Milosevic's top agent and killer was also top CIA agent

Death squad leader was top CIA agent

(with my comments interspersed, plus further articles and comments below, on where this intriguing story leads)

SERBIA: Gabriel Ronay
full: http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var.2497030.0.death_squad_leader_was_top_cia_agent.php

THE LATE President Milosevic's secret police chief and organiser of Serb death squads during the genocidal ethnic cleansing of disintegrating Yugoslavia was the United States' top CIA agent in Belgrade, according to the independent Belgrade Radio B92.

The claim that from 1992 until the end of the decade, Jovica Stanisic, head of Serbia's murderous DB Secret Police, was regularly informing his CIA handlers of the thinking in Milosevic's inner circle has shocked the region

Stanisic is said to have loyally served his two masters for eight years

(Comment MK: Yes, loyally, from all reports. Which srongly sugests there was not much of a contradiction).

He is facing war crimes charges at the International Criminal Court at The Hague
In the terrifying years of Yugoslavia's internecine wars, he acted as the willing "muscle" behind Milosevic's genocidal campaigns in Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia, including Srebrenica

(Comment MK: Yeh, in fact you could hardly have got worse than Stanisic).

According to the charges he faces, Stanisic was "part of a joint criminal enterprise that included former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbian politicians".
Dermot Groome, The Hague's chief prosecutor, has specifically accused him of sending in the Serb Scorpion and Red Beret death squads into the states seeking independence from Belgrade. Stanisic has pleaded not guilty.

(Comment MK: Just for reference, the Scorpions took part in the Srebrenica massacre of over 8000 Muslim captives when they overrun the Srebrenica/Gaza/Warsaw ghetto in July 1995)

Like in a Cold War spy thriller, Serbia's secret police chief met his CIA handlers in safe houses, parks and boats on the river Sava to betray his master's action plans
(Comment MK: "Betray"? Well, let's see).

He provided, it is claimed, information on the whereabouts of Nato hostages
(Comment MK: Who were not being held by his master, the Milosevic Serbian govt, but by the Karadzic Bosnian Serb gangster govt., at a time (1995) when the former was pressuring the latter into agreeing to generous US "peace" terms, under which half of Bosnia would be given as a Serb Republic, despite Serbs being only 30% of the pop'n - Karadzic was vainly holding out for more, something like Lieberman to Netanyahu I suppose. Hence Stanisic was actually doing his master's bidding at the time)

aided CIA operatives in their search for Muslim mass graves
(MK: ie, after the end of the war)

and helped the US set up secret bases in Bosnia to monitor the implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace accord
(MK: ie the accord just signed between the US, Milosevic and Tudjman to partition Bosnia - the main purpose of these NATO bases being to hunt down the Muslim fighters from the Middle East that had come to besieged Bosnia's aid during the war, indeed some sent of to Guantanamo for 6 years - so no "betrayal" of his master anywhere here in these tasks for the CIA)

This has raised awkward questions for Washington. With Stanisic providing chapter and verse of the genocidal slaughter of Croats, Bosnians and Albanians from the early 1990s, should President Clinton have cut a deal with Milosevic at Dayton, Ohio, ending the Bosnian war on such equitable terms for the Serbs?
(Commnet MK: yeh, much more than "equitable" to the Bosnian Serb Republic" in half of Bosnia).

Or, using Stanisic's evidence, should the Americans not have unmasked Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, the then head of Republika Srpska, as genocidal war criminals and demanded their surrender?

From his prison cell at The Hague, Stanisic countered the charges facing him with an aide memoir portraying himself as "a person who had sought to moderate Milosevic and had done a great deal to moderate the crisis"
(Comment MK: Yeh, "modeation" I guess means being the most ruthless killer of the lot)

In an unusual move, the CIA has submitted classified documents to the court that confirm Stanisic's "undercover operative role in helping to bring peace to the region and aiding the agency's work. He helped defuse some of the most explosive actions of the Bosnian war."
Thus the judges at The Hague are having to judge a man who allegedly sent the Scorpion death squads to Srebrenica to "deal" with men and boys fleeing the UN-protected Muslim enclave, while working with the CIA trying to end Milosevic's ethnic wars.


Here's some more to help fill out the picture:

Serbian spy's trial lifts cloak on his CIA alliance

As Milosevic's intelligence chief, Jovica Stanisic is accused of setting up genocidal death squads. But as a valuable source for the CIA, an agency veteran says, he also 'did a whole lot of good.'

By Greg Miller March 1, 2009

www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-serbia-spy-cia1-2009mar01,0,5662696.story
(clip, lots of the same as above)
In 1991, as ethnic violence escalated, Milosevic ordered the creation of secret paramilitary units, with names like Red Berets and Scorpions, that would roam the Balkans. They wore unmarked uniforms, were led by thugs and committed some of the worst atrocities of the war.

As the trial got underway last year, Groome showed photos of Stanisic posing with members of the special units. He played audio of intercepted communications in which Stanisic appears to refer to the units as his "boys."

At one point, Groome introduced a videotape showing images of Muslim men and boys - their hands bound with wire - being led into the woods and shot, one by one, by members of the Scorpions.

"Jovica Stanisic established these units," said Groome, an American lawyer. And Stanisic made sure "they had everything that they needed, including a license to clear the land of unwanted people, a license to commit murder."

(Comment MK: then the following creeps innocently into the text, strangely with no conclusions being drawn, least of all the obvious ones:

OVER TIME, STANISIC SOUGHT TO MOVE HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE AGENCY OUT OF THE SHADOWS. WELL AFTER HIS SECRET MEETINGS HAD STARTED, STANISIC PERSUADED MILOSEVIC TO LET HIM OPEN CONTACTS WITH THE CIA AS A BACK CHANNEL TO THE WEST. THE MIDNIGHT MEETINGS IN THE PARK GAVE WAY TO DAYLIGHT SESSIONS IN STANISIC'S OFFICE.
(clip)

By then, the Clinton administration was engaged in an all-out diplomatic push to end the war. Stanisic accompanied Milosevic to Dayton, Ohio, for peace talks, then returned to Serbia to carry out key pieces of the accord.

It was left to Stanisic to get the president of Bosnia's Serb republic, Radovan Karadzic, to sign a document pledging to leave office. And Stanisic helped the CIA establish a network of bases in Bosnia to monitor the cease-fire
(MK: Ah yeh, but hang on, didn't this little event about encouraging Karadzic to leave office have somethig to do with one Richard Holbrooke - chief US negotiator/crook at Dayton - making certain promises to Karadzic - let's see below)


US diplomats back Karadzic's claim of immunity deal
By Marlise Simons
Published: March 22, 2009
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/22/europe/bosnia.php

PARIS: Every time Radovan Karadzic, the onetime Bosnian Serb leader, appears in court on war crimes charges, he hammers on one recurring claim: A senior American official pledged that he would never be standing there.

The official, Richard C. Holbrooke, now a special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration, has repeatedly denied having promised Mr. Karadzic immunity from prosecution in exchange for abandoning power after the Bosnian war.
But the rumor persists, and different versions have recently emerged that line up with Mr. Karadzic's assertion, including a new historical study of the Yugoslav wars published by Purdue University in Indiana.

Charles W. Ingrao, the study's co-editor, said that three senior State Department officials, one of them retired, and several other people with knowledge of Mr. Holbrooke's activities had told him that Mr. Holbrooke had assured Mr. Karadzic in July 1996 that he would not be pursued by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague if he left politics.

Mr. Karadzic had already been charged by the tribunal with genocide and other crimes against civilians.
Two of the people cited anonymously in the new study, a former senior State Department official who spent almost a decade in the Balkans and another American who was involved with international peacekeeping there in the 1990s, provided additional details in interviews with The New York Times, speaking on condition that they not be further identified
(clip)
Mr. Holbrooke, who brokered the peace agreement that ended the Bosnian war in 1995, returned to Belgrade in 1996 to press Mr. Karadzic to resign as president of the Bosnian Serb republic. Mr. Holbrooke's memoirs recount a night of fierce negotiation on July 18, 1996, but make no mention of any pledge of immunity.

The Purdue University study, "Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars' Initiative," says that Mr. Holbrooke "instructed his principal assistant, Christopher Hill, to draft the memorandum to be signed by Karadzic," committing him to give up power
Mr. Ingrao said Mr. Holbrooke had used Slobodan Milosevic, then the Serbian leader, and other Serbian officials as intermediaries to convey the promise of immunity and to reach the deal with Mr. Karadzic.


US protected Mladic?

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2009&mm=03&dd=03&nav_id=57546

3 March 2009 10:14 Source: Vecernje novosti BELGRADE -- U.S. historian Charles Ingrao says that the Pentagon did not consider the arrest of Hague fugitives a priority, according to daily Vecernje Novosti.

Ingrao has completed a report that is the result of five years of investigative work by 300 historians, sociologists and legal experts from the former Yugoslavia and entire world.
According to the Belgrade daily, the report states that the American military did everything in its power to make sure that the chief Hague fugitives, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, were not arrested.

The report claims that from late February to early July 1996, a specially-formed American reconnaissance unit had Mladic "in its sights" at least 20 times.
The daily states that the American observers were accompanied several times by American Colonel John Batista, who held meetings with Mladic at the command headquarters of the Republic of Srpska military to discuss, reportedly, the terms for his surrender.
The negotiations came to an abrupt halt on July 6, when American soldiers and Mladic's security personnel came to blows.

