Thursday, December 30, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Jihad in the Balkans and America's complicity
"The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West"
For almost two decades, events in the Balkans have been described in the West as a simple consequence of "greater Serbian nationalism," a phantom notion conjured to explain the complexities of a deeply conflicted region in the aftermath of the Cold War. Social, economic, ethnic and religious factors involved in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia were routinely ignored, and in their stead propaganda about "genocidal fascism" and "butcher Milosevic" ruled the airwaves � and minds.
In the trickle of works that break with this dogma, a prominent place should be reserved for The Coming Balkans Caliphate by Christopher Deliso, a longtime Antiwar.com contributor and founder of Balkanalysis.com. Deliso, who lives in Macedonia, has had ample opportunity to observe Balkans events from up close, and point out holes in the official propaganda large enough to let through a carrier battle group or three.
In Caliphate, Deliso examines the taboo topic of the modern Balkans: the infiltration of radical Islam. The mere mention of this religion, let alone any examination of the role its followers have played in the Balkans recently, is met with shrill denunciations from, as Deliso once put it, investors in the "Bank of Collective Serbian Guilt." The Muslims of Bosnia are commonly referred to as "Bosnians" or "Bosniaks," even though Islam is the foundation of their national identity. The fact that Albanians in Kosovo are predominantly Muslim is also ignored, or declared irrelevant.
Yet Alija Izetbegovic, who spearheaded the secession of Bosnia-Herzegovina and bears a lion�s share of the blame for the brutal civil war that ravaged it for over three years, is revered in the Muslim world and is buried at a cemetery for martyrs in the jihad. Likewise, the current Muslim member of the Bosnian presidency, Haris Silajdzic, studied religion and started his career as an imam.
...
Jihad Unending
Only fifteen days had passed between the fall of Kabul to the mujahedin and the outbreak of fighting in Bosnia, recalled an Afghan mujahedin in 1994 (p.27). Abu Abdel-Aziz, who chose to continue the jihad by going to Bosnia, saw that as a sign of divine providence. In Bosnia, Islamic militants who sought to continue the struggle began in Afghanistan found themselves working arm in arm with the United States, with the common purpose of bolstering the Izetbegovic regime and an independent Bosnian state.
The second wave of radical penetration went via Albania, and into Albanian-populated areas of Serbia (Kosovo) and Macedonia. Whether money and indoctrination following weapons or the other way around, radical Islam was making inroads throughout the region, bolstered by American and European support for Bosnian Muslim and ethnic Albanian political causes.
One may be tempted to dismiss as an exaggeration Deliso�s claim that "Bosnia had become one of al-Qaeda�s most important European assets, as both the staging post that proved the viability of jihad in its global sense and the place were Europe�s first Islamic state might someday be established." (6) Or that Osama Bin Laden spent time in Albania and that his organization had connections with the "Kosovo Liberation Army." What should one make, then, of U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Ca.), who in April 2007 appealed directly to jihadists, pointing out that "the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe." He meant Kosovo, but his words apply to Bosnia just as much.
Missionary Zeal
The holy warriors that poured into Bosnia and to a lesser extent Kosovo and Macedonia were a vanguard. What followed were money and missionaries � Saudi-trained clerics, spreading the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam to the receptive audience. This worldview has on occasion clashed with the more Ottoman views of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims; however, "the challenges of specific local realities merely force [well-funded Arab proselytizers] to tailor their methods to best influence the particular society in question. What works in Brazil or China or Belgium might not work in Kosovo. But where there is a Wahhabi, there is a way."
Deliso notes a significant difference between Bosnia and Kosovo; while in Bosnia Islam has played a much more pronounced role, the Albanians of Kosovo have been driven by more nationalist ideas. Albanians have shown particular savagery towards Serbian Orthodox churches. Yet they have also persecuted ethnic Turks and Slavic Muslims (Gorani), who share their religion. Meanwhile, Wahhabi missionaries have been destroying Ottoman-era mosques and replacing them with Saudi-style ones. (p.55) Now that they have in effect exterminated the Serbs, explains Deliso, Albanian identity politics will find itself dominated by religious differences � between Ottoman and Wahhabi Islam in particular.
...
Hopeless?
If there is one objection that can be legitimately laid at the doorstep of Deliso�s analysis, it�s his apparent belief that Islamic conquest of the Balkans is something that can at best be contained, but certainly not reversed or defeated. For example, on p. 113 he says that the growth of Muslim populations in the Balkans might eventually level off under the influence of urbanization and Westernization, but it might be "too late" for Christians to avoid returning to Ottoman status of second-class citizens.
Then again, if the Empire�s behavior is anything to go by, there isn�t much reason for hope. While Western governments and spies play games with the Balkans, jockeying over power, influence, natural resources and capital, Islamic radicals are working on establishing their ideal political order: "a religious commonwealth, a sort of revived Ottoman Empire distinguished by Saudi mosques, Afghan clothes, and fundamentalist mores."
"Almost three decades after the CIA put Osama bin Laden in charge of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets," writes Deliso, "the West has still not learned its lesson: that no matter what they promise or how nicely they behave, the fundamentalists are merely using them for their own purposes. In assuming that religious fanatics can be bought off, appeased, or even enlisted for a limited use, Western intelligence agencies imperil not only themselves but all of Western society."
Until Western leaders realize this, the "war on terror" will be nothing but a sham, and all the death and destruction associated with it will be in vain.
------------------------------------
* In the aftermath of the Serb surrender in June 1999, the victorious KLA seized the opportunity to drive approximately 200,000 non-Albanians � overwhelmingly Serbs, but also Roma � out of the province. Human Rights Watch reported that this flight was motivated largely by concrete threats and the occasional local massacre, with a reported total of one thousand Serb men, women and children murdered.
* In February 2001, an IED planted by Albanians destroyed a bus carrying Serbs to family gravesites at the Gračanica monastery.
* In August 2003, Serb boys swimming were machine-gunned from a riverbank.
* In March 2004, a deliberate anti-Serb pogrom claimed dozens of lives, and further ghettoized the remaining Serbs in their northern enclaves.
* Perhaps most distressing from a cultural standpoint is the deliberate and systemic destruction of Serbian Orthodox Church parishes, properties, monasteries, and art throughout Kosovo since 1999. Students of the 20th century will recall the Nazi efforts to comprehensively erase Jewish culture from the Continent, which included the demolition of synagogues and the use of Jewish headstones as paving: since then, only the Kosovo Albanian program to exterminate Serbian culture in Kosovo compares in European history. In the summer following the Serbian defeat, the KLA demolished the Church of the Holy Virgin at Musutiste and St Mark�s of Korisa Monastery. Sadly, they did not stop there...
For almost two decades, events in the Balkans have been described in the West as a simple consequence of "greater Serbian nationalism," a phantom notion conjured to explain the complexities of a deeply conflicted region in the aftermath of the Cold War. Social, economic, ethnic and religious factors involved in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia were routinely ignored, and in their stead propaganda about "genocidal fascism" and "butcher Milosevic" ruled the airwaves � and minds.
In the trickle of works that break with this dogma, a prominent place should be reserved for The Coming Balkans Caliphate by Christopher Deliso, a longtime Antiwar.com contributor and founder of Balkanalysis.com. Deliso, who lives in Macedonia, has had ample opportunity to observe Balkans events from up close, and point out holes in the official propaganda large enough to let through a carrier battle group or three.
In Caliphate, Deliso examines the taboo topic of the modern Balkans: the infiltration of radical Islam. The mere mention of this religion, let alone any examination of the role its followers have played in the Balkans recently, is met with shrill denunciations from, as Deliso once put it, investors in the "Bank of Collective Serbian Guilt." The Muslims of Bosnia are commonly referred to as "Bosnians" or "Bosniaks," even though Islam is the foundation of their national identity. The fact that Albanians in Kosovo are predominantly Muslim is also ignored, or declared irrelevant.
Yet Alija Izetbegovic, who spearheaded the secession of Bosnia-Herzegovina and bears a lion�s share of the blame for the brutal civil war that ravaged it for over three years, is revered in the Muslim world and is buried at a cemetery for martyrs in the jihad. Likewise, the current Muslim member of the Bosnian presidency, Haris Silajdzic, studied religion and started his career as an imam.
...
Jihad Unending
Only fifteen days had passed between the fall of Kabul to the mujahedin and the outbreak of fighting in Bosnia, recalled an Afghan mujahedin in 1994 (p.27). Abu Abdel-Aziz, who chose to continue the jihad by going to Bosnia, saw that as a sign of divine providence. In Bosnia, Islamic militants who sought to continue the struggle began in Afghanistan found themselves working arm in arm with the United States, with the common purpose of bolstering the Izetbegovic regime and an independent Bosnian state.
The second wave of radical penetration went via Albania, and into Albanian-populated areas of Serbia (Kosovo) and Macedonia. Whether money and indoctrination following weapons or the other way around, radical Islam was making inroads throughout the region, bolstered by American and European support for Bosnian Muslim and ethnic Albanian political causes.
One may be tempted to dismiss as an exaggeration Deliso�s claim that "Bosnia had become one of al-Qaeda�s most important European assets, as both the staging post that proved the viability of jihad in its global sense and the place were Europe�s first Islamic state might someday be established." (6) Or that Osama Bin Laden spent time in Albania and that his organization had connections with the "Kosovo Liberation Army." What should one make, then, of U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Ca.), who in April 2007 appealed directly to jihadists, pointing out that "the United States stands foursquare for the creation of an overwhelmingly Muslim country in the very heart of Europe." He meant Kosovo, but his words apply to Bosnia just as much.
