The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia
In 1999, the U.S. national security state — which has been involved throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and death squads — launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with some 300 major overseas support bases — all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.
While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half million Tutsi in Rwanda — not to mention the French who were complicit in that massacre. Nor have U.S. leaders considered launching “humanitarian bombings” against the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese and were continuing such slaughter through the summer of 1999, or the Guatemalans for the Guatemalan military’s systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In such cases, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators — who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.
Why then did U.S. leaders wage an unrestrainedly murderous assault upon Yugoslavia?
The Third Worldization of Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was built on an idea, namely that the Southern Slavs would not remain weak and divided peoples, squabbling among themselves and easy prey to outside imperial interests. Together they could form a substantial territory capable of its own economic development. Indeed, after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became a viable nation and an economic success. Between 1960 and 1980 it had one of the most vigorous growth rates: a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a life expectancy of 72 years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, with a not-for-profit economy that was mostly publicly owned. This was not the kind of country global capitalism would normally tolerate. Still, socialistic Yugoslavia was allowed to exist for 45 years because it was seen as a nonaligned buffer to the Warsaw Pact nations.
The dismemberment and mutilation of Yugoslavia was part of a concerted policy initiated by the United States and the other Western powers in 1989. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily overthrow what remained of its socialist system and install a free-market economic order. In fact, Yugoslavs were proud of their postwar economic development and of their independence from both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The U.S. goal has been to transform the Yugoslav nation into a Third-World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the following characteristics:
incapable of charting an independent course of self-development;
a shattered economy and natural resources completely accessible to multinational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo;
an impoverished, but literate and skilled population forced to work at subsistence wages, constituting a cheap labor pool that will help depress wages in western Europe and elsewhere;
dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, and automobile industries, and various light industries, that offer no further competition with existing Western producers.
U.S. policymakers also want to abolish Yugoslavia’s public sector services and social programs — for the same reason they want to abolish our public sector services and social programs. The ultimate goal is the privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, as it is the Third Worldization of the United States and every other nation. In some respects, the fury of the West’s destruction of Yugoslavia is a backhanded tribute to that nation's success as an alternative form of development, and to the pull it exerted on neighboring populations both East and West.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Belgrade’s leaders, not unlike the Communist leadership in Poland, sought simultaneously to expand the country’s industrial base and increase consumer goods, a feat they intended to accomplish by borrowing heavily from the West. But with an enormous IMF debt came the inevitable demand for “restructuring,” a harsh austerity program that brought wage freezes, cutbacks in public spending, increased unemployment, and the abolition of worker-managed enterprises. Still, much of the economy remained in the not-for-profit public sector, including the Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, described in the New York Times as “war’s glittering prize . . . the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans . . . worth at least $5 billion” in rich deposits of coal, lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and silver.1
That U.S. leaders have consciously sought to dismember Yugoslavia is not a matter of speculation but of public record. In November 1990, the Bush administration pressured Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six months would lose U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate elections in each of the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State Department approval of both election procedures and results as a condition for any future aid. Aid would go only to the separate republics, not to the Yugoslav government, and only to those forces whom Washington defined as “democratic,” meaning right-wing, free-market, separatist parties.
Another goal of U.S. policy has been media monopoly and ideological control. In 1997, in what remained of Serbian Bosnia, the last radio station critical of NATO policy was forcibly shut down by NATO “peacekeepers.” The story in the New York Times took elaborate pains to explain why silencing the only existing dissident Serbian station was necessary for advancing democratic pluralism. The Times used the term “hardline” eleven times to describe Bosnian Serb leaders who opposed the shutdown and who failed to see it as “a step toward bringing about responsible news coverage in Bosnia.”2
Likewise, a portion of Yugoslav television remained in the hands of people who refused to view the world as do the U.S. State Department, the White House, and the corporate-owned U.S. news media, and this was not to be tolerated. The NATO bombings destroyed the two government TV channels and dozens of local radio and television stations, so that by the summer of 1999 the only TV one could see in Belgrade, when I visited that city, were the private channels along with CNN, German television, and various U.S. programs. Yugoslavia's sin was not that it had a media monopoly but that the publicly owned portion of its media deviated from the western media monopoly that blankets most of the world, including Yugoslavia itself.
In 1992, another blow was delivered against Belgrade: international sanctions. Led by the United States, a freeze was imposed on all trade to and from Yugoslavia, with disastrous results for the economy: hyperinflation, mass unemployment of up to 70 percent, malnourishment, and the collapse of the health care system.3
Divide and Conquer
One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that “those who are mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia — not the Serbs, Croats or Muslims, but the Western powers — are depicted as saviors.”4 While pretending to work for harmony, U.S. leaders supported the most divisive, reactionary forces from Croatia to Kosovo.
In Croatia, the West’s man-of-the-hour was Franjo Tudjman, who claimed in a book he authored in 1989, that “the establishment of Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews,” and that only 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the Holocaust. Tudjman’s government adopted the fascist Ustasha checkered flag and anthem.5 Tudjman presided over the forced evacuation of over half a million Serbs from Croatia between 1991 and 1995, replete with rapes and summary executions.6 This included the 200,000 from Krajina in 1995, whose expulsion was facilitated by attacks from NATO war planes and missiles. Needless to say, U.S. leaders did nothing to stop and much to assist these atrocities, while the U.S. media looked the other way. Tudjman and his cronies now reside in obscene wealth while the people of Croatia are suffering the afflictions of the free market paradise. Tight controls have been imposed on Croatian media, and anyone who criticizes President Tudjman’s government risks incarceration. Yet the White House hails Croatia as a new democracy.
In Bosnia, U.S. leaders supported the Muslim fundamentalist, Alija Izetbegovic, an active Nazi in his youth, who has called for strict religious control over the media and now wants to establish an Islamic Bosnian republic. Izetbegovic himself does not have the support of most Bosnian Muslims. He was decisively outpolled in his bid for the presidency yet managed to take over that office by cutting a mysterious deal with frontrunner Fikret Abdic.7 Bosnia is now under IMF and NATO regency. It is not permitted to develop its own internal resources, nor allowed to extend credit or self-finance through an independent monetary system. Its state-owned assets, including energy, water, telecommunications, media and transportation, have been sold off to private firms at garage sale prices.
In the former Yugoslavia, NATO powers have put aside neoimperialism and have opted for out-and-out colonial occupation. In early 1999, the democratically elected president of Republika Srpska, the Serb ministate in Bosnia, who had defeated NATO’s chosen candidate, was removed by NATO troops because he proved less than fully cooperative with NATO’s “high representative” in Bosnia. The latter retains authority to impose his own solutions and remove elected officials who prove in any way obstructive.8 This too was represented in the western press as a necessary measure to advance democracy.
In Kosovo, we see the same dreary pattern. The U.S. gave aid and encouragement to violently right-wing separatist forces such as the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army, previously considered a terrorist organization by Washington. The KLA has been a longtime player in the enormous heroin trade that reaches to Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Sweden.9 KLA leaders had no social program other than the stated goal of cleansing Kosovo of all non-Albanians, a campaign that had been going on for decades. Between 1945 and 1998, the non-Albanian Kosovar population of Serbs, Roma, Turks, Gorani (Muslim Slavs), Montenegrins, and several other ethnic groups shrank from some 60 percent to about 20 percent. Meanwhile, the Albanian population grew from 40 to 80 percent (not the 90 percent repeatedly reported in the press), benefiting from a higher birth rate, a heavy influx of immigrants from Albania, and the systematic intimidation and expulsion of Serbs.
In 1987, in an early untutored moment of truth, the New York Times reported: “Ethnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. . . . Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls. . . . As the Slavs flee the protracted violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have been demanding for years . . . an ‘ethnically pure’ Albanian region. . . .’10 Ironically, while the Serbs were repeatedly charged with ethnic cleansing, Serbia itself is now the only multi-ethnic society left in the former Yugoslavia, with some twenty-six nationality groups including thousands of Albanians who live in and around Belgrade.
Demonizing the Serbs
The propaganda campaign to demonize the Serbs fits the larger policy of the Western powers. The Serbs were targeted for demonization because they were the largest nationality and the one most opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia. None other than Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, commented on it in 1994: “The popular image of this war in Bosnia is one of unrelenting Serb expansionism. Much of what the Croatians call ‘the occupied territories’ is land that has been held by Serbs for more that three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia. . . . In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs.” While U.S. leaders claim they want peace, Boyd concludes, they have encouraged a deepening of the war.11
But what of the atrocities they committed? All sides committed atrocities, but the reporting was consistently one-sided. Grisly incidents of Croat and Muslim atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S. press, and when they did they were accorded only passing mention.12 Meanwhile Serb atrocities were played up and sometimes even fabricated, as we shall see. Recently, three Croatian generals were indicted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment and deaths of Serbs in Krajina and elsewhere. Where were U.S. leaders and U.S. television crews when these war crimes were being committed? John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, USA, asks: Where were the TV cameras when hundreds of Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?13 The official line, faithfully parroted in the U.S. media, is that the Serbs committed all the atrocities at Srebrenica.
Before uncritically ingesting the atrocity stories dished out by U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media, we might recall the five hundred premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait, a story repeated and believed until exposed as a total fabrication years later. During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of having an official policy of rape. “Go forth and rape” a Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that story never could be traced. The commander's name was never produced. As far as we know, no such utterance was ever made. Even the New York Times belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing that “the existence of ‘a systematic rape policy’ by the Serbs remains to be proved.”14
Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 Muslim women. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not more than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military engagements. A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that stories of massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian governments and had no credible supporting evidence. Common sense would dictate that these stories be treated with the utmost skepticism — and not be used as an excuse for an aggressive and punitive policy against Yugoslavia.
The mass rape propaganda theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify NATO’s renewed attacks on Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco Examiner tells us: “SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE, KOSOVO REFUGEES SAY.” Only at the bottom of the story, in the nineteenth paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found no such organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the dozens “and not many dozens,” according to the OSCE spokesperson. This same story did note that the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal sentenced a Bosnian Croat military commander to ten years in prison for failing to stop his troops from raping Muslim women in 1993 — an atrocity we heard little about when it was happening.15
The Serbs were blamed for the infamous Sarajevo market massacre of 1992. But according to the report leaked out on French TV, Western intelligence knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed Bosnian civilians in the marketplace in order to induce NATO involvement. Even international negotiator David Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.16 However, the well-timed fabrication served its purpose of inducing the United Nations to go along with the U.S.-sponsored sanctions.
On one occasion, notes Barry Lituchy, the New York Times ran a photo purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed an obscure retraction the following week.17
We repeatedly have seen how “rogue nations” are designated and demonized. The process is predictably transparent. First, the leaders are targeted. Qaddafi of Libya was a “Hitlerite megalomaniac” and a “madman.” Noriega of Panama was a “a swamp rat,” one of the world’s worst “drug thieves and scums,” and “a Hitler admirer.” Saddam Hussein of Iraq was “the Butcher of Baghdad,” a “madman,” and “worse than Hitler.” Each of these leaders then had their countries attacked by U.S. forces and U.S.-led sanctions. What they really had in common was that each was charting a somewhat independent course of self-development or somehow was not complying with the dictates of the global free market and the U.S. national security state.18
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has been described by Bill Clinton as “a new Hitler.” Yet he was not always considered so. At first, the Western press, viewing the ex-banker as a bourgeois Serbian nationalist who might hasten the break-up of the federation, hailed him as a “charismatic personality.” Only later, when they saw him as an obstacle rather than a tool, did they begin to depict him as the demon who “started all four wars.” This was too much even for the managing editor of the U.S. establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria. He noted in the New York Times that Milosevic who rules “an impoverished country that has not attacked its neighbors — is no Adolf Hitler. He is not even Saddam Hussein.”19
Some opposition radio stations and newspapers were reportedly shut down during the NATO bombing. But, during my trip to Belgrade in August 1999, I observed nongovernmental media and opposition party newspapers going strong. There are more opposition parties in the Yugoslav parliament than in any other European parliament. Yet the government is repeatedly labeled a dictatorship. Milosevic was elected as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few violations. As of the end of 1999, he presided over a coalition government that included four parties. Opposition groups openly criticized and demonstrated against his government. Yet he was called a dictator.
The propaganda campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that prominent personages on the Left — who oppose the NATO policy against Yugoslavia — have felt compelled to genuflect before this demonization orthodoxy.20 Thus do they reveal themselves as having been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they criticize on so many other issues. To reject the demonized image of Milosevic and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia.
More Atrocity Stories
Atrocities (murders and rapes) occur in every war, which is not to condone them. Indeed, murders and rapes occur in many peacetime communities. What the media propaganda campaign against Yugoslavia charged was that atrocities were conducted on a mass genocidal scale. Such charges were used to justify the murderous aerial assault by NATO forces.
Up until the bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources had put the figure at 800. In either case, such casualties reveal a limited insurgency, not genocide. The forced expulsion policy began after the NATO bombings, with thousands being uprooted by Serb forces mostly in areas where the KLA was operating or was suspected of operating. In addition, if the unconfirmed reports by the ethnic Albanian refugees can be believed, there was much plundering and instances of summary execution by Serbian paramilitary forces — who were unleashed after the NATO bombing started.
We should keep in mind that tens of thousands fled Kosovo because of the bombings, or because the province was the scene of sustained ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or because they were just afraid and hungry. An Albanian woman crossing into Macedonia was eagerly asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb police. She responded: “There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the [NATO] bombs.”21 During the bombings, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of Kosovo took flight (mostly north but some to the south), as did thousands of Roma and other non-Albanian ethnic groups.22 Were these people ethnically cleansing themselves? Or were they not fleeing the bombing and the ground war?
The New York Times reported that “a major purpose of the NATO effort is to end the Serb atrocities that drove more than one million Albanians from their homes.”23 So, we are told to believe, the refugee tide was caused not by the ground war against the KLA and not by the massive NATO bombing but by unspecified atrocities. The bombing, which was the major cause of the refugee problem was now seen as the solution. The refugee problem created in part by the massive aerial attacks was now treated as justification for such attacks, a way of putting pressure on Milosevic to allow “the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees.”24
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers — usually well-clothed and in good health, some riding their tractors, trucks, or cars, many of them young men of recruitment age — they were described as being “slaughtered.” Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds and the forced expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as “genocide.” But experts in surveillance photography and wartime propaganda charged NATO with running a “propaganda campaign” on Kosovo that lacked any supporting evidence. State Department reports of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000 missing Albanian men “are just ludicrous,” according to these independent critics.25
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of mass killings was hyped once again. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic Albanians “might be buried in mass graves” around a mountain village in western Kosovo. Such speculations were based on sources that NATO officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article mentions “four decomposing bodies” discovered near a large ash heap, with no details as to who they might be or how they died.26
An ABC “Nightline” program made dramatic and repeated references to the “Serbian atrocities in Kosovo” while offering no specifics. Ted Kopple asked angry Albanian refugees what they had witnessed? They pointed to an old man in their group who wore a wool hat. The Serbs had thrown the man's hat to the ground and stepped on it, “because the Serbs knew that his hat was the most important thing to him,” they told Kopple, who was appropriately appalled by this one example of a “war crime” offered in the hour-long program.
A widely circulated story in the New York Times, headlined “U.S. REPORT OUTLINES SERB ATTACKS IN KOSOVO,” tells us that the State Department issued “the most comprehensive documentary record to date on atrocities.” The report concludes that there had been organized rapes and systematic executions. But reading further into the article, one finds that stories of such crimes “depend almost entirely on information from refugee accounts. There was no suggestion that American intelligence agencies had been able to verify, most, or even many, of the accounts . . . and the word ‘reportedly’ and ‘allegedly’ appear throughout the document.”27
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence. One woman caught him glancing at the watch on her wrist, while her husband told him how all the women had been robbed of their jewelry and other possessions. A spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees talked of mass rapes and what sounded like hundreds of killings in three villages. When Gillan pressed him for more precise information, he reduced it drastically to five or six teenage rape victims. But he admitted that he had not spoken to any witnesses and that “we have no way of verifying these reports.”28
Gillan noted that some refugees had seen killings and other atrocities, but there was little to suggest that they had seen it on the scale that was being reported. Officials told him of refugees who talked of sixty or more being killed in one village and fifty in another, but Gillan “could not find one eye-witness who actually saw these things happening.” It was always in some other village that the mass atrocities seem to have occurred. Yet every day western journalists reported “hundreds” of rapes and murders. Sometimes they noted in passing that the reports had yet to be substantiated, but then why were such stories being so eagerly publicized?
In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign Office privately denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was a component of Yugoslav policy: “Even in Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters.”29
Still, Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced expulsion of Albanian Kosovars, and with summary executions of a hundred or so individuals. Again, alleged crimes that occurred after the NATO bombing had started were used as justification for the bombing. The biggest war criminals of all were the NATO political leaders who orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and destruction.
As the White House saw it, since the stated aim of the aerial attacks was not to kill civilians; there was no liability, only regrettable mistakes. In other words, only the professed intent of an action counted and not its ineluctable effects. But a perpetrator can be judged guilty of willful murder without explicitly intending the death of a particular victim — as with an unlawful act that the perpetrator knew would likely cause death. As George Kenney, a former State Department official under the Bush Administration, put it: “Dropping cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn’t result in accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing.”30
In the first weeks of the NATO occupation of Kosovo, tens of thousands of Serbs were driven from the province and hundreds were killed by KLA gunmen in what was described in the western press as acts of “revenge” and “retaliation,” as if the victims were deserving of such a fate. Also numbering among the victims of “retribution” were the Roma, Gorani, Turks, Montenegrins, and Albanians who had “collaborated” with the Serbs by speaking Serbian, opposing separatism, and otherwise identifying themselves as Yugoslavs. Others continued to be killed or maimed by the mines planted by the KLA and the Serb military, and by the large number of NATO cluster bombs sprinkled over the land.31
It was repeatedly announced in the first days of the NATO occupation that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs (down from the 100,000 and even 500,000 Albanian men supposedly executed during the war). No evidence was ever offered to support the 10,000 figure, nor even to explain how it was so swiftly determined — even before NATO forces had moved into most of Kosovo.
Repeatedly unsubstantiated references to “mass graves,” each purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims also failed to materialize. Through the summer of 1999, the media hype about mass graves devolved into an occasional unspecified reference. The few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies or sometimes twice that number, but with no certain evidence regarding causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some cases there was reason to believe the victims were Serbs.32
Lacking evidence of mass graves, by late August 1999 the Los Angeles Times focused on wells “as mass graves in their own right. . . . Serbian forces apparently stuffed...many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells during their campaign of terror.”33 Apparently? The story itself dwelled on only one village in which the body of a 39-year-old male was found in a well, along with three dead cows and a dog. No cause was given for his death and “no other human remains were discovered.” The well’s owner was not identified. Again when getting down to specifics, the atrocities seem not endemic but sporadic.
Ethnic Enmity and U.S. “Diplomacy”
Some people argue that nationalism, not class, is the real motor force behind the Yugoslav conflict. This presumes that class and ethnicity are mutually exclusive forces. In fact, ethnic enmity can be enlisted to serve class interests, as the CIA tried to do with indigenous peoples in Indochina and Nicaragua — and more recently in Bosnia.34
When different national groups are living together with some measure of social and material security, they tend to get along. There is intermingling and even intermarriage. But when the economy goes into a tailspin, thanks to sanctions and IMF destabilization, then it becomes easier to induce internecine conflicts and social discombobulation. In order to hasten that process in Yugoslavia, the Western powers provided the most retrograde separatist elements with every advantage in money, organization, propaganda, arms, hired thugs, and the full might of the U.S. national security state at their backs. Once more the Balkans are to be balkanized.
NATO's attacks on Yugoslavia have been in violation of its own charter, which says it can take military action only in response to aggression committed against one of its members. Yugoslavia attacked no NATO member. U.S. leaders discarded international law and diplomacy. Traditional diplomacy is a process of negotiating disputes through give and take, proposal and counterproposal, a way of pressing one's interests only so far, arriving eventually at a solution that may leave one side more dissatisfied than the other but not to the point of forcing either party to war.
U.S. diplomacy is something else, as evidenced in its dealings with Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, and now Yugoslavia. It consists of laying down a set of demands that are treated as nonnegotiable, though called “accords” or “agreements,” as in the Dayton Accords or Rambouillet Agreements. The other side’s reluctance to surrender completely to every condition is labeled “stonewalling,” and is publicly misrepresented as an unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. U.S. leaders, we hear, run out of patience as their “offers” are “snubbed.” Ultimatums are issued, then aerial destruction is delivered upon the recalcitrant nation so that it might learn to see things the way Washington does.
Milosevic balked because the Rambouillet plan, drawn up by the U.S. State Department, demanded that he hand over a large, rich region of Serbia, that is, Kosovo, to foreign occupation. The plan further stipulated that these foreign troops shall have complete occupational power over all of Yugoslavia, with immunity from arrest and with supremacy over Yugoslav police and authorities. Even more revealing of the U.S. agenda, the Rambouillet plan stated: “The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles.”
Rational Destruction
While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were convinced that “this time” the U.S. national security state was really fighting the good fight. “Yes, the bombings don’t work. The bombings are stupid!” they said at the time, “but we have to do something.” In fact, the bombings were other than stupid: they were profoundly immoral. And in fact they did work; they destroyed much of what was left of Yugoslavia, turning it into a privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor country of cheap labor, defenseless against capital penetration, so battered that it will never rise again, so shattered that it will never reunite, not even as a viable bourgeois country.
When the productive social capital of any part of the world is obliterated, the potential value of private capital elsewhere is enhanced — especially when the crisis faced today by western capitalism is one of overcapacity. Every agricultural base destroyed by western aerial attacks (as in Iraq) or by NAFTA and GATT (as in Mexico and elsewhere), diminishes the potential competition and increases the market opportunities for multinational corporate agribusiness. To destroy publicly-run Yugoslav factories that produced auto parts, appliances, or fertilizer — or a publicly financed Sudanese plant that produced pharmaceuticals at prices substantially below their western competitors — is to enhance the investment value of western producers. And every television or radio station closed down by NATO troops or blown up by NATO bombs extends the monopolizing dominance of the western media cartels. The aerial destruction of Yugoslavia's social capital served that purpose.
We have yet to understand the full effect of NATO’s aggression. Serbia is one of the greatest sources of underground waters in Europe, and the contamination from U.S. depleted uranium and other explosives is being felt in the whole surrounding area all the way to the Black Sea. In Pancevo alone, huge amounts of ammonia were released into the air when NATO bombed the fertilizer factory. In that same city, a petrochemical plant was bombed seven times. After 20,000 tons of crude oil were burnt up in only one bombardment of an oil refinery, a massive cloud of smoke hung in the air for ten days. Some 1,400 tons of ethylene dichloride spilled into the Danube, the source of drinking water for ten million people. Meanwhile, concentrations of vinyl chloride were released into the atmosphere at more than 10,000 times the permitted level. In some areas, people have broken out in red blotches and blisters, and health officials predict sharp increases in cancer rates in the years ahead.35
National parks and reservations that make Yugoslavia among thirteen of the world's richest bio-diversity countries were bombed. The depleted uranium missiles that NATO used through many parts of the country have a half-life of 4.5 billion years.36 It is the same depleted uranium that now delivers cancer, birth defects, and premature death upon the people of Iraq. In Novi Sad, I was told that crops were dying because of the contamination. And power transformers could not be repaired because U.N. sanctions prohibited the importation of replacement parts. The people I spoke to were facing famine and cold in the winter ahead.
With words that might make us question his humanity, the NATO commander, U.S. General Wesley Clark boasted that the aim of the air war was to “demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately eliminate the essential infrastructure” of Yugoslavia. Even if Serbian atrocities had been committed, and I have no doubt that some were, where is the sense of proportionality? Paramilitary killings in Kosovo (which occurred mostly after the aerial war began) are no justification for bombing fifteen cities in hundreds of around-the-clock raids for over two months, spewing hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals into the water, air, and soil, killing thousands of Serbs, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and others, and destroying bridges, residential areas, and over two hundred hospitals, clinics, schools, and churches, along with the productive capital of an entire nation.
A report released in London in August 1999 by the Economist Intelligence Unit concluded that the enormous damage NATO’s aerial war inflicted on Yugoslavia's infrastructure will cause the economy to shrink dramatically in the next few years.37 Gross domestic product will drop by 40 percent this year and remain at levels far below those of a decade ago. Yugoslavia, the report predicted, will become the poorest country in Europe. Mission accomplished.
Postscript
In mid-September 1999, the investigative journalist Diana Johnstone emailed associates in the U.S. that former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, who had backed Tudjman’s “operation storm” that drove 200,000 Serbians (mostly farming families) out of the Krajina region of Croatia four years ago, was recently in Montenegro, chiding Serbian opposition politicians for their reluctance to plunge Yugoslavia into civil war. Such a war would be brief, he assured them, and would “solve all your problems.” Another strategy under consideration by U.S. leaders, heard recently in Yugoslavia, is to turn over the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina to Hungary. Vojvodina has some twenty-six nationalities including several hundred thousand persons of Hungarian descent who, on the whole show no signs of wanting to secede, and who certainly are better treated than the larger Hungarian minorities in Rumania and Slovakia. Still, a recent $100 million appropriation from the U.S. Congress fuels separatist activity in what remains of Yugoslavia — at least until Serbia gets a government sufficiently pleasing to the free-market globalists in the West. Johnstone concludes: “With their electric power stations ruined and factories destroyed by NATO bombing, isolated, sanctioned and treated as pariahs by the West, Serbs have the choice between freezing honorably in a homeland plunged into destitution, or following the ‘friendly advice’ of the same people who have methodically destroyed their country. As the choice is unlikely to be unanimous one way or the other, civil war and further destruction of the country are probable.”
Michael Parenti is the author of To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, Contrary Notions, Against Empire, and The Assassination of Julius Caesar.
NOTES:
New York Times, July 8, 1998.
New York Times, October 10, 1997.
For more detailed background information on the stratagems preceding the NATO bombing, see the collection of reports by Ramsey Clark, Sean Gervasi, Sara Flounders, Nadja Tesich, Michel Choussudovsky, and others in NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition (New York: International Action Center, 1998).
Joan Phillips, "Breaking the Selective Silence," Living Marxism, April 1993, p. 10.
Financial Times (London), April 15, 1993.
See for instance, Yigal Chazan's report in The Guardian (London/Manchester), August 17, 1992.
See Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 211; also Diana Johnstone, "Alija Izetbegovic: Islamic Hero of the Western World," CovertAction Quarterly, Winter 1999, p. 58.
Michael Kelly, "The Clinton Doctrine is a Fraud, and Kosovo Proves It," Boston Globe, July 1, 19 99.
San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1999 and Washington Times, May 3, 1999.
New York Times, November 1, 1987.
Foreign Affairs, September/October 1994.
For instance, Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops 'Cleansed' the Serbs," New York Times, March 21, 1999, a revealing report that has been ignored in the relentless propaganda campaign against the Serbs.
John Ranz in his paid advertisement in the New York Times, April 29, 1993.
"Correction: Report on Rape in Bosnia," New York Times, October 23, 1993.
San Francisco Examiner, April 26, 1999.
David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, p. 262.
Barry Lituchy, "Media Deception and the Yugoslav Civil War," in NATO in the Balkans, p. 205; see also New York Times, August 7, 1993.
For further discussion of this point, see my Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995).
New York Times, March 28, 1999.
Both Noam Chomsky in his comments on Pacifica Radio, April 7, 1999, and Alexander Cockburn in the Nation, May 10, 1999, referred to Serbian "brutality" and described Milosevic as "monstrous" without offering any specifics.
Brooke Shelby Biggs, "Failure to Inform," San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 5, 1999, p. 25.
Washington Post, June 6, 1999.
New York Times, June 15, 1999.
See for instance, Robert Burns, Associated Press report, April 22, 1999.
Charles Radin and Louise Palmer, "Experts Voice Doubts on Claims of Genocide: Little Evidence for NATO Assertions," San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1999.
Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
New York Times, May 11, 1999.
Audrey Gillan "What's the Story?" London Review of Books, May 27, 1999.
Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, January 12, 1999 and October 29, 1998 to the German Administrative Courts, translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht Forum, New York, April 20, 1999.
Teach-in, Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, May 23, 1999.
Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1999.
See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO Fails to Protect Serbs," New York Times, August 27, 1999.
Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1999.
It is a matter of public record that the CIA has been active in Bosnia. Consider these headlines: The Guardian (Manchester/London), November 17 1994: "CIA AGENTS TRAINING BOSNIAN ARMY"; The London Observer, November 20, 1994: "AMERICA'S SECRET BOSNIA AGENDA"; The European, November 25, 1994: "HOW THE CIA HELPS BOSNIA FIGHT BACK."
Report by Steve Crawshaw in the London Independent, reprinted in the San Francisco Examiner, July 26, 1999.
See the communication from Serbian environmentalist Branka Jovanovic: http://beograd.rockbridge.net/greens_from_belgrade.htm; March 31, 1999.
San Francisco Examiner, August 23, 1999.
http://www.michaelparenti.org/yugoslavia.html
The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Diana Johnstone on the Balkan Wars
by Edward S. Herman
(Feb 21, 2003)
Topics: Imperialism
Diana Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press, 2002) is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the causes, effects, and rights-and-wrongs of the Balkan wars of the past dozen years. The book should be priority reading for leftists, many of whom have been carried along by a NATO-power party line and propaganda barrage, believing that this was one case where Western intervention was well-intentioned and had beneficial results. An inference from this misconception, by “cruise missile leftists” and others, is that imperialism can be constructive and its power projections must be evaluated on their merits, case by case. But that the Western intervention in the Balkans constitutes a valid special case is false; the conventional and obvious truths on the Balkan wars that sustain such a view disintegrate on close inspection.
Johnstone provides that close inspection, with impressive results. It is a pleasure to watch her dismantle the claims and expose the methods of David Rieff, a literary and media favorite, as well as Roy Gutman, John Burns, and David Rohde, three reporters whose close adherence to the party line in Bosnia was rewarded with the Pulitzer prize—all fueling the “humanitarian bombing” bandwagon. While critics of the party line risk being tagged and dismissed as apologists for the Serbs, even the most fervent partisan of an idealized “Bosnia” and campaigner for NATO military intervention such as Rieff, or the novice journalist Rohde, who wrote on Srebrenica in a semi-fictional mode, with U.S. intelligence guidance, has never had to fear being criticized as an apologist for the Muslims or NATO. Michael Ignatieff, another media favorite, acknowledges the help he has received from U.S. officials like Richard Holbrooke, General Wesley Clark and former Tribunal prosecutor Louise Arbour, and Rieff lauded him for his “close relations” with these “important figures in the West’s political and military leadership.” [1]
The widespread acceptance of the official connections, open advocacy, and spectacular bias displayed by these authors has rested in part on the usual media and intellectual community subservience to official policy positions, but it was also a result of the rapid and thoroughgoing demonization of the Serbs as the “new Nazis” or “last of the Communists.” Given that NATO was good, combatting evil, the close relationship with officials was not seen as involving any conflict of interest or compromise with objectivity; they were all on the same “team”—a phalanx seeking justice. Thus even the uncritical conduiting of anti-Serb propaganda—including unverified rumors and outright disinformation—was not only acceptable, it was capable of yielding journalistic honors.
On the other hand, any attempt to counter the official/media team’s claims and supposed evidence was quickly interpreted as apologetics. This is hardly new. In each U.S. war critics of U.S. policy are charged with being apologists for the demonized enemy—Ho Chi Minh and communism; Pol Pot; Saddam Hussein; Arafat; Daniel Ortega; Bin Laden, etc. The demonization of Milosevic was in accord with longstanding practice, and the charge of apologist for challenging the official line on the demon was inevitable for a forceful challenger. What is perhaps exceptional has been the extensive acceptance of the party line among people on the left, with, among others, Christopher Hitchens, [2] Ian Williams and the editors of The Nation in its grip. In These Times rejected first hand reporting from Kosovo by Johnstone, their longtime European Editor, when it diverged from the line of their more recent correspondent, Paul Hockenos, whose connections with the establishment included a stint as the spokesperson and media officer for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina, acting as an occupying power in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, and an affiliation with the American Academy in Berlin, whose chairman and co-chairman are Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissinger. [3]
What makes the double standard in treatment of Johnstone and the “journalists of attachment” especially laughable is that Johnstone is a serious investigative journalist, very knowledgeable about Balkan history and politics, whose work in Fools’ Crusade sets a standard in cool examination of issues that is several grades higher than that in Rieff, Gutman, Rohde, Burns (and for that matter, Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Noel Malcolm, Hitchens, Williams, and Hockenos). On issue after issue she discusses both the evidence and counter-evidence, weighs them, gives them a historical and political context, and comes to an assessment, which is sometimes that the verifiable evidence doesn’t support a clear conclusion. She does this convincingly, and in the process lays waste to the established version.
For example, Johnstone notes that in late September, 1991, some 120 Serbs in the Croatian town of Gospic were abducted and massacred in what Croatian human rights activists called the first major massacre of civilians in the Yugoslav civil wars. Although this was clearly designed to frighten the Serbs into moving, the term “ethnic cleansing” was only taken up by the Western media months later in reference to Serb treatment of Muslims in Bosnia. The Gospic slaughter was barely noticed, and only hit the news in 1997 when a disgruntled former policeman, Miro Bajramovic went public, claiming that the Gospic massacre was done on orders from the Croatian Interior Ministry to spread terror among the Serbs. Bajramovic was quickly imprisoned in Croatia and tortured, and no moves were taken to deal with the crimes he named either within Croatia or by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (hereafter, ICTY, or Tribunal).
Shortly thereafter three other Croatian soldiers risked their lives to take videotapes and documents on this massacre to the Hague, but the Tribunal refused to offer them protection; one was murdered, the others fled Gospic, and while Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte insisted that the Tribunal must have priority over Serb courts in dealing with Serbs, she waived priority in dealing with Croats. Thus, nothing was done regarding Gospic except the harassment, torture and killing of witnesses. [4]
One of the Croatian officers leading the attacks on Serbs, an Albanian, Agim Ceku, was subsequently trained by “retired” U.S. army officers on contract to Croatia, and he helped command “Operation Storm” in 1995, in which hundreds of Serb civilians were killed and Krajina was ethnically cleansed of several hundred thousand Serbs in what was probably the largest single ethnic cleansing operation in the Balkan wars. Ceku later returned to Kosovo to join the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and worked with them during the 1999 bombing war. Ceku has not only never been indicted by the Tribunal, in January 2000 he was sworn in by NATO’s proconsul in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, as chief of the “Kosovo Protection Corps,” the new look KLA.
You may not have heard of Gospic or Ceku, and Nasir Oric is also not a name featured by Rieff, the media, or the Tribunal. Arkan is a more familiar name. Arkan was a Serb paramilitary leader, eventually indicted by the Tribunal, just as NATO started to bomb Yugoslavia in March 1999, no doubt coincidentally providing exemplary public relations service to NATO. Nasir Oric was a Bosnian Muslim officer operating out of Srebrenica, from which “safe haven” Oric ventured out to attack nearby Serb villages, burning homes and killing over a thousand Serbs between May 1992 and January 1994. Oric even invited Western reporters to his apartment to see his “war trophies”: videocassettes showing cut- off Serb heads, burnt houses, and piles of corpses. [5]
You thought that Srebrenica was a “safe haven” only for civilians and that it could hardly be a UN cover for Bosnian Muslim military operations? You were misinformed. [6] You hadn’t heard of the 1992 pushing out of Serbs from Srebrenica and the multiyear attacks on nearby Serb towns and massacres that preceded the Srebrenica massacre (discussed further below)? In fact, it has been an absolute rule of Rieff et al./media reporting on the Bosnian conflict to present evidence of Serb violence in vacuo, suppressing evidence of prior violence against Serbs, thereby falsely suggesting that Serbs were never responding but only initiated violence (this applies to Vukovar, Mostar, Tuzla, Gorazde, and many other towns). [7]
You hadn’t heard of Nasir Oric and can’t understand why he has never been indicted by the Tribunal although doing the same sort of thing as Arkan, but perhaps on a somewhat larger scale? It is not puzzling at all if you realize that the “phalanx” I mentioned above which includes Rieff et al., the media, and the Tribunal, also includes the NATO powers and is serving their ends, which did not include justice (see below).
Johnstone provides many examples of how the phalanx twisted facts for political ends, including an extensive and compelling analysis of the various non-proofs of “systematic rape” as Serb policy. [8] But the choicest morsel showing how the propaganda system works was the Nazi-style “death camp” with its picture of the “thin man” Fikret Alic behind barbed wire. As Johnstone notes, the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians also had prison camps during the Bosnian wars, but Radovan Karadzic, the “indicted war criminal,” was not as smart as they were—he allowed the Western media to visit his camps.
It is now well established as truth, if not permitted to surface in the mainstream media, that: (1) the thin man was not behind barbed wire—the barbed wire was around a small unused compound from which the photographers from Britain’s Independent Television Network took their pictures; (2) he was not even in a prison camp, let alone a death camp, but was in transit through a refugee center, on his way to exile in Scandinavia; (3) the thinness of Fikret Alic was not typical of people in the camp, but was highlighted to fit the “Auschwitz” image.
Nevertheless, “in August 1992, the ‘thin man behind barbed wire’ photos made the tour of the front pages of virtually every tabloid newspaper in the Western world and appeared on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and other mass circulation magazines.” [9] The U.S. proposal for a war crimes tribunal followed in the same month, and German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, featuring the evidence of the “thin man” photo, made it clear that the Tribunal’s function was to prosecute Serbs, who were ethnic cleansing “to achieve their national goals in Bosnia-Herzegovina [which] is genocide.” This was only one of many frauds based on disinformation, but it was a major one, helping make the Serbs-as- Nazis a given for the phalanx and much of the Western public.
Milosevic Started It All
Central to the party line of NATO and the phalanx has been the theme that Milosevic is the demon who started it all by his nationalist quest for a “Greater Serbia” and his (and Serbia’s) view that non-Serbs “had no place in their country, and even no right to live” (Clinton). According to David Rieff, Milosevic “had quite correctly been described by U.S. officials …as the architect of the catastrophe,” [10] and Tim Judah referred to Milosevic’s responsibility for wars in “Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo: four wars since 1991 and the result of these terrible conflicts, which began with the slogan ‘All Serbs in One State’ is the cruelest of ironies.” [11]
On its face this perspective seems simple-minded, and is even referred to by a more sophisticated analyst than Rieff or Judah, Lenard Cohen, a bit sardonically, as the “paradise lost/loathsome leaders perspective” on history. [12] Johnstone’s book destroys this party line by a convincing analysis of the dynamics of the conflict observable in the actions and interests of all the parties involved, extending even to expatriate lobbying groups of the Croatians and Albanians.
In her enlightening chapter on Germany, Johnstone describes its hostility to Serbia and contacts with Croatian emigre groups long before the arrival of Milosevic. Germany had attacked Serbia during World War I and then again under the Nazis; whereas the Croatians and Kosovo Albanians had been German allies. Germany under the Nazis had regularly used the gambit of siding with “ethnic minorities” as a means of weakening rival or target states, and with the death of the Soviet Union and the end of Western support of a unified and independent Yugoslavia, and German reunification, Germany renewed that gambit as it aimed to consolidate its power in Eastern Europe. Germany encouraged the unilateral secession of Slovenia and Croatia and pressured her Maastricht allies to go along with supporting this secession, although it was unnegotiated and in violation of international law.
At the same time as the Europeans encouraged the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, and the United States threatened Yugoslavia if it tried to maintain its borders by use of its army, the NATO alliance failed to deal with the threat to the stranded minorities in the seceding territories. The EU-appointed Badinter commission even announced in November 1991 that Yugoslavia was “in a process of dissolution,” which helped accelerate the dissolution; and by giving recognition to the artificial boundaries of the “Republics,” while refusing to consider the demands of the large groups within those Republics that wanted to stay in Yugoslavia, Badinter provided an ideal formula for producing ethnic warfare. This was not Milosevic causing trouble, it was the Germans and other NATO powers who encouraged dissolution without offering any constructive solution to minority demands (Johnstone discusses some of the ignored possibilities).
Their obvious bias against the Serbs, and encouragement to the national groups opposed to the Serbs, also maximized the threat to peace, as it made the Serbs justly suspicious of NATO intentions and encouraged the other groups to resist a negotiated settlement and provoke the Serbs into actions that would increase NATO intervention on their behalf. This was dramatically evident in Bosnia, where the European powers arranged for an independence vote in 1992, despite the fact that the Bosnia-Herzegovina constitution required that such a vote be taken only upon agreement among the republic’s three “constituent peoples” (Muslims, Croats and Serbs). The Bosnian Serbs boycotted this election, and the creation of this artificial and badly divided state assured war and ethnic cleansing. This again was a catastrophic decision made by the NATO powers, not by Milosevic.
Johnstone has an extensive discussion of the brutal historical background of Bosnia- Herzegovina (and Croatia), which had been the scene of massive inter-group crimes during World War II. [13] She also demonstrates clearly that Bosnia was no multiethnic paradise upset by Serb violence, in the myth perpetrated by Rieff et al. and the NATO media. Johnstone points out that even as early as December 1990, in elections in Bosnia the nationalist parties won easily, capturing 90 percent of the votes, suggesting something other than a non-nationalistic society. She also provides solid evidence that Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader of Bosnia in the war years, was a committed believer in an Islamic—not a multiethnic—state, and a man who regarded Turkey as too advanced and modernist, preferring Pakistan as his Islamic model. The thousands of Mujahidden fighters, including Al Qaeda militants, that he welcomed to fight for his cause, and the massive aid given him by Saudi Arabia, were not supplied in the cause of multi-ethnicity.
Johnstone shows that with U.S. aid and encouragement Izetbegovic fought any settlement that would result in autonomy for the major national groups. He, like the KLA, realized that he could pursue a maximalist strategy by getting the more-than-willing United States to support him both diplomatically and, increasingly, by military means. Milosevic, and to a lesser extent the Bosnian Serbs, were repeatedly willing to sign compromise agreements, but Izetbegovic repeatedly refused, with U.S. support—most importantly, in the case of the “Lisbon Accord” of March 1992, which was signed by all three parties, but from which Izetbegovic withdrew, on U.S. advice. Milosevic also supported the Owen-Vance plan of 1992, vetoed by the Bosnian Serbs, to Milosevic’s disgust. This diplomatic history is well documented in Lord David Owen’s memoir, Balkan Odyssey, which is why this Britisher’s work is not well regarded by the party liners. Richard Holbrooke acknowledges Milosevic’s efforts to save the Dayton accord from Izetbegovic’s foot-dragging, and the 1995 U.S. bombing of Bosnian Serbs may have been part of the price paid to get Izetbegovic, not Milosevic, to negotiate at Dayton. [14]
Johnstone’s detailed account of Croatia stresses the genocidal behavior of the Croats toward the Serbs in World War II; the long- standing backing of the nationalist movement in Croatia by Germany, Austria, and the Vatican; the importance of the Croatian lobby in the United States and elsewhere in mobilizing support for their breakaway from Yugoslavia; and Croatia’s skilled propaganda efforts, helped along by their employment of public relations firm Ruder Finn. “News” about Croatia and its victimization by Serbia flowed from Zagreb and Ruder Finn. Quite independently of Milosevic the Croatian nationalists, led by Franjo Tudjman from 1990, were clearly aiming at a “Greater Croatia” that would include a part of Bosnia, as well as the Serb- inhabited Krajina area. As convincingly described by Johnstone, it was a masterpiece of effective propaganda that Croatia’s war in Bosnia and expulsion of a quarter million Serbs from Krajina (with active U.S. assistance) was portrayed in the West not as part of a quest for a Greater Croatia, but as a resistance to Milosevic’s striving for a Greater Serbia.
According to Clinton and mainstream commentary, Milosevic’s drive for a Greater Serbia and nationalism was demonstrated by his inflammatory nationalistic speeches of 1987 and 1989. This is a perfect illustration of the profound role of disinformation in the demonization process. The two famous speeches DENOUNCE nationalism: Milosevic actually said that “Yugoslavia is a multinational community, and it can survive only on condition of full equality of all nations that live in it.” Nothing in the two speeches contradicts this sentiment.
In dispelling the “myth” of Milosevic, Johnstone hardly puts him on a pedestal. He was an opportunistic politician, “whose ‘ambiguity’ allowed him to win elections, but not to unite the Serbs.” Milosevic gained popularity by condemning both Serbian nationalism and Communist bureaucracy, and by promising economic reforms in line with the demands of the Western financial community. In Johnstone’s view, Milosevic can be regarded as a criminal “if using criminals to do dirty tasks makes him a criminal,” but on this count he was “no more [guilty] (or rather less) than the late President Tudjman of Croatia or President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, widely regarded as a saint.” He was less a nationalist than Tudjman and Izetbegovic, and claims that he had “dehumanizing beliefs” and an “eliminationist project” are taken out of the whole cloth. [15]
Milosevic’s alleged pursuit of a Greater Serbia was also a misreading of his actual policies, which were, first, to prevent the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and second, as that disintegration occurred to protect the Serb minorities in the new states and allow them either to remain in Yugoslavia or obtain autonomy in the new rump states. In fact, he was considered by the Bosnian Serbs and Krajina victims of Operation Storm to be a sell- out, eager to bargain away their interests in exchange for a possible lifting of sanctions on Yugoslavia. He did support the Bosnian Serbs, sporadically, but it is rarely mentioned that all the NATO powers and Saudia Arabia and Al Qaeda were supporting the Bosnian Muslims (and Croatia was supporting its allies in Bosnia).
So Milosevic was guilty of pursuing a Greater Serbia by trying to prevent the dissolution of Yugoslavia and feebly seeking to give stranded and threatened Serb populations protection! His “war” against Slovenia—one of those “terrible conflicts” Tim Judah attributes to Milosevic—was a half-hearted ten-day effort to prevent an illegal secession of that Republic, quickly terminated with minimal (and mainly Yugoslav army) casualties. Meanwhile, Tudjman, quite openly seeking a Greater Croatia, and Izetbegovic, trying to leverage U.S. and other NATO hostility to Yugoslavia into a means of compelling unwanted Greater Muslim rule in Bosnia, were just victims of the bad man! This is Orwell written into mainstream truth.
The same is true of the Kosovo struggle. There is no question but that Milosevic’s crackdown in 1989 was brutal, and that police and army actions against the KLA in later years were sometimes ruthless, but the phalanx has ignored a number of key facts. One is that Kosovo was largely run by Albanians before 1989, and the first target of the 1989 crackdown was the old bureaucracy run by Albanian communists. Second, under their rule it was Serbs who were discriminated against and driven out of Kosovo. In the 1980s and earlier Kosovo Albanian nationalists were openly engaging in “ethnic cleansing” in the interests of a homogenous Albanian state, and in the 1990s the movement became strictly irredendist, aiming not at reform but exit from Yugoslavia. The movement’s leaders were also more openly interested in a “Greater Albania.” As in the case of the Izetbegovic faction of the Bosnian Muslims, the KLA soon saw that by provocation and effective propaganda it would be possible to get NATO to serve as its military arm.
Johnstone describes the Yugoslav efforts to compromise and give the Albanians greater autonomy, and she notes the complete failure of the NATO powers to seek any kind of mediated solution (including a division of the Kosovo territory). The war engineered by the KLA and United States then ensued, with disastrous results. In Kosovo it produced great destruction, an immense flight of refugees, with thousands of casualties and a fresh injection of hatred on all sides that contradicted the alleged NATO aim of producing a genuine multiethnic community. This was followed by a massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Roma, Turks and Jews by the NATO-supported KLA, and Kosovo was left “without a legal system, ruled by illegal structures of the Kosovo Liberation Army and very often by competing mafias” (quoting Jiri Dienstbier, UN human rights rapporteur in Kosovo). Under NATO auspices, and helped along by leaders of Albania, a new advance was made in the aim of a “Greater Albania” in Macedonia and possibly elsewhere. Finally, Serbia was very badly damaged by the war, reduced to penury and dependency, conflict ridden and with a sham democracy in place.
Of course, there was Srebrenica. But since so much in this establishment Balkan story consists of lies and half-truths, is it possible that the establishment version of this story is also misleading? Johnstone examines the various sources and finds considerable uncertainty regarding two issues: the number of victims, and the motives of the combatants. [16] It is true that 199 bodies were found bound or blindfolded following the Bosnian Serb occupation of the town in July 1995, almost surely slaughtered by the Bosnian Serb attackers. But what about the alleged 8,000 killed? The figure of 8,000 seems to have been arrived at by adding a Red Cross estimate of 3,000 that “witnesses” said were detained by the Bosnian Serbs to the figure of 5,000 who the Red Cross said “fled Srebrenica, some of whom reached Central Bosnia.” Although there was no reason from this accounting to add the 5,000 as killed, this became conventional truth. The Bosnian Muslims shrewdly refused to tell the Red Cross how many had survived, helping suggest that they were all dead.
Six years later, Tribunal forensic teams had uncovered 2,361 bodies in this region of heavy fighting, many almost surely fallen soldiers on both sides. Recall also that the United States had engaged in intensive satellite imaging of this area, and Madeleine Albright had even promised to keep watching to see if the Bosnian Serbs disturbed the graves. But she never produced for public view any satellite photo showing bodies being deposited in or removed from graves.