According to the daily, American military commanders actively blocked the efforts of the Dutch and Danish to arrest the fugitives, which, the daily says, was confirmed by military and civil officials from several NATO member-states, as well as by Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was the international high representative in Bosnia-Hercegovina at the time


CIA protected Karadzic"
10 August 2008 10:20 Source: FoNet, Blic

http://www.b92.net/eng/news/crimes-article.php?yyyy=2008&mm=08&dd=10&nav_id=52591
BELGRADE -- A former Hague Tribunal insider has added her comments to claims that Radovan Karadzic enjoyed support from the United States.
Former Hague spokeswoman Florence Hartmann told the Belgrade daily Blic that the UN war crimes court's prosecution on several occasions gave the U.S. exact locations where the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs was hiding.

But, Hartmann says, "they did nothing".
"Information about the fugitives' whereabouts was abundant, however, it would always turn out that one of the three countries - the U.S., Britain or France - would block arrests."
"Sometimes arrest operations were halted by [former French President Jacques] Chirac personally, other times by [former U.S. President Bill] Clinton," she told the daily in an interview published today, and added she spoke "based on authentic statements and documents".

Hartmann claims that during the summer of 2005, two CIA agents asked the Bosnia-Herzegovina police to put an end to a surveillance operation directed at Karadzic's family members, ordered previously by Del Ponte and the Hague Tribunal.

She adds that former Bosnian secret police chief Momir Munibabic was sacked on former High Representative Paddy Ashdown's orders, "for being efficient in his search for Karadzic, and for sending information to Del Ponte".

Hartmann also believes that Karadzic's arrest "was never a problem for Serbia as much as for the West - unlike the case of Ratko Mladic, whom the Hague sees as a firm link of crime that connects Belgrade and Bosnia".

Karadzic, she continued, was known to distance himself from Serbia.
"Now that Karadzic has finally been arrested, he can tell a lot about secret deals that led to the fall of Srebrenica. His testimony represents a great risk for the great western powers," Hartmann is convinced.

According to her, so far no solid evidence emerged that it was the western countries who had handed Srebrenica over in exchange for the Serbs' cooperation in the peace process, but that "if anyone has any knowledge about such secret deals, it's Karadzic".

(Comment MK: Ah yeh, but there's plenty more about that as well, isn't there?):


US Connived in Bosnian Serb seizure of Srebrenica
Report on Bosnian Murders Fuels Debate
Marc Perelman Fri. Nov 10, 2006

http://www.forward.com/articles/report-on-bosnian-murders-fuels-debate/

A French media report published last week is sparking claims that the United States was partially complicit in the 1995 destruction of three Bosnian Muslim enclaves, protected by the United Nations.

The report, which appeared in the magazine Paris-Match, drew on an interview given by former American diplomat Richard Holbrooke to a Bosnian television station last year. In the interview, Holbrooke, a Clinton administration assistant secretary of state, said that his "initial instructions" at the time were to sacrifice the three enclaves, which included Srebrenica, the site of the grisly murder of some 8,000 Muslims. These instructions, Holbrooke then told Paris-Match, came from Anthony Lake, national security adviser at that time, and Holbrooke claims he rejected them. Word that the instructions were given, however, has fueled speculation that Western countries not only allowed the fall of the enclaves, but in effect encouraged it, as well, in order to facilitate a diplomatic solution in which the dividing line between Bosnian Serb and Muslim territories would be clear.

Holbrooke, a key architect of the Dayton peace agreements that ended the war, has long said that he resisted orders from the White House to abandon one of the three enclaves, Gorazde; however, his seeming admission that American policy envisioned sacrificing the two others - Srebrenica and one called Zepa - was in sharp contrast with all previous assertions by officials of the United States, including Holbrooke himself.

Holbrooke told the Forward that he misspoke and that the instructions he received and rejected involved only Gorazde. "I was sloppy," he said. "I conflated Srebrenica and Gorazde."

Lake, who now teaches at Georgetown University and has had a sometimes tense relationship with Holbrooke, said through an assistant that Holbrooke also had told him that he had misspoken and that he agreed with Holbrooke's explanation. But Muhamed Sacirbey, who was Bosnia's foreign minister at the time, claims that Holbrooke did not misspeak and that his words were in fact "an indictment" of Western countries.

"It was a long, sit-down interview to mark the 10th anniversary of the Dayton accord, and the main topic was Srebrenica, so I have a hard time believing that someone like Dick Holbrooke could make such an obvious mistake," Sacirbey said. "I think it's an attempt on his part to disperse blame in the face of mounting evidence of Western complicity" with the Bosnian Serbs and Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

In an interview with author Sylvie Matton, published in the same issue of Paris-Match, Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, asserts that Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic had a meeting with Western officials in the spring of 1995 in which they indicated their plans to take over Srebrenica. "This is the smoking gun," del Ponte said, adding that there were minutes of the meeting and that she knew the names of the Western participants but was unwilling to divulge them.

Sacirbey said that the meeting in question was part of a negotiation process that he now believes led to a deal in the early summer of 1995 between Western officials and Milosevic that included the transfer of the three enclaves, which were under the protection of U.N. peacekeepers, to what would become Bosnian Serb territory.
(clip)
"For many years, I believed that the West gave an orange light to the Serbs to take over Srebrenica, but I am now convinced that it was a green light," said Sacirbey, who added that although he had no rock-solid evidence, a series of revelations like the meeting mentioned by del Ponte made him reassess some of the instances he witnessed a decade ago.

My comments on that:
US green light to Bosnian Serbs to seize Srebrenica: the smoking gun? http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2007/03/us-green-light-to-bosnian-serbs-to.html


But then it all goes back much further, doesn't it?


Conspiracist leftist icon Michel Chossudovsky, one of the leading apologists for Serbian nationalism among the left, wrote that a 1984 US "Secret Sensitive" National Security Decision Directive (NSDD 133) called for a "quiet revolution" to overthrow Communist governments, while seeking to "promote the trend toward an effective, market-oriented Yugoslav economic structure...and to expand US economic relations with Yugoslavia...," with an important role to be played by the IMF. Yet Chossudovsky, hung up on the absurdist view that the West "broke up" Yugoslavia, makes no mention of the fact that the role being played by the IMF was precisely to encourage Yugoslav recentralisation (which by definition could only be under domination of its biggest republic, Serbia), nor of the already very large-scale US economic relations with the federal Yugoslav government and army, and in particular, links to Milosevic personally.

Now the "Secret Sensitive" classification indicates the existence of confidential relationships with individuals or groups. It was in these conditions that Milosevic - who had wide business experience in the capitalist world and direct connections and "confidential relationships" with important US political and business circles - seized power in the Serbian regime in 1987.

Could Milosevic have been preciely the kind of gut the US had a "confidential relationship" with, so that his seiure of power in 1987 so soon after the CIA's secet senstive call was no coincidence? Let's see:

Deputy Secretary of State under George Bush, Lawrence Eagleburger, who was US ambassador to Yugoslavia in the late 1970s, had "a well-tested working relationship" with Milosevic,[1] who headed Yugoslavia's main bank, Beobank, in both New York and Belgrade.[2] As Beobank CEO in New York, Milosevic was the key Yugosav representative at IMF meetings in the late 1970s and early 19080s. Through Beobank, the JNA, Yugoslavia's largest industry (based in Serbia), dealt in its annual $3 billion arms exports program.[3] Eagleburger was President of Henry Kissinger Associates, a US consultancy providing world strategic and economic advice, which had large contracts with Yugo America and other Yugoslav companies.[4] Eagleburger was also on the Board of Directors of Yugo America, which is owned by Zavodi Crvena Zastava,[5] the major Serbian weapons producer, also a client of Kissinger Associates.

According to Eric Margolis in The World of Sunday, "Since the late 1970s, say Washington sources, Kissinger Associates channeled hundreds of millions of dollars in private US investments into Yugoslavia. By sheer coincidence, most of it was made after Eagleburger served as American ambassador to Belgrade."[9]

Eagleburger was also on the Board of Lljubljanska Banka (LBS), Yugoslavia's second biggest bank. LBS had significant business interests in the US, largely through connections to BNL bank in Atlanta, whose international department was headed by Kissinger.[10] In addition to US arms' sales to Yugoslavia, the JNA also bought licences for its arms exports industry for sophisticated new weapons from the US arms manufacturers for years.[11] Products were sold for oil or dollars, the oil going to Technogas, and the dollars to Beobanka - Milosevic at one time or another being CEO of both.[12]

As the World of Sunday article continues, "Kissinger risked his reputation by advising clients to invest heavily in Yugoslavia where his connections were excellent. Kissinger, Eagleburger and Snowcroft may have done their utmost to shore up the crumbling Yugoslav state. When it did collapse, they apparently managed to delay recognition of the new nations that emerged from Yugoslavia . If the regime of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic falls, any hope that Kissinger's investors will ever see even a fraction of their money will be gone."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Boyes, R, "America Gets Tough with Serbs in Policy Switch," The Times, London, April 24, 1992.
[2] Gow, J, Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War, Hurst and Company, London, 1997, p205.
[3] Skoric, op cit, p2
[4]BNL Subpoena Renewal, H2549-51.
[5] ibid, H2549.
[6] Poulsen, T, in Allcock, J, Horton, J, Milivojevic, M, Eds, Yugoslavia in Transition, Berg Publishers, New York, 1992, p52.
[7] Skoric, op cit, p3. When Yugo filed for bankruptcy in 1989, it was bailed out by Zastava and BSE-Genex, a Yugoslav trading firm based in London and ranking 266th among Britain's top 500 companies, Artisien , P and Brown, A, in Allcock et al, op cit, p380.
[8] Milivojevic, M, in Ramet, S and Adamovich, L Edited, Beyond Yugoslavia, Westview press, Boulder, 1995, p78
[9] Margolis, E, The World of Sunday, April 25, 1992, quoted in Skoric, op cit, p4.
[10] BNL Subpoena Renewal, op cit, H2547-51. BNL made an illicit loan of 4 billion dollars to Iraq in the late 1980s.
[11] For example, Rockwell International Corporation sold licenses to Yugoslavia to supply Iraq's telecommunications equipment, Skoric, op cit.
[12] Skoric, op cit, p1-2.
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Serbia Arrests Karadzic – Architect of the Destruction of Bosnia

Serbia Arrests Karadzic – Architect of the Destruction of Bosnia

By Michael Karadjis

The new Serbian government last month finally cornered Radovan Karadzic, the former leader of the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska), one of the two entities which make up Bosnia, during the war in 1992-5 when that statelet was created. Karadzic had been in hiding for many years from the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, which in 1995 had indicted him for various war crimes including genocide.