Missionary Zeal
The holy warriors that poured into Bosnia and to a lesser extent Kosovo and Macedonia were a vanguard. What followed were money and missionaries � Saudi-trained clerics, spreading the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam to the receptive audience. This worldview has on occasion clashed with the more Ottoman views of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims; however, "the challenges of specific local realities merely force [well-funded Arab proselytizers] to tailor their methods to best influence the particular society in question. What works in Brazil or China or Belgium might not work in Kosovo. But where there is a Wahhabi, there is a way."
Deliso notes a significant difference between Bosnia and Kosovo; while in Bosnia Islam has played a much more pronounced role, the Albanians of Kosovo have been driven by more nationalist ideas. Albanians have shown particular savagery towards Serbian Orthodox churches. Yet they have also persecuted ethnic Turks and Slavic Muslims (Gorani), who share their religion. Meanwhile, Wahhabi missionaries have been destroying Ottoman-era mosques and replacing them with Saudi-style ones. (p.55) Now that they have in effect exterminated the Serbs, explains Deliso, Albanian identity politics will find itself dominated by religious differences � between Ottoman and Wahhabi Islam in particular.
...
Hopeless?
If there is one objection that can be legitimately laid at the doorstep of Deliso�s analysis, it�s his apparent belief that Islamic conquest of the Balkans is something that can at best be contained, but certainly not reversed or defeated. For example, on p. 113 he says that the growth of Muslim populations in the Balkans might eventually level off under the influence of urbanization and Westernization, but it might be "too late" for Christians to avoid returning to Ottoman status of second-class citizens.
Then again, if the Empire�s behavior is anything to go by, there isn�t much reason for hope. While Western governments and spies play games with the Balkans, jockeying over power, influence, natural resources and capital, Islamic radicals are working on establishing their ideal political order: "a religious commonwealth, a sort of revived Ottoman Empire distinguished by Saudi mosques, Afghan clothes, and fundamentalist mores."
"Almost three decades after the CIA put Osama bin Laden in charge of the Afghan jihad against the Soviets," writes Deliso, "the West has still not learned its lesson: that no matter what they promise or how nicely they behave, the fundamentalists are merely using them for their own purposes. In assuming that religious fanatics can be bought off, appeased, or even enlisted for a limited use, Western intelligence agencies imperil not only themselves but all of Western society."
Until Western leaders realize this, the "war on terror" will be nothing but a sham, and all the death and destruction associated with it will be in vain.
------------------------------------
* In the aftermath of the Serb surrender in June 1999, the victorious KLA seized the opportunity to drive approximately 200,000 non-Albanians � overwhelmingly Serbs, but also Roma � out of the province. Human Rights Watch reported that this flight was motivated largely by concrete threats and the occasional local massacre, with a reported total of one thousand Serb men, women and children murdered.
* In February 2001, an IED planted by Albanians destroyed a bus carrying Serbs to family gravesites at the Gračanica monastery.
* In August 2003, Serb boys swimming were machine-gunned from a riverbank.
* In March 2004, a deliberate anti-Serb pogrom claimed dozens of lives, and further ghettoized the remaining Serbs in their northern enclaves.
* Perhaps most distressing from a cultural standpoint is the deliberate and systemic destruction of Serbian Orthodox Church parishes, properties, monasteries, and art throughout Kosovo since 1999. Students of the 20th century will recall the Nazi efforts to comprehensively erase Jewish culture from the Continent, which included the demolition of synagogues and the use of Jewish headstones as paving: since then, only the Kosovo Albanian program to exterminate Serbian culture in Kosovo compares in European history. In the summer following the Serbian defeat, the KLA demolished the Church of the Holy Virgin at Musutiste and St Mark�s of Korisa Monastery. Sadly, they did not stop there...
Monday, December 20, 2010
Srebrenica Revisited
Last summer, almost the entire political spectrum in the Western world joined in a chorus of self-flagellation on the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. The dominant theme was "nostra culpa": "we" let it happen, "we" didn't want to know about it, and "we" mustn't let it happen again.
Dear reader, who are "we" in this case? How in the world could "we" (you and I) have known or done anything about this at the time? And in fact, how much do "we" really know about it now? We know what we read in the newspapers or see on television. But how precise and accurate is that information? How do we know now that we are much better informed than we were before the event?
Such questions are virtually taboo. Srebrenica has become a sacred symbol of collective guilt, and to raise the slightest question is to be instantly condemned as an apologist for frightful crimes , or as a "holocaust denier".
A left that retains any capacity for critical thinking should regard the lavish public breast-beating over "Srebrenica" (the quotation marks indicate the symbol rather than the actual event) with a certain skepticism. If mainstream media commentators and politicians are so extraordinarily moved by "Srebrenica", this is because it has become an incantation to justify whatever future foreign war the U.S. government and media decide to sell under the label of "humanitarian intervention".
The Uses of a Massacre
Aside from the probable future use of "Srebrenica", there is the way it has already been used. Indeed, it was perhaps being used even before it happened.
From the the U.N. Secretary General's 1999 Report on Srebrenica, it emerges that the idea of a "Srebrenica massacre" was already in the air at a September 1993 meeting in Sarajevo between Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic and members of his Muslim party from Srebrenica. On the agenda was a Serb proposal to exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for some territories around Sarajevo as part of a peace settlement.
"The delegation opposed the idea, and the subject was not discussed further. Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people." (1)
Izetbegovic later denied this, but he is outnumbered by witnesses. It is clear that Izetbegovic's constant strategy was to portray his Muslim side in the bloody civil war as pure helpless victims, in order to bring U.S. military power in on his side. On his death bed, he readily admitted as much to his ardent admirer Bernard Kouchner, in the presence of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Kouchner reminded Izetbegovic of a conversation he had had with French President Mitterrand in which he "spoke of the existence of 'extermination camps' in Bosnia."
You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked considerable emotion throughout the world. [...] They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?
Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. I saw the reaction of the French and the others-I was mistaken. [...] Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps whatever the horror of those places. (2)
Like the Bosnian Serbs, the Muslims also herded their adversaries into "horrible" camps at the start of the civil war, on the way to expulsion. Unlike the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims enjoyed the services of high-powered U.S. public relations experts in the Washington-based Ruder Finn agency who knew how to "spin" the Bosnian conflict in order to equate the Serbs with the Nazis-the quickest and easiest way to win public opinion over to the Muslim side. The news media and political figures were showered with press releases and other materials exaggerating Serb atrocities, whereas Muslim atrocities (such as the decapitations of Serb prisoners, fully documented) remained confidential. To the public, this was a one-sided conflict between a Serbian "fascist aggressor" and innocent victims, all unarmed civilians.
The general public did not know that Srebrenica, described as a "safe area", was not in fact simply a haven for refugees, but also a Muslim military base. The general public did not know what Lord Owen knew and recounted in his important 1995 book, Balkan Odyssey (p.143), namely that in April 1993, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was extremely anxious to prevent Bosnian Serb forces from overrunning Srebrenica. "On 16 April I spoke on the telephone to President Milosevic about my anxiety that, despite repeated assurances from Dr. Karadzic that he had no intention of taking Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb army was now proceeding to do just that. The pocket was greatly reduced in size. I had rarely heard Milosevic so exasperated, but also so worried: he feared that if the Bosnian Serb troops entered Srebrenica there would be a bloodbath because of the tremendous bad blood that existed between the two armies. The Bosnian Serbs held the young Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, responsible for a massacre near Bratunac in December 1992 in which many Serb civilians had been killed. Milosevic believed it would be a great mistake for the Bosnian Serbs to take Srebrenica and promised to tell Karadzic so."
Thus, many months before the July 1995 "Srebrenica massacre", both Izetbegovic and Milosevic were aware of the possibility and of its potential impact-favorable to the Muslim cause, and disastrous for the Serbs.
A few other indisputable facts should not be overlooked:
Shortly before the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim troops stationed in that enclave carried out murderous attacks on nearby Serb villages. These attacks were certain to incite Serb commanders to retaliate against the Srebrenica garrison.
Meanwhile, the Muslim high command in Sarajevo ordered the Srebrenica commanders, Oric and his lieutenants, to withdraw from Srebrenica, leaving thousands of his soldiers without commanders, without orders, and in total confusion when the foreseeable Serb attack occurred. Surviving Srebrenica Muslim officials have bitterly accused the Izetbegovic government of deliberately sacrificing them to the interests of his State.
According to the most thorough study of Srebrenica events, by Cees Wiebes for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation report, the Bosnian Serb forces set out in July 1995 to reduce the area held by Bosnian Muslim forces on the outskirts of Srebrenica, and only decided to capture the town itself when they unexpectedly found it undefended.
"The VRS [Republika Srpska Army] advance went so well that the evening of July 9 saw an important 'turning point' [...] The Bosnian Serbs decided that they would no longer confine themselves to the southern part of the enclave, but would extend the operation and take the town of Srebrenica itself. Karadzic was informed that the results achieved now put the Drina Corps in a position to take the town; he had expressed his satisfaction with this and had agreed to a continuation of the operation to disarm the 'Muslim terrorist gangs' and to achieve a full demilitarization of the enclave. In this order, issued by Major General Zdravko Tolimir, it was also stated that Karadzic had determined that the safety of UNPROFOR soldiers and of the population should be ensured. Orders to this effect were to be provided to all participating units. [...] The orders made no mention of a forced relocation of the population. [...] A final instruction, also of significance, was that the population and prisoners of war should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. On July 11 all of Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Bosnian Serbs."
In testimony to a French parliamentary commission inquiry into Srebrenica, General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR officer who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, stated his belief that Bosnian Serb forces had fallen into a "trap" when they decided to capture Srebrenica.
Subsequently, on February 12, 2004, testifying at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, General Morillon stressed that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, "engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region, and this prompted the region of Bratunac in particular---that is the entire Serb population---to rebel against the very idea that through humanitarian aid one might help the population that was present there."
Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that "Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself. I think that he realized that these were the rules of this horrific war, that he could not allow himself to take prisoners. According to my recollection, he didn't even look for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can't be bothered with prisoners."
Morillon recounted how "the Serbs took me to a village to show me the evacuation of the bodies of the inhabitants that had been thrown into a hole, a village close to Bratunac. And this made me understand the degree to which this infernal situation of blood and vengeance [...] led to a situation when I personally feared that the worst would happen if the Serbs of Bosnia managed to enter the enclaves and Srebrenica."
"I feared that the Serbs, the local Serbs, the Serbs of Bratunac, these militiamen, they wanted to take their revenge for everything that they attributed to Naser Oric. It wasn't just Naser Oric that they wanted to revenge, take their revenge on, they wanted to revenge their dead on Orthodox Christmas."
* * *
In short, Srebrenica, whose Serb population had been chased out by Muslim troops at the start of the civil war in 1992, was both a gathering point for civilian Muslim refugees and a Muslim army base. The enclave lived from international humanitarian aid. The Muslim military did not allow civilians to leave, since their presence was what ensured the arrival of humanitarian aid provisions which the military controlled.
When the Bosnian Serb forces captured the town on July 11, 2005, civilians were clamoring to leave the enclave, understandably enough, since there was virtually no normal economic life there. Much has been made of the fact that Serb forces separated the population, providing buses for women, children and the infirm to take them to Tuzla, while detaining the men. In light of all that preceded, the reason for this separation is obvious: the Bosnian Serbs were looking for the perpetrators of raids on Serb villages, in order to take revenge.
However, only a relatively small number of Muslim men were detained at that point, and some of them are known to have survived and eventually been released in exchange for Serb prisoners. When the Serb forces entered the town from the south, thousands of Muslim soldiers, in disarray because of the absence of commanding officers, fled northwards, through wild wooded hills toward Tuzla. It is clear enough that they fled because they feared exactly what everyone aware of the situation dreaded: that Serb soldiers would take vengeance on the men they considered guilty of murdering Serb civilians and prisoners.
Thousands of those men did in fact reach Tuzla, and were quietly redeployed. This was confirmed by international observers. However, Muslim authorities never provided information about these men, preferring to let them be counted among the missing, that is, among the massacred. Another large, unspecified number of these men were ambushed and killed as they fled in scenes of terrible panic. This was, then, a "massacre", such as occurs in war when fleeing troops are ambushed by superior forces.
Counting the victims
So we come to the question of numbers. The question is difficult, both because of the uncertainty that surrounds it, and because merely pointing to this uncertainty is instantly denounced as "revisionism" and lack of respect for the victims. This reproach is not logical. Victims are victims, whether few or many, and respect is not in proportion to their numbers.
The question of numbers is complex and has been dealt with in detail by others, recently by an independent international Srebrenica research group which will soon publish its findings in book form. (3)
Suffice it here to note the following:
1. The sacralization of the estimated number of victims. In many if not most disasters, initial estimates of casualties tend to be inflated, for various reasons, such as multiple reports of the same missing person, and are subsequently corrected downwards. This was the case for the World Trade Center disaster, where initial estimates of up to 10,000 victims were finally brought down to less than 3000, and there are many other examples. In the case of Srebrenica, the figure of 8,000 originated with September 1995 announcements by the International Committee of the Red Cross that it was seeking information about some 3,000 men reportedly detained as well as about some 5,000 who had fled to central Bosnia. Neither the Bosnian Serbs nor the Muslims were ever forthcoming with whatever information they had, and the "8,000" figure has tended ever since to be repeated as an established total of "Muslim men and boys executed by Serb forces". It can be noted that this was always an estimate, the sum of two separate groups, the smaller one of prisoners (whose execution would be a clear war crime) and the larger one of retreating troops (whose "massacre" as they fled would be the usual tragic consequence of bitter civil war). Anyone familiar with the workings of journalism knows that there is a sort of professional inertia which leads reporters to repeat whatever figure they find in previous reports, without verification, and with a marked preference for big numbers. This inertia is all the greater when no truly authoritative figures ever emerge.
The number of bodies exhumed.
Despite unprecedented efforts over the past ten years to recover bodies from the area around Srebrenica, less than 3,000 have been exhumed, and these include soldiers and others-Serb as well as Muslim-who died in the vicious combats that took place during three years of war. Only a fraction have been identified.
2. The political desire for the largest possible number. Aside from the journalistic inertia mentioned above, the retention of the unproven high figure of massacre victims in the case of Srebrenica is clearly the result of political will on the part of two governments: the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic and, more importantly, the government of the United States. From the moment that Madeleine Albright brandished satellite photos of what she claimed was evidence of Serb massacres committed at Srebrenica (evidence that was both secret, as the photos were shown in closed session to the Security Council, and circumstantial, as they showed changes in terrain which might indicate massacres, not the alleged massacres themselves), the U.S. used "Srebrenica" for two clear purposes:
to draw attention away from the U.S.-backed Croatian offensive which drove the Serb population out of the Krajina which, as much as Srebrenica, was supposed to be protected by the United Nations;
to implicate Bosnian Serb leaders in "genocide" in order to disqualify them from negotiating the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina. (The U.S. preferred to replace them at Dayton by Milosevic, whose eagerness to end the war could be exploited to get concessions the Bosnian Serbs might refuse.)
Exploitation of "Srebrenica" then helped set the stage for the Kosovo war of 1999:
by blaming the United Nations (whose failure to defend Srebrenica was in reality the inevitable result of the unwillingness of the United States to give full support to U.N. ground forces), NATO emerged as the only agent capable of effective "humanitarian intervention".
by falsely identifying Milosevic with the Bosnian Serb leadership and by exploiting the notion that Srebrenica killings were part of a vast Serb plan of "genocide" carried out against non-Serbs for purely racist reasons, Madeleine Albright was able to advocate the NATO war against Yugoslavia as necessary to prevent "another Srebrenica" in Kosovo, where the situation was altogether different.
To use "Srebrenica" as an effective instrument in the restructuring of former Yugoslavia, notably by replacing recalcitrant Serb leaders by more pliable politicians, the crime needed to be as big as possible: not a mere war crime (such as the United States itself commits on a serial basis, from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq), but "genocide": "the worst atrocity in Europe since the Holocaust". That arouses the Hitler image, which is always good for the image of the United States as saviour from across the seas, and implies a plan decided at the highest levels, rather than the brutal behavior of enraged soldiers (or paramilitaries, the probable culprits in this case) out of control.
But what plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about all the Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Zepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an "expert" opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. This amounts to shrinking the concept of "genocide" to fit the circumstances.
It was on basis of this definition that in August 2001 the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of "complicity in genocide". Although he neither ordered, participated in or was even aware of any executions, the judges ruled that he took part in what the ICTY calls a "joint criminal enterprise" simply by capturing Srebrenica, since he must have been aware that genocide was "a natural and foreseeable consequence". This is the ruling that established "genocide" as the official description of events at Srebrenica.
Why such relentless determination to establish Srebrenica as "genocide"? A December 27, 2003, Associated Press dispatch provided an explanation by U.S. jurist Michael Scharf, one of the designers of the ICTY who has also coached the judges for the trial of Saddam Hussein: On a practical level, if the court determines Srebrenica does not fit the legal definition of genocide, it would be very difficult to make the charge stick against Milosevic, said Michael Scharf, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
"And it is crucial that he be convicted of genocide," Scharf said. If Milosevic can't be convicted, "then who can you convict of genocide in the modern age?" he asked.
The legal definition of genocide could also come into play in an Iraqi war-crimes tribunal, which has vowed to follow international legal precedent.
It is striking that from the very start, the effort of the United States and of the Tribunal in The Hague-which it mainly finances, staffs and controls-has been to establish what it calls "command responsibility" for Serb crimes rather than individual guilt of actual perpetrators. The aim is not to identify and punish men who violated the Geneva conventions by executing prisoners, but rather to pin the supreme crime on the top Serb leadership.
The office of the ICTY prosecutor has chosen to rely heavily on a single confessed participant in the Srebrenica massacre. This person is one Drazen Erdemovic, a petty criminal of Croatian nationality who was hospitalized in Serbia in March 1996 after a near-fatal brawl in a bar in Novi Sad. Quite possibly in order to escape further threats from his personal enemies, Erdemovic confessed to Western news media to having taken part in mass murder in Bosnia. He was arrested by Serb authorites who then, at his request, turned him over to the Hague Tribunal.
From then on, the prosecution has used Erdemovic repeatedly as its star witness, using the U.S. procedure of "plea bargaining" by which a confessed criminal gets off lightly by incriminating somebody else the prosecution wants to convict. He has told his story to the judges at his own brief trial, where he was exempted from cross examination thanks to his guilty plea, as well as at a hearing incriminating Karadzic and Mladic (in the absence of any legal defense) and at various trials whenever "Srebrenica" comes up.
His story goes like this: after briefly serving in the Bosnian Muslim army, Erdemovic joined an international mercenary militia unit that seems to have been employed by the Bosnian Serb command for sabotage operations on enemy territory. On July 16, 1995, his unit of eight men executed between 1,000 and 1,200 Muslim men near the village of Pilice, some 40 kilometers north of Srebrenica. From around 10:30 in the morning to 3 o'clock in the afternoon, these eight mercenaries emptied bus load after bus load of prisoners and lined them up to be shot by groups of ten.
