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THEIR KINGDOM COME -- INSIDE THE SECRET WORLD OF OPUS DEI |
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34. The Croatian War Machine
OPUS DEI AND JOHN PAUL II SHARE AN EXTRAORDINARY DEVOTION TO the Virgin Mary. The Prelature has adopted the Pope's motto Totus tuus ('All for you, Mary') as its own. Opus Dei members turn out at all papal appearances waving Totus tuus banners. According to the doctrine of the Virgin, she co-operated in man's redemption by becoming the Mother .of God. Papa Wojtyla believes that she has a major millennium role to play, and that Marian apparitions signify her journey through space and time on a pilgrimage towards the second coming, which marks 'the close of the age' -- i.e., the end of the world. But before the Parousia -- the second coming -- Christ ordered that the Gospel must be preached in ,all nations; 'and then the end will come'. [1] Mary also had special significance for Rwanda's Hutu rebels, a number of whom were newly converted Muslims. Until the civil war there, Rwanda was regarded as one of Africa's most Christianized countries. Only 10 per cent of its population was Muslim. The Hutus comprised more than 80 per cent of the population, but paradoxically almost half of Rwanda's Catholic clergy was Tutsi. 'This was unbearable to Hutu extremists,' explained Father Octave Ugiras, a Tutsi priest who ran the Christus Centre in Kigali. During the troubles, Hutu militiamen came to the centre and slaughtered seventeen priests and nuns, believing them to have supported the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, which later won the civil war. 'The militiamen told us we had nothing to do with God. They said the Virgin Mary was a Tutsi woman and she had to be killed.' [2] The Hutus then riddled Mary's statue with bullets. During the four weeks that the African Synod sat in Rome, more than 200,000 Rwandans -- including the Archbishop of Kigali, two bishops, 103 priests and 65 nuns -- were slaughtered by the extremists. Thirteen years before the Rwandan massacres, the Virgin Mary made her first appearance in the Bosnian Croat village of Medjugorje with a plea for peace and reconciliation. Judging by the tragic events that followed, the message was not understood, and yet Medjugorje became the fourth most popular pilgrimage for Christians of all faiths, attracting before the outbreak of war in the Balkans hundreds of thousands of people each year. In 1986 the Vatican began to show an interest in Medjugorje and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was asked to investigate the 'authenticity' of the apparitions. A rumour swept Medjugorje that the Pope had secretly come to see for himself. When asked in January 1987 by an Italian bishop how to react to the events at Medjugorje, the Pope replied: 'Aren't you aware of the marvellous fruits they are producing?' [3] A few days later, the Virgin spoke through one of the local mediums of her sadness about what was happening in the world. 'You have allowed Satan to take the upper hand ...' she is quoted as having said. Four years later the region was inflamed in bitter interreligious conflict. With overwhelming superiority in arms, the Serbs dominated the battlefield, carrying out medieval-style warfare that threatened to reduce Sarajevo to cinders and spark the beginning of the Tenth Crusade. One-third of Croatia and nearly three-fourths of Bosnia fell to the Serb aggressors. The Serbs, it seemed, feared the 'Croat lobby' in Rome more than the Croatian army. The Serb media branded Vatican policy as 'dishonest and untrustworthy'. Belgrade was convinced that the 'obstinate and smart work' of the Holy See -- guided by Opus Dei and the newly appointed nuncio in Zagreb, Archbishop Giulio Einaudi -- enabled Croatia to dote its newly formed national army with an impressive arsenal of modern weaponry. Indeed, Serb sources alleged that Father Stanislav Crnica, the Opus Dei regional vicar in Zagreb, had direct access to President Franjo Tudjman!s office. [4] Archbishop Einaudi took up his posting six weeks after the Vatican -- on 13 January 1992 -- became the first foreign 'power' to recognize Croatia's independence. He had previously been nuncio in Chile where he had come under the spell of Opus Dei's former regional vicar, Adolfo Rodriguez Vidal, who had been elevated to Bishop of Los Angeles di Chile. During Einaudi's nunciature the number of Opus Dei bishops in Chile rose to four. Einaudi was not only a friend of the Prelature, he saw eye to eye with Regional Vicar Crnica on all important issues. Belgrade's suspicions of Vatican collusion seemed confirmed when Serb intelligence purloined from the files of the Croatian finance ministry a draft $2,000 million loan agreement which the