The July 21 arrest led to a wave of hypocrisy in western capitals, congratulating Serbia on the arrest of the vile criminal. Yet for the last seven years in Afghanistan and five years in Iraq, well upwards of a million people have been killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of these countries. Whole countries are being destroyed; yet not only do these war crimes of climactic scale go unpunished, but these leading war criminals then see themselves as having the right to designate who is a war criminal.

Daily war crimes are committed against the Palestinian people year in and out by a country which has stood in open violation of international law for decades, yet continues to receive massive military and economic aid from the US.

Such naked hypocrisy can never lead to justice or even a feeling of justice among the oppressed of the world. However, it is a big mistake to jump from this condemnation of the overall system of injustice to any defense of Karadzic, let alone viewing him as some kind of anti-imperialist hero, as some on the left and far right fringes do.

Who is Karadzic and what makes him so important?

Born in 1945 in Montenegro, Karadzic was the son of a Chetnik (Serb-chauvinist) warrior, Vuk, of World War II. The Chetniks first fought the Nazis but then ended up collaborating with them against Tito's communist Partisans. For much of Karadzic's childhood under Tito, his father was in prison.

The victorious partisans set up a multi-ethnic socialist federation, in which Serbs were just one of many equal nations. Extreme nationalism was kept under wraps by Tito, in order that the dominant nations, especially Serbs and Croats, could not dominate the smaller nations, to maintain a united working class. The Chetniks by contrast had aimed to revive the pre-war rule of the Serbian monarchy over the other non-Serb peoples.

However, as capitalism swept across the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s, the ascending bourgeoisie needed a new ideology to replace "communism" and "brotherhood and unity." They found it in a revived national chauvinism.

A psychiatrist and a "poet", Karadzic fell under the influence of leading anti-Titoist dissident Dobrica Cosic, a prominent figure in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences and the intellectual father of modern Serb nationalism. The rising Serb nationalist, medievalist, lunar-right revival of the 1980s came to dominate the Academy, which, though in Belgrade, chose Karadzic to head the newly formed pro-Chetnik, anti-communist Serb Democratic Party (SDS) in Bosnia in 1990.
This is where we have to understand Karadzic. Neither an International Monetary Fund-linked party technocrat like then Serbian prime minister Slobodan Milosevic, nor a sadistic military officer like General Mladic, would necessarily have ended up destroying Yugoslavia. Rather it was the wind of Serbian chauvinism - itself not something from the sky, but reflecting the rising capitalist class - that swept both along as opportunists of power, political and military.

Karadzic, by contrast, like his close ally Vojislav Seselj, the founder of the quasi-fascist Serbian Chetnik Movement (later Serbian Radical Party), was always an enemy of the old power structure and a natural leader of the new. The entire ideology of Karadzic, Seselj and the Serb nationalist lunar right was fundamentally pro-imperialist: they were re-launching the crusades to finally drive "the Turks" out of Europe (ie, they called Balkan Muslims "Turks”), they were defending Christian Europe against "Islamic invasion." If Tito had identified with anti-colonial movements like that in Algeria against French rule, Karadzic by contrast declared “Bosnia has become like Algeria for the French in the 1950s. After the appearance of fundamentalism, peace with the Muslims is no longer possible.” While the new bourgeoisie of other Yugoslav nations also promoted national chauvinism – most notably the regime of Franjo Tudjman of Croatia – that of the dominant Serb nation had an additional weapon to put their chauvinist ideology into practice, with the aim of grabbing the largest slice of the ashes of Yugoslavia: they hijacked the former Yugoslav army, the 4th largest military force in Europe, and drove out the non-Serbs.

In 1992, there was a country called Bosnia, a historic entity, one of the former Yugoslav republics, which was constitutionally a republic of three peoples, Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), all three of whom were represented in the elected government proportionally, and at every level of the state apparatus. The three peoples were inextricably mixed. About a quarter of the land mass of Bosnia, containing also a quarter of its population, had no ethnic majority at all; and in about half the areas that did, these “majorities” were tenuous. Major cities were occupied by Serbs, Croats, Muslims, mixed Serb-Croats, Serb-Muslims, Croat-Muslims, Serb-Croat-Muslims, "Yugoslavs", "Bosnians", atheists, Jews, Roma etc, living in the same apartment blocks and working in the same factories and offices, essentially a new nation in formation, a post-capitalist nation under development in socialist Yugoslavia, where Bosnia was the high point of that multi-ethnic state. This coexistence had lasted 800 years, and everywhere were scattered mosques, synagogues, Serbian Orthodox and Croat Catholic churches.

From the outset, this leader out of nowhere had a plan: to destroy Bosnia, root and branch, the entire historic civilisation, so rudely based, as it was, on coexistence between peoples rather than ethnic purity, Serb domination and apartheid. In this, he had agreement from his Bosnian Croat chauvinist counterparts, backed by Tudjman.

To do this, however, the Muslim plurality of the population had to be eliminated. Unlike the much smarter Milosevic, Karadzic made no bones about this; in a speech to the Bosnian parliament months before Bosnia’s independence, he threatened that the Muslims would “disappear from the face of the Earth.”

The blueprint for this genocide was laid out by the SDS leadership in “The Strategic Goals of the Serbian People in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” adopted by the Republika Srpska national assembly in May 1992. These goals were: (1) Separation as a state from the other two ethnic communities; (2) a corridor between Sermberija and Krajina; (3) the establishment of a corridor in the Drina River valley, i.e., the elimination of the border between Serbian states; (4) the establishment of a border on the Una and Neretva rivers; and (5) the division of the city of Sarajevo into a Serbian part and a Muslim part, and the establishment of effective State authorities within each part.”[1] Looking at a demographic map of these regions, particularly the Drina Valley and the “corridor,” one can understand that this could only mean the physical elimination of the non-Serb, mainly Muslim, majorities, of these regions. Mladić gave the order: “Inflict the greatest losses and force the enemy to abandon the regions of Birač, Žepa and Goražde together with the Moslem population. First offer the disarming of militarily capable and armed men, and if they do not accept, destroy them.”[2]

He set out to do that in 1992 - and succeeded. In the northern spring and summer of that year, his Chetniks and the now completely Serb-run "Yugoslav" army swept across Bosnia and uprooted, bombed and massacred the non-Serb population of 70 percent of Bosnia (Serbs were only 30 percent of the population). While the July 1995 massacre in the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica – where Mladic’s troops killed over 8000 Muslim captives in a few days – is the most terrible crime committed, the massacre in the whole of Muslim-majority east Bosnia occurred over many months of 1992, alongside the massacre in north and west Bosnia, while the mixed population of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, along with dozens of other towns and cities, were besieged and bombed daily throughout these years. Officially, 100,000 people were killed, though like with the Iraq Body Count, real numbers may be much higher. 83 percent of civilian victims were Muslims, and millions were driven from their homes or made refugees.

Nearly 1700 mosques were destroyed, many flattened and turned into parking lots, whereas when revenge – never justified but essentially inevitable – set in, only 34 Orthodox churches suffered the same fate. Thus mosques were destroyed at a ratio of 50 to 1 compared to Orthodox churches (some 340 Croat Catholic churches were also destroyed). The National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with over “a million books, more than a hundred thousand manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of historical records,” according to professor of Islamic Studies Michael sells, went up in flames, the biggest book-burning in history, as did the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, containing more than five thousand Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, from many parts of the Middle East.

The high point of this 3.5 year genocidal war against Bosnia’s Muslims in the heart of Europe with only whimpers from the European imperialist powers within earshot away was the massacre of 8000 Muslim captives in Srebrenica, when it was captured by Karadzic’s army, under the command of Mladic, in July 1995. At the end of this monstrosity, Mladic declared the Serb people had finally liberated Srebrenica from "the Turks".

It is somewhat unfortunate that even this crime has come under the spotlight for moral relativists. Ed Herman, in particular, has penned some appalling work on this (for a full rebuttal of these left-revisionist works, see my article at: http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2007/11/srebrenica-response-to-left-wing.html).