Now in fact, it seems that a serious crime was indeed committed in Pilice. Subsequent forensic investigators exhumed 153 bodies. One hundred and fifty-three executions of prisoners of war is a serious crime, and there is material evidence that this crime was committed. But 1,200? According to the manner of execution described by Erdemovic, it would have taken 20 hours to murder so many victims. Yet the judges have never questioned this elementary arithmetical discrepancy, and Erdemovic's word has consistently been accepted as gospel truth by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. (4)
Why this insistence on an implausibly higher number than can be supported by material evidence? Obviously, the Tribunal wants to keep the figures as high as possible in order to sustain the charge of "genocide". The charge of "genocide" is what sharply distinguishes the indictment of Serbs from indictments of Croats or Muslims for similar crimes committed during the Yugoslav disintegration wars.
In August 2000 after not quite four and a half years in jail, the self-confessed mass murderer Erdemovic was freed, given a new identity, residence in an unspecified Western country and a "job", so to speak, as occasional paid and "protected" witness for the ICTY.
In contrast, General Krstic was sentenced to 35 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 20 years.
Clearly, the purpose of the "genocide" charge is not to punish the perpetrators but to incriminate the Bosnian Serb, and the Yugoslav Serb, chain of command right up to the top.
Srebrenica As Myth
The transformation of Srebrenica into myth was illustrated last July by an article in the Italian leftist daily Liberazione (close to the "Communist Refoundation" party) reporting on a semi-documentary film entitled "Srebrenica, luci dall'oblio" ("Srebrenica, lights from oblivion"). The title suggests that the film-makers have rescued from oblivion a tragically neglected event, when in fact, rarely in the history of warfare has a massacre been the focus of so much attention.
Here we have the usual self-flagellation: "...what happened in Srebrenica: the massacre of 9,000 civilians, in the most total silence/absence on the part of the world institutions [responsible for] peace..." The author accepts without question the term "genocide" and raises the figure of victims to new heights. "Around 9,000 men between the ages of 14 and 70 were transported by truck to nearby centers where they were massacred and buried in mass graves..." This was "the greatest mass genocide committed since the days of Nazism until today"... What is the point of this exaggeration, this dramatization? Why is Srebrenica so much more terrible than the war that ravaged Vietnam, with countless massacres and devastation of the countryside by deadly chemicals, or the cold-blooded massacre of surrendering Iraqis at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991? But that is a genuinely forgotten massacre-not only forgotten, but never even recognized in the first place, and the "international community" has not sent teams of forensic scientists to find and identify the victims of U.S. weapons.
In all probability the film-makers, aspiring artists and "genocide experts" who consider "Srebrenica" suitable material for touching the emotions of the public believe that they are serving the interests of peace and humanity. But I would suggest quite the contrary. The misrepresentation of "Bosnia" as scene of a deliberate "genocide" against Muslims, rather than a civil war with atrocities on all sides, contributes to a spirit of "conflict of civilizations". It has helped recruit volunteers for Islamic terrorist groups.
The political exploitation of Srebrenica has turned the Bosnian war into a morality pantomimew between pure good and pure evil, a version of events which the Serbs can never really accept and the Muslims have no desire to give up. This stands in the way of unbiased investigation and serious historical analysis. Reconciliation is in fact ruled out by the moralistic insistence that a stark distinction must be made between "aggressor" and "victim". This stark difference exists between NATO and Yugoslavia, or between the U.S. and Iraq, where an overwhelmingly superior military power deliberately launched an aggressive war against a sovereign country that neither attacked nor threatened it.
But the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not of that nature. The war there was the result of an extraordinarily complex legal situation (an unsettled small Federal Republic constitutionally composed of three "nationalities": Serb, Muslim and Croat, itself part of a disintegrating larger Federal Republic) exacerbated by myriad local power plays and the incoherent intervention of Great Powers. Moreover, this occurred in a region where memories of extremely bloody civil war during World War II were still very much alive. To a large extent, the fighting that broke loose in 1992 was a resumption of the vicious cycle of massacres and vengeance that devastated Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1941-44, when the Nazi occupation broke up Yugoslavia and attached Bosnia-Herzegovina to Greater Croatia, which proceeded to eliminate Serbs.
Today it is an unquestioned dogma that recalling atrocies is a "duty of memory" to the victims, something that must be endlessly repeated, lest we forget. But is this really so obvious? The insistence on past atrocities may simply prepare the next wave, which is what has already happened in the Balkans, and more than once. Because in reality, the dead victims cannot profit from such memories. But the memory of victimhood is a moral and political capital of great value for the heirs of victimhood and especially for their self-appointed champions. And in the case of Bosnia, it promises to bring considerable financial gain. If Milosevic, as former president of Serbia, can be convicted of genocide, then the Bosnian Muslims hope to win billions of dollars in reparations that will keep Serbia on its knees for the foreseeable future.
* * *
The obsessive reference to "Srebrenica" has a negative effect far beyond the Balkans.
The "Srebrenica massacre" is part of a dominant culture discourse that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our "values" when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit "genocide". It is remarkable how "genocide" has become fashionable, with more and more "genocide experts" in universities, as if studying genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline. What would all these people do without genocide? I wonder what is behind the contemporary fascination with genocide and serial killers, and I doubt that it is a sign of a healthy social psychology.
In the world today, few people, including Bosnian Muslims, are threatened by "genocide" in the sense of a deliberate Hitler-style project to exterminate a population-which is how most people understand the term. But millions of people are threatened, not by genocidal maniacs, but by genocidal conditions of life: poverty, disease, inadequate water, global climate change. The Srebrenica mourning cult offers nothing positive in regard to these genocidal conditions. Worse, it is instrumentalized openly to justify what is perhaps the worst of all the genocidal conditions: war.
The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because "we" let that happen, "we" mustn't let "it" happen again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of "genocide". Whatever happened in Srebrenica could have best been prevented, not by U.S. or NATO bombing, but by preventing civil war from breaking out in Bosnia Herzegovina to begin with. This prevention was possible if the "international community", meaning the NATO powers, Europe and the United States, had firmly insisted that the Yugoslav crisis of 1990 should be settled by negotiations. But first of all, Germany opposed this, by bullying the European Union into immediate recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia, without negotiation. All informed persons knew that this threatened the existence of Bosnia Herzegovina. The European Union proposed a cantonization plan for Bosnia Herzegovina, not very different from the present arrangement, which was accepted by leaders of the Bosnian Muslim, Serb and Croat communities. But shortly thereafter, Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic reneged, after the U.S. ambassador encouraged him to hold out for more. Throughout the subsequent fighting, the U.S. put obstacles in the way of every European peace plan. [6] These years of obstruction enabled the United States to take control of the eventual peace settlement in Dayton, in November 1995.
This rejection of compromise, which plunged Bosnia-Herzegovina into fratricidal war, was supported at the time by a chorus of humanitarians- not least politicians safely ensconced in the European Parliament who voted for "urgent resolutions" about situations of which they were totally ignorant-claiming that Bosnia must be a centralized State for the sake of "multiculturalism". These were the same humanitarians who applauded the breakup of multicultural Yugoslavia-which in fact created the crisis in Bosnia.
Clearly, whoever executes unarmed prisoners commits a very serious crime whether in Bosnia or anywhere else. But when all is said and done, it is an illusion to think that condemning perpetrators of a massacre in Bosnia will ensure that the next civil war somewhere in the world will be carried out in a more chivalrous manner. War is a life and death matter, and inevitably leads people to commit acts they would never commit in peacetime.
The notion that war can be made "clean", played according to rules, should not be the main focus of international law or of peace movements. War first of all needs to be prevented, not policed.
The false interpretation of "Srebrenica" as part of an ongoing Serb project of "genocide" was used to incite the NATO war against Yugoslavia, which devastated a country and left behind a cauldron of hatred and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The United States is currently engaged in a far more murderous and destructive war in Iraq. In this context, the Western lamentations that inflate the Srebrenic massacre into "the greatest mass genocide since Nazi times" are a diversion from the real existing genocide, which is not the work of some racist maniac, but the ongoing imposition of a radically unjust socio-economic world order euphemistically called "globalization".
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions published by Monthly Review Press. She can be reached at: dianajohnstone@compuserve.com
Dear reader, who are "we" in this case? How in the world could "we" (you and I) have known or done anything about this at the time? And in fact, how much do "we" really know about it now? We know what we read in the newspapers or see on television. But how precise and accurate is that information? How do we know now that we are much better informed than we were before the event?
Such questions are virtually taboo. Srebrenica has become a sacred symbol of collective guilt, and to raise the slightest question is to be instantly condemned as an apologist for frightful crimes , or as a "holocaust denier".
A left that retains any capacity for critical thinking should regard the lavish public breast-beating over "Srebrenica" (the quotation marks indicate the symbol rather than the actual event) with a certain skepticism. If mainstream media commentators and politicians are so extraordinarily moved by "Srebrenica", this is because it has become an incantation to justify whatever future foreign war the U.S. government and media decide to sell under the label of "humanitarian intervention".
The Uses of a Massacre
Aside from the probable future use of "Srebrenica", there is the way it has already been used. Indeed, it was perhaps being used even before it happened.
From the the U.N. Secretary General's 1999 Report on Srebrenica, it emerges that the idea of a "Srebrenica massacre" was already in the air at a September 1993 meeting in Sarajevo between Bosnian Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic and members of his Muslim party from Srebrenica. On the agenda was a Serb proposal to exchange Srebrenica and Zepa for some territories around Sarajevo as part of a peace settlement.
"The delegation opposed the idea, and the subject was not discussed further. Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told them he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could only occur if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people." (1)
Izetbegovic later denied this, but he is outnumbered by witnesses. It is clear that Izetbegovic's constant strategy was to portray his Muslim side in the bloody civil war as pure helpless victims, in order to bring U.S. military power in on his side. On his death bed, he readily admitted as much to his ardent admirer Bernard Kouchner, in the presence of U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke. Kouchner reminded Izetbegovic of a conversation he had had with French President Mitterrand in which he "spoke of the existence of 'extermination camps' in Bosnia."
