally developed an interest in UDBa’s activities. I began to investigate the infiltration of the local Macedonian community by UDBa. My quest took me to Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia in 1993, which broke away from Yugoslavia together with Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991. I spoke to Aleksander Dinevski, a former high-ranking official within the Interior Ministry, responsible for both the Police and Security Services.

Dinevski revealed he had read a number of files that confirmed UDBa had monitored and infiltrated Australia’s Macedonian community.

On 6 January 2006 I received a curious email out of the blue from Dr John Schindler, Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy, United States. Naval War College:

“I encountered your recent article discussing UDBa terrorism and was intrigued. I'm doing research into the topic of Yugoslav state security (UDBa, later SDB) anti-émigré operations during the Cold War, including assassinations.

“I've found some information you cite, including the ASIO scandals of the 1970s, but as an American I must confess some of the cases you cite (eg Croatian Six) were new to me. Have you published anything else on this topic? Any thoughts on where I ought to be looking for more info on UDBa operations in Australia?”

I explained to Dr Schindler that the Australian authorities, in particular ASIO, had turned a blind eye to UDBa operations on Australian soil or had tried to hush things up.

In 1974 Dr Blagoja Sambevski a Macedonian dissident living in West Germany was assassinated by having his skull smashed in ala Trotsky style by an UDBa hit man in a Munich train station. In 1981the hit man entered Australia on an unknown task but was quietly told to leave by immigration officials.

Mr David Perrin, a Liberal Victorian State MP for Bulleen, in 1990 accused in parliament the Melbourne-based and tax-payer funded Australian Yugoslav Welfare Society (AYWS) of being a front for Yugoslav intelligence.

Professor Nikola Zezov, an academic at Saints Kiril and Metodi (Cyril and Methodius) University in Skopje, has bravely explored Macedonia’s controversial communist past within Yugoslavia.

He is co-author of the 2005 ground-breaking book “The repressed and repression in contemporary Macedonian history” (Represijata I represiranite vo sovremena Makedonska istorija). He was given access to 14,000 intelligence files. He concluded that one in five Macedonians living in communist Yugoslavia (1945-91) were paid informers for UDBa. This is an alarming figure on par with East German communist intelligence, the Stasi, and its hold on the population.

In March 1993, Stevce Pavlovski, Macedonia’s Public Prosecutor told me in an interview he would not open an investigation into communist crimes because he would end up having to imprison fifty per cent of Macedonia’s old communists.

It is surprising that no Australian big name investigative reporter or scholar has ever bothered to access the old UDBa files held in the newly independent states of Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro (Crna Gora), and Kosovo. They must contain a goldmine of information on Australian politicians and journalists!

(end)

COMMANDOS SET UP BY TALIBAN

2010-04-28T11:25:00.003+10:00

On the left is the Australian Army Major in charge of the Commando raid in February 2009 in Afghanistan. This photo was taken in 2001. Copyright Sasha Uzunov.

Exclusive – TEAM UZUNOV INVESTIGATION

COMMANDOS RETURN MEDIA FIRE: “We were set up by Taliban”
By Sasha Uzunov

Sources close to The Australian Army’s elite reservist unit, 1 Commando Regiment have told TEAM UZUNOV that members from that unit on a patrol in Afghanistan last February were fired upon by the Taliban and in the ensuing battle five local children were killed by grenades thrown by the Australians.

“These guys were set up by the Taliban,” one of the sources said. “When they encountered enemy fire during a room clearance inside a home they reacted to their training. The Taliban used the locals as civilian shields.”

Serving Australian Defence Forces personnel are not permitted to comment to the media unless given permission by the Defence Department. Sources close to 1 Commando Regiment have revealed to TEAM UZUNOV the name of the overall mission commander responsible for the raid and other participants.

The commander holds the rank of Major and is an experienced and well respected Regular Army Special Forces operator. His name, for security reasons, cannot be revealed. TEAM UZUNOV during his service as a soldier met the Major, and can say that he was regarded as popular amongst the ordinary rank and file.

One of the patrol members is a Commando Reservist and a New South Wales Policeman in civilian life, who according to one of the sources is highly experienced with previous service in East Timor.

“What happened was unfortunate,” one of the sources said. “But our guys were simply tricked by the Taliban. I can’t understand why they’re being made a scapegoat. This nonsense of rivalry between Regular Army and Chockos (Reservist) is simply bullshit. The raid had people from both sides involved.”

SBS TV’s Dateline program reporter Sophie McNeill and Fairfax newspaper journalists Tom Hyland and Jonathan Pearlman have been following the story. Accusations have been made that the Defence Department has been involved in a cover up over the raid.

The host of the ABC TV’s Media Watch program--journalism watchdog—Jonathan Holmes has complained about a lack of media access in Afghanistan. (Media Access and Afghanistan, Episode 11, 19 April 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2876988.htm).

Media Watch, after a tip off from an Afghani-Australian which could not be ignored, discovered Dateline had confused the identity of an Afghan man, Zahir Khan, with someone else over an interview concerning a botched raid by Australian Commandos which resulted in the death of 5 children in February 2009. Dateline sat on the mistake for a year. www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2853029.htm

TEAM UZUNOV supports the fierce scrutiny of Australia’s Defence Forces but also believes there needs to be consistency when scrutiny is applied. The media should also fall under that spotlight.

McNeill in 2008 asked not to be contacted to discuss defence issues, including Afghanistan; Hyland is against non-Fairfax journalists scrutinising defence experts.

Peter Charley, the then Executive Producer of the ABC TV program Lateline and now with SBS’s Dateline, issued this warning over scrutiny on defence reporting: “It is neither wise nor clever to suggest that "little ol' Lateline” is "afraid" to have anyone on the program…” (Friday 13 January 2006, email).”

In an extraordinary outburst, Holmes does not believe that big name war reporter Paul McGeough should be asked tough questions, despite the fact he makes his living doing so of others:

“Paul McGeough, who you so snidely deride, has probably spent more time in the “Afghan war zone” – and in Iraq, for that matter – than any other Australian journalist – including you. The fact that he doesn’t have a military background is to my mind entirely irrelevant.”
http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/10/abc-media-watch-responds.html

(end)

Link:

Afghan scandal & Australian media response
www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10227
Online Opinion - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate.

Scrutinising the media's scrutiny of defenceBy Sasha Uzunov - Tuesday, 30 March 2010

TIMOR TOUR OF DUTY...now on DVD

2010-04-16T10:04:00.001+10:00

LUKE LEON MEDIA (ABN: 91310556447) in association with Sasha Uzunov...

TIMOR TOUR OF DUTY...now available on DVD....RATED M...

Timor Tour Of Duty, which looks at the Indonesian military's secret war against Australian and New Zealand troops and international peacekeepers in East Timor, received a special commendation Platinum Reel Award from the 2009 Nevada Film Festival.

The film made its US and international screen debut at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival in October 2009.

THE DVD includes 4 extra minutes of two scenes cut from the original film festival screening.

Official film website:
http://timortourofduty.blogspot.com/

news story clipping:

www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/29/2727819.htm

Price is $25.50 (postage & handling and GST included) within Australia.... Order your copy....

Payment by Australia Post Money Order.

Luke Leon Media
PO BOX 172
Preston VIC 3072
Australia

Overseas orders contact Sasha Uzunov on luke-leon@hotmail.com for further details.

Europe/Asia/Pacific/New Zealand/North America
DVD PAL $35.50 (Australian) -including postage & handling & GST.

SBS Dateline get it wrong on Afghan story

2010-03-31T13:05:00.010+11:00

Post Script to my story: Scrutinising the media's scrutiny of defence

www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2853029.htm
22 March 2010
In Search of Zahir Khan.