Vatican had purportedly arranged through the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta. The loan was for 10 years and it carried no interest. Even though the 12-page document was undated and unsigned, the accompanying correspondence -- between the Croatian government and Monsignor Roberto Coppola, who described himself as a Knights of Malta plenipotentiary minister and extraordinary ambassador -- was dated in early October 1990, eight months before Croatia declared independence. After receiving a copy of the loan agreement, the Serb newspaper Politika charged that the Vatican was assisting the break-up of Yugoslavia. Possibly from a partisan position, Politika reported that Cardinal Franjo Kuharic of Zagreb helped arrange the loan, which had been negotiated on the Croatian side by prime minister Josip Manolic, his deputy Mate Babic, finance minister Hrvoje Sarinic and a councillor at the French finance ministry, Madame Mirjana Zelen-Maksa. [5] But what the Serbs did not realize was that in Zagreb's haste to finance the first arms purchases from abroad it had fallen victim to a hoax. No mention of 'Monsignor' Coppola appeared in the Vatican yearbook and the Knights of Malta, embarrassed by the unwanted publicity, maintained that the loan document was bogus, part of a confidence trickster's attempt to harvest an up-front commission of $200,000 from the Croatians. The fraud was uncovered in time and the perpetrator -- although he claimed immunity from prosecution by virtue of holding diplomatic passports from several eastern countries -- was said to be in jail in Italy. In fact the Knights of Malta's anti-fraud department, headed by Count Jose Antonio Linati, possessed a lengthy file on Roberto Coppola, an enterprising Neapolitan with a history of past misrepresentations dating back to the 1970s, and had warned the Order's embassies abroad to be on the lookout for the unworthy 'monsignor'. Politika nonetheless noted that the Vatican financiers had also backed the founding of an embargo-busting cargo airline that operated between the Adriatic port of Split and Malta. It claimed that the money for the airline had been transferred to the Croatians through a Luxembourg bank that formerly had been used in some of the United Trading transactions. Politika's disclosures apart, the evidence suggests that the Opus Dei network, in contravention of the UN arms embargo imposed in 1991, was instrumental in easing Croatia's task of forging a well-armed, efficient war machine, first by improving Croatia's image in the West so that it escaped international sanctions, and then facilitating its contacts with the Clinton administration. The efforts to arm Croatia began even before the Vatican's recognition of the Tudjman republic. When the federal Yugoslav forces abandoned their barracks around Zagreb in 1992 they left behind two old Yugoslav Air Force MiGs and a few disabled tanks. By September 1993, the Croats had purchased twenty-eight MiG 21s from surplus stocks in the Czech Republic. The MiGs were transported to Croatia in kit form by truck through Hungary. Zagreb was also successful in obtaining a piece of the American foreign aid pie. Opus Dei's Washington network, which by then extended from the papal nunciature on Massachusetts Avenue to the White House, the FBI and the Pentagon, provided the Croats with the right contacts so that they knew exactly what to ask for and how to formulate their requests. [6] The Serbs were hit with international sanctions, but the Croats, perpetrators of their own depredations in western Bosnia, successfully avoided them. In a move that perplexed observers, Alvaro del Portillo spent several weeks during the summer of 1993 at the Prelature's Warwick House in Pittsburgh. Its director, numerary John Freeh, was the brother of Louis J. Freeh, since 1993 Clinton's director of the FBI. [7] Officially Bishop Portillo was in Pittsburgh to address prominent local Catholics. But unremarked was that Pittsburgh is the headquarters of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America, a life insurance association with assets of $150 million but also the largest Croat emigrant organization in the world. The Union's national president, Bernard M. Luketich, was so highly viewed by Rome and Washington that he accompanied the official White House delegation that greeted John Paul II on his visit to the United States in 1995. [8] Opus Dei's operations in Pittsburgh were assisted in the 1980s by an energetic young priest, Father Ron Gillis, who had been recruited while a law student at Boston. Gillis had known the Founder in Rome and witnessed some of his famous tantrums. On one occasion he reported that Escriva de Balaguer started banging chairs about, screaming that he needed more 'saints' -- i.e., new vocations. Gillis told a friend he never wanted to be a priest but the Father convinced him he had a vocation as big as a house. Gillis confided that Opus Dei was attempting to recruit inside the Pentagon and that he himself regularly gave lectures there on 'military ethics'. Soon after, he left Pittsburgh and by 1992, as the Balkans crisis hotted up, he was back in Washington. In the summer of 1993, plans to arm Croatia in spite of the UN embargo took on greater urgency. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which monitors arms transfers in the region, Croatia created its own armaments industry and refurbished equipment left behind by the Yugoslav army. Other arms were acquired from Ukraine, among them 200 T-55 battle tanks, 400 armoured personnel carriers, 150 heavy artillery pieces, 35 multiple rocket launchers and 45 assault helicopters. But the Croatians lacked basic battlefield management skills. In January 1994 the Croatian Fraternal Union was instrumental in founding the National Federation of Croatian Americans as a registered lobby in Washington. Luketich had White House contacts at the highest level, extending to Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Anthony Lake, the National Security Adviser. [9] Lake, who describes himself as a 'pragmatic liberal', had served in two previous administrations -- Nixon's and Jimmy Carter's. A former political science professor at Holyoke College in Massachusetts, he had received his PhD from Princeton, where he could have encountered Opus Dei's Father John McCloskey III, an assistant chaplain who left the Princeton chaplaincy in 1990 after creating a firestorm by advising students not to take courses which he deemed doctrinally dangerous. Two months after the Croatian lobby's formation, Zagreb's defence minister, Gojko Susak, requested Washington's assistance in educating the Croatian general staff 'in military-civilian relations, programming and budgeting'. Susak's extreme Croat nationalism -- he was originally from the region of Mostar -- had caused him to flee Yugoslavia in 1967, settling with two brothers in Ottawa, where he worked in a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. Later he bought a pizza parlour and staffed it with Lebanese while putting all his energies into organizing Canadian Croats for the Croatian Fraternal Union of America. In 1991, Brother Susak was listed as president of the board of trustees of the Ottawa chapter, when he returned to Zagreb to beef up Croatia's military punch. Susak specifically asked the Clinton administration for permission to employ a group of retired US army officers who operated from offices in Alexandria, Virginia, under the name of Military Professional Resources Incorporated. [10] The only problem was the 1991 UN arms embargo imposed on all of Yugoslavia. But this problem faded with John Paul II's visit to Zagreb in September 1994 to celebrate the ninth centenary of the See of Zagreb. Tudjman was said to be ecstatic. He told a press conference that the first papal visit to the Balkans since 1117 signified Vatican backing for Croatia's bid to regain its Serb-held territory 'by war if necessary.' 'The Holy Father is coming as an apostle of peace, the preacher of co-operation and friendship among nations,' he said. 'His arrival ... signifies moral support from the supreme international moral authority for Croatia's demand that it has the right to establish its legal system over its entire territory.' To show Croatia's 'everlasting gratitude' for the Holy See's protection two bootlegged MiG 21 fighters escorted the papal airliner into Croatian airspace and when it landed on Croatian soil church bells pealed throughout the country. In 1519, Leo X had bestowed on the Croats the title of Antemurale Christianitatis -- the Bulwark of Christianity -- for their defence of Europe against endless hordes from the East. Almost 480 years later, John Paul II was again exhorting the Croats to stand firm for Christendom. Within days of the papal visit, Military Professional Resources (MPRI) received the green light from the US State Department to sign a consulting agreement with the Croatian defence ministry. Clinton, after conferring with his national security adviser, approved the decision. MPRI was no fly-by-night organization. It employed 140 persons and reported an annual turnover in excess of $7.S million. Among those working on the Croatian contract -- nondescriptly referred to as the 'Democratic Transition Assistance Programme' -- were former US Army chief of staff General Carl Vuono, former US Army Europe commander General Crosbie 'Butch' Saint, and former Defence Intelligence Agency chief Lieutenant General Ed Soyster. 'The mission was to convert the eastern-style army they had ... to a western-style army based on democratic principles,' Soyster said. 