You repeated that in front of the journalists. That provoked considerable emotion throughout the world. [...] They were horrible places, but people were not systematically exterminated. Did you know that?
Yes. I thought that my revelations could precipitate bombings. I saw the reaction of the French and the others-I was mistaken. [...] Yes, I tried, but the assertion was false. There were no extermination camps whatever the horror of those places. (2)
Like the Bosnian Serbs, the Muslims also herded their adversaries into "horrible" camps at the start of the civil war, on the way to expulsion. Unlike the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Muslims enjoyed the services of high-powered U.S. public relations experts in the Washington-based Ruder Finn agency who knew how to "spin" the Bosnian conflict in order to equate the Serbs with the Nazis-the quickest and easiest way to win public opinion over to the Muslim side. The news media and political figures were showered with press releases and other materials exaggerating Serb atrocities, whereas Muslim atrocities (such as the decapitations of Serb prisoners, fully documented) remained confidential. To the public, this was a one-sided conflict between a Serbian "fascist aggressor" and innocent victims, all unarmed civilians.
The general public did not know that Srebrenica, described as a "safe area", was not in fact simply a haven for refugees, but also a Muslim military base. The general public did not know what Lord Owen knew and recounted in his important 1995 book, Balkan Odyssey (p.143), namely that in April 1993, Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was extremely anxious to prevent Bosnian Serb forces from overrunning Srebrenica. "On 16 April I spoke on the telephone to President Milosevic about my anxiety that, despite repeated assurances from Dr. Karadzic that he had no intention of taking Srebrenica, the Bosnian Serb army was now proceeding to do just that. The pocket was greatly reduced in size. I had rarely heard Milosevic so exasperated, but also so worried: he feared that if the Bosnian Serb troops entered Srebrenica there would be a bloodbath because of the tremendous bad blood that existed between the two armies. The Bosnian Serbs held the young Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, responsible for a massacre near Bratunac in December 1992 in which many Serb civilians had been killed. Milosevic believed it would be a great mistake for the Bosnian Serbs to take Srebrenica and promised to tell Karadzic so."
Thus, many months before the July 1995 "Srebrenica massacre", both Izetbegovic and Milosevic were aware of the possibility and of its potential impact-favorable to the Muslim cause, and disastrous for the Serbs.
A few other indisputable facts should not be overlooked:
Shortly before the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim troops stationed in that enclave carried out murderous attacks on nearby Serb villages. These attacks were certain to incite Serb commanders to retaliate against the Srebrenica garrison.
Meanwhile, the Muslim high command in Sarajevo ordered the Srebrenica commanders, Oric and his lieutenants, to withdraw from Srebrenica, leaving thousands of his soldiers without commanders, without orders, and in total confusion when the foreseeable Serb attack occurred. Surviving Srebrenica Muslim officials have bitterly accused the Izetbegovic government of deliberately sacrificing them to the interests of his State.
According to the most thorough study of Srebrenica events, by Cees Wiebes for the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation report, the Bosnian Serb forces set out in July 1995 to reduce the area held by Bosnian Muslim forces on the outskirts of Srebrenica, and only decided to capture the town itself when they unexpectedly found it undefended.
"The VRS [Republika Srpska Army] advance went so well that the evening of July 9 saw an important 'turning point' [...] The Bosnian Serbs decided that they would no longer confine themselves to the southern part of the enclave, but would extend the operation and take the town of Srebrenica itself. Karadzic was informed that the results achieved now put the Drina Corps in a position to take the town; he had expressed his satisfaction with this and had agreed to a continuation of the operation to disarm the 'Muslim terrorist gangs' and to achieve a full demilitarization of the enclave. In this order, issued by Major General Zdravko Tolimir, it was also stated that Karadzic had determined that the safety of UNPROFOR soldiers and of the population should be ensured. Orders to this effect were to be provided to all participating units. [...] The orders made no mention of a forced relocation of the population. [...] A final instruction, also of significance, was that the population and prisoners of war should be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. On July 11 all of Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Bosnian Serbs."
In testimony to a French parliamentary commission inquiry into Srebrenica, General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR officer who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, stated his belief that Bosnian Serb forces had fallen into a "trap" when they decided to capture Srebrenica.
Subsequently, on February 12, 2004, testifying at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, General Morillon stressed that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, "engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region, and this prompted the region of Bratunac in particular---that is the entire Serb population---to rebel against the very idea that through humanitarian aid one might help the population that was present there."
Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that "Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself. I think that he realized that these were the rules of this horrific war, that he could not allow himself to take prisoners. According to my recollection, he didn't even look for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can't be bothered with prisoners."
Morillon recounted how "the Serbs took me to a village to show me the evacuation of the bodies of the inhabitants that had been thrown into a hole, a village close to Bratunac. And this made me understand the degree to which this infernal situation of blood and vengeance [...] led to a situation when I personally feared that the worst would happen if the Serbs of Bosnia managed to enter the enclaves and Srebrenica."
"I feared that the Serbs, the local Serbs, the Serbs of Bratunac, these militiamen, they wanted to take their revenge for everything that they attributed to Naser Oric. It wasn't just Naser Oric that they wanted to revenge, take their revenge on, they wanted to revenge their dead on Orthodox Christmas."
* * *
In short, Srebrenica, whose Serb population had been chased out by Muslim troops at the start of the civil war in 1992, was both a gathering point for civilian Muslim refugees and a Muslim army base. The enclave lived from international humanitarian aid. The Muslim military did not allow civilians to leave, since their presence was what ensured the arrival of humanitarian aid provisions which the military controlled.
When the Bosnian Serb forces captured the town on July 11, 2005, civilians were clamoring to leave the enclave, understandably enough, since there was virtually no normal economic life there. Much has been made of the fact that Serb forces separated the population, providing buses for women, children and the infirm to take them to Tuzla, while detaining the men. In light of all that preceded, the reason for this separation is obvious: the Bosnian Serbs were looking for the perpetrators of raids on Serb villages, in order to take revenge.
However, only a relatively small number of Muslim men were detained at that point, and some of them are known to have survived and eventually been released in exchange for Serb prisoners. When the Serb forces entered the town from the south, thousands of Muslim soldiers, in disarray because of the absence of commanding officers, fled northwards, through wild wooded hills toward Tuzla. It is clear enough that they fled because they feared exactly what everyone aware of the situation dreaded: that Serb soldiers would take vengeance on the men they considered guilty of murdering Serb civilians and prisoners.
Thousands of those men did in fact reach Tuzla, and were quietly redeployed. This was confirmed by international observers. However, Muslim authorities never provided information about these men, preferring to let them be counted among the missing, that is, among the massacred. Another large, unspecified number of these men were ambushed and killed as they fled in scenes of terrible panic. This was, then, a "massacre", such as occurs in war when fleeing troops are ambushed by superior forces.
Counting the victims
So we come to the question of numbers. The question is difficult, both because of the uncertainty that surrounds it, and because merely pointing to this uncertainty is instantly denounced as "revisionism" and lack of respect for the victims. This reproach is not logical. Victims are victims, whether few or many, and respect is not in proportion to their numbers.
The question of numbers is complex and has been dealt with in detail by others, recently by an independent international Srebrenica research group which will soon publish its findings in book form. (3)
Suffice it here to note the following:
1. The sacralization of the estimated number of victims. In many if not most disasters, initial estimates of casualties tend to be inflated, for various reasons, such as multiple reports of the same missing person, and are subsequently corrected downwards. This was the case for the World Trade Center disaster, where initial estimates of up to 10,000 victims were finally brought down to less than 3000, and there are many other examples. In the case of Srebrenica, the figure of 8,000 originated with September 1995 announcements by the International Committee of the Red Cross that it was seeking information about some 3,000 men reportedly detained as well as about some 5,000 who had fled to central Bosnia. Neither the Bosnian Serbs nor the Muslims were ever forthcoming with whatever information they had, and the "8,000" figure has tended ever since to be repeated as an established total of "Muslim men and boys executed by Serb forces". It can be noted that this was always an estimate, the sum of two separate groups, the smaller one of prisoners (whose execution would be a clear war crime) and the larger one of retreating troops (whose "massacre" as they fled would be the usual tragic consequence of bitter civil war). Anyone familiar with the workings of journalism knows that there is a sort of professional inertia which leads reporters to repeat whatever figure they find in previous reports, without verification, and with a marked preference for big numbers. This inertia is all the greater when no truly authoritative figures ever emerge.
The number of bodies exhumed.
Despite unprecedented efforts over the past ten years to recover bodies from the area around Srebrenica, less than 3,000 have been exhumed, and these include soldiers and others-Serb as well as Muslim-who died in the vicious combats that took place during three years of war. Only a fraction have been identified.
2. The political desire for the largest possible number. Aside from the journalistic inertia mentioned above, the retention of the unproven high figure of massacre victims in the case of Srebrenica is clearly the result of political will on the part of two governments: the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic and, more importantly, the government of the United States. From the moment that Madeleine Albright brandished satellite photos of what she claimed was evidence of Serb massacres committed at Srebrenica (evidence that was both secret, as the photos were shown in closed session to the Security Council, and circumstantial, as they showed changes in terrain which might indicate massacres, not the alleged massacres themselves), the U.S. used "Srebrenica" for two clear purposes:
to draw attention away from the U.S.-backed Croatian offensive which drove the Serb population out of the Krajina which, as much as Srebrenica, was supposed to be protected by the United Nations;
to implicate Bosnian Serb leaders in "genocide" in order to disqualify them from negotiating the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina. (The U.S. preferred to replace them at Dayton by Milosevic, whose eagerness to end the war could be exploited to get concessions the Bosnian Serbs might refuse.)