As to motive for the killings that took place, it is interesting that the significant killings (and expulsions) of Serbs (and Roma) in (and from) Kosovo after the NATO takeover were regularly treated in the West as “revenge,” whereas the killings in and around Srebrenica, plausibly attributable to Bosnian Serb anger at the prior murderous operations of Nasir Oric against Serbs in the Srebrenica vicinity, were not “revenge” but “genocide” in the Western system of double standards. As noted, this rests in good part on the blackout of the prior events associated with Nasir Oric and his Bosnian Muslim forces.
Johnstone has a devastating account of the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, showing its political origin, purpose and service, as well as its violation of all Western judicial norms (including its use of “indictments” to condemn and ostracize without trial). Among many other points featured is the fact that the Tribunal has only sought to establish responsibility at the top for Serbs, never for Croatian or Bosnian Muslim leaders. Johnstone also notes the unwillingness to indict any NATO personnel or officials for readily documented war crimes. She also points out that the indictment of Milosevic on May 27, 1999, based on unverified information provided by U.S. intelligence one day earlier, was needed by NATO to cover over its intensifying bombing of Serbian civilian sites, in straightforward violation of international law. As Clinton said, “The indictment confirms that our war is just,” but it much more clearly confirmed that the Tribunal was a political, not a judicial institution.
A further illustration is afforded in her enlightening account of the novel “hearing” on the Karadzic case in July 1996, where the Tribunal innovated a judicial rule whereby Karadzic’s attorney was not allowed to offer a defense of his client; he could merely observe. The main evidence of Karadzic’s “genocidal intent” was a phrase he uttered in 1991 while calling on Izetbegovic to recognize the Bosnian Serbs desire to remain in Yugoslavia, saying that “do not think that you will not perhaps make the Muslim people disappear, because the Muslims cannot defend themselves if there is a war—How will you prevent everyone from being killed in Bosnia- Herzegovina?” Although this muddled sentence issued in the heat of debate could be interpreted as a warning of the dangers of war, and comparable statements were made by Izetbegovic and many others, this was presented by the Tribunal as serious evidence of genocidal intent.
Johnstone contends that the United States was a participant in the Balkan wars for a number of reasons, including the desire to maintain its role as leader of NATO and to help provide it with a function on its 50th anniversary year (celebrated in the midst of the 78-day bombing war in April 1999); if Germany and others were going to intervene in Yugoslavia, the United States would have to enter and play its role, and incidentally show that in the use of force it was still champion. The United States was also helping itself in its Bosnian intervention by demonstrating its willingness to aid Muslims, contradicting its image as anti-Muslim, and solidifying its relationship with Turkey and other Muslim countries helping in the Bosnian war. It was also positioning itself for further advances in the region with a major military base in Kosovo and new clients in an area of increasing interest with links to the Caspian basin. The humanitarian motive was contradicted by inherent implausibility and by the nature and inhumanitarian results of the U.S. and NATO intervention.
All-in-all the United States did well from its intervention, but the people of the area did poorly. The policies of it and its European allies were primary causes of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the failure to manage any split peaceably. Their intervention was not “too late,” but early, destructive, and well designed to encourage the ethnic cleansing that followed. Subsequently, they failed to mediate the conflict in Kosovo and collaborated with the KLA in producing a highly destructive war, followed by an occupation in which REAL ethnic cleansing took place, with NATO acquiesence and even cooperation. Bosnia and Kosovo are under colonial occupation. The remnant Yugoslavia, once a vibrant and truly multiethnic state, is poor, crowded with refugees, dependent on a hostile West, conflict-ridden, and rudderless. The Balkans are neither stable nor free; their future as NATO clients does not look promising.
Diana Johnstone has written up this story in a readable, scholarly, and convincing way that I have been able to summarize all to briefly here. It is an important book, especially for a left that has been confused by the outpourings of a very powerful propaganda system.
Notes
David Rieff, “Virtual War: Kovoso and Beyond,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2000; Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 6.
Christopher Hitchens is properly referred to as an ex-leftist, who is now a reliable apologist for imperial wars. However, his furiously anti-Serb and pro-Bosnian Muslim and pro-NATO war biases date back to the early 1990s when he joined the “Potemkin Sarejevo” groupies in a new cult idealizing and misreading the facts on Izetbegovic and the allegedly multiethnic paradise now being upset by the Serbs. For an excellent account, Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, pp. 40-64.
See my Open Letter Reply to Paul Hockenos and In These Times on Their Coverage of the Balkans: http://www.zmag.org/openhermanitt.htm
Johnstone, pp. 27-32.
John Pomfret reported on Nasi Oric’s trophies in a unique article on “Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica’s Tough Guy,” Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
Johnstone, p. 110.
Among the sources on this point, providing documentation that included numerous personal affidavits, all ignored by Rieff et al. and the Western media: S. Dabic et al., “Persecution of Serbs And Ethnic Cleansing in Croatia 1991-1998, Documents and Testimonies,” Serbian Council Information Center, Belgrade, 1998; “Memoradum on War Crimes and Crimes and Genocide in Eastern Bosnia (Communes of Bratunac, Skelani and Srebrenica) Committed Against the Serbian Population From April 1992 to April 1993,” sent by Ambassador Dragomir Djokic to the General Assembly and Security Council, June 2, 1993; Milovoje Ivanisevic, “Expulsion of the Serbs From Bosnia and Herzogovina, 1992-1995,” Edition WARS, Book II, Belgrade, 2000. See also Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia- Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention ( Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 178-180; Raymond K. Kent, “Contextualizing Hate: The Hague Tribunal, the Clinton Administration and the Serbs”: http://www.beograd.com/nato/texts/engli ... izing_hate. html
Johnstone, pp. 78-90
Ibid., p. 73.
David Rieff, “A New Age of Liberal Imperialism,” World Policy Journal, Summer 1999.
Tim Judah, “Is Milosevic Planning Another Balkan War?,” Scotland on Sunday, March 19, 2000.
Lenard Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall ofSlobodan Milosevic (Boulder. Col.: Westview Press, 2001), p. 380.
Johnstone, pp. 23-32, 144-156.
Ibid., pp. 60-61
Ibid., pp. 16-23.
Ibid., pp. 109-118.
https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/di ... lkan-wars/
by Edward S. Herman
(Feb 21, 2003)
Topics: Imperialism
Diana Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press, 2002) is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the causes, effects, and rights-and-wrongs of the Balkan wars of the past dozen years. The book should be priority reading for leftists, many of whom have been carried along by a NATO-power party line and propaganda barrage, believing that this was one case where Western intervention was well-intentioned and had beneficial results. An inference from this misconception, by “cruise missile leftists” and others, is that imperialism can be constructive and its power projections must be evaluated on their merits, case by case. But that the Western intervention in the Balkans constitutes a valid special case is false; the conventional and obvious truths on the Balkan wars that sustain such a view disintegrate on close inspection.
Johnstone provides that close inspection, with impressive results. It is a pleasure to watch her dismantle the claims and expose the methods of David Rieff, a literary and media favorite, as well as Roy Gutman, John Burns, and David Rohde, three reporters whose close adherence to the party line in Bosnia was rewarded with the Pulitzer prize—all fueling the “humanitarian bombing” bandwagon. While critics of the party line risk being tagged and dismissed as apologists for the Serbs, even the most fervent partisan of an idealized “Bosnia” and campaigner for NATO military intervention such as Rieff, or the novice journalist Rohde, who wrote on Srebrenica in a semi-fictional mode, with U.S. intelligence guidance, has never had to fear being criticized as an apologist for the Muslims or NATO. Michael Ignatieff, another media favorite, acknowledges the help he has received from U.S. officials like Richard Holbrooke, General Wesley Clark and former Tribunal prosecutor Louise Arbour, and Rieff lauded him for his “close relations” with these “important figures in the West’s political and military leadership.” [1]
The widespread acceptance of the official connections, open advocacy, and spectacular bias displayed by these authors has rested in part on the usual media and intellectual community subservience to official policy positions, but it was also a result of the rapid and thoroughgoing demonization of the Serbs as the “new Nazis” or “last of the Communists.” Given that NATO was good, combatting evil, the close relationship with officials was not seen as involving any conflict of interest or compromise with objectivity; they were all on the same “team”—a phalanx seeking justice. Thus even the uncritical conduiting of anti-Serb propaganda—including unverified rumors and outright disinformation—was not only acceptable, it was capable of yielding journalistic honors.
On the other hand, any attempt to counter the official/media team’s claims and supposed evidence was quickly interpreted as apologetics. This is hardly new. In each U.S. war critics of U.S. policy are charged with being apologists for the demonized enemy—Ho Chi Minh and communism; Pol Pot; Saddam Hussein; Arafat; Daniel Ortega; Bin Laden, etc. The demonization of Milosevic was in accord with longstanding practice, and the charge of apologist for challenging the official line on the demon was inevitable for a forceful challenger. What is perhaps exceptional has been the extensive acceptance of the party line among people on the left, with, among others, Christopher Hitchens, [2] Ian Williams and the editors of The Nation in its grip. In These Times rejected first hand reporting from Kosovo by Johnstone, their longtime European Editor, when it diverged from the line of their more recent correspondent, Paul Hockenos, whose connections with the establishment included a stint as the spokesperson and media officer for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina, acting as an occupying power in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, and an affiliation with the American Academy in Berlin, whose chairman and co-chairman are Richard Holbrooke and Henry Kissinger. [3]
What makes the double standard in treatment of Johnstone and the “journalists of attachment” especially laughable is that Johnstone is a serious investigative journalist, very knowledgeable about Balkan history and politics, whose work in Fools’ Crusade sets a standard in cool examination of issues that is several grades higher than that in Rieff, Gutman, Rohde, Burns (and for that matter, Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, Noel Malcolm, Hitchens, Williams, and Hockenos). On issue after issue she discusses both the evidence and counter-evidence, weighs them, gives them a historical and political context, and comes to an assessment, which is sometimes that the verifiable evidence doesn’t support a clear conclusion. She does this convincingly, and in the process lays waste to the established version.
For example, Johnstone notes that in late September, 1991, some 120 Serbs in the Croatian town of Gospic were abducted and massacred in what Croatian human rights activists called the first major massacre of civilians in the Yugoslav civil wars. Although this was clearly designed to frighten the Serbs into moving, the term “ethnic cleansing” was only taken up by the Western media months later in reference to Serb treatment of Muslims in Bosnia. The Gospic slaughter was barely noticed, and only hit the news in 1997 when a disgruntled former policeman, Miro Bajramovic went public, claiming that the Gospic massacre was done on orders from the Croatian Interior Ministry to spread terror among the Serbs. Bajramovic was quickly imprisoned in Croatia and tortured, and no moves were taken to deal with the crimes he named either within Croatia or by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (hereafter, ICTY, or Tribunal).
Shortly thereafter three other Croatian soldiers risked their lives to take videotapes and documents on this massacre to the Hague, but the Tribunal refused to offer them protection; one was murdered, the others fled Gospic, and while Tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte insisted that the Tribunal must have priority over Serb courts in dealing with Serbs, she waived priority in dealing with Croats. Thus, nothing was done regarding Gospic except the harassment, torture and killing of witnesses. [4]
One of the Croatian officers leading the attacks on Serbs, an Albanian, Agim Ceku, was subsequently trained by “retired” U.S. army officers on contract to Croatia, and he helped command “Operation Storm” in 1995, in which hundreds of Serb civilians were killed and Krajina was ethnically cleansed of several hundred thousand Serbs in what was probably the largest single ethnic cleansing operation in the Balkan wars. Ceku later returned to Kosovo to join the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and worked with them during the 1999 bombing war. Ceku has not only never been indicted by the Tribunal, in January 2000 he was sworn in by NATO’s proconsul in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, as chief of the “Kosovo Protection Corps,” the new look KLA.
You may not have heard of Gospic or Ceku, and Nasir Oric is also not a name featured by Rieff, the media, or the Tribunal. Arkan is a more familiar name. Arkan was a Serb paramilitary leader, eventually indicted by the Tribunal, just as NATO started to bomb Yugoslavia in March 1999, no doubt coincidentally providing exemplary public relations service to NATO. Nasir Oric was a Bosnian Muslim officer operating out of Srebrenica, from which “safe haven” Oric ventured out to attack nearby Serb villages, burning homes and killing over a thousand Serbs between May 1992 and January 1994. Oric even invited Western reporters to his apartment to see his “war trophies”: videocassettes showing cut- off Serb heads, burnt houses, and piles of corpses. [5]
You thought that Srebrenica was a “safe haven” only for civilians and that it could hardly be a UN cover for Bosnian Muslim military operations? You were misinformed. [6] You hadn’t heard of the 1992 pushing out of Serbs from Srebrenica and the multiyear attacks on nearby Serb towns and massacres that preceded the Srebrenica massacre (discussed further below)? In fact, it has been an absolute rule of Rieff et al./media reporting on the Bosnian conflict to present evidence of Serb violence in vacuo, suppressing evidence of prior violence against Serbs, thereby falsely suggesting that Serbs were never responding but only initiated violence (this applies to Vukovar, Mostar, Tuzla, Gorazde, and many other towns). [7]
You hadn’t heard of Nasir Oric and can’t understand why he has never been indicted by the Tribunal although doing the same sort of thing as Arkan, but perhaps on a somewhat larger scale? It is not puzzling at all if you realize that the “phalanx” I mentioned above which includes Rieff et al., the media, and the Tribunal, also includes the NATO powers and is serving their ends, which did not include justice (see below).
Johnstone provides many examples of how the phalanx twisted facts for political ends, including an extensive and compelling analysis of the various non-proofs of “systematic rape” as Serb policy. [8] But the choicest morsel showing how the propaganda system works was the Nazi-style “death camp” with its picture of the “thin man” Fikret Alic behind barbed wire. As Johnstone notes, the Bosnian Muslims and Croatians also had prison camps during the Bosnian wars, but Radovan Karadzic, the “indicted war criminal,” was not as smart as they were—he allowed the Western media to visit his camps.
It is now well established as truth, if not permitted to surface in the mainstream media, that: (1) the thin man was not behind barbed wire—the barbed wire was around a small unused compound from which the photographers from Britain’s Independent Television Network took their pictures; (2) he was not even in a prison camp, let alone a death camp, but was in transit through a refugee center, on his way to exile in Scandinavia; (3) the thinness of Fikret Alic was not typical of people in the camp, but was highlighted to fit the “Auschwitz” image.
Nevertheless, “in August 1992, the ‘thin man behind barbed wire’ photos made the tour of the front pages of virtually every tabloid newspaper in the Western world and appeared on the cover of Time, Newsweek, and other mass circulation magazines.” [9] The U.S. proposal for a war crimes tribunal followed in the same month, and German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, featuring the evidence of the “thin man” photo, made it clear that the Tribunal’s function was to prosecute Serbs, who were ethnic cleansing “to achieve their national goals in Bosnia-Herzegovina [which] is genocide.” This was only one of many frauds based on disinformation, but it was a major one, helping make the Serbs-as- Nazis a given for the phalanx and much of the Western public.
Milosevic Started It All
Central to the party line of NATO and the phalanx has been the theme that Milosevic is the demon who started it all by his nationalist quest for a “Greater Serbia” and his (and Serbia’s) view that non-Serbs “had no place in their country, and even no right to live” (Clinton). According to David Rieff, Milosevic “had quite correctly been described by U.S. officials …as the architect of the catastrophe,” [10] and Tim Judah referred to Milosevic’s responsibility for wars in “Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo: four wars since 1991 and the result of these terrible conflicts, which began with the slogan ‘All Serbs in One State’ is the cruelest of ironies.” [11]
On its face this perspective seems simple-minded, and is even referred to by a more sophisticated analyst than Rieff or Judah, Lenard Cohen, a bit sardonically, as the “paradise lost/loathsome leaders perspective” on history. [12] Johnstone’s book destroys this party line by a convincing analysis of the dynamics of the conflict observable in the actions and interests of all the parties involved, extending even to expatriate lobbying groups of the Croatians and Albanians.
In her enlightening chapter on Germany, Johnstone describes its hostility to Serbia and contacts with Croatian emigre groups long before the arrival of Milosevic. Germany had attacked Serbia during World War I and then again under the Nazis; whereas the Croatians and Kosovo Albanians had been German allies. Germany under the Nazis had regularly used the gambit of siding with “ethnic minorities” as a means of weakening rival or target states, and with the death of the Soviet Union and the end of Western support of a unified and independent Yugoslavia, and German reunification, Germany renewed that gambit as it aimed to consolidate its power in Eastern Europe. Germany encouraged the unilateral secession of Slovenia and Croatia and pressured her Maastricht allies to go along with supporting this secession, although it was unnegotiated and in violation of international law.
At the same time as the Europeans encouraged the secession of Slovenia and Croatia, and the United States threatened Yugoslavia if it tried to maintain its borders by use of its army, the NATO alliance failed to deal with the threat to the stranded minorities in the seceding territories. The EU-appointed Badinter commission even announced in November 1991 that Yugoslavia was “in a process of dissolution,” which helped accelerate the dissolution; and by giving recognition to the artificial boundaries of the “Republics,” while refusing to consider the demands of the large groups within those Republics that wanted to stay in Yugoslavia, Badinter provided an ideal formula for producing ethnic warfare. This was not Milosevic causing trouble, it was the Germans and other NATO powers who encouraged dissolution without offering any constructive solution to minority demands (Johnstone discusses some of the ignored possibilities).
Their obvious bias against the Serbs, and encouragement to the national groups opposed to the Serbs, also maximized the threat to peace, as it made the Serbs justly suspicious of NATO intentions and encouraged the other groups to resist a negotiated settlement and provoke the Serbs into actions that would increase NATO intervention on their behalf. This was dramatically evident in Bosnia, where the European powers arranged for an independence vote in 1992, despite the fact that the Bosnia-Herzegovina constitution required that such a vote be taken only upon agreement among the republic’s three “constituent peoples” (Muslims, Croats and Serbs). The Bosnian Serbs boycotted this election, and the creation of this artificial and badly divided state assured war and ethnic cleansing. This again was a catastrophic decision made by the NATO powers, not by Milosevic.
Johnstone has an extensive discussion of the brutal historical background of Bosnia- Herzegovina (and Croatia), which had been the scene of massive inter-group crimes during World War II. [13] She also demonstrates clearly that Bosnia was no multiethnic paradise upset by Serb violence, in the myth perpetrated by Rieff et al. and the NATO media. Johnstone points out that even as early as December 1990, in elections in Bosnia the nationalist parties won easily, capturing 90 percent of the votes, suggesting something other than a non-nationalistic society. She also provides solid evidence that Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader of Bosnia in the war years, was a committed believer in an Islamic—not a multiethnic—state, and a man who regarded Turkey as too advanced and modernist, preferring Pakistan as his Islamic model. The thousands of Mujahidden fighters, including Al Qaeda militants, that he welcomed to fight for his cause, and the massive aid given him by Saudi Arabia, were not supplied in the cause of multi-ethnicity.
Johnstone shows that with U.S. aid and encouragement Izetbegovic fought any settlement that would result in autonomy for the major national groups. He, like the KLA, realized that he could pursue a maximalist strategy by getting the more-than-willing United States to support him both diplomatically and, increasingly, by military means. Milosevic, and to a lesser extent the Bosnian Serbs, were repeatedly willing to sign compromise agreements, but Izetbegovic repeatedly refused, with U.S. support—most importantly, in the case of the “Lisbon Accord” of March 1992, which was signed by all three parties, but from which Izetbegovic withdrew, on U.S. advice. Milosevic also supported the Owen-Vance plan of 1992, vetoed by the Bosnian Serbs, to Milosevic’s disgust. This diplomatic history is well documented in Lord David Owen’s memoir, Balkan Odyssey, which is why this Britisher’s work is not well regarded by the party liners. Richard Holbrooke acknowledges Milosevic’s efforts to save the Dayton accord from Izetbegovic’s foot-dragging, and the 1995 U.S. bombing of Bosnian Serbs may have been part of the price paid to get Izetbegovic, not Milosevic, to negotiate at Dayton. [14]
Johnstone’s detailed account of Croatia stresses the genocidal behavior of the Croats toward the Serbs in World War II; the long- standing backing of the nationalist movement in Croatia by Germany, Austria, and the Vatican; the importance of the Croatian lobby in the United States and elsewhere in mobilizing support for their breakaway from Yugoslavia; and Croatia’s skilled propaganda efforts, helped along by their employment of public relations firm Ruder Finn. “News” about Croatia and its victimization by Serbia flowed from Zagreb and Ruder Finn. Quite independently of Milosevic the Croatian nationalists, led by Franjo Tudjman from 1990, were clearly aiming at a “Greater Croatia” that would include a part of Bosnia, as well as the Serb- inhabited Krajina area. As convincingly described by Johnstone, it was a masterpiece of effective propaganda that Croatia’s war in Bosnia and expulsion of a quarter million Serbs from Krajina (with active U.S. assistance) was portrayed in the West not as part of a quest for a Greater Croatia, but as a resistance to Milosevic’s striving for a Greater Serbia.
According to Clinton and mainstream commentary, Milosevic’s drive for a Greater Serbia and nationalism was demonstrated by his inflammatory nationalistic speeches of 1987 and 1989. This is a perfect illustration of the profound role of disinformation in the demonization process. The two famous speeches DENOUNCE nationalism: Milosevic actually said that “Yugoslavia is a multinational community, and it can survive only on condition of full equality of all nations that live in it.” Nothing in the two speeches contradicts this sentiment.
In dispelling the “myth” of Milosevic, Johnstone hardly puts him on a pedestal. He was an opportunistic politician, “whose ‘ambiguity’ allowed him to win elections, but not to unite the Serbs.” Milosevic gained popularity by condemning both Serbian nationalism and Communist bureaucracy, and by promising economic reforms in line with the demands of the Western financial community. In Johnstone’s view, Milosevic can be regarded as a criminal “if using criminals to do dirty tasks makes him a criminal,” but on this count he was “no more [guilty] (or rather less) than the late President Tudjman of Croatia or President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, widely regarded as a saint.” He was less a nationalist than Tudjman and Izetbegovic, and claims that he had “dehumanizing beliefs” and an “eliminationist project” are taken out of the whole cloth. [15]
Milosevic’s alleged pursuit of a Greater Serbia was also a misreading of his actual policies, which were, first, to prevent the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and second, as that disintegration occurred to protect the Serb minorities in the new states and allow them either to remain in Yugoslavia or obtain autonomy in the new rump states. In fact, he was considered by the Bosnian Serbs and Krajina victims of Operation Storm to be a sell- out, eager to bargain away their interests in exchange for a possible lifting of sanctions on Yugoslavia. He did support the Bosnian Serbs, sporadically, but it is rarely mentioned that all the NATO powers and Saudia Arabia and Al Qaeda were supporting the Bosnian Muslims (and Croatia was supporting its allies in Bosnia).
So Milosevic was guilty of pursuing a Greater Serbia by trying to prevent the dissolution of Yugoslavia and feebly seeking to give stranded and threatened Serb populations protection! His “war” against Slovenia—one of those “terrible conflicts” Tim Judah attributes to Milosevic—was a half-hearted ten-day effort to prevent an illegal secession of that Republic, quickly terminated with minimal (and mainly Yugoslav army) casualties. Meanwhile, Tudjman, quite openly seeking a Greater Croatia, and Izetbegovic, trying to leverage U.S. and other NATO hostility to Yugoslavia into a means of compelling unwanted Greater Muslim rule in Bosnia, were just victims of the bad man! This is Orwell written into mainstream truth.
The same is true of the Kosovo struggle. There is no question but that Milosevic’s crackdown in 1989 was brutal, and that police and army actions against the KLA in later years were sometimes ruthless, but the phalanx has ignored a number of key facts. One is that Kosovo was largely run by Albanians before 1989, and the first target of the 1989 crackdown was the old bureaucracy run by Albanian communists. Second, under their rule it was Serbs who were discriminated against and driven out of Kosovo. In the 1980s and earlier Kosovo Albanian nationalists were openly engaging in “ethnic cleansing” in the interests of a homogenous Albanian state, and in the 1990s the movement became strictly irredendist, aiming not at reform but exit from Yugoslavia. The movement’s leaders were also more openly interested in a “Greater Albania.” As in the case of the Izetbegovic faction of the Bosnian Muslims, the KLA soon saw that by provocation and effective propaganda it would be possible to get NATO to serve as its military arm.
Johnstone describes the Yugoslav efforts to compromise and give the Albanians greater autonomy, and she notes the complete failure of the NATO powers to seek any kind of mediated solution (including a division of the Kosovo territory). The war engineered by the KLA and United States then ensued, with disastrous results. In Kosovo it produced great destruction, an immense flight of refugees, with thousands of casualties and a fresh injection of hatred on all sides that contradicted the alleged NATO aim of producing a genuine multiethnic community. This was followed by a massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Roma, Turks and Jews by the NATO-supported KLA, and Kosovo was left “without a legal system, ruled by illegal structures of the Kosovo Liberation Army and very often by competing mafias” (quoting Jiri Dienstbier, UN human rights rapporteur in Kosovo). Under NATO auspices, and helped along by leaders of Albania, a new advance was made in the aim of a “Greater Albania” in Macedonia and possibly elsewhere. Finally, Serbia was very badly damaged by the war, reduced to penury and dependency, conflict ridden and with a sham democracy in place.
Of course, there was Srebrenica. But since so much in this establishment Balkan story consists of lies and half-truths, is it possible that the establishment version of this story is also misleading? Johnstone examines the various sources and finds considerable uncertainty regarding two issues: the number of victims, and the motives of the combatants. [16] It is true that 199 bodies were found bound or blindfolded following the Bosnian Serb occupation of the town in July 1995, almost surely slaughtered by the Bosnian Serb attackers. But what about the alleged 8,000 killed? The figure of 8,000 seems to have been arrived at by adding a Red Cross estimate of 3,000 that “witnesses” said were detained by the Bosnian Serbs to the figure of 5,000 who the Red Cross said “fled Srebrenica, some of whom reached Central Bosnia.” Although there was no reason from this accounting to add the 5,000 as killed, this became conventional truth. The Bosnian Muslims shrewdly refused to tell the Red Cross how many had survived, helping suggest that they were all dead.
Six years later, Tribunal forensic teams had uncovered 2,361 bodies in this region of heavy fighting, many almost surely fallen soldiers on both sides. Recall also that the United States had engaged in intensive satellite imaging of this area, and Madeleine Albright had even promised to keep watching to see if the Bosnian Serbs disturbed the graves. But she never produced for public view any satellite photo showing bodies being deposited in or removed from graves.
As to motive for the killings that took place, it is interesting that the significant killings (and expulsions) of Serbs (and Roma) in (and from) Kosovo after the NATO takeover were regularly treated in the West as “revenge,” whereas the killings in and around Srebrenica, plausibly attributable to Bosnian Serb anger at the prior murderous operations of Nasir Oric against Serbs in the Srebrenica vicinity, were not “revenge” but “genocide” in the Western system of double standards. As noted, this rests in good part on the blackout of the prior events associated with Nasir Oric and his Bosnian Muslim forces.
Johnstone has a devastating account of the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, showing its political origin, purpose and service, as well as its violation of all Western judicial norms (including its use of “indictments” to condemn and ostracize without trial). Among many other points featured is the fact that the Tribunal has only sought to establish responsibility at the top for Serbs, never for Croatian or Bosnian Muslim leaders. Johnstone also notes the unwillingness to indict any NATO personnel or officials for readily documented war crimes. She also points out that the indictment of Milosevic on May 27, 1999, based on unverified information provided by U.S. intelligence one day earlier, was needed by NATO to cover over its intensifying bombing of Serbian civilian sites, in straightforward violation of international law. As Clinton said, “The indictment confirms that our war is just,” but it much more clearly confirmed that the Tribunal was a political, not a judicial institution.
A further illustration is afforded in her enlightening account of the novel “hearing” on the Karadzic case in July 1996, where the Tribunal innovated a judicial rule whereby Karadzic’s attorney was not allowed to offer a defense of his client; he could merely observe. The main evidence of Karadzic’s “genocidal intent” was a phrase he uttered in 1991 while calling on Izetbegovic to recognize the Bosnian Serbs desire to remain in Yugoslavia, saying that “do not think that you will not perhaps make the Muslim people disappear, because the Muslims cannot defend themselves if there is a war—How will you prevent everyone from being killed in Bosnia- Herzegovina?” Although this muddled sentence issued in the heat of debate could be interpreted as a warning of the dangers of war, and comparable statements were made by Izetbegovic and many others, this was presented by the Tribunal as serious evidence of genocidal intent.
Johnstone contends that the United States was a participant in the Balkan wars for a number of reasons, including the desire to maintain its role as leader of NATO and to help provide it with a function on its 50th anniversary year (celebrated in the midst of the 78-day bombing war in April 1999); if Germany and others were going to intervene in Yugoslavia, the United States would have to enter and play its role, and incidentally show that in the use of force it was still champion. The United States was also helping itself in its Bosnian intervention by demonstrating its willingness to aid Muslims, contradicting its image as anti-Muslim, and solidifying its relationship with Turkey and other Muslim countries helping in the Bosnian war. It was also positioning itself for further advances in the region with a major military base in Kosovo and new clients in an area of increasing interest with links to the Caspian basin. The humanitarian motive was contradicted by inherent implausibility and by the nature and inhumanitarian results of the U.S. and NATO intervention.
All-in-all the United States did well from its intervention, but the people of the area did poorly. The policies of it and its European allies were primary causes of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the failure to manage any split peaceably. Their intervention was not “too late,” but early, destructive, and well designed to encourage the ethnic cleansing that followed. Subsequently, they failed to mediate the conflict in Kosovo and collaborated with the KLA in producing a highly destructive war, followed by an occupation in which REAL ethnic cleansing took place, with NATO acquiesence and even cooperation. Bosnia and Kosovo are under colonial occupation. The remnant Yugoslavia, once a vibrant and truly multiethnic state, is poor, crowded with refugees, dependent on a hostile West, conflict-ridden, and rudderless. The Balkans are neither stable nor free; their future as NATO clients does not look promising.
Diana Johnstone has written up this story in a readable, scholarly, and convincing way that I have been able to summarize all to briefly here. It is an important book, especially for a left that has been confused by the outpourings of a very powerful propaganda system.
Notes
David Rieff, “Virtual War: Kovoso and Beyond,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2000; Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 6.
Christopher Hitchens is properly referred to as an ex-leftist, who is now a reliable apologist for imperial wars. However, his furiously anti-Serb and pro-Bosnian Muslim and pro-NATO war biases date back to the early 1990s when he joined the “Potemkin Sarejevo” groupies in a new cult idealizing and misreading the facts on Izetbegovic and the allegedly multiethnic paradise now being upset by the Serbs. For an excellent account, Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, pp. 40-64.
See my Open Letter Reply to Paul Hockenos and In These Times on Their Coverage of the Balkans: http://www.zmag.org/openhermanitt.htm
Johnstone, pp. 27-32.
John Pomfret reported on Nasi Oric’s trophies in a unique article on “Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica’s Tough Guy,” Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
Johnstone, p. 110.
Among the sources on this point, providing documentation that included numerous personal affidavits, all ignored by Rieff et al. and the Western media: S. Dabic et al., “Persecution of Serbs And Ethnic Cleansing in Croatia 1991-1998, Documents and Testimonies,” Serbian Council Information Center, Belgrade, 1998; “Memoradum on War Crimes and Crimes and Genocide in Eastern Bosnia (Communes of Bratunac, Skelani and Srebrenica) Committed Against the Serbian Population From April 1992 to April 1993,” sent by Ambassador Dragomir Djokic to the General Assembly and Security Council, June 2, 1993; Milovoje Ivanisevic, “Expulsion of the Serbs From Bosnia and Herzogovina, 1992-1995,” Edition WARS, Book II, Belgrade, 2000. See also Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia- Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention ( Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), pp. 178-180; Raymond K. Kent, “Contextualizing Hate: The Hague Tribunal, the Clinton Administration and the Serbs”: http://www.beograd.com/nato/texts/engli ... izing_hate. html
Johnstone, pp. 78-90
Ibid., p. 73.
David Rieff, “A New Age of Liberal Imperialism,” World Policy Journal, Summer 1999.
Tim Judah, “Is Milosevic Planning Another Balkan War?,” Scotland on Sunday, March 19, 2000.
Lenard Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall ofSlobodan Milosevic (Boulder. Col.: Westview Press, 2001), p. 380.
Johnstone, pp. 23-32, 144-156.
Ibid., pp. 60-61
Ibid., pp. 16-23.
Ibid., pp. 109-118.
https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/di ... lkan-wars/
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Breaking Yugoslavia: an interview with Diana Johnstone
March 16, 2010 15:11 | New Left Project in: Europe
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She spoke to the New Left Project (NLP) on the wars in the former Yugoslavia, western involvement and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
What was your view of Yugoslavia before its dissolution. What was admirable about that society? What was not so admirable?
Every society has its good and bad points, and I am not qualified to make an overall judgement of such a complex society as former Yugoslavia.
From my personal experience, what was not admirable was that in Tito’s lifetime it was a personal dictatorship. Tito didn’t run everything, but he had the right of final decision in case of conflict. The harshest repression was reserved for communists loyal to the Soviet Union after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948. But repression is not all that is wrong with a dictatorship, a system which encourages hypocrisy and lack of recourse for unfair or unwise measures. Nevertheless, despite the undemocratic regime, it was always easy to find critical intellectuals in Yugoslavia who thought for themselves and said what they thought.
Yugoslavia’s “self-managed socialism” was certainly an improvement over the Soviet model. It provided full employment, which is what people most acutely miss today. It is noteworthy that many former critics of the socialist system today declare that the so-called free market democracy they have now is much worse.
As the only European member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia enjoyed privileged relations with Third World countries, notably in the Arab world. The Yugoslav passport was welcome everywhere, and Yugoslavs enjoyed their freedom to travel throughout the world as citizens of a country whose international prestige was great for its size.
Tito’s policy toward the great ethnic diversity of Yugoslavia had been to give considerable cultural and linguistic rights to each group, a policy which is pursued today by Serbia – although not by Croatia and Slovenia. (For example, Serbia provides bilingual schools using the mother tongue of Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Slovak minorities.)
If, in 1990, there had been a national referendum on the subject, I have little doubt that an overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs would have voted to maintain the federation. But elections were held only within the various republics, enabling the bureaucracies of Croatia and Slovenia to promote their secessionist projects.
You argue that Western governments bear significant responsibility for the wars in the former Yugoslavia by encouraging the secession of the constituent republics. Was the West not merely supporting those states in their struggle for self-determination?
There is nothing in international law or diplomatic practice that justifies secession from an existing state on grounds of “self-determination”. There is great confusion and hypocrisy on this point. First one can point to comparisons: Why did the United States not support the struggle of the Basques against Spain, which has been going on much longer? Why did they not support Corsicans against France, Scottish nationalists against Britain, the Kurds against Turkey – a violent struggle with deep historic roots, including Western promises to Kurds after World War I? Why did they not support the separatist “Padania” movement that was growing about the same time in northern Italy, seeking separation from the poorer south of Italy – a movement that had a great deal in common with the Slovenian separatist movement? The answer is obvious: the United States does not support separatist movements in countries they consider their allies. The targets are either countries they consider rivals, like Russia or China, or countries that are too weak to resist, and where they can obtain totally dependent client states from the breakup – which is what happened with Yugoslavia.
Second there are the simple facts of the matter. History, to start with. Former Yugoslavia was not formed by conquest, but by a voluntary association after World War I as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Croats and Serbs speak essentially the same south Slavic language, and Slovenian is quite similar. This association was sought by Croatian leaders who wished to leave Austro-Hungarian rule and who actually coined the word “Yugoslavia”, meaning land of southern Slavs. Since Serbia already existed as an independent country, Serb leaders were wary of this union, but accepted it under urging from the Western powers, France and Britain.
After Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia entered an extremely clumsy phase of political transition, which was distorted by severe economic regression caused by the debt crisis. Since Tito’s method of rule had been to respond to unrest by decentralization rather than by democratization, the local Communist parties in each republic of the federal state, as well as the autonomous provinces within Serbia, enjoyed considerable autonomy. Rivalry between the party bureaucracies undermined national unity. The dynamic thus tended toward dissolution rather than democratization. This trend was encouraged by outside forces (German and Austrian organizations represented by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Habsburg, who was very active in this phase) which supported secession of the parts of Yugoslavia which had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, Croatia and Slovenia.
Now, assuming that “self-determination” would lead to dissolution of the federation, there was the crucial issue of how this would be done. The Serbs interpreted the constitution to argue that Yugoslavia was a political union of three peoples – Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, who would have to negotiate the terms of secession. The Slovenes and especially the Croats maintained that the constituent units were the “republics” in the boundaries set for them by Tito during World War II, which left sizeable Serb populations in both Croatia (about 12%) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (a relative majority up until the 1971 census). Germany persuaded the United States and the European Union to accept the Croatian claim without ever seriously considering the Serbian argument. This was unacceptable to the Serb minority in Croatia who had been persecuted by Nazi-sponsored independent Croatia during World War II, and whose “self-determination” was thereby denied. This was the cause of the civil war in Croatia.
Both Slovenia and Croatia enjoyed full equality and autonomy within Yugoslavia. In no way could they be considered oppressed minorities. Tito was a Croat as was the last functioning prime minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Markovic, not to mention a disproportionate number of senior officers in the Yugoslav armed forces. As the richest part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia’s desire to secede was based almost solely on the desire to “jump the queue” and join the rich EU ahead of the rest of the country, which it succeeded in doing. The Croatian secessionist movement was nationalistic, with strong racist overtones, and was strongly supported by a Croatian diaspora with crucial political influence in Germany and in Washington (in the office of Senator Bob Dole). In the absence of any legal justification for unnegotiated secession, nationalist leaders in both Slovenia and Croatia provoked units of the Yugoslav army stationed in their territory and used the inevitable response as their justification for seceding. This succeeded only because it was supported by Western governments and media – otherwise the Yugoslav army would have held the country together. Instead, the collapsing Yugoslav army effort to preserve the federation, as it was supposed to do, was denounced as a “Serbian invasion”. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic handled this crisis badly, but he did not, as accused, instigate the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
You have suggested that there are certain continuities between the policies of the German government and the objectives of the Third Reich in the Balkans. Can you describe those continuities for us?
Even before the Third Reich, the government of Kaiser Wilhelm and even more the democratic Weimar Republic supported self-determination of ethnic minorities, and the Federal Republic of Germany continues to do so today, for reasons of national interest and ideology. The “revenge” against Serbia, and detachment of former Austro-Hungarian territories within Yugoslavia, harks back to World War I. Of course, the Third Reich cut Yugoslavia into pieces, and on that point the 1991 German policy was more than disturbingly reminiscent, it was essentially the same. Germany has reasons for wanting to bring Slovenia and Croatia into its own sphere of influence. In a sense I am more critical of Western governments which followed the German policy without bothering or daring to evaluate the situation clearly for themselves. As this turned out to be disastrous, they had to blame the devil Milosevic for everything, in order to cover their own mistakes.
Why did the United States so strongly support Bosnian secession?
I think this support was the product of a number of factors. One, pointed out by former State Department official George Kenney, was the influence of media reports, in turn heavily influenced by a propaganda campaign run by Ruder Finn public relations agency on behalf of the government of Croatia, and later the Bosnian Muslims, which succeeded in presenting the Serbs as “new Nazis”. This public relations campaign was hugely successful with the public and politicians alike. American foreign policy-making can be vulnerable to the propaganda of lobbies, and the Croatian lobby was active and influential. The Bosnian lobby was smaller but very well connected, notably through Mohammed Sacirbey, the American son of a colleague of Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who chose him to be Bosnia’s ambassador to the United States. There was a natural class affinity between American officials like Richard Holbrooke and the Bosnian Muslims, who had been the upper class under the Ottoman Empire and presented themselves as more anti-communist than the Serbs.
A second element was that since Germany was emerging as the sponsor of Croatia, the United States could have its own client state by supporting the Bosnian Muslims. Some US leaders thought that siding with the Muslim party in Bosnia would make a good impression in the Muslim world, counterbalancing US support to Israel. The late influential Congressman Tom Lantos, who was chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, called US support for the Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo independence “just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world” that “the United States leads the way for creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.” Support to Bosnian Muslims was strongly advocated by the pro-Israel neo-conservatives. It is hard to believe that neo-con guru Richard Perle served as advisor to Muslim leader Izetbegovic at the Dayton peace talks with no private agenda of his own. The Clinton administration found it natural to do a favour to the Afghan mujahidin (which then included Osama bin Laden), whom they had supported and used against the Soviet Union, by helping them fight the Orthodox Christian Serbs in the Bosnian civil war.
But perhaps the main cause should be seen in the main effect: to reassert United States supremacy in Europe. The August 1995 NATO bombing “marked a historic development in post-Cold War relations between Europe and the United States”, wrote Richard Holbrooke in his memoirs, citing columnist William Pfaff who alone seemed to get the point: “The United States today is again Europe’s leader: there is no other.” (Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, Random House, 1998, p.101.) By the policy of an “even playing field”, the United States created a stalemate between the Bosnian parties which allowed Holbrooke to take charge of what he called “the Bosnian end game” at Dayton. The United States was able to pose as “the indispensable nation”.
Some have accused you of downplaying or even denying the Srebrenica massacre. How do you respond to such accusations?
First of all, I think these accusations are designed primarily to distract public attention from the main focus of my writing on Yugoslavia, and in particular my book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. That focus is political. As the title indicates, my book is not about Srebrenica. It is about the historical and political background, and the deception and self-deception involved in media coverage and Western policy-making that led to the illegal NATO war of aggression in 1999. The only reason I wrote about Srebrenica at all is that I could not very well avoid the subject, but I stated from the start I was not writing about what happened at Srebrenica (on which I claim no special knowledge) but about the political uses of it. I am not a war correspondent but a political analyst. The trouble is that some people do not welcome political analysis of the Balkan conflicts, and use Srebrenica to ban it. If mothers are weeping, how can anyone engage in such a heartless exercise as political analysis? Judging complex events solely on the basis of images and emotions, which are often deceptive, is infantile. But we are living in a period of infantile regression.
For instance, the wives and mothers of the men who were killed deserve sympathy, but is their individual grief any greater if their son was one of several hundred or one of several thousand? Why this insistence on a particular number, which has not been clearly proved? Isn’t it possible, and even likely, that the genuine grief of mourning women is exploited for political ends? How many people are in a position to know exactly what happened at Srebrenica? Where are the documents, where are the photographs? Yet people who know nothing are ready to consider it scandalous if someone says openly, “I don’t know exactly what happened.”
I do know that from the very start of the Yugoslav tragedy, there were significant massacres of Serb civilians (for instance, in the town of Gospic in Croatia) that were studiously ignored in the West. But I do not care to engage in competitive victimhood.
As for Srebrenica, certainly any execution of prisoners is a war crime and deserves punishment, even if the figure of 8,000 is certainly exaggerated, since it includes men who died in ambush while trying to escape, or even men who actually did escape. But whatever the number of victims, a single massacre of military-age men while sparing women and children cannot in my opinion be correctly described as “genocide” – unless the term “genocide” is redefined to fit the single case of Srebrenica. And this is precisely what was done by the International Criminal Tribunal on former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In order to convict General Radislav Krstic (who was not even present at the scene) of complicity in “genocide”, the ICTY judges ruled in August 2001 that killing a large number of Muslim men from Srebrenica was “genocide” because of the “patriarchal” nature of their society. Women and children survivors were too insignificant in such a patriarchal society to matter! This preposterous verdict simply confirmed the obvious fact that ICTY is working for those who set it up, choose its judges and pay its expenses: that is, essentially, NATO. It is there to justify the NATO interpretation of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, by putting the entire burden of blame on the Serbs. Unless an Orwellian future bans free historical inquiry, I am confident that my critical appraisal of ICTY will be justified by history.
Why do you believe NATO carried out its bombing war against Serbia?
The essential reason was to save NATO from obsolescence after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, whose supposed threat had been its ostensible raison d’être. The United States came up with a new “humanitarian mission”, and the large-scale NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 served to prove that NATO could get away with it, without United Nations authorization. This was “the war to start wars”. It is regularly cited by apologists as “the good war” which proves that “human rights” constitute the most efficient excuse for aggression. It was indeed a perfect little war, waged safely from the air with all the casualties on the ground, whether Serb or Albanian.
How do you view the UK’s role in the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia?
As absolutely shameful. The British foreign office certainly had experts able to understand the complexities of the Yugoslav situation, and indeed the conservative government hesitated. Lord Carrington and then Lord Owen, if supported, might have brokered an early peace in Bosnia. But Tony Blair preferred to strut the stage of “humanitarian intervention”, and most of the left swallowed the wild tale according to which the world’s most powerful military alliance was henceforth motivated by sentimental concern for the underdog.
What did you make of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic?
That trial actually aroused my first admiration for Slobodan Milosevic. He defended himself, and his country, with great courage and intelligence, and successfully disproved most of the charges against him, even though he died before the defence could make its case. The ICTY was set up largely to convict Milosevic, and would surely have found a way to do so regardless of the evidence. His death spared them that trouble. Of course, Western media failed totally to report fairly on the proceedings.
You speak of your admiration for Milosevic “defending his country” in the Hague. But is there not a wider and more fundamental sense in which Milosevic’s rule was by no means beneficial for Serbia? V. P. Gagnon Jr. has written about how Milosevic used war as a tool against movements for democratic reform, by effectively changing the subject to whether people were pro or anti-Serb at any point where these movements became too strong. Karel Turza and Eric Gordy have written about the deleterious effect that Milosevic’s rule had on Serbian society and culture. Little of this speaks of a man worthy of admiration, even from a Serbian perspective. Was Milosovic defending Serbia, or just defending his regime?
When I said that Milosevic on trial in The Hague aroused my first admiration for the man, I was obviously making the distinction between Milosevic as President and Milosevic as prisoner of a biased tribunal that had been set up to convict him. However unfortunate his policies as president, he became a victim when he was illegally shipped off to The Hague, in a rather sordid deal between prime minister Zoran Djindjic, who violated Serbian law in the hope of economic rewards, and the NATO powers, who needed the trial in order to justify their 1999 bombing campaign.
What is meant by “democratic reforms”? Milosevic did introduce a multi-party system, which is the basic democratic reform. Whatever his faults, it is by no means clear that his political adversaries in the early 1990s would have been better for the Serbian people than he was. Now that Serbia has Western-approved “democratic” governments, major industries have been sold to Western corporations, the media are more uniform than ever, and the economic situation of the majority of the population has worsened considerably.
Many people in Serbia who hated Milosevic when he was in office admired his defence at The Hague. His self-defence was automatically a defence of his country, since the totally arbitrary (and unproven) charge of a “joint criminal enterprise” in effect implicated collective guilt, since the alleged enterprise had no defined limits.
Little blame for the Balkan wars appears to attach to the Serb side in your account. Yet Bosnian Serb figures such as Vojislav Šešelj, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić have stated publicly that there was a drive for a Greater Serbia. Doubtless there have been many attempts to reduce the conflict to nothing more than a case of Serbian aggression, but while correcting for that is it not also important to still leave room for attaching the appropriate level of blame to the Serbian side?
Testifying at the Milosevic trial, Vojislav Šešelj stated clearly that Milosevic was not in favour of Greater Serbia, and that he had slandered him politically for that very reason, because Šešelj himself did favour Greater Serbia. The meaning of “Greater Serbia” is complicated, and I have dealt with it in my book, “Fools’ Crusade”. But Serbs were divided on the matter, and Milosevic for one did not advocate a “Greater Serbia”. Milosevic was competing with politicians such as Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic, whom the West considers “democratic”, but who were far more nationalistic than he was. No Serbian politician could be totally indifferent to Serb populations cut off from Serbia by the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, starting in 1992, Milosevic signed onto a series of potential peace accords that left Serbs outside of shrinking Yugoslavia, and were clearly incompatible with a greater Serbia.
I do not presume to attach “appropriate levels of blame” to the various Yugoslav parties. I simply point out certain facts, and the only blame that really interests me is that of the Western powers and especially of the United States. That is my responsibility as an American citizen. It is the United States that exploited the tragedy to strengthen NATO, and the people of Yugoslavia who suffered and are still suffering.
Many of our readers will find it hard to accept your expressing admiration for Milosovic. Its well understood that the West portrays its enemies dishonestly (take Saddam’s mythical WMD, for example). But to praise the “courage” of a man widely seen (including by those who are no fans of Western power) as having a lot of blood on his hands goes a good deal further than this. Is your choice of words here really appropriate?
I am not going to change what I say because many of your readers, as you allege, have a limited capacity to understand the complexities of human character. Of course, all leaders of countries involved in wars can be said to “have blood on their hands”. The stereotype of an inhuman Milosevic is a fictional propaganda creation, like the long line of “Hitlers” the West keeps discovering. But supposing the man was utterly ruthless, does that preclude courage? I fear our “humanitarian” age is adopting an unprecedentedly simplistic notion of what people are – either innocent lambs or savage beasts. Look at many of the heroes of ancient tragedy, who were complicated enough to be ruthless and courageous, and often displayed a mixture of good and bad qualities. If we are incapable of recognizing the humanity of our chosen enemies (and Milosevic was a chosen enemy, who actually liked the United States where he had lived as a banker, and never even slightly threatened the West), then there can be no peace in the world.
What have been the consequences for the constituent republics of becoming independent states?
