Date: March 10, 1995
Author: Valentina Krčmar, Thornhill, Ontario
Addressed to: Letters to the Editor, The Globe and Mail
View the Original Letter: krcmar book 3_Part2_Part40.pdf
About This Letter
In this letter dated March 10, 1995, Valentina Krčmar writes to The Globe and Mail in response to the article “Belgrade Accused of Leading Role in Ethnic Crimes” (March 9, 1995). Her gratitude for the coverage quickly turns into sharp criticism — not for what was said, but for what was left unsaid.
She praises the paper for reporting Serbia’s leading role in the atrocities of the Balkans but condemns the omission of the report’s most vital truth: that the war was not a “civil war” but a calculated act of Serbian aggression. The persistent Western framing of the conflict as an internal struggle, she argues, was more than just inaccurate — it was deadly.
“The report makes nonsense of the view — now consistently put forward by Western European governments and intermittently by the Clinton administration — that the Bosnian conflict is a civil war… rather than a case of Serbian aggression.”
Krčmar’s letter exposes how language itself became complicit in violence. The repeated use of “civil war,” she writes, had become as lethal as “Serbian bullets or knives,” killing the truth and obscuring the suffering of innocent civilians. Her voice carries both moral outrage and maternal grief as she calls on the international media to speak plainly about the horrors unfolding in Bosnia.
“‘Civil war’ expression, along with the Serbian bullets or knives, has killed many of Croatian and Bosnian children… please start calling it by the proper name: Serbian aggression.”
By grounding her plea in the death toll from the UN-protected haven of Bihać — where hundreds of children had already died of starvation — Krčmar reasserts the ethical duty of journalists and governments alike: to name evil when they see it. Her letter is not merely a correction to the record, but a moral indictment of those who softened their words while lives were being lost.
