September 7th, 2007 posted by Bender Rodríguez
On the importance of knowing your geography. We received hundreds of emails to our webmaster email account at Euroleague Basketball in regards to a seemingly innocuous error on our website surrounding the birth city of one of the coaches. In short, one of our editors had listed his hometown as Capljina, Croatia, when in fact Capljina is in Bosnia and Herzegovina, right on the border with Croatia. Most of the emails were very emotional and very aggressive, calling us fascists and suggesting, among other things slightly more graphic, that we go back to school to study geography. The following email, however, was very well written (if somewhat grammatically inaccurate), with the author taking the time to explain why the error was so offensive to the Bosnians.
-----Mensaje original----- Enviado el: jueves, 06 de septiembre de 2007 20:16 Para: webmaster Asunto: Offensive information on your web-site Dear Webmaster, I would like to ask you kind to change on Euroleague official site where you said that Jasmin Repesa is from Capljina Croatia. I do not know if you are aware that Capljina is actually located in Bosnia and not in Croatia and I do not know if you are alos aware that this text is quite offensive for all Bosnians. I would like to point to you that in the Lasva Valley Croatian army pefrormed ethnicl cleansing on Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) civilians. The campaign, planned by Croatian army from May 1992 to March 1993 and erupting the following April, was meant to implement objectives set forth by Croat nationalists in November of 1991. The Lašva Valley's Bosniaks were subjected to persecution on political, racial and religious grounds, deliberately discriminated against in the context of a widespread attack on the region's civilian population and suffered mass murder, rape, imprisonment in camps, as well as the destruction of cultural sites and private property. This was often followed by anti-Bosniak propaganda, particularly in the municipalities of Vitez, Busovaèa, Novi Travnik and Kiseljak. According to the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center (IDC), around 2,000 Bosniaks from the Lašva Valley are missing or were killed during this period so once again I would like you to change this text and apologize to us Bosnians on your web-site.0 Comments, 0 trackbacks (Trackback URL)
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