In general, secession is beneficial to the bureaucrats. Someone who was only a minor official in a large country gets to be Cabinet Minister, or ambassador. So secession was a good thing for members of the bureaucracy in each statelet. It has also been good for a minority who live off crime and corruption. For the rest of the population, it was beneficial primarily to Slovenia, whose leaders succeeded in getting into the European Union ahead of the others. Of course it was not beneficial to the small population of Yugoslavs who were not ethnic Slovenians and found themselves living in Slovenia without any civil status.
Croatia has the advantage of strong German support, but so far this has not yielded all the economic benefits hoped for. Most of the Serb population has been driven out, which is of course satisfying to the racist Croat nationalists, and does not seem to disturb the Western leftist multiculturalists.
Otherwise, people who once were citizens of an independent, medium-sized European country find themselves confined in small mutually hostile statelets, dependent on outside powers and poorer than before. Outside intervention has served to exacerbate ethnic hatreds, and continues to do so, notably in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The political situation of most of the successor states is precarious and further tragedy is almost certain.
This interview was conducted and first published by the New Left Project
http://www.spectrezine.org/breaking-yug ... -johnstone
March 16, 2010 15:11 | New Left Project in: Europe
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. She spoke to the New Left Project (NLP) on the wars in the former Yugoslavia, western involvement and the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.
What was your view of Yugoslavia before its dissolution. What was admirable about that society? What was not so admirable?
Every society has its good and bad points, and I am not qualified to make an overall judgement of such a complex society as former Yugoslavia.
From my personal experience, what was not admirable was that in Tito’s lifetime it was a personal dictatorship. Tito didn’t run everything, but he had the right of final decision in case of conflict. The harshest repression was reserved for communists loyal to the Soviet Union after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948. But repression is not all that is wrong with a dictatorship, a system which encourages hypocrisy and lack of recourse for unfair or unwise measures. Nevertheless, despite the undemocratic regime, it was always easy to find critical intellectuals in Yugoslavia who thought for themselves and said what they thought.
Yugoslavia’s “self-managed socialism” was certainly an improvement over the Soviet model. It provided full employment, which is what people most acutely miss today. It is noteworthy that many former critics of the socialist system today declare that the so-called free market democracy they have now is much worse.
As the only European member of the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslavia enjoyed privileged relations with Third World countries, notably in the Arab world. The Yugoslav passport was welcome everywhere, and Yugoslavs enjoyed their freedom to travel throughout the world as citizens of a country whose international prestige was great for its size.
Tito’s policy toward the great ethnic diversity of Yugoslavia had been to give considerable cultural and linguistic rights to each group, a policy which is pursued today by Serbia – although not by Croatia and Slovenia. (For example, Serbia provides bilingual schools using the mother tongue of Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Slovak minorities.)
If, in 1990, there had been a national referendum on the subject, I have little doubt that an overwhelming majority of Yugoslavs would have voted to maintain the federation. But elections were held only within the various republics, enabling the bureaucracies of Croatia and Slovenia to promote their secessionist projects.
You argue that Western governments bear significant responsibility for the wars in the former Yugoslavia by encouraging the secession of the constituent republics. Was the West not merely supporting those states in their struggle for self-determination?
There is nothing in international law or diplomatic practice that justifies secession from an existing state on grounds of “self-determination”. There is great confusion and hypocrisy on this point. First one can point to comparisons: Why did the United States not support the struggle of the Basques against Spain, which has been going on much longer? Why did they not support Corsicans against France, Scottish nationalists against Britain, the Kurds against Turkey – a violent struggle with deep historic roots, including Western promises to Kurds after World War I? Why did they not support the separatist “Padania” movement that was growing about the same time in northern Italy, seeking separation from the poorer south of Italy – a movement that had a great deal in common with the Slovenian separatist movement? The answer is obvious: the United States does not support separatist movements in countries they consider their allies. The targets are either countries they consider rivals, like Russia or China, or countries that are too weak to resist, and where they can obtain totally dependent client states from the breakup – which is what happened with Yugoslavia.
Second there are the simple facts of the matter. History, to start with. Former Yugoslavia was not formed by conquest, but by a voluntary association after World War I as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Croats and Serbs speak essentially the same south Slavic language, and Slovenian is quite similar. This association was sought by Croatian leaders who wished to leave Austro-Hungarian rule and who actually coined the word “Yugoslavia”, meaning land of southern Slavs. Since Serbia already existed as an independent country, Serb leaders were wary of this union, but accepted it under urging from the Western powers, France and Britain.
After Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia entered an extremely clumsy phase of political transition, which was distorted by severe economic regression caused by the debt crisis. Since Tito’s method of rule had been to respond to unrest by decentralization rather than by democratization, the local Communist parties in each republic of the federal state, as well as the autonomous provinces within Serbia, enjoyed considerable autonomy. Rivalry between the party bureaucracies undermined national unity. The dynamic thus tended toward dissolution rather than democratization. This trend was encouraged by outside forces (German and Austrian organizations represented by the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto von Habsburg, who was very active in this phase) which supported secession of the parts of Yugoslavia which had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I, Croatia and Slovenia.
Now, assuming that “self-determination” would lead to dissolution of the federation, there was the crucial issue of how this would be done. The Serbs interpreted the constitution to argue that Yugoslavia was a political union of three peoples – Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, who would have to negotiate the terms of secession. The Slovenes and especially the Croats maintained that the constituent units were the “republics” in the boundaries set for them by Tito during World War II, which left sizeable Serb populations in both Croatia (about 12%) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (a relative majority up until the 1971 census). Germany persuaded the United States and the European Union to accept the Croatian claim without ever seriously considering the Serbian argument. This was unacceptable to the Serb minority in Croatia who had been persecuted by Nazi-sponsored independent Croatia during World War II, and whose “self-determination” was thereby denied. This was the cause of the civil war in Croatia.
Both Slovenia and Croatia enjoyed full equality and autonomy within Yugoslavia. In no way could they be considered oppressed minorities. Tito was a Croat as was the last functioning prime minister of Yugoslavia, Ante Markovic, not to mention a disproportionate number of senior officers in the Yugoslav armed forces. As the richest part of Yugoslavia, Slovenia’s desire to secede was based almost solely on the desire to “jump the queue” and join the rich EU ahead of the rest of the country, which it succeeded in doing. The Croatian secessionist movement was nationalistic, with strong racist overtones, and was strongly supported by a Croatian diaspora with crucial political influence in Germany and in Washington (in the office of Senator Bob Dole). In the absence of any legal justification for unnegotiated secession, nationalist leaders in both Slovenia and Croatia provoked units of the Yugoslav army stationed in their territory and used the inevitable response as their justification for seceding. This succeeded only because it was supported by Western governments and media – otherwise the Yugoslav army would have held the country together. Instead, the collapsing Yugoslav army effort to preserve the federation, as it was supposed to do, was denounced as a “Serbian invasion”. Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic handled this crisis badly, but he did not, as accused, instigate the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
You have suggested that there are certain continuities between the policies of the German government and the objectives of the Third Reich in the Balkans. Can you describe those continuities for us?
Even before the Third Reich, the government of Kaiser Wilhelm and even more the democratic Weimar Republic supported self-determination of ethnic minorities, and the Federal Republic of Germany continues to do so today, for reasons of national interest and ideology. The “revenge” against Serbia, and detachment of former Austro-Hungarian territories within Yugoslavia, harks back to World War I. Of course, the Third Reich cut Yugoslavia into pieces, and on that point the 1991 German policy was more than disturbingly reminiscent, it was essentially the same. Germany has reasons for wanting to bring Slovenia and Croatia into its own sphere of influence. In a sense I am more critical of Western governments which followed the German policy without bothering or daring to evaluate the situation clearly for themselves. As this turned out to be disastrous, they had to blame the devil Milosevic for everything, in order to cover their own mistakes.
Why did the United States so strongly support Bosnian secession?
I think this support was the product of a number of factors. One, pointed out by former State Department official George Kenney, was the influence of media reports, in turn heavily influenced by a propaganda campaign run by Ruder Finn public relations agency on behalf of the government of Croatia, and later the Bosnian Muslims, which succeeded in presenting the Serbs as “new Nazis”. This public relations campaign was hugely successful with the public and politicians alike. American foreign policy-making can be vulnerable to the propaganda of lobbies, and the Croatian lobby was active and influential. The Bosnian lobby was smaller but very well connected, notably through Mohammed Sacirbey, the American son of a colleague of Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who chose him to be Bosnia’s ambassador to the United States. There was a natural class affinity between American officials like Richard Holbrooke and the Bosnian Muslims, who had been the upper class under the Ottoman Empire and presented themselves as more anti-communist than the Serbs.
A second element was that since Germany was emerging as the sponsor of Croatia, the United States could have its own client state by supporting the Bosnian Muslims. Some US leaders thought that siding with the Muslim party in Bosnia would make a good impression in the Muslim world, counterbalancing US support to Israel. The late influential Congressman Tom Lantos, who was chairman of the House foreign affairs committee, called US support for the Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo independence “just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world” that “the United States leads the way for creation of a predominantly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe.” Support to Bosnian Muslims was strongly advocated by the pro-Israel neo-conservatives. It is hard to believe that neo-con guru Richard Perle served as advisor to Muslim leader Izetbegovic at the Dayton peace talks with no private agenda of his own. The Clinton administration found it natural to do a favour to the Afghan mujahidin (which then included Osama bin Laden), whom they had supported and used against the Soviet Union, by helping them fight the Orthodox Christian Serbs in the Bosnian civil war.
But perhaps the main cause should be seen in the main effect: to reassert United States supremacy in Europe. The August 1995 NATO bombing “marked a historic development in post-Cold War relations between Europe and the United States”, wrote Richard Holbrooke in his memoirs, citing columnist William Pfaff who alone seemed to get the point: “The United States today is again Europe’s leader: there is no other.” (Richard Holbrooke, To End a War, Random House, 1998, p.101.) By the policy of an “even playing field”, the United States created a stalemate between the Bosnian parties which allowed Holbrooke to take charge of what he called “the Bosnian end game” at Dayton. The United States was able to pose as “the indispensable nation”.
Some have accused you of downplaying or even denying the Srebrenica massacre. How do you respond to such accusations?
First of all, I think these accusations are designed primarily to distract public attention from the main focus of my writing on Yugoslavia, and in particular my book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions. That focus is political. As the title indicates, my book is not about Srebrenica. It is about the historical and political background, and the deception and self-deception involved in media coverage and Western policy-making that led to the illegal NATO war of aggression in 1999. The only reason I wrote about Srebrenica at all is that I could not very well avoid the subject, but I stated from the start I was not writing about what happened at Srebrenica (on which I claim no special knowledge) but about the political uses of it. I am not a war correspondent but a political analyst. The trouble is that some people do not welcome political analysis of the Balkan conflicts, and use Srebrenica to ban it. If mothers are weeping, how can anyone engage in such a heartless exercise as political analysis? Judging complex events solely on the basis of images and emotions, which are often deceptive, is infantile. But we are living in a period of infantile regression.
For instance, the wives and mothers of the men who were killed deserve sympathy, but is their individual grief any greater if their son was one of several hundred or one of several thousand? Why this insistence on a particular number, which has not been clearly proved? Isn’t it possible, and even likely, that the genuine grief of mourning women is exploited for political ends? How many people are in a position to know exactly what happened at Srebrenica? Where are the documents, where are the photographs? Yet people who know nothing are ready to consider it scandalous if someone says openly, “I don’t know exactly what happened.”
I do know that from the very start of the Yugoslav tragedy, there were significant massacres of Serb civilians (for instance, in the town of Gospic in Croatia) that were studiously ignored in the West. But I do not care to engage in competitive victimhood.
As for Srebrenica, certainly any execution of prisoners is a war crime and deserves punishment, even if the figure of 8,000 is certainly exaggerated, since it includes men who died in ambush while trying to escape, or even men who actually did escape. But whatever the number of victims, a single massacre of military-age men while sparing women and children cannot in my opinion be correctly described as “genocide” – unless the term “genocide” is redefined to fit the single case of Srebrenica. And this is precisely what was done by the International Criminal Tribunal on former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In order to convict General Radislav Krstic (who was not even present at the scene) of complicity in “genocide”, the ICTY judges ruled in August 2001 that killing a large number of Muslim men from Srebrenica was “genocide” because of the “patriarchal” nature of their society. Women and children survivors were too insignificant in such a patriarchal society to matter! This preposterous verdict simply confirmed the obvious fact that ICTY is working for those who set it up, choose its judges and pay its expenses: that is, essentially, NATO. It is there to justify the NATO interpretation of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, by putting the entire burden of blame on the Serbs. Unless an Orwellian future bans free historical inquiry, I am confident that my critical appraisal of ICTY will be justified by history.
Why do you believe NATO carried out its bombing war against Serbia?
The essential reason was to save NATO from obsolescence after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, whose supposed threat had been its ostensible raison d’être. The United States came up with a new “humanitarian mission”, and the large-scale NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 served to prove that NATO could get away with it, without United Nations authorization. This was “the war to start wars”. It is regularly cited by apologists as “the good war” which proves that “human rights” constitute the most efficient excuse for aggression. It was indeed a perfect little war, waged safely from the air with all the casualties on the ground, whether Serb or Albanian.
How do you view the UK’s role in the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia?
As absolutely shameful. The British foreign office certainly had experts able to understand the complexities of the Yugoslav situation, and indeed the conservative government hesitated. Lord Carrington and then Lord Owen, if supported, might have brokered an early peace in Bosnia. But Tony Blair preferred to strut the stage of “humanitarian intervention”, and most of the left swallowed the wild tale according to which the world’s most powerful military alliance was henceforth motivated by sentimental concern for the underdog.
What did you make of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic?
That trial actually aroused my first admiration for Slobodan Milosevic. He defended himself, and his country, with great courage and intelligence, and successfully disproved most of the charges against him, even though he died before the defence could make its case. The ICTY was set up largely to convict Milosevic, and would surely have found a way to do so regardless of the evidence. His death spared them that trouble. Of course, Western media failed totally to report fairly on the proceedings.
You speak of your admiration for Milosevic “defending his country” in the Hague. But is there not a wider and more fundamental sense in which Milosevic’s rule was by no means beneficial for Serbia? V. P. Gagnon Jr. has written about how Milosevic used war as a tool against movements for democratic reform, by effectively changing the subject to whether people were pro or anti-Serb at any point where these movements became too strong. Karel Turza and Eric Gordy have written about the deleterious effect that Milosevic’s rule had on Serbian society and culture. Little of this speaks of a man worthy of admiration, even from a Serbian perspective. Was Milosovic defending Serbia, or just defending his regime?
When I said that Milosevic on trial in The Hague aroused my first admiration for the man, I was obviously making the distinction between Milosevic as President and Milosevic as prisoner of a biased tribunal that had been set up to convict him. However unfortunate his policies as president, he became a victim when he was illegally shipped off to The Hague, in a rather sordid deal between prime minister Zoran Djindjic, who violated Serbian law in the hope of economic rewards, and the NATO powers, who needed the trial in order to justify their 1999 bombing campaign.
What is meant by “democratic reforms”? Milosevic did introduce a multi-party system, which is the basic democratic reform. Whatever his faults, it is by no means clear that his political adversaries in the early 1990s would have been better for the Serbian people than he was. Now that Serbia has Western-approved “democratic” governments, major industries have been sold to Western corporations, the media are more uniform than ever, and the economic situation of the majority of the population has worsened considerably.
Many people in Serbia who hated Milosevic when he was in office admired his defence at The Hague. His self-defence was automatically a defence of his country, since the totally arbitrary (and unproven) charge of a “joint criminal enterprise” in effect implicated collective guilt, since the alleged enterprise had no defined limits.
Little blame for the Balkan wars appears to attach to the Serb side in your account. Yet Bosnian Serb figures such as Vojislav Šešelj, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić have stated publicly that there was a drive for a Greater Serbia. Doubtless there have been many attempts to reduce the conflict to nothing more than a case of Serbian aggression, but while correcting for that is it not also important to still leave room for attaching the appropriate level of blame to the Serbian side?
Testifying at the Milosevic trial, Vojislav Šešelj stated clearly that Milosevic was not in favour of Greater Serbia, and that he had slandered him politically for that very reason, because Šešelj himself did favour Greater Serbia. The meaning of “Greater Serbia” is complicated, and I have dealt with it in my book, “Fools’ Crusade”. But Serbs were divided on the matter, and Milosevic for one did not advocate a “Greater Serbia”. Milosevic was competing with politicians such as Vuk Draskovic and Zoran Djindjic, whom the West considers “democratic”, but who were far more nationalistic than he was. No Serbian politician could be totally indifferent to Serb populations cut off from Serbia by the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, starting in 1992, Milosevic signed onto a series of potential peace accords that left Serbs outside of shrinking Yugoslavia, and were clearly incompatible with a greater Serbia.
I do not presume to attach “appropriate levels of blame” to the various Yugoslav parties. I simply point out certain facts, and the only blame that really interests me is that of the Western powers and especially of the United States. That is my responsibility as an American citizen. It is the United States that exploited the tragedy to strengthen NATO, and the people of Yugoslavia who suffered and are still suffering.
Many of our readers will find it hard to accept your expressing admiration for Milosovic. Its well understood that the West portrays its enemies dishonestly (take Saddam’s mythical WMD, for example). But to praise the “courage” of a man widely seen (including by those who are no fans of Western power) as having a lot of blood on his hands goes a good deal further than this. Is your choice of words here really appropriate?
I am not going to change what I say because many of your readers, as you allege, have a limited capacity to understand the complexities of human character. Of course, all leaders of countries involved in wars can be said to “have blood on their hands”. The stereotype of an inhuman Milosevic is a fictional propaganda creation, like the long line of “Hitlers” the West keeps discovering. But supposing the man was utterly ruthless, does that preclude courage? I fear our “humanitarian” age is adopting an unprecedentedly simplistic notion of what people are – either innocent lambs or savage beasts. Look at many of the heroes of ancient tragedy, who were complicated enough to be ruthless and courageous, and often displayed a mixture of good and bad qualities. If we are incapable of recognizing the humanity of our chosen enemies (and Milosevic was a chosen enemy, who actually liked the United States where he had lived as a banker, and never even slightly threatened the West), then there can be no peace in the world.
What have been the consequences for the constituent republics of becoming independent states?
In general, secession is beneficial to the bureaucrats. Someone who was only a minor official in a large country gets to be Cabinet Minister, or ambassador. So secession was a good thing for members of the bureaucracy in each statelet. It has also been good for a minority who live off crime and corruption. For the rest of the population, it was beneficial primarily to Slovenia, whose leaders succeeded in getting into the European Union ahead of the others. Of course it was not beneficial to the small population of Yugoslavs who were not ethnic Slovenians and found themselves living in Slovenia without any civil status.
Croatia has the advantage of strong German support, but so far this has not yielded all the economic benefits hoped for. Most of the Serb population has been driven out, which is of course satisfying to the racist Croat nationalists, and does not seem to disturb the Western leftist multiculturalists.
Otherwise, people who once were citizens of an independent, medium-sized European country find themselves confined in small mutually hostile statelets, dependent on outside powers and poorer than before. Outside intervention has served to exacerbate ethnic hatreds, and continues to do so, notably in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The political situation of most of the successor states is precarious and further tragedy is almost certain.
This interview was conducted and first published by the New Left Project
http://www.spectrezine.org/breaking-yug ... -johnstone
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Fools’ Crusade, Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions
Introduction
1. Apparently, many people on the left, who would normally defend peace and justice, were fooled or confused by the claim that the “Kosovo war” was waged for purely humanitarian reasons.
2. A significant difference was that the war against Yugoslavia was waged by the political center-left. The NATO governments were mostly led by liberals and “Third Way” social democrats.
Globalization vs U.S. hegemony
6. In the words of Madeleine Albright, “What’s the point of having this superb military … if we can’t use it?”[1]
7. As the ability of nation-states to protect the interests of their citizens declines, the importance of citizenship diminishes in turn.
Conversion of the threat
8-9. The chef d’œuvre of that policy of destruction was undoubtedly the use of Islamic mujahidins in Afghanistan to entrap the Soviet Union – the declared goal of Jimmy Carter’s openly cynical advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.[2]
9. Between Democratic and Republican administrations there is no fundamental difference, even though the Democrats often prefer to stress positive and ambitious goals such as “nation-building” and “human rights.”
9. An influential member of this foreign policy establishment is Morton Abramowitz, whose career has involved him with both the Afghan mujahidin and Kosovo Albanian rebels.
9-10. “American ideals and self-interest merge when the United States supports the spread of democracy around the globe – or what we prefer to call ‘limited’ constitutional democracy, meaning rule by a government that has been legitimized by free elections,” was the conclusion of the Carnegie experts, summed up in the Endowment’s 1992 publication Self-Determination in the New World Order. (…)This future “rule of law” is not to be confused with existing international law. (…)In the future, the authors announced in 1992, “Humanitarian interventions will become increasingly unavoidable.” [3]
10-11. Abramowitz continued to act from behind the scenes as an eminence grise for Albright. He helped found the high-level International Crisis Group, a chief policy designer for Bosnia and Kosovo. He was omnipresent behind the scenes of the Kosovo drama, both in making policy and in shaping elite business, government, and media opinion.
11. Islamic fundamentalism is compatible with U.S. globalization in that it cares nothing for national boundaries and does not threaten to establish national governments that can serve as a progressive model of alternative development.
11. In a way, Yugoslavia became an enemy both as a discarded asset and as a potential alternative.
Humanitarian missionaries
12. If the country held together, it might stand in the way of Western plans for the region.
13. In Yugoslavia, the National Endowment for Democracy generously funded Albanian separatists in Kosovo and the anti-Miloševic opposition in Serbia, Human Rights Watch, closely linked to U.S. policy-making, repeatedly launched inflammatory and unsubstantiated accusations against the Yugoslav government.
13. Operating across borders, some charitable groups tend to perceive national sovereignty as little more than an obstacle to their own operations. Based in the rich NATO countries, operating in poorer countries, the direction of their intervention is the same as that of NATO, acting as policeman of the new world order.
About the book
14. My main thesis is that the intervention of the NATO powers in Yugoslavia, far from being a last-minute rescue, was from the start a major driving factor in the tragic course of events.
1. The Yugoslav Guinea Pig
Miloševic, a fictional charachter
16-17. Margaret Thatcher went further: “We are not dealing with some minor thug,” she insisted. “Miloševic’s regime and the genocidal ideology that sustains it represents … a truly monstrous evil … which must be totally defeated …”
What was really wrong with Miloševic
19. Miloševic’s sin was that he used the Kosovo question to wrest leadership of the Serbian League of Communists away from the man in line for the job, Belgrade party leader Dragiša Pavlović. (…)Supporters of Pavlovic bitterly resented Miloševic’s rise to prominence and played a key role in characterizing him as an “extreme nationalist.”[4]
19-20. What was really wrong with Miloševic was a mixture of optimism and ambiguity not uncommon among ambitious politicians. He was often described as better at tactics than at strategy. His claim to be able to resolve the problem of Kosovo was based on illusion, lie continued to preach unity, but offered no program for achieving it.
Invisible economic causes
21. Susan Woodward has provided a masterly description of this process, which by the end of the 1980s had resulted in “a breakdown in all elements of the domestic order, political disintegration and rising nationalism.”[5]
Scapegoating economic reforms
22. Tito’s Yugoslavia was built on a policy of deliberately reducing Serbian influence. The “key” system of national quotas ensured even distribution of public office between the various nationalities. Serbian dominance of Yugoslavia after World War II was a myth.
22. By granting effective veto power to Serbia’s autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, the 1974 Constitution made it impossible for Serbia to carry out serious reform.
23. National governments are discredited. Only the “International Community” knows what is best for everyone.
Invisible Croatia
23. Tudman had the strong political and financial support of the Croatian émigré community, including direct descendants of the fascist Ustashe movement which ran the “Croatian Independent State” set up in 1941 following the Nazi invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
24. It was clear that “by now the Croatian countryside was bristling with weapons that had been secreted or stolen from JNA warehouses or smuggled across the Croatian-Hungarian border.”[6]
24. On 17 January 1991, the United States made a decisive intervention on behalf of Croatian secession. The U.S. ambassador to Belgrade, Warren Zlmmermann, informed Jovic that the United States would not accept any use of force to disarm the paramilitaries.
24. And of course, the United States considers Abraham Lincoln its greatest president for using force against the secessionists of the southern Confederacy.
25. Warren Zimmermann, arrived in Belgrade with instructions to deliver “a new message: Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.”[7]
25. Most Serbs would surely have preferred to preserve the Yugoslav Federation intact. But was this possible, when the United States was banning the use of force?
26. “It is not our intention to prevent the Croats or any other nation from leaving Yugoslavia/’ Miloševic told Belgrade University professors on 21 March 1991, “but we are not going to allow anybody to dug the Serbs out with them against their will.”
26. Self-determination was the right of the peoples, not of the republics, regarded as arbitrary administrative units, drawn by the communists without popular consultation.
The ghosts of Gospic
27. The Serb rebellion, as it gained support from Belgrade, was masterfully exploited by Tudman to portray the long-planned Croatian secession as a defensive resistance to “Greater Serbia.”
28. Mile Budak, described how Croatia was to be purified of non-Croatians within ten years.[8] 20 For non-Croats, he said, “we have three million bullets. We shall kill one part of the Serbian population, expel another, and the rest we shall convert to the Roman Catholic religion.”
28. Two Albanian officers, Ahmet Krasniqi and Agim Çeku, reportedly played a leading role in betraying the JNA garrison to the Croatian separatists, thus depriving local Serbs of protection. This was an early manifestation of an operational alliance between Croatian and Albanian nationalists.
28. Çeku helped command “Operation Storm” which emptied the Krajina of its Serb population.[9]
29. In late September 1991, over 120 Gospic Serbs, including prominent professors and judges, were abducted and murdered, their bodies destroyed or hidden. “It was a warning to Serbs – they were no longer safe in Croatia.”[10]
29. Western media ignored the 1991 Gospid massacre until the late summer of 1997 when a disgruntled former policeman, Miro Bajramovic, decided to reveal all.[11] Bajramovic said his paramilitary unit was sent to Gospic in September 1991 with orders from the Croatian Interior Ministry to spread terror among the region’s 9,000 Serbs.
30. The three – Milan Levar, the former commander of a reconnaissance intelligence unit, Zdenko Bando, a former military police commander, Zdenko Ropac, a former secret intelligence police officer -told New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges that they had witnessed “scores of abductions and killings in and around the town of Gospic.”
Greater Serbia or smaller Yugoslavia
33. A look at the map shows that the failed attempt to detach the “Serbian Republic of Krajina” from Croatia was less an attempt to create “Greater Serbia” than an effort to solidify a “Smaller Yugoslavia.”
33. The two “Serb Republics” in the Croatian Krajina and in Bosnia-Herzegovina were left out. The West failed to acknowledge that this amounted to a formal renunciation of “Greater Serbia,” or even of medium-sized Yugoslavia.
Integrating Europe, disintegrating Yugoslavia
34. If using criminals for dirty tasks makes him a criminal, then he may be considered a criminal – but surely no more (or rather, less) than the late President Tudman of Croatia or President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, widely regarded as a saint.
35. The main significance of the Maastricht Treaty was to lock the EU member states into a monetarist economic policy from which there was no way out, but it was presented to the public as a brave step toward a peaceful democratic new Europe that would emerge as the wonder, even the salvation, of the world.
35. The country’s relatively prosperous and market-oriented economic development, as well as its geographic position between Italy and Greece, would have seemed to make Yugoslavia the most eligible of Eastern European countries to join the European Union. There was, however, no clear program for integrating Yugoslavia.
35. At this point, the richest of the republics – especially Slovenia, but also Croatia – saw their chance to “jump the queue” and get into the European Union ahead of the others by cutting themselves off from the rest of Yugoslavia.
36. What could “Europe” have done? The answer in principle is simple, although the application would have been complex. It could have offered Yugoslavia’s people and politicians a prospect of an overall solution to their supposed problems of coexistence by offering a clear, feasible program for integration of all of Yugoslavia – all the republics, simultaneously – into the European Union.
The Badinter Commission
36. At the time, Germany was calling the shots in the Balkans, insisting on rapid diplomatic recognition of independent Slovenia and Croatia.
37. Advocates of hasty recognition of the secessionist republics claimed that this would prevent civil war in Yugoslavia by settling the matter once and for all. But the real impact of hasty diplomatic recognition was not to stop the fighting, but rather to formally transform a civil war into an international conflict, thus allowing international intervention. The impact was to destroy the prospect of neutral mediation and further polarize the conflict.
37-38. In the summer of 1991, while Slovenian and Croatian independence were in suspension at Europe’s request, the Serbian government submitted three questions to the Commission for its opinion:
Who can be the subject of the right to self-determination from the standpoint of international public law, a nation or a federal unit? Is the right of self-determination a subjective collective right or the right of a territory?
Can tension be a legal act from the standpoint of the United Nations and other relevant legal rules?
Are the demarcation lines between constituent parts of a federal state (provinces, cantons, states, Länder, republics and the like) borders in the sense of international public law?
38. On 29 November 1991, the Badinter Commission issued its First Opinion, which sounded the death knell of Federal Yugoslavia by announcing that “the Federative Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia is engaged in a process of dissolution.”[12]
38-39. In regard to the question of what new states should be recognized in place of the “disintegrating” Yugoslavia, it abandoned the traditional realistic criteria for diplomatic recognition (control of territory).
39. The Badinter Commission avoided questions of legal principle by resorting to an interpretation of fact: Yugoslavia was “in a process of dissolution.”
40. A British legal scholar has observed: “The view that the SFRY underwent a process of dismemberment was also undoubtedly influential as regards the United Nations’ determination that the FRY should not continue automatically the membership of the former SFRY in the UN.”[13]
40. In those years in EU circles, Yugoslavia could only be “the former Yugoslavia,” and to use the term “Yugoslavia” without the obligatory “former” was taboo in polite company.
Multicultural Bosnia vs. Multicultural Yugoslavia
41. At this point, cautious and constructive outside mediation might have avoided war through negotiations to preserve the federation, while avoiding excessive domination by Serbia.
42. Ironically, however, as part of the limitless demonization of Miloševic, Tudman was subsequently criticized not so much for having proposed the division (which he admittedly did), but for having made a deal with Miloševic.
42-43. To avoid such a war, dividing the territory between Serbia and Croatia was not necessarily a scandalous idea. It would have required guaranteeing that the full religious freedom already enjoyed by Bosnian Muslims would be safeguarded – by no means a difficult matter. Serbs and Croats had no objection to living with Muslims as neighbors; their objections were to living as potentially second-class citizens of a Muslim state – another matter altogether.
44. The compromise did not satisfy Mr. Izetbegovic because (in the words of U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann) it would have “denied him and his Muslim party a dominant role in the republic.”
44. the same U.S. ambassador who first prohibited the Yugoslav People’s Army from maintaining the unity of Yugoslavia, then went on to encourage lzetbegovic’s party to fight to maintain the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Morally and practically, this was contradictory.
45. The United States never delivered on Zimmermann’s implicit promise to ensure Izetbegovic a dominant role in a unified Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, behind the scenes it helped him arm his military forces, with considerable input from Islamic states and mujahidin fighters, while portraying his cause to the world as one of pure martyrdom.
46. It was also a useful demonstration that, despite unshakable support for Israel and the ongoing destruction of Iraq, the United States was not anti-Muslim.
46. “The main purpose of NATO countries, for the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Gulf.”[14]
47. On the rhetorical level – which was dominant in the early Clinton years – verbal support for the Muslims was an indispensable gauge of liberal sensibility, anti-racism, and concern for human rights.
The Bosnia Cult
48. “Bosnia was and always will be a just cause,” wrote David Rieff, who has expressed as well as anyone the ideology of the Bosnia cult.[15] By “Bosnia,” Rieff meant above all the value of multiculturalism, which, in his mind, was exemplified in Bosnia-Herzegovina where it was the object of “genocide.”
48. He had left the United States in order to write about the effect of non-European refuses and immigrants on Europe, firmly persuaded in advance of the imperative need to transform old Europe into a new Europe that was “genuinely multicultural and multiracial”
48. Television viewers suddenly discovered a romantic Sarajevo, populated by gentle, blue-eyed Muslims, practicing musical instruments in comfortable apartments – people “just like us.” These people would be perfect neighbors, and their lukewarm European Islam seemed to offer the ideal model for successful assimilation.
49. If these ideals were so worth preserving, why had there been no such ardent crusade for preserving Yugoslavia?
50. With the help of US-based public relations experts, this perfectly reasonable (In terms of self-interest of a Muslim state) attitude was presented as proof of devotion to multicultural tolerance in contrast to the “racism” of the Serbs.
Ideals vs. facts
51. In the opening stages of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tudman sent the Croatian army to occupy southwestern Herzegovina. Extreme right-wing Croatian nationalist militia drove the Serb population out of Mostar.
52. “the Islamic fundamentalists became more and more important as the conflict dragged on…”[16] But neither Rieff nor the other Bosnia enthusiasts stopped to consider that the extreme fragility of the Islamic party’s devotion to multicultural values might explain why Serbs (and Croats) did not want to remain under a government headed by Izetbegovic.
52. The media reproduced photographs of the grandfatherly Izetbegovic, but not his words, such as in this March 1994 speech:[17]
“In one of our respectable newspapers I read that our soldiers are dying for a multicultural coexistence, that they are sacrificing their lives so we can live together. Multicultural togetherness is all very well, but – may I say this openly – it is a lie! We cannot He to our people or deceive the public. The soldier in combat is not dying for a multinational coexistence…”
53. The fact that Izetbegovic enjoyed the active support of these Muslims from outside Bosnia, against a large part of the indigenous Bosnian Muslim population, was also of little interest to Western enthusiasts.
54. Rieff evidently considered the genocide charge so self-evident that he made no effort to prove it. He simply repeated the figure that everyone else repeats: 200,000 dead. “Two hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims die, in full view of the world’s television cameras,” according to Rieff.[18]
Izetbegovic: Islamic hero of the Western world
56. In reality, Izetbegovic not only failed utterly to represent the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina in its multicultural variety, he did not even represent all the Muslims. In the 1990 election, the former head of the republic’s important agrial company, Fikret Abdic, received 1,010,618 votes, compared to 847,386 for Izetbegovic. As president of Bosnia, the pragmatic Abdic could have been acceptable to the non-Muslim populations.
Politics and religion
56. First distributed in 1970 and republished 20 years later, precisely at the time of his bid for the presidency, the “Islamic Declaration” was a manifesto addressed to Bosnian Muslims who, according to Izetbegovic, could not be satisfied in a secular order.
“Islamic society without an Islamic government is incomplete and Impotent … A Muslim, in general, does not exist as an individual … to live and exist as a Muslim, he must create an environment, a community, a social order… History does not know of a single truly Islamic movement which was not simultaneously a political movement.”
57-58. The country Izetbegovic singled out in his “Declaration” as an example and inspiration, as “our great hope”, was Pakistan. “Pakistan constitutes the rehearsal for introduction of Islamic order in contemporary conditions and at the present level of development.”
58. He was calling for an awakening of an Islamic consciousness as the first necessary step toward eventual restoration of International Islamic unity and Islamic government wherever Muslims would constitute a majority, regardless of the nature of the existing government.
61. To a certain number of indigenous Muslims, it was clear that Izetbegovic’s SDA was using outside forces, primarily the international Islamic network but also naive Western supporters, to solidify his control over Bosnian Muslims who, without the war, would never have accepted the leadership of a religious party.
2. Moral Dualism in a Multicultural World
The uses of rape
78. The stigmatization at Serbs as “Nazi rapists” was an extremely effective way to win over to the side of their enemies’ two constituencies with enormous influence in the liberal mainstream of Western society.
78. The same journalist who launched the “death camps” story, Roy Gutman, also played a major role in the rape story. His 9 August 1992. Newsday article, headlined “Bosnia Rape Horror,” began with a vivid description of the rape of a 16-year-old girl by three Serb guards. The account was drawn from an interview with a refugee girl and her mother who had been persuaded by a doctor in Croatia to tell the story to the Newsday journalist. Gutman added a multiplier drawn from politically interested sources.[19]
79. One of his sources was Jadranka Cigelj, who combined the roles of rape victim and Croatian nationalist propagandist with considerable success.
80. Gutman’s other source was “a Western diplomat, who asked not to be identified by name or country,” who confirmed that women were raped and men were killed at Omarska. How are readers to evaluate the credibility of a source who refuses to be identified “by name or country”?
80. Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian president Franjo Tudman’s ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by the same right-wing Croatian émigré groups that backed Tudjman.
81-82. After Gutman’s report, every editor wanted a “Serb rape” story for his own paper. Pursuing the search in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a fledgling feminist journalist named Alexandra Stiglmayer complained to a German colleague, Martin Lettmayer, that it was “damned hard” to find a victim to interview.[20]
82. Although based on only one victim, Stiglmayer’s story magnified this single case by giving it a broad political interpretation in terms familiar to the women’s movement.
82. Medical staff said that only three raped women had been treated there in the past seven months, Lettmayer had nothing to sell. A rape story is a rape story, even if unverified. A no rape story is no story at all.
Rape and politics
83. The mainstream media chose to play up stories involving Muslim victims, while ignoring the rape of Serbian women.
83. By accident, a group of basically uninformed European women politicians became the main source for a figure, which was thereafter repeated as authoritative. In February 1993, Gutman reported:
“A probe authorized by the European Community came to the conclusion that at least 20,000 Muslim women had been raped during the Serb conquest. Some of the rapes occurred in special detention centers set up for women and children.”
This was a reference to the “Warburton Report,” which, in the absence of serious sources, became the available and thus favorite “official source” for countless politicians and journalists.
83. The delegation soon noted the discrepancy between the huge number of presumed rape victims reported by the media and the absence of concrete evidence.
84. The Warburton mission lacked the means to carry out a serious, scientific investigation. Formed under pressure to “do something,” it could only repeat the accusations it heard in Zagreb, capital of a country at war with the Serbs.
84. The most prestigious member of the delegation was Simone Veil, a former French minister of health who had served as president of the European Parliament.
84-85. Mme Veil criticized the EU governments for having instructed the Warburton delegation to investigate the rape of Muslim women only (without specifying whether, as reported, it was the German government that eliminated Serb rape victims from the mandate).[21]
85. While Mme Veil stepped back, others stepped forward, especially Mrs Doris Pack, a German Christian Democrat who first as vice chairman and later as chairwoman of the European Parliament (EP) delegation for relations with the republics of former Yugoslavia found a mission as one of the chief demonizers of the Serbs.
85. To Mrs. Pack, the absence of proof was no obstacle to repeating such horrendous tales.
85. Thierry Germond, of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said abuses had been committed by all sides and there was not enough evidence to describe rapes as “systematic.”
Yet the only conclusion drawn by the European Parliamentarians was expressed in a resolution adopted on 11 March 1993, demanding that “systematic rape of women be considered a war crime and a crime against humanity” and calling for rapid establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The crime, it should be noted, was not simply rape but “systematic” rape. Yet “systematic” rape was a mere assumption.
Numbers and patterns
86. The only international body to pursue a thorough investigation of rape accusations was the Commission set up by the Security Council to prepare the documentary basis for the ICTY. It began work in 1992 under the presidency of Frits Kalshoven, professor of humanitarian international law at the University of Leiden.
86. In 1993, Professor Kalshoven resigned and was replaced with Professor Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni. An American of Egyptian origin, Professor Bassiouni was an author of books and essays on Islam. His sympathy for the Muslims of Bosnia was manifest.
87. In the absence of large, verifiable figures, Professor Bassiouni sought to base the case less on the clearly inadequate number of proven cases than on what he considered “patterns,” from which he deduced a “policy.” The search for “patterns” became a regular substitute for either numbers or documentary evidence.
88. Five years after resigning from the UN commission, Professor Kalshoven told Dutch journalist Aart Brouwer:
“Terms like ‘genocide’ came all too easily from the mouths of people like Bassiouni, an American professor of law, who had to establish a reputation and to work on fund-raising. In my opinion these terms were way out of line. ‘Genocidal rape’ is utter nonsense. ‘Genocide’ means extermination, and it is of course impossible to exterminate people and make them pregnant at the same time. It is a propaganda term which was used against the Serbs right from the start, but I have never found any indication that rape was committed systematically by any of the parties – and I understand by ‘systematically’, on orders from the top.”
Imaginary rapes in Kosovo
89-90. The more preposterous the tale, the more fiendish the enemy. Moreover, editors know that sex crime stories attract readers. During the Kosovo bombing and refugee crisis, the insatiable demand of journalists for “rape stories” irritated some aid workers. Dr. Richard Munz, a German surgeon working with humanitarian aid in Macedonia, complained to the daily Die Welt about the inability of most reporters to accept the fact that among the 60,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees in their camp, medical aid workers had not encountered a single case of rape.
90. Guardian reporter Audrey Gillan later reported that she knew of “several tabloid reporters who were dispatched to Macedonia and Albania with the sole purpose of finding a rape victim . Chatting together in the bar of Skopje’s Hotel Continen as a potential alternative., which, in his mind, was exemplified in Bosnia-Herzegovina where it was the object of “genocide.”tal, reporters rehearsed the “notorious” question: “Is there anyone here who’s been raped and speaks English?” Benedicte Giaever, the coordinator for OSCE’s field office in Skopje, complained that almost every journalist who came to see her asked one thing: could she give them a rape victim to interview.[22]
90. The final OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission report on refugee testimony, intended for the Hague Tribunal, demonstrated a willingness, even an eagerness, to believe the worst. Noting that “very little” had been documented on the subject of rape, the KVM hastened to explain that this did not prove anything. “A woman who admits having been raped can be reRape and politicsNumbers and patternsjected or expelled by her husband, her family or her husband’s family.” Yet, the report continued, interviewers “received the support of the men in trying to make the women feel secure enough to talk … and often they would encourage the women to tell the whole story with all details.”[23]
3. Comparative Nationalisms
124. Throughout the 1990s, “nationalism” was widely denounced, with the Yugoslav disaster given as the prime illustration of where » could lead. However, the condemnation of Serbian nationalism as the arch villain supposedly opposing “multiculturalism” led to tacit endorsement of the separatist nationalisms that were tearing apart the multinational state of Yugoslavia. Anti-nationalism in theory became pro-nationalism in practice.
4. The Making of Empires
Germany is born again
165. With the Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s, newly reunified Germany abruptly emerged on the international scene as the major power wielder in Europe. It was the foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who successfully put pressure on his country’s West European partners to dismantle Yugoslavia by recognizing Slovenia and Croatia as independent states.
165. For Germans, assertion of humanitarian ideals as justification for foreign intervention was widely understood as a form of compensation for their Nazi past.
165-166. The crisis in Yugoslavia enabled German leaders to proclaim a new Germany, not only innocent of the realpolitik sins of the past, but moved by a special responsibility born of t e Holocaust to play a prominent role in the crusade for universal human rights.
Why “Serbia must die”
166. In July 1991 a virulent barrage of articles appeared in the German press, led by the Influential conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Day after day, FAZ editor Johann Georg Rei ssmüller denounced the “Serbo-communist power called Yugoslavia,” “Belgrade Serbo-communism” that held a “Greater Serbian communist knife at the throat” of the Slovenes and Croats. Reissmüller described “the Yugo-Serbs” as essentially oriental “militarist Bolsheviks” who had “no place in the European Community.”[24]
167. Everywhere, Serbs were stigmatized as “non-European” barbarians intruding into civilized Europe. Nineteen months after German reunification, and for the first time since Hitler’s defeat in 1945, the German media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews.[25]
167. The attitude was summed up in the 1914 slogan “Serbien muss sterbien” (a play on the word sterben, to die), meaning “Serbia must die.”
168. A few observations: these hostages were all civilians, in no way linked to the acts being punished. The policy of retaliation was carried out not by the SS, usually held responsible for all the criminal acts of Nazi occupation, but by the Wehrmacht, the regular army.
Nation-state vs. volk-state
168-169. “Overcoming the consequences of the First World War” was set as a policy goal of unified Germany in a significant speech by a leading policy-maker, Rupert Scholz, deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU faction in the German Bundestag.
In September 1991, Scholz gave a talk on “the security policy role of the Germans in Europe” to a forum of business leaders and army officers in which he stressed the “basically new tasks and orientation” of German foreign and security policy that came with “German reunification and the recovered full sovereignty.”[26]
169. Far from feeling restrained by Germany’s aggressive role in the Balkans in two world wars, Scholz maintained that this “historic experience” gave Germans a special mandate to show solidarity … with Croats and Slovenians. He called for immediate international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia.
169. Scholz’s meaning was clear: rapid recognition of Croatia and Slovenia was designed not – as was officially claimed by the German government – to prevent military conflict, but to internationalize it, in order to justify outside military intervention, with German participation, under the auspices of either the UN or the OSCE.
169-170. In this traditional German view, “self- determination” is above all an ethnic – or völkisch, from the German word for ethnic or national group, Volk – rather than a political principle, a matter not of the political rights (such as equality before the law, free elections, and other civil rights) of people sharing a particular territory, but rather of the collective right of a racially and culturally homogeneous population to assert its identity as the basic principle of political organization.
Self-determination as ethnic determination
180. On 12 September 1990, less than a month before the official unification of the two German states, their two foreign ministers, along with the foreign ministers of the four Allied Occupation Powers – the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – signed the treaty for the final settlement of the German question, known as the “Two Plus Four” Treaty, in particular, the treaty included a binding commitment never again to export war from German soil. Henceforth, the Germans vowed, the German Constitution barred any disturbance of peaceful coexistence between peoples. On the day of reunification, 3 October 1990, Chancellor Helmut Kohl sent a message to all the world’s governments, including that of Yugoslavia, declaring that: “With its national unity restored, our country will serve peace in the world.”[27]
181. Nowhere in Europe would such restraint seem more obligatory than in Yugoslavia, a country attacked, invaded, occupied, and fragmented by Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
181. The old tradition of ethnic or linguistic determination of state boundaries was given a fresh emotional charge by the 1989 slogan “Wir sind einVolk” justifying the rapid unification of the two German states.
182. The enthusiasm of politicians and the media for Germany’s special mission to defend “self-determination” moved Genscher, the main architect of the successful reunification policy, to overrule the warnings of the German diplomatic corps, including Bonn’s own ambassador in Belgrade, and force through immediate recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. Such recognition was certain to give Serbs the impression that they were facing a repetition of 1941, when Germany backed the establishment of the murderous “Independent State of Croatia.”
182. Recognizing unnegotiated secessions was a flagrant violation of the pledge to respect “intangibility of borders and territorial integrity,” as Yugoslavia’s territory was suddenly stripped of its two richest territories.
182. It took heavy pressure from the Bonn government to persuade the member states of the European Community to disregard the advice of their own diplomats and recognize Slovenia and Croatia as independent states.
Old friends and old enemies
184-185. Reunified Germany’s forceful backing of its World War II clients, the Croatian and Albanian nationalists, may have seemed startling to those who accepted the postwar description of the Federal Republic of Germany as an “economic giant and a political dwarf.” In reality, Germany’s absence from international politics was largely an illusion fostered by the Bonn government’s discretion in the face of the widespread hostility left from the war.
185. In addition, there were the undercover operations of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German equivalent of the CIA. (…)Once Khrushchev had restored “peaceful coexistence” with Tito in the late 1950s, the BND intensified contacts with militant Croatian nationalist exiles.[28]
186. One of the fatal consequences of the disastrous 1974 Yugoslav Constitution was that it enabled each of the republics to set up its own clandestine intelligence service. (…)Initially, since Tito himself was a Croat, Croats had a prominent place within Yugoslav Intelligence services. One of these was Ivan Krajacic. (…)Krajacic reverted to Croatian nationalism, and in the 1970s his circle of “national communists” pursued contacts with a END agent in Yugoslavia, Klaus Dorner, who organized numerous secret meetings in Germany, Austria, and Croatia itself designed to forge an effective alliance between the national communists and the Ustashe emigration.
186. It was years before the German public received any hint of Its government’s role in preparing the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In January 1995 journalist Andreas Zumach disclosed reports Indicating that[29] “since the 1980s, in cooperation with the Croatian secret service, the BND systematically worked to aggravate conflicts between Zagreb and Belgrade.”
187. These connections were recounted in detail in intelligence analyst Erich Schmidt-Eenboom’s 1995 book on Kinkel, DieSchattenkrieger.
187. In the case of the Albanians, it seems there was not so much continuity as a resumption of relations between the German secret services and Albanian secessionists in Kosovo. The enthusiasm of the armed Kosovo Albanian rebels for NATO has a clear precedent in the enthusiasm of their fathers and grandfathers for the German Wehrmacht 50 years earlier.
188. Through sponsorship of a so-called “Second Prizren League” and the formation of an all-Albanian SS Division named for the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg, the Nazi occupiers actively encouraged their proud, gun-toting mountaineer allies to create a “racially pure Greater Albania” (including Kosovo) by massacring Serbs, Greeks, and other non-Albanians.
188. Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his government turned out to be ideal salesmen for a remilitarized Germany. The champion in this exercise was without doubt the Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer.
189. In his battle to win leadership of the Greens, Fischer was allied with his long-time Frankfurt friend and co-tactician Daniel Cohn-Bendit, another media favorite, since his spectacular emergence as symbol of the May’68 student uprising in Paris.