The ABC TV's Media Watch program did a take down on SBS TV's Dateline story about the Afghan scandal as reported by Sophie McNeill. Absolutely hilarious stuff up. The identity of an Afghan man, Zahir Khan, was confused with someone else over an interview concerning a botched raid by Australian Commandos which resulted in the death of 5 children in February 2009.

SOPHIE McNEILL MISSING IN ACTION?
Will the real Zahir Khan please stand up?

Old Dateline website blurb about Sophie McNeill once read: www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10004

“Pick, arguably, the most dangerous region in the world today and that’s where you'll find Sophie McNeill.”

But not according to Media Watch www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2853029.htm

Sophie McNeill was in Australia when the story broke, and she stayed there. She couldn't have travelled safely to the remote village in Oruzgan where the killings took place. So instead, she explained to her viewers, Dateline turned for help to a producer it had worked with in Afghanistan before, called Fazel Reshad.

TEAM UZUNOV guarantee, when we do a big story we will go to the source, including on the spot in Afghanistan!

More on Sophie McNeill:

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10004

Reporting on the Reporters - Online Opinion

and

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10227
Scrutinising the media's scrutiny of defence

Afghan scandal & Australian media response

2010-03-30T12:24:00.003+11:00

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10227
Online Opinion - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate.

Scrutinising the media's scrutiny of defence
By Sasha Uzunov - Tuesday, 30 March 2010

If the media scrutinise the tip of the spear in combat - recent Australian soldiers' behaviour on the ground in the Afghan war - then they need to scrutinise the spear throwers - the politicians and defence experts and journalists.

A case in point has been SBS TV reporter Sophie McNeill and Fairfax newspaper journalists Jonathon Pearlman and Tom Hyland who have been ferociously targeting the Australian Army’s 1 Commando Regiment over a botched raid which resulted in the killing of children in Afghanistan last February.

Soldiers from that unit, largely reservist, could possibly face legal proceedings for murder, manslaughter, negligence and so on. But there are three important issues about the Afghan incident: due process of law, the presumption of innocence and who shapes Australia’s defence policy.

McNeill, Pearlman and Hyland have probably sensed Army blood and a possible Walkley Award for what they perceive is “Australia’s My Lai”. But some of us who are journalists and ex-soldiers believe that McNeill, Pearlman and Hyland have a democratic right to scrutinise the military. We would uphold their freedom of speech. The irony is that the media do not believe that the ordinary tax payer has the right to scrutinise the media in its coverage of defence issues.

In 2008 McNeill requested I not contact her to discuss defence issues, including Afghanistan. Hyland has gone on the record to allude that those who are not Fairfax journalists but who scrutinise defence experts are involved in a curious crusade.

The question is why are Australia’s big name reporters so tough when it comes to “exposing” defence scandals but are so panicked by a few straight forward questions about their war reporting credentials?

McNeill’s boss at SBS TV’s Dateline, Peter Charley, also does not like being questioned over how defence issues are covered.

Methinks SBS, the ABC and Fairfax protesteth too much!

Hyland the “defence expert” for The Sunday Age wrote in “Deadly Afghan raids expose leadership failings” on March 21, 2010:

The regiment's experiences have triggered an intense debate within army ranks - about Special Forces tactics, and wider questions about a political and military preference for sending Special Forces, rather than large infantry units, to conflicts like Afghanistan.

It is funny for Hyland to ask this question because the answer may not be to his liking. In fact it might be too close to home, if you pardon the pun. Let me explain.

On January 21, 2005 I wrote an op-ed piece for The Herald Sun newspaper in which I was the first to indentify this change in Australian Army warfighting doctrine.

Some have criticised General (Peter) Cosgrove on his over reliance on the SAS (Special Forces) to do the fighting in East Timor that would normally have been taken up by the regular infantry. But I think this criticism is unjustified.

Criticism should be aimed at the government of the day (Howard 1996-2007) and those at home squeamish about seeing a 19-year-old lad away from home for the first time fighting a war. Better to send the SAS, whose identity cannot be revealed ...

On September 9, 2008 I wrote:

To top that off, a legacy of the Nelson-Howard military doctrine has the Special Forces doing most of the fighting (in Afghanistan), because of the fear of casualties to our regular infantry units. The long term effect could be burn out of our Special Forces. But the irony is if we withdraw our SF units and do not replace them with infantry units, then the pressure on Taliban is eased. It is one contradictory military doctrine, to say the least.

Here is a key point that has been missed, until recently: why is it Australian Defence Policy to use Special Forces in an infantry role in Afghanistan, as well as throwing Army reservists in the deep end? Who caused this dramatic shift in defence thinking?

Something Hyland has not touched upon is that the change came about in Defence policy when two key “experts”, Professor Paul Dibb and ex-Fairfax journalist turned government advisor Hugh White, decided to cut back the number of infantry. This led to the consequences of using reservists in combat roles and stretched our Special Forces to breaking point.

During Bob Hawke’s Prime Ministership (1983-91) he brought in British academic Professor Paul Dibb and ex-Fairfax journalist Hugh White. Their brief was to transform the defence department with a number of reports, Defence White Papers and so on. Instead we ended up with a mess that took more than a decade to bring under some form of control.

Mr Bruce Haigh, a former diplomat revealed during an interview with SBS TV’s Dateline program on September 27, 2000 that:

Defence is the department that’s divided amongst itself, as far as I can gather, and there are certain people inside Defence who’ve taken a certain line for a long period of time - the Paul Dibb line, if you like, which is high-tech, US-alliance - and you’ve got others who are saying, "No. We’ve got the situation to the north- we need to have more people in uniform, we need to have them trained, we need to have night-vision equipment provided for them. “… the Australian Army can see what needs to be done, but many of the civilian Defence personnel, who’ve built their careers on playing up to this particular line, are arguing the other case, and feeling increasingly isolated, because they are not facing reality. That’s the problem.

Respected Brigadier Jim Wallace, former Special Forces Commander, wrote in 2003:

Unfortunately, Australian defence policy has been mainly wrong for the whole of this period. Even after we committed troops to East Timor, Professor Paul Dibb, the policy's chief architect, was standing in front of parliamentary committees vowing that Australia would not be conducting what he called "expeditionary" operations out of the region. This was despite a series of major UN deployments over many years to places as far afield as Rwanda and Somalia. Afghanistan and Iraq have hopefully now discredited this logic.

At the same time, Dr Hugh White was arguing in initial drafts for the 2000 white paper to reduce the size of our army to about 19,000, on the basis that, like Professor Dibb, he didn't see the Government needing options for deployment out of the region, particularly for sending the army. The result has been an incredible demand on the dedication and professionalism of our special forces as they have again been thrown into the breach that our supposedly expert defence planners couldn't predict.

We now await to see if McNeill, Hyland and Pearlman will be ferociously chasing ex-Fairfax journalist Hugh White for answers. Perhaps this is not part of the script. Only those who serve in uniform can and do make mistakes, those who are arm-chair generals can do no wrong!

-----

FAIRFAX CRUSADE AGAINST 1 COMMANDO REGIMENT

2010-03-21T13:15:00.009+11:00

In 1998, a year before the break out of conflict in East Timor, Lieutenant General Frank Hickling, then Chief of the Australian Army, wisely undid some of the damage caused by defence experts in their running down of the Army's warfighting capability. It seems the Australian media have failed to scrutinise these "failed defence theorists" in light of recent controversies in Afghanistan. Hickling is pictured (second from left) with then Major General Peter Cosgrove, the 1999 East Timor mission commander. Photo source: ADF.