Karadzic’s capture again brought out some of this. For example, Louis Proyect, the moderator of the Marxism List, wrote:

“In the latest issue of Links, Karadjis holds forth on the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the Serb warlord who is qualitatively worse than all the other warlords in Yugoslavia, including the Muslim Naser Oric whose anti-Serb pogroms near Srebrenica unleashed Karadzic’s bloodlust revenge.”[3]

This dishonesty is astounding, and can only be uttered by someone so enamored to the cause of Serbian chauvinism that he allows himself to write things he knows are untrue. His suggestion here is that the war in east Bosnia began when Oric launched “anti-Serb pogroms.” This then provoked Karadzic into his “bloodlust revenge,” by killing 8000 Muslims in Srebrenica.

Proyect however well knows that the massacre and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from east Bosnia began in earnest – and extremely bloodily – from April 1992, and that is why the Muslim military leader got holed up in the Gaza-like ghetto of Srebrenica in the first place. Before that, most of east Bosnia, including all the region surrounding Srebrenica, had a Muslim majority. Tens of thousands of Muslim refugees poured into the Srebrenica ghetto, which then became known as a Muslim “enclave” in “Serb” east Bosnia. Naturally enough, this led to desperate raids out of the ghetto into the lands formerly their own, mostly to get food and seize animals.

These raids, which peaked around late 1992 and early 1993, were often led by Oric, and sometimes bloody vengeance was exacted on small numbers of Serb civilians. I have never covered for any attack on civilians, but these raids were more or less the exact equivalent of the raids out of the Gaza ghetto, the Gaza concentration camp, by desperate Palestinians, which similarly result in deaths of Israeli citizens, and can hardly be compared to the systematic crimes of the Israeli occupier.

Not only were the numbers of Serb casualties far less than the Muslim casualties either *before or after* this time, but above all, Proyect has casually reversed the chronology and causality involved. Surely he would have been more correct to say that the massive bloodlust pogroms against the Muslims throughout 1992 is what led to Oric’s much later and smaller-scale “bloodlust revenge.” How the latter can then be claimed as provoking the deliberate, planned capture and massacre of thousands in Srebrenica years later is a tall story indeed.

This then is the legacy of Karadzic, the utter destruction of the nation of Bosnia, in the same way as Bush is responsible for the wholesale destruction of Iraq. In 1994, Karadzic’s ‘Serb Republic’ annulled all decisions of the ‘National Antifascist Council for the People’s Liberation of Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (ZAVNOBiH), the Partisan assembly in World War II which gave birth to both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Communist Yugoslavia. By contrast, the Bosnian government continues to celebrate the anniversary of the first ZAVNOBiH session as the birth of the Bosnian republic. In 1996, retreating Chetnik forces destroyed the memorial to Partisan war dead and victims of fascism in Sarajevo.

But imperialism also wanted the destruction of that Bosnia, because its heartland cities and industrial centres represented a still multi-ethnic working class, the last embers of what was socialist about the very contradictory phenomenon of Titoist Yugoslavia. Thus even from before the war began, the European imperialist powers put forward the Carrington-Cultheiro Plan, drawn up by the Serb and Croat chauvinists - indeed by Karadzic himself – for the ethnic dismemberment of Bosnia into “three constituent (territorial) units”[4], despite the intermingling of populations. This directly led to the ethnic cleansing.

The EU continued to put forward such partition plans throughout the war. In mid-1993, EU negotiator Lord Owen from the UK Foreign Office and the UN envoy, Thorvald Stoltenberg, decided the best way to achieve “peace” was to offer Karadzic everything he wanted - a full republic occupying 52 percent of Bosnian territory within a loose Bosnian confederation of three republics. Owen and Stoltenberg, Milosevic and Tudjman, the Bosnian Serb and Croat paramilitary leaders Karadzic and Boban, met and agreed on principles.[5] Alia Izetbegovic, president of the legal, UN-recognised government of Bosnia, was not invited to any of these meetings to dismember his country. In September, and again in December, the Bosnian parliament flatly rejected this imperialist carve-up.

Meanwhile, the imperialist powers embargoed arms from the Bosnian government to force it to surrender, in violation of Article 1 of the UN Charter, on the right of UN member states to self-defense. Only Iran and some Muslim states managed to smuggle some arms trough in violation of the imperialist embargo. The UN General Assembly twice voted to lift the illegal embargo against Bosnia, yet this was blocked by the Security Council mainly due to the insistence of Britain and France.

Examples of NATO enforcement of the embargo include the interception by US officers, in September 1992, at Zagreb airport of an Iranian plane bound for Bosnia with 4000 automatic rifles, and the turning back by NATO navies of a large shipment of Iranian arms to Bosnia in January 1993, at a time that Bosnia could have used such arms to face the huge combined assault by Serb and Croat nationalist forces.[6] In April 1993, the US even forced the Pakistani government – at the risk of being declared a “terrorist state” – to sack the then head of the ISI, Javed Nasir, due to his role in attempting to get arms to the Bosnian Muslims.[7]

Finally, the US took over, and after the Srebrenica genocide, intervened in late 1995 with a brief bombing of the Bosnian Serb artillery that had been bombing Sarajevo daily for years, a show necessary in order to hand over half of Bosnia to the "Serb Republic," violently “cleansed” of its non-Serb plurality – obtaining "peace" via a total victory of Karadzic's war aims.It is no wonder then that Holbrooke, the chief US architect of this Serbian victory at the 1995 Dayton Accords, made a secret deal with Karadzic to grant him immunity provided he “disappear” from public life.

Former Serbian Interior Ministry cabinet chief, Vlado Nadezdin, recently claimed this agreement was signed between Karadzic and Holbrooke before Dayton. "I was then chief of cabinet to the Yugoslav Interior Minister Milana Milutinovic and I saw that document. The agreement contained a number of points, at the top of the page was the president of the Republic of Srpska, the president's cabinet, in the left-hand corner was Radovan Karadzic's signature, and in the right, Richard Holbrooke's. The main clause of the agreement out of the three or four, stated that the Hague Tribunal was not responsible for Radovan Karadzic," he said.

This confirms similar accusations by Florence Hartmann, the former spokeswoman for Hague Tribunal Chief Prosecutor. In a recent book she claimed Russia and America systematically blocked for the past decade the arrest of Karadzic. Most recently, she claims, in 2004 American forces tipped off Karadzic that he was about to be arrested by the Serbian government.

Hartman claimed western leaders wanted to avoid their relations with Karadzic coming to light and admitting that they did not make an effort to stop the Srebrenica genocide. Yet other revelations suggest another US-Karadzic deal had already included conspiring in the capture of Srebrenica (see http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2007/03/us-green-light-to-bosnian-serbs-to.html), which seems likely given that the Muslim town was handed to the now-recognised Serb Republic at Dayton as if nothing had happened.

Meanwhile, the Belgrade daily Blic claimed in early August that the CIA had protected Karadzic from arrest until 2000. Hartmann also told Blic that the Hague on several occasions gave the US exact locations where Karadzic was hiding, but “they did nothing.” Information “was abundant, however, it would always turn out that one of the three countries – the U.S., Britain or France – would block arrests.”

Hartmann also claimed Karadžić's arrest “was never a problem for Serbia as much as for the West – unlike the case of Ratko Mladić, whom the Hague sees as a firm link of crime that connects Belgrade and Bosnia,” due to Mladic’s status as a general in the Bosnian Serb Army but having originally been a general in the Belgrade-based “Yugoslav” army. Karadžić, by contrast, “was known to distance himself from Serbia,” especially as Milosevic had long agreed to imperialist partition plans giving the Serb Republic half of Bosnia, whereas “true believing” right-wing fanatic Karadzic held out for much more till the end. "Now that Karadžić has finally been arrested, he can tell a lot about secret deals that led to the fall of Srebrenica. His testimony represents a great risk for the great western powers," Hartmann said.

It is not only the US at risk, but even more the former leaders of the then Tory regime in the UK, the most prominent imperialist spokespeople for Serbian victory from beginning to end. Tory MP and relative of the former Montenegrin royal family, Jovan Gvozdenovic (John Kennedy), organised two large donations of around 100,000 pounds to the ruling Tory Party in 1992 and 1994. The money was donated by a network of British based companies that Kennedy was involved in, partly or wholly owned by a Serbian parent company with strong links to Karadzic.[8] The large London-based Serbian firm Genex was owned in Bosnia by Karadzic’s people. Kennedy led delegations of British MP’s to meet Karadzic and other SDS leaders. Kennedy was a researcher for and close friend of Tory MP Henry Bellingham, parliamentary secretary to Malcolm Rifkind, British Defense Secretary, and reportedly “had access to the highest levels of the Conservative Party.”[9] The only MP to come out openly to call for support for Milosevic, right-winger David Hart, was also an adviser to Rifkind.

It is significant that no-one had been asking Serbia to extradite Karadzic, but only Mladic, believed to be in Serbia, given his long term military connections. Karadzic, who had no such traditional connections, was alleged by both Serbia and western governments to be in the hills of Bosnia or Montenegro (his birthplace), in fact they held up Bosnia's EU candidacy process on this account, yet it turns out he was living for years right under the very noses of the authorities in downtime Belgrade, where he had been masquerading brilliantly as a alternative therapies quack dealing in “energies” and the like.