189-190. In 1994, the conflict in Bosnia took a new turn. Secretly armed by Islamic countries and supported diplomatically by the United States, the Bosnian Muslims were on the offensive in Bosnia itself, although the media studiously ignored Muslim attacks or military advances.
190. In Germany, Cohn-Bendit won a seat In the European Parliament on the Green list and promptly departed from the majority Green position by calling for German participation in military intervention in Bosnia.
190. At that time, the Social Democrats and Greens were overwhelmingly against such intervention. The exception was Cohn-Bendit, who dismissed Green objections as “ridiculous” and found original arguments to support Kohl’s position.
191. At that time, Fischer was still arguing that Germany should stay out. But by the following August, Cohn-Bendit was able to announce that his friend Joschka was “on the right path,” even though he still opposed sending in German soldiers. But, predicted Cohn-Bendit with remarkable clairvoyance, “Once Fischer is foreign minister, he won’t be able to maintain this position.”[30]
191-192. The debate on Yugoslavia became a matter of German conscience first and foremost, encouraging self-absorbed moralistic poses favored by self-styled “realists.” Together, Cohn-Bendit and Fischer had succeeded in playing the role of pied pipers of Frankfurt, leading the Green children over the brink into support of German participation in NATO’s war against the Serbs.
The ideological domination of this moralistic approach was achieved by constant analogy with “Auschwitz” and “the Holocaust,” equating the Serbs with the Nazis. (…) In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic lifted its ban on military operations outside the NATO defensive area.
192. Fischer had managed to reassure the kingmakers in Germany and Washington that here was a man they could trust.
193. Returning from his visit to German troops in Kosovo, Chancellor Schroder declared: “It is already impressive and moved me deeply, when in Prizren I saw on the one hand German tanks and German soldiers with machine guns, and on the other hand I could share the experience of the extraordinary euphoric jubilation with which a German Chancellor was welcomed. I find that in the context of the specific German history in this region, really anyone must be moved by this.”[31]
193. Is it credible that the German Chancellor, however ignorant of history, was not informed by his advisors of the fact that the enthusiasm came from the same Albanians, or their descendants, whose terror against Serbian inhabitants was encouraged by the Nazi occupiers?
5. The New Imperial Model
Albanians: a people in search of an empire
201. Albanians have inhabited the Western Balkans since time immemorial, without organizing an Albanian state until less than a century ago.
202. After Serbs sided with the Habsburgs in their seventeenth-century wars against the Ottoman Empire, the Turks turned to Albanian converts to Islam to suppress the Serbs in Kosovo.
202. An oft-quoted statement dating back to the late nineteenth century claimed that “The religion of the Albanians is Albanianism.”[32]
202. The newly formed “Prizren League” called for the preservation of Ottoman rule and of Islam.
202. It was only as they saw that the Turks were no longer determined to preserve the old order that the Prizren League tried to expel them and take over.
203. The fact that toward the end of the Ottoman Empire the Albanian leadership had more to lose than to gain from the creation of new modern states, whereas the Serbs had everything to gain and little to lose, confirmed the deep cleavage between the two communities.
The crowded “cradle of civilization”
203. As Turkish rule crumbled, Ismail Kemal, a prominent Albanian statesman who had served the Sultan in Istanbul, returned to the Albanian port of Vlora and, on 28 November 1912, encouraged by Austria, proclaimed: “From today on Albania is free and independent.”
203. Despite the Vlora declaration, there was no coherent national movement that could claim to represent the core of a representative Albanian state.
204. Allied with Essad Pasha Toptani until his assassination in Paris in June 1920, the Belgrade government did what it could to champion an independent Albania in opposition to Italy.
204. Monuments of the past were unquestionably Serbian, but by 1912 the Albanians were the most numerous group in a mixed population, including not only Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins, but also a large number of Serbian Muslims (notably the Gorani in the mountainous southernmost tip of Kosovo), Turks, Gypsies, and even some Circassians brought in by the Turks.
204. Each side has remembered being massacred by the other, but forgotten times when it was the other way around.
205. In contrast, the Serbs did not cross oceans to conquer foreign lands. They were liberating the traditional heartland of their nation, still inhabited by Serb peasants who had been oppressed by Albanians.
Problems of education, language, and truth
208. For Tito, an “Albanian” Kosovo was initially perceived as an asset toward incorporating Albania itself into Yugoslavia on the way to creation of a broader Balkan federation (an ambition rapidly quashed by Moscow).
208. However, the birthrate among Kosovo Albanians – Europe’s highest by far – kept per capita income low.[33]
209. It was clearly part of the Albanian nationalist agenda to appear as numerous as possible.
209. In early 1912, on the eve of the first Balkan war, the Serbian government attempted to accommodate Albanian leaders in Kosovo by offering an accord guaranteeing freedom of religion, use of the Albanian language in schools and courts, and a separate Albanian assembly to legislate for the Albanian community.15 The Albanian leaders rejected any such agreement.
210. So what went wrong? In reality, educating Albanians in their own language aggravated their cultural isolation and self-absorption. Since written Albanian was a relatively new language, there were no great libraries in the Albanian language treating all the various subjects required for a full modern education. Schooling in Serbian offered broader cultural resources, notably access to the modern scientific and technical culture greatly prized by the Serbs.
211. In 1968, in an odd concession to Albanian nationalism, the Tito government banned use of the word Šiptar, the Serbo-Croatian version of Shqiptar, the name that the Albanians use for themselves.
211. Subsequently, the insistence on being called “Kosovars2 helped give the world the impression that the Shqiptars/Albanians were the only genuine inhabitants of Kosovo, just as calling Muslims “Bosniaks” or Bosnians suggested that Serbs and Croats were intruders in Bosnia.
211. With their schoolbooks imported from Tirana, Kosovo’s Albanian children were being raised as citizens of a foreign state.
212. The question arises: how can any society survive when its children are educated in complete ignorance of each other and with no common language?
212. In 1981, an Albanian professor at Priština University concluded from extensive travels abroad that “not a single national minority in the world has achieved the rights that the Albanian nationality enjoys in Socialist Yugoslavia.” Only the Hungarians in Romania and the Swedes in Finland had their own universities, but without the full autonomy enjoyed by the Albanians at the University of Priština, he observed.[34]
213. The Western left often assumes that only socio-economic oppression leads to revolt; ergo, the Kosovo Albanians were oppressed.[35]
214. “The nationalist movement gained momentum after the Constitution of 1974 promoted Kosovo to an autonomous unit of Federal Yugoslavia. Kosovars began acting as masters, making Serbs and Montenegrins feel like subjects.”[36]
218. Calling Albanian harassment of Serbs in Kosovo “genocide” was precisely the type of emotional overstatement that in the following decade would be used constantly against the Serbs themselves.
Politics and human rights
219. In the 1980s, Western journalists and diplomats had defended the Serb viewpoint. The New York Times published reports of the plight of Serbs being driven out of Kosovo by Albanian “ethnic cleansing.”[37] Western governments supported modernizes (such as Miloševic) who saw the need to reduce Kosovo’s autonomy in order to enact economic reforms.
220. Miloševic was introducing political pluralism and had transformed the Serbian League of Communists into the Serbian Socialist Party, inviting ethnic Albanians to join. The new Constitution defined Serbia as “a democratic state of all its citizens,” without ethnic distinctions. But Miloševic and the Serbian leadership grievously underestimated the wound they had inflicted on Kosovo and the capacity for mobilization of the Albanian community. The formal equality offered by the new Constitution was of no interest to Albanian leaders who wanted nothing to do with Serbia.
220. Miloševic’s crackdown on Kosovo was harsh, but no more so than Tito’s style of governing, and it was accomplished for the sake of an economic reform program approved by the West.
221. Prominent HRW members include Morton Abramowitz, involved in using Islamists to wreck Afghanistan before going on to use the “Kosovars” to wreck Yugoslavia; former U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmerman; and Paul Goble, director of the U.S. propaganda news network Radio Free Europe, which for years displayed its bias by using only Albanian language names for towns in Kosovo.
222. The 1992 Constitutions of both Yugoslavia and Serbia guaranteed extensive rights to several national minorities, notably the right to education in their own mother tongue, the right to information media in their own language, and the right to use their own language in judicial or administrative proceedings.
222-223. Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, claimed that Albanians in Kosovo “have lived for years under conditions similar to those suffered by Jews in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just before World War II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free, but politically disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil liberties.”[38] This was as incendiary as it was untrue.
The Kosovo NGO
The authorities in Belgrade justified the harsh 1989 crackdown in Kosovo on the grounds that they were combating a violent secessionist movement. Those grounds were rapidly undermined by the unexpected decision of Kosovo Albanians to turn to something they had never tried before: non-violence. This sudden metamorphosis was described by the prominent Kosovo Albanian intellectual Shkelzen Maliqi (…) In Maliqi’s words:[39]
“However, in winter and spring of 1990 there was a sudden and radical change. Warriors went out of fashion over night. The interesting thing is that there were no major theoretical disputes, nor organized campaigns propagating non-violence, nor was there even a specific personality to undertake the role of the Albanian Gandhi. Dr. Rugova became the most influential leader of the Albanians later on when the concept was already spontaneously formulated. The strategy of non-violence was somehow self-imposed as the best, most pragmatic and most efficient response to Serbian aggressive plans.”
224. Albanians boycotted Serbian institutions, and refused to pay taxes or utility bills. Without public debate or charismatic leader, they proclaimed their own parallel state, which was immediately recognized by neighboring Albania (but by no one else).
224. The Kosovo Albanians were not trying to gain improvements for Albanians within the framework of Yugoslav or Serbian institutions. They simply rejected those institutions totally. There was no non-violent campaign to gain equal access to education or other social benefits. The Kosovo Albanian movement boycotted them.
224. Albanian abstention ensured President Miloševic’s party some 35 swing seats in parliament. If the Albanians had elected their own representatives instead of boycotting elections, they could have altered the political majority in Serbia. However, Albanian leaders preferred the “demonized” Miloševic as an irreplaceable public relations asset to their cause.[40]
225. By the end of 1992, the Serbian authorities had given in and accepted the principle that “leaders of each nation were responsible for the cultural development of their own people.”[41]
225. To get the children back in the official schools, Serbian officials told Albanian leaders during talks held in Switzerland that they could write their own program. But by that time, Albanian leaders were attached to their own system and saw its extraordinary value as a political weapon.[42]
225-226. According to official figures in 1998, 64 per cent of the official Serbian system’s health employees in Kosovo and 80 percent of its patients were still ethnic Albanian.
226. Serbia was widely accused of practicing “apartheid” in Kosovo.[43] This likening of Kosovo to racist South Africa was a successful propaganda theme. But there was no state-decreed separation of populations in Kosovo. If “apartheid” is reduced to meaning a degree of separation between ethnic communities, in Kosovo it was organized by the very Kosovar Albanian nationalist leaders who denounced it in order to win support from international public opinion. The amazing strategy of “self-apartheid” was designed both to deepen the chasm between the Albanian majority in Kosovo and the dwindling Serbian minority, and to win international sympathy by posing as victims of “racism.” It was successful thanks to the internal discipline of Albanian patriarchal society, which massively followed calls for boycott, and constant support from abroad. Western support took the form of readiness to believe -or seem to believe – that the Kosovo problem was a matter of human rights rather than a conflict between a recognized government and an irredentist movement seeking territorial secession.[44]
228. In 1996, the radical Kosovo Albanian nationalist Adem Demaqi suggested a democratically re-federated Yugoslavia, with a new name such as “Balkania,” including Kosovo. Some Albanian leaders proposed granting Kosovo the status of a third “republic” within Yugoslavia (alongside Serbia and Montenegro), without the right to secede.[45] Such ideas gained circulation at a time when the 1997 “pyramid scheme” collapse plunged Albania itself into lawlessness, which initially was understood as a blow to the political credibility of secession. This might have been the moment when unbiased outside mediation could have promoted efforts toward reconciliation and a peaceful compromise.[46]
228. Kosovo Albanians had no reason to negotiate when they could count on support from U.S. government-financed “NGOs.” Through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), set up by the Reagan administration to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries with U.S. taxpayers’ money, the United States had a major influence on how Kosovo was seen by the world.
229. The main source of all reports circulated worldwide concerning Serbian police brutality and other abuses originated with the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, founded in 1989 by militant Kosovo Albanian nationalists.
229-230. In the months leading up to the NATO bombing, in response to demands for asylum lodged by Kosovo Albanians, the German Foreign Ministry and various regional German courts categorically denied that Kosovo Albanians were being persecuted or even that there was a “humanitarian catastrophe” resulting from Yugoslav security forces’ repression of armed Albanian rebels. In late October 1998, the Bavarian administrative court, on the basis of intelligence reports from the German Foreign Ministry, concluded that the recent violence “was a selective use of force against the military underground movement (especially the UÇK – Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës)A government program of persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians has never existed either now or earlier.”[47]
The ear of the Empire: the Albanian lobby in the United States
231. In their effort to win separate states of their own, Croats, Albanians, and Bosnian Muslims shared a common enemy. That common enemy was multinational Yugoslavia. Politically, the formula for winning support from American politicians was to identify Yugoslavia with the Serbs and the Serbs with “communism”. The success of the three anti-Serb lobbies owed much to a young aide Of Senator Robert Dole, Mira Radielovic Baratta, who went to work for Dole in June 1989.
231. Baratta has “as good an understanding of the Balkans as anyone on Capitol Hill,” The Weekly Standard reported admiringly, adding that “she is probably the only congressional staffer monitoring ex-Yugoslavia who speaks and reads both Croatian and Serbian” – a statement which itself indicates the prevailing ignorance, since Croatian and Serbian are the same language.[48]
232. An independent Albanian Kosovo would strengthen Turkey’s renewed presence in the Balkans. This would bolster the key strategic partnership between the United States and Turkey, linked to Israel in the eastern Mediterranean and expanding northward into the oil-rich ex-Soviet republics.
232. Washington’s support for the “Kosovar” cause has helped make Albania the most enthusiastically pro-American country in the world, whose leaders constantly plead for establishment of permanent U.S. bases.
Preparing for war
234. The UÇK demanded a stop to what it called the “colonization” of Kosovo and called on the United States to recognize the independence of Kosovo. It warned that any fellow Albanians who chose “Kosovo’s autonomy within Serbia” would be assassinated.[49]
234. For a long time, Rugova and his colleagues denied the very existence of the UÇK, claiming that it was nothing but an invention of Serbian propaganda designed to discredit the Kosovar cause.
235. “The KLA had a simple but effective plan. It would kill Serbian policemen. The Serbs would retaliate, Balkan style, with widespread reprisals and the occasional massacre. The West would get more and more appalled, until finally it would, as it did in Bosnia, take action. In effect, the United States and much of Europe would go to war on the side of the KLA. It worked.”[50]
“Bombing for peace”
236. The NATO powers insisted that Kosovo should remain part of Yugoslavia … but also blamed Belgrade when negotiation were blocked by Kosovo Albanians’ refusal to discuss anything but independence from Yugoslavia.
236. Izetbegovic wanted to continue the war, and it was only if the United States bombed the Bosnian Serbs that he would even consent to discuss negotiations.[51]
237. UÇK commander Agim Çeku, who as an officer in the Croatian army had previously won notoriety by massacring Serb civilians, later explained: “The cease-fire was very useful to us. It enabled us to get organized, to consolidate, to grow.”[52]
238. According to one Swiss verifier, “We understood from the start that the information gathered by OSCE patrols during our mission was destined to complete the Information that NATO had gathered by satellite. We had the very sharp impression of doing espionage work for the Atlantic Alliance.”[53]
238. France’s KVM deputy chief, Ambassador Gabriel Keller, complained that “every pullback by the Yugoslav army or the Serbian police was followed by a movement forward by UÇK forces”. The UÇK took advantage of Serbian restraint “to consolidate its positions everywhere, continuing to smuggle arms from Albania, abducting and killing both civilians and military personnel, Albanians and Serbs alike.” Privately, Keller said he believed that Walker deliberately sabotaged the mission, and that his only obsession was to “keep the UÇK for the Americans.”[54]
The Rambouillet farce
244. Rambouillet was an exercise in fake diplomacy designed to “prove” that diplomacy had failed and that war was unavoidable.
244. Thaqi was treated as a special pet by Madeleine Albright’s press officer Jamie Rubin. The Kosovo Albanian delegation at Rambouillet was counseled by top U.S. foreign policy guru Morton Abramowitz.
245. In any normal negotiation, the long proposal presented by the Serbian government calling for extensive local self-government and guaranteed rights for all ethnic groups would at least have been acknowledged as a basis for discussion.
245. Substantial economic aid was promised to Kosovo, while Serbia was to get nothing; the agreement did not evea title=”” href=”#ref-44″n mention suspending economic sanctions against Serbia, much less any help to the 650,000 refugees in Serbia.
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http://sorryserbia.com/2013/fools-crusade/
Introduction
1. Apparently, many people on the left, who would normally defend peace and justice, were fooled or confused by the claim that the “Kosovo war” was waged for purely humanitarian reasons.
2. A significant difference was that the war against Yugoslavia was waged by the political center-left. The NATO governments were mostly led by liberals and “Third Way” social democrats.
Globalization vs U.S. hegemony
6. In the words of Madeleine Albright, “What’s the point of having this superb military … if we can’t use it?”[1]
7. As the ability of nation-states to protect the interests of their citizens declines, the importance of citizenship diminishes in turn.
Conversion of the threat
8-9. The chef d’œuvre of that policy of destruction was undoubtedly the use of Islamic mujahidins in Afghanistan to entrap the Soviet Union – the declared goal of Jimmy Carter’s openly cynical advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski.[2]
9. Between Democratic and Republican administrations there is no fundamental difference, even though the Democrats often prefer to stress positive and ambitious goals such as “nation-building” and “human rights.”
9. An influential member of this foreign policy establishment is Morton Abramowitz, whose career has involved him with both the Afghan mujahidin and Kosovo Albanian rebels.
9-10. “American ideals and self-interest merge when the United States supports the spread of democracy around the globe – or what we prefer to call ‘limited’ constitutional democracy, meaning rule by a government that has been legitimized by free elections,” was the conclusion of the Carnegie experts, summed up in the Endowment’s 1992 publication Self-Determination in the New World Order. (…)This future “rule of law” is not to be confused with existing international law. (…)In the future, the authors announced in 1992, “Humanitarian interventions will become increasingly unavoidable.” [3]
10-11. Abramowitz continued to act from behind the scenes as an eminence grise for Albright. He helped found the high-level International Crisis Group, a chief policy designer for Bosnia and Kosovo. He was omnipresent behind the scenes of the Kosovo drama, both in making policy and in shaping elite business, government, and media opinion.
11. Islamic fundamentalism is compatible with U.S. globalization in that it cares nothing for national boundaries and does not threaten to establish national governments that can serve as a progressive model of alternative development.
11. In a way, Yugoslavia became an enemy both as a discarded asset and as a potential alternative.
Humanitarian missionaries
12. If the country held together, it might stand in the way of Western plans for the region.
13. In Yugoslavia, the National Endowment for Democracy generously funded Albanian separatists in Kosovo and the anti-Miloševic opposition in Serbia, Human Rights Watch, closely linked to U.S. policy-making, repeatedly launched inflammatory and unsubstantiated accusations against the Yugoslav government.
13. Operating across borders, some charitable groups tend to perceive national sovereignty as little more than an obstacle to their own operations. Based in the rich NATO countries, operating in poorer countries, the direction of their intervention is the same as that of NATO, acting as policeman of the new world order.
About the book
14. My main thesis is that the intervention of the NATO powers in Yugoslavia, far from being a last-minute rescue, was from the start a major driving factor in the tragic course of events.
1. The Yugoslav Guinea Pig
Miloševic, a fictional charachter
16-17. Margaret Thatcher went further: “We are not dealing with some minor thug,” she insisted. “Miloševic’s regime and the genocidal ideology that sustains it represents … a truly monstrous evil … which must be totally defeated …”
What was really wrong with Miloševic
19. Miloševic’s sin was that he used the Kosovo question to wrest leadership of the Serbian League of Communists away from the man in line for the job, Belgrade party leader Dragiša Pavlović. (…)Supporters of Pavlovic bitterly resented Miloševic’s rise to prominence and played a key role in characterizing him as an “extreme nationalist.”[4]
19-20. What was really wrong with Miloševic was a mixture of optimism and ambiguity not uncommon among ambitious politicians. He was often described as better at tactics than at strategy. His claim to be able to resolve the problem of Kosovo was based on illusion, lie continued to preach unity, but offered no program for achieving it.
Invisible economic causes
21. Susan Woodward has provided a masterly description of this process, which by the end of the 1980s had resulted in “a breakdown in all elements of the domestic order, political disintegration and rising nationalism.”[5]
Scapegoating economic reforms
22. Tito’s Yugoslavia was built on a policy of deliberately reducing Serbian influence. The “key” system of national quotas ensured even distribution of public office between the various nationalities. Serbian dominance of Yugoslavia after World War II was a myth.
22. By granting effective veto power to Serbia’s autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, the 1974 Constitution made it impossible for Serbia to carry out serious reform.
23. National governments are discredited. Only the “International Community” knows what is best for everyone.
Invisible Croatia
23. Tudman had the strong political and financial support of the Croatian émigré community, including direct descendants of the fascist Ustashe movement which ran the “Croatian Independent State” set up in 1941 following the Nazi invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
24. It was clear that “by now the Croatian countryside was bristling with weapons that had been secreted or stolen from JNA warehouses or smuggled across the Croatian-Hungarian border.”[6]
24. On 17 January 1991, the United States made a decisive intervention on behalf of Croatian secession. The U.S. ambassador to Belgrade, Warren Zlmmermann, informed Jovic that the United States would not accept any use of force to disarm the paramilitaries.
24. And of course, the United States considers Abraham Lincoln its greatest president for using force against the secessionists of the southern Confederacy.
25. Warren Zimmermann, arrived in Belgrade with instructions to deliver “a new message: Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.”[7]
25. Most Serbs would surely have preferred to preserve the Yugoslav Federation intact. But was this possible, when the United States was banning the use of force?
26. “It is not our intention to prevent the Croats or any other nation from leaving Yugoslavia/’ Miloševic told Belgrade University professors on 21 March 1991, “but we are not going to allow anybody to dug the Serbs out with them against their will.”
26. Self-determination was the right of the peoples, not of the republics, regarded as arbitrary administrative units, drawn by the communists without popular consultation.
The ghosts of Gospic
27. The Serb rebellion, as it gained support from Belgrade, was masterfully exploited by Tudman to portray the long-planned Croatian secession as a defensive resistance to “Greater Serbia.”
28. Mile Budak, described how Croatia was to be purified of non-Croatians within ten years.[8] 20 For non-Croats, he said, “we have three million bullets. We shall kill one part of the Serbian population, expel another, and the rest we shall convert to the Roman Catholic religion.”
28. Two Albanian officers, Ahmet Krasniqi and Agim Çeku, reportedly played a leading role in betraying the JNA garrison to the Croatian separatists, thus depriving local Serbs of protection. This was an early manifestation of an operational alliance between Croatian and Albanian nationalists.
28. Çeku helped command “Operation Storm” which emptied the Krajina of its Serb population.[9]
29. In late September 1991, over 120 Gospic Serbs, including prominent professors and judges, were abducted and murdered, their bodies destroyed or hidden. “It was a warning to Serbs – they were no longer safe in Croatia.”[10]
29. Western media ignored the 1991 Gospid massacre until the late summer of 1997 when a disgruntled former policeman, Miro Bajramovic, decided to reveal all.[11] Bajramovic said his paramilitary unit was sent to Gospic in September 1991 with orders from the Croatian Interior Ministry to spread terror among the region’s 9,000 Serbs.
30. The three – Milan Levar, the former commander of a reconnaissance intelligence unit, Zdenko Bando, a former military police commander, Zdenko Ropac, a former secret intelligence police officer -told New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges that they had witnessed “scores of abductions and killings in and around the town of Gospic.”
Greater Serbia or smaller Yugoslavia
33. A look at the map shows that the failed attempt to detach the “Serbian Republic of Krajina” from Croatia was less an attempt to create “Greater Serbia” than an effort to solidify a “Smaller Yugoslavia.”
33. The two “Serb Republics” in the Croatian Krajina and in Bosnia-Herzegovina were left out. The West failed to acknowledge that this amounted to a formal renunciation of “Greater Serbia,” or even of medium-sized Yugoslavia.
Integrating Europe, disintegrating Yugoslavia
34. If using criminals for dirty tasks makes him a criminal, then he may be considered a criminal – but surely no more (or rather, less) than the late President Tudman of Croatia or President Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, widely regarded as a saint.
35. The main significance of the Maastricht Treaty was to lock the EU member states into a monetarist economic policy from which there was no way out, but it was presented to the public as a brave step toward a peaceful democratic new Europe that would emerge as the wonder, even the salvation, of the world.
35. The country’s relatively prosperous and market-oriented economic development, as well as its geographic position between Italy and Greece, would have seemed to make Yugoslavia the most eligible of Eastern European countries to join the European Union. There was, however, no clear program for integrating Yugoslavia.
35. At this point, the richest of the republics – especially Slovenia, but also Croatia – saw their chance to “jump the queue” and get into the European Union ahead of the others by cutting themselves off from the rest of Yugoslavia.
36. What could “Europe” have done? The answer in principle is simple, although the application would have been complex. It could have offered Yugoslavia’s people and politicians a prospect of an overall solution to their supposed problems of coexistence by offering a clear, feasible program for integration of all of Yugoslavia – all the republics, simultaneously – into the European Union.
The Badinter Commission
36. At the time, Germany was calling the shots in the Balkans, insisting on rapid diplomatic recognition of independent Slovenia and Croatia.
37. Advocates of hasty recognition of the secessionist republics claimed that this would prevent civil war in Yugoslavia by settling the matter once and for all. But the real impact of hasty diplomatic recognition was not to stop the fighting, but rather to formally transform a civil war into an international conflict, thus allowing international intervention. The impact was to destroy the prospect of neutral mediation and further polarize the conflict.
37-38. In the summer of 1991, while Slovenian and Croatian independence were in suspension at Europe’s request, the Serbian government submitted three questions to the Commission for its opinion:
Who can be the subject of the right to self-determination from the standpoint of international public law, a nation or a federal unit? Is the right of self-determination a subjective collective right or the right of a territory?
Can tension be a legal act from the standpoint of the United Nations and other relevant legal rules?
Are the demarcation lines between constituent parts of a federal state (provinces, cantons, states, Länder, republics and the like) borders in the sense of international public law?
38. On 29 November 1991, the Badinter Commission issued its First Opinion, which sounded the death knell of Federal Yugoslavia by announcing that “the Federative Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia is engaged in a process of dissolution.”[12]
38-39. In regard to the question of what new states should be recognized in place of the “disintegrating” Yugoslavia, it abandoned the traditional realistic criteria for diplomatic recognition (control of territory).
39. The Badinter Commission avoided questions of legal principle by resorting to an interpretation of fact: Yugoslavia was “in a process of dissolution.”
40. A British legal scholar has observed: “The view that the SFRY underwent a process of dismemberment was also undoubtedly influential as regards the United Nations’ determination that the FRY should not continue automatically the membership of the former SFRY in the UN.”[13]
40. In those years in EU circles, Yugoslavia could only be “the former Yugoslavia,” and to use the term “Yugoslavia” without the obligatory “former” was taboo in polite company.
Multicultural Bosnia vs. Multicultural Yugoslavia
41. At this point, cautious and constructive outside mediation might have avoided war through negotiations to preserve the federation, while avoiding excessive domination by Serbia.
42. Ironically, however, as part of the limitless demonization of Miloševic, Tudman was subsequently criticized not so much for having proposed the division (which he admittedly did), but for having made a deal with Miloševic.
42-43. To avoid such a war, dividing the territory between Serbia and Croatia was not necessarily a scandalous idea. It would have required guaranteeing that the full religious freedom already enjoyed by Bosnian Muslims would be safeguarded – by no means a difficult matter. Serbs and Croats had no objection to living with Muslims as neighbors; their objections were to living as potentially second-class citizens of a Muslim state – another matter altogether.
44. The compromise did not satisfy Mr. Izetbegovic because (in the words of U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann) it would have “denied him and his Muslim party a dominant role in the republic.”
44. the same U.S. ambassador who first prohibited the Yugoslav People’s Army from maintaining the unity of Yugoslavia, then went on to encourage lzetbegovic’s party to fight to maintain the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Morally and practically, this was contradictory.
45. The United States never delivered on Zimmermann’s implicit promise to ensure Izetbegovic a dominant role in a unified Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, behind the scenes it helped him arm his military forces, with considerable input from Islamic states and mujahidin fighters, while portraying his cause to the world as one of pure martyrdom.
46. It was also a useful demonstration that, despite unshakable support for Israel and the ongoing destruction of Iraq, the United States was not anti-Muslim.
46. “The main purpose of NATO countries, for the foreseeable future, will be to serve as staging areas for American wars in the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Gulf.”[14]
47. On the rhetorical level – which was dominant in the early Clinton years – verbal support for the Muslims was an indispensable gauge of liberal sensibility, anti-racism, and concern for human rights.
The Bosnia Cult
48. “Bosnia was and always will be a just cause,” wrote David Rieff, who has expressed as well as anyone the ideology of the Bosnia cult.[15] By “Bosnia,” Rieff meant above all the value of multiculturalism, which, in his mind, was exemplified in Bosnia-Herzegovina where it was the object of “genocide.”
48. He had left the United States in order to write about the effect of non-European refuses and immigrants on Europe, firmly persuaded in advance of the imperative need to transform old Europe into a new Europe that was “genuinely multicultural and multiracial”
48. Television viewers suddenly discovered a romantic Sarajevo, populated by gentle, blue-eyed Muslims, practicing musical instruments in comfortable apartments – people “just like us.” These people would be perfect neighbors, and their lukewarm European Islam seemed to offer the ideal model for successful assimilation.
49. If these ideals were so worth preserving, why had there been no such ardent crusade for preserving Yugoslavia?
50. With the help of US-based public relations experts, this perfectly reasonable (In terms of self-interest of a Muslim state) attitude was presented as proof of devotion to multicultural tolerance in contrast to the “racism” of the Serbs.
Ideals vs. facts
51. In the opening stages of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tudman sent the Croatian army to occupy southwestern Herzegovina. Extreme right-wing Croatian nationalist militia drove the Serb population out of Mostar.
52. “the Islamic fundamentalists became more and more important as the conflict dragged on…”[16] But neither Rieff nor the other Bosnia enthusiasts stopped to consider that the extreme fragility of the Islamic party’s devotion to multicultural values might explain why Serbs (and Croats) did not want to remain under a government headed by Izetbegovic.
52. The media reproduced photographs of the grandfatherly Izetbegovic, but not his words, such as in this March 1994 speech:[17]
“In one of our respectable newspapers I read that our soldiers are dying for a multicultural coexistence, that they are sacrificing their lives so we can live together. Multicultural togetherness is all very well, but – may I say this openly – it is a lie! We cannot He to our people or deceive the public. The soldier in combat is not dying for a multinational coexistence…”
53. The fact that Izetbegovic enjoyed the active support of these Muslims from outside Bosnia, against a large part of the indigenous Bosnian Muslim population, was also of little interest to Western enthusiasts.
54. Rieff evidently considered the genocide charge so self-evident that he made no effort to prove it. He simply repeated the figure that everyone else repeats: 200,000 dead. “Two hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims die, in full view of the world’s television cameras,” according to Rieff.[18]
Izetbegovic: Islamic hero of the Western world
56. In reality, Izetbegovic not only failed utterly to represent the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina in its multicultural variety, he did not even represent all the Muslims. In the 1990 election, the former head of the republic’s important agrial company, Fikret Abdic, received 1,010,618 votes, compared to 847,386 for Izetbegovic. As president of Bosnia, the pragmatic Abdic could have been acceptable to the non-Muslim populations.
Politics and religion
56. First distributed in 1970 and republished 20 years later, precisely at the time of his bid for the presidency, the “Islamic Declaration” was a manifesto addressed to Bosnian Muslims who, according to Izetbegovic, could not be satisfied in a secular order.
“Islamic society without an Islamic government is incomplete and Impotent … A Muslim, in general, does not exist as an individual … to live and exist as a Muslim, he must create an environment, a community, a social order… History does not know of a single truly Islamic movement which was not simultaneously a political movement.”
57-58. The country Izetbegovic singled out in his “Declaration” as an example and inspiration, as “our great hope”, was Pakistan. “Pakistan constitutes the rehearsal for introduction of Islamic order in contemporary conditions and at the present level of development.”
58. He was calling for an awakening of an Islamic consciousness as the first necessary step toward eventual restoration of International Islamic unity and Islamic government wherever Muslims would constitute a majority, regardless of the nature of the existing government.
61. To a certain number of indigenous Muslims, it was clear that Izetbegovic’s SDA was using outside forces, primarily the international Islamic network but also naive Western supporters, to solidify his control over Bosnian Muslims who, without the war, would never have accepted the leadership of a religious party.
2. Moral Dualism in a Multicultural World
The uses of rape
78. The stigmatization at Serbs as “Nazi rapists” was an extremely effective way to win over to the side of their enemies’ two constituencies with enormous influence in the liberal mainstream of Western society.
78. The same journalist who launched the “death camps” story, Roy Gutman, also played a major role in the rape story. His 9 August 1992. Newsday article, headlined “Bosnia Rape Horror,” began with a vivid description of the rape of a 16-year-old girl by three Serb guards. The account was drawn from an interview with a refugee girl and her mother who had been persuaded by a doctor in Croatia to tell the story to the Newsday journalist. Gutman added a multiplier drawn from politically interested sources.[19]
79. One of his sources was Jadranka Cigelj, who combined the roles of rape victim and Croatian nationalist propagandist with considerable success.
80. Gutman’s other source was “a Western diplomat, who asked not to be identified by name or country,” who confirmed that women were raped and men were killed at Omarska. How are readers to evaluate the credibility of a source who refuses to be identified “by name or country”?
80. Cigelj was a vice president of Croatian president Franjo Tudman’s ruling nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) and was in charge of the Zagreb office of the Croatia Information Center (CIC), a wartime propaganda agency funded by the same right-wing Croatian émigré groups that backed Tudjman.
81-82. After Gutman’s report, every editor wanted a “Serb rape” story for his own paper. Pursuing the search in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a fledgling feminist journalist named Alexandra Stiglmayer complained to a German colleague, Martin Lettmayer, that it was “damned hard” to find a victim to interview.[20]
82. Although based on only one victim, Stiglmayer’s story magnified this single case by giving it a broad political interpretation in terms familiar to the women’s movement.
82. Medical staff said that only three raped women had been treated there in the past seven months, Lettmayer had nothing to sell. A rape story is a rape story, even if unverified. A no rape story is no story at all.
Rape and politics
83. The mainstream media chose to play up stories involving Muslim victims, while ignoring the rape of Serbian women.
83. By accident, a group of basically uninformed European women politicians became the main source for a figure, which was thereafter repeated as authoritative. In February 1993, Gutman reported:
“A probe authorized by the European Community came to the conclusion that at least 20,000 Muslim women had been raped during the Serb conquest. Some of the rapes occurred in special detention centers set up for women and children.”
This was a reference to the “Warburton Report,” which, in the absence of serious sources, became the available and thus favorite “official source” for countless politicians and journalists.
83. The delegation soon noted the discrepancy between the huge number of presumed rape victims reported by the media and the absence of concrete evidence.
84. The Warburton mission lacked the means to carry out a serious, scientific investigation. Formed under pressure to “do something,” it could only repeat the accusations it heard in Zagreb, capital of a country at war with the Serbs.
84. The most prestigious member of the delegation was Simone Veil, a former French minister of health who had served as president of the European Parliament.
84-85. Mme Veil criticized the EU governments for having instructed the Warburton delegation to investigate the rape of Muslim women only (without specifying whether, as reported, it was the German government that eliminated Serb rape victims from the mandate).[21]
85. While Mme Veil stepped back, others stepped forward, especially Mrs Doris Pack, a German Christian Democrat who first as vice chairman and later as chairwoman of the European Parliament (EP) delegation for relations with the republics of former Yugoslavia found a mission as one of the chief demonizers of the Serbs.
85. To Mrs. Pack, the absence of proof was no obstacle to repeating such horrendous tales.
85. Thierry Germond, of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said abuses had been committed by all sides and there was not enough evidence to describe rapes as “systematic.”
Yet the only conclusion drawn by the European Parliamentarians was expressed in a resolution adopted on 11 March 1993, demanding that “systematic rape of women be considered a war crime and a crime against humanity” and calling for rapid establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The crime, it should be noted, was not simply rape but “systematic” rape. Yet “systematic” rape was a mere assumption.
Numbers and patterns
86. The only international body to pursue a thorough investigation of rape accusations was the Commission set up by the Security Council to prepare the documentary basis for the ICTY. It began work in 1992 under the presidency of Frits Kalshoven, professor of humanitarian international law at the University of Leiden.
86. In 1993, Professor Kalshoven resigned and was replaced with Professor Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni. An American of Egyptian origin, Professor Bassiouni was an author of books and essays on Islam. His sympathy for the Muslims of Bosnia was manifest.
87. In the absence of large, verifiable figures, Professor Bassiouni sought to base the case less on the clearly inadequate number of proven cases than on what he considered “patterns,” from which he deduced a “policy.” The search for “patterns” became a regular substitute for either numbers or documentary evidence.
88. Five years after resigning from the UN commission, Professor Kalshoven told Dutch journalist Aart Brouwer:
“Terms like ‘genocide’ came all too easily from the mouths of people like Bassiouni, an American professor of law, who had to establish a reputation and to work on fund-raising. In my opinion these terms were way out of line. ‘Genocidal rape’ is utter nonsense. ‘Genocide’ means extermination, and it is of course impossible to exterminate people and make them pregnant at the same time. It is a propaganda term which was used against the Serbs right from the start, but I have never found any indication that rape was committed systematically by any of the parties – and I understand by ‘systematically’, on orders from the top.”
Imaginary rapes in Kosovo
89-90. The more preposterous the tale, the more fiendish the enemy. Moreover, editors know that sex crime stories attract readers. During the Kosovo bombing and refugee crisis, the insatiable demand of journalists for “rape stories” irritated some aid workers. Dr. Richard Munz, a German surgeon working with humanitarian aid in Macedonia, complained to the daily Die Welt about the inability of most reporters to accept the fact that among the 60,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees in their camp, medical aid workers had not encountered a single case of rape.
90. Guardian reporter Audrey Gillan later reported that she knew of “several tabloid reporters who were dispatched to Macedonia and Albania with the sole purpose of finding a rape victim . Chatting together in the bar of Skopje’s Hotel Continen as a potential alternative., which, in his mind, was exemplified in Bosnia-Herzegovina where it was the object of “genocide.”tal, reporters rehearsed the “notorious” question: “Is there anyone here who’s been raped and speaks English?” Benedicte Giaever, the coordinator for OSCE’s field office in Skopje, complained that almost every journalist who came to see her asked one thing: could she give them a rape victim to interview.[22]
90. The final OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission report on refugee testimony, intended for the Hague Tribunal, demonstrated a willingness, even an eagerness, to believe the worst. Noting that “very little” had been documented on the subject of rape, the KVM hastened to explain that this did not prove anything. “A woman who admits having been raped can be reRape and politicsNumbers and patternsjected or expelled by her husband, her family or her husband’s family.” Yet, the report continued, interviewers “received the support of the men in trying to make the women feel secure enough to talk … and often they would encourage the women to tell the whole story with all details.”[23]
3. Comparative Nationalisms
124. Throughout the 1990s, “nationalism” was widely denounced, with the Yugoslav disaster given as the prime illustration of where » could lead. However, the condemnation of Serbian nationalism as the arch villain supposedly opposing “multiculturalism” led to tacit endorsement of the separatist nationalisms that were tearing apart the multinational state of Yugoslavia. Anti-nationalism in theory became pro-nationalism in practice.
4. The Making of Empires
Germany is born again
165. With the Yugoslav crisis of the 1990s, newly reunified Germany abruptly emerged on the international scene as the major power wielder in Europe. It was the foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, who successfully put pressure on his country’s West European partners to dismantle Yugoslavia by recognizing Slovenia and Croatia as independent states.
165. For Germans, assertion of humanitarian ideals as justification for foreign intervention was widely understood as a form of compensation for their Nazi past.
165-166. The crisis in Yugoslavia enabled German leaders to proclaim a new Germany, not only innocent of the realpolitik sins of the past, but moved by a special responsibility born of t e Holocaust to play a prominent role in the crusade for universal human rights.
Why “Serbia must die”
166. In July 1991 a virulent barrage of articles appeared in the German press, led by the Influential conservative newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). Day after day, FAZ editor Johann Georg Rei ssmüller denounced the “Serbo-communist power called Yugoslavia,” “Belgrade Serbo-communism” that held a “Greater Serbian communist knife at the throat” of the Slovenes and Croats. Reissmüller described “the Yugo-Serbs” as essentially oriental “militarist Bolsheviks” who had “no place in the European Community.”[24]
167. Everywhere, Serbs were stigmatized as “non-European” barbarians intruding into civilized Europe. Nineteen months after German reunification, and for the first time since Hitler’s defeat in 1945, the German media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of the pre-war propaganda against the Jews.[25]
167. The attitude was summed up in the 1914 slogan “Serbien muss sterbien” (a play on the word sterben, to die), meaning “Serbia must die.”
168. A few observations: these hostages were all civilians, in no way linked to the acts being punished. The policy of retaliation was carried out not by the SS, usually held responsible for all the criminal acts of Nazi occupation, but by the Wehrmacht, the regular army.
Nation-state vs. volk-state
168-169. “Overcoming the consequences of the First World War” was set as a policy goal of unified Germany in a significant speech by a leading policy-maker, Rupert Scholz, deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU faction in the German Bundestag.
In September 1991, Scholz gave a talk on “the security policy role of the Germans in Europe” to a forum of business leaders and army officers in which he stressed the “basically new tasks and orientation” of German foreign and security policy that came with “German reunification and the recovered full sovereignty.”[26]
169. Far from feeling restrained by Germany’s aggressive role in the Balkans in two world wars, Scholz maintained that this “historic experience” gave Germans a special mandate to show solidarity … with Croats and Slovenians. He called for immediate international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia.
169. Scholz’s meaning was clear: rapid recognition of Croatia and Slovenia was designed not – as was officially claimed by the German government – to prevent military conflict, but to internationalize it, in order to justify outside military intervention, with German participation, under the auspices of either the UN or the OSCE.
169-170. In this traditional German view, “self- determination” is above all an ethnic – or völkisch, from the German word for ethnic or national group, Volk – rather than a political principle, a matter not of the political rights (such as equality before the law, free elections, and other civil rights) of people sharing a particular territory, but rather of the collective right of a racially and culturally homogeneous population to assert its identity as the basic principle of political organization.
Self-determination as ethnic determination
180. On 12 September 1990, less than a month before the official unification of the two German states, their two foreign ministers, along with the foreign ministers of the four Allied Occupation Powers – the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – signed the treaty for the final settlement of the German question, known as the “Two Plus Four” Treaty, in particular, the treaty included a binding commitment never again to export war from German soil. Henceforth, the Germans vowed, the German Constitution barred any disturbance of peaceful coexistence between peoples. On the day of reunification, 3 October 1990, Chancellor Helmut Kohl sent a message to all the world’s governments, including that of Yugoslavia, declaring that: “With its national unity restored, our country will serve peace in the world.”[27]
181. Nowhere in Europe would such restraint seem more obligatory than in Yugoslavia, a country attacked, invaded, occupied, and fragmented by Hitler’s Wehrmacht.
181. The old tradition of ethnic or linguistic determination of state boundaries was given a fresh emotional charge by the 1989 slogan “Wir sind einVolk” justifying the rapid unification of the two German states.
182. The enthusiasm of politicians and the media for Germany’s special mission to defend “self-determination” moved Genscher, the main architect of the successful reunification policy, to overrule the warnings of the German diplomatic corps, including Bonn’s own ambassador in Belgrade, and force through immediate recognition of Slovenia and Croatia. Such recognition was certain to give Serbs the impression that they were facing a repetition of 1941, when Germany backed the establishment of the murderous “Independent State of Croatia.”
182. Recognizing unnegotiated secessions was a flagrant violation of the pledge to respect “intangibility of borders and territorial integrity,” as Yugoslavia’s territory was suddenly stripped of its two richest territories.
182. It took heavy pressure from the Bonn government to persuade the member states of the European Community to disregard the advice of their own diplomats and recognize Slovenia and Croatia as independent states.
Old friends and old enemies
184-185. Reunified Germany’s forceful backing of its World War II clients, the Croatian and Albanian nationalists, may have seemed startling to those who accepted the postwar description of the Federal Republic of Germany as an “economic giant and a political dwarf.” In reality, Germany’s absence from international politics was largely an illusion fostered by the Bonn government’s discretion in the face of the widespread hostility left from the war.
185. In addition, there were the undercover operations of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the German equivalent of the CIA. (…)Once Khrushchev had restored “peaceful coexistence” with Tito in the late 1950s, the BND intensified contacts with militant Croatian nationalist exiles.[28]
186. One of the fatal consequences of the disastrous 1974 Yugoslav Constitution was that it enabled each of the republics to set up its own clandestine intelligence service. (…)Initially, since Tito himself was a Croat, Croats had a prominent place within Yugoslav Intelligence services. One of these was Ivan Krajacic. (…)Krajacic reverted to Croatian nationalism, and in the 1970s his circle of “national communists” pursued contacts with a END agent in Yugoslavia, Klaus Dorner, who organized numerous secret meetings in Germany, Austria, and Croatia itself designed to forge an effective alliance between the national communists and the Ustashe emigration.
186. It was years before the German public received any hint of Its government’s role in preparing the disintegration of Yugoslavia. In January 1995 journalist Andreas Zumach disclosed reports Indicating that[29] “since the 1980s, in cooperation with the Croatian secret service, the BND systematically worked to aggravate conflicts between Zagreb and Belgrade.”
187. These connections were recounted in detail in intelligence analyst Erich Schmidt-Eenboom’s 1995 book on Kinkel, DieSchattenkrieger.
187. In the case of the Albanians, it seems there was not so much continuity as a resumption of relations between the German secret services and Albanian secessionists in Kosovo. The enthusiasm of the armed Kosovo Albanian rebels for NATO has a clear precedent in the enthusiasm of their fathers and grandfathers for the German Wehrmacht 50 years earlier.
188. Through sponsorship of a so-called “Second Prizren League” and the formation of an all-Albanian SS Division named for the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg, the Nazi occupiers actively encouraged their proud, gun-toting mountaineer allies to create a “racially pure Greater Albania” (including Kosovo) by massacring Serbs, Greeks, and other non-Albanians.
188. Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his government turned out to be ideal salesmen for a remilitarized Germany. The champion in this exercise was without doubt the Green foreign minister, Joschka Fischer.
189. In his battle to win leadership of the Greens, Fischer was allied with his long-time Frankfurt friend and co-tactician Daniel Cohn-Bendit, another media favorite, since his spectacular emergence as symbol of the May’68 student uprising in Paris.
189-190. In 1994, the conflict in Bosnia took a new turn. Secretly armed by Islamic countries and supported diplomatically by the United States, the Bosnian Muslims were on the offensive in Bosnia itself, although the media studiously ignored Muslim attacks or military advances.
190. In Germany, Cohn-Bendit won a seat In the European Parliament on the Green list and promptly departed from the majority Green position by calling for German participation in military intervention in Bosnia.
190. At that time, the Social Democrats and Greens were overwhelmingly against such intervention. The exception was Cohn-Bendit, who dismissed Green objections as “ridiculous” and found original arguments to support Kohl’s position.
191. At that time, Fischer was still arguing that Germany should stay out. But by the following August, Cohn-Bendit was able to announce that his friend Joschka was “on the right path,” even though he still opposed sending in German soldiers. But, predicted Cohn-Bendit with remarkable clairvoyance, “Once Fischer is foreign minister, he won’t be able to maintain this position.”[30]
191-192. The debate on Yugoslavia became a matter of German conscience first and foremost, encouraging self-absorbed moralistic poses favored by self-styled “realists.” Together, Cohn-Bendit and Fischer had succeeded in playing the role of pied pipers of Frankfurt, leading the Green children over the brink into support of German participation in NATO’s war against the Serbs.
The ideological domination of this moralistic approach was achieved by constant analogy with “Auschwitz” and “the Holocaust,” equating the Serbs with the Nazis. (…) In the name of human rights, the Federal Republic lifted its ban on military operations outside the NATO defensive area.
192. Fischer had managed to reassure the kingmakers in Germany and Washington that here was a man they could trust.
193. Returning from his visit to German troops in Kosovo, Chancellor Schroder declared: “It is already impressive and moved me deeply, when in Prizren I saw on the one hand German tanks and German soldiers with machine guns, and on the other hand I could share the experience of the extraordinary euphoric jubilation with which a German Chancellor was welcomed. I find that in the context of the specific German history in this region, really anyone must be moved by this.”[31]
193. Is it credible that the German Chancellor, however ignorant of history, was not informed by his advisors of the fact that the enthusiasm came from the same Albanians, or their descendants, whose terror against Serbian inhabitants was encouraged by the Nazi occupiers?