'We are talking about totally changing a system, converting their eastern-style military to a western one with democratic values and methods.' MPRI's assistance 'has no correlation to anything happening on the battlefield today,' he added. [11] Otherwise stated, MPRI was assisting Croatia to train a professional officers corps. Leading the Croatian programme on the ground was retired Major General Richard B. Griffitts. His 15-strong group was staffed by former Pentagon colonels. The Croats were accorded State Department clearance to attend special courses at US bases and schools. Under a separate arrangement, retired Major General John Sewall, former deputy director of strategic planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spearheaded a State Department effort to improve military co-ordination between the Bosnian and Croatian governments and the Bosnian Croat militia -- in other words, to make the three forces more combat efficient. Sewall took over the job of special adviser to the Bosnian and Croatian militaries from General John Rogers Galvin, the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Although the Americans denied it, French and British intelligence sources claimed that the Croatians were receiving advanced US computer technology and fire-control systems designed to give them battlefield superiority. This know-how, however, was not passed on to the Bosnians. It seems that by then Lake had counselled Clinton to silently assent to a Tudjman proposal -- put forward in the spring of 1994 -- to allow Iranian arms for Bosnia to transit Croatia. [12] It has since been alleged that by turning a blind eye to the Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia, the Americans permitted Tehran to expand its foothold in the Balkans. But the evidence suggests otherwise. The Iranians already had their foothold. They had been shipping their arms through the Croatian ports of Split and Rijeka since 1993, with Zagreb routinely exacting a 'transit tax' on the 30 to 50-truck convoys before they left the ports for destinations inside Bosnia. Opus Dei's strategists seem to have realized that if Bosnia did not receive a minimum of military aid to defend itself, without permitting Sarajevo an offensive capability that might threaten Croatia -- a proposition that the Bush administration had refused -- Islamic guerrillas would soon be present in the Balkans in uncontrollable numbers and Bosnia would fully become an Iranian client state. At least this way Croatia could exert some control over the weapons flow, thereby guaranteeing Zagreb's military superiority over its beleaguered neighbour. The plan worked well enough, although it was rendered more complicated than expected by the fact that American military gear was soon being spotted in the battle zone. How did it get there? That mystery remains unsolved. Possibly the Iranians, having some left-over American equipment from the time of the Shah, introduced it in an effort to sour relations between the US and its European allies. The subterfuge almost succeeded, because the French and British governments became unhappy about the apparent violation of the UN embargo. Their peacekeeping contingents reported seeing Bosnian Croat and Muslim soldiers dressed in American battle fatigues and carrying M-16 rifles. UN officials were in fact convinced that the US used NATO patrols enforcing the 'no-fly zone' over Bosnia to shield private contractors sending contraband arms cargoes into Bosnian-held Tuzla airport. They claimed that the deliveries were made at night using just-off-the-ground airdrops, a technique developed when Butch Saint was commander of the US Army in Europe and Sewall was the army's deputy chief of planning. In spite of allegations that the US was breaking the arms embargo, there was no FBI investigation, even though the British and French brought their embargo-busting evidence to the attention of US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General John Shalikashvili and Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs. It perhaps should be pointed out that FBI director Louis Freeh, appointed by Clinton in July 1993, and his wife Marilyn have been named as supernumerary members and that their two eldest children attended The Heights, Opus Dei's school in Washington. [13] By July 1995, when John Paul II officially invoked the Just War doctrine to defend Bosnia, it was clear to the Vatican that the Serb aggression risked transforming what had been the world's most secularized Islamic community -- a model for future relations between Christians and Muslims -- into a radical theocracy, not far distant from Rome. If Bosnia turned radically Muslim, the very existence of the Catholic Church in that part of the Balkans