FAIRFAX'S "CURIOUS CRUSADE" AGAINST 1 COMMANDO REGIMENT
By Sasha Uzunov

Fairfax newspaper reporters Jonathon Pearlman and Tom Hyland are ferociously targeting the Australian Army’s 1 Commando Regiment over an alleged botched raid which resulted in the killing of children in Afghanistan last February. Soldiers from that unit, largely reservist, could possibly face legal proceedings.

But there are three important issues being missed here in the Fairfax’s crusade: due process of law, the presumption of innocence and who shapes Australia’s defence policy.

Here’s a recap. Pearlman wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 5 December 2009

www.smh.com.au/national/soldiers-may-be-first-to-face-charges-for-combat-since-vietnam-20091204-kaxw.html?skin=text-only

A NIGHT-TIME raid in which five Afghan children were killed has cast a cloud over Australia's elite forces and could result in combat-related charges against Australian soldiers for the first time since the Vietnam War.

TEAM UZUNOV on 7 December 2009 reported the other side of the story in www.scoop.nz.co

The Australian Army’s elite reservist unit, 1 Commando Regiment, is being made a scapegoat over allegations of misconduct in Afghanistan, a former unit member has told TEAM UZUNOV.

The experienced ex-Commando said that he was deeply concerned over claims that poorly trained and led members had breached rules of engagement during a raid on house in Afghanistan which resulted in the deaths of 5 local children after grenades had been thrown last February.

“My concern is the unit has been left out to dry by the Defence Department even before judgement has been passed. Let due process of law take place,” he said. “If people were innocent then that should be shouted from the rooftops but if people were guilty then throw the book at them.”

“Whatever the outcome of the investigation, the responsibility is with the government of the day as well Defence Department bureaucrats. It is they who send troops to war.”
-------------------------
Tom Hyland, the “defence expert” for The Sunday Age in "Deadly Afghan raids expose leadership failings" on 21 March 2010 wrote:

link:
www.theage.com.au/world/deadly-afghan-raids-expose-leadership-failings-20100320-qn9t.html

“Now, 12 months on, members of the unit await a decision on whether they will face criminal charges over the deaths of Amrullah and the children, killed on February 12, 2009.”
-----------------------
Tom Hyland quote:, Sunday Age, 21 March, 2010

" Along the way, it has exposed a rivalry almost as old as the army itself, between full-time troops and part-time reservists - chocos, some regulars call them, chocolate soldiers who can't take the heat."
------------------------
TEAM UZUNOV quote, 7 December 2009,

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0912/S00060.htm

Traditionally a fierce rivalry has existed between the Australian Regular Army (ARA) and the Army Reserve (Ares). Reservists are known as “chocolate soldiers” or “chockos” for allegedly not being able to withstand combat and melt under pressure.

Some Regular soldiers and officers see the reservists as allegedly incompetent or as “weekend warriors.” Some reservists regard their full time colleagues as “lifers” unable to think outside the box.
------------------
Tom Hyland, Sunday Age, 21 March 2010

"The regiment's experiences have triggered an intense debate within army ranks - about Special Forces tactics, and wider questions about a political and military preference for sending Special Forces, rather than large infantry units, to conflicts like Afghanistan."
-----------------
2005 UZUNOV STORY ON THE OVER USE OF THE SAS (extract):

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/01/minister-on-afghan-fact-finding-trip.html
The Herald Sun newspaper
A grand political warrior

by Sasha Uzunov21 January 2005

...Some have criticised General (Peter) Cosgrove on his over reliance on the SAS to do the fighting in East Timor that would normally have been taken up by the regular infantry. But I think this criticism is unjustified.

Criticism should be aimed at the government of the day (Howard 1996-2007) and those at home squeamish about seeing a 19 year old lad away from home for the first time fighting a war. Better to send the SAS, whose identity cannot be revealed...

TEAM UZUNOV – 9 September 2008

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/failed-nelson-howard-doctrine-on.html

NELSON-HOWARD MILITARY DOCTRINE: contradiction?

To top that off, a legacy of the Nelson-Howard military doctrine has the Special Forces doing most of the fighting (in Afghanistan), because of the fear of casualties to our regular infantry units. The long term effect could be burn out of our Special Forces. But the irony is if we withdraw our SF units and do not replace them with infantry units, then the pressure on Taliban is eased. It is one contradictory military doctrine, to say the least.

Both Pearlman and Hyland are quite correct to scrutinise the above story and we would encourage them to do so in an even handed manner. We would encourage them to examine overall defence policy and who shapes it.

Here is a key point that has been missed: why is it Australian Defence Policy to use Special Forces in an infantry role in Afghanistan, as well as throwing Army reservists in the deep end? Who caused this dramatic shift in defence thinking?

Hyland has gone on the record as calling anyone, other than fellow Fairfax journalists, who scrutinises defence experts or defence policy engaged in a “curious crusade.” See link: www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9078&page=0

What Pearlman and Hyland will not touch upon is the change came about in Defence policy when two key “experts” Professor Paul Dibb and ex-Fairfax journalist turned government advisor Hugh White decided to cut back the number of full time infantry soldiers with the consequences of using reservists in combat roles.

Here’s a blast from the past:

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8179
Generals and Diggers saved the day in Timor – 20 November 2008

Influential Defence expert and former Fairfax journalist, Hugh White, has revealed that Australia’s involvement in East Timor succeeded because of the Indonesian military’s (TNI) reluctance to fight a full scale war; this is partly true.

"Interfet succeeded as well as it did largely because Habibie and the TNI allowed it to succeed," White said.

Interfet was the name of the 1999 Australian led mission to restore order after East Timor declared its independence from 24 years of harsh Indonesian occupation. BJ Habibie was the then President of Indonesia who permitted East Timor to hold a UN supervised referendum.

White, who was the deputy secretary (strategy and intelligence) in the Defence Department, and the mastermind behind the Interfet mission, fails to mention four big factors behind the success.

They are: the brilliant leadership of two Australian Army generals, Frank Hickling and Interfet Commander Peter Cosgrove, the calibre of the Special Forces, the SASR, and the ordinary digger when confronted by the pro-Indonesian militia groups.

There was a secret war in East Timor fought by Indonesian Special Forces: Kopassus. The objective was to inflict as many casualties on Australians and New Zealanders in the hope that their respective governments would withdraw.

The Howard government at the time deliberately used the Army’s elite Special Forces unit, SASR (Special Air Service Regiment), to do most of the fighting in East Timor: fighting which should have been performed by the infantry.

The political logic was that the public and media would accept SASR casualties rather than a 19-year-old infantryman, fresh out of home or from a small country town.

But political logic does not necessarily make good military sense and vice-versa. In East Timor the pro-Indonesian militia tried to inflict as many casualties as possible on our infantry units, including battalions made up of many reserve/part time soldiers, in the hope that Australia would withdraw.

White is quiet on the issue of throwing reservists into the deep end after the regular army had been gutted; it was only the quality of the ordinary Australian soldier which stopped a disaster from happening.

It was General Frank Hickling’s foresight in 1998 as the Chief of Army that should be acknowledged. He issued his famous “back to basics” order that all Australian soldiers, regular and reserve, must sharpen their war fighting skills. He was concerned at the rundown of the Army.

Ironically, it was White and another defence expert, Paul Dibb, who were the prime movers in cutting back Army numbers in the late 1980s. Neither have ever served in uniform.

Here’s more on Dibb and White

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/rudd-real-mccoy-on-defence.html

September 23, 2008 - RUDD THE REAL McCOY ON DEFENCE?