5. The New Imperial Model
Albanians: a people in search of an empire
201. Albanians have inhabited the Western Balkans since time immemorial, without organizing an Albanian state until less than a century ago.
202. After Serbs sided with the Habsburgs in their seventeenth-century wars against the Ottoman Empire, the Turks turned to Albanian converts to Islam to suppress the Serbs in Kosovo.
202. An oft-quoted statement dating back to the late nineteenth century claimed that “The religion of the Albanians is Albanianism.”[32]
202. The newly formed “Prizren League” called for the preservation of Ottoman rule and of Islam.
202. It was only as they saw that the Turks were no longer determined to preserve the old order that the Prizren League tried to expel them and take over.
203. The fact that toward the end of the Ottoman Empire the Albanian leadership had more to lose than to gain from the creation of new modern states, whereas the Serbs had everything to gain and little to lose, confirmed the deep cleavage between the two communities.
The crowded “cradle of civilization”
203. As Turkish rule crumbled, Ismail Kemal, a prominent Albanian statesman who had served the Sultan in Istanbul, returned to the Albanian port of Vlora and, on 28 November 1912, encouraged by Austria, proclaimed: “From today on Albania is free and independent.”
203. Despite the Vlora declaration, there was no coherent national movement that could claim to represent the core of a representative Albanian state.
204. Allied with Essad Pasha Toptani until his assassination in Paris in June 1920, the Belgrade government did what it could to champion an independent Albania in opposition to Italy.
204. Monuments of the past were unquestionably Serbian, but by 1912 the Albanians were the most numerous group in a mixed population, including not only Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins, but also a large number of Serbian Muslims (notably the Gorani in the mountainous southernmost tip of Kosovo), Turks, Gypsies, and even some Circassians brought in by the Turks.
204. Each side has remembered being massacred by the other, but forgotten times when it was the other way around.
205. In contrast, the Serbs did not cross oceans to conquer foreign lands. They were liberating the traditional heartland of their nation, still inhabited by Serb peasants who had been oppressed by Albanians.
Problems of education, language, and truth
208. For Tito, an “Albanian” Kosovo was initially perceived as an asset toward incorporating Albania itself into Yugoslavia on the way to creation of a broader Balkan federation (an ambition rapidly quashed by Moscow).
208. However, the birthrate among Kosovo Albanians – Europe’s highest by far – kept per capita income low.[33]
209. It was clearly part of the Albanian nationalist agenda to appear as numerous as possible.
209. In early 1912, on the eve of the first Balkan war, the Serbian government attempted to accommodate Albanian leaders in Kosovo by offering an accord guaranteeing freedom of religion, use of the Albanian language in schools and courts, and a separate Albanian assembly to legislate for the Albanian community.15 The Albanian leaders rejected any such agreement.
210. So what went wrong? In reality, educating Albanians in their own language aggravated their cultural isolation and self-absorption. Since written Albanian was a relatively new language, there were no great libraries in the Albanian language treating all the various subjects required for a full modern education. Schooling in Serbian offered broader cultural resources, notably access to the modern scientific and technical culture greatly prized by the Serbs.
211. In 1968, in an odd concession to Albanian nationalism, the Tito government banned use of the word Šiptar, the Serbo-Croatian version of Shqiptar, the name that the Albanians use for themselves.
211. Subsequently, the insistence on being called “Kosovars2 helped give the world the impression that the Shqiptars/Albanians were the only genuine inhabitants of Kosovo, just as calling Muslims “Bosniaks” or Bosnians suggested that Serbs and Croats were intruders in Bosnia.
211. With their schoolbooks imported from Tirana, Kosovo’s Albanian children were being raised as citizens of a foreign state.
212. The question arises: how can any society survive when its children are educated in complete ignorance of each other and with no common language?
212. In 1981, an Albanian professor at Priština University concluded from extensive travels abroad that “not a single national minority in the world has achieved the rights that the Albanian nationality enjoys in Socialist Yugoslavia.” Only the Hungarians in Romania and the Swedes in Finland had their own universities, but without the full autonomy enjoyed by the Albanians at the University of Priština, he observed.[34]
213. The Western left often assumes that only socio-economic oppression leads to revolt; ergo, the Kosovo Albanians were oppressed.[35]
214. “The nationalist movement gained momentum after the Constitution of 1974 promoted Kosovo to an autonomous unit of Federal Yugoslavia. Kosovars began acting as masters, making Serbs and Montenegrins feel like subjects.”[36]
218. Calling Albanian harassment of Serbs in Kosovo “genocide” was precisely the type of emotional overstatement that in the following decade would be used constantly against the Serbs themselves.
Politics and human rights
219. In the 1980s, Western journalists and diplomats had defended the Serb viewpoint. The New York Times published reports of the plight of Serbs being driven out of Kosovo by Albanian “ethnic cleansing.”[37] Western governments supported modernizes (such as Miloševic) who saw the need to reduce Kosovo’s autonomy in order to enact economic reforms.
220. Miloševic was introducing political pluralism and had transformed the Serbian League of Communists into the Serbian Socialist Party, inviting ethnic Albanians to join. The new Constitution defined Serbia as “a democratic state of all its citizens,” without ethnic distinctions. But Miloševic and the Serbian leadership grievously underestimated the wound they had inflicted on Kosovo and the capacity for mobilization of the Albanian community. The formal equality offered by the new Constitution was of no interest to Albanian leaders who wanted nothing to do with Serbia.
220. Miloševic’s crackdown on Kosovo was harsh, but no more so than Tito’s style of governing, and it was accomplished for the sake of an economic reform program approved by the West.
221. Prominent HRW members include Morton Abramowitz, involved in using Islamists to wreck Afghanistan before going on to use the “Kosovars” to wreck Yugoslavia; former U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmerman; and Paul Goble, director of the U.S. propaganda news network Radio Free Europe, which for years displayed its bias by using only Albanian language names for towns in Kosovo.
222. The 1992 Constitutions of both Yugoslavia and Serbia guaranteed extensive rights to several national minorities, notably the right to education in their own mother tongue, the right to information media in their own language, and the right to use their own language in judicial or administrative proceedings.
222-223. Aaron Rhodes, executive director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, claimed that Albanians in Kosovo “have lived for years under conditions similar to those suffered by Jews in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just before World War II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free, but politically disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil liberties.”[38] This was as incendiary as it was untrue.
The Kosovo NGO
The authorities in Belgrade justified the harsh 1989 crackdown in Kosovo on the grounds that they were combating a violent secessionist movement. Those grounds were rapidly undermined by the unexpected decision of Kosovo Albanians to turn to something they had never tried before: non-violence. This sudden metamorphosis was described by the prominent Kosovo Albanian intellectual Shkelzen Maliqi (…) In Maliqi’s words:[39]
“However, in winter and spring of 1990 there was a sudden and radical change. Warriors went out of fashion over night. The interesting thing is that there were no major theoretical disputes, nor organized campaigns propagating non-violence, nor was there even a specific personality to undertake the role of the Albanian Gandhi. Dr. Rugova became the most influential leader of the Albanians later on when the concept was already spontaneously formulated. The strategy of non-violence was somehow self-imposed as the best, most pragmatic and most efficient response to Serbian aggressive plans.”
224. Albanians boycotted Serbian institutions, and refused to pay taxes or utility bills. Without public debate or charismatic leader, they proclaimed their own parallel state, which was immediately recognized by neighboring Albania (but by no one else).
224. The Kosovo Albanians were not trying to gain improvements for Albanians within the framework of Yugoslav or Serbian institutions. They simply rejected those institutions totally. There was no non-violent campaign to gain equal access to education or other social benefits. The Kosovo Albanian movement boycotted them.
224. Albanian abstention ensured President Miloševic’s party some 35 swing seats in parliament. If the Albanians had elected their own representatives instead of boycotting elections, they could have altered the political majority in Serbia. However, Albanian leaders preferred the “demonized” Miloševic as an irreplaceable public relations asset to their cause.[40]
225. By the end of 1992, the Serbian authorities had given in and accepted the principle that “leaders of each nation were responsible for the cultural development of their own people.”[41]
225. To get the children back in the official schools, Serbian officials told Albanian leaders during talks held in Switzerland that they could write their own program. But by that time, Albanian leaders were attached to their own system and saw its extraordinary value as a political weapon.[42]
225-226. According to official figures in 1998, 64 per cent of the official Serbian system’s health employees in Kosovo and 80 percent of its patients were still ethnic Albanian.
226. Serbia was widely accused of practicing “apartheid” in Kosovo.[43] This likening of Kosovo to racist South Africa was a successful propaganda theme. But there was no state-decreed separation of populations in Kosovo. If “apartheid” is reduced to meaning a degree of separation between ethnic communities, in Kosovo it was organized by the very Kosovar Albanian nationalist leaders who denounced it in order to win support from international public opinion. The amazing strategy of “self-apartheid” was designed both to deepen the chasm between the Albanian majority in Kosovo and the dwindling Serbian minority, and to win international sympathy by posing as victims of “racism.” It was successful thanks to the internal discipline of Albanian patriarchal society, which massively followed calls for boycott, and constant support from abroad. Western support took the form of readiness to believe -or seem to believe – that the Kosovo problem was a matter of human rights rather than a conflict between a recognized government and an irredentist movement seeking territorial secession.[44]
228. In 1996, the radical Kosovo Albanian nationalist Adem Demaqi suggested a democratically re-federated Yugoslavia, with a new name such as “Balkania,” including Kosovo. Some Albanian leaders proposed granting Kosovo the status of a third “republic” within Yugoslavia (alongside Serbia and Montenegro), without the right to secede.[45] Such ideas gained circulation at a time when the 1997 “pyramid scheme” collapse plunged Albania itself into lawlessness, which initially was understood as a blow to the political credibility of secession. This might have been the moment when unbiased outside mediation could have promoted efforts toward reconciliation and a peaceful compromise.[46]
228. Kosovo Albanians had no reason to negotiate when they could count on support from U.S. government-financed “NGOs.” Through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), set up by the Reagan administration to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries with U.S. taxpayers’ money, the United States had a major influence on how Kosovo was seen by the world.
229. The main source of all reports circulated worldwide concerning Serbian police brutality and other abuses originated with the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms, founded in 1989 by militant Kosovo Albanian nationalists.
229-230. In the months leading up to the NATO bombing, in response to demands for asylum lodged by Kosovo Albanians, the German Foreign Ministry and various regional German courts categorically denied that Kosovo Albanians were being persecuted or even that there was a “humanitarian catastrophe” resulting from Yugoslav security forces’ repression of armed Albanian rebels. In late October 1998, the Bavarian administrative court, on the basis of intelligence reports from the German Foreign Ministry, concluded that the recent violence “was a selective use of force against the military underground movement (especially the UÇK – Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës)A government program of persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians has never existed either now or earlier.”[47]
The ear of the Empire: the Albanian lobby in the United States
231. In their effort to win separate states of their own, Croats, Albanians, and Bosnian Muslims shared a common enemy. That common enemy was multinational Yugoslavia. Politically, the formula for winning support from American politicians was to identify Yugoslavia with the Serbs and the Serbs with “communism”. The success of the three anti-Serb lobbies owed much to a young aide Of Senator Robert Dole, Mira Radielovic Baratta, who went to work for Dole in June 1989.
231. Baratta has “as good an understanding of the Balkans as anyone on Capitol Hill,” The Weekly Standard reported admiringly, adding that “she is probably the only congressional staffer monitoring ex-Yugoslavia who speaks and reads both Croatian and Serbian” – a statement which itself indicates the prevailing ignorance, since Croatian and Serbian are the same language.[48]
232. An independent Albanian Kosovo would strengthen Turkey’s renewed presence in the Balkans. This would bolster the key strategic partnership between the United States and Turkey, linked to Israel in the eastern Mediterranean and expanding northward into the oil-rich ex-Soviet republics.
232. Washington’s support for the “Kosovar” cause has helped make Albania the most enthusiastically pro-American country in the world, whose leaders constantly plead for establishment of permanent U.S. bases.
Preparing for war
234. The UÇK demanded a stop to what it called the “colonization” of Kosovo and called on the United States to recognize the independence of Kosovo. It warned that any fellow Albanians who chose “Kosovo’s autonomy within Serbia” would be assassinated.[49]
234. For a long time, Rugova and his colleagues denied the very existence of the UÇK, claiming that it was nothing but an invention of Serbian propaganda designed to discredit the Kosovar cause.
235. “The KLA had a simple but effective plan. It would kill Serbian policemen. The Serbs would retaliate, Balkan style, with widespread reprisals and the occasional massacre. The West would get more and more appalled, until finally it would, as it did in Bosnia, take action. In effect, the United States and much of Europe would go to war on the side of the KLA. It worked.”[50]
“Bombing for peace”
236. The NATO powers insisted that Kosovo should remain part of Yugoslavia … but also blamed Belgrade when negotiation were blocked by Kosovo Albanians’ refusal to discuss anything but independence from Yugoslavia.
236. Izetbegovic wanted to continue the war, and it was only if the United States bombed the Bosnian Serbs that he would even consent to discuss negotiations.[51]
237. UÇK commander Agim Çeku, who as an officer in the Croatian army had previously won notoriety by massacring Serb civilians, later explained: “The cease-fire was very useful to us. It enabled us to get organized, to consolidate, to grow.”[52]
238. According to one Swiss verifier, “We understood from the start that the information gathered by OSCE patrols during our mission was destined to complete the Information that NATO had gathered by satellite. We had the very sharp impression of doing espionage work for the Atlantic Alliance.”[53]
238. France’s KVM deputy chief, Ambassador Gabriel Keller, complained that “every pullback by the Yugoslav army or the Serbian police was followed by a movement forward by UÇK forces”. The UÇK took advantage of Serbian restraint “to consolidate its positions everywhere, continuing to smuggle arms from Albania, abducting and killing both civilians and military personnel, Albanians and Serbs alike.” Privately, Keller said he believed that Walker deliberately sabotaged the mission, and that his only obsession was to “keep the UÇK for the Americans.”[54]
The Rambouillet farce
244. Rambouillet was an exercise in fake diplomacy designed to “prove” that diplomacy had failed and that war was unavoidable.
244. Thaqi was treated as a special pet by Madeleine Albright’s press officer Jamie Rubin. The Kosovo Albanian delegation at Rambouillet was counseled by top U.S. foreign policy guru Morton Abramowitz.
245. In any normal negotiation, the long proposal presented by the Serbian government calling for extensive local self-government and guaranteed rights for all ethnic groups would at least have been acknowledged as a basis for discussion.
245. Substantial economic aid was promised to Kosovo, while Serbia was to get nothing; the agreement did not evea title=”” href=”#ref-44″n mention suspending economic sanctions against Serbia, much less any help to the 650,000 refugees in Serbia.
...
http://sorryserbia.com/2013/fools-crusade/
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
“Denying” the Srebrenica Genocide Because It’s Not True: an Interview with Diana Johnstone
by ANN GARRISON
Saturday, July 11th, was the official 20th anniversary of what is called the “Srebrenica Massacre” and “the Srebrenica Genocide,” when Muslim men were killed by Serbian forces in the Bosnian civil war of 1992 to 1995. The Western consensus about what happened at Srebrenica is, like the official history of the Rwandan massacres, disputed by academics, journalists and international criminal defense attorneys including Ed Herman, David Peterson, Michael Parenti, Robin Philpot, John Philpot, Christopher Black, Peter Erlinder, Ramsey Clark, and Diana Johnstone. Both official histories serve as cornerstones of Western interventionist ideology.
Last week, prior to the July 11th commemoration, Russia infuriated Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, by vetoing a Security Council resolution on Srebrenica because it included the word “genocide.” Four Security Council members, Angola, China, Nigeria and Venezuela, abstained. Speaking to the Voice of America, Samantha Power then called all those who disagree with the Western consensus “genocide deniers.” I spoke to genocide denier Diana Johnstone, author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions and Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, coming in September from CounterPunch Books.
Ann Garrison: Diana Johnstone, UN Ambassador Samantha Power calls you a genocide denier, along with Ed Herman, David Peterson, Michael Parenti, and anyone else who’s dared to challenge Western consensus on what happened at Srebrenica in July 1995. What’s your response?
Diana Johnstone: Well, I am very much a genocide denier, and I’m proud of it and I can say why.
AG: Please do.
DJ: Yes, because what happened was not a genocide. Note that denying “genocide” means denying an interpretation, not the facts, whatever they are. There was a massacre of prisoners, whose proportions are disputed. That was a war crime. But it was not genocide. When your victims are military age men and you spare women and children, that cannot be genocide by any sensible definition. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was set up to blame the Serbs for genocide, and they did so by a far-fetched sociological explanation, claiming that because the Bosnian Muslims had a patriarchal society, killing the men would be a sort of genocide in one town. But that is not what people understand by genocide.
AG: Why were Serbians a US target? And why were Bosnian Muslims favored?
DJ: Well, for one thing, the Clinton Administration and subsequent administrations have had a policy of allying with Muslims all around the world. Partly in a long term anti-Russian strategy which goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s policy of supporting Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. The notion that the soft foolsjohnstoneunderbelly of the Russian Empire is Muslim and that they can be used against Orthodox Christians – that’s a long term US strategy going back to Brzezinski’s role in the 1970s.
AG: In the Carter Administration?
DJ: Yes, and so Serbia was seen as a potential Russian ally in the region, as the Serbs are Orthodox Christians, and so that was the reason it was targeted. The story was that Orthodox Christians are the bad guys and the Muslims are the good guys. And that’s been a constant US strategy for the last several decades.
AG: So, you’re saying that the USA is not constantly fighting evil Muslims all over the world?
DJ: No, it’s fighting the less evil ones. It’s been fighting the ones who are more secular. It was fighting the less fanatic. In Bosnia, the US supported Izetbegovic who was the most Islamist politician among Muslims there, who had written a declaration saying a country with a Muslim majority should be ruled by Islamic law. It was fighting Gaddafi, whose main enemy was the extreme Muslims, and it got rid of Gaddafi, and now they’re taking over Libya. It attacked Saddam Hussein, who had a secular society, who was hated by the Islamic extremists. And now they’re taking over Iraq. And the United States has been against Assad’s regime in Syria. They have targeted precisely the Muslim regimes which were not religiously fanatic. So of course Islam is divided, so the United States has been killing Muslims, but they have been favoring the most extremist.
There’s another point I want to make and that is that calling Srebrenica a genocide is extremely harmful for more than one reason. Of course we know that the main reason for this has been to justify future wars by saying, “Oh dear, we let this happen in Rwanda. We let this happen in Srebrenica, so we have to have preventive wars to prevent it from happening again.” That’s the ideological pretext used by the United States. But, the fact is that supporting the view that the West stood by – which is a sort of Samantha Power thing – we just stood by and let the Serbs commit genocide against Muslims is harmful in other ways as well. That line, which is untrue, is used to recruit people to extreme Islam against the West, which is what is happening in the Middle East. Because they think the West is the enemy, the West supported genocide of Muslims, we are the victims, therefore we are justified. And they’re recruiting young men from all over the world, including Europe, to go and fight the West partly on the basis of that pretext. So it’s very harmful, this lie.
AG: So all of the US attacks on secular states, where Islam is the dominant religion, have led to Islamic fundamentalism and recruitment to groups like ISIS?
DJ: Absolutely, absolutely. And the whole US policy for the past decades has in fact inspired this extreme Muslim radicalism against the West. The notion was that we’ll get the Muslims on our side by supporting them, but it’s worked quite the opposite way because we have weakened the secular Muslim leaders, and with the help of our dear ally Saudi Arabia, which is of course an extremist Muslim state and our close ally in the region.
AG: Would you like to say anything about the controversial figure of 8,000 dead? Global Research published an interview with Ed Herman headlined “The Srebrenica Massacre was a Gigantic Political Fraud,” in which he says that the numbers were inflated without supporting forensic evidence and that there were many massacres in the Srebrenica area, including massacres of women and children in Serb villages.
DJ: Well, I’m very skeptical about this 8,000 number, more than skeptical. I think it’s clearly not true, but I didn’t want to dwell on that because my main point is not so much how many bodies, but the uses of this, the exploitation of it. And also, the fact that since it was men and boys of military age, this cannot be genocide. This is the sort of massacre that happens in wars. Men get killed because of what they are; they’re on the other side. That’s what it’s all about. And of course it happened on both sides. This was a war; it wasn’t just Serbs killing Muslims. Muslims were killing Serbs. I mean this was a civil war with two sides fighting.
AG: That is exactly what is ignored about Rwanda. The infamous 100 days in Rwanda were the final days of a four year war of aggression that begin when Ugandan troops invaded Rwanda in October 1990 and then waged a four year war until they seized power in Kigali. The received story treats the 100 days as though it happened in a vacuum.
Is there anything else you’d like to say about Srebrenica?
DJ: Well, maybe there is one more thing I should have said.
AG: Go ahead.
DJ: That is, it’s very ironic that Bill Clinton is going there as one of the official mourners of the dead at Srebrenica, because a story that is very much circulated outside of mainstream media is that the whole Srebrenica Massacre was a trap that was deliberately laid to lure the Serbs in because Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, had heard from Bill Clinton that Clinton needed for there to be a massacre of at least 5000 Muslims in order to politically bring the US and NATO into the war on the Muslim side.
That’s in a book by a Bosnian Muslim leader, Ibran Mustafic. The book, however, is in Serbo-Croatian. It was mentioned in a UN report that a lot of Muslims have said that the Srebrenica Massacre was a setup in order to blame the Serbs and get the US and NATO in on the Bosnian Muslim side. That’s been said by a lot of people, and there’s a documentary film about it, but that has been kept out of the mainstream discourse entirely.
AG: Is there documentation that Clinton said that?
DJ: There’s documentation that Izetbegovic thought he said that. And, remember that they don’t speak the same language. Clinton might have said offhand, “Well, y’know I’d need a massacre of at least 5000 to be politically able to come in,” without really meaning that anyone should stage such a massacre. I’m not accusing Clinton of having ordered the massacre. But on the other hand, it is extremely probable that Izetbegovic, whose whole strategy was to portray the Bosnian Muslims as pure victims, might have taken that up. And he ordered the commander out of Srebrenica. There was no defense there, although there were more soldiers, more Bosnian Muslim soldiers, in Srebrenica than Serbian soldiers who attacked. But they did not defend, they ran away. And this has been interpreted by a lot of Bosnian Muslims as deliberately setting things up in order to have Serb vengeance, because there had been a lot of Serb victims of the Muslim soldiers. They had killed over 3000 Serb villagers in the region. And so, many believe that this was deliberately set up to have the victims that would bring the US in on the Bosnia Muslim side. Even the French General Morillon said that.
But another reason it was not genocide against Muslims is that the Serbs were allied with another group of Bosnian Muslims on the western side of Bosnia, whose leader was a secular Muslim, Fikret Abdic, who was originally more popular than Izetbegovic, got more votes. So the genocide label is absolutely absurd, and yes I’m a genocide denier because it’s not true.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/16 ... johnstone/
by ANN GARRISON
Saturday, July 11th, was the official 20th anniversary of what is called the “Srebrenica Massacre” and “the Srebrenica Genocide,” when Muslim men were killed by Serbian forces in the Bosnian civil war of 1992 to 1995. The Western consensus about what happened at Srebrenica is, like the official history of the Rwandan massacres, disputed by academics, journalists and international criminal defense attorneys including Ed Herman, David Peterson, Michael Parenti, Robin Philpot, John Philpot, Christopher Black, Peter Erlinder, Ramsey Clark, and Diana Johnstone. Both official histories serve as cornerstones of Western interventionist ideology.
Last week, prior to the July 11th commemoration, Russia infuriated Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations, by vetoing a Security Council resolution on Srebrenica because it included the word “genocide.” Four Security Council members, Angola, China, Nigeria and Venezuela, abstained. Speaking to the Voice of America, Samantha Power then called all those who disagree with the Western consensus “genocide deniers.” I spoke to genocide denier Diana Johnstone, author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions and Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton, coming in September from CounterPunch Books.
Ann Garrison: Diana Johnstone, UN Ambassador Samantha Power calls you a genocide denier, along with Ed Herman, David Peterson, Michael Parenti, and anyone else who’s dared to challenge Western consensus on what happened at Srebrenica in July 1995. What’s your response?
Diana Johnstone: Well, I am very much a genocide denier, and I’m proud of it and I can say why.
AG: Please do.
DJ: Yes, because what happened was not a genocide. Note that denying “genocide” means denying an interpretation, not the facts, whatever they are. There was a massacre of prisoners, whose proportions are disputed. That was a war crime. But it was not genocide. When your victims are military age men and you spare women and children, that cannot be genocide by any sensible definition. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia was set up to blame the Serbs for genocide, and they did so by a far-fetched sociological explanation, claiming that because the Bosnian Muslims had a patriarchal society, killing the men would be a sort of genocide in one town. But that is not what people understand by genocide.
AG: Why were Serbians a US target? And why were Bosnian Muslims favored?
DJ: Well, for one thing, the Clinton Administration and subsequent administrations have had a policy of allying with Muslims all around the world. Partly in a long term anti-Russian strategy which goes back to Zbigniew Brzezinski’s policy of supporting Mujahadeen in Afghanistan. The notion that the soft foolsjohnstoneunderbelly of the Russian Empire is Muslim and that they can be used against Orthodox Christians – that’s a long term US strategy going back to Brzezinski’s role in the 1970s.
AG: In the Carter Administration?
DJ: Yes, and so Serbia was seen as a potential Russian ally in the region, as the Serbs are Orthodox Christians, and so that was the reason it was targeted. The story was that Orthodox Christians are the bad guys and the Muslims are the good guys. And that’s been a constant US strategy for the last several decades.
AG: So, you’re saying that the USA is not constantly fighting evil Muslims all over the world?
DJ: No, it’s fighting the less evil ones. It’s been fighting the ones who are more secular. It was fighting the less fanatic. In Bosnia, the US supported Izetbegovic who was the most Islamist politician among Muslims there, who had written a declaration saying a country with a Muslim majority should be ruled by Islamic law. It was fighting Gaddafi, whose main enemy was the extreme Muslims, and it got rid of Gaddafi, and now they’re taking over Libya. It attacked Saddam Hussein, who had a secular society, who was hated by the Islamic extremists. And now they’re taking over Iraq. And the United States has been against Assad’s regime in Syria. They have targeted precisely the Muslim regimes which were not religiously fanatic. So of course Islam is divided, so the United States has been killing Muslims, but they have been favoring the most extremist.
There’s another point I want to make and that is that calling Srebrenica a genocide is extremely harmful for more than one reason. Of course we know that the main reason for this has been to justify future wars by saying, “Oh dear, we let this happen in Rwanda. We let this happen in Srebrenica, so we have to have preventive wars to prevent it from happening again.” That’s the ideological pretext used by the United States. But, the fact is that supporting the view that the West stood by – which is a sort of Samantha Power thing – we just stood by and let the Serbs commit genocide against Muslims is harmful in other ways as well. That line, which is untrue, is used to recruit people to extreme Islam against the West, which is what is happening in the Middle East. Because they think the West is the enemy, the West supported genocide of Muslims, we are the victims, therefore we are justified. And they’re recruiting young men from all over the world, including Europe, to go and fight the West partly on the basis of that pretext. So it’s very harmful, this lie.
AG: So all of the US attacks on secular states, where Islam is the dominant religion, have led to Islamic fundamentalism and recruitment to groups like ISIS?
DJ: Absolutely, absolutely. And the whole US policy for the past decades has in fact inspired this extreme Muslim radicalism against the West. The notion was that we’ll get the Muslims on our side by supporting them, but it’s worked quite the opposite way because we have weakened the secular Muslim leaders, and with the help of our dear ally Saudi Arabia, which is of course an extremist Muslim state and our close ally in the region.
AG: Would you like to say anything about the controversial figure of 8,000 dead? Global Research published an interview with Ed Herman headlined “The Srebrenica Massacre was a Gigantic Political Fraud,” in which he says that the numbers were inflated without supporting forensic evidence and that there were many massacres in the Srebrenica area, including massacres of women and children in Serb villages.
DJ: Well, I’m very skeptical about this 8,000 number, more than skeptical. I think it’s clearly not true, but I didn’t want to dwell on that because my main point is not so much how many bodies, but the uses of this, the exploitation of it. And also, the fact that since it was men and boys of military age, this cannot be genocide. This is the sort of massacre that happens in wars. Men get killed because of what they are; they’re on the other side. That’s what it’s all about. And of course it happened on both sides. This was a war; it wasn’t just Serbs killing Muslims. Muslims were killing Serbs. I mean this was a civil war with two sides fighting.
AG: That is exactly what is ignored about Rwanda. The infamous 100 days in Rwanda were the final days of a four year war of aggression that begin when Ugandan troops invaded Rwanda in October 1990 and then waged a four year war until they seized power in Kigali. The received story treats the 100 days as though it happened in a vacuum.
Is there anything else you’d like to say about Srebrenica?
DJ: Well, maybe there is one more thing I should have said.
AG: Go ahead.
DJ: That is, it’s very ironic that Bill Clinton is going there as one of the official mourners of the dead at Srebrenica, because a story that is very much circulated outside of mainstream media is that the whole Srebrenica Massacre was a trap that was deliberately laid to lure the Serbs in because Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, had heard from Bill Clinton that Clinton needed for there to be a massacre of at least 5000 Muslims in order to politically bring the US and NATO into the war on the Muslim side.
That’s in a book by a Bosnian Muslim leader, Ibran Mustafic. The book, however, is in Serbo-Croatian. It was mentioned in a UN report that a lot of Muslims have said that the Srebrenica Massacre was a setup in order to blame the Serbs and get the US and NATO in on the Bosnian Muslim side. That’s been said by a lot of people, and there’s a documentary film about it, but that has been kept out of the mainstream discourse entirely.
AG: Is there documentation that Clinton said that?
DJ: There’s documentation that Izetbegovic thought he said that. And, remember that they don’t speak the same language. Clinton might have said offhand, “Well, y’know I’d need a massacre of at least 5000 to be politically able to come in,” without really meaning that anyone should stage such a massacre. I’m not accusing Clinton of having ordered the massacre. But on the other hand, it is extremely probable that Izetbegovic, whose whole strategy was to portray the Bosnian Muslims as pure victims, might have taken that up. And he ordered the commander out of Srebrenica. There was no defense there, although there were more soldiers, more Bosnian Muslim soldiers, in Srebrenica than Serbian soldiers who attacked. But they did not defend, they ran away. And this has been interpreted by a lot of Bosnian Muslims as deliberately setting things up in order to have Serb vengeance, because there had been a lot of Serb victims of the Muslim soldiers. They had killed over 3000 Serb villagers in the region. And so, many believe that this was deliberately set up to have the victims that would bring the US in on the Bosnia Muslim side. Even the French General Morillon said that.
But another reason it was not genocide against Muslims is that the Serbs were allied with another group of Bosnian Muslims on the western side of Bosnia, whose leader was a secular Muslim, Fikret Abdic, who was originally more popular than Izetbegovic, got more votes. So the genocide label is absolutely absurd, and yes I’m a genocide denier because it’s not true.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/16 ... johnstone/
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Milosevic: Test your Media
By Michel Collon
Global Research, March 16, 2006
It becomes a little less difficult to determine whether we have been informed correctly about Yugoslavia. Did they have a right to present the Nato war as “humanitarian”? Did the Great Powers have secret strategies? Were there media lies told and war propaganda spread?
We recommend that you take this brief Media test in order to have a clear view, and to test how your medias are going to inform you in the coming hours.
MEDIA QUIZ
How good is our information
on the destruction of Yugoslavia?
1 Did the war begin in 1991 with the secessions of Slovenia and Croatia?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
2 Did Germany deliberately provoke the civil war?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
3 Did the US really remain ‘passive and disinterested’ during this war?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
4 Did the World Bank and the IMF help destroying this country?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
5 Did the media give a phony image of ‘our friends’ Tudjman & Izetbegovic?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
6 Did the media hide the essential history and geography of Bosnia?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
7 Was the topic ‘Serb aggressors, Croat and Muslim victims’ correct?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
8 Did Serbia initiate a program of ethnic cleansing?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
9 Did the media correctly report on Srebrenica?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
10 Were the first victims of the war killed by the Serbs?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
11 Was the famous image of the ‘concentration camps’ false?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
12 Were we given the true stories on the three large massacres in Sarajevo?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
13 Was the largest ethnic cleansing of the war committed by the Croat Army?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
14 Did the US use depleted uranium weapons also in Bosnia?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
15 Was the war against Yugoslavia the US’s ‘only good war’?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
ANSWERS:
1 1991 OR EARLIER?
Did the war begin in 1991 with the secessions of Slovenia and Croatia?
NO. In 1979, the BND (German CIA) sent a team of secret agents to Zagreb. Mission: to support Franjo Tudjman, a racist who actively promoted ethnic hatred and did all he could toward the break-up of Yugoslavia. Germany supported and financed this Croatian Le Pen, and sent him arms before the war.
To what end? Berlin never acknowledged the existence of the unified Yugoslav state which had courageously resisted German aggression in the two world wars. By once more breaking Yugoslavia into easily dominated mini-states, Germany sought to control the Balkans. An economic zone it could annex in order to remove it from local authority, to export German products to it, and to dominate it as a market. And a strategic route toward the oil and gas of the Middle East and the Caucasus. In 1992, the Bavarian Interior Minister declared: “Helmut Kohl has succeeded where neither Emperor Guillaume nor Hitler could.” (see the parallel maps ‘Yugoslavia in 1941–in 1991′, Liars’ Poker, pp 68-69)
2 GERMAN WILL?
Did Germany deliberately provoke the civil war?
YES. At the beginning of the Maastricht Summit in 1991, German Chancellor Kohl was alone in wanting to break up Yugoslavia and precipitously to recognize the ‘independence’ of Slovenia and Croatia, in defiance of both International Law and the Yugoslav Constitution. But the rise of German power would impose this madness on all its partners. Paris and London fell right in line.
According to The Observer of London: “Prime Minister Major paid dearly for supporting German policies toward Yugoslavia which all observers said precipitated the war.” In effect, all the experts had warned that this ‘recognition’ would provoke a civil war. Why? 1. Nearly every Yugoslav Republic was a mix of diverse nationalities. Separating the territories was as absurd as dividing Paris or London into ethnically pure municipal districts. 2. By favoring the neo-fascist Tudjman and the Muslim nationalist Izetbegovic (who had in his youth collaborated with Hitler), it was certain that panic would be provoked among the important Serb minorities who had lived for centuries in Croatia and Bosnia. Every Serb family had lost at least one member to the horrible genocide committed by the fascist Croats and Muslims, agents of Nazi Germany in 1941-45.
Only Tito’s Yugoslavia had been able to bring about peace, equality and coexistence. But Berlin, then Washington, wanted once and for all to break this country they saw as being ‘too far to the Left’ (see question 4).
3 A PASSIVE USA?
Did the US remain ‘passive and disinterested’ during this war?
NO. Lord Owen, special European Union envoy to Bosnia, and later a well-placed observer, wrote in his memoirs: “I greatly respect the United States. But in recent years (92-95) this nation’s diplomacy has been guilty of needlessly prolonging the war in Bosnia.”
What was its aim? While the Germans were busy taking control of Slovenia, Croatia and, eventually, Bosnia, Washington put pressure on Izetbegovic, the Muslim nationalist leader in Sarajevo: “Don’t sign any peace agreements proposed by the Europeans. We will win the war for you on the ground.” Washington then prolonged for two years the horrible suffering inflicted on all the people of Bosnia.
By what means? 1. Setting aside all the advantages Berlin had gained in this strategic region of the Balkans. 2. Dividing and weakening the European Union. 3. Installing NATO as the Continental European policeman. 4. Restricting all Russian access to the Mediterranian Sea. 5. Imposing its military and political leadership on all the other wars being prepared.
Because the war against Yugoslavia was at the same time a non-declared war against Europe. After the fall of the Berlin wall, US strategies were geared toward stopping, at all costs, the emergence of a European superpower. So everything was done to weaken Europe militarily and politically.
4 WORLD BANK & IMF
Did the World Bank and the IMF help destroying this country?
YES. In December 1989, the IMF imposed draconian conditions on Yugoslavia which forced liberal prime minister Markovic to beg for aid from George Bush Sr. This ‘help’ was aimed at destabilizing and bankrupting all large state-owned businesses. The World Bank dismantled the banking system, laid off 525,000 workers in one year, then ordered the immediate elimination of two out of every three jobs. The quality of life fell dramatically.
These policies and the growing incidence of work stoppages in solidarity with displaced workers in all the Republics heightened the contradictions among the leaders of the various Republics to whom Belgrade could no longer provide financing. To get themselves out of this mess, the leaders had to resort to divisive tactics and invested greatly in nationalist hatreds. This war was ignited from abroad. Like so many others.
The war against Yugoslavia was a war of globalization. All the great Western powers sought to liquidate the Yugoslav economic system which they found too Leftist: with a strong public sector, important social rights, resistance to the multinationals… The real reason for these various wars against Yugoslavia can be read in this reproach (this threat?) from the Washington Post: “Milosevic was unable to grasp the political message of the fall of the Berlin wall. Other Communist politicians accepted the Western model, but Milosevic went the other way.” (4 August 1996).
5 “OUR FRIENDS”
Did the media give a phony image of ‘our friends’ Tudjman & Izetbegovic?
YES. The hyper-nationalist Croat and Muslim leaders were presented as the pure victims, great anti-racist democrats. But their past as much as their present should have alerted us:
When he took power, Franjo Tudjman declared: “I’m happy my wife isn’t a Jew or a Serb.” He hurriedly renamed the streets that had carried the names of antifascist partisans, reinstated the money and the flag of the old genocidal fascist regime, and changed the Constitution in order to run off the Serbs.
During his 1990 electoral campaign, Izetbegovic reissued his ‘Islamic Declaration’: “There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and those social and political institutions that are non-Islamic.” He set up a corrupt and mafia-ridden regime based primarily on the lucrative black market and the hijacking of funds from international aid. He called for assistance, with Washington’s blessings, from Islamic mercenaries, most notably from al Qaeda.
Once the war had started, serious crimes were committed by all three camps, but by hiding these histories, the situation was rendered incomprehensible.
6 HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY
Did the media hide the essential history and geography of Bosnia?
YES. We were made to believe that the Serbs were the aggressors, that they had invaded Bosnia from outside its borders. In reality, three national groups had been living in Bosnia for a long time: the Muslims (43%), the Serbs (31%), the Croats (17%). And one should not forget that 7% of ‘Yugoslavs’ were born of mixed marriages or preferred to eschew narrow national identities.
Dividing Bosnia according to nationalities, as the EU did, was absurd and dangerous. Because this diverse population was completely intermingled: the Muslims lived primarily in the cities while the Serbs and Croats made up the peasantry and were dispersed throughout the sub-regions. Bosnia could not be divided without civil war.
In fact, the Serbs of Bosnia did not fight to invade the territories of ‘others’, but to save their own lands and establish corridors of communication between them. It was an absurd and bloody situation, with all the ravages of a civil war, but this civil war was provoked by the great powers.
7 “GOOD GUYS” AND “BAD GUYS”
Was the presumption of “Serb aggressors, Croat and Muslim victims” correct?
NO. In command of the UN forces in Bosnia from July 1993 to January 1994, Belgian general Briquemont was well placed to declare: “The disinformation is total (…) Television needs a scapegoat. For the moment, there is complete unanimity in condemning the Serbs, and that in no way facilitates the search for a solution. I don’t think one can view the problem of ex-Yugoslavia and of Bosnia-Herzegovina only from the anti-Serb angle. It is much more complicated than that. One day in the middle of the Croat-Muslim war, we gave some information on the massacres committed by the Croatian army. An American journalist said to me: ‘If you give out that sort of information, the American public won’t understand anything.'”
It is not a question of denying the crimes committed by the Serb forces. The ideology one finds in the writings of Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic is extremely right wing. But in reality, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, on all sides, certain criminal and political forces used the methods of war to seize territory and riches. In the three camps – Croat, Muslim and Serb – militias committed grave crimes. To the detriment of all the people. Thus, in August 1994, the Muslim nationalist leader in Sarajevo, Izetbegovic, attacked the Muslim region of Bihac, controlled by Fikret Abdic, who had distanced himself from Izetbegovic and wanted to live in harmony with his Serb and Croat neighbors. In this offensive, Izetbegovic was aided by six US generals.
Remaining silent to the crimes of ‘our friends’ but demonizing whoever resists us is classic war propaganda. Numerous media lies were totally fabricated by a US public relations firm, Ruder Finn. Colleagues of the famous Hill & Knowlton, who created the media lie about Kuwaiti incubators stolen by the Iraqis.
8 “ETHNIC CLEANSING”?
Did Serbia initiate a program of ethnic cleansing?
NO. If one believes that ethnic cleansing was actually the program of ‘the dictator Milosevic’, one has to admit that this program was sadly ineffective. Because throughout the war years and still today, one of every five inhabitants of Serbia is a non-Serb. In Belgrade there are and have always been many minorities living without any difficulty: Muslims, Gypsies, Albanians, Macedonians, Turks, Hungarians, Gorans . . .
In reality, contrary to the image given by the press, Serbia is today the only state of the ex-Yugoslavia, along with Macedonia, that remains ‘multinational’. On the other hand, all the NATO protectorates – Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo – practiced an almost total ethnic purification.
Milosevic objected to the excesses committed by the Serb militias in Bosnia. His wife made several declarations against them. An embargo was even applied by Serbia against Karadzic. Certainly, part of Serb public opinion was influenced by racist nationalism. But this was due precisely to Germany and the great powers having plunged the country into civil war and thus into hatred.
9 SREBRENICA
Did the media correctly report on Srebrenica?
NO. First element. Even if it’s a matter of condemning abominable crimes, historical truth – necessary for reconciliation – is not served by the propagandistic processes that unreflexively use the term ‘genocide’, by the obfuscation of the fact that that some of the victims died in combat or by the systematic exaggeration of the numbers. Inquests have determined that many of the ‘victims’ were found some months later voting in subsequent elections or even taking part in other battles with Izetbegovic’s army. This information was and remains obscured. We won’t here go into the argument over numbers which only serious historians will be able to sort out definitively.
Second element. Why did the media hide the events essential to an understanding of this drama? In the beginning, this region was inhabited by Muslim AND Serbs. The latter were run off in 1993 by an ethnic cleansing committed by the Muslim nationalist troops of Izetbegovic. French general Morillon, who commanded the UN force there, charges: “On the night of the Orthodox Christmas, the holy night of January 1993, Nasser Oric led raids on Serb villages. . . . There were heads cut off, abominable massacres committed by the forces of Nasser Oric in all the neighboring villages.” (Documents of information from the French National Assembly, Srebrenica, t 2, pp. 140-154) The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later. But why systematically hide the crimes of ‘our friends’?
Third element. Like other so-called demilitarized ‘safe havens’, Srebrenica was in reality an area used by the forces of Izetbegovic to regroup, the UN protecting them from total defeat. Astonishingly, Oric’s troops retreated from Srebrenica just a week before the massacre. French general Germanos: “Oric had widely declared that they had abandoned Srebrenica because they’d wanted Srebrenica to fall. The ‘they’ was Izetbegovic.”
And why? It is interesting to return to a curious UN report, written a year and a half earlier by Kofi Annan: “Izetbegovic had learned that a NATO intervention into Bosnia was possible. But it would happen only if the Serbs forced their way into Srebrenica and massacred at least 5,000 people [sic].” A massacred predicted a year and a half before it happened! (UN Report of 28-29 November)
General Morillon also informed us that “It is Izetbegovic’s people who opposed the evacuation of all those who had asked to be taken out, and there were many.” His conclusion: “Mladic fell into a trap at Srebrenica.”
10 FIRST VICTIMS
Were the first victims of the war killed by Serbs?
NO. June 28, 1991, the Slovenian police executed (at least) two unarmed soldiers of the Yugoslav national army who had surrendered at Holmec, a post on the Austrian border. This was acknowledged by the newspaper Slovenske Novice. It has also been ‘established from the very beginning’ that three soldiers of this same Yugoslav army were executed at a post on the Italian border after surrendering themselves. (Facts and testimony reported to the ICY at The Hague, cfr Forgotten Crimes, Igor Mekina, AIM Ljubljana, 11/02/99).
11 CONCENTRATION CAMPS?
Was the famous image of the ‘concentration camps’ false?
YES. Fabricated by Bernard Kouchner and Médecins du Monde, this image showed some ‘prisoners’ held, seemingly, behind barbed wire. One of them had terribly protruding ribs. Kouchner had pasted beside the photo a guard tower from Auschwitz and the accusation ‘mass extermination’. To hammer home the message “Serbs = Nazis”. He thus abetted a campaign of demonization launched by the US public relations firm Ruder Finn.
But the whole thing was faked and taken from a report by British TV channel ITN. The trickery became obvious when one viewed the footage shot at the same time by a local TV news crew. In reality, the British camera had been deliberately placed behind the two lonely strands of barbed wire that formed a fence surrounding an old enclosure for farming equipment. The ‘prisoners’ were on the ‘outside’ of the barbed wire. Free because they were refugees in this camp to escape the war and the militias who would force them to fight. In the complete film, the only prisoner who speaks English declares to the ITN journalist three times that they are being well treated and are safe. The man with the protruding ribs (gravely ill) was called to the foreground when all his mates looked to be in too good a shape. Kouchner’s montage was a gross falsehood. (Cfr Liars’ Poker, p. 34)
There certainly were camps in Bosnia. Not for extermination, but rather for the preparation of prisoner exchanges. Violations of Human Rights were committed here. But why were the UN reports on this subject hidden from us? They accounted for six Croat camps, two Serb camps and one Muslim camp.
12 SARAJEVO
Were we given the true stories on the three large massacres in Sarajevo?
NO. Three times Western public opinion was shocked by these terrible images: dozens of victims blown to bits in front of a bakery or in the marketplace of Sarajevo. Immediately the Serbs were accused of having killed civilians by bombarding the city. This despite numerous contradictions in official communications.
But never was the public informed of the results of inquiries made outside the UN. Nor of the reports which accused the forces of president Izetbegovic. Furthermore, high Western officials knew about them but kept them carefully hidden. It was only much later that the editor-in-chief of the Nouvel Observateur, Jean Daniel, admitted: “Today I have to say it. I heard, in succession, Edouard Balladur (French Prime Minister at the time), François Léotard (Minister of the Army), Alain Juppé (Foreign Minister) and two ‘high-ranking’ generals, whose confidence I will not betray by naming them, tell me (. . .) that the shell fired on the marketplace was itself also from the Muslims! They would have brought carnage upon their own people! Was I afraid of this observation? Yes, the Prime Minister answered me without hesitating… “(Nouvel Observateur, August 21, 1995)
Why these manipulations? As if by chance, each massacre took place just before an important meeting to justify some Western measures: an embargo against the Serbs (92), a NATO bombing (94), a final offensive (95). NATO and Izetbegovic applied an essential principle of war propaganda: justify the offensive with a media lie, a ‘massacre’ to shock public opinion.
The official version of the siege of Sarajevo hides several points: 1. The Serb forces certainly committed serious crimes. But the civilians who wanted to flee through a tunnel that permitted them to leave the city were stopped by the Izetbegovic regime. He wanted to maximize the clientele for his black market, hijacking international aid money. 2. It was especially important to present a black and white image of a victim people and their aggressors. In reality, even in Sarajevo, Izetbegovic’s snipers regularly killed the inhabitants of Serb sections of the city without anyone ever speaking of it. 3. Some equally grave atrocities went down, for example, at Mostar. But here they were due to fighting between the Croat and Muslim forces who had long before run off all the Serbs.
13 THE LARGEST “CLEANSING”
Was the largest ethnic cleansing of the war committed by the Croat army?
YES. On August 4, 1995, a hundred thousand Croat soldiers, a hundred and fifty tanks, two hundred troop transports, more than three hundred pieces of artillery, and forty missile launchers attacked the Serb population of the Krajina. More than 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave this region which they had inhabited for centuries. The worst atrocities of the war were committed: the Croat forces killed the elderly who could not flee, and burned 85% of the abandoned houses.
Clinton called the offensive ‘useful’. His Secretary of State said: “The retaking of the Krajina could lead to a new strategic situation which might be favorable for us.” Worse yet: the United States advised Croatia in carrying out its offensive, according to an admission by the Croatian foreign minister. Furthermore, it was Washington that took charge of the ‘democratic’ training of this army. (Liars’ Poker, pp. 193-194)
14 URANIUM BOMBS
Did the US use depleted uranium weapons also in Bosnia?
YES. At an international conference, “Uranium, the victims speak”, organized in Brussels in March 2001, a Bosnian doctor presented a Bosnian Serb forest ranger, a victim like many others of multiple atypical and fast moving cancers. after having been exposed to DU in areas of US bombardment.
A Bosnian health official laid out some statistics : the population of a Serb neighbourhood of Sarajevo bombed by US planes in 1995, (a population later expelled from that city), showed a five-fold increase in various types of cancer.
The weapons using depleted uranium allowed the US – but also France and Great Britain – to get rid of waste materials from their nuclear plants. These by-products seriously pollute the earth as well as the underground water table, causing cancer, leukemia and monstrous birth defects (including babies born to contaminated GIs). In short, use of these depleted uranium arms transformed several countries into nuclear waste dumps for eternity. (video and brochure “Uranium, the victims speak”).