would be threatened. Tudjman, therefore, was primed to follow the Vatican's lead. His advisers proposed the opening of peace talks with the Serbs of Krajina, which were predestined to fail, thereby qualifying for application of the Just War doctrine. Meanwhile, the commander of the Croatian armed forces, General Janko Bobetko, and his American advisers put the final touches on Operation Storm. The Serbs helped at the end of July 1995 by overplaying their hand, seizing control of Srebrenica, a UN 'safe zone' in eastern Bosnia, once again turning international opinion against them. In quick succession the UN abandoned Zepa, another Muslim 'safe area', and Sarajevo came under intensified bombardment. Serb General Ratko Mladic then moved his troops against the Muslim enclave of Bihac, where 180,000 Muslims were encircled, in the west of Bosnia. Four years after the Serbs had set up on Croatian territory the autonomous Republika Srpska Krajina, one supposed that they were solidly dug in and ready for a fight. As part of Greater Serbia, the Krajina Serbs believed they enjoyed the solid backing of Belgrade. The joint attack on Bihac by Bosnian Serbs and those of Krajina provided the pretext for General Bobetko to begin Operation Storm. His streamlined, Americanized army launched a lightning attack against Krajina. Within eighty-four hours Krajina's capital of Knin had fallen and the siege of Bihac was lifted. As the Croatian war machine started rolling through Krajina, a mortar attack -- supposedly carried out by Serbs -- against Sarajevo killed thirty-seven civilians, bringing almost instant NATO retaliation: in two weeks 3,500 bombing sorties (two-thirds of them by American warplanes) destroyed over 100 strategic targets in Serb-held territory. The Serbs were unable to counter-attack. Within days they had lost more than 3,000 square kilometres of terrain and their routes were clogged with 60,000 new refugees. Bobetko's troops were within shelling distance of Banja Luka when they announced a unilateral ceasefire. Belgrade never budged. The coincidence of a Croatian blitzkrieg and the NATO bombing forced the Serbs to admit defeat. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano portrayed the NATO air raids as a warning to the psychopaths of Pale, intended to 'restore hope to the martyred people' of Bosnia. The bombings were not an act of war, the Vatican paper said, but demonstrated 'a determination to protect the rights of those populations, the unfortunate Bosnians -- Croats, Serbs and Muslims -- and all the other ethnic groups dragged into the madness of a lengthy and ferocious war.' Cardinal Kuharic of Zagreb proclaimed Operation Storm 'a legitimate action of Croatia to liberate her own territory'. When he pointed out that the rebel occupation of Krajina had been illegal, that Knin had rejected Tudjman's offer to negotiate, making military action a necessary last resort, and that the international community was unable to protect the victims of Serb aggression, he was reciting the four prerequisites for receiving a Just War label. More importantly, Operation Storm had momentarily short-circuited radical Islam's call for total jihad, issued after the fall of Srebrenica. Iran's foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati had pledged at a private meeting to give the Bosnian Muslims all the military assistance they needed, forcing more moderate nations like Turkey, Egypt, Malaysia and Jordan, whose troops participated in the UN humanitarian force, to back the Bosnian government openly rather than leave the Iranians to hold Islam's high moral ground. Backed by its new military might, Croatia was determined to exert a moderating influence over its neighbour and made it clear that imported Islamic extremism would not be tolerated. By then a couple of brigades of non-Bosnian Muslims, numbering about 4,000 fighters qualified by US officers as 'hard-core terrorists', were operating within and sometimes in parallel to the Bosnian government forces. Although the Dayton peace agreement that followed the Serb defeat called for all foreign fighters to leave Bosnia, defence officials acknowledged there was little hope of persuading them to depart, even in spite of Bosnian affirmations that they would be out of the country within thirty days. 