Whatever PM Rudd’s true motivation is, you have hand it to him he is a very clever strategic/foreign affairs operator that many pundits have not given him the credit. Let me explain by drawing a comparison with Bob Hawke, another ALP Prime Minister (1983-91), also with messianic tendencies.

Hawke was known as the great conciliator whose claim to fame was his ability to bring opposing groups to the negotiating tables and hammer out a deal. During his Prime Ministership he brought in British academic Professor Paul Dibb and ex-Fairfax journalist Hugh White. Their brief was to transform the defence department with a number of reports, Defence White Papers and so on. Instead we ended up with a mess that took over a decade to bring under some form of control.

Mr Bruce Haigh, a former diplomat revealed during an interview with SBS TV’s Dateline program on 27-9-2000 that:

“Defence is the department that’s divided amongst itself, as far as I can gather, and there are certain people inside Defence who’ve taken a certain line for a long period of time - the Paul Dibb line, if you like, which is high-tech, US-alliance - and you’ve got others who are saying, "No. We’ve got the situation to the north- we need to have more people in uniform, we need to have them trained, we need to have night-vision equipment provided for them. “… the Australian Army can see what needs to be done, but many of the civilian Defence personnel, who’ve built their careers on playing up to this particular line, are arguing the other case, and feeling increasingly isolated, because they are not facing reality. That’s the problem.”

Respected Brigadier Jim Wallace, former Special Forces Commander, wrote in 2003:

“Unfortunately, Australian defence policy has been mainly wrong for the whole of this period. Even after we committed troops to East Timor, Professor Paul Dibb, the policy's chief architect, was standing in front of parliamentary committees vowing that Australia would not be conducting what he called "expeditionary" operations out of the region. This was despite a series of major UN deployments over many years to places as far afield as Rwanda and Somalia. Afghanistan and Iraq have hopefully now discredited this logic.

“At the same time, Dr Hugh White was arguing in initial drafts for the 2000 white paper to reduce the size of our army to about 19,000, on the basis that, like Professor Dibb, he didn't see the Government needing options for deployment out of the region, particularly for sending the army. The result has been an incredible demand on the dedication and professionalism of our special forces as they have again been thrown into the breach that our supposedly expert defence planners couldn't predict.”

Professor Dibb’s response was to make the snide remark on the ABC TV Lateline program on July 11, 2002 that Wallace was a “retired brigadier.”

The moral of the story is if your a big name Fairfax journalist you have a "Special Media Licence" to scrutinise or a 'Media Sheriff's Badge" which no one else seems to be entitled to.

ASIO's poor record

2010-03-01T14:04:00.001+11:00

ASIO’S POOR RECORD
By Sasha Uzunov

The alleged use of Australian passports by Mossad--Israeli intelligence—agents in a recent Middle East assassination suggest an impotent Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), which is responsible for our domestic safety. But ASIO has a poor record in tracking down the bad guys.

In 2006 The Australian reporter Cameron Stewart revealed that Chinese communist spies were running rampant in Canberra so much so that ASIO increased it recruitment of agents. www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/spy-drive-to-tackle-chinese/story-e6frg6nf-1111112747905

Columnist John Birmingham has taken the mickey out of ASIO’s slick new job ads in search of nosey, latte-sipping spies. www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/the-man-with-the-golden--cufflinks-and-matching-tie-pin/20100224-p39q.html

It is both tragic and comical but ASIO has a poor record in catching the bad guys. The 1970s infiltration of Australia by then Yugoslav communist spies is a classic case.

Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic communist federation founded in 1945, modeled on the Soviet Union, and fell apart in 1991 into various independent nation states.

Yugoslav intelligence (UDBa) later known as SDB, together with Yugoslav military counter-intelligence (KOS) were largely pre-occupied with silencing dissident Croats, Macedonians, Serbs and Albanians living in Western Europe, North America and Australia, who were agitating for independence from Yugoslavia.

UDBa was so ruthless and efficient it at one time rivaled the old Soviet KGB and Mossad in liquidating opponents. In Munich, West Germany, a whole section of a cemetery was set-aside for Croats assassinated by UDBa.

Communist strongman Marshal Josip Broz Tito ruled Yugoslavia until his death in 1980 and during the height of the Cold War managed a great balancing act between East and West. He was seen as an indirect ally of the West after his infamous split with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1949.

A number of Australian left-wing politicians, including Victorian State MP Joan Coxsedge, began to allege that ASIO was turning a blind eye to extremist Croatian elements, who were secretly training on Australian soil to undertake terrorist attacks on Yugoslav territory or upon Yugoslav diplomatic missions in Australia.

In this atmosphere of terrorism mania during the 1970s Australia’s Croat community were looked upon as the bad guy.

No doubt this was not helped by the fact that a sizeable number of Croats during World War II had collaborated with the Nazis. However, a large number had also fought against the Nazis as Partizans, including Franjo Tudjman later to become President of independent Croatia in 1991. But UDBa began to target the émigré Macedonian community in Australia, which had no history of large-scale Nazi collaboration, in fact the opposite.

Then there is Federal Attorney General Lionel Murphy’s infamous ASIO raid on 16 March 1973.
So much has been written about Murphy’s raid on ASIO. The controversial politician used the pretext that he was being kept in the dark by ASIO about alleged émigré Croatian terrorism on Australian soil aimed against the Yugoslav government. ALP Prime Minister Gough Whitlam said the Murphy raid was a mistake which hurt his government.

On 27 June 2007, I applied under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the media briefing notes of George Negus, Murphy’s Press Secretary and later celebrity war reporter, hoping if they could throw more light on the raid. But I ended hitting a bureaucratic brick wall.

We now know that the alleged Croatian terrorism on Australian soil was the work of UDBa. In 1991 legendary ABC TV investigative reporter Chris Masters dropped a bombshell on the Four Corners program.

Masters filed a story about The Croatian Six case. An agent provocateur set up members of Australia's Croatian community in 1979. Six Croats were imprisoned on false charges of wanting to plant bombs in Sydney. Masters tracked down the agent provocateur, Vitomir Visimovic, who was an ethnic Serb living in Bosnia but had passed himself off as a Croat.

In fact, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police (successor of the Commonwealth Police) and the infamous and corrupt New South Wales Police Special Branch were all aware that Visimovic was an UDBa operative but suppressed the information during the trial of the Croatian Six. Moreover, the alarming thing was the Australian authorities let the man depart the country. This was during Malcolm Fraser’s tenure as Prime Minister.

Masters’ older brother, fellow journalist and Rugby League Legend, Rugged Roy Masters wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on November 25, 2005:

“It is fashionable now to be a Croatian Australian, what with nearly half the Socceroos, including captain Mark Viduka, of Croatian background, plus Tony Santic, the owner of Makybe Diva, the triple Melbourne Cup-winning horse, and Andrew Bogut, the basketballer making a big impression in the United States.

“But when a young Scottish-born girl named Shirley, raised in north Queensland, started going out with Nikola Stedul, a Croatian-born cane cutter, in the early 1960s, her sister was horrified, asking, "Does he carry a knife?"

"Croatians were the bogymen then," Shirley, who married Stedul in 1965, said. "Like Muslims are today."

"The Steduls, who live in the Melbourne suburb of Altona, after being adrift in Europe for 30 years because the Australian government would not renew Stedul's passport, warn the new anti-terrorism laws will create more problems than they are likely to solve. They claim a possible outcome is a society divided into the privileged and the proscribed, creating fertile ground for home-grown terrorism.

"Paradoxically, the police and security agencies will be more efficient but the population will be less secure," Stedul, 68, says.