15 THE ONLY “GOOD WAR”
Was the war against Yugoslavia the US’s only good war?
NO. The United States tried to make believe that it had fought a humanitarian war. And to present itself, for once, as a defender of Muslims. But in reality Washington and Berlin provoked this war. Deliberately. In the selfish interest of conquering certain strategic objectives: the economic colonization of the Balkans, gaining control of the routes for transporting oil, and the fight for world domination.
The USA has never fought a humanitarian war. And it was not the fireman in this war against Yugoslavia, it was the firebug. It was the most guilty of inflicting suffering on all the people. The USA can not be, on the one hand, the friend of the Muslims in the Balkans, and, on the other, their worst enemy in Palestine and Iraq. The US is the Muslims’ enemy everywhere.
And the most dangerous enemy of all the people of the world. It threatens Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and some day even China. Because its war strategy has no other goal than to maintain an unjust economic order, to dominate and exploit every country on earth to the end of further enriching a small handful of super – billionaires.
This is why it is so important to unmask all the media lies and to make the truth known about the war against Yugoslavia: It was a war of aggression.
In conclusion. An appeal.
We will not give you a ‘score’ to evaluate the degree to which you have suffered from media manipulations. That would be indecent. During this decade, too many innocents suffered and suffer still because of the disinformation orchestrated by the great powers in order to advance their imperialist domination.
And other people, closer to you, or yourself perhaps, have suffered another injury: knowing what was traumatizing you behind these orchestrated lies, but not being able to do anything about it. Such was the powerful indoctrination of the public consciousness.
The answers that we set forth here are the results of long research, which took a great deal of time and required detailed investigation to break out the truth. We would like only to show you that it is possible for each of you to escape the media’s hypnotic spell meant to make us accept the unacceptable.
What to do? It’s not enough, after the lies of each conflict, to say: “Never again!” We must search without ceasing to understand what is truly at stake economically and strategically in each war. To yank the curtain on the puppeteers who pull the strings from off-stage. To organize collectively, to investigate more rapidly. And to spread more widely the results of these ‘media quiz’.
You can help reinforce the effects of the media quiz by contacting us. Because we must never become enured to this horror and cynicism.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/milosevic ... media/2110
By Michel Collon
Global Research, March 16, 2006
It becomes a little less difficult to determine whether we have been informed correctly about Yugoslavia. Did they have a right to present the Nato war as “humanitarian”? Did the Great Powers have secret strategies? Were there media lies told and war propaganda spread?
We recommend that you take this brief Media test in order to have a clear view, and to test how your medias are going to inform you in the coming hours.
MEDIA QUIZ
How good is our information
on the destruction of Yugoslavia?
1 Did the war begin in 1991 with the secessions of Slovenia and Croatia?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
2 Did Germany deliberately provoke the civil war?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
3 Did the US really remain ‘passive and disinterested’ during this war?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
4 Did the World Bank and the IMF help destroying this country?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
5 Did the media give a phony image of ‘our friends’ Tudjman & Izetbegovic?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
6 Did the media hide the essential history and geography of Bosnia?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
7 Was the topic ‘Serb aggressors, Croat and Muslim victims’ correct?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
8 Did Serbia initiate a program of ethnic cleansing?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
9 Did the media correctly report on Srebrenica?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
10 Were the first victims of the war killed by the Serbs?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
11 Was the famous image of the ‘concentration camps’ false?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
12 Were we given the true stories on the three large massacres in Sarajevo?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
13 Was the largest ethnic cleansing of the war committed by the Croat Army?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
14 Did the US use depleted uranium weapons also in Bosnia?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
15 Was the war against Yugoslavia the US’s ‘only good war’?
O Yes O No O Don’t know
ANSWERS:
1 1991 OR EARLIER?
Did the war begin in 1991 with the secessions of Slovenia and Croatia?
NO. In 1979, the BND (German CIA) sent a team of secret agents to Zagreb. Mission: to support Franjo Tudjman, a racist who actively promoted ethnic hatred and did all he could toward the break-up of Yugoslavia. Germany supported and financed this Croatian Le Pen, and sent him arms before the war.
To what end? Berlin never acknowledged the existence of the unified Yugoslav state which had courageously resisted German aggression in the two world wars. By once more breaking Yugoslavia into easily dominated mini-states, Germany sought to control the Balkans. An economic zone it could annex in order to remove it from local authority, to export German products to it, and to dominate it as a market. And a strategic route toward the oil and gas of the Middle East and the Caucasus. In 1992, the Bavarian Interior Minister declared: “Helmut Kohl has succeeded where neither Emperor Guillaume nor Hitler could.” (see the parallel maps ‘Yugoslavia in 1941–in 1991′, Liars’ Poker, pp 68-69)
2 GERMAN WILL?
Did Germany deliberately provoke the civil war?
YES. At the beginning of the Maastricht Summit in 1991, German Chancellor Kohl was alone in wanting to break up Yugoslavia and precipitously to recognize the ‘independence’ of Slovenia and Croatia, in defiance of both International Law and the Yugoslav Constitution. But the rise of German power would impose this madness on all its partners. Paris and London fell right in line.
According to The Observer of London: “Prime Minister Major paid dearly for supporting German policies toward Yugoslavia which all observers said precipitated the war.” In effect, all the experts had warned that this ‘recognition’ would provoke a civil war. Why? 1. Nearly every Yugoslav Republic was a mix of diverse nationalities. Separating the territories was as absurd as dividing Paris or London into ethnically pure municipal districts. 2. By favoring the neo-fascist Tudjman and the Muslim nationalist Izetbegovic (who had in his youth collaborated with Hitler), it was certain that panic would be provoked among the important Serb minorities who had lived for centuries in Croatia and Bosnia. Every Serb family had lost at least one member to the horrible genocide committed by the fascist Croats and Muslims, agents of Nazi Germany in 1941-45.
Only Tito’s Yugoslavia had been able to bring about peace, equality and coexistence. But Berlin, then Washington, wanted once and for all to break this country they saw as being ‘too far to the Left’ (see question 4).
3 A PASSIVE USA?
Did the US remain ‘passive and disinterested’ during this war?
NO. Lord Owen, special European Union envoy to Bosnia, and later a well-placed observer, wrote in his memoirs: “I greatly respect the United States. But in recent years (92-95) this nation’s diplomacy has been guilty of needlessly prolonging the war in Bosnia.”
What was its aim? While the Germans were busy taking control of Slovenia, Croatia and, eventually, Bosnia, Washington put pressure on Izetbegovic, the Muslim nationalist leader in Sarajevo: “Don’t sign any peace agreements proposed by the Europeans. We will win the war for you on the ground.” Washington then prolonged for two years the horrible suffering inflicted on all the people of Bosnia.
By what means? 1. Setting aside all the advantages Berlin had gained in this strategic region of the Balkans. 2. Dividing and weakening the European Union. 3. Installing NATO as the Continental European policeman. 4. Restricting all Russian access to the Mediterranian Sea. 5. Imposing its military and political leadership on all the other wars being prepared.
Because the war against Yugoslavia was at the same time a non-declared war against Europe. After the fall of the Berlin wall, US strategies were geared toward stopping, at all costs, the emergence of a European superpower. So everything was done to weaken Europe militarily and politically.
4 WORLD BANK & IMF
Did the World Bank and the IMF help destroying this country?
YES. In December 1989, the IMF imposed draconian conditions on Yugoslavia which forced liberal prime minister Markovic to beg for aid from George Bush Sr. This ‘help’ was aimed at destabilizing and bankrupting all large state-owned businesses. The World Bank dismantled the banking system, laid off 525,000 workers in one year, then ordered the immediate elimination of two out of every three jobs. The quality of life fell dramatically.
These policies and the growing incidence of work stoppages in solidarity with displaced workers in all the Republics heightened the contradictions among the leaders of the various Republics to whom Belgrade could no longer provide financing. To get themselves out of this mess, the leaders had to resort to divisive tactics and invested greatly in nationalist hatreds. This war was ignited from abroad. Like so many others.
The war against Yugoslavia was a war of globalization. All the great Western powers sought to liquidate the Yugoslav economic system which they found too Leftist: with a strong public sector, important social rights, resistance to the multinationals… The real reason for these various wars against Yugoslavia can be read in this reproach (this threat?) from the Washington Post: “Milosevic was unable to grasp the political message of the fall of the Berlin wall. Other Communist politicians accepted the Western model, but Milosevic went the other way.” (4 August 1996).
5 “OUR FRIENDS”
Did the media give a phony image of ‘our friends’ Tudjman & Izetbegovic?
YES. The hyper-nationalist Croat and Muslim leaders were presented as the pure victims, great anti-racist democrats. But their past as much as their present should have alerted us:
When he took power, Franjo Tudjman declared: “I’m happy my wife isn’t a Jew or a Serb.” He hurriedly renamed the streets that had carried the names of antifascist partisans, reinstated the money and the flag of the old genocidal fascist regime, and changed the Constitution in order to run off the Serbs.
During his 1990 electoral campaign, Izetbegovic reissued his ‘Islamic Declaration’: “There can be neither peace nor coexistence between the Islamic religion and those social and political institutions that are non-Islamic.” He set up a corrupt and mafia-ridden regime based primarily on the lucrative black market and the hijacking of funds from international aid. He called for assistance, with Washington’s blessings, from Islamic mercenaries, most notably from al Qaeda.
Once the war had started, serious crimes were committed by all three camps, but by hiding these histories, the situation was rendered incomprehensible.
6 HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY
Did the media hide the essential history and geography of Bosnia?
YES. We were made to believe that the Serbs were the aggressors, that they had invaded Bosnia from outside its borders. In reality, three national groups had been living in Bosnia for a long time: the Muslims (43%), the Serbs (31%), the Croats (17%). And one should not forget that 7% of ‘Yugoslavs’ were born of mixed marriages or preferred to eschew narrow national identities.
Dividing Bosnia according to nationalities, as the EU did, was absurd and dangerous. Because this diverse population was completely intermingled: the Muslims lived primarily in the cities while the Serbs and Croats made up the peasantry and were dispersed throughout the sub-regions. Bosnia could not be divided without civil war.
In fact, the Serbs of Bosnia did not fight to invade the territories of ‘others’, but to save their own lands and establish corridors of communication between them. It was an absurd and bloody situation, with all the ravages of a civil war, but this civil war was provoked by the great powers.
7 “GOOD GUYS” AND “BAD GUYS”
Was the presumption of “Serb aggressors, Croat and Muslim victims” correct?
NO. In command of the UN forces in Bosnia from July 1993 to January 1994, Belgian general Briquemont was well placed to declare: “The disinformation is total (…) Television needs a scapegoat. For the moment, there is complete unanimity in condemning the Serbs, and that in no way facilitates the search for a solution. I don’t think one can view the problem of ex-Yugoslavia and of Bosnia-Herzegovina only from the anti-Serb angle. It is much more complicated than that. One day in the middle of the Croat-Muslim war, we gave some information on the massacres committed by the Croatian army. An American journalist said to me: ‘If you give out that sort of information, the American public won’t understand anything.'”
It is not a question of denying the crimes committed by the Serb forces. The ideology one finds in the writings of Bosnian Serb leader Karadzic is extremely right wing. But in reality, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, on all sides, certain criminal and political forces used the methods of war to seize territory and riches. In the three camps – Croat, Muslim and Serb – militias committed grave crimes. To the detriment of all the people. Thus, in August 1994, the Muslim nationalist leader in Sarajevo, Izetbegovic, attacked the Muslim region of Bihac, controlled by Fikret Abdic, who had distanced himself from Izetbegovic and wanted to live in harmony with his Serb and Croat neighbors. In this offensive, Izetbegovic was aided by six US generals.
Remaining silent to the crimes of ‘our friends’ but demonizing whoever resists us is classic war propaganda. Numerous media lies were totally fabricated by a US public relations firm, Ruder Finn. Colleagues of the famous Hill & Knowlton, who created the media lie about Kuwaiti incubators stolen by the Iraqis.
8 “ETHNIC CLEANSING”?
Did Serbia initiate a program of ethnic cleansing?
NO. If one believes that ethnic cleansing was actually the program of ‘the dictator Milosevic’, one has to admit that this program was sadly ineffective. Because throughout the war years and still today, one of every five inhabitants of Serbia is a non-Serb. In Belgrade there are and have always been many minorities living without any difficulty: Muslims, Gypsies, Albanians, Macedonians, Turks, Hungarians, Gorans . . .
In reality, contrary to the image given by the press, Serbia is today the only state of the ex-Yugoslavia, along with Macedonia, that remains ‘multinational’. On the other hand, all the NATO protectorates – Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo – practiced an almost total ethnic purification.
Milosevic objected to the excesses committed by the Serb militias in Bosnia. His wife made several declarations against them. An embargo was even applied by Serbia against Karadzic. Certainly, part of Serb public opinion was influenced by racist nationalism. But this was due precisely to Germany and the great powers having plunged the country into civil war and thus into hatred.
9 SREBRENICA
Did the media correctly report on Srebrenica?
NO. First element. Even if it’s a matter of condemning abominable crimes, historical truth – necessary for reconciliation – is not served by the propagandistic processes that unreflexively use the term ‘genocide’, by the obfuscation of the fact that that some of the victims died in combat or by the systematic exaggeration of the numbers. Inquests have determined that many of the ‘victims’ were found some months later voting in subsequent elections or even taking part in other battles with Izetbegovic’s army. This information was and remains obscured. We won’t here go into the argument over numbers which only serious historians will be able to sort out definitively.
Second element. Why did the media hide the events essential to an understanding of this drama? In the beginning, this region was inhabited by Muslim AND Serbs. The latter were run off in 1993 by an ethnic cleansing committed by the Muslim nationalist troops of Izetbegovic. French general Morillon, who commanded the UN force there, charges: “On the night of the Orthodox Christmas, the holy night of January 1993, Nasser Oric led raids on Serb villages. . . . There were heads cut off, abominable massacres committed by the forces of Nasser Oric in all the neighboring villages.” (Documents of information from the French National Assembly, Srebrenica, t 2, pp. 140-154) The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later. But why systematically hide the crimes of ‘our friends’?
Third element. Like other so-called demilitarized ‘safe havens’, Srebrenica was in reality an area used by the forces of Izetbegovic to regroup, the UN protecting them from total defeat. Astonishingly, Oric’s troops retreated from Srebrenica just a week before the massacre. French general Germanos: “Oric had widely declared that they had abandoned Srebrenica because they’d wanted Srebrenica to fall. The ‘they’ was Izetbegovic.”
And why? It is interesting to return to a curious UN report, written a year and a half earlier by Kofi Annan: “Izetbegovic had learned that a NATO intervention into Bosnia was possible. But it would happen only if the Serbs forced their way into Srebrenica and massacred at least 5,000 people [sic].” A massacred predicted a year and a half before it happened! (UN Report of 28-29 November)
General Morillon also informed us that “It is Izetbegovic’s people who opposed the evacuation of all those who had asked to be taken out, and there were many.” His conclusion: “Mladic fell into a trap at Srebrenica.”
10 FIRST VICTIMS
Were the first victims of the war killed by Serbs?
NO. June 28, 1991, the Slovenian police executed (at least) two unarmed soldiers of the Yugoslav national army who had surrendered at Holmec, a post on the Austrian border. This was acknowledged by the newspaper Slovenske Novice. It has also been ‘established from the very beginning’ that three soldiers of this same Yugoslav army were executed at a post on the Italian border after surrendering themselves. (Facts and testimony reported to the ICY at The Hague, cfr Forgotten Crimes, Igor Mekina, AIM Ljubljana, 11/02/99).
11 CONCENTRATION CAMPS?
Was the famous image of the ‘concentration camps’ false?
YES. Fabricated by Bernard Kouchner and Médecins du Monde, this image showed some ‘prisoners’ held, seemingly, behind barbed wire. One of them had terribly protruding ribs. Kouchner had pasted beside the photo a guard tower from Auschwitz and the accusation ‘mass extermination’. To hammer home the message “Serbs = Nazis”. He thus abetted a campaign of demonization launched by the US public relations firm Ruder Finn.
But the whole thing was faked and taken from a report by British TV channel ITN. The trickery became obvious when one viewed the footage shot at the same time by a local TV news crew. In reality, the British camera had been deliberately placed behind the two lonely strands of barbed wire that formed a fence surrounding an old enclosure for farming equipment. The ‘prisoners’ were on the ‘outside’ of the barbed wire. Free because they were refugees in this camp to escape the war and the militias who would force them to fight. In the complete film, the only prisoner who speaks English declares to the ITN journalist three times that they are being well treated and are safe. The man with the protruding ribs (gravely ill) was called to the foreground when all his mates looked to be in too good a shape. Kouchner’s montage was a gross falsehood. (Cfr Liars’ Poker, p. 34)
There certainly were camps in Bosnia. Not for extermination, but rather for the preparation of prisoner exchanges. Violations of Human Rights were committed here. But why were the UN reports on this subject hidden from us? They accounted for six Croat camps, two Serb camps and one Muslim camp.
12 SARAJEVO
Were we given the true stories on the three large massacres in Sarajevo?
NO. Three times Western public opinion was shocked by these terrible images: dozens of victims blown to bits in front of a bakery or in the marketplace of Sarajevo. Immediately the Serbs were accused of having killed civilians by bombarding the city. This despite numerous contradictions in official communications.
But never was the public informed of the results of inquiries made outside the UN. Nor of the reports which accused the forces of president Izetbegovic. Furthermore, high Western officials knew about them but kept them carefully hidden. It was only much later that the editor-in-chief of the Nouvel Observateur, Jean Daniel, admitted: “Today I have to say it. I heard, in succession, Edouard Balladur (French Prime Minister at the time), François Léotard (Minister of the Army), Alain Juppé (Foreign Minister) and two ‘high-ranking’ generals, whose confidence I will not betray by naming them, tell me (. . .) that the shell fired on the marketplace was itself also from the Muslims! They would have brought carnage upon their own people! Was I afraid of this observation? Yes, the Prime Minister answered me without hesitating… “(Nouvel Observateur, August 21, 1995)
Why these manipulations? As if by chance, each massacre took place just before an important meeting to justify some Western measures: an embargo against the Serbs (92), a NATO bombing (94), a final offensive (95). NATO and Izetbegovic applied an essential principle of war propaganda: justify the offensive with a media lie, a ‘massacre’ to shock public opinion.
The official version of the siege of Sarajevo hides several points: 1. The Serb forces certainly committed serious crimes. But the civilians who wanted to flee through a tunnel that permitted them to leave the city were stopped by the Izetbegovic regime. He wanted to maximize the clientele for his black market, hijacking international aid money. 2. It was especially important to present a black and white image of a victim people and their aggressors. In reality, even in Sarajevo, Izetbegovic’s snipers regularly killed the inhabitants of Serb sections of the city without anyone ever speaking of it. 3. Some equally grave atrocities went down, for example, at Mostar. But here they were due to fighting between the Croat and Muslim forces who had long before run off all the Serbs.
13 THE LARGEST “CLEANSING”
Was the largest ethnic cleansing of the war committed by the Croat army?
YES. On August 4, 1995, a hundred thousand Croat soldiers, a hundred and fifty tanks, two hundred troop transports, more than three hundred pieces of artillery, and forty missile launchers attacked the Serb population of the Krajina. More than 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave this region which they had inhabited for centuries. The worst atrocities of the war were committed: the Croat forces killed the elderly who could not flee, and burned 85% of the abandoned houses.
Clinton called the offensive ‘useful’. His Secretary of State said: “The retaking of the Krajina could lead to a new strategic situation which might be favorable for us.” Worse yet: the United States advised Croatia in carrying out its offensive, according to an admission by the Croatian foreign minister. Furthermore, it was Washington that took charge of the ‘democratic’ training of this army. (Liars’ Poker, pp. 193-194)
14 URANIUM BOMBS
Did the US use depleted uranium weapons also in Bosnia?
YES. At an international conference, “Uranium, the victims speak”, organized in Brussels in March 2001, a Bosnian doctor presented a Bosnian Serb forest ranger, a victim like many others of multiple atypical and fast moving cancers. after having been exposed to DU in areas of US bombardment.
A Bosnian health official laid out some statistics : the population of a Serb neighbourhood of Sarajevo bombed by US planes in 1995, (a population later expelled from that city), showed a five-fold increase in various types of cancer.
The weapons using depleted uranium allowed the US – but also France and Great Britain – to get rid of waste materials from their nuclear plants. These by-products seriously pollute the earth as well as the underground water table, causing cancer, leukemia and monstrous birth defects (including babies born to contaminated GIs). In short, use of these depleted uranium arms transformed several countries into nuclear waste dumps for eternity. (video and brochure “Uranium, the victims speak”).
15 THE ONLY “GOOD WAR”
Was the war against Yugoslavia the US’s only good war?
NO. The United States tried to make believe that it had fought a humanitarian war. And to present itself, for once, as a defender of Muslims. But in reality Washington and Berlin provoked this war. Deliberately. In the selfish interest of conquering certain strategic objectives: the economic colonization of the Balkans, gaining control of the routes for transporting oil, and the fight for world domination.
The USA has never fought a humanitarian war. And it was not the fireman in this war against Yugoslavia, it was the firebug. It was the most guilty of inflicting suffering on all the people. The USA can not be, on the one hand, the friend of the Muslims in the Balkans, and, on the other, their worst enemy in Palestine and Iraq. The US is the Muslims’ enemy everywhere.
And the most dangerous enemy of all the people of the world. It threatens Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and some day even China. Because its war strategy has no other goal than to maintain an unjust economic order, to dominate and exploit every country on earth to the end of further enriching a small handful of super – billionaires.
This is why it is so important to unmask all the media lies and to make the truth known about the war against Yugoslavia: It was a war of aggression.
In conclusion. An appeal.
We will not give you a ‘score’ to evaluate the degree to which you have suffered from media manipulations. That would be indecent. During this decade, too many innocents suffered and suffer still because of the disinformation orchestrated by the great powers in order to advance their imperialist domination.
And other people, closer to you, or yourself perhaps, have suffered another injury: knowing what was traumatizing you behind these orchestrated lies, but not being able to do anything about it. Such was the powerful indoctrination of the public consciousness.
The answers that we set forth here are the results of long research, which took a great deal of time and required detailed investigation to break out the truth. We would like only to show you that it is possible for each of you to escape the media’s hypnotic spell meant to make us accept the unacceptable.
What to do? It’s not enough, after the lies of each conflict, to say: “Never again!” We must search without ceasing to understand what is truly at stake economically and strategically in each war. To yank the curtain on the puppeteers who pull the strings from off-stage. To organize collectively, to investigate more rapidly. And to spread more widely the results of these ‘media quiz’.
You can help reinforce the effects of the media quiz by contacting us. Because we must never become enured to this horror and cynicism.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/milosevic ... media/2110
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Enough Said
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
Former Yugoslavia: The name of the game is OIL!
By Karen Talbot
The Bush administration, with its spectacular connections to oil and
energy corporations, is telling the U.S. people they need more oil,
gas and nuclear power to meet the so-called "energy crisis." It is
becoming unmistakable that events in the Balkans, including the
recent terrorist attacks in Macedonia, have been directly related to
this drive for ever-greater sources of oil and profits. Not only do the
people of the former Yugoslavia continue to pay an enormous
human price, but U.S. consumers and taxpayers also are shelling
out huge sums which ultimately enrich these corporations. The
intensifying civil war in Macedonia is a case in point.
- - - - - -
Terrorist assaults in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
(FYROM) by the so-called "National Liberation Army" (NLA) have
resumed and greatly escalated in recent days with major ambushes
including against security forces near Kumanova. The FYROM
government troops have responded with a major offensive to
counter the terrorists. (1) The ethnic Albanian terrorists have been
engaging in fierce attacks in the rugged mountains of Macedonia,
not only targeting Serbs and Macedonians, but also Albanians who
oppose them. Their actions have been criticized by Western
powers as threatening to ignite a wider Balkan conflict. (2) But is
there a hidden agenda?
Though the U.S. administration says it opposes the recent terrorism
in this region, they have not stopped these attacks which are
initiated from the Serbian province of Kosovo. This is despite the
overwhelming KFOR presence, including U.S. forces based at the
huge military base, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, conveniently
located in this vital area.
These NLA forces are openly acknowledged to be connected with
the Kovoso Liberation Army (KLA) which has consistently been
backed by the U.S. and NATO troops occupying Kosovo. This
alliance has persisted despite the KLA's continuing widespread
attacks on Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo and its widely
known criminal and drug trafficking activities. The KLA was
nominally transformed into the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC)
which is trained by Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI),
made up by former U.S. military officers, based in Alexandria,
Virginia. The MPRI also had been involved in the training and
command of the Croatian military that forced over 200,000 ethnic
Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995. (3)
It is curious, therefore, that NATO Secretary-General George
Robertson described the ethnic Albanian NLA fighters as "a bunch
of murderous thugs whose objective is to destroy a democratic
Macedonia and who are using civilians as human shields." Are they
not thugs when engaging in similar behavior in Kosovo? (4)
Contingents connected with the KLA also have been stirring up
intense fighting in the Presevo Valley in southeast Serbia. This
valley is a narrow strip of land between lofty mountains bordering
Kosovo on the west and a high range bordering Bulgaria on the
east. It is a strategic route used for centuries for commerce and to
provide passage for armies between Europe to the Middle East.
Hitler's fascist armies relied heavily on this passageway. The
current attacks in Macedonia have centered very near the
boundaries between Macedonia, Kosovo and the Presevo Valley.
Trans-Balkan oil pipeline
It is now becoming clearer than ever that one primary reason the
U.S. has been so involved in Kosovo, Bosnia, and throughout
Yugoslavia, has much to do with the immense wealth to be gleaned
from oil.
Construction of a major "trans-Balkan" pipeline is underway from
Burgas in Bulgaria on the Black Sea, through Macedonia, to the
Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. It is being built by U.S.-owned
Albanian-Macedonia-Bulgarian company (AMBO) and is scheduled
to be operational by 2005. (5)
The trans-Balkan pipeline passes through what is known as
corridor 8 -traversing very near the borders between Macedonia,
Kosovo and the Presevo Valley. (see map) Furthermore, it is to be
connected with another series of pipelines, some of them Soviet-
era pipelines. A major one of these will pass down the Presevo
Valley - known as corridor 10 - connecting with the AMBO
pipeline precisely at these same critical borders. This system of
pipelines not only is designed to transport petroleum to sea ports
for shipping abroad, but extends into the heart of Europe. Two
branches of the AMBO line jut into Greece - one to Thessalonika,
the other to a terminal on the west coast.
All of this has to do with the enormously rich petroleum fields of the
Caspian Sea basin. In order to get that oil to market, one of the
best routes is to pipe it to the Black Sea, ship it in tankers across
the sea, and then pipe it again across the Balkans to the Adriatic
Sea. This by-passes the treacherous narrow Bosporous Straits
near Istanbul, which Turkey claims could not safely accommodate
the heavy tanker traffic from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
By restricting this route, Turkey is also limiting Russian oil transport
through the straits and boosting its own interest in the construction
of a pipeline from Baku on the Caspian Sea to the Turkish terminal
at Ceyhan, which would also by-pass Russia. This route also has
fluctuating support by the U.S.
The AMBO Trans-Balkan pipeline "will make all countries from the
Caspian Sea to the Balkans politically and economically dependent
on the U.S." (6)
The transport of oil through the Balkans is not the only
consideration for the giant oil cartels. They are also pursuing the
development of rich petroleum fields in various parts of the Balkan
region itself, especially in Albania.
The feasibility study giving the green light to the AMBO project was
largely paid for by U.S taxpayers. Was it mere coincidence that the
terrorist attacks in Macedonia began just after the successful
completion of the study and the go-ahead was given for the
pipeline?
Journalist Richard Norton-Taylor, writing in the [London] Guardian,
put it this way: "While the U.S. and NATO - and now the EU -
hold out the prospect of untold wealth for the Caucasian states of
the former Soviet Union, the West will also have an important
economic stake in Albania and Macedonia...The implications for
Kosovo, a Serbian province with an overwhelming ethnic Albanian
population, and for Macedonia, with armed groups from Kosovo
stirring up trouble among the ethnic Albanian population, are
potentially immense." (7)
General Michael Jackson, who eventually took over command of
KFOR in Kosovo, when speaking of Macedonia, said: "[W]e will
certainly remain here a long time so that we can also guarantee the
security of the energy corridors which traverse this country." (8)
Bush administration ties
Somehow it comes as no surprise that the pipeline being built by
AMBO is headed by CEO, E.L. "Ted" Ferguson, former Director of
Oil & Gas Development for Europe for Brown and Root, part of
Halliburton - Vice President Dick Cheney's old company! The oil
giants already moving into place to operate under the umbrella of
AMBO are Texaco, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, BP, Amoco, Agip and
TotalElFina. (9) Interestingly, the gargantuan Camp Bondsteel was
also built by Halliburton. It is the largest U.S. military base
constructed since Vietnam. Furthermore, the troops stationed in the
Balkans are being serviced by Halliburton and the feasibility study
for the AMBO pipeline was conducted by Brown and Root Ltd. of
London.(10) There is tremendous pot of "Black Gold" at the end of
this pipeline rainbow.
Such a massive project as the trans-Balkan pipeline requires
enormous amounts of U.S. government money in the form of
investment guarantees from the Export-Import Bank, loans from the
World Bank, and other backing. It needs the sword to march along
with the dollar, even if that sword is wielded by surrogate forces. It
needs NATO troops and the massive U.S. "Fort" Bondsteel in the
"frontier" outpost of Kosovo, to protect the investments. Who better
to guarantee all of these things than the Bush Administration team
with its connections to corporations like Halliburton, and big oil?
They are dripping in oil and energy profits.
Europe-U.S. rivalry
The European Union, with Germany leading the way, since the
early 1990s has been projecting several corridors not only as
energy corridors, but to provide a vast complex of communications
- highways, railroads, airports, maritime ports and rivers - critical
to the economy and corporate profits in Europe. These plans have
created one of a number of substantial rivalries between the U.S.
and the E.U. with the U.S. balking at several of the pipeline and
corridor plans that would carry oil from the Caspian and Russia,
(including through Ukraine) into Europe. Another pipeline
competing with the AMBO corridor is projected to carry crude from
Russia to Greece via Bulgaria. (11) Hundreds of billions of Euro
dollars are at stake. (12) This competition has been reflected in
recent years in differences over Kosovo, Bosnia, and Macedonia,
among other disputes. However, it appears that the AMBO pipeline,
with its connection to the corridor 10 pipeline, will give the U.S.
control over a considerable amount of the oil coming into Europe
from the Caspian basin.
Greater Albania
The goal of the ongoing terrorism led by the KLA has been, and
now is openly proclaimed to be, the establishment a "Greater
Albania." The only time such an entity ever existed was under the
fascist rule during World War II. This objective again is being
espoused by the neo-fascists of today. Is the success of the AMBO
pipeline project dependent on going along with this aim?
The map of "Greater Albania," includes parts of Greece. Is it mere
happenstance that the AMBO line includes branches into Greece
and that the Presevo Valley is the only possible route for a pipeline
between Europe and the Greek port of Thessalonika? (see map)
The agony of the people of Yugoslavia who were steadily bombed
by the U.S. and NATO for 78 days, and hard hit by the severest
economic sanctions for years, coupled with the fragmenting of the
former Yugoslavia, requires viewing against the backdrop of
corporate profits, particular oil profits. Upon close examination, one
discovers that the giant oil companies continue to be deeply
involved in most of the conflicts in the world including in efforts to
destroy national sovereignty, breakup nations, Balkanize, and
create tiny "emirates" and "banana republics." More often than not,
U.S. government and military policies back them up. In the case of
the southern Balkans, the intent may well be to establish a "Greater
Albania" to advance the interests of the oil conglomerates.
This article is an update to several articles by Karen Talbot
including "Backing up Globalization with Military Might,"
CovertAction Quarterly, fall/winter, 1999; "Chechnya: More Blood
for Oil," CovertAction Quarterly, Spring/Summer,2000, "Bush
administration is dripping in oil and energy profits," People's Weekly
World, Mar. 10, 2001.
The attached map is from
http://www.scarabee.com/EDITO2/070699.ht
Notes
(1) "Macedonians Fear Impending Civil War," Danica Kirka,
Associated Press, May 3, 2001
(2) "Macedonian Conflict Reignites World Worries," Reuters, May 4,
2001.
(3) "The U.N. Appoints an Alleged War Criminal," Michel
Chossudovsky, Mar. 17, 2000, www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes]
(4) "Rebels push Macedonia to `the brink,'" Juliette Terzieff, San
Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 2001.
(5) "AMBO Pipeline to Start Raising Funds in July," Reuters, June
15, 2000.
(6) "Trans-Balkan Pipeline Complicates U.S.-Turkey Relations,"
Global Intelligence Update, Jan. 14, 2000.
(7) "The New Great Game," Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian
(London), Mar. 5, 2001.
(8) Sole 24 Ore, Apr.13, 1999.
(9) Op. cit. no. 4.
(10) see MILSNEWS, Skopje, Jan. 23, 1997.
(11) Op. cit. no. 4.
(12)"Caspian Sea's Oil Reserves," Michel Collon,
http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/mcollon.ht
https://www.mail-archive.com/pen-l@gala ... 56250.html
Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba
Former Yugoslavia: The name of the game is OIL!
By Karen Talbot
The Bush administration, with its spectacular connections to oil and
energy corporations, is telling the U.S. people they need more oil,
gas and nuclear power to meet the so-called "energy crisis." It is
becoming unmistakable that events in the Balkans, including the
recent terrorist attacks in Macedonia, have been directly related to
this drive for ever-greater sources of oil and profits. Not only do the
people of the former Yugoslavia continue to pay an enormous
human price, but U.S. consumers and taxpayers also are shelling
out huge sums which ultimately enrich these corporations. The
intensifying civil war in Macedonia is a case in point.
- - - - - -
Terrorist assaults in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
(FYROM) by the so-called "National Liberation Army" (NLA) have
resumed and greatly escalated in recent days with major ambushes
including against security forces near Kumanova. The FYROM
government troops have responded with a major offensive to
counter the terrorists. (1) The ethnic Albanian terrorists have been
engaging in fierce attacks in the rugged mountains of Macedonia,
not only targeting Serbs and Macedonians, but also Albanians who
oppose them. Their actions have been criticized by Western
powers as threatening to ignite a wider Balkan conflict. (2) But is
there a hidden agenda?
Though the U.S. administration says it opposes the recent terrorism
in this region, they have not stopped these attacks which are
initiated from the Serbian province of Kosovo. This is despite the
overwhelming KFOR presence, including U.S. forces based at the
huge military base, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, conveniently
located in this vital area.
These NLA forces are openly acknowledged to be connected with
the Kovoso Liberation Army (KLA) which has consistently been
backed by the U.S. and NATO troops occupying Kosovo. This
alliance has persisted despite the KLA's continuing widespread
attacks on Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo and its widely
known criminal and drug trafficking activities. The KLA was
nominally transformed into the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC)
which is trained by Military Professional Resources Inc (MPRI),
made up by former U.S. military officers, based in Alexandria,
Virginia. The MPRI also had been involved in the training and
command of the Croatian military that forced over 200,000 ethnic
Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995. (3)
It is curious, therefore, that NATO Secretary-General George
Robertson described the ethnic Albanian NLA fighters as "a bunch
of murderous thugs whose objective is to destroy a democratic
Macedonia and who are using civilians as human shields." Are they
not thugs when engaging in similar behavior in Kosovo? (4)
Contingents connected with the KLA also have been stirring up
intense fighting in the Presevo Valley in southeast Serbia. This
valley is a narrow strip of land between lofty mountains bordering
Kosovo on the west and a high range bordering Bulgaria on the
east. It is a strategic route used for centuries for commerce and to
provide passage for armies between Europe to the Middle East.
Hitler's fascist armies relied heavily on this passageway. The
current attacks in Macedonia have centered very near the
boundaries between Macedonia, Kosovo and the Presevo Valley.
Trans-Balkan oil pipeline
It is now becoming clearer than ever that one primary reason the
U.S. has been so involved in Kosovo, Bosnia, and throughout
Yugoslavia, has much to do with the immense wealth to be gleaned
from oil.
Construction of a major "trans-Balkan" pipeline is underway from
Burgas in Bulgaria on the Black Sea, through Macedonia, to the
Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. It is being built by U.S.-owned
Albanian-Macedonia-Bulgarian company (AMBO) and is scheduled
to be operational by 2005. (5)
The trans-Balkan pipeline passes through what is known as
corridor 8 -traversing very near the borders between Macedonia,
Kosovo and the Presevo Valley. (see map) Furthermore, it is to be
connected with another series of pipelines, some of them Soviet-
era pipelines. A major one of these will pass down the Presevo
Valley - known as corridor 10 - connecting with the AMBO
pipeline precisely at these same critical borders. This system of
pipelines not only is designed to transport petroleum to sea ports
for shipping abroad, but extends into the heart of Europe. Two
branches of the AMBO line jut into Greece - one to Thessalonika,
the other to a terminal on the west coast.
All of this has to do with the enormously rich petroleum fields of the
Caspian Sea basin. In order to get that oil to market, one of the
best routes is to pipe it to the Black Sea, ship it in tankers across
the sea, and then pipe it again across the Balkans to the Adriatic
Sea. This by-passes the treacherous narrow Bosporous Straits
near Istanbul, which Turkey claims could not safely accommodate
the heavy tanker traffic from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.
By restricting this route, Turkey is also limiting Russian oil transport
through the straits and boosting its own interest in the construction
of a pipeline from Baku on the Caspian Sea to the Turkish terminal
at Ceyhan, which would also by-pass Russia. This route also has
fluctuating support by the U.S.
The AMBO Trans-Balkan pipeline "will make all countries from the
Caspian Sea to the Balkans politically and economically dependent
on the U.S." (6)
The transport of oil through the Balkans is not the only
consideration for the giant oil cartels. They are also pursuing the
development of rich petroleum fields in various parts of the Balkan
region itself, especially in Albania.
The feasibility study giving the green light to the AMBO project was
largely paid for by U.S taxpayers. Was it mere coincidence that the
terrorist attacks in Macedonia began just after the successful
completion of the study and the go-ahead was given for the
pipeline?
Journalist Richard Norton-Taylor, writing in the [London] Guardian,
put it this way: "While the U.S. and NATO - and now the EU -
hold out the prospect of untold wealth for the Caucasian states of
the former Soviet Union, the West will also have an important
economic stake in Albania and Macedonia...The implications for
Kosovo, a Serbian province with an overwhelming ethnic Albanian
population, and for Macedonia, with armed groups from Kosovo
stirring up trouble among the ethnic Albanian population, are
potentially immense." (7)
General Michael Jackson, who eventually took over command of
KFOR in Kosovo, when speaking of Macedonia, said: "[W]e will
certainly remain here a long time so that we can also guarantee the
security of the energy corridors which traverse this country." (8)
Bush administration ties
Somehow it comes as no surprise that the pipeline being built by
AMBO is headed by CEO, E.L. "Ted" Ferguson, former Director of
Oil & Gas Development for Europe for Brown and Root, part of
Halliburton - Vice President Dick Cheney's old company! The oil
giants already moving into place to operate under the umbrella of
AMBO are Texaco, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, BP, Amoco, Agip and
TotalElFina. (9) Interestingly, the gargantuan Camp Bondsteel was
also built by Halliburton. It is the largest U.S. military base
constructed since Vietnam. Furthermore, the troops stationed in the
Balkans are being serviced by Halliburton and the feasibility study
for the AMBO pipeline was conducted by Brown and Root Ltd. of
London.(10) There is tremendous pot of "Black Gold" at the end of
this pipeline rainbow.
Such a massive project as the trans-Balkan pipeline requires
enormous amounts of U.S. government money in the form of
investment guarantees from the Export-Import Bank, loans from the
World Bank, and other backing. It needs the sword to march along
with the dollar, even if that sword is wielded by surrogate forces. It
needs NATO troops and the massive U.S. "Fort" Bondsteel in the
"frontier" outpost of Kosovo, to protect the investments. Who better
to guarantee all of these things than the Bush Administration team
with its connections to corporations like Halliburton, and big oil?
They are dripping in oil and energy profits.
Europe-U.S. rivalry
The European Union, with Germany leading the way, since the
early 1990s has been projecting several corridors not only as
energy corridors, but to provide a vast complex of communications
- highways, railroads, airports, maritime ports and rivers - critical
to the economy and corporate profits in Europe. These plans have
created one of a number of substantial rivalries between the U.S.
and the E.U. with the U.S. balking at several of the pipeline and
corridor plans that would carry oil from the Caspian and Russia,
(including through Ukraine) into Europe. Another pipeline
competing with the AMBO corridor is projected to carry crude from
Russia to Greece via Bulgaria. (11) Hundreds of billions of Euro
dollars are at stake. (12) This competition has been reflected in
recent years in differences over Kosovo, Bosnia, and Macedonia,
among other disputes. However, it appears that the AMBO pipeline,
with its connection to the corridor 10 pipeline, will give the U.S.
control over a considerable amount of the oil coming into Europe
from the Caspian basin.
Greater Albania
The goal of the ongoing terrorism led by the KLA has been, and
now is openly proclaimed to be, the establishment a "Greater
Albania." The only time such an entity ever existed was under the
fascist rule during World War II. This objective again is being
espoused by the neo-fascists of today. Is the success of the AMBO
pipeline project dependent on going along with this aim?
The map of "Greater Albania," includes parts of Greece. Is it mere
happenstance that the AMBO line includes branches into Greece
and that the Presevo Valley is the only possible route for a pipeline
between Europe and the Greek port of Thessalonika? (see map)
The agony of the people of Yugoslavia who were steadily bombed
by the U.S. and NATO for 78 days, and hard hit by the severest
economic sanctions for years, coupled with the fragmenting of the
former Yugoslavia, requires viewing against the backdrop of
corporate profits, particular oil profits. Upon close examination, one
discovers that the giant oil companies continue to be deeply
involved in most of the conflicts in the world including in efforts to
destroy national sovereignty, breakup nations, Balkanize, and
create tiny "emirates" and "banana republics." More often than not,
U.S. government and military policies back them up. In the case of
the southern Balkans, the intent may well be to establish a "Greater
Albania" to advance the interests of the oil conglomerates.
This article is an update to several articles by Karen Talbot
including "Backing up Globalization with Military Might,"
CovertAction Quarterly, fall/winter, 1999; "Chechnya: More Blood
for Oil," CovertAction Quarterly, Spring/Summer,2000, "Bush
administration is dripping in oil and energy profits," People's Weekly
World, Mar. 10, 2001.
The attached map is from
http://www.scarabee.com/EDITO2/070699.ht
Notes
(1) "Macedonians Fear Impending Civil War," Danica Kirka,
Associated Press, May 3, 2001
(2) "Macedonian Conflict Reignites World Worries," Reuters, May 4,
2001.
(3) "The U.N. Appoints an Alleged War Criminal," Michel
Chossudovsky, Mar. 17, 2000, www.tenc.net [emperors-clothes]
(4) "Rebels push Macedonia to `the brink,'" Juliette Terzieff, San
Francisco Chronicle, May 8, 2001.
(5) "AMBO Pipeline to Start Raising Funds in July," Reuters, June
15, 2000.
(6) "Trans-Balkan Pipeline Complicates U.S.-Turkey Relations,"
Global Intelligence Update, Jan. 14, 2000.
(7) "The New Great Game," Richard Norton-Taylor, Guardian
(London), Mar. 5, 2001.
(8) Sole 24 Ore, Apr.13, 1999.
(9) Op. cit. no. 4.
(10) see MILSNEWS, Skopje, Jan. 23, 1997.
(11) Op. cit. no. 4.
(12)"Caspian Sea's Oil Reserves," Michel Collon,
http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/mcollon.ht
https://www.mail-archive.com/pen-l@gala ... 56250.html
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
Was Srebrenica a Hoax? Eye-Witness Account of a Former United Nations Military Observer in Bosnia
Global Research Editor’s Note
Ratko Mladić has recently been convicted to life imprisonment by the the ICTY on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity while he was Chief Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska between 1992 and 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This detailed account first published in 1998 by former UN Military Observer Carlos Martino Branco casts doubts on the decision of the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) that “genocide was committed in Srebrenica in 1995.”
“…Bosnia Serb forces carried out genocide against the Bosnian Muslims (…) .Those who devise and implement genocide seek to deprive humanity of the manifold richness its nationalities, races, ethnicities and religions provide. This is a crime against all humankind, its harm being felt not only by the group targeted for destruction, but by all of humanity.”
This article by General Major Carlos Martino Branko first published by Global Research on 20 April 2004 casts doubt on the ICTY conviction of Ratko Mladić.
Michel Chossudovsky, 23 November 2017
***
Author’s Preface
I was on the ground in Bosnia during the war and, in particular, during the fall of Srebrenica.
One may agree or disagree with my political analysis, but one really ought to read the account of how Srebrenica fell, who are the victims whose bodies have been found so far, and why the author believes that the Serbs wanted to conquer Srebrenica and make the Bosnian Muslims flee, rather than having any intentions of butchering them. The comparison Srebrenica vs. Krajina, as well as the related media reaction by the “free press” in the West, is also rather instructive.
There is little doubt that at least 2,000 Bosnian Muslims died in fighting the better trained and better commanded VRS/BSA. Yet, the question remains, WHEN did most of these casualties of combat occur? According to the analysis below, it was before the final fall of Srebrenica: the Muslims offered very little resistance in the summer of 1995.
I was UNMO [United Nations Military Observer] Deputy Chief Operations Officer of the UNPF [United Nations Population Fund] (at theatre level) and my information is based upon debriefings of UN military observers who where posted to Srebrenica during those days as well as several United Nations reports which were not made public.
My sources of information are not Ruder & Finn Global Public Affairs. My name is not included in their database.
I do not wish to discuss numbers and similar matters pertaining thereto. There is reason to believe that figures have been used and manipulated for propaganda purposes. These figures and information do not provide a serious understanding of the Yugoslavian conflict.
The article is based upon TRUE information and includes my analysis of the events. The story is longer than what I have presented here in this article.
It is my hope that it will contribute to clarifying what really happened in Srebrenica.
Was Srebenica a Hoax?
It is now two years since the Muslim enclave, Srebenica, fell into the hands of the Serbian army in Bosnia. Much has been written about the matter. Nonetheless the majority of reports have been limited to a broad media exposure of the event, with very little analytic rigor.
Discussion of Srebrenica cannot be limited to genocide and mass graves.
A rigorous analysis of the events must take into consideration the background circumstances, in order to understand the real motives which led to the fall of the enclave.
The zone of Srebrenica, like almost all of Eastern Bosnia, is characterized by very rugged terrain. Steep valleys with dense forests and deep ravines make it impossible for combat vehicles to pass, and offers a clear advantage to defensive forces. Given the resources available to both parties, and the characteristics of the terrain, it would seem that the Bosnian army (ABiH) had the necessary force to defend itself, if it had used full advantage of the terrain. This, however, did not occur.
Given the military advantage of the defensive forces it is very difficult to explain the absence of military resistance. The Muslim forces did not establish an effective defensive system and did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery, under control of the United Nations (UN) forces, at a time in which they had every reason to do so.
The lack of a military response stands in clear contrast to the offensive attitude which characterized the actions of the defensive forces in previous siege situations, which typically launched violent “raids” against the Serbian villages surrounding the enclave, thus provoking heavy casualties amongst the Serbian civilian population.
But in this instance, with the attention of the media focused upon the area, military defence of the enclave would have revealed the true situation in security zones, and demonstrate that these had never been genuinely demilitarized zones as was claimed, but were harboured highly-armed military units. Military resistance would jeopardize the image of “victim”, which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.
Throughout the entire operation, it was clear that there were profound disagreements between the leaders of the enclave. From a military viewpoint, there was total confusion. Oric, the charismatic commander of Srebenica, was absent.
The Sarajevo government did not authorize his return in order to lead the resistance. Military power fell into the hands of his lieutenants, who had a long history of incompatibility. The absence of Oric’s clear leadership led to a situation of total ineptitude. The contradictory orders of his successors completely paralyzed the forces under siege.
The behavior of the political leaders is also interesting. The local SDP president, Zlatko Dukic, in an interview with European Union observers, explained that Srebrenica formed part of a business transaction which involved a logistical support route to Sarajevo, via Vogosca.
He also claimed that the fall of the enclave formed part of an orchestrated campaign to discredit the West and win the support of Islamic countries. This was the reason for Oric to maintain a distance from his troops. This thesis was also defended by the local supporters of the DAS. There were also many rumours of a trade within the local population of the enclave.
Another curious aspect was the absence of a military reaction from the 2nd Corps of the Muslim army, which did nothing to relieve the military pressure on the enclave. It was common knowledge that the Serbian unit in the region, the “Drina Corps”, was exhausted and that the attack on Srebenica was only possible with the aid of the units from other regions. Despite this fact, Sarajevo did not lift a finger in order to launch an attack which would have divided the Serbian forces and exposed the vulnerabilities created by the concentration of resources around Srebenica. Such an attack would have reduced the military pressure on the enclave.