'These guys are mean. They've got to be controlled,' an American adviser to the Bosnian government said. [14] According to a Sarajevo newspaper, a handful of the volunteers left for Chechnya, where war with the Russians had broken out again. But many simply faded into the snow-covered Hercegovina mountains to prepare for the next round of fighting. They were only too aware that the 1995 Dayton agreement had brought about the de facto partition of Bosnia, and this was not acceptable to them. They called it a betrayal. Instructors at a 'Martyrs Detachment' training camp in central Bosnia, according to an intercepted report to their headquarters in Tehran, told European recruits that they were engaged 'in a jihad to defend Islam and its sacred principles against a crazed, spiteful Occidental Crusade.' For members of the 'Seekers of Martyrdom' battalion, then, the Tenth Crusade had already begun. A Croatian flag flew over western Bosnia, where the Croatian kuna and not the Bosnian dinar was in use, and those inhabitants who remained considered that part of the country to be solidly Croatian. As further proof, Medjugorje was under the control of the apparently Opus Dei-assisted and Catholic-led Croatian Army. Zagreb demonstrated its determination to bar imported Islamic extremism from the region when in September 1995 it arrested Sheikh Tala'at Fouad Qassem, a leader in exile of the Gama'a al-Islamiya terrorist organization. Sheikh Tala'at had been foolish enough to cross Croatia on his way to Sarajevo to offer the Bosnian army more mujahedin volunteers. The Croatian authorities claimed they had expelled him, but he and his bodyguard disappeared and were presumed dead. Days later Gama'a exploded a car bomb in Rijeka, killing the bomber and injuring twenty-nine. A statement faxed to the Reuters news agency announced that Gama'a al-Islamiya had carried out its first terrorist attack against Croatian interests. 'This historic operation is to assure the Croats that the fate of Tala'at Fouad Qassem will not pass without floods of blood running through internal and external Croatian interests,' Gama'a said. A month later the Croatians answered Gama'a's threat by intercepting and killing the 'Emir of the Mujahedin', Sheikh Anwar Shaaban, and four other Muslim volunteers serving with the Bosnian Third Army Corps. The ongoing hatred and fear prompted one Serb observer to remark that even with 60,000 NATO troops acting as guardians of the Dayton agreement, 'there will be no real peace in Bosnia for a long time to come.' Nevertheless the lull before the next round of fighting enabled the Pope's secret warriors to focus their attention elsewhere along the Spiritual Curtain. _______________ Notes: 1. Matthew 24:3 and 24:14. 2. Edith M. Lederer, 'The Church and Rwanda', Associated Press. 23 January 1995. 3. Robert Faricy and Lucy Rooney, Medjugorje Journal -- Mary Speaks to the World, McCrimmons, Great Wakening, Essex, 1987, p. 146. 4. According to reports from Zagreb, one of President Tudjman's daughters-in-law -- he has two, Ivana Moric, wife of Dr. Miroslav Tudjman. and Snjezana, wife of Stjepan Tudjman -- is an Opus Dei supernumerary. 5. Radivoje Petrovic, 'The Holy See is providing loans to help Croatia and the break-up of Yugoslavia', Politika, Belgrade, 2 February 1991. 6. The nuncio in Washington, Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, began his diplomatic career in 1976 as the nuncio in Kenya, where he first came into contact with Opus Dei's Corps Mobile. 7. John Freeh resigned as a numerary and left Warwick House in 1994 to marry. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful and it is uncertain whether he remains an Opus Dei member. 8. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1 October 1995. 9. Zajednicar (Fraremalist), 'the official organ of the Croatian Fraternal Union of America'. reported in its 6 January and 3 February 1993 issues that Mr. Luketich was invited to a private dinner at the Old State House Building in Little Rock with Hillary and Bill Clinton and Al Gore. See also, inter alia, Zajednicar, 7 April 1993, and 'Special Report From Washington' concerning an American-Croatian delegation headed by Mr. Luketich that met at the White House on 27 February 1995 with Anthony Lake and Alexander Vershbow, the NSC's senior adviser for European Affairs, Zajednicar, 8 March 1995. 10. David B. Ottaway, 'US General Plays Down Bosnia Role -- "Non-Lethal Advice" Is All He's Giving', The Washington Post, 28 July 1995. 11. Sean D. Naylor, 'Retired Army General Helps Balkan Militaries to Shape Up', Army Times, Washington, 12 June 1995. 12. James Risen and Doyle McManus, 'Despite his public opposition to lifting embargo, Clinton reportedly let shipments go through', Los Angeles Times, 5 April 1996. 13. The Inspector in Charge of the FBI's Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, John E. Collingwood. stated in reply to the author's queries to the director: 'While 1 cannot answer your specific questions, I do note that you have been "informed" incorrectly by whomever your sources might be.' 14. Dana Priest, 'Foreign Muslims Fighting in Bosnia Considered "Threat" to US Troops" The Washington Post, 30 November 1995 (emphasis added).
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