But 13 years have gone by, and Holbrooke's long gone. A new situation now allows a new government coalition in Serbia to arrest and extradite Karadzic. The coalition includes both the Socialist Party – the former party of Milosevic – and the Democratic Party, the party that handed Milosevic to the Hague. Both parties are now linked to the Second International, espouse “neo-liberalism with a social face,” and are strongly pro-EU.

As a maverick right-wing extremist, ideologically linked to those now in opposition in Serbia, Karadzic can now be handed over as a trophy to the EU. The circumstances suggest both the west and Belgrade long kept quiet so that he could be traded at the right time.

Serbian nationalists and their supporters often claim the Hague is “anti-Serb” because the majority of indictees are Serb. Even a far better article, by Paul D’Amato, which made no apologetics for Karadzic at all, made a similar claim. After noting that, “on first look, the ICTY offers an image of impartiality,” listing some of the Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Kosovar Albanian indictees, D’Amato writes:

“However, of the 161 individuals indicted by the ICTY, from common soldiers to generals, police commanders and political leaders, three-quarters are Serbs or Montenegrins.”

This is a very strange argument. Why should the number of indictees be 25:25:25:25 Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Albanians, as if they all committed, or were able to commit, crimes in equal proportion? Would we complain if a world court indicted 70 percent Israelis and "only" 30 percent Palestinians for war crimes, that the court was "anti-Jewish"?

Yes, some three quarters of indictees from the Croatia and Bosnia wars are Serbs, most of the rest Croats and a small percent Bosnian Muslims - an excellent summary of the proportion of war crimes committed by each. Over Kosova, 6 Albanians and 7 Serbs have been indicted.

The Hague is however anti-Balkan – only Balkan peoples have been indicted, no imperialist leaders have been indicted for war crimes, particularly for horrendous crimes committed during the bombing of Serbia in 1999. This aspect of D’Amato’s article is completely valid.

Clearly, this fact suggests that any justice served by the Hague can only be selective at best. This point can and must be made without any doubts that Karadzic is indeed a war criminal of the tallest order, but it makes it difficult to judge the current Serbian government’s actions. While the Serbian ultra-right mobilises against the “traitor” government, the decision to arrest Karadzic is arguably a great day for the Serbian people, removing an appalling stain, dissociating their nation from some of the most vile rubbish to walk the Balkans since 1945.

The rather pathetically small demonstrations against the arrest, mostly hard-line Radical Party ranks, give a good idea of the extent to which most Serb people have moved on and rightly want nothing to do with those who destroyed their nation and the rest of the region. Those who understand this as the ‘resignation” of the Serb people to imperialist pressure greatly underestimate the intelligence and political level of the majority of Serbs; this is in fact a form of anti-Serb racism of those who prefer to support Serbian fascists, and denounce anyone criticising the politics of the Serbian ultra-right as “Serb-bashers,” copying the Zionist slur of “anti-Semitism” against anti-Zionists.

If this arrest can advance reconciliation among the peoples of the Balkans – impossible without the main perpetrator of the genocide behind bars – this may be a benefit greater than the demerit of sending a Serb leader to a court that refuses to prosecute imperialists.

The Hague’s bias had much greater relevance in the trial of Milosevic over his crimes against humanity in Kosova, because these crimes – all real and vile enough – took place in the context of the untried crimes against humanity being inflicted on the Serbian people by the world’s worst war criminals.

Bosnia was an entirely separate and different war. Karadzic did not fight imperialism, and neither did the latter fight him.

However, if the Holbrooke strategy was to cover up the crimes that imperialism and Karadzic were jointly responsible for, the current imperialist powers supporting the Hague process want him as a scapegoat for these joint crimes - as long as he doesn't say too much. Though the ultra-right has failed to mobilise, even the fact that it maintains the passive electoral support of some one third of voters, far higher than it should be, is partially a reflection nevertheless of the Hague’s hypocrisy.



.



[1] http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm. It is remarkable how similar this is to the plans of their Chetnik forebears in World War II. Their plan was outlined as follows in 1941: “To cleanse the state territory of all national minorities and anti-national elements” and “To create a direct continuous border between Serbia and Montenegro and between Serbia and Slovenia, by cleansing Sandzak of its Moslem inhabitants and Bosnia of its Moslem and Croatian inhabitants,” Tomasevich, J, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941-45: The Chetniks, Stanford, California, 1975.
[2] Katarina Luketić, Zarez, July 14, 2005,
http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/report_format.cfm?articleid=2990&reportid=168
[3] Proyect’s strange article can be found on his blog at http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/the-dsp-versus-the-archfiends. Apart from this particular aspect, the article contains a number of highly inaccurate statements, as well as very imaginative speculations, about this issue and about the views of the DSP and myself on these issues, as is usual in his world on this issue.
[4] Statement of Principles for New Constitutional Arrangement for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lisbon 23 February 1992, from Yugoslavia Through Documents, Ed Trifunovska, S, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Netherlands, 1994, pp 517-519.
[5] Report of the Co-Chairmen of the Steering Committee of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, UN Document S/26066, July 6, 1993.
[6] Gordon, M, New York Times News Service, January 25, 1993.
[7] ‘Ex-ISI Chief Reveals Secret Missile Shipments to Bosnia defying UN Embargo’,
http://www.satribune.com/archives/dec23_29_02/P1_bosniastory.htm
[8] The Sunday Times, May 19, 1996, p1.
[9] Malcolm, N, “The Whole Lot of Them Are Serbs,” The Spectator, June 10, 1995, p16.

US Bolivia ambassador partitioned Bosnia not Yugoslavia

US Bolivia ambassador partitioned Bosnia not Yugoslavia

By Michael Karadjis

I feel forced to write to correct some confusion that has been circulating regarding the current US ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, who has been supporting the so-called “autonomy” referendum by the Bolivian oligarchy.

A continuous line has come out that Goldberg “has experience in partition” because he allegedly participated in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. This tends to be a secondary point alongside a more general point that erroneously compares actual oppressed nations, such as the Kosovar Albanians, the poorest people in Europe, who have striven for independence for over a century, with the rich oligarchy of low-lands Bolivia, engaged in an imperialist-backed destabilization of the Bolivian revolution.

Along with Kosova, some also list Tibet and other examples of so-called “secessionism” as being related to the Bolivian oligarchy’s campaign. One feels compelled to add Palestine, Eritrea, Bangladesh, East Timor, Aceh, Tamil Ealam and other national liberation struggles by oppressed peoples just to make it consistent.

Much more could be said on the unscientific nature of such comparisons, but the essential point is that when Lenin was advocating the right of *oppressed nations* to self-determination he would have been surprised to see people a century later managing to confuse this with any “right” of *oppressor classes* to the same.

If struggles by oppressed nations and oppressor classes are now going to be all lumped together as “secession,” perhaps we ought to go back to the long “struggle” of the white Rhodesian elite against Britain, and declare it fundamentally similar to the struggle of the black Zimbabwean masses against that elite – both advocated “secession” from Britain.

The claims about Goldberg and the Balkans appear aimed at fitting out this false comparison with a coordinator. If the same bad guy, now stirring up the Bolivian oligarchy to “secession”, previously also pushed for “secession” of nations of the former Yugoslavia, then this proves how wicked those peoples of the Balkans were for struggling for self-determination against an oppressive regime.

The problem is, it is a house of cards. According to one such article, by Marina Menéndez Quintero (Bolivia Is One Sole Nation) in Juventud Rebelde:

“The activity of US Ambassador Philip Goldberg —who was an assistant of Richard Holbrooke, identified as one of the strategists in the disintegration of Yugoslavia— and whose arrival in Bolivia is related to the break out of the first separatist actions...”

Similarly, we read:
“Between 1994 and 1996 he was Special Assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, one of the strategists behind Yugoslavian disintegration … Goldberg, recognized as an expert in stoking ethnic or racial conflicts and his experience in Bosnia’s ethnic struggles preceding the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, would be key in Bolivia.”
(Roberto Bardini, The Ambassador of Ethnic Cleansing, May 3, 2008, http://machetera.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/the-ambassador-of-ethnic-cleansing/)

Let’s look at the chronology. Yugoslavia broke up in 1991-92. At that time, Goldberg’s boss Holbrooke, a Democrat, was nowhere near either the then US Republican government, or the Balkans, so could hardly have been a “strategist behind Yugoslavian disintegration.” In any case, the US Republican regime of George Bush I strongly opposed the “secession” of the non-Serb Yugoslav republics, and supported “the unity of Yugoslavia” to the bitter end. It was full of folk like Eagelburger and Scowcroft (and Kissinger just behind the scenes) up to their eyeballs in Yugoslav commercial and other connections.

US State Secretary Baker went to Belgrade in June 1991 on the eve of Croatia’s independence referendum – also the eve of the Serb-dominated ‘Yugoslav’ army’s massive 6-month bombing and ethnic cleansing war against that republic – and declared the US was for the maintenance of “the unity of Yugoslavia” by all means, and called the Croatian and Slovenian referendums “illegal and illegitimate.” A clear green light to Milosevic to launch his war. Even after the following 6 months of slaughter, when the EU and Russia finally recognised the constitutionally legal independence of the two republics in January 1992, the US still refused for several more months.

Clinton’s Democrat regime did not take power until January 1993, by which time the former Yugoslav federation was long gone. Now there was a horrific war going on in Bosnia, one of the now independent former republics, as Serbia and Croatia and their Bosnian proxies ethnically cleansed the Bosnian Muslim plurality of the population from vast areas of that country in order to partition Bosnia between them. The EU obliged with one after another ethnic partition plan to recognise this ethnic cleansing. The idea that these “Bosnian ethnic struggles” of 1992-95 could have “preceded” the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1989-92, as suggested above, is quite a leap of faith.