It is also important to register the pathetic appeal of the president of Opstina, Osman Suljic, on July 9, which implored military observers to say to the world that the Serbians were using chemical weapons. The same gentleman later accused the media of transmitting false news items on the resistance of troops in the enclave, requiring a denial from the UN. According to Suljic, the Muslim troops did not respond, and would never respond with heavy artillery fire. Simultaneously, he complained of the lack of food supplies and of the humanitarian situation. Curiously, observers were never allowed to inspect the food reserve deposits. The emphasis given by political leaders on the lack of military response and the absence of food provisions loosely suggests an official policy which began to be discernible.
In mid 1995, the prolongation of the war had dampened public interest. There had been a substantial reduction in the pressure of public opinion in the western democracies. An incident of this importance would nonetheless provide hot news material for the media during several weeks, could awaken public opinion and incite new passions. In this manner it would be possible to kill two birds with one stone: pressure could be laid to bear in order to lift the embargo and simultaneously the occupying countries would find it difficult to withdraw their forces, a hypothesis which had been advanced by leading UN figures such as Akashi and Boutros-Boutros Ghali.
The Muslims always harbored a secret hope that the embargo would be lifted. This had become the prime objective of the Sarajevo government, and had been fuelled by the vote in the US Senate and Congress in favor of such a measure. President Clinton, however, vetoed the decision and required a two thirds majority in both houses. The enclaves collapse gave the decisive push that the campaign needed. After its fall, the US Senate voted with over a two thirds majority in favor of lifting the embargo.
It was clear that sooner or later the enclaves would fall into the hands of the Serbians, it was an inevitability. There was a consensus amongst the negotiators (the US administration, the UN and European governments) that it was impossible to maintain the three Muslim enclaves, and that they should be exchanged for territories in Central Bosnia. Madeleine Albright suggested this exchange on numerous occasions to Izetbegovic, based on the proposals of the Contact Group.
As early as 1993, at the time of the first crisis of the enclave, Karadzic had proposed to Izetbgovic to exchange Srebrenica for the suburb of Vogosca. This exchange included the movement of populations in both directions. This was the purpose of secret negotiations in order to avoid undesirable publicity. This implied that the western countries accepted and encouraged ethnic separation.
The truth is that both the Americans and President Izetbegovic had tacitly agreed that it made no sense to insist in maintaining these isolated enclaves in a divided Bosnia. In 1995 nobody believed any longer in the inevitability of ethnic division of the territory. In the month of June 1995, before the military operation in Srebrenica, Alexander Vershbow, Special Assistant to President Clinton stated that “America should encourage the Bosnians to think in terms of territories with greater territorial coherence and compactness.” In other words this meant that the enclaves should be forgotten. The attack on Srebrenica, with no help from Belgrade, was completely unnecessary and proved to be one of the most significant examples of the political failure of the Serbian leadership.
Meanwhile the western media exacerbated the situation by transforming the enclaves into a powerful mass-media icon; a situation which Izetbegovic was quick to explore. CNN had daily broadcasts of the images of mass graves for thousands of corpses, obtained from spy satellites. Despite the microscopic precision in the localization of these graves, it is certain that no discovery to date has confirmed such suspicions. Since there are no longer restrictions on movement, we inevitably speculate on why they have still not been shown to the world.
If there had been a premeditated plan of genocide, instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north – which left the hypothesis to escape to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped. The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN.
The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there. In this instance, the media maintained an absolute silence, despite the fact that the genocide occurred over a three month period. The objective of Srebrenica was ethnic cleansing and not genocide, unlike what happened in Krajina, in which although there was no military action, the Croatian army decimated villages.
Despite knowledge of the fact that the enclaves were already a lost cause, Sarajevo insisted in drawing political dividends from the fact. The receptivity which had been created in the eyes of public opinion made it easier to sell the thesis of genocide.
But of even greater importance than the genocide thesis and the political isolation of the Serbs, was blackmailing of the UN: either the UN joined forces with the Sarajevo government in the conflict (which subsequently happened) or the UN would be completely discredited in the eyes of the public, leading in turn to support for Bosnia. Srebrenica was the last straw which led western governments to reach agreement on the need to cease their neutrality and commence a military action against one side in the conflict. It was the last straw which united the West in their desire to break “Serbian bestiality”. Sarajevo was conscious of the fact that it lacked the military capacity to defeat the Serbs. It was necessary to create conditions via which the international community could do this for them. Srebrenica played a vital role in this process.
Srebrenica represents one of a series of acts by the Serbian leaders intended to provoke the UN, in order to demonstrate their impotence. This was a serious strategic error which would cost them dear. The side which had everything to win by demonstrating the impotence of the UN was the Sarajevo leadership and not that of Pale. In 1995 it was clear that the change in the status quo required a powerful intervention which would overthrow the Serbian military power. Srebrenica was one of the pretexts, resulting from the short-sightedness of the Bosnian Serbian leaders.
The besieged forces could have easily defended the enclave, at least for much longer, if they had been well led. It proved convenient to let the enclave fall in this manner. Since the enclave was doomed to fall, it was preferable to let this happen in the most beneficial manner possible. But this would only have been viable if Sarajevo had political initiative and freedom of movement, which would never occur at the negotiating table. The deliberate fall of the enclave might appear to be an act of terrible machiavellian orchestration, but the truth is that the Sarajevo government had much to gain, as proved to be the case. Srebrenica was not a zero-sum game. The Serbians won a military victory but with highly negative political side-effects, which helped result in their definitive ostracization.
We might add a final curious note. As the UN observation posts were attacked, and proved impossible to maintain, the forces withdrew. The barricades set up by the Muslim army did not let the troops past. These troops were not treated as soldiers fleeing from the front line, but rather with a sordid differentiation.
The Muslims not only refused to fight to defend themselves, they forced others to fight on their behalf. In one instance, the commander of a Dutch vehicle decided after conversations with ABiH to pass the barrier. A Muslim soldier threw a hand grenade whose fragments mortally wounded him. The only UN soldier to die in the Srebrenica offensive, was killed by the Muslims.
General Major Carlos Martins Branco is a high-ranking officer of Portugal’s Armed Forces, who served as a UN Military Observer in Bosnia in 1995
https://www.globalresearch.ca/was-srebr ... bosnia/731
Global Research Editor’s Note
Ratko Mladić has recently been convicted to life imprisonment by the the ICTY on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity while he was Chief Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska between 1992 and 1995 in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This detailed account first published in 1998 by former UN Military Observer Carlos Martino Branco casts doubts on the decision of the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) that “genocide was committed in Srebrenica in 1995.”
“…Bosnia Serb forces carried out genocide against the Bosnian Muslims (…) .Those who devise and implement genocide seek to deprive humanity of the manifold richness its nationalities, races, ethnicities and religions provide. This is a crime against all humankind, its harm being felt not only by the group targeted for destruction, but by all of humanity.”
This article by General Major Carlos Martino Branko first published by Global Research on 20 April 2004 casts doubt on the ICTY conviction of Ratko Mladić.
Michel Chossudovsky, 23 November 2017
***
Author’s Preface
I was on the ground in Bosnia during the war and, in particular, during the fall of Srebrenica.
One may agree or disagree with my political analysis, but one really ought to read the account of how Srebrenica fell, who are the victims whose bodies have been found so far, and why the author believes that the Serbs wanted to conquer Srebrenica and make the Bosnian Muslims flee, rather than having any intentions of butchering them. The comparison Srebrenica vs. Krajina, as well as the related media reaction by the “free press” in the West, is also rather instructive.
There is little doubt that at least 2,000 Bosnian Muslims died in fighting the better trained and better commanded VRS/BSA. Yet, the question remains, WHEN did most of these casualties of combat occur? According to the analysis below, it was before the final fall of Srebrenica: the Muslims offered very little resistance in the summer of 1995.
I was UNMO [United Nations Military Observer] Deputy Chief Operations Officer of the UNPF [United Nations Population Fund] (at theatre level) and my information is based upon debriefings of UN military observers who where posted to Srebrenica during those days as well as several United Nations reports which were not made public.
My sources of information are not Ruder & Finn Global Public Affairs. My name is not included in their database.
I do not wish to discuss numbers and similar matters pertaining thereto. There is reason to believe that figures have been used and manipulated for propaganda purposes. These figures and information do not provide a serious understanding of the Yugoslavian conflict.
The article is based upon TRUE information and includes my analysis of the events. The story is longer than what I have presented here in this article.
It is my hope that it will contribute to clarifying what really happened in Srebrenica.
Was Srebenica a Hoax?
It is now two years since the Muslim enclave, Srebenica, fell into the hands of the Serbian army in Bosnia. Much has been written about the matter. Nonetheless the majority of reports have been limited to a broad media exposure of the event, with very little analytic rigor.
Discussion of Srebrenica cannot be limited to genocide and mass graves.
A rigorous analysis of the events must take into consideration the background circumstances, in order to understand the real motives which led to the fall of the enclave.
The zone of Srebrenica, like almost all of Eastern Bosnia, is characterized by very rugged terrain. Steep valleys with dense forests and deep ravines make it impossible for combat vehicles to pass, and offers a clear advantage to defensive forces. Given the resources available to both parties, and the characteristics of the terrain, it would seem that the Bosnian army (ABiH) had the necessary force to defend itself, if it had used full advantage of the terrain. This, however, did not occur.
Given the military advantage of the defensive forces it is very difficult to explain the absence of military resistance. The Muslim forces did not establish an effective defensive system and did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery, under control of the United Nations (UN) forces, at a time in which they had every reason to do so.
The lack of a military response stands in clear contrast to the offensive attitude which characterized the actions of the defensive forces in previous siege situations, which typically launched violent “raids” against the Serbian villages surrounding the enclave, thus provoking heavy casualties amongst the Serbian civilian population.
But in this instance, with the attention of the media focused upon the area, military defence of the enclave would have revealed the true situation in security zones, and demonstrate that these had never been genuinely demilitarized zones as was claimed, but were harboured highly-armed military units. Military resistance would jeopardize the image of “victim”, which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.
Throughout the entire operation, it was clear that there were profound disagreements between the leaders of the enclave. From a military viewpoint, there was total confusion. Oric, the charismatic commander of Srebenica, was absent.
The Sarajevo government did not authorize his return in order to lead the resistance. Military power fell into the hands of his lieutenants, who had a long history of incompatibility. The absence of Oric’s clear leadership led to a situation of total ineptitude. The contradictory orders of his successors completely paralyzed the forces under siege.
The behavior of the political leaders is also interesting. The local SDP president, Zlatko Dukic, in an interview with European Union observers, explained that Srebrenica formed part of a business transaction which involved a logistical support route to Sarajevo, via Vogosca.
He also claimed that the fall of the enclave formed part of an orchestrated campaign to discredit the West and win the support of Islamic countries. This was the reason for Oric to maintain a distance from his troops. This thesis was also defended by the local supporters of the DAS. There were also many rumours of a trade within the local population of the enclave.
Another curious aspect was the absence of a military reaction from the 2nd Corps of the Muslim army, which did nothing to relieve the military pressure on the enclave. It was common knowledge that the Serbian unit in the region, the “Drina Corps”, was exhausted and that the attack on Srebenica was only possible with the aid of the units from other regions. Despite this fact, Sarajevo did not lift a finger in order to launch an attack which would have divided the Serbian forces and exposed the vulnerabilities created by the concentration of resources around Srebenica. Such an attack would have reduced the military pressure on the enclave.
It is also important to register the pathetic appeal of the president of Opstina, Osman Suljic, on July 9, which implored military observers to say to the world that the Serbians were using chemical weapons. The same gentleman later accused the media of transmitting false news items on the resistance of troops in the enclave, requiring a denial from the UN. According to Suljic, the Muslim troops did not respond, and would never respond with heavy artillery fire. Simultaneously, he complained of the lack of food supplies and of the humanitarian situation. Curiously, observers were never allowed to inspect the food reserve deposits. The emphasis given by political leaders on the lack of military response and the absence of food provisions loosely suggests an official policy which began to be discernible.
In mid 1995, the prolongation of the war had dampened public interest. There had been a substantial reduction in the pressure of public opinion in the western democracies. An incident of this importance would nonetheless provide hot news material for the media during several weeks, could awaken public opinion and incite new passions. In this manner it would be possible to kill two birds with one stone: pressure could be laid to bear in order to lift the embargo and simultaneously the occupying countries would find it difficult to withdraw their forces, a hypothesis which had been advanced by leading UN figures such as Akashi and Boutros-Boutros Ghali.
The Muslims always harbored a secret hope that the embargo would be lifted. This had become the prime objective of the Sarajevo government, and had been fuelled by the vote in the US Senate and Congress in favor of such a measure. President Clinton, however, vetoed the decision and required a two thirds majority in both houses. The enclaves collapse gave the decisive push that the campaign needed. After its fall, the US Senate voted with over a two thirds majority in favor of lifting the embargo.
It was clear that sooner or later the enclaves would fall into the hands of the Serbians, it was an inevitability. There was a consensus amongst the negotiators (the US administration, the UN and European governments) that it was impossible to maintain the three Muslim enclaves, and that they should be exchanged for territories in Central Bosnia. Madeleine Albright suggested this exchange on numerous occasions to Izetbegovic, based on the proposals of the Contact Group.
As early as 1993, at the time of the first crisis of the enclave, Karadzic had proposed to Izetbgovic to exchange Srebrenica for the suburb of Vogosca. This exchange included the movement of populations in both directions. This was the purpose of secret negotiations in order to avoid undesirable publicity. This implied that the western countries accepted and encouraged ethnic separation.
The truth is that both the Americans and President Izetbegovic had tacitly agreed that it made no sense to insist in maintaining these isolated enclaves in a divided Bosnia. In 1995 nobody believed any longer in the inevitability of ethnic division of the territory. In the month of June 1995, before the military operation in Srebrenica, Alexander Vershbow, Special Assistant to President Clinton stated that “America should encourage the Bosnians to think in terms of territories with greater territorial coherence and compactness.” In other words this meant that the enclaves should be forgotten. The attack on Srebrenica, with no help from Belgrade, was completely unnecessary and proved to be one of the most significant examples of the political failure of the Serbian leadership.
Meanwhile the western media exacerbated the situation by transforming the enclaves into a powerful mass-media icon; a situation which Izetbegovic was quick to explore. CNN had daily broadcasts of the images of mass graves for thousands of corpses, obtained from spy satellites. Despite the microscopic precision in the localization of these graves, it is certain that no discovery to date has confirmed such suspicions. Since there are no longer restrictions on movement, we inevitably speculate on why they have still not been shown to the world.
If there had been a premeditated plan of genocide, instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north – which left the hypothesis to escape to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped. The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN.
The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there. In this instance, the media maintained an absolute silence, despite the fact that the genocide occurred over a three month period. The objective of Srebrenica was ethnic cleansing and not genocide, unlike what happened in Krajina, in which although there was no military action, the Croatian army decimated villages.
Despite knowledge of the fact that the enclaves were already a lost cause, Sarajevo insisted in drawing political dividends from the fact. The receptivity which had been created in the eyes of public opinion made it easier to sell the thesis of genocide.
But of even greater importance than the genocide thesis and the political isolation of the Serbs, was blackmailing of the UN: either the UN joined forces with the Sarajevo government in the conflict (which subsequently happened) or the UN would be completely discredited in the eyes of the public, leading in turn to support for Bosnia. Srebrenica was the last straw which led western governments to reach agreement on the need to cease their neutrality and commence a military action against one side in the conflict. It was the last straw which united the West in their desire to break “Serbian bestiality”. Sarajevo was conscious of the fact that it lacked the military capacity to defeat the Serbs. It was necessary to create conditions via which the international community could do this for them. Srebrenica played a vital role in this process.
Srebrenica represents one of a series of acts by the Serbian leaders intended to provoke the UN, in order to demonstrate their impotence. This was a serious strategic error which would cost them dear. The side which had everything to win by demonstrating the impotence of the UN was the Sarajevo leadership and not that of Pale. In 1995 it was clear that the change in the status quo required a powerful intervention which would overthrow the Serbian military power. Srebrenica was one of the pretexts, resulting from the short-sightedness of the Bosnian Serbian leaders.
The besieged forces could have easily defended the enclave, at least for much longer, if they had been well led. It proved convenient to let the enclave fall in this manner. Since the enclave was doomed to fall, it was preferable to let this happen in the most beneficial manner possible. But this would only have been viable if Sarajevo had political initiative and freedom of movement, which would never occur at the negotiating table. The deliberate fall of the enclave might appear to be an act of terrible machiavellian orchestration, but the truth is that the Sarajevo government had much to gain, as proved to be the case. Srebrenica was not a zero-sum game. The Serbians won a military victory but with highly negative political side-effects, which helped result in their definitive ostracization.
We might add a final curious note. As the UN observation posts were attacked, and proved impossible to maintain, the forces withdrew. The barricades set up by the Muslim army did not let the troops past. These troops were not treated as soldiers fleeing from the front line, but rather with a sordid differentiation.
The Muslims not only refused to fight to defend themselves, they forced others to fight on their behalf. In one instance, the commander of a Dutch vehicle decided after conversations with ABiH to pass the barrier. A Muslim soldier threw a hand grenade whose fragments mortally wounded him. The only UN soldier to die in the Srebrenica offensive, was killed by the Muslims.
General Major Carlos Martins Branco is a high-ranking officer of Portugal’s Armed Forces, who served as a UN Military Observer in Bosnia in 1995
https://www.globalresearch.ca/was-srebr ... bosnia/731
Re: The Destruction of Yugoslavia
The Dismantling of Yugoslavia (Part I)
A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse)
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Topics: Imperialism , Political Economy
Places: Yugoslavia
Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2002). David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago.
Jump to Part: II, III, IV | Glossary | Timeline
The breakup of Yugoslavia provided the fodder for what may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty years. The journalistic and historical narratives that were imposed upon these wars have systematically distorted their nature, and were deeply prejudicial, downplaying the external factors that drove Yugoslavia’s breakup while selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors. Perhaps no civil wars—and Yugoslavia suffered multiple civil wars across several theaters, at least two of which remain unresolved—have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms. Nor have any other civil wars been turned into such a proving ground for the related notions of “humanitarian intervention” and the “right [or responsibility] to protect.” Yugoslavia’s conflicts were not so much mediated by foreign powers as they were inflamed and exploited by them to advance policy goals. The result was a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in whose wake the world is still reeling.
Key to the Former Yugoslavia
From 1991 on, Yugoslavia and its successor states were exploited for ends as crass and as classically realpolitik as: (1) preserving the NATO military alliance despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc—NATO’s putative reason for existence; (2) overthrowing the UN Charter’s historic commitments to non-interference and respect for the sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in favor of the right of those more enlightened to interfere in the affairs of “failing” states, and even to wage wars against “rogue” states; (3) humiliating the European Union (EU) (formerly the European Community [EC]) over its inability to act decisively as a threat-making and militarily punitive force in its own backyard; (4) and of course dismantling the last economic and social holdout on the European continent yet to be integrated into the “Washington consensus.” The pursuit of these goals required that certain agents within Yugoslavia be cast in the role of the victims, and others as villains—the latter not just belligerents engaged in a civil war, but evil and murderous perpetrators of mass crimes which, in turn, would legitimate military intervention. At its extreme, in the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Yugoslavia has been cast as one gigantic crime scene, with the wars in their totality to be explained as a “Joint Criminal Enterprise,” the alleged purpose of which was the expulsion of non-Serbs from territories the Serbs wanted all to themselves—an utterly risible caricature, as we show below, but taken seriously in Western commentary, much as Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were to be taken early in the next decade.
While the destruction of Yugoslavia had both internal and external causes, it is easy to overlook the external causes, despite their great importance, because Western political interests and ideology have masked them by focusing entirely on the alleged resurgence of Serb nationalism and drive for a “Greater Serbia” as the root of the collapse. In a widely read book that accompanied their BBC documentary, Laura Silber and Allan Little wrote that “under Milosevic’s stewardship” the Serbs were “the key secessionists,” as Milosevic sought the “creation of a new enlarged Serbian state, encompassing as much territory of Yugoslavia as possible,” his “politics of ethnic intolerance provok[ing] the other nations of Yugoslavia, convincing them that it was impossible to stay in the Yugoslav federation and propelling them down the road to independence.” In another widely read book, Misha Glenny wrote that “without question, it was Milosevic who had willfully allowed the genie [of violent, intolerant nationalism] out of the bottle, knowing that the consequences might be dramatic and even bloody.” Noel Malcolm found that by the late 1980s, “Two processes seemed fused into one: the gathering of power into Milosevic’s hands, and the gathering of the Serbs into a single political unit which could either dominate Yugoslavia or break it apart.” For Roy Gutman, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina “was the third in a series of wars launched by Serbia….Serbia had harnessed the powerful military machine of the Yugoslav state to achieve the dream of its extreme nationalists: Greater Serbia.” For David Rieff, “even if [Croatia’s President Franjo] Tudjman had been an angel, Slobodan Milosevic would still have launched his war for Greater Serbia.”1
In a commentary in 2000, Tim Judah wrote that Milosevic was responsible for wars in “Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo: four wars since 1991 and [that] the result of these terrible conflicts, which began with the slogan ‘All Serbs in One State,’ is the cruelest irony.” Sometime journalist, sometime spokesperson for the ICTY at The Hague, Florence Hartmann, wrote that “Long before the war began, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and, following his example, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, had turned their backs on the Yugoslav ideal of an ethnically mixed federal State and set about carving out their own ethnically homogeneous States. With Milosevic’s failure, in 1991, to take control of all of Yugoslavia, the die was cast for war.” After Milosevic’s death in 2006, the New York Times’s Marlise Simons wrote about the “incendiary nationalism” of the man who “rose and then clung to power by resurrecting old nationalist grudges and inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia…the prime engineer of wars that pitted his fellow Serbs against the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Albanians of Kosovo and ultimately the combined forces of the entire NATO alliance.” And at the more frenzied end of the media spectrum, Mark Danner traced the Balkan war dynamic to the Serbs’ “unquenchable blood lust,” while Ed Vulliamy asserted that “Once Milosevic had back-stabbed his way to power and had switched from communism to fascism, he and Mirjana set out to establish their dream of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia cleansed of Croats and ‘mongrel races’ such as Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians.”2
This version of history—or ideology under the guise of history—fails at multiple levels. For one, it ignores the economic and financial turbulence within which Yugoslavia’s highly indebted, unevenly developed republics and autonomous regions found themselves in the years following Tito’s death in 1980, the aptly named “great reversal” during which the “standard of living whose previous growth had muted most regional grievances and legitimized Communist rule declined by fully one-quarter.”3 It also ignores the geopolitical context marked by the decline and eventual dissolution of the Soviet bloc, just as it ignores the German, Austrian, Vatican, EU, and eventual U.S. interest in the dismantlement of the socialist as well as federal dimensions of a unitary Yugoslav state, and the actions that brought about that result. Furthermore, it underrates the importance of Albanian (Kosovo), Slovene, Croat, Macedonian, Bosnian Muslim, Montenegrin, and even Hungarian (Vojvodina) nationalisms, and the competing interests of each of these groups as they sought sovereignty within, and later independence from, Yugoslavia. Perhaps most critical of all, it overrates the Serbs’ and Milosevic’s nationalism, gives these an unwarranted causal force, and transforms their expressed interest in preserving the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and/or allowing Serbs to remain within a single unified successor state into wars of aggression whose goal was “Greater Serbia.”
The standard narrative also fails egregiously in claiming the Western interventions humanitarian in purpose and result. In that narrative those interventions came late but did their work well. We will show on the contrary that they came early, encouraged divisions and ethnic wars, and in the end had extremely damaging effects on the freedom, independence, and welfare of the inhabitants, although they served well the ends of Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovo Albanian nationalists, as well as those of the United States and NATO. Furthermore, NATO’s 1999 bombing war against Yugoslavia, in violation of the UN Charter, built upon precedents set by NATO’s late summer 1995 bombing attacks on the Bosnian Serbs. More important, it provided additional precedents which advanced the same law-of-the-jungle lineage under the cover of “human rights.” It thus served as a precursor and a model for the subsequent U.S. regime’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lies that enabled them.
Another notable feature of the dismantling of Yugoslavia was the very widespread support for the Western interventions expressed by liberals and leftists. These intellectuals and journalists swallowed and helped propagate the standard narrative with remarkable gullibility, and their work made a major contribution to engineering consent to the ethnic cleansing wars, the NATO bombing attacks, the neocolonial occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the wars that followed against Afghanistan and Iraq.
1. Geopolitics and Nationalism
The Yugoslav (or “South Slav”) solution to this region of Southeastern Europe’s “national question” had always been tenuous. “Failure…to maintain the [united, federal] state throughout the…country’s existence [was] an ever present possibility,” Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick write. Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo—the three most bloodily contested areas in the 1990s—had all been “areas of high ethnic fragmentation” and “persistent hotbeds of political criminality.” Throughout Yugoslavia’s brief history, ethnic unity “was more an artifact of party pronouncements, induced personnel rotation, and institutional reorganization, than an outcome of genuine political incorporation or enhanced cohesion among the different segments of the population”4
This fragile state of affairs had been held together by the rule of Tito, along with Western support for the independent Yugoslavia in an otherwise Soviet-dominated area. Tito’s death in 1980 loosened the authoritarian cement. The collapse of the Soviet bloc a decade later deprived Yugoslavia of Western support for the unified state. As the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia purportedly instructed Belgrade upon his arrival in April 1989: “Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.”5
Yugoslavia’s economy was deeply troubled by the 1980s. Unemployment was dangerously high and persistent. Regional inequalities remained the rule. On a per-capita basis, Slovenia’s income by the late 1980s was at least twice the average for Yugoslavia as a whole, Croatia’s more than one-fourth greater, and Serbia proper’s roughly equal to the average. But Montenegro’s was only 74 percent of Yugoslavia’s average, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s 68 percent, Macedonia’s 63 percent, and Kosovo’s 27 percent.6 What is more, Yugoslavia borrowed abroad heavily in the 1970s, and it accumulated a large external debt that stood at $19.7 billion in 1989.7 With hyperinflation spiking upward to more than 1,000 percent this same year,8 Yugoslavia was pressured by the IMF to undertake a classic “shock therapy” program that threatened the solidarity of its population.
Economic decline was accompanied by a diminished confidence in the federal system and the rise of republican challenges to it. But as Susan Woodward notes, taking the lead “were not the unemployed but the employed who feared unemployment” and property owners who feared “that they would lose value and status.” It was in the two wealthiest republics of the northwest, Slovenia and Croatia, but Slovenia in particular, that the drive toward autonomy took the most pronounced anti-federal form.9 Although less than 30 percent of Yugoslavia’s population lived in Slovenia and Croatia, they accounted for half of federal tax revenues—before they stopped paying it. They openly resented these obligations. Longing for closer ties with Western Europe, they revolted.10
In what Robert Hayden calls the “new doctrine of republican supremacy,” by midsummer 1989 Slovenia had rejected the federation. Amendments were proposed for Slovenia’s constitution that clashed with its federal counterpart. Among these was a notorious amendment that defined “Slovenia” as the “state of the sovereign Slovenian nation”—a change that the Borba newspaper (Belgrade) editorialized would “divide Yugoslavia.” In February 1990, the Constitutional Court (a federal body) ruled against Slovenia’s assertion that its laws took precedence over federal ones. This included the “question of secession,” which the court ruled “could only be decided jointly with the agreement of all the republics.” The court also ruled “that the Presidency of Yugoslavia would have both the right and the obligation to declare a state of emergency in Slovenia if some general danger threatened the existence or constitutional order of that republic, on the grounds that such a condition would also threaten the whole of the country.” Slovenia “rejected the court’s jurisdiction,” Hayden adds.
In April 1990, both Slovenia and Croatia held the first multiparty elections in Yugoslavia since the late 1930s. A coalition of six parties called DEMOS that campaigned on an independence platform received 55 percent of the Slovene vote. In Croatia, Franjo Tudjman’s blatantly nationalistic and separatist Croatian Democratic Union received 70 percent. News accounts conveyed the resurgence of nationalist politics in Slovenia and Croatia, along with a distinct flavor of ethnic chauvinism pitting these Westernized republics against the other, less advanced counterparts. Hayden notes that on July 2, 1990, the Slovene parliament declared Slovenia’s “complete sovereignty,” and that the “republic’s laws superseded those of the federation.” Then on July 25, Croatia’s parliament did likewise, making Croatia “a politically and economically sovereign state” (Tudjman). Finally in September—still three months before its own republican elections, in which Milosevic’s Socialist Party received 65 percent on a platform of preserving Yugoslavia, in explicit opposition to the separatist parties that had come to power in Slovenia and Croatia, and were to be soundly defeated in Serbia—Serbia adopted a new constitution granting its laws the same supremacy over federal institutions. “If the Slovenes can do it, so can we,” a member of the Serbian Presidency said. With these challenges to federal authority by each of the three most powerful republics, the “collapse of the Yugoslav state was inevitable,” Hayden concludes.11
In contrast to the standard narrative, it is clear that nationalist forces at this time were stronger in Slovenia and Croatia than in Serbia. The decisive, history-making difference, however, was that in Slovenia and Croatia, the nationalist parties that won the April 1990 elections also adopted separatist platforms. Not only did they challenge the federal institutions as a whole, they also sought to sever ties with them—the last real bonds left from the Tito era.
Had Western powers supported the federal state, Yugoslavia might have held together—but they did not. Instead they not only encouraged Slovenia, Croatia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina to secede, they also insisted that the federal state not use force to prevent it. Diana Johnstone recounts a January 1991 meeting in Belgrade between the U.S. ambassador and Borisav Jovic, a Serb then serving on Yugoslavia’s collective State Presidency. “[T]he United States would not accept any use of force to disarm the paramilitaries,” Jovic was told. “Only ‘peaceful’ means were acceptable to Washington. The Yugoslav army was prohibited by the United States from using force to preserve the Federation, which meant that it could not prevent the Federation from being dismembered by force”12—a remarkable injunction against a sovereign state. Similar warnings were communicated by the EC as well. We might try to imagine what the United States would look like today, were the questions it faced in 1860 about its federal structure and the rights of states handled in as prejudicial a manner by much stronger foreign powers.
At the heart of the multiple civil wars had always been a simple question: In which state do the people of Yugoslavia want to live—the SFRY or a successor state?13 But for a great many Yugoslavs, an answer contrary to their desires and contrary to the Yugoslav constitution was imposed from the outside. One way this was accomplished was by the EC’s September 1991 appointment of an Arbitration Commission—the Badinter Commission—to assess legal aspects of the contests over Yugoslavia. This body’s work provided a “pseudo-legal gloss to the [EC’s] opportunistic consent to the destruction of Yugoslavia demanded by Germany,” Diana Johnstone writes.14 On each of the major issues contested by the Serbian republic, the commission ruled against Serbia. Yugoslavia was “in the process of dissolution,” the commission’s notorious Opinion No. 1 stated when published on December 7, 1991. Similarly, Opinion No. 2 held that “the Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina…[does not] have the right to self-determination,” though it “is entitled to all the rights concerned to minorities and ethnic groups under international law….” And Opinion No. 3 declared that “the [former] internal boundaries between Croatia and Serbia and between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia…[have] become frontiers protected by international law.”15 Remarkably, the commission recognized the right of republics to secede from the former Yugoslavia, and thus affixed the right of self-determination to Yugoslavia’s former administrative units; but the commission detached the right of self-determination from Yugoslavia’s peoples, and thus denied comparable rights to the new minorities now stranded within the breakaway republics. The breakaway republics themselves might be blessed with foreign recognition; or, like Serbia and Montenegro for the remainder of the decade, recognition would be withheld, and its peoples rendered effectively stateless.
From the standpoint of conflict resolution, this was a disastrous set of rulings, as the republics had been administrative units within Yugoslavia, and three of them (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia) included large ethnic minorities who strongly opposed the terms of Yugoslavia’s breakup, and who had been able to live with each other in relative peace on condition that their rights were safeguarded by a powerful federal state. Once the guarantees of the federal state were removed, it was inflammatory to deny peoples the right to choose the successor state in which they wanted to live; and the more ethnically mixed a republic or even commune, the more provocative the foreign demand that the old internal republican boundaries were sacrosanct.16 But the Badinter Commission’s rulings made perfect sense from a much different standpoint: That of prescribing an outline for Yugoslavia’s dismantlement that was in accord with the demands of the secessionist forces in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina and their Western supporters, while ignoring the rights (and wishes) of the constituent “nations” as specified in the Yugoslav constitution, and justifying foreign interference in the civil wars as a defense of the newly independent states.
Germany in particular encouraged Slovenia and Croatia to secede, which they did on June 25, 1991; formal recognition was granted on December 23, one year to the day after 94.5 percent of Slovenes had voted in a referendum in favor of independence. EC recognition followed on January 15, 1992, as did U.S. recognition in early April, when Washington recognized Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina all at once. More provocative yet, whereas the UN admitted all three breakaway republics as member states on May 22, it withheld the admission of a successor state to the dismantled Yugoslavia for another eight-and-a-half years; the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, composed of Serbia and Montenegro, often denigrated as the “rump” Yugoslavia, was not admitted until November 1, 2000, almost four weeks after Milosevic’s ouster. In other words, the two republics within the SFRY—itself a founding member of the UN—that rejected the dismantling of the federal state had been denied the right to succeed the SFRY as well as membership within the UN for close to a decade. At this highest level of the “international community,” it would be difficult to find a more extreme case of realpolitik at work, but it was a realpolitik that assured a violent outcome—and to the victor, the spoils.
A far more aggressive U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia began in 1993, with Washington anxious to redefine NATO’s mission and to expand NATO eastward; and searching for a client among the contestants, Washington settled on the Bosnian Muslims and Alija Izetbegovic. To serve these ends the Clinton administration sabotaged a series of peace efforts between 1993 and the Dayton accords of 1995;17 encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to reject any settlement until their military position had improved; helped arm and train the Muslims and Croats to shift the balance of forces on the ground;18 and finally settled at Dayton with an agreement that imposed upon the warring factions terms that could have been had as early as 1992, but for one missing link: In 1992, a Western-managed neocolonial regime, complete with NATO serving as its military enforcer, still was not achievable.19 Now into the twelfth year after Dayton, Bosnia remains a foreign occupied, severely divided, undemocratic, and in every sense of the term—failed state.20
A similar process took place in Kosovo, where an indigenous, ethnic Albanian independence movement was captured by an ultra-nationalist faction, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leaders soon recognized that, like the Bosnian Muslims, they could enlist U.S. and NATO sponsorship and military intervention by provoking Yugoslav authorities to violence and getting the incidents reported the right way. Thus in the year before NATO’s seventy-eight-day bombing war in the spring of 1999, the “KLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been,” British Defense Secretary George Robertson told his Parliament.21 As was true of the Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces before their major spring and summer offensives in 1995, the KLA received covert training and supplies from the Clinton administration,22 a well-guarded secret to the Western publics then being fed lines about “Milosevic’s willing executioners” marching off to perpetrate genocide in Kosovo.
On matters of principle, neither the EU nor the United States have been consistent on secession rights. In 1991–92, they encouraged the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to break away from Yugoslavia; the federal state was denied any right to use force to prevent them from doing so; and no one living within these republics was permitted to break away from them. And yet as recently as June 2006, the EU, United States, and UN accepted Montenegro’s right to break away from its Serbian partner; and more recently, the UN’s special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari has supported the right of the Serbian province of Kosovo to break away from Serbia once and for all—“to be supervised for an initial period by the international community.” Calling NATO-occupied Kosovo “a unique case that demands a unique solution,” Ahtisaari reassured that Kosovo would not “create a precedent for other unresolved conflicts.” With resolution 1244, Ahtisaari reports, the “Security Council responded to Milosevic’s actions in Kosovo by denying Serbia a role in its governance, placing Kosovo under temporary UN administration and envisaging a political process designed to determine Kosovo’s future. The combination of these factors makes Kosovo’s circumstances extraordinary.”23
The UN special envoy is badly deluded. Kosovo is a NATO-occupied province in southern Serbia, following NATO’s illegal war in the spring of 1999. Kosovo’s status ought to be no different than was Kuwait’s on August 3, 1990: It is a territory taken by military force in contravention of the UN Charter, and its independence should mean above all the restoration of its sovereignty to Serbia. But as with the subsequent U.S. wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Security Council neither condemned NATO’s 1999 aggression nor demanded that measures be taken to remedy it, for the simple reason that three of the Council’s Permanent Five members had launched it. And in 2007, the UN’s special envoy shows not the slightest interest that Serbia entered into its war-ending treaties under the duress of a conquered state. Instead of demanding that NATO return the province to the country from which it was seized, the UN not only accepts the aggression as a fait accompli, but also affirms its legitimacy on “humanitarian” grounds. The Ahtisaari solution is a case of “commissioned power politics.”24 The only “extraordinary” circumstance is to be found in which group of states launched the war. (On the fraudulence of the “humanitarian” rationale for NATO’s war, and the inhumanitarian effects of both the war and occupation, see sections 9 and 10.)
In sum, the United States and NATO entered the Yugoslav struggles quite early and were key external factors in the initiation of ethnic cleansing, in keeping it going, and in working toward a violent resolution of the conflicts that would keep the United States and NATO relevant in Europe, and secure NATO’s dominant position in the Balkans.
2. The Role of the Serbs, Milosevic, and ‘Greater Serbia’
A key element in the myth structure holds that Milosevic incited the Serbs to violence, setting loose the genie of Serb nationalism from the bottle that had contained it under Tito. During the prosecution’s opening statement at his trial, a videotape was played of Milosevic uttering the words “No one should dare beat you” at the Hall of Culture in Pristina in April 1987. “It was that phrase…and the response of others to it that gave this accused the taste or a better taste of power, maybe the first realisation of a dream,” prosecutor Geoffrey Nice told the court. With these words Milosevic “had broken the taboo of [Tito] against invoking nationalism,” Dusko Doder and Louise Branson write, “a taboo credited with submerging ethnic hatreds and holding Yugoslavia together for more than forty years….The initial impact was catastrophic: rabid ethnic nationalism swept all regions of Yugoslavia like a disease.”25
But neither these remarks by Milosevic nor his June 28, 1989, speech on the six-hundreth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo had anything like the characteristics imputed to them. Instead Milosevic used both speeches to appeal to multi-ethnic tolerance, accompanied by a warning against the threat posed to Yugoslavia by nationalism—“hanging like a sword over their heads all the time” (1989).26
In his 1987 speech—the words “no one should dare beat you” having been uttered in response to the news that the police had roughed up some local Serbs—Milosevic said “we do not want to divide people into Serbs and Albanians, but we must draw the line that divides the honest and progressive who are struggling for brotherhood and unity and national equality from the counterrevolution and nationalists on the other side.” Similarly in his 1989 speech, he said that “Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it,” and nothing in either of these speeches conflicted with this sentiment—nor can quotes like these be found in the speeches and writings of Tudjman or Izetbegovic. But the standard narrative steers clear of Milosevic’s actual words, understandably, as the misrepresentation that surrounds the simple phrase “no one should dare beat you” is deeply ingrained, and repeated by the ICTY’s prosecutor, Silber and Little, Glenny, Malcolm, Judah, Doder and Branson, and a cast of thousands; also by The Guardian and the New York Times, to name but two, all of whom allude to these speeches in the inciting-Serb-nationalism mode, but almost surely never bothered to read and report their actual content.
The massive trial of Milosevic, with 295 prosecution witnesses and 49,191 pages of courtroom transcripts, failed to produce a single credible piece of evidence that Milosevic had spoken disparagingly of non-Serb “nations” or ordered any killings that might fall under the category of war crimes. But the so-called Brioni Transcript of talks that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman held with his military and political leadership on July 31, 1995, reveal Tudjman instructing his generals to “inflict such a blow on the Serbs that they should virtually disappear.”27 What followed within days was Operation Storm, a massive, well-planned military blow that made the Krajina Serbs literally disappear. Imagine the windfall that a statement such as Tudjman’s would have provided Carla Del Ponte, Geoffrey Nice, Marlise Simons, and Ed Vulliamy, had it been Milosevic who uttered a statement directly linking him to criminal activity of this magnitude. But by the summer of 1995 Tudjman was a U.S. ally, and Operation Storm was approved and aided by the United States and some of its corporate mercenaries.28
Similarly, in Alija Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration, first circulated in 1970 but republished in 1990 for his presidential campaign, his major theme is what he called the “incompatibility of Islam with non-Islamic systems.” “There is neither peace nor coexistence between the ‘Islamic religion’ and non-Islamic social and political institutions,” Izetbegovic argued. “Having the right to govern its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of putting a foreign ideology into practice on its territory. There is thus no principle of secular government and the State must express and support the moral principles of religion.”29 Again, nothing ever uttered by Milosevic matches this for a program of ethno-religious intolerance. But as it was the prescription of a man who became a key U.S. client, Izetbegovic’s beliefs were ignored by the same journalists and historians for whom “no one should dare beat you” was alleged to herald the breakup of an entire country. Instead, David Rieff adopted the Bosnian Muslims as his “just cause” because, in his account, theirs was “a society committed to multiculturalism…and tolerance, and of an understanding of national identity as deriving from shared citizenship rather than ethnic identity”—and this witness-bearer claims to be referring to the “values” and “ideals” that Izetbegovic’s Bosnia would uphold!30
In the series of ICTY indictments of Milosevic et al., the charge that he was striving to produce a “Greater Serbia” ranks high among the causes of the wars. This is also the standard formula that entered into the intellectual and media narrative of cause, as expressed by Judah’s statement “that it all began with the slogan ‘All Serbs in One State’” and in an obituary in the Washington Post in March 2006, where we read again that Milosevic’s “pledge to unify all Serbs in one state turned into an ironic promise.” And in a comprehensive offering of cliché lies, we find Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books stating: “As had the Yugoslav wars, the Dayton peace sprang from the forehead of Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of Greater Serbia, the man who had built his power base by inciting and exploiting Serb nationalism.”31
One serious problem with the prosecution’s theory and the premise of the establishment narrative—that Yugoslavia’s wars were the result of the “incendiary nationalism” (Marlise Simons), “blood lust” (Mark Danner), and ruthless contempt for the “mongrel races” (Ed Vulliamy) by the Serbs and Milosevic—is that Serbia proper, the alleged heartland of this “joint criminal enterprise,” was itself subject to no “ethnic cleansing” whatsoever throughout the wars, but witnessed a net inflow of refugees from other former republics. (For data on refugee flows in the former Yugoslavia, see section 9.) This dramatic fact was brought out by Milosevic in his trial, during his examination of defense witness Mihailo Markovic, a noted professor of philosophy and one of the founders of Praxis. Acknowledging the “paradox in view of all these charges” concerning “Greater Serbia” and “ethnic cleansing,” Markovic said that “Serbia still has today the same national structure that it had in the 1970s,” and that although “Serbs were expulsed from practically all the other republics, Serbia did not change.” “Why would Serbs be expelling Croatians from Croatia if they’re not expelling them from Serbia?” Markovic asked the court. “Why would Serbs be expelling Albanians from Kosovo if they’re not expelling them from Belgrade and other parts of Serbia?” Shortly thereafter, Milosevic directed much the same question back toward Markovic:
Milosevic: f you have in mind that the greatest part of that Greater Serbia would be precisely the Republic of Serbia, which did not see any expulsions at all throughout the crisis, do you find it logical that Serbia should initiate expulsions from territories outside of Serbia?
Markovic: Well, I already told you it seems illogical to me.32
Obviously, these are important questions, whose answers cast doubts on a fundamental tenet of the standard narrative. If the Belgrade Serbs, as the alleged originators of the “joint criminal enterprise” to create a “Greater Serbia,” did not implement their conspiracy where they held unquestioned power, inside Serbia proper, then what is the likelihood that the prosecution’s theory for the wars has any merit? Lead prosecutor Geoffrey Nice had no solution for this “paradox.” And Marlise Simons, Mark Danner, Ed Vulliamy, David Rieff, and others have not dealt with it by any method other than yet more misleading rhetoric and strategic silence. This exchange was unreported in any Western media institution.
But in an even more devastating development in the Milosevic trial, which occurred during its defense phase, prosecutor Geoffrey Nice admitted that Milosevic’s objective of allowing Serbs to live in one state “was different from the concept of the Greater Serbia….”33 Nice was responding to questions that had been raised by amicus curiae attorney David Kay and presiding judge Patrick Robinson about the prosecution’s claim that Milosevic et al. had a plan to create a “Greater Serbia,” and what such a plan really meant—a charge that exists in each of the three indictments for Croatia, in both indictments for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that is either asserted or implied by countless news and historical treatments of the wars. “I had the clear impression that this was an essential foundation of the Prosecution’s case,” Judge Robinson noted.34 A short while later, Judge O-Gon Kwon asked Nice to explain to the court the “difference of the Greater Serbia idea and the idea of one—all Serbs living in one state.” Nice replied:
t may be that the accused’s aim was for that which could qualify as a de facto Greater Serbia….Did he find the source of his position at least overtly in [the] historical concept of Greater Serbia; no, he didn’t. His was…the pragmatic one of ensuring that all the Serbs who had lived in the former Yugoslavia should be allowed for either constitutional or other reasons to live in the same unit. That meant as we know historically from his perspective first of all that the former Yugoslavia shouldn’t be broken up….35
In this passage, Nice betrays the fact that the prosecution itself doesn’t believe its most notorious accusation against Milosevic et al., as to why Yugoslavia broke apart: That leading Serbs in Belgrade and elsewhere conspired to create a living space exclusively for Serbs, cleansed of the other ethnic groups (“Greater Serbia”); that they entered into this conspiracy by no later than August 1, 1991; and that they were willing to perpetrate any atrocity, genocide included, to execute their conspiracy. Instead, what the prosecution really believes is that the breakup of Yugoslavia was accompanied by civil wars, plain and simple; that the principal crime for which Milosevic et al. have always been held responsible among the Western powers was the crime of trying to hold Yugoslavia together, against the West’s efforts to dismantle it; and that once events beyond their control closed-off this option, they attempted to hang onto a smaller successor state established on the same principles as the larger one they had lost. That they were not striving for an “ethnically pure” Serb state was made clear by the absence of any ethnic cleansing in Serbia proper.
Of course, the prosecution would reply that once Yugoslavia had undergone the process of dismantlement—and on July 4, 1992, Opinion No. 8 of the Badinter Commission declared that as a “matter of fact,” the “process of dissolution of the SFRY referred to in Opinion No. 1…is now complete and that the SFRY no longer exists”36—any attempt by the minority Serb populations of Croatia or Bosnia to secede from the new, internationally recognized states and to join the “rump” Yugoslavia was an act of rebellion, and any aid provided by Milosevic to these rebels was interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, aggressive, and criminal. But Badinter ran roughshod over both Yugoslavia’s constitution and fundamental principles of self-determination: The former reserved the right of secession to Yugoslavia’s constituent nations, not to its administrative units;37 and Badinter’s endorsement of the independence claims of Yugoslavia’s Slovenes, Croats, Muslims, and Macedonians, while rejecting the claims of its Serbs, ranks among the greatest and most costly exercises of the double-standard in modern times.38
Despite the allegations to the contrary, it remained the prosecution’s belief throughout the trial that the Milosevic regime’s political objective at the time of the secessions of Slovenia, Croatia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina was to preserve the SFRY; and that if this could not be done, then as much of the old SFRY as possible should be kept within a single, unitary successor state. Indeed, this was the reason for which Milosevic’s Socialist Party had received 65 percent of the Serbian vote in December 1990, in the republic’s first multiparty elections: Not to create a “Greater Serbia,” but to preserve Yugoslavia. Until historians recognize that the ultimate crime for which the serial indictments have been brought against Milosevic et al. was the crime of trying to hold the SFRY together or a successor state on a similarly unified, federal model, they will never understand the enormity of what Nice conceded in court on August 25, 2005. As best we can tell, this startling concession to the Milosevic defense and the historical record, which amounted to the prosecution’s de facto abandonment of the main component of the ICTY’s case, has never been reported in the major English-language print media.
Furthermore, it is not even true that Milosevic fought to keep all Serbs in one state. He either supported or agreed to a series of settlements, like Brioni (July 1991), Lisbon (February 1992), Vance-Owen (January 1993), Owen-Stoltenberg (August 1993), the European Action Plan (January 1994), the Contact Group Plan (July 1994), and ultimately the Dayton Accords (November 1995)—none of which would have kept all Serbs in one state.39 He declined to defend the Croatian Serbs when they were ethnically cleansed in two related operations in May and August 1995. He agreed to an official contraction in the earlier SFRY to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e., to Serbia and Montenegro—itself further shrunk with the exit of Montenegro), which in effect abandoned the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to their fate outside any “Greater Serbia.” His aid to Serbs in both Croatia and Bosnia was sporadic, and their leaders felt him to have been an opportunistic and unreliable ally, more concerned with getting the UN sanctions against Yugoslavia removed than making serious sacrifices for the stranded Serbs elsewhere.
In short, Milosevic struggled fitfully to defend Serbs who felt abandoned and threatened in the hostile, secessionist states of a progressively dismantled Yugoslavia; and he wanted, but did not fight very hard, to preserve a shrinking Yugoslav Federation that would have kept all the Serbs in a successor common state. For historians, journalists, and the ICTY to call this a drive for a “Greater Serbia” is Orwellian political rhetoric that transforms a weak and unsuccessful defense of a shrinking Yugoslavia into a bold and aggressive offensive to seize other peoples’ territory. It is also of interest that the clear drives of Croatian and Kosovo Albanian nationalists toward a “Greater Croatia” and “Greater Albania,” and Bosnian Muslim leader Izetbegovic’s refusal to agree to a settlement (with U.S. encouragement) in hopes that with NATO aid he could rule over all three “nations” in Bosnia, have been ignored in the standard narrative as serious causal factors in the ethnic wars of the 1990s.