“The Steduls accuse ASIO of conspiring with the Yugoslav secret police to prevent them returning to Australia and co-operating with a paid assassin, Vinko Sindicic, who fired six bullets into Stedul as he leaned through a car window outside their Edinburgh [UK] home on October 20, 1988.

“Two bullets entered his mouth and four were fired into his body, one nicking his spinal cord, causing a slight limp.

“Sindicic was arrested at Heathrow Airport after a neighbour had recorded the registration number of the hire car from which he had shot Stedul.

“The assassination attempt and the resulting trial, where Sindicic was sentenced to 32 years' jail, were given widespread publicity, and a film was produced for Scottish television. At the trial it was revealed that Sindicic had been in Australia in 1978, working with another Yugoslav agent on a plan to link Croatian political activists with terrorism.”

Television reporter Sarah Ferguson, the wife of ABC TV Lateline host Tony Jones, rehashed some of the discredited claims of Croatian terrorism on the now defunct Channel Nine program Sunday:

“The post-war migration boom brought not only cultural diversity, it brought ethnic divisions and old-country politics and foreign agents. It also spawned the first manifestations of domestic terrorism, a threat ASIO failed to deal with because the offenders were anti-communist Croatian nationalists.”

(The Spying Game, 2 April 2006, Sunday program)

Ferguson did not interview Chris Masters about his 1991 expose nor did she speak to anyone from the Croatian community.

Beacause my parents were Macedonian migrants to Australia, I naturally developed an interest in UDBa’s activities. I began to investigate the infiltration of the local Macedonian community by UDBa. My quest took me to Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia in 1993, which broke away from Yugoslavia together with Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1991. I spoke to Aleksander Dinevski, a former high-ranking official within the Interior Ministry, responsible for both the Police and Security Services.

Dinevski revealed he had read a number of files that confirmed UDBa had monitored and infiltrated Australia’s Macedonian community.

On 6 January 2006 I received a curious email out of the blue from Dr John Schindler, Associate Professor of Strategy and Policy, United States. Naval War College:

“I encountered your recent article discussing UDBa terrorism and was intrigued. I'm doing research into the topic of Yugoslav state security (UDBa, later SDB) anti-émigré operations during the Cold War, including assassinations.

“I've found some information you cite, including the ASIO scandals of the 1970s, but as an American I must confess some of the cases you cite (eg Croatian Six) were new to me. Have you published anything else on this topic? Any thoughts on where I ought to be looking for more info on UDBa operations in Australia?”

I explained to Dr Schindler that the Australian authorities, in particular ASIO, had turned a blind eye to UDBa operations on Australian soil or had tried to hush things up.

In 1974 Dr Blagoja Sambevski a Macedonian dissident living in West Germany was assassinated by having his skull smashed in ala Trotsky style by an UDBa hit man in a Munich train station. In 1981the hit man entered Australia on an unknown task but was quietly told to leave by immigration officials.

Mr David Perrin, a Liberal Victorian State MP for Bulleen, in 1990 accused in parliament the Melbourne-based and tax-payer funded Australian Yugoslav Welfare Society (AYWS) of being a front for Yugoslav intelligence.

Professor Nikola Zezov, an academic at Saints Kiril and Metodi (Cyril and Methodius) University in Skopje, has bravely explored Macedonia’s controversial communist past within Yugoslavia.

He is co-author of the 2005 ground-breaking book “The repressed and repression in contemporary Macedonian history” (Represijata I represiranite vo sovremena Makedonska istorija). He was given access to 14,000 intelligence files. He concluded that one in five Macedonians living in communist Yugoslavia (1945-91) were paid informers for UDBa. This is an alarming figure on par with East German communist intelligence, the Stasi, and its hold on the population.

In March 1993, Stevce Pavlovski, Macedonia’s Public Prosecutor told me in an interview he would not open an investigation into communist crimes because he would end up having to imprison fifty per cent of Macedonia’s old communists.

It is surprising that no Australian big name investigative reporter or scholar has ever bothered to access the old UDBa files held in the newly independent states of Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro (Crna Gora), and Kosovo. They must contain a goldmine of information on Australian politicians and journalists!

(end)

Birmingham's hilarious take on security

2010-02-26T10:57:00.002+11:00

www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/the-man-with-the-golden--cufflinks-and-matching-tie-pin/20100224-p39q.html

ASIO Recruits Latte Sippers John Birmingham Blunt Instrument
I am indebted to my Facebook buddy Sasha Uzunov for alerting me to this advert for ASIO surveillance officers published in a local rag in Melbourne: ...

Blunt Instrument
John Birmingham tells stories.

The Age
The man with the golden ... cufflinks and matching tie pin

February 25, 2010
Comments 56

We are doomed.

Not because, as the government has suddenly realised in its Counterterrorism White Paper, the beardy nut-jobs are here to stay, but because our response to this is to unleash on them the awesome power of a fully operational espresso machine. While the Ruddbot and his national security advisers are worrying late into the night about national resilience, counter-intelligence, and terrorism as a "persistent and permanent" condition, the front line agency charged with protecting us from things that go boom in the nightclub has decided to recruit its next generation of spies from the idle wanker demographic.

I am indebted to my Facebook buddy Sasha Uzunov for alerting me to this advert for ASIO surveillance officers published in a local rag in Melbourne:

see link: http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/

Australian Government Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ASIO YOU'RE SITTING AT YOUR FAVOURITE CAF [sic] ON CHAPEL QUIETLY WATCHING THE WORLD GO BY. YOU'VE ORDERED THE USUAL. THERE'S A MAN SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU. YOU NOTICE THE PATTERN ON HIS SHIRT IS SIMILAR TO THE PATTERN IN THE FROTH OF YOUR CAPPUCCINO. HE'S ON HIS OWN. HE LOOKS UP, PAUSES FOR A MINUTE AND SCRIBBLES SOMETHING DOWN ON A SERVIETTE. HE DOES THIS AGAIN. HE MUST BE A WRITER, YOU THINK. THE NEXT TIME HE LOOKS UP, YOU CASUALLY ASK WHAT HE'S WRITING ABOUT. JUST JOTTING DOWN IDEAS FOR HIS NEW BOOK, APPARENTLY. PERCEPTIVE. INTUITIVE. ASSURED. YOU DON'T THINK TWICE ABOUT IT, UNTIL YOU DISCOVER THESE ARE THE QUALITIES YOU'LL BE VALUED FOR AS A SURVEILLANCE OFFICER. ASIO.GOV.AU/SURVEILLANCE WE ACTIVELY ENCOURAGE WOMEN AND ETHNIC MINORITIES TO APPLY.

One hardly knows where to begin extracting the urine. With the effete, latte-sipping obsessive compulsive shirt pervert, who loves nothing more than to attract attention to him or herself by questioning the members of the public about their private business? Or with the seething, medieval bazaar of Chapel Street in which shady frock sellers mingle with former KGB baristas and rogue CIA sauvignon blanc fanciers in a dangerous world of fast-paced espionage, state-sponsored murder, and retail therapy.

I mean, WTF? I'd always assumed the reason that the government refused to comment on anything involving security or intelligence matters was because somewhere out there in the dark we had a legion of cruel spies and agents and rogue death-dealing assassins harvesting our enemies as soon as they foolishly put their heads up.

Oh how my heart thrilled this morning when I read that some of the cold-eyed killers who necked that Hamas villain in Dubai were carrying Aussie passports. That's the ticket, I thought. Our tax dollars well spent in the dark arts of statecraft and political murder.