Goldberg arrived on the scene in 1994. As explained, between 1994 and 1996, Goldberg was special assistant to Holbrooke, then Clinton’s chief of Balkan diplomacy. And in this capacity, Holbrooke certainly was an architect of partition: not of Yugoslavia, but of Bosnia.

Holbrooke’s crowning achievement was the 1995 US-engineered Dayton partition plan of Bosnia, which ended the war on Serbian terms. In half of Bosnia, a ‘Serb Republic’ was recognised, despite Serbs being only 30% of the population, and despite this territory having been ethnically cleansed of about a million non-Serbs, about half its pre-war population. This included the whole of east Bosnia, formerly overwhelmingly Muslim in population, which had suffered genocide at the hands of Milosevic’s thugs in 1992. Holbrooke’s “peace” plan recognised this genocidal disappearance of this Muslim majority (along with 1700 mosques destroyed to make sure no-one suspected the Muslims were ever there).

Holbrooke’s partners in the Dayton crime were Milosevic and his Croatian partner Tudjman, in fact it is often called the Holbrooke-Milosevic-Tudjman plan. The biggest losers were the Bosnian Muslims and mixed Bosnians, who had fought to retain a multi-ethnic constitution, reflecting the multi-ethnic reality that had been Bosnia, and the population spread of Muslims throughout the mixed republic.

Even Srebrenica, a Muslim enclave in east Bosnia which had just been overrun by Serbian general Mladic in July 1995, a couple of months before Dayton, where 8000 Muslim captives were summarily slaughtered in Europe’s largest massacre since World War II, was ceded to the Serb Republic.

Even worse, Holbrooke has been accused of having given the green light for the Bosnian Serb army to take Srebrenica. In a 2005 interview with the French magazine Paris-Match, he admitted his initial instructions from national security adviser Anthony Lake were to sacrifice the three remaining Muslim ‘enclaves’ in East Bosnia – Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde – to the Serb nationalists. He has long claimed he rejected pressure to abandon Gorazde, leaving the question of the other two unclear. The same issue of Paris-Match had an interview with the chief prosecutor of the Hague Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, who claims that western officials held a meeting with Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic in 1995, to discuss the plans to seize Srebrenica.

The reason for such dealing was that the US felt the map to divide Bosnia 50/50 needed first a little “tidying up” (which was also the Bosnian Serb leadership’s condition for signing Dayton) – and a Muslim ‘enclave’ still rudely sticking out into east Bosnia, from where all the rest of the Muslim population had been expelled, was considered too untidy.

So the dismemberment of *Bosnia*, not Yugoslavia, appears to be Goldberg’s major experience in partition and dismemberment.

However, while still unrelated to the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the Bardini article also makes another assertion about Goldberg’s career. It says that “after serving as Deputy Chief of Mission in Santiago de Chile between 2001 and 2004, Goldberg went once more to the Balkans to head the Kosovo mission, where he worked until 2006 to break away Serbia and Montenegro.”

However, it would be quite a remarkable achievement if he had really worked to break Serbia and Montenegro apart, given that US policy was to oppose separation, and to the last moment advocated Montenegrins vote against separation in their referendum. The US State Dept even invited the four leaders of the anti-independence Montenegrin *opposition* coalition to Washington for official talks in the month just before the referendum. The Montenegrins did not take this US advice (or the even more forceful EU advice).

Indeed, why would the US want separation? At the time, the US was the fifth biggest investor in Serbia; especially after buying Serbia’s major steel plant; by contrast, after Montenegrin independence, much of Montenegro’s coastline, and its only significant factory, a huge aluminium plant, along with a connected bauxite mine, were bought up by Russian oligarchs. Between them, the aluminium plant and bauxite mine account for nearly one fifth of Montenegro’s GDP.

A final assertion comes from Roger Burbach, who claims that during his Kosova mission of 2004-6, Goldberg “played a central role in orchestrating Kosovo's independence from Serbia, which it had been a province of for centuries” (‘United States Maneuvers to Carve Up Bolivia with Autonomy Vote’, May 5, 2008, http://globalalternatives.org/node/86).

Just as an aside, Kosova was conquered by Serbia in 1913, that is less than a century ago, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants, who were then and are now Albanians. In all that time it has never held the people down in any way other than repression – that is a straight out fact. It is unfortunate for an astute commentator such as Burbach to be speaking about Kosova being a province of Serbia “for centuries,” an invention of the Serbian Orthodox and Chetnik ultra-right, a view rightly rejected for 40 years by Titoist Yugoslavia.

But that is not the issue. Did he “play a central role” in “orchestrating” Kosova’s independence? In fact, through most of this period (2004-6), US policy remained opposed to independence.

The UN-led negotiations between Serbia and the Kosovar Albanian leadership only began in December 2005, late in Goldberg’s term. In response, US Senate Resolution 237 (Voinovich, Lugar, Biden) made no mention of independence, but called on the negotiations to reach a “compromise” that satisfies the aspirations of the people both of Kosova and of Serbia, and stressed “the anticipated discussions of the long-term status of Kosovo should result in a plan for implementing the Standards for Kosovo, particularly with regard to minority protections, return of property, and the development of rule of law as it relates to the improvement of protection of minorities, the return of internally displaced persons, the return of property, and the prosecution of human rights violations.”

Towards the end of Goldberg’s term, the US began to hint for the first time that independence was one of the possible options. American UN ambassador, neo-con extremist John Bolton, noted in early 2006 that “Independence is a possible outcome,” but stressed “parties must be ready to engage on key issues, including minority rights, decentralization and the status of religious sites -- issues that will allow Kosovo to remain multi-ethnic regardless of its status.” It is unlikely Bolton was being disingenuous in saying independence was only one option, because Bolton has since come out furiously opposed to US recognition of Kosovar independence (Warning Light on Kosovo,
http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2008/0131_kosovo_rodman.aspx?emc=lm&m=212544&l=34&v=14967, and denounced the US State Department for allegedly pushing "an anti-Serb policy for over 15 years now.”

In any case this had no influence on the position of the Kosovar Albanians, who had always striven for nothing less than independence, and had voted for it in their 1991 referendum by a margin of over 99 percent.

US leaders were coming to understand that to prevent their independence would require a counterinsurgency war launched either by Serbia or NATO, and was gradually deciding this was not worth it, especially inside Europe, and so limiting, restricting some kind of “conditional independence” with large concessions to the Serb minority might be the best route. But even this was not yet official policy during Goldberg’s term.

It was not until early 2007, well after Goldberg had left, that UN negotiator Marti Ahtisaari decided the talks had reached impasse and so put forward a plan for highly restricted “supervised independence” with significant autonomy for Serbs. Interestingly, the very *restrictions* imposed on Kosova’s independence make it closely resemble the kind of “state” the US wants to negotiate for the Palestinians. It was only then that the US officially came out supporting that position.

But what of Goldberg himself? It is feasible that he may have secretly represented an already more solidly pro-independence faction in the US ruling class, and so went about “orchestrating” it in various undercover ways. But if so, no evidence whatsoever has been produced for such a scenario.

Actually, he was instrumental in *pressuring* the Kosovar Albanian leadership to take part in status negotiations with Serbia at all; at the time, the Kosovar Albanians rejected this. Kosova Assembly speaker Nexhat Daci expressed the view that “Independence is non-negotiable, not under any circumstances. Other things, all other issues should be negotiated with the international community and Belgrade; that includes the treatment of minorities, the lack of cooperation between minorities, the issue of free movement in the region.” (‘US envoy to Kosovo says time has come to prepare for status talks’, text of report by Kosovo Albanian television KohaVision TV on 16 August 2005).

Goldberg however stressed that “the status issue has to go through talks” and stated “You know there are people who are saying this isn't going to be a negotiation. Well, it is. Even if you take as your premise a certain position in the final status, which we all know on this side [Kosovo] means independence, on the other side [Belgrade] means something else. There are still a whole lot of issues that flow from that. What are the rights and obligations of certain communities here; decentralization and how that will have an effect on the future of Kosovo; the north of Kosovo and what will happen there, because we all know that there has been a different reality there than in the rest of Kosovo.”

He stressed the need for Kosova to have a better policy towards the Serb minority: “The majority needs to accept that there are minorities here, who have every right to live in safety, security, with their own language, with their own culture. That, in many ways, is part of the decentralization effort to assure that by putting a policy behind the rhetoric. I think that the institutions need to be more welcoming of minorities and more willing to offer opportunities to people. I think safety and security is not yet what we would like.” (U.S. Mission Head Talks To RFE/RL About Province Status Issue,
http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/09/a4954fe1-7758-473f-814e-78a4db685f41.html)

All gloss? Perhaps, but I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary.

What we have therefore is accusations regarding separating Kosova from Serbia which appear unclear and unlikely, accusations regarding separating Montenegro and Serbia which are considerably more unlikely if not impossible, and accusations regarding orchestrating the disintegration of Yugoslavia which are a straight chronological impossibility.