It should also be clear that the assured claims of Silber and Little, Glenny, Malcolm, Judah, and Simons (and they are only a small sample from a vast universe) about who was responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia is ideology and myth parading under the guise of history—easily confuted, but part of the standard narrative that is unchallengeable in a closed system.
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Notes
↩ Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 26; Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 33; Noel Malcolm, Bosnia, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 212; Roy Gutman, introduction, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), xviii; David Rieff, “The Balkans,” Toronto Globe and Mail, July 19, 1997.
↩ Tim Judah, “Is Milosevic Planning Another Balkan War?” Scotland on Sunday, March 19, 2000; Florence Hartmann, “Bosnia,” in Roy Gutman & David Rieff, eds., Crimes of War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 50–51; Marlise Simons, “Slobodan Milosevic, 64, Former Yugoslav Leader Accused of War Crimes, Dies,” New York Times, March 12, 2006; Mark Danner, “America and the Bosnia Genocide,” New York Review of Books, December 4, 1997; Ed Vulliamy, “Profile: Mira Milosevic,” The Observer, July 8, 2001.
↩ Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (New York: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. 40–71; and John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 322. In Lydall’s words, “the year 1979 was climacteric: from that year onwards, the trend of economic change [was] in almost all respects downwards” (40).
↩ Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), esp. chap. 7; here 1; 152; 157.
↩ Warren Zimmermann, “The Last Ambassador,” Foreign Affairs, March/April, 1995.
↩ Dijana Plestina, Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), table 6.1, 180. For what these numbers represent, see n. 9, xxvii.
↩ World Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), table 21, “Total external debt,” 245.
↩ Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), esp. figure 3.3, 54.
↩ Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. 345–70, here 361. Also see “Unemployment Rate by Republic or Province,” 384.
↩ As Dijana Plestina sums up her study: “[E]conomic regionalism, that is, the pursuit of one’s own region’s economic interests, explains better than any other factor the Yugoslav socialist regime’s overall failure in narrowing regional economic inequalities.” Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia, 173. She adds that by 1990, the disparity in per capita income between Slovenia and Kosovo had reached as high as 8:1.
↩ Robert M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 27–52.
↩ Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 24.
↩ The logic of the constitutional crisis that led to Yugoslavia’s violent breakup is best exemplified by the oft-quoted, oft-misrepresented, and perhaps apocryphal quip attributed to a Macedonian political figure: “Why should I be a minority in your State, when you can be a minority in mine?”
↩ Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, 36–40.
↩ Perhaps the most accessible copy of the Arbitration (or Badinter) Commission’s Opinions is to be found within the electronic archives of the European Journal of International Law 3, no. 1 (1992), and 4, no. 1 (1993), http:// www.ejil.org.
↩ According to Yugoslavia’s 1981 census, out of a total population of 22.4 million, Slovenia was 90.5 percent Slovene; “Serbia proper” 85.4 percent Serb; Croatia 75.1 percent Croat and 11.5 percent Serbs; Montenegro 68.5 percent Montenegrin; Macedonia 67 percent Macedonian; and Bosnia- Herzegovina 39.5 percent Muslim, 32 percent Serb, and 18.4 percent Croat. The autonomous region of Kosovo was 77.4 percent Albanian; and Vojvodina 54.4 percent Serb and 19 percent Hungarian. See Cohen and Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic, appendix A, “The Ethnic Composition of Yugoslavia,” table A.1, 164.
↩ See the invaluable memoir of David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995).
↩ On covert aid to the Croatian and Muslim forces, see the report by the House Committee on International Relations (a.k.a. the “Iranian Green Light Subcommittee”), Final Report of the Select Subcommittee to Investigate the United States Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and Bosnia, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997); and Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992–1995 (London: Lit Verlag, 2003), esp. 157–218.
↩ NATO remained the sole military enforcer of Dayton from January 1996 through December 2005, when it was joined by a European Union force (EUFOR).
↩ See David Chandler, Bosnia (Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 1999); David Chandler, Empire in Denial (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006).
↩ George Robertson, Testimony before the Select Committee on Defense, U.K. House of Commons, March 24, 1999, par. 391.
↩ On covert aid to the KLA, see, e.g., Ian Bruce, “Serbs used CIA phone to call in convoy raid,” The Herald (Glasgow), April 19, 1999; Tom Walker & Aidan Laverty, “CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army,” Sunday Times, March 12, 2000; “NATO Faces Combat With KLA Forces Which the US Trained and Armed,” Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, February, 2001; Peter Beaumont et al., “‘CIA’s bastard army ran riot in Balkans,’” The Observer, March 11, 2001; James Bissett, “We created a monster,” Toronto Globe and Mail, July 31, 2001.
↩ Martti Ahtisaari, Report of the Special Envoy of the Secretary- General on Kosovo’s future status (S/2007/168), March 26, 2007, par. 5; par. 15.
↩ See Johan Galtung et al., “Ahtisaari’s Kosovo proposal,” Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, May 11, 2007.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, February 12, 2002, 19; Dusko Doder & Louise Branson, Milosevic (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 3–4; also 43ff.
↩ See “Speech by Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo Polje,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, April 28, 1987; and “Slobodan Milosevic addresses rally at Gazimestan,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, June 30, 1989.
↩ For our reference to the Brioni Transcripts of July 31, 1995, see Milosevic Trial Transcript, June 26, 2003, 23200 (lines 1–10).
↩ Ken Silverstein quotes a writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine, who noted that as of early 1995, the Croatian military “consisted of criminal rabble, a bunch of fucking losers. MPRI [i.e., the Virginiabased Military Professional Resources Incorporated] turned them into something resembling an army.” Private Warriors (New York: Verso, 2000), 173.
↩ Alija Izetbegovic, Islamic De-claration, 1970, 1990, 30, as posted to the Web site of the Balkan Repository Project, http://www .balkanarchive.org.yu.
↩ David Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 10.
↩ Daniel Williams & R. Jeffrey Smith, “Crusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End,” Washington Post, March 12, 2006; Mark Danner, “Endgame in Kosovo,” New York Review of Books, April 7, 1999.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, November 16, 2004, 33460–63.
↩ See Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43223ff; here 43225, lines 9–10.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43224, lines 11–12.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43227, line 6 through 43228, line 3, emphases added.
↩ For the Badinter sources, see note 15, above.
↩ According to the opening words of the Preamble to the 1974 Constitution of the SFRY, “The nations of Yugoslavia, preceding from the right of every nation to self-determination, including the right to secession, on the basis of their will freely expressed in the common struggle of all nations and nationalities in the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution…” (emphases added). See Snezana Trifunovska, ed., Yugoslavia Through Documents (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1994), 224–33, here 224. No fragment among this Constitution’s 10 principles or 406 articles contradicted what its preamble unambiguously proclaimed, and earlier constitutions (e.g., 1963 and 1971) had as well: That the “subjects” to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged were explicitly defined as nations—real flesh and bone people, not republican units in the federation—of which Yugoslavia recognized six equally: Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Slovenes.
↩ See Peter Radan, The Break-up of Yugoslavia and International Law (New York: Routledge, 2002), 216–22. Here we add that the Slovene and Croat declarations of independence of June 25, 1991, each separately affirmed the “right of the Slovene nation to self-determination” and the “right of the Croatian nation to self-determination.” Thus, as the two triggers for Yugoslavia’s breakup, this fact underscored the belief then prevalent in Yugoslavia that the legal subject to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged was the nations, and not, as the Badinter Commission would later rule, the republics (i.e., mere administrative units within the SFRY). See Trifunovska, Yugoslavia Through Documents, (a) Republic of Slovenia Assembly Declaration of Independence, Ljubljana, June 25, 1991, 286; and (b) Constitutional Decision on the Sovereignty and Independence of the Republic of Croatia, Zagreb, June 25, 1991, 299.
↩ See, e.g., Owen, Balkan Odyssey; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy; Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 2nd. ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); and Steven L. Burg & Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
https://monthlyreview.org/2007/10/01/th ... ugoslavia/
A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse)
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Topics: Imperialism , Political Economy
Places: Yugoslavia
Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2002). David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago.
Jump to Part: II, III, IV | Glossary | Timeline
The breakup of Yugoslavia provided the fodder for what may have been the most misrepresented series of major events over the past twenty years. The journalistic and historical narratives that were imposed upon these wars have systematically distorted their nature, and were deeply prejudicial, downplaying the external factors that drove Yugoslavia’s breakup while selectively exaggerating and misrepresenting the internal factors. Perhaps no civil wars—and Yugoslavia suffered multiple civil wars across several theaters, at least two of which remain unresolved—have ever been harvested as cynically by foreign powers to establish legal precedents and new categories of international duties and norms. Nor have any other civil wars been turned into such a proving ground for the related notions of “humanitarian intervention” and the “right [or responsibility] to protect.” Yugoslavia’s conflicts were not so much mediated by foreign powers as they were inflamed and exploited by them to advance policy goals. The result was a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in whose wake the world is still reeling.
Key to the Former Yugoslavia
From 1991 on, Yugoslavia and its successor states were exploited for ends as crass and as classically realpolitik as: (1) preserving the NATO military alliance despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc—NATO’s putative reason for existence; (2) overthrowing the UN Charter’s historic commitments to non-interference and respect for the sovereign equality, territorial integrity, and political independence of all states in favor of the right of those more enlightened to interfere in the affairs of “failing” states, and even to wage wars against “rogue” states; (3) humiliating the European Union (EU) (formerly the European Community [EC]) over its inability to act decisively as a threat-making and militarily punitive force in its own backyard; (4) and of course dismantling the last economic and social holdout on the European continent yet to be integrated into the “Washington consensus.” The pursuit of these goals required that certain agents within Yugoslavia be cast in the role of the victims, and others as villains—the latter not just belligerents engaged in a civil war, but evil and murderous perpetrators of mass crimes which, in turn, would legitimate military intervention. At its extreme, in the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Yugoslavia has been cast as one gigantic crime scene, with the wars in their totality to be explained as a “Joint Criminal Enterprise,” the alleged purpose of which was the expulsion of non-Serbs from territories the Serbs wanted all to themselves—an utterly risible caricature, as we show below, but taken seriously in Western commentary, much as Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” were to be taken early in the next decade.
While the destruction of Yugoslavia had both internal and external causes, it is easy to overlook the external causes, despite their great importance, because Western political interests and ideology have masked them by focusing entirely on the alleged resurgence of Serb nationalism and drive for a “Greater Serbia” as the root of the collapse. In a widely read book that accompanied their BBC documentary, Laura Silber and Allan Little wrote that “under Milosevic’s stewardship” the Serbs were “the key secessionists,” as Milosevic sought the “creation of a new enlarged Serbian state, encompassing as much territory of Yugoslavia as possible,” his “politics of ethnic intolerance provok[ing] the other nations of Yugoslavia, convincing them that it was impossible to stay in the Yugoslav federation and propelling them down the road to independence.” In another widely read book, Misha Glenny wrote that “without question, it was Milosevic who had willfully allowed the genie [of violent, intolerant nationalism] out of the bottle, knowing that the consequences might be dramatic and even bloody.” Noel Malcolm found that by the late 1980s, “Two processes seemed fused into one: the gathering of power into Milosevic’s hands, and the gathering of the Serbs into a single political unit which could either dominate Yugoslavia or break it apart.” For Roy Gutman, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina “was the third in a series of wars launched by Serbia….Serbia had harnessed the powerful military machine of the Yugoslav state to achieve the dream of its extreme nationalists: Greater Serbia.” For David Rieff, “even if [Croatia’s President Franjo] Tudjman had been an angel, Slobodan Milosevic would still have launched his war for Greater Serbia.”1
In a commentary in 2000, Tim Judah wrote that Milosevic was responsible for wars in “Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo: four wars since 1991 and [that] the result of these terrible conflicts, which began with the slogan ‘All Serbs in One State,’ is the cruelest irony.” Sometime journalist, sometime spokesperson for the ICTY at The Hague, Florence Hartmann, wrote that “Long before the war began, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and, following his example, Franjo Tudjman in Croatia, had turned their backs on the Yugoslav ideal of an ethnically mixed federal State and set about carving out their own ethnically homogeneous States. With Milosevic’s failure, in 1991, to take control of all of Yugoslavia, the die was cast for war.” After Milosevic’s death in 2006, the New York Times’s Marlise Simons wrote about the “incendiary nationalism” of the man who “rose and then clung to power by resurrecting old nationalist grudges and inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia…the prime engineer of wars that pitted his fellow Serbs against the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Albanians of Kosovo and ultimately the combined forces of the entire NATO alliance.” And at the more frenzied end of the media spectrum, Mark Danner traced the Balkan war dynamic to the Serbs’ “unquenchable blood lust,” while Ed Vulliamy asserted that “Once Milosevic had back-stabbed his way to power and had switched from communism to fascism, he and Mirjana set out to establish their dream of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia cleansed of Croats and ‘mongrel races’ such as Bosnia’s Muslims and Kosovo’s Albanians.”2
This version of history—or ideology under the guise of history—fails at multiple levels. For one, it ignores the economic and financial turbulence within which Yugoslavia’s highly indebted, unevenly developed republics and autonomous regions found themselves in the years following Tito’s death in 1980, the aptly named “great reversal” during which the “standard of living whose previous growth had muted most regional grievances and legitimized Communist rule declined by fully one-quarter.”3 It also ignores the geopolitical context marked by the decline and eventual dissolution of the Soviet bloc, just as it ignores the German, Austrian, Vatican, EU, and eventual U.S. interest in the dismantlement of the socialist as well as federal dimensions of a unitary Yugoslav state, and the actions that brought about that result. Furthermore, it underrates the importance of Albanian (Kosovo), Slovene, Croat, Macedonian, Bosnian Muslim, Montenegrin, and even Hungarian (Vojvodina) nationalisms, and the competing interests of each of these groups as they sought sovereignty within, and later independence from, Yugoslavia. Perhaps most critical of all, it overrates the Serbs’ and Milosevic’s nationalism, gives these an unwarranted causal force, and transforms their expressed interest in preserving the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) and/or allowing Serbs to remain within a single unified successor state into wars of aggression whose goal was “Greater Serbia.”
The standard narrative also fails egregiously in claiming the Western interventions humanitarian in purpose and result. In that narrative those interventions came late but did their work well. We will show on the contrary that they came early, encouraged divisions and ethnic wars, and in the end had extremely damaging effects on the freedom, independence, and welfare of the inhabitants, although they served well the ends of Croatian, Bosnian Muslim, and Kosovo Albanian nationalists, as well as those of the United States and NATO. Furthermore, NATO’s 1999 bombing war against Yugoslavia, in violation of the UN Charter, built upon precedents set by NATO’s late summer 1995 bombing attacks on the Bosnian Serbs. More important, it provided additional precedents which advanced the same law-of-the-jungle lineage under the cover of “human rights.” It thus served as a precursor and a model for the subsequent U.S. regime’s attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and the lies that enabled them.
Another notable feature of the dismantling of Yugoslavia was the very widespread support for the Western interventions expressed by liberals and leftists. These intellectuals and journalists swallowed and helped propagate the standard narrative with remarkable gullibility, and their work made a major contribution to engineering consent to the ethnic cleansing wars, the NATO bombing attacks, the neocolonial occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo, and the wars that followed against Afghanistan and Iraq.
1. Geopolitics and Nationalism
The Yugoslav (or “South Slav”) solution to this region of Southeastern Europe’s “national question” had always been tenuous. “Failure…to maintain the [united, federal] state throughout the…country’s existence [was] an ever present possibility,” Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick write. Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo—the three most bloodily contested areas in the 1990s—had all been “areas of high ethnic fragmentation” and “persistent hotbeds of political criminality.” Throughout Yugoslavia’s brief history, ethnic unity “was more an artifact of party pronouncements, induced personnel rotation, and institutional reorganization, than an outcome of genuine political incorporation or enhanced cohesion among the different segments of the population”4
This fragile state of affairs had been held together by the rule of Tito, along with Western support for the independent Yugoslavia in an otherwise Soviet-dominated area. Tito’s death in 1980 loosened the authoritarian cement. The collapse of the Soviet bloc a decade later deprived Yugoslavia of Western support for the unified state. As the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia purportedly instructed Belgrade upon his arrival in April 1989: “Yugoslavia no longer enjoyed the geopolitical importance that the United States had given it during the Cold War.”5
Yugoslavia’s economy was deeply troubled by the 1980s. Unemployment was dangerously high and persistent. Regional inequalities remained the rule. On a per-capita basis, Slovenia’s income by the late 1980s was at least twice the average for Yugoslavia as a whole, Croatia’s more than one-fourth greater, and Serbia proper’s roughly equal to the average. But Montenegro’s was only 74 percent of Yugoslavia’s average, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s 68 percent, Macedonia’s 63 percent, and Kosovo’s 27 percent.6 What is more, Yugoslavia borrowed abroad heavily in the 1970s, and it accumulated a large external debt that stood at $19.7 billion in 1989.7 With hyperinflation spiking upward to more than 1,000 percent this same year,8 Yugoslavia was pressured by the IMF to undertake a classic “shock therapy” program that threatened the solidarity of its population.
Economic decline was accompanied by a diminished confidence in the federal system and the rise of republican challenges to it. But as Susan Woodward notes, taking the lead “were not the unemployed but the employed who feared unemployment” and property owners who feared “that they would lose value and status.” It was in the two wealthiest republics of the northwest, Slovenia and Croatia, but Slovenia in particular, that the drive toward autonomy took the most pronounced anti-federal form.9 Although less than 30 percent of Yugoslavia’s population lived in Slovenia and Croatia, they accounted for half of federal tax revenues—before they stopped paying it. They openly resented these obligations. Longing for closer ties with Western Europe, they revolted.10
In what Robert Hayden calls the “new doctrine of republican supremacy,” by midsummer 1989 Slovenia had rejected the federation. Amendments were proposed for Slovenia’s constitution that clashed with its federal counterpart. Among these was a notorious amendment that defined “Slovenia” as the “state of the sovereign Slovenian nation”—a change that the Borba newspaper (Belgrade) editorialized would “divide Yugoslavia.” In February 1990, the Constitutional Court (a federal body) ruled against Slovenia’s assertion that its laws took precedence over federal ones. This included the “question of secession,” which the court ruled “could only be decided jointly with the agreement of all the republics.” The court also ruled “that the Presidency of Yugoslavia would have both the right and the obligation to declare a state of emergency in Slovenia if some general danger threatened the existence or constitutional order of that republic, on the grounds that such a condition would also threaten the whole of the country.” Slovenia “rejected the court’s jurisdiction,” Hayden adds.
In April 1990, both Slovenia and Croatia held the first multiparty elections in Yugoslavia since the late 1930s. A coalition of six parties called DEMOS that campaigned on an independence platform received 55 percent of the Slovene vote. In Croatia, Franjo Tudjman’s blatantly nationalistic and separatist Croatian Democratic Union received 70 percent. News accounts conveyed the resurgence of nationalist politics in Slovenia and Croatia, along with a distinct flavor of ethnic chauvinism pitting these Westernized republics against the other, less advanced counterparts. Hayden notes that on July 2, 1990, the Slovene parliament declared Slovenia’s “complete sovereignty,” and that the “republic’s laws superseded those of the federation.” Then on July 25, Croatia’s parliament did likewise, making Croatia “a politically and economically sovereign state” (Tudjman). Finally in September—still three months before its own republican elections, in which Milosevic’s Socialist Party received 65 percent on a platform of preserving Yugoslavia, in explicit opposition to the separatist parties that had come to power in Slovenia and Croatia, and were to be soundly defeated in Serbia—Serbia adopted a new constitution granting its laws the same supremacy over federal institutions. “If the Slovenes can do it, so can we,” a member of the Serbian Presidency said. With these challenges to federal authority by each of the three most powerful republics, the “collapse of the Yugoslav state was inevitable,” Hayden concludes.11
In contrast to the standard narrative, it is clear that nationalist forces at this time were stronger in Slovenia and Croatia than in Serbia. The decisive, history-making difference, however, was that in Slovenia and Croatia, the nationalist parties that won the April 1990 elections also adopted separatist platforms. Not only did they challenge the federal institutions as a whole, they also sought to sever ties with them—the last real bonds left from the Tito era.
Had Western powers supported the federal state, Yugoslavia might have held together—but they did not. Instead they not only encouraged Slovenia, Croatia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina to secede, they also insisted that the federal state not use force to prevent it. Diana Johnstone recounts a January 1991 meeting in Belgrade between the U.S. ambassador and Borisav Jovic, a Serb then serving on Yugoslavia’s collective State Presidency. “[T]he United States would not accept any use of force to disarm the paramilitaries,” Jovic was told. “Only ‘peaceful’ means were acceptable to Washington. The Yugoslav army was prohibited by the United States from using force to preserve the Federation, which meant that it could not prevent the Federation from being dismembered by force”12—a remarkable injunction against a sovereign state. Similar warnings were communicated by the EC as well. We might try to imagine what the United States would look like today, were the questions it faced in 1860 about its federal structure and the rights of states handled in as prejudicial a manner by much stronger foreign powers.
At the heart of the multiple civil wars had always been a simple question: In which state do the people of Yugoslavia want to live—the SFRY or a successor state?13 But for a great many Yugoslavs, an answer contrary to their desires and contrary to the Yugoslav constitution was imposed from the outside. One way this was accomplished was by the EC’s September 1991 appointment of an Arbitration Commission—the Badinter Commission—to assess legal aspects of the contests over Yugoslavia. This body’s work provided a “pseudo-legal gloss to the [EC’s] opportunistic consent to the destruction of Yugoslavia demanded by Germany,” Diana Johnstone writes.14 On each of the major issues contested by the Serbian republic, the commission ruled against Serbia. Yugoslavia was “in the process of dissolution,” the commission’s notorious Opinion No. 1 stated when published on December 7, 1991. Similarly, Opinion No. 2 held that “the Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina…[does not] have the right to self-determination,” though it “is entitled to all the rights concerned to minorities and ethnic groups under international law….” And Opinion No. 3 declared that “the [former] internal boundaries between Croatia and Serbia and between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia…[have] become frontiers protected by international law.”15 Remarkably, the commission recognized the right of republics to secede from the former Yugoslavia, and thus affixed the right of self-determination to Yugoslavia’s former administrative units; but the commission detached the right of self-determination from Yugoslavia’s peoples, and thus denied comparable rights to the new minorities now stranded within the breakaway republics. The breakaway republics themselves might be blessed with foreign recognition; or, like Serbia and Montenegro for the remainder of the decade, recognition would be withheld, and its peoples rendered effectively stateless.
From the standpoint of conflict resolution, this was a disastrous set of rulings, as the republics had been administrative units within Yugoslavia, and three of them (Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia) included large ethnic minorities who strongly opposed the terms of Yugoslavia’s breakup, and who had been able to live with each other in relative peace on condition that their rights were safeguarded by a powerful federal state. Once the guarantees of the federal state were removed, it was inflammatory to deny peoples the right to choose the successor state in which they wanted to live; and the more ethnically mixed a republic or even commune, the more provocative the foreign demand that the old internal republican boundaries were sacrosanct.16 But the Badinter Commission’s rulings made perfect sense from a much different standpoint: That of prescribing an outline for Yugoslavia’s dismantlement that was in accord with the demands of the secessionist forces in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina and their Western supporters, while ignoring the rights (and wishes) of the constituent “nations” as specified in the Yugoslav constitution, and justifying foreign interference in the civil wars as a defense of the newly independent states.
Germany in particular encouraged Slovenia and Croatia to secede, which they did on June 25, 1991; formal recognition was granted on December 23, one year to the day after 94.5 percent of Slovenes had voted in a referendum in favor of independence. EC recognition followed on January 15, 1992, as did U.S. recognition in early April, when Washington recognized Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina all at once. More provocative yet, whereas the UN admitted all three breakaway republics as member states on May 22, it withheld the admission of a successor state to the dismantled Yugoslavia for another eight-and-a-half years; the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, composed of Serbia and Montenegro, often denigrated as the “rump” Yugoslavia, was not admitted until November 1, 2000, almost four weeks after Milosevic’s ouster. In other words, the two republics within the SFRY—itself a founding member of the UN—that rejected the dismantling of the federal state had been denied the right to succeed the SFRY as well as membership within the UN for close to a decade. At this highest level of the “international community,” it would be difficult to find a more extreme case of realpolitik at work, but it was a realpolitik that assured a violent outcome—and to the victor, the spoils.
A far more aggressive U.S. policy toward Yugoslavia began in 1993, with Washington anxious to redefine NATO’s mission and to expand NATO eastward; and searching for a client among the contestants, Washington settled on the Bosnian Muslims and Alija Izetbegovic. To serve these ends the Clinton administration sabotaged a series of peace efforts between 1993 and the Dayton accords of 1995;17 encouraged the Bosnian Muslims to reject any settlement until their military position had improved; helped arm and train the Muslims and Croats to shift the balance of forces on the ground;18 and finally settled at Dayton with an agreement that imposed upon the warring factions terms that could have been had as early as 1992, but for one missing link: In 1992, a Western-managed neocolonial regime, complete with NATO serving as its military enforcer, still was not achievable.19 Now into the twelfth year after Dayton, Bosnia remains a foreign occupied, severely divided, undemocratic, and in every sense of the term—failed state.20
A similar process took place in Kosovo, where an indigenous, ethnic Albanian independence movement was captured by an ultra-nationalist faction, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leaders soon recognized that, like the Bosnian Muslims, they could enlist U.S. and NATO sponsorship and military intervention by provoking Yugoslav authorities to violence and getting the incidents reported the right way. Thus in the year before NATO’s seventy-eight-day bombing war in the spring of 1999, the “KLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Yugoslav authorities had been,” British Defense Secretary George Robertson told his Parliament.21 As was true of the Bosnian Muslim and Croat forces before their major spring and summer offensives in 1995, the KLA received covert training and supplies from the Clinton administration,22 a well-guarded secret to the Western publics then being fed lines about “Milosevic’s willing executioners” marching off to perpetrate genocide in Kosovo.
On matters of principle, neither the EU nor the United States have been consistent on secession rights. In 1991–92, they encouraged the republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina to break away from Yugoslavia; the federal state was denied any right to use force to prevent them from doing so; and no one living within these republics was permitted to break away from them. And yet as recently as June 2006, the EU, United States, and UN accepted Montenegro’s right to break away from its Serbian partner; and more recently, the UN’s special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari has supported the right of the Serbian province of Kosovo to break away from Serbia once and for all—“to be supervised for an initial period by the international community.” Calling NATO-occupied Kosovo “a unique case that demands a unique solution,” Ahtisaari reassured that Kosovo would not “create a precedent for other unresolved conflicts.” With resolution 1244, Ahtisaari reports, the “Security Council responded to Milosevic’s actions in Kosovo by denying Serbia a role in its governance, placing Kosovo under temporary UN administration and envisaging a political process designed to determine Kosovo’s future. The combination of these factors makes Kosovo’s circumstances extraordinary.”23
The UN special envoy is badly deluded. Kosovo is a NATO-occupied province in southern Serbia, following NATO’s illegal war in the spring of 1999. Kosovo’s status ought to be no different than was Kuwait’s on August 3, 1990: It is a territory taken by military force in contravention of the UN Charter, and its independence should mean above all the restoration of its sovereignty to Serbia. But as with the subsequent U.S. wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Security Council neither condemned NATO’s 1999 aggression nor demanded that measures be taken to remedy it, for the simple reason that three of the Council’s Permanent Five members had launched it. And in 2007, the UN’s special envoy shows not the slightest interest that Serbia entered into its war-ending treaties under the duress of a conquered state. Instead of demanding that NATO return the province to the country from which it was seized, the UN not only accepts the aggression as a fait accompli, but also affirms its legitimacy on “humanitarian” grounds. The Ahtisaari solution is a case of “commissioned power politics.”24 The only “extraordinary” circumstance is to be found in which group of states launched the war. (On the fraudulence of the “humanitarian” rationale for NATO’s war, and the inhumanitarian effects of both the war and occupation, see sections 9 and 10.)
In sum, the United States and NATO entered the Yugoslav struggles quite early and were key external factors in the initiation of ethnic cleansing, in keeping it going, and in working toward a violent resolution of the conflicts that would keep the United States and NATO relevant in Europe, and secure NATO’s dominant position in the Balkans.
2. The Role of the Serbs, Milosevic, and ‘Greater Serbia’
A key element in the myth structure holds that Milosevic incited the Serbs to violence, setting loose the genie of Serb nationalism from the bottle that had contained it under Tito. During the prosecution’s opening statement at his trial, a videotape was played of Milosevic uttering the words “No one should dare beat you” at the Hall of Culture in Pristina in April 1987. “It was that phrase…and the response of others to it that gave this accused the taste or a better taste of power, maybe the first realisation of a dream,” prosecutor Geoffrey Nice told the court. With these words Milosevic “had broken the taboo of [Tito] against invoking nationalism,” Dusko Doder and Louise Branson write, “a taboo credited with submerging ethnic hatreds and holding Yugoslavia together for more than forty years….The initial impact was catastrophic: rabid ethnic nationalism swept all regions of Yugoslavia like a disease.”25
But neither these remarks by Milosevic nor his June 28, 1989, speech on the six-hundreth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo had anything like the characteristics imputed to them. Instead Milosevic used both speeches to appeal to multi-ethnic tolerance, accompanied by a warning against the threat posed to Yugoslavia by nationalism—“hanging like a sword over their heads all the time” (1989).26
In his 1987 speech—the words “no one should dare beat you” having been uttered in response to the news that the police had roughed up some local Serbs—Milosevic said “we do not want to divide people into Serbs and Albanians, but we must draw the line that divides the honest and progressive who are struggling for brotherhood and unity and national equality from the counterrevolution and nationalists on the other side.” Similarly in his 1989 speech, he said that “Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it,” and nothing in either of these speeches conflicted with this sentiment—nor can quotes like these be found in the speeches and writings of Tudjman or Izetbegovic. But the standard narrative steers clear of Milosevic’s actual words, understandably, as the misrepresentation that surrounds the simple phrase “no one should dare beat you” is deeply ingrained, and repeated by the ICTY’s prosecutor, Silber and Little, Glenny, Malcolm, Judah, Doder and Branson, and a cast of thousands; also by The Guardian and the New York Times, to name but two, all of whom allude to these speeches in the inciting-Serb-nationalism mode, but almost surely never bothered to read and report their actual content.
The massive trial of Milosevic, with 295 prosecution witnesses and 49,191 pages of courtroom transcripts, failed to produce a single credible piece of evidence that Milosevic had spoken disparagingly of non-Serb “nations” or ordered any killings that might fall under the category of war crimes. But the so-called Brioni Transcript of talks that Croatian President Franjo Tudjman held with his military and political leadership on July 31, 1995, reveal Tudjman instructing his generals to “inflict such a blow on the Serbs that they should virtually disappear.”27 What followed within days was Operation Storm, a massive, well-planned military blow that made the Krajina Serbs literally disappear. Imagine the windfall that a statement such as Tudjman’s would have provided Carla Del Ponte, Geoffrey Nice, Marlise Simons, and Ed Vulliamy, had it been Milosevic who uttered a statement directly linking him to criminal activity of this magnitude. But by the summer of 1995 Tudjman was a U.S. ally, and Operation Storm was approved and aided by the United States and some of its corporate mercenaries.28
Similarly, in Alija Izetbegovic’s Islamic Declaration, first circulated in 1970 but republished in 1990 for his presidential campaign, his major theme is what he called the “incompatibility of Islam with non-Islamic systems.” “There is neither peace nor coexistence between the ‘Islamic religion’ and non-Islamic social and political institutions,” Izetbegovic argued. “Having the right to govern its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of putting a foreign ideology into practice on its territory. There is thus no principle of secular government and the State must express and support the moral principles of religion.”29 Again, nothing ever uttered by Milosevic matches this for a program of ethno-religious intolerance. But as it was the prescription of a man who became a key U.S. client, Izetbegovic’s beliefs were ignored by the same journalists and historians for whom “no one should dare beat you” was alleged to herald the breakup of an entire country. Instead, David Rieff adopted the Bosnian Muslims as his “just cause” because, in his account, theirs was “a society committed to multiculturalism…and tolerance, and of an understanding of national identity as deriving from shared citizenship rather than ethnic identity”—and this witness-bearer claims to be referring to the “values” and “ideals” that Izetbegovic’s Bosnia would uphold!30
In the series of ICTY indictments of Milosevic et al., the charge that he was striving to produce a “Greater Serbia” ranks high among the causes of the wars. This is also the standard formula that entered into the intellectual and media narrative of cause, as expressed by Judah’s statement “that it all began with the slogan ‘All Serbs in One State’” and in an obituary in the Washington Post in March 2006, where we read again that Milosevic’s “pledge to unify all Serbs in one state turned into an ironic promise.” And in a comprehensive offering of cliché lies, we find Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books stating: “As had the Yugoslav wars, the Dayton peace sprang from the forehead of Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of Greater Serbia, the man who had built his power base by inciting and exploiting Serb nationalism.”31
One serious problem with the prosecution’s theory and the premise of the establishment narrative—that Yugoslavia’s wars were the result of the “incendiary nationalism” (Marlise Simons), “blood lust” (Mark Danner), and ruthless contempt for the “mongrel races” (Ed Vulliamy) by the Serbs and Milosevic—is that Serbia proper, the alleged heartland of this “joint criminal enterprise,” was itself subject to no “ethnic cleansing” whatsoever throughout the wars, but witnessed a net inflow of refugees from other former republics. (For data on refugee flows in the former Yugoslavia, see section 9.) This dramatic fact was brought out by Milosevic in his trial, during his examination of defense witness Mihailo Markovic, a noted professor of philosophy and one of the founders of Praxis. Acknowledging the “paradox in view of all these charges” concerning “Greater Serbia” and “ethnic cleansing,” Markovic said that “Serbia still has today the same national structure that it had in the 1970s,” and that although “Serbs were expulsed from practically all the other republics, Serbia did not change.” “Why would Serbs be expelling Croatians from Croatia if they’re not expelling them from Serbia?” Markovic asked the court. “Why would Serbs be expelling Albanians from Kosovo if they’re not expelling them from Belgrade and other parts of Serbia?” Shortly thereafter, Milosevic directed much the same question back toward Markovic:
Milosevic: f you have in mind that the greatest part of that Greater Serbia would be precisely the Republic of Serbia, which did not see any expulsions at all throughout the crisis, do you find it logical that Serbia should initiate expulsions from territories outside of Serbia?
Markovic: Well, I already told you it seems illogical to me.32
Obviously, these are important questions, whose answers cast doubts on a fundamental tenet of the standard narrative. If the Belgrade Serbs, as the alleged originators of the “joint criminal enterprise” to create a “Greater Serbia,” did not implement their conspiracy where they held unquestioned power, inside Serbia proper, then what is the likelihood that the prosecution’s theory for the wars has any merit? Lead prosecutor Geoffrey Nice had no solution for this “paradox.” And Marlise Simons, Mark Danner, Ed Vulliamy, David Rieff, and others have not dealt with it by any method other than yet more misleading rhetoric and strategic silence. This exchange was unreported in any Western media institution.
But in an even more devastating development in the Milosevic trial, which occurred during its defense phase, prosecutor Geoffrey Nice admitted that Milosevic’s objective of allowing Serbs to live in one state “was different from the concept of the Greater Serbia….”33 Nice was responding to questions that had been raised by amicus curiae attorney David Kay and presiding judge Patrick Robinson about the prosecution’s claim that Milosevic et al. had a plan to create a “Greater Serbia,” and what such a plan really meant—a charge that exists in each of the three indictments for Croatia, in both indictments for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that is either asserted or implied by countless news and historical treatments of the wars. “I had the clear impression that this was an essential foundation of the Prosecution’s case,” Judge Robinson noted.34 A short while later, Judge O-Gon Kwon asked Nice to explain to the court the “difference of the Greater Serbia idea and the idea of one—all Serbs living in one state.” Nice replied:
t may be that the accused’s aim was for that which could qualify as a de facto Greater Serbia….Did he find the source of his position at least overtly in [the] historical concept of Greater Serbia; no, he didn’t. His was…the pragmatic one of ensuring that all the Serbs who had lived in the former Yugoslavia should be allowed for either constitutional or other reasons to live in the same unit. That meant as we know historically from his perspective first of all that the former Yugoslavia shouldn’t be broken up….35
In this passage, Nice betrays the fact that the prosecution itself doesn’t believe its most notorious accusation against Milosevic et al., as to why Yugoslavia broke apart: That leading Serbs in Belgrade and elsewhere conspired to create a living space exclusively for Serbs, cleansed of the other ethnic groups (“Greater Serbia”); that they entered into this conspiracy by no later than August 1, 1991; and that they were willing to perpetrate any atrocity, genocide included, to execute their conspiracy. Instead, what the prosecution really believes is that the breakup of Yugoslavia was accompanied by civil wars, plain and simple; that the principal crime for which Milosevic et al. have always been held responsible among the Western powers was the crime of trying to hold Yugoslavia together, against the West’s efforts to dismantle it; and that once events beyond their control closed-off this option, they attempted to hang onto a smaller successor state established on the same principles as the larger one they had lost. That they were not striving for an “ethnically pure” Serb state was made clear by the absence of any ethnic cleansing in Serbia proper.
Of course, the prosecution would reply that once Yugoslavia had undergone the process of dismantlement—and on July 4, 1992, Opinion No. 8 of the Badinter Commission declared that as a “matter of fact,” the “process of dissolution of the SFRY referred to in Opinion No. 1…is now complete and that the SFRY no longer exists”36—any attempt by the minority Serb populations of Croatia or Bosnia to secede from the new, internationally recognized states and to join the “rump” Yugoslavia was an act of rebellion, and any aid provided by Milosevic to these rebels was interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, aggressive, and criminal. But Badinter ran roughshod over both Yugoslavia’s constitution and fundamental principles of self-determination: The former reserved the right of secession to Yugoslavia’s constituent nations, not to its administrative units;37 and Badinter’s endorsement of the independence claims of Yugoslavia’s Slovenes, Croats, Muslims, and Macedonians, while rejecting the claims of its Serbs, ranks among the greatest and most costly exercises of the double-standard in modern times.38
Despite the allegations to the contrary, it remained the prosecution’s belief throughout the trial that the Milosevic regime’s political objective at the time of the secessions of Slovenia, Croatia, and later Bosnia-Herzegovina was to preserve the SFRY; and that if this could not be done, then as much of the old SFRY as possible should be kept within a single, unitary successor state. Indeed, this was the reason for which Milosevic’s Socialist Party had received 65 percent of the Serbian vote in December 1990, in the republic’s first multiparty elections: Not to create a “Greater Serbia,” but to preserve Yugoslavia. Until historians recognize that the ultimate crime for which the serial indictments have been brought against Milosevic et al. was the crime of trying to hold the SFRY together or a successor state on a similarly unified, federal model, they will never understand the enormity of what Nice conceded in court on August 25, 2005. As best we can tell, this startling concession to the Milosevic defense and the historical record, which amounted to the prosecution’s de facto abandonment of the main component of the ICTY’s case, has never been reported in the major English-language print media.
Furthermore, it is not even true that Milosevic fought to keep all Serbs in one state. He either supported or agreed to a series of settlements, like Brioni (July 1991), Lisbon (February 1992), Vance-Owen (January 1993), Owen-Stoltenberg (August 1993), the European Action Plan (January 1994), the Contact Group Plan (July 1994), and ultimately the Dayton Accords (November 1995)—none of which would have kept all Serbs in one state.39 He declined to defend the Croatian Serbs when they were ethnically cleansed in two related operations in May and August 1995. He agreed to an official contraction in the earlier SFRY to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (i.e., to Serbia and Montenegro—itself further shrunk with the exit of Montenegro), which in effect abandoned the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to their fate outside any “Greater Serbia.” His aid to Serbs in both Croatia and Bosnia was sporadic, and their leaders felt him to have been an opportunistic and unreliable ally, more concerned with getting the UN sanctions against Yugoslavia removed than making serious sacrifices for the stranded Serbs elsewhere.
In short, Milosevic struggled fitfully to defend Serbs who felt abandoned and threatened in the hostile, secessionist states of a progressively dismantled Yugoslavia; and he wanted, but did not fight very hard, to preserve a shrinking Yugoslav Federation that would have kept all the Serbs in a successor common state. For historians, journalists, and the ICTY to call this a drive for a “Greater Serbia” is Orwellian political rhetoric that transforms a weak and unsuccessful defense of a shrinking Yugoslavia into a bold and aggressive offensive to seize other peoples’ territory. It is also of interest that the clear drives of Croatian and Kosovo Albanian nationalists toward a “Greater Croatia” and “Greater Albania,” and Bosnian Muslim leader Izetbegovic’s refusal to agree to a settlement (with U.S. encouragement) in hopes that with NATO aid he could rule over all three “nations” in Bosnia, have been ignored in the standard narrative as serious causal factors in the ethnic wars of the 1990s.
It should also be clear that the assured claims of Silber and Little, Glenny, Malcolm, Judah, and Simons (and they are only a small sample from a vast universe) about who was responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia is ideology and myth parading under the guise of history—easily confuted, but part of the standard narrative that is unchallengeable in a closed system.
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Notes
↩ Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 26; Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 33; Noel Malcolm, Bosnia, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 212; Roy Gutman, introduction, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993), xviii; David Rieff, “The Balkans,” Toronto Globe and Mail, July 19, 1997.
↩ Tim Judah, “Is Milosevic Planning Another Balkan War?” Scotland on Sunday, March 19, 2000; Florence Hartmann, “Bosnia,” in Roy Gutman & David Rieff, eds., Crimes of War (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999), 50–51; Marlise Simons, “Slobodan Milosevic, 64, Former Yugoslav Leader Accused of War Crimes, Dies,” New York Times, March 12, 2006; Mark Danner, “America and the Bosnia Genocide,” New York Review of Books, December 4, 1997; Ed Vulliamy, “Profile: Mira Milosevic,” The Observer, July 8, 2001.
↩ Harold Lydall, Yugoslavia in Crisis (New York: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. 40–71; and John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 322. In Lydall’s words, “the year 1979 was climacteric: from that year onwards, the trend of economic change [was] in almost all respects downwards” (40).
↩ Lenard Cohen and Paul Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), esp. chap. 7; here 1; 152; 157.
↩ Warren Zimmermann, “The Last Ambassador,” Foreign Affairs, March/April, 1995.
↩ Dijana Plestina, Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), table 6.1, 180. For what these numbers represent, see n. 9, xxvii.
↩ World Development Report 1991 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), table 21, “Total external debt,” 245.
↩ Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), esp. figure 3.3, 54.
↩ Susan L. Woodward, Socialist Unemployment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. 345–70, here 361. Also see “Unemployment Rate by Republic or Province,” 384.
↩ As Dijana Plestina sums up her study: “[E]conomic regionalism, that is, the pursuit of one’s own region’s economic interests, explains better than any other factor the Yugoslav socialist regime’s overall failure in narrowing regional economic inequalities.” Regional Development in Communist Yugoslavia, 173. She adds that by 1990, the disparity in per capita income between Slovenia and Kosovo had reached as high as 8:1.
↩ Robert M. Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 27–52.
↩ Diana Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 24.
↩ The logic of the constitutional crisis that led to Yugoslavia’s violent breakup is best exemplified by the oft-quoted, oft-misrepresented, and perhaps apocryphal quip attributed to a Macedonian political figure: “Why should I be a minority in your State, when you can be a minority in mine?”
↩ Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, 36–40.
↩ Perhaps the most accessible copy of the Arbitration (or Badinter) Commission’s Opinions is to be found within the electronic archives of the European Journal of International Law 3, no. 1 (1992), and 4, no. 1 (1993), http:// www.ejil.org.
↩ According to Yugoslavia’s 1981 census, out of a total population of 22.4 million, Slovenia was 90.5 percent Slovene; “Serbia proper” 85.4 percent Serb; Croatia 75.1 percent Croat and 11.5 percent Serbs; Montenegro 68.5 percent Montenegrin; Macedonia 67 percent Macedonian; and Bosnia- Herzegovina 39.5 percent Muslim, 32 percent Serb, and 18.4 percent Croat. The autonomous region of Kosovo was 77.4 percent Albanian; and Vojvodina 54.4 percent Serb and 19 percent Hungarian. See Cohen and Warwick, Political Cohesion in a Fragile Mosaic, appendix A, “The Ethnic Composition of Yugoslavia,” table A.1, 164.
↩ See the invaluable memoir of David Owen, Balkan Odyssey (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1995).
↩ On covert aid to the Croatian and Muslim forces, see the report by the House Committee on International Relations (a.k.a. the “Iranian Green Light Subcommittee”), Final Report of the Select Subcommittee to Investigate the United States Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and Bosnia, U.S. House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997); and Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992–1995 (London: Lit Verlag, 2003), esp. 157–218.
↩ NATO remained the sole military enforcer of Dayton from January 1996 through December 2005, when it was joined by a European Union force (EUFOR).
↩ See David Chandler, Bosnia (Sterling, VI: Pluto Press, 1999); David Chandler, Empire in Denial (Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006).
↩ George Robertson, Testimony before the Select Committee on Defense, U.K. House of Commons, March 24, 1999, par. 391.
↩ On covert aid to the KLA, see, e.g., Ian Bruce, “Serbs used CIA phone to call in convoy raid,” The Herald (Glasgow), April 19, 1999; Tom Walker & Aidan Laverty, “CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army,” Sunday Times, March 12, 2000; “NATO Faces Combat With KLA Forces Which the US Trained and Armed,” Defense and Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, February, 2001; Peter Beaumont et al., “‘CIA’s bastard army ran riot in Balkans,’” The Observer, March 11, 2001; James Bissett, “We created a monster,” Toronto Globe and Mail, July 31, 2001.
↩ Martti Ahtisaari, Report of the Special Envoy of the Secretary- General on Kosovo’s future status (S/2007/168), March 26, 2007, par. 5; par. 15.
↩ See Johan Galtung et al., “Ahtisaari’s Kosovo proposal,” Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, May 11, 2007.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, February 12, 2002, 19; Dusko Doder & Louise Branson, Milosevic (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 3–4; also 43ff.
↩ See “Speech by Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo Polje,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, April 28, 1987; and “Slobodan Milosevic addresses rally at Gazimestan,” BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, June 30, 1989.
↩ For our reference to the Brioni Transcripts of July 31, 1995, see Milosevic Trial Transcript, June 26, 2003, 23200 (lines 1–10).
↩ Ken Silverstein quotes a writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine, who noted that as of early 1995, the Croatian military “consisted of criminal rabble, a bunch of fucking losers. MPRI [i.e., the Virginiabased Military Professional Resources Incorporated] turned them into something resembling an army.” Private Warriors (New York: Verso, 2000), 173.
↩ Alija Izetbegovic, Islamic De-claration, 1970, 1990, 30, as posted to the Web site of the Balkan Repository Project, http://www .balkanarchive.org.yu.
↩ David Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 10.
↩ Daniel Williams & R. Jeffrey Smith, “Crusader for Serb Honor Was Defiant Until the End,” Washington Post, March 12, 2006; Mark Danner, “Endgame in Kosovo,” New York Review of Books, April 7, 1999.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, November 16, 2004, 33460–63.
↩ See Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43223ff; here 43225, lines 9–10.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43224, lines 11–12.
↩ Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, 43227, line 6 through 43228, line 3, emphases added.
↩ For the Badinter sources, see note 15, above.
↩ According to the opening words of the Preamble to the 1974 Constitution of the SFRY, “The nations of Yugoslavia, preceding from the right of every nation to self-determination, including the right to secession, on the basis of their will freely expressed in the common struggle of all nations and nationalities in the National Liberation War and Socialist Revolution…” (emphases added). See Snezana Trifunovska, ed., Yugoslavia Through Documents (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1994), 224–33, here 224. No fragment among this Constitution’s 10 principles or 406 articles contradicted what its preamble unambiguously proclaimed, and earlier constitutions (e.g., 1963 and 1971) had as well: That the “subjects” to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged were explicitly defined as nations—real flesh and bone people, not republican units in the federation—of which Yugoslavia recognized six equally: Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Slovenes.
↩ See Peter Radan, The Break-up of Yugoslavia and International Law (New York: Routledge, 2002), 216–22. Here we add that the Slovene and Croat declarations of independence of June 25, 1991, each separately affirmed the “right of the Slovene nation to self-determination” and the “right of the Croatian nation to self-determination.” Thus, as the two triggers for Yugoslavia’s breakup, this fact underscored the belief then prevalent in Yugoslavia that the legal subject to whom the rights of self-determination and secession belonged was the nations, and not, as the Badinter Commission would later rule, the republics (i.e., mere administrative units within the SFRY). See Trifunovska, Yugoslavia Through Documents, (a) Republic of Slovenia Assembly Declaration of Independence, Ljubljana, June 25, 1991, 286; and (b) Constitutional Decision on the Sovereignty and Independence of the Republic of Croatia, Zagreb, June 25, 1991, 299.
↩ See, e.g., Owen, Balkan Odyssey; Woodward, Balkan Tragedy; Lenard J. Cohen, Broken Bonds, 2nd. ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995); and Steven L. Burg & Paul S. Shoup, The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999).
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