But no, the truth is much scarier, if more predictable. They weren't gallant little vegemiters at all. Probably just your common and garden variety wet work squad from Mossad or one of the cooler arms of the CIA. Our government, of course, won't comment.

The reason it won't comment is because we would die of shame to discover that our national security is being safeguarded by the sort of inner-city fops and dilettantes who'd be more at home in a vegan yoga class than getting split up the middle by a laser beam in Auric Goldfinger's torture dungeon. Not for our spies a silenced pistol and a spring-loaded throwing knife. No, not when they might clash horribly with the delightful little Burberry clutch they picked up in Chapel Street when they should have been gouging eyeballs and pulling teeth on the North-West frontier.

We are doomed, I tell you. Doomed.

ASIO WANTS LATTE SIPPERS AS SPIES

2010-02-23T10:55:00.009+11:00

US tennis champion Serena Williams spotted in Chapel Street doing some shopping but no sighting of Osama Bin Laden as yet. Canadian journalist Scott Taylor dressed as a local in Kandahar, Afghanistan, having a cappuccino. Photos by Sasha Uzunov copyright.

ASIO WANTS LATTE SIPPERS AS SPIES

by Sasha Uzunov

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), this country's domestic spy agency, has put out a job ad looking for nosey, coffee drinking people who hang out in Melbourne's fashionable Chapel Street, Prahran.

As yet there have been no sightings of terrorism supremo Osama Bin Laden in the Latte Strip, only celebrities checking out the boutiques...

Concerned and security conscious Australians should contact TEAM UZUNOV if they see or hear of any suspicious activity in Chapel Street. Please note: Young men doing burnouts in cars or fighting outside nightclubs does not count as suspicious activity.

The best people to recruit as surveillance officers for ASIO are the ordinary Australian men and women who work as private investigators for insurance companies such as workers compensation or do marital infidelity cases.. Most of these people blend in and are never noticed... Food for thought!

It is nice to see our taxpayer dollars being used "wisely" in the war against terror!

Read the ad below:

About the Job

Australian Government Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ASIO

YOU'RE SITTING AT YOUR FAVOURITE CAF ON CHAPEL QUIETLY WATCHING THE WORLD GO BY. YOU'VE ORDERED THE USUAL. THERE'S A MAN SITTING ACROSS FROM YOU. YOU NOTICE THE PATTERN ON HIS SHIRT IS SIMILAR TO THE PATTERN IN THE FROTH OF YOUR CAPPUCCINO. HE'S ON HIS OWN. HE LOOKS UP, PAUSES FOR A MINUTE AND SCRIBBLES SOMETHING DOWN ON A SERVIETTE. HE DOES THIS AGAIN. HE MUST BE A WRITER, YOU THINK. THE NEXT TIME HE LOOKS UP, YOU CASUALLY ASK WHAT HE'S WRITING ABOUT. JUST JOTTING DOWN IDEAS FOR HIS NEW BOOK, APPARENTLY. PERCEPTIVE. INTUITIVE. ASSURED. YOU DON'T THINK TWICE ABOUT IT, UNTIL YOU DISCOVER THESE ARE THE QUALITIES YOU'LL BE VALUED FOR AS A SURVEILLANCE OFFICER. ASIO.GOV.AU/SURVEILLANCE WE ACTIVELY ENCOURAGE WOMEN AND ETHNIC MINORITIES TO APPLY.

Job Code
2015367
Date Posted
17/02/2010
Category
Government, Defence & Emergency

Link: http://www.careerone.com.au/

Full link:

http://jobview.careerone.com.au/GetJob.aspx?JobID=86347659&q=security&lid=137&sort=dt&cn=&rad=50&rad_units=km&cnme=Melbourne&sid=97&brd=1&pp=50&vw=b&AVSDM=2010-02-17+12%3a38%3a00&pg=1&seq=40

---------------------------
other link:

Letter to the Editor - The Age newspaper
http://www.theage.com.au/national/letters/good-deed-kept-secret-for-so-long-20100214-nzdh.html

15 February 2010 by Judy Crozier, Preston

Beware the trilbied men in overcoats
I WAS sitting at my favourite cafe in Brunswick Street when I noticed the ASIO advertisement in The Age (13/2), seeking surveillance staff. The blurb posits an imagined (perceptive, intuitive) person sitting at a favourite cafe (on Chapel Street) noticing a man taking notes on a serviette - he claims to be jotting down ideas for his new book.

OMG, but that's what I do! Over coffee, I jot down ideas for my book or short story. Does this make me a suspect? I glance about myself, a light perspiration upon my lip. Over there, could that be a (perceptive, intuitive) surveillance officer?

read on...

Evans dispels Vietnam Biggles myth

2010-02-21T21:41:00.007+11:00

Above: Ex-Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans, nicknamed Biggles after a fictitious British World War One Fighter Ace (below).

Exclusive: GARETH EVANS DISPELS VIETNAM BIGGLES MYTH
By Sasha Uzunov

Australia’s former high profile Foreign Minister and International trouble shooter, Gareth Evans, has finally put to rest a long running urban legend about a combat plane ride he allegedly took during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.

The former politician was recently appointed Chancellor of the Australian National University in Canberra.

“Gareth Evans (ANU Chancellor) has asked me to convey to you that he was not the person in your anecdote. He believes there may have been a journalist of the same name in the region around that time,” Mr Simon Couper, an ANU spokesman said.

In 1983 Evans, as Federal Attorney General and a Senator, was the nicknamed Biggles, a fictitious larger than life British World War I fighter ace, for using the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) to spy on anti-dam protestors in Tasmania’s wilderness.

As Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1996, Evans was criticised for being too close to Indonesia during its brutal occupation of East Timor and his cynical deployment of Australian soldiers into combat in Kuwait, Somalia, Rwanda and Cambodia in an attempt to win the Nobel Peace Prize and become United Nations Secretary General.

A former Australian diplomat, the New Zealand born Alastair Gaisford has been critical of Evan’s failure to save Australian David Wilson, who was kidnapped and later murdered in Cambodia in 1994.

A number of high profile Australian Army pilots who saw combat action in the Vietnam War with the Army Aviation Corps unit 161 Recce Squadron made the interesting claim that a journalist “Gareth Evans” was given a joyride in a Cessna spotter plane in Vietnam, circa 1967-68 One of the pilots has also claimed that the name "Gareth Evans" is in the flight log book.

According to Mr Ashley Ekins, an official historian of the Vietnam War with the Australian War Memorial, there was a “Gareth Evans” who was a journalist in Vietnam. One of Evans’ articles is in the footnotes of the book, an official history of Australia’s Vietnam War, called ‘On the Offensive.’

Mr Ekins said:

“The reference you mention is to a newspaper article in The Sun of 11 October 1967 (On the Offensive, p. 253, p. 567 n. 71) quoting Brigadier Stuart Graham, commander of the 1st Australian Task Force.

“I’m unable to confirm whether the writer of that article, Gareth Evans, was the same Gareth Evans who later served as Attorney General and Foreign Minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. However, it seems unlikely. Gareth Evans the politician initially pursued a career in law.

“Notwithstanding his later expressed position on Vietnam, as President of the Student Union at the University of Melbourne in 1965, Evans supported Australian and American involvement in the Vietnam War in student debates and letters to the Melbourne Age on 7 May 1965 and The Nation on 15 May 1965 (although he was opposed to the sending of conscripts).”

The authorised biography of Gareth Evans, the ex-Foreign Minister, by ex-Foreign Affairs (DFAT) staffer, Keith Scott, makes no mention of any specific visit to Vietnam during the 1960s.
There is a reference to Evans being on a United States Navy ship in the south Pacific and later backpacking through South East Asia and Indochina before taking up a post as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in the United Kingdom in August 1968.