But that the key period when Goldberg was at the Balkan desk of Washington’s leading Balkan negotiator Holbrooke was the period when his leader was centrally involved in the racist partition of Bosnia which recognised the Serbian ethnic cleansing and genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims by granting a purified ‘Serb Republic’ on half of Bosnia’s territory. And, perhaps by accident, *this* partition actually has more in common with the partition he is now engaged in in Bolivia, because the Bosnian Serbs were not an oppressed nation in Bosnia, but on the contrary, the most powerful section of population, politically, economically and militarily.

A final point can be added regarding the broader issue of the incorrect comparison. It is no accident that the Bolivian oligarchy is mainly focused on “autonomy” rather than outright “independence.” Obviously not that they have any more right to the latter either, of course. But it is better for their purposes to advocate "autonomy" because the whole point is they are not a nation and do not see themselves as one, they are a reactionary part of the Bolivian nation aiming to overthrow the revolution in their nation.

And the great irony of this is that if one did want to make absurd comparisons with a national question in a different part of the world, then what Serbia offered Kosova, that Kosova rejected in favour of independence, was ... "autonomy"! Which interestingly enough is also what Indonesia offered Timor in 1999 - the referendum was "autonomy" v independence, not “subjugation to Indonesia” v independence. And what Israel has offered the Palestinians for decades in place of a Palestinian state is "autonomy."

Not that autonomy is a bad thing if accepted by the people at stake, just that if you make unscientific comparisons, they at least ought to be with the same thing. In all these cases, the oppressed nation rejects autonomy because they don't trust a regime that has oppressed them for ages to rule them in any way, and in the case of Kosova, because autonomy was precisely what they previously had that got ripped up. Still, nothing much to do with Santa Cruz in any case.

Yet if these people writing these things really do think that the entire Kosovar Albanian nation is nothing but an oligarchic counterrevolutionary cabal (against which revolution I don't know), then they should be warning Serbia's right-wing regime against its offers of autonomy. It should instead advocate a war of bloody suppression; or failing that, it should prefer full separation so that the counterrevolution is less able to undermine the government. "Autonomy" would appear the worst option.

Kosova and the Question of Self-Determination

Kosova Independence Series Part II:

Kosova and the Question of Self-Determination

By Michael Karadjis

This is the second part of a series of articles looking at different aspects of the issue of the recently announced semi-independence of Kosova, which has produced markedly different reactions among left-wing and socialist movements around the world.

This part will tackle the general question of the right to self-determination, and why Kosova’s situation fully accords with this right long supported by the left. While much more will be said of the role of imperialism and other factors in the following parts – including imperialism’s role precisely in limiting Kosovar self-determination – understanding this aspect is primary to developing an overall position.

………………………………………………………………………………………………

Support of the right of nations to self-determination is a long-term principle for Marxists. Lenin in particular elaborated a great deal on this issue, and his writings remain of great relevance today.

Lenin stresses that even abolishing national oppression can only become reality “with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the "sympathies" of the population, including complete freedom to secede.” This is not in order to create small states, but on the contrary, only this can, dialectically, “serve as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations …”[1]

Thus this is all the more important when talking about capitalist states, the relationships between which are commonly characterised by national oppression. Lenin considered it self-evident that peoples will only revolt for independence if the conditions of national oppression are intolerable:

“From their daily experience the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse.”[2]

Moreover, for all practical purposes, to oppose the right of self-determination means to support the right of the stronger nation to forcibly suppress their struggles:

“... in the capitalist state, repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration, to the detriment of democratic methods...”[3]

Far from being a concession to the narrow bourgeois aspect of the nationalism of the oppressed, it is only the right to full secession that is capable of undermining such nationalism:

“The right to self-determination and secession seems to ‘concede’ the maximum to nationalism” but “in reality, the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism” because it helps promote the internationalist “class solidarity” of the workers of oppressor and oppressed nations.”[4]

But while many leftists accept this right in theory, some claim it is limited to struggles by oppressed peoples against imperialism, or at least that it depends on whether a particular struggle for national self-determination strengthens or weakens imperialist interests.

But this wasn’t how Lenin viewed it at all. When he supported Norway’s independence from Sweden it had no connection to either alleged condition. Even more starkly, recognising that the balance of class forces was against the working class in the Baltic states in 1918, Lenin chose not to send the Red Army of the young Soviet republic in to help the Communist forces in these republics, where right wing regimes came to power. The Bolsheviks did not believe socialism could be imposed on the barrel of a gun; only the working classes in those states could carry out this task.In the 1930s, following the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the revival of Great Russian oppression by the Stalinist regime, the issue again arose of the position revolutionaries would take towards movements for self-determination in the oppressed non-Russian republics. Trotsky’s view was clear. Calling for a “united, free, and independent workers’ and peasants’ Ukraine,” Trotsky pointed out that it was precisely the denial of the right to self-determination of the Ukraine by a “Communist” regime that has shifted the Ukrainian national movement to “the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques,” who had won over a section of the Ukrainian working class. On the other hand, an independent Ukraine would become “if only by virtue of its own interests, a mighty southwestern bulwark of the USSR.”[5]

When one sees Kosovar Albanians wildly waving American flags next to their own Albanian flag – which, ironically enough, imperialism has forced them to abandon – one is reminded of this quote from Trotsky: it was not the exercise of Kosovar self-determination, but precisely the denial of it to the Kosovars, that allowed US imperialism – very belatedly – to pose as their champion when it found it opportune, leading to this marked pro-imperialist shift in the consciousness of Kosovar Albanians.

There is a basic “common sense” aspect to this right: given that people will only risk a struggle for independence when they find conditions unbearable, any opposition to their struggle from leftists will not only change nothing about their struggle, but alienate the left from this entire oppressed nation. Every claim that a particular national struggle may happen to coincide with some reactionary or imperialist interest can be countered by the simple fact that it was the oppression in the first place that produced this result. The masses of this oppressed nation will not move on to a more progressive, let alone socialist, consciousness, until they have achieved their right to run their own state and learn in practice that their “own” bourgeoisie is also their enemy.
The roots of Albanian oppression and resistance

In the 19th century, the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian people had waged successful liberation struggles against the Ottoman empire and set up their own independent capitalist states – as today’s critics of Kosova might say, they carried out “illegal secession” that “violated Ottoman sovereignty.” However, a strip of the Balkans, covering the Albanian, Macedonian and Thracian regions, with a wide ethnic mixture, remained under Ottoman rule.

In 1912, the Albanian peoples rose in revolt against Ottoman rule. Aiming to grab as much territory from the retreating empire as possible, before the Albanians or other local peoples could set up their own states, the three independent Balkan states launched the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 to carve up remaining Ottoman territory. Approximately half of the Albanian ethnic territory fell to the Serbian monarchy, including Kosova, a large section of Serbian-conquered part of Macedonia (itself divided into three), the Presevo Valley in southeast Serbia and parts of Montenegro. The other half was rescued for a rump Albanian state by Austrian diplomacy.

This partition of the Albanian and Macedonian nations and the other borders drawn in blood were officially recognised by the imperialist powers at the London Conference of 1913. Serbia was a key ally of the British-French-Russian imperialist bloc in its impending clash with its German-Austrian rivals. This imperialist consecration of the division of the Albanian nation is at the heart of the conflict which has raged throughout the century.

The Kosovar Albanians furiously resisted the occupation. The Serbian monarchy was pitiless in its suppression - according to the investigators of the Carnegie Commission, referring to the period immediately after the Balkan wars:“Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind - such were the means which were employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.”[6] Another account was given by Lazer Mjeda, the Catholic Archbishop of Skopje, who noted that in Ferizaj only 3 Muslim Albanians over the age of 15 had been left alive, and that the population of Gjakova had been massacred despite surrendering. He described the scene in Prizren, which had also surrendered peacefully in the hope of being spared what was happening elsewhere in Kosova:“The city seems like the Kingdom of Death. They knock on the doors of the Albanian houses, take away the men and shoot them immediately. In a few days the number of men killed reached 400. As for plunder, looting and rape, all that goes without saying; henceforth, the order of the day is: everything is permitted against Albanians, not only permitted, but willed and commanded.”[7]

Serbian Marxist Dimitrije Tucovic witnessed “barbaric crematoria in which hundreds of women and children are burnt alive” and claimed the clergy were urging the troops on to take revenge for the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, when the then Serbian empire was defeated by the Ottoman empire in Kosova. “The historic task of Serbia,” he wrote “is a big lie.”[8] “For as long as the Serbs will not understand and realize that they are on foreign lands and territory, they will never be in peace or have good neighbor relations with Albanians,” Tucovic wrote. “Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans.”[9]

Tucovic was leader of the left faction of the Serbian Social-democratic Party which, together with Lenin’s Russian Bolsheviks, were among the only social-democratic parties to remain internationalist during WWI and to deny war credits to their “own” bourgeoisie. What he writes above about 1912-13 may just as well have been written about the 1980s and 1990s.

Meanwhile, living under the Austro-Hungarian yoke were other south Slavs, the Slovenes, Croats and now Bosnians. In their own freedom struggle, the idea had emerged of the unity of all South Slavs, in a “Yugoslav” state. In practice this meant that these Hapsburg-ruled Slavic nations would unite with the expanded Serbian monarchy. This “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” was proclaimed in 1918 under Anglo-French auspices, but from the start was a classic prison-house of nations, completely dominated by the Serbian bourgeoisie.