Exploitation of "Srebrenica" then helped set the stage for the Kosovo war of 1999:
by blaming the United Nations (whose failure to defend Srebrenica was in reality the inevitable result of the unwillingness of the United States to give full support to U.N. ground forces), NATO emerged as the only agent capable of effective "humanitarian intervention".
by falsely identifying Milosevic with the Bosnian Serb leadership and by exploiting the notion that Srebrenica killings were part of a vast Serb plan of "genocide" carried out against non-Serbs for purely racist reasons, Madeleine Albright was able to advocate the NATO war against Yugoslavia as necessary to prevent "another Srebrenica" in Kosovo, where the situation was altogether different.
To use "Srebrenica" as an effective instrument in the restructuring of former Yugoslavia, notably by replacing recalcitrant Serb leaders by more pliable politicians, the crime needed to be as big as possible: not a mere war crime (such as the United States itself commits on a serial basis, from Vietnam to Panama to Iraq), but "genocide": "the worst atrocity in Europe since the Holocaust". That arouses the Hitler image, which is always good for the image of the United States as saviour from across the seas, and implies a plan decided at the highest levels, rather than the brutal behavior of enraged soldiers (or paramilitaries, the probable culprits in this case) out of control.
But what plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about all the Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Zepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an "expert" opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. This amounts to shrinking the concept of "genocide" to fit the circumstances.
It was on basis of this definition that in August 2001 the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of "complicity in genocide". Although he neither ordered, participated in or was even aware of any executions, the judges ruled that he took part in what the ICTY calls a "joint criminal enterprise" simply by capturing Srebrenica, since he must have been aware that genocide was "a natural and foreseeable consequence". This is the ruling that established "genocide" as the official description of events at Srebrenica.
Why such relentless determination to establish Srebrenica as "genocide"? A December 27, 2003, Associated Press dispatch provided an explanation by U.S. jurist Michael Scharf, one of the designers of the ICTY who has also coached the judges for the trial of Saddam Hussein: On a practical level, if the court determines Srebrenica does not fit the legal definition of genocide, it would be very difficult to make the charge stick against Milosevic, said Michael Scharf, a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
"And it is crucial that he be convicted of genocide," Scharf said. If Milosevic can't be convicted, "then who can you convict of genocide in the modern age?" he asked.
The legal definition of genocide could also come into play in an Iraqi war-crimes tribunal, which has vowed to follow international legal precedent.
It is striking that from the very start, the effort of the United States and of the Tribunal in The Hague-which it mainly finances, staffs and controls-has been to establish what it calls "command responsibility" for Serb crimes rather than individual guilt of actual perpetrators. The aim is not to identify and punish men who violated the Geneva conventions by executing prisoners, but rather to pin the supreme crime on the top Serb leadership.
The office of the ICTY prosecutor has chosen to rely heavily on a single confessed participant in the Srebrenica massacre. This person is one Drazen Erdemovic, a petty criminal of Croatian nationality who was hospitalized in Serbia in March 1996 after a near-fatal brawl in a bar in Novi Sad. Quite possibly in order to escape further threats from his personal enemies, Erdemovic confessed to Western news media to having taken part in mass murder in Bosnia. He was arrested by Serb authorites who then, at his request, turned him over to the Hague Tribunal.
From then on, the prosecution has used Erdemovic repeatedly as its star witness, using the U.S. procedure of "plea bargaining" by which a confessed criminal gets off lightly by incriminating somebody else the prosecution wants to convict. He has told his story to the judges at his own brief trial, where he was exempted from cross examination thanks to his guilty plea, as well as at a hearing incriminating Karadzic and Mladic (in the absence of any legal defense) and at various trials whenever "Srebrenica" comes up.
His story goes like this: after briefly serving in the Bosnian Muslim army, Erdemovic joined an international mercenary militia unit that seems to have been employed by the Bosnian Serb command for sabotage operations on enemy territory. On July 16, 1995, his unit of eight men executed between 1,000 and 1,200 Muslim men near the village of Pilice, some 40 kilometers north of Srebrenica. From around 10:30 in the morning to 3 o'clock in the afternoon, these eight mercenaries emptied bus load after bus load of prisoners and lined them up to be shot by groups of ten.
Now in fact, it seems that a serious crime was indeed committed in Pilice. Subsequent forensic investigators exhumed 153 bodies. One hundred and fifty-three executions of prisoners of war is a serious crime, and there is material evidence that this crime was committed. But 1,200? According to the manner of execution described by Erdemovic, it would have taken 20 hours to murder so many victims. Yet the judges have never questioned this elementary arithmetical discrepancy, and Erdemovic's word has consistently been accepted as gospel truth by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. (4)
Why this insistence on an implausibly higher number than can be supported by material evidence? Obviously, the Tribunal wants to keep the figures as high as possible in order to sustain the charge of "genocide". The charge of "genocide" is what sharply distinguishes the indictment of Serbs from indictments of Croats or Muslims for similar crimes committed during the Yugoslav disintegration wars.
In August 2000 after not quite four and a half years in jail, the self-confessed mass murderer Erdemovic was freed, given a new identity, residence in an unspecified Western country and a "job", so to speak, as occasional paid and "protected" witness for the ICTY.
In contrast, General Krstic was sentenced to 35 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 20 years.
Clearly, the purpose of the "genocide" charge is not to punish the perpetrators but to incriminate the Bosnian Serb, and the Yugoslav Serb, chain of command right up to the top.
Srebrenica As Myth
The transformation of Srebrenica into myth was illustrated last July by an article in the Italian leftist daily Liberazione (close to the "Communist Refoundation" party) reporting on a semi-documentary film entitled "Srebrenica, luci dall'oblio" ("Srebrenica, lights from oblivion"). The title suggests that the film-makers have rescued from oblivion a tragically neglected event, when in fact, rarely in the history of warfare has a massacre been the focus of so much attention.
Here we have the usual self-flagellation: "...what happened in Srebrenica: the massacre of 9,000 civilians, in the most total silence/absence on the part of the world institutions [responsible for] peace..." The author accepts without question the term "genocide" and raises the figure of victims to new heights. "Around 9,000 men between the ages of 14 and 70 were transported by truck to nearby centers where they were massacred and buried in mass graves..." This was "the greatest mass genocide committed since the days of Nazism until today"... What is the point of this exaggeration, this dramatization? Why is Srebrenica so much more terrible than the war that ravaged Vietnam, with countless massacres and devastation of the countryside by deadly chemicals, or the cold-blooded massacre of surrendering Iraqis at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991? But that is a genuinely forgotten massacre-not only forgotten, but never even recognized in the first place, and the "international community" has not sent teams of forensic scientists to find and identify the victims of U.S. weapons.
In all probability the film-makers, aspiring artists and "genocide experts" who consider "Srebrenica" suitable material for touching the emotions of the public believe that they are serving the interests of peace and humanity. But I would suggest quite the contrary. The misrepresentation of "Bosnia" as scene of a deliberate "genocide" against Muslims, rather than a civil war with atrocities on all sides, contributes to a spirit of "conflict of civilizations". It has helped recruit volunteers for Islamic terrorist groups.
The political exploitation of Srebrenica has turned the Bosnian war into a morality pantomimew between pure good and pure evil, a version of events which the Serbs can never really accept and the Muslims have no desire to give up. This stands in the way of unbiased investigation and serious historical analysis. Reconciliation is in fact ruled out by the moralistic insistence that a stark distinction must be made between "aggressor" and "victim". This stark difference exists between NATO and Yugoslavia, or between the U.S. and Iraq, where an overwhelmingly superior military power deliberately launched an aggressive war against a sovereign country that neither attacked nor threatened it.
But the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not of that nature. The war there was the result of an extraordinarily complex legal situation (an unsettled small Federal Republic constitutionally composed of three "nationalities": Serb, Muslim and Croat, itself part of a disintegrating larger Federal Republic) exacerbated by myriad local power plays and the incoherent intervention of Great Powers. Moreover, this occurred in a region where memories of extremely bloody civil war during World War II were still very much alive. To a large extent, the fighting that broke loose in 1992 was a resumption of the vicious cycle of massacres and vengeance that devastated Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1941-44, when the Nazi occupation broke up Yugoslavia and attached Bosnia-Herzegovina to Greater Croatia, which proceeded to eliminate Serbs.
Today it is an unquestioned dogma that recalling atrocies is a "duty of memory" to the victims, something that must be endlessly repeated, lest we forget. But is this really so obvious? The insistence on past atrocities may simply prepare the next wave, which is what has already happened in the Balkans, and more than once. Because in reality, the dead victims cannot profit from such memories. But the memory of victimhood is a moral and political capital of great value for the heirs of victimhood and especially for their self-appointed champions. And in the case of Bosnia, it promises to bring considerable financial gain. If Milosevic, as former president of Serbia, can be convicted of genocide, then the Bosnian Muslims hope to win billions of dollars in reparations that will keep Serbia on its knees for the foreseeable future.
* * *
The obsessive reference to "Srebrenica" has a negative effect far beyond the Balkans.
The "Srebrenica massacre" is part of a dominant culture discourse that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our "values" when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit "genocide". It is remarkable how "genocide" has become fashionable, with more and more "genocide experts" in universities, as if studying genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline. What would all these people do without genocide? I wonder what is behind the contemporary fascination with genocide and serial killers, and I doubt that it is a sign of a healthy social psychology.
In the world today, few people, including Bosnian Muslims, are threatened by "genocide" in the sense of a deliberate Hitler-style project to exterminate a population-which is how most people understand the term. But millions of people are threatened, not by genocidal maniacs, but by genocidal conditions of life: poverty, disease, inadequate water, global climate change. The Srebrenica mourning cult offers nothing positive in regard to these genocidal conditions. Worse, it is instrumentalized openly to justify what is perhaps the worst of all the genocidal conditions: war.
