More on the Kelley Capers: of Yugoslavia, War Crimes, and "Three-Ring Binders"
An alert FYROB (Former Yugoslav Reader of Balkanalysis) wrote us the other day and made an interesting contribution to the case of Jack Kelley, former USA Today reporter fired for inventing stories. The key story that sparked the internal investigation, about an alleged notebook containing JNA orders to ethnically cleanse a Kosovo Albanian village, led to many other discoveries of inspired fiction.
While the reader, Zagreb-born Dr. Joran Velikonja, could not resolve our own Kelley question, he did offer another proof of fallacy in the above-mentioned case. Velikonja's letter reads:
"...I wanted to make a remark about the 'JNA notebook' story from 1999, which was also mentioned in your posting. I remember having read somewhere, after the Kelley scandal made headlines, that the notebook in question was a three-ring binder. That small detail should have made many readers from Europe raise their eyebrows. Namely, the stationery in Yugoslavia used excluively two- and four-ring binders, in compliance with industrial standards in Germany, etc.
As a high-shool student in the early 70's, I used to have an old three-ring binder from the Voice-of America office in Munich. With the words 'PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT' printed on its cloth-bound cover, it would have been a real killer with my friends. Alas, neither in Yugoslavia nor in Germany and Austria was there any three-hole punch for it.
When I left Zagreb (my former hometown) for Canada in 1991, the stationary standards were still the same as ever. Besides, having served the JNA in 1982/83, and spending most of my time there as my unit's office scribe, I know quite a bit about the stationery in use at that time. Virtually all official notebooks, logbooks, agendas, etc., were bound at the spine and had numbered pages. There was nothing I ever filed into a ring binder of any kind. So much for the record by someone who likes to payattention to detail, like the proverbial baseball bats which some Serbs 'reportedly' used to torture their victims (baseball being as popular a sport in the Balkans as, let's say, ice hockey in Rwanda--though, admittedly, I never found a story on hockey-stick massacres there."
While the reader, Zagreb-born Dr. Joran Velikonja, could not resolve our own Kelley question, he did offer another proof of fallacy in the above-mentioned case. Velikonja's letter reads:
"...I wanted to make a remark about the 'JNA notebook' story from 1999, which was also mentioned in your posting. I remember having read somewhere, after the Kelley scandal made headlines, that the notebook in question was a three-ring binder. That small detail should have made many readers from Europe raise their eyebrows. Namely, the stationery in Yugoslavia used excluively two- and four-ring binders, in compliance with industrial standards in Germany, etc.
As a high-shool student in the early 70's, I used to have an old three-ring binder from the Voice-of America office in Munich. With the words 'PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT' printed on its cloth-bound cover, it would have been a real killer with my friends. Alas, neither in Yugoslavia nor in Germany and Austria was there any three-hole punch for it.
When I left Zagreb (my former hometown) for Canada in 1991, the stationary standards were still the same as ever. Besides, having served the JNA in 1982/83, and spending most of my time there as my unit's office scribe, I know quite a bit about the stationery in use at that time. Virtually all official notebooks, logbooks, agendas, etc., were bound at the spine and had numbered pages. There was nothing I ever filed into a ring binder of any kind. So much for the record by someone who likes to payattention to detail, like the proverbial baseball bats which some Serbs 'reportedly' used to torture their victims (baseball being as popular a sport in the Balkans as, let's say, ice hockey in Rwanda--though, admittedly, I never found a story on hockey-stick massacres there."
posted by Balkanalysis Blog Editor @ 4/10/2005 12:47:00 PM
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