The worst excesses occurred in Kosova, where the largely Muslim Albanian majority were not Slavic at all, and lived in a land that Serb nationalists declared the cradle of their nation due to the presence of a large number of medieval Orthodox churches, and the famous battle against the Ottomans back in 1389.

Modern Serb nationalists claim that “Kosova has always been Serbia,” but according to one reading of Turkish statistics of 1911, of the 912,902 residents of the Vilayet of Kosova, 743,040 (80.5 percent) were Albanians and 106,209 (11.5 percent) were Serbs.[10] According to a more generous reading, Ottoman statistics put Orthodox Serbs at 21 percent of the population, still an absolute minority, and Austrian statistics in 1903 put it as high as 25 percent, the maximum claimed by any source.[11] The discrepancy in claimed Ottoman figures is almost certainly due to the fact that the Ottomans did not do censuses of ethnic groups, but only of religious affiliation – ‘Orthodox’ was assumed to be ‘Serb’ by the more generous researchers, but this would be an incorrect reading. But even according to the most generous reading, Albanians were the absolute majority.
Between the two World Wars, Albanians were ruthlessly uprooted: in one example, the entire Albanian population of upper Drenica (6,064 people) were dispossessed of their land in 1938. They were pressured into leaving for Albania or Turkey - estimates are of some 70,000 Albanians leaving during this period. However, that was not considered adequate, so in 1938, Yugoslavia made a deal with Turkey to expel another 40,000 Albanians, as Turkey wanted to use the Muslim Albanians to colonise eastern Anatolia as an outpost against its own oppressed Kurds and Armenians. A leading member of the Serbian Academy, Vaso Cubrilovic, put out a memorandum entitled “The expulsion of the Albanians” in which he claimed that if Hitler and Stalin could get away with all kinds of slaughter without anyone reacting, then what would the world care about the expulsion of a few hundred thousand Albanians?

Some 15,000 Serb families - representing some 70,000 people, or about 10 percent of the total Kosova population - were moved in from Serbia proper as colonists and given large properties. Of 400,000 hectares of arable land in Kosova, these colonists were awarded 100,000 hectares. In 1928, Serbian official Djorje Krstic boasted that colonisation had boosted the percentage of Serbs in Kosova from 24 percent, which he claimed for 1919, to 38 percent.[12] Given that in 1999, the then Serb population of only 10 percent of Kosova consisted of only 200,000 people, this gives an idea of how significant this colonization was.

Following these 25 years of this prison-hell, when Mussolini invaded, the Albanians initially welcomed the Italian fascist troops, like Ukrainians and many other initially welcomed Nazi troops, or like future Indonesian national hero Sukarno collaborated with the Japanese occupiers. Of course, there were also Serb collaborators, as there were among all Yugoslav nations.[13]

The Italian occupiers allowed Kosova to be reunited with Albania as their puppet state. It is estimated that some 40,000 Serbs were expelled by the Albanian collaborationist regime. Though these were overwhelmingly the Serb colonists that were driven out, as the war progressed, Albanian fascists got less discriminating and acted with ruthless brutality towards the Serb population.

However, a Kosovar Albanian Partisan movement also appeared, fighting for the right to self-determination, including unity with Communist Albania. This was inspired by the program of Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans, who opposed the unitary Serb-dominated Yugoslavia of the inter-war years, and advocated instead an equal federation of Yugoslavia’s nations, based on proletarian internationalist ideals. Yugoslav and Albanian Communist leaders Tito and Enver Hoxha had aimed for Albania to become part of this, and for a new socialist federation of all Balkan nations, beyond a mere Yugoslav federation. As such, there could be no Kosovar republic, because it would eventually be part of the Albanian republic in the new federation, alongside the six Yugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro), and perhaps Bulgaria as well.

However, this never came to pass. In the first major violation of the new impending federal order, Tito had gathered Serb Partisans together with large numbers of former royalist, Serbian-chauvinist Cetniks (who came over following two amnesties declared by Tito in late 1944) and crushed the Kosovar Partisans.

According to Miranda Vickers:

“Perhaps the worst atrocity occurred in Tivar in Montenegro, where 1,670 Albanians were herded into a tunnel which was then sealed off so that all were asphyxiated.”[14]

As relations between Yugoslavia and Albania later deteriorated, Kosova was stuck in the highly unsatisfactory situation of autonomy inside Serbia.

Kosova’s “autonomy” status signified it the Albanians as a “national minority” rather than a “nation” as their nation state was Albania. However, Albanians were the vast majority of the population of Kosova in 1945, and in sheer numbers, they were bigger than most of the “nations” of Yugoslavia, and growing. This lack of republican status, combined with Kosova’s drastically poorer position than all Yugoslav republics, made the Albanians an unambiguously oppressed nation in the new Yugoslavia.

In the first twenty years, under hard-line Serb leader Rankovic, this ‘autonomy” meant little more than living under permanent terror. Even the expulsions continued: in 1953, the pact with Turkey was reactivated, and some 100,000 Albanians were forced out in the program in the 1950s.

With the fall of the Rankovic regime in 1966, the Kosovar Albanian national movement began to blossom, partly under the influence of the 60’s rebellion. Responding to this, Tito visited Kosova in 1967, and declared a complete reversal of policy. According to Tito:

“One cannot talk about equal rights when Serbs are given preference in factories … and Albanians are rejected even tough they have the same and better qualifications.”[15]

A new, more internationalist, policy was introduced, which for the first time brought Kosovar Albanians close to the same level of equality enjoyed by the six other nations under the Titoist ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ policy of the socialist federation of equal nations. Till then, Albanians had been left out of this policy largely as a concession to Serbian nationalists, who had always regarded Titoism and federation as “the destruction of the Serb nation,” because that nation did not have the absolute power it had had in capitalist Yugoslavia. By denying equality at least to the “Serb holy land” of Kosova, and giving them many positions in the repressive apparatus there, Tito had hoped to pacify these reactionary forces.

According to Clark:

“The provincial government now gained more autonomy, introduced secondary schooling in Albanian, accepted Albanian and Turkish alongside Serbo-Croatian as official languages, and began to administer the ‘ethnic keys’ that were a feature of Yugoslavia at that time. For the first time, the majority of members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in Kosovo were Albanians.”[16]

Prisoners were released, the secret police purged, and the media allowed a field day to expose the crimes of the Rankovic era. In 1970, the University of Pristina, with courses in both Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, was opened, as was the Rilindja publishing house, for the first time bringing out many books on Albanian history and culture. Above all, Kosovar Albanians could now fly the flag of neighbouring Albania as their own flag, reflecting their actual national consciousness, and the degree to which ‘high Titoism’ was moving towards internationalism on this issue.

The new 1974 constitution upgraded Kosova’s status to what is known famously as ‘high level autonomy’, under which, while still officially an autonomous province of Serbia, it was also declared a ‘constituent element’ of the Yugoslav federation itself. Kosova had direct representation in the Yugoslav federal presidency as an equal to other republics, not via the Serbian republic. Albanians from Kosova had their turns as president and vice-president, like representatives from other republics, positions annually rotated among the eight equal constituent units of the federation. Kosova even had the same right to veto on the collective presidency as did republics. It had its own supreme court, its own central bank, its own territorial defence force, all features of a republic.

Despite these highly positive changes, Albanians still continually called for full formal republic status, as recognition of full equality. Leading Albanian Communist Mehmet Hoxha had asked in 1968 “Why do 370,000 Montenegrins have their own republic, but 1.2 million Albanians do not even have total autonomy.”[17] However, now that they did have “total autonomy-plus” after 1974, this near-republic status, while far from perfect, was the “legal” situation, and therefore the claim that Kosova was a mere “province” of Serbia, and thus that is all it can aspire to now, is false. Indeed it is important to understand that even the element of still being formally a “highly autonomous” province of Serbia was entirely connected to and conditional upon it also being a direct part of the Yugoslav federation, so when that federation later collapsed, so did this entire constitutional set-up that included “autonomy”, because mere autonomy within Serbia can only be a downgraded status compared to being a constituent unit of a greater federation, which no longer exists.

The fact that Albanians nevertheless remained dissatisfied was accentuated by Kosova’s dramatic economic situation, where unemployment hovered around 50 percent, two and a half times the Yugoslav average. Kosova’s proportion of Yugoslav GDP was only one quarter its share of the population, and its GDP per capita was one quarter that of Serbia, again revealing its absolutely oppressed state.[18] Albanians likewise were grossly under-represented in unelected state bodies: with 8 percent of the Yugoslav population, they accounted for only one percent of the officers of the Yugoslav People’s Army, while 67 per cent of officers were Serb or Montenegrin (compared to their 39 per cent of the population).[19]

Tito died in 1980, and with him, one of the key figures dedicated to preserving the delicate ethnic balance that held the federation together. In 1981, demonstrations at Pristina University were brutally crushed by the Yugoslav military, with considerable killing. Thousands were arrested. This was followed by years of repression. Albanians, while only 8 per cent of Yugoslavia’s population, made up 75 per cent of political prisoners in the 1980s.[20] Between 1981 and 1988, 1000 Albanian teachers were sacked for allegedly not being committed to the fight against Albanian “nationalism.”[21]

This crackdown demonstrated to the Kosovars how frail their “high level” autonomy really was. Even though this remained their official status, this new wave of heavy repression effectively put to an end the 1968-81 ‘honeymoon period’ of Albanians in Yugoslavia. This intensified their push for republic status, and, amongst a minority, for full independence or unity with Albania. An array of far left underground