The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because "we" let that happen, "we" mustn't let "it" happen again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of "genocide". Whatever happened in Srebrenica could have best been prevented, not by U.S. or NATO bombing, but by preventing civil war from breaking out in Bosnia Herzegovina to begin with. This prevention was possible if the "international community", meaning the NATO powers, Europe and the United States, had firmly insisted that the Yugoslav crisis of 1990 should be settled by negotiations. But first of all, Germany opposed this, by bullying the European Union into immediate recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia, without negotiation. All informed persons knew that this threatened the existence of Bosnia Herzegovina. The European Union proposed a cantonization plan for Bosnia Herzegovina, not very different from the present arrangement, which was accepted by leaders of the Bosnian Muslim, Serb and Croat communities. But shortly thereafter, Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic reneged, after the U.S. ambassador encouraged him to hold out for more. Throughout the subsequent fighting, the U.S. put obstacles in the way of every European peace plan. [6] These years of obstruction enabled the United States to take control of the eventual peace settlement in Dayton, in November 1995.
This rejection of compromise, which plunged Bosnia-Herzegovina into fratricidal war, was supported at the time by a chorus of humanitarians- not least politicians safely ensconced in the European Parliament who voted for "urgent resolutions" about situations of which they were totally ignorant-claiming that Bosnia must be a centralized State for the sake of "multiculturalism". These were the same humanitarians who applauded the breakup of multicultural Yugoslavia-which in fact created the crisis in Bosnia.
Clearly, whoever executes unarmed prisoners commits a very serious crime whether in Bosnia or anywhere else. But when all is said and done, it is an illusion to think that condemning perpetrators of a massacre in Bosnia will ensure that the next civil war somewhere in the world will be carried out in a more chivalrous manner. War is a life and death matter, and inevitably leads people to commit acts they would never commit in peacetime.
The notion that war can be made "clean", played according to rules, should not be the main focus of international law or of peace movements. War first of all needs to be prevented, not policed.
The false interpretation of "Srebrenica" as part of an ongoing Serb project of "genocide" was used to incite the NATO war against Yugoslavia, which devastated a country and left behind a cauldron of hatred and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The United States is currently engaged in a far more murderous and destructive war in Iraq. In this context, the Western lamentations that inflate the Srebrenic massacre into "the greatest mass genocide since Nazi times" are a diversion from the real existing genocide, which is not the work of some racist maniac, but the ongoing imposition of a radically unjust socio-economic world order euphemistically called "globalization".
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions published by Monthly Review Press. She can be reached at: dianajohnstone@compuserve.com
http://www.swans.com/library/art9/lproy04.html
Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions.
A Book Review by Louis Proyect
A Book Review by Louis Proyect
Holbrooke or Milosevic: Who is the Greater Murderer?
It is usually considered good form to avoid sharp criticism of someone who has just died. But Richard Holbrooke himself set a striking example of the breach of such etiquette. On learning of the death in prison of Slobodan Milosevic, Holbrooke did not hesitate to describe him as a "monster" comparable to Hitler and Stalin.
This was rank ingratitude, considering that Holbrooke owed his greatest career success – the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina – almost entirely to Milosevic. This was made quite clear in his memoir To End a War (Random House, 1998).
But Holbrooke’s greatest skill, made possible by media complicity, was to dress up reality in a costume favorable to himself.
The Dayton Peace Accords were presented as a heroic victory for peace extracted by the brilliant Holbrooke from a reluctant Milosevic, who had to be "bombed to the negotiating table" by the United States. In reality, the U.S. government was fully aware that Milosevic was eager for peace in Bosnia to free Serbia from crippling economic sanctions. It was the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who wanted to keep the war going, with U.S. military help.
In reality, the U.S. bombed the Serbs in order to get Izetbegovic to the negotiating table. And the agreement reached in the autumn of 1995 was not very different from the agreement reached in March 1992 by the three ethnic groups under European Community auspices, which could have prevented the entire civil war, if it had not been sabotaged by Izetbegovic, who withdrew his agreement with the encouragement of the then U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann. In short, far from being the great peacemaker in the Balkans, the United States first encouraged the Muslim side to fight for its goal of a centralized Bosnia, and then sponsored a weakened federated Bosnia – after nearly four years of bloodshed which left the populations bereft and embittered.
The real purpose of all this, as Holbrooke made quite clear in To End a War, was to demonstrate that Europeans could not manage their own vital affairs and that the United States remained the "indispensable nation". His book also made it clear that the Muslim leaders were irritatingly reluctant to end war short of total victory, and that only the readiness of Milosevic to make concessions saved the Dayton talks from failure -- allowing Holbrooke to be proclaimed a hero.
The functional role of the Holbrooke’s diplomacy was to prove that diplomacy, as carried out by Europeans, was bound to fail. His victory was a defeat for diplomacy. The spectacle of bombing plus Dayton was designed to show that only the threat or application of U.S. military might could end conflicts.
Milosevic had hoped that his concessions would lead to peace and reconciliation with the United States. As it happened, his only reward for handing Holbrooke the victory of his career was to have his country bombed by NATO in 1999 in order to wrest from Serbia the province of Kosovo and prepare Milosevic’s own fall from office. Holbrooke played a prominent role in this scenario, suddently posing shoeless in a tent in the summer of 1998 for a photo op seated among armed Albanian secessionists which up to then had been characterized by the State Department as "terrorists", and shortly thereafter announcing to Milosevic that Serbia would be bombed unless he withdrew security forces from the province, in effect giving it to the ex-terrorists transformed by the Holbrooke blessing into freedom fighters.
In his long career from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Holbrooke was active on many fronts. In 1977, after Indonesia invaded East Timor and set about massacring the people of that former Portuguese colony, Holbrooke was dispatched by the United States supposedly to promote "human rights" but in reality to help arm the Suharto dictatorship against the East Timorese. Sometimes the government is armed against rebels, sometimes rebels are armed against the government, but despite appearances of contradiction, what is consistent throughout is the cynical exploitation and exacerbation of tragic local conflicts to extend U.S. imperial power throughout the world.
Holbrooke and Milosevic were born in the same year, 1941. When Milosevic died in 2006, Holbrooke gave a long statement to the BBC without a single syllable of human kindness. "This man wrecked the Balkans," said Holbrooke.
"He was a war criminal who caused four wars, over 300,000 deaths, 2.5million homeless. Sometimes monsters make the biggest impacts on history - Hitler and Stalin - and such is the case with this gentleman."
Holbrooke presented himself as goodness dealing with evil for a worthy cause. When negotiating with Milosevic, "you're conscious of the fact that you're sitting across the table from a monster whose role in history will be terrible and who has caused so many deaths."
Who was the monster? Nobody, including at the Hague tribunal where he died for lack of medical treatment, has ever actually proved that Milosevic was responsible for the tragic deaths in the wars of Yugoslav disintegration. But Holbrooke was never put on trial for all the deaths in Vietnam, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and, yes, former Yugoslavia, which resulted at least in part from the U.S. policies he carried out.
From his self-proclaimed moral heights, Holbrooke judged the Serbian leader as an opportunist without political convictions, neither communist nor nationalist, but simply "an opportunist who sought power and wealth for himself."
In reality, there has never been any proof that Milosevic sought or obtained wealth for himself, whereas Holbrooke was, among many other things, a vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of the private equity firm Perseus LLC, and a member of the board of directors of AIG, the American International Group, at a time when, according to Wikipedia, "the firm engaged in wildly speculative credit default insurance schemes that may cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions to prevent AIG from bringing down the entire financial system."
Milosevic was on trial for years without ever being to present his defense before he died under troubling circumstances. Holbrooke found that outcome perfectly satisfying: "I knew as soon as he reached The Hague that he'd never see daylight again and I think that justice was served in a weird way because he died in his cell, and that was the right thing to do."
There are many other instances of lies and deceptions in Holbrooke’s manipulation of Balkan woes, as well as his totally cynical exploitation of the tragedies of Vietnam, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. But still, his importance should not be overstated. Moral monsters do not always make a great impact on history, when they are merely the vain instruments of a bureaucratic military machine running amok.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions.She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr
This was rank ingratitude, considering that Holbrooke owed his greatest career success – the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina – almost entirely to Milosevic. This was made quite clear in his memoir To End a War (Random House, 1998).
But Holbrooke’s greatest skill, made possible by media complicity, was to dress up reality in a costume favorable to himself.
The Dayton Peace Accords were presented as a heroic victory for peace extracted by the brilliant Holbrooke from a reluctant Milosevic, who had to be "bombed to the negotiating table" by the United States. In reality, the U.S. government was fully aware that Milosevic was eager for peace in Bosnia to free Serbia from crippling economic sanctions. It was the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic who wanted to keep the war going, with U.S. military help.
In reality, the U.S. bombed the Serbs in order to get Izetbegovic to the negotiating table. And the agreement reached in the autumn of 1995 was not very different from the agreement reached in March 1992 by the three ethnic groups under European Community auspices, which could have prevented the entire civil war, if it had not been sabotaged by Izetbegovic, who withdrew his agreement with the encouragement of the then U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann. In short, far from being the great peacemaker in the Balkans, the United States first encouraged the Muslim side to fight for its goal of a centralized Bosnia, and then sponsored a weakened federated Bosnia – after nearly four years of bloodshed which left the populations bereft and embittered.
The real purpose of all this, as Holbrooke made quite clear in To End a War, was to demonstrate that Europeans could not manage their own vital affairs and that the United States remained the "indispensable nation". His book also made it clear that the Muslim leaders were irritatingly reluctant to end war short of total victory, and that only the readiness of Milosevic to make concessions saved the Dayton talks from failure -- allowing Holbrooke to be proclaimed a hero.
The functional role of the Holbrooke’s diplomacy was to prove that diplomacy, as carried out by Europeans, was bound to fail. His victory was a defeat for diplomacy. The spectacle of bombing plus Dayton was designed to show that only the threat or application of U.S. military might could end conflicts.
Milosevic had hoped that his concessions would lead to peace and reconciliation with the United States. As it happened, his only reward for handing Holbrooke the victory of his career was to have his country bombed by NATO in 1999 in order to wrest from Serbia the province of Kosovo and prepare Milosevic’s own fall from office. Holbrooke played a prominent role in this scenario, suddently posing shoeless in a tent in the summer of 1998 for a photo op seated among armed Albanian secessionists which up to then had been characterized by the State Department as "terrorists", and shortly thereafter announcing to Milosevic that Serbia would be bombed unless he withdrew security forces from the province, in effect giving it to the ex-terrorists transformed by the Holbrooke blessing into freedom fighters.
In his long career from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Holbrooke was active on many fronts. In 1977, after Indonesia invaded East Timor and set about massacring the people of that former Portuguese colony, Holbrooke was dispatched by the United States supposedly to promote "human rights" but in reality to help arm the Suharto dictatorship against the East Timorese. Sometimes the government is armed against rebels, sometimes rebels are armed against the government, but despite appearances of contradiction, what is consistent throughout is the cynical exploitation and exacerbation of tragic local conflicts to extend U.S. imperial power throughout the world.
Holbrooke and Milosevic were born in the same year, 1941. When Milosevic died in 2006, Holbrooke gave a long statement to the BBC without a single syllable of human kindness. "This man wrecked the Balkans," said Holbrooke.
"He was a war criminal who caused four wars, over 300,000 deaths, 2.5million homeless. Sometimes monsters make the biggest impacts on history - Hitler and Stalin - and such is the case with this gentleman."
Holbrooke presented himself as goodness dealing with evil for a worthy cause. When negotiating with Milosevic, "you're conscious of the fact that you're sitting across the table from a monster whose role in history will be terrible and who has caused so many deaths."
Who was the monster? Nobody, including at the Hague tribunal where he died for lack of medical treatment, has ever actually proved that Milosevic was responsible for the tragic deaths in the wars of Yugoslav disintegration. But Holbrooke was never put on trial for all the deaths in Vietnam, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq and, yes, former Yugoslavia, which resulted at least in part from the U.S. policies he carried out.
From his self-proclaimed moral heights, Holbrooke judged the Serbian leader as an opportunist without political convictions, neither communist nor nationalist, but simply "an opportunist who sought power and wealth for himself."
In reality, there has never been any proof that Milosevic sought or obtained wealth for himself, whereas Holbrooke was, among many other things, a vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of the private equity firm Perseus LLC, and a member of the board of directors of AIG, the American International Group, at a time when, according to Wikipedia, "the firm engaged in wildly speculative credit default insurance schemes that may cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions to prevent AIG from bringing down the entire financial system."
Milosevic was on trial for years without ever being to present his defense before he died under troubling circumstances. Holbrooke found that outcome perfectly satisfying: "I knew as soon as he reached The Hague that he'd never see daylight again and I think that justice was served in a weird way because he died in his cell, and that was the right thing to do."
There are many other instances of lies and deceptions in Holbrooke’s manipulation of Balkan woes, as well as his totally cynical exploitation of the tragedies of Vietnam, East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. But still, his importance should not be overstated. Moral monsters do not always make a great impact on history, when they are merely the vain instruments of a bureaucratic military machine running amok.
Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions.She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr
Thaci's bin Laden planned a''jihad''
(Translated from Serbian)
Director of the American Council for Kosovo James Jatras said that the American establishment, from day one, knowing that Hashim Thaci and the KLA a criminal group that supports Osama bin Laden and is engaged in trade - drug trafficking, arms smuggling across Europe, but is still supported.
Jatras believes that publication of reports of investigators of the Council as soon as EvropeDika Marti Thaci - nicknamed "The Snake" - declared victory in recent elections, suggests that someone in Europe wants to jump out of''a train rushing to destruction''?
"The U.S. government knew that the KLA supported Bin Laden, with whom, according to a former head of the Albanian intelligence service, Thaci met in Tirana, 1998. To plan the jihad in Kosovo and to support the Iranians, Saudis, Turks and other Muslim supporters of the re-conquest of the Balkans "said Jatras in an article, submitted Srna.
If the "Google" suggests Jatras, see pictures from Thaci name and almost any influential American figures, you'll see that Thaci hot to handle, and often intimate embraces with representatives of the American establishment: George Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Bill Gates, with Clinton , Joseph Biden, Medellin Albright, Wesley Clark and others.
''One would think that some of these prominent figures could now with enough decency to say (even in the manner of a virtuoso of hypocrites): `What? I did not know! I would never support those types that I know it `But the problem is that, even if we exclude the crime of trafficking in organs, the American establishment knew from day one that Thaci and the company (` KLA `) just a bunch of bandits," said Jatras.
Now it appears Marty serious charges of Thaci, who is currently participating in a masquerade as a "prime" illegal separatist administration in Pristina, headed by "mafia" operation involving the killing of prisoners, mostly Serbs, in order to sell their organs on the black market.
But, recalls Jatras, the story of trafficking in organs first appeared two years ago and developed the''obscene equivocation `power` in Pristina and Tirana, with the full support of Washington. "
''Let's hope that Marty's good work will not be misplaced in the `memory` alley with all the other unpleasant facts in American politics, "said Jatras.
He says it is not enough to catch the perpetrators as individuals, or even "wrap up" Thaci in prison, even though it was a good start, but it is time to expose the lies on which it was based on U.S. policy in the Balkans - that the U.S. cut to obsessive support the Islamic jihad against the indigenous Christian population, and in particular to cease with a global lobbying on behalf of the KLA regime.
Marty,''If the discovery of human organ trafficking may serve as a catalyst for honest review of U.S. policy and events of the last few years, the death of all those victims would not be in vain'', said Jatras.
He said that the U.S. intervention in Kosovo from the beginning was based on a pile of lies, and that in reality the U.S.''shock and cry forced the allies in NATO to support the Muslim mob that committed genocide on the Christian Serbs''.
Jatras said that most Republicans in Congress did not vote for the NATO war against Serbia in 1999. year, which was illegally running, and that the House of Representatives voted against approving the use of military force.
As for Serbia, says Jatras, "if they existed in Belgrade government worthy of respect, it would not be prepared for a meeting with representatives of Thaci's government` `in direct negotiations."
Director of the American Council for Kosovo reminded that former Bishop Artemije two years ago called for Bush to refuse to meet with Thaci and demanded invocation of responsibility regarding the shameful trafficking in organs.
http://www.vesti-online.com/Vesti/Srbija/104535/Taci-sa-Bin-Ladenom-planirao-dzihad
Friday, December 3, 2010
WikiLeaks: Bribery, graft rampant in Afghanistan
U.S. diplomatic cables revealed Friday portray Afghanistan as rife with graft to the highest levels of government, with tens of millions of dollars flowing out of the country and a cash transfer network that facilitates bribes for corrupt Afghan officials, drug traffickers and insurgents.
In a July 7, 2009, cable, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry describes "two contrasting portraits" of the Afghan president.
"The first is of a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation building and overly self-conscious that his time in the spotlight of glowing reviews from the international community has passed," the cable says. "The other is that of an ever-shrewd politician who sees himself as a nationalist hero. ... In order to recalibrate our relationship with Karzai, we must deal with and challenge both of these personalities."
Well this is certainly no news to those who have spent time in that country!
In a July 7, 2009, cable, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry describes "two contrasting portraits" of the Afghan president.
"The first is of a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation building and overly self-conscious that his time in the spotlight of glowing reviews from the international community has passed," the cable says. "The other is that of an ever-shrewd politician who sees himself as a nationalist hero. ... In order to recalibrate our relationship with Karzai, we must deal with and challenge both of these personalities."
Well this is certainly no news to those who have spent time in that country!
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Special forces Afghan probe prompts oversight calls
There are calls for public oversight of an elite military unit amid allegations that a Canadian soldier was involved in an unlawful killing of an Afghan.
Federal politicians and a former member of the military are making the calls in light of a series of closed-door investigations in Ottawa that have been looking into the explosive claims involving the covert unit, Joint Task Force 2.
The allegations included claims that members of JTF2 witnessed American soldiers killing an unarmed man, and, in a separate incident, that a member of JTF2 killed a man who was surrendering.
Earlier this year, CBC News reported that the first probe, named Sand Trap, looked into the allegations that a Canadian was involved in the 2006 shooting death of an Afghan who had his hands up in the act of surrender. That probe ended without any charges.
Sand Trap Two, which is looking at the claims against American forces, is still ongoing.
The Canadian soldier who raised those allegations said that in January 2008, his team was sent to conduct a mission alongside an American special operations team. He said he witnessed the U.S. forces kill a man who was wounded and unarmed.
"We know nothing about this formally," said New Democrat MP Jack Harris. "All we know is what individuals may tell us."
MP Claude Bachand of the Bloc Québécois believes there has to be a way to balance the need for military secrecy with the need for accountability.
Denis Morisset spent eight years in JTF2, and witnessed ugly battles in Bosnia and Afghanistan. He thinks more oversight would lead to paralysis on the battlefield.
"From my point of view, it's completely stupid," he said.
Go figure the Bloc and NDP are raising a stink about this. The Canadian incident has been investigated and no charges laid, so drop it. The US incident investigation is ongoing.
I can't believe any Canadian combat soldier and especially the JTF/CSOR gang would lose any sleep over another dead Afghan. I guess if in the end the folks turned out to be "innocent", about a 1% chance, they may get troubled.
Although I don't think the Special Forces of any country should have free reign to roam the countryside executing just anybody who gets in their way. But having worked with a few of these teams, I respect and admire what the have to do.
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