In 1965 Evans as President of Melbourne University’s student union (SRC) threw his weight behind the Vietnam War though he opposed conscription (the draft). He was born in 1944 and just missed out on the national service call up when it was reintroduced for Vietnam.

He was selected by the United States State Department as a student leader to undertake an overseas trip talking about the War but later grew opposed to it.

Mr Noel Turnbull, an arts patron, public relations guru, academic and former journalist, knew Evans during their university days.

“I am not aware of Gareth making a private visit to Vietnam,” he said. “You should ask him directly.”

Mr Turnbull, who is regarded as a living legend within public relations circles in Australia, was himself conscripted for Vietnam War service as an Army Artillery officer in 1968.

There was a Gary Evans who worked as a journalist for the Brisbane Courier Mail, The Sunday Mirror in London and the Australian Associated Press, and did a stint as a Vietnam War correspondent. He is now a member of The Australian Press Council. A message was left for him at the APC over whether he was the Gareth Evans in question. No response as yet. We will keep you posted on any further developments. Link: www.presscouncil.org.au/pcsite/about/members/journmems.html

(end)

Links:

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8673&page=0
When politicians should step aside - On Line Opinion - 19/3/2009

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/03/cambodia-murder-controversy.html
Team Uzunov: Cambodia murder controversy

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/07/15th-anniversary-of-david-wilson-murder.html
Team Uzunov: 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF DAVID WILSON KIDNAPPING/MURDER

www.smh.com.au/opinion/by/alastair-gaisford
Alastair Gaisford - National Times - smh.com.au

Tony Jones & ABC running scared on defence debate?

2010-02-15T21:09:00.003+11:00

Tony Jones & ABC running scared on defence debate?
by Sasha Uzunov

The host of the ABC TV's Lateline and Q & A programs, Tony Jones, has a reputation for being a media tough guy, who is willing to ask tough questions and scrutinise delicate issues. But it would appear that both Jones and the ABC are petrified by an email campaign organised by Vietnam Veterans over military superannuation.

Brigadier Neil Weekes (retired), a Vietnam War hero who won a Military Cross for bravery during the famous Battles of Coral/Balmoral in 1968, has revealed:

"I have just received a call from the Executive Producer of the ABC Q&A Show, asking me to contact the veteran community with a request to stop sending any more emails on the DFDB/DFRDB issues. In particular he has asked that we stop sending "nasty" emails to Tony Jones.

"He told me that the ABC has received more than 1,000 emails on the DFDB/DFRDB topics, that the ABC is aware that this is an organised email campaign and that once a question has been posted once, there is little point in repeating it. He advised that, while he is personally interested in the topic, he cannot guarantee that any of our questions will receive a hearing tonight."

In 2004 on Lateline Tony Jones played hardball with Liberal political head kicker Tony Abbott over his alleged secret meeting with Catholic Cardinal George Pell to discuss government policy. There were overtones of a dark conspiracy between the Abbott and the Catholic Priest. There were dark overtones of a Dan Brown Davinci Code Conspiracy. It was actually more high farce on Jones’ part. But when it comes to defence experts, Jones’ blowtorch is nowhere to be seen.

In this day and age, where ABC journalists openly question Jesus, the Prophet Muhammed and the Buddha, big name Fairfax journalist and "war expert" Paul McGeough is above scrutiny.

In a remarkable email, Jonathan Holmes the host of the ABC TV's Media Watch program revealed:

"Paul McGeough, who you so snidely deride, has probably spent more time in the “Afghan war zone” – and in Iraq, for that matter – than any other Australian journalist – including you. The fact that he doesn’t have a military background is to my mind entirely irrelevant."

Trying to extract information from ABC and SBS journalists is like having your sore wisdom teeth pulled: its is very painfull but very necessary. In trying to discuss defence and national security issues over the past couple of years I have encountered either silence or a haughty manner from our public funded journalists.

Media tough guy Peter Charley has a reputation for speaking his mind. As Executive Producer of ABC TV program Lateline in 2006 he issued this statement to me over my criticism of why Lateline was reluctant to open up Australia’s defence debate:

“It is neither wise nor clever to suggest that "little ol' Lateline” is "afraid" to have anyone on the program…” (Friday 13 January 2006, email).

The rhetorical question is why is it not wise or clever?

---
Backrgound:

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009/10/abc-media-watch-responds.html

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

ABC MEDIA WATCH RESPONDS
TEAM UZUNOV POLICY IS TO OPEN UP AUSTRALIA'S DEFENCE DEBATE.
Therefore, we encourage diversity of opinion on ths issue

The host of the ABC TV's Media Watch, Jonathan Holmes, responds to the TEAM UZUNOV story: ABC-Fairfax hissy fit at Afghan news.

MEDIA WATCH DEFENDS PAUL McGEOUGH

“ABC and Fairfax big name reporters spit the dummy over not being able to navigate through Afghan warzone without a helping hand from the ADF...”

Not on Media Watch, they didn’t. No ABC journalist was quoted complaining about ADF media policy on our program. Nor was ABC News. The only ‘big name journalist” who was quoted was Ian McPhedran, defence correspondent for News Ltd. And he was complaining about the lack of access to Australian troops on the ground, not about his inability to ‘navigate through Afghan warzones”.

The same complaint as John Martinkus makes in his New Matilda piece.

Paul McGeough, who you so snidely deride, has probably spent more time in the “Afghan war zone” – and in Iraq, for that matter – than any other Australian journalist – including you. The fact that he doesn’t have a military background is to my mind entirely irrelevant.

- Jonathan Holmes
----------------------------------------------

TEAM UZUNOV RESPONSE:
PUT DEFENCE DEBATE TO THE PUBLIC

Thank your for your prompt and frank reply..

But asking Paul McGeough why he didnt volunteer for military service is highly relevant, much in the same way we would scrutinise medical doctors, mechanics, etc over their "qualifications."

The general public has an interest in the issue, which is why it keeps me in print and above the poverty-line! (freelanceer's attempt at humour!)

It only seems journalists without actual military experience who oppose such scrutiny. If it is irrelevant why not put it to the test? Why not ask the public?

Why do certain sections of the media, namely ABC Media Watch, avoid this issue? Is it because by opening up this debate to the public that big name reporters at the ABC will have their lucrative business of writing books and appearing on television threantened?

Furthermore, when McGeough refuses to answer the question put to him but then complains when politicians deny him information it is hypocritical. It is a case of wanting to have his cake and eat it too.

Mate (Jonathan Holmes), you're a big name ABC reporter and you sounded as though you were upset at the ADF denying reporters info....Therefore my story is correct...

I can supply you previously published stories with quotes from your former colleagues Chris Masters and Max Uechtritz and their "views" on military service....

link: www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9078

MEDIA WATCH (Jonathan Holmes): News Ltd is not the same as Fairfax. Or hadn’t you noticed?

TEAM UZUNOV: I wasnt focusing on News Ltd but Fairfax.... You're forgetting Cynthia Banham's gabfest at ANU..

A WORD FROM JO PUCCINI, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF MEDIA WATCH:
Thanks for your email Sasha. I appreciate your perspective.

(end)
------------------------------------------------

http://teamuzunovmedia.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

Tuesday, October 13, 2009
MEDIA HISSY FIT AT AFGHAN NEWS
WAR & PEACE INCORPORATED

By Sasha Uzunov

Australia’s big name journalists who write on defence and national security issues have the double advantage of making a lot of money as well as indirectly influencing government policy but without having to face the electors.

However, in recent times certain sections of the media have been chucking a hissy fit at the Australian Defence Forces and its public relations arm for allegedly denying journalists access to combat troop operations in Afghanistan.

read on...

2010-02-04T10:26:00.002+11:00

With a new Australian television ratings season about to kick-off, the search for the next Jana Wendt, super reporter, continues...

ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10004&page=0

Reporting on the reporters
By Sasha Uzunov - Thursday, 4 February 2010

With a new television ratings season dawning on the horizon, some of Australia’s heavy hitters in television journalism, no doubt, have been in search of the Holy Grail that is to find the next Jana Wendt. One media boss might have struck gold in the shape of SBS TV Dateline reporter Sophie McNeill.

Wendt in her heyday - the late 1980s and early 90s - was unbeatable. She is a highly educated woman who speaks many languages and could out-interview some of the big names of politics and celebrity. Her nickname was the perfumed steam-roller and she picked up a Gold Logie as Australia’s top television celebrity in 1992.

Legendary news bosses Peter Meakin and John Westacott made their names at the Nine Network when Wendt was hosting the A Current Affair program.

Since Wendt’s retirement, Nine has focused its attention on current ACA host Tracy Grimshaw, who is a formidable interviewer in her own right, to carry the torch. But Wendt and Grimshaw are as different as chalk and cheese. Grimshaw recently went head to head with foulmouthed Scottish chef Gordon Ramsay, with the result that the tough guy lost

Meakin, after a bitter falling out with Nine, took his bag of tricks to the Seven Network. At first the beautiful, blue-eyed brunette Naomi Robson was the host of Today Tonight, Seven’s answer to A Current Affair, and began to beat Nine at its own game. In a takedown over a cannibal story in West Papua, Robson was left with egg on her face in 2006. The Seven network counter-claimed that she was set up.

Reporter Anna Coren was poached from the Nine network and filled the breech at Today Tonight. Coren was sent, wearing a flak jacket, into the short lived Israel-Lebanese Hezbollah war. But Coren had other ambitions and left for US media giant CNN.

Coren, who was the subject of many send ups by comedy team The Chaser from ABC TV, had this to say about her war reporting: “The highlight was going to Israel and covering the war against Hezbollah. It was fascinating being in a place where air-raid sirens were going off all the time and rockets were falling; it makes you feel very alive being in that particular environment."
So that now brings us to Sophie McNeill, video-journalist with SBS TV Dateline program. McNeill was in Afghanistan last year reporting from the frontlines about alleged civilian casualties caused by Australian soldiers.

In 2008 she was named Young Australian Journalist of the Year and is an accomplished film maker.

In fact her rise has been meteoric. She was hailed as child prodigy and a wiz kid way back in 2003 by George Negus, legendary reporter, on his ABC TV show George Negus Tonight:

Sophie McNeill is a remarkable young woman who's been a political activist and social campaigner since the age of nine. When she was 15 she went, alone, to Timor and produced a self-funded documentary (Awaiting Freedom) that received national praise. Earlier this year she produced another on the death of a detainee asylum-seeker. Sophie is now 18 and studying politics at Curtin University in Western Australia. … working in Sydney as an investigative journalist for the SBS programme “Insight”.

Negus is now the host of SBS TV's Dateline program. In 2008 McNeill requested that I not contact her to discuss media issues, including Afghanistan. She has no previous military experience.

Her boss is the veteran, wily and street smart Peter Charley, who replaced “Iron” Mike Carey as Executive Producer of Dateline in 2007. Charley was previously EP of the ABC TV’s Lateline. Carey told me that Charley is a close personal friend of his.

Charley has a reputation for speaking his mind. (As EP of Lateline he issued this warning to me over my criticism of why Lateline was reluctant to open up Australia’s defence debate: “It is neither wise nor clever to suggest that "little ol' Lateline” is "afraid" to have anyone on the program…” (Friday January 13, 2006, email). Why is it not wise nor clever?)

I had observed that Lateline had only used one Australian journalist with actual military experience to comment on defence issues and that was legendary newsman Gerald Stone, the founding producer of Australia’s version of 60 Minutes on the Nine Network in 1979 and a former US Army officer. You would think that Stone would have been utilised more often and other journalists with military experience given a chance to speak on Lateline.

In 2004 Lateline host Tony Jones played hardball with Liberal political head kicker Tony Abbott over his alleged secret meeting with Catholic Cardinal George Pell to discuss government policy. There were overtones of a dark conspiracy between the Abbott and the Catholic Priest. It was actually more high farce on Jones’ part. But when it comes to defence experts, Jones’ blowtorch is nowhere to be seen.

Ironically, Charley served his apprenticeship as a producer under the master Gerald Stone on a failed show called Real Life on the Seven Network in 1992-93. Charley is an award winning journalist but has never served in the military.

I have spent years studying Stone’s playbook. In all seriousness the man is a genius, whether you like or dislike tabloid TV news. You have to give him his dues. The great man is now Non-executive Director and Deputy Chairman of the SBS Board.

In the late 1970s Stone probably sensed an Australian society needing strong masculine heroes to fill the void left by the controversial Vietnam War which had overturned traditional stereotypes. He recruited three journalists, Ray Martin, Ian Leslie and George Negus. As canny Mark Day, a newspaperman of the old school, observed:

I guess we can blame Gerald Stone and George Negus for the emergence of the celebrity journalist - at least in Australia.

Stone was executive producer of the Nine (TV network) clone of CBS’s 60 Minutes when it launched here in 1979 with the premise that the reporter was the story.

George, along with Ray Martin and Ian Leslie were sent into war zones, deep jungles, and dark places in search of ripper yarns, and the cameras tracked them tracking down the story.

George, coat slung over his shoulder, embraced this role with a particular gusto, adding his idiosyncratic commentary into which he wove his personal beliefs.

It wasn’t long before George was a bigger celeb than any of the news makers he pursued, even after being savaged by the likes of Margaret Thatcher.

Negus was dubbed the Balmain Cowboy after a tough working class inner Sydney suburb because of his macho image, even though he never served in Vietnam but was a school teacher who dabbled in journalism and later became a press secretary to a politician, Lionel Murphy.

But with the resurgence of the Anzac Legend and in particular a new respect for those who serve in uniform, where does that leave the war reporter in society’s eyes after having fulfilled the role of surrogate “warrior” stereotype during the 1970s and 80s?

Rival Australian television networks, in a game of one-upmanship, have inadvertently brought the notion of the warrior-as-reporter to the surface. A famous case involved veteran Nine Network reporter Jim Waley wearing a the flak jacket in Iraq in 2004 as opposed to his competitor Adrian Brown of the Seven Network who did not. Both were metres away from each other in Baghdad.

Australian soldier Mark Donaldson’s award of the Victoria Cross medal for bravery in Afghanistan has now well and truly put an end to the era of the media tough guy as society’s hero. Perhaps this is where McNeill fits in. Women can also be seen as brave role models.

Maybe Charley, in taking his master’s game plan and tweaking it for the 21 century, could be onto a big winner in the form of McNeill.

The Dateline website blurb about McNeill once read:

“Pick, arguably, the most dangerous region in the world today and that’s where you'll find Sophie McNeill.”

The current big star of Dateline is reporter Mark Davis. Davis, a former lawyer turned video journalist without military experience, has his own unique style of going into war zones carrying his own camera, which stays focused on himself most of the time. This style has earned him pop-star status but SBS TV insiders say that there may not be room for two big stars at Dateline. The word is McNeill maybe given her own current affairs show at SBS or even head hunted by a commercial network, perhaps CNN.

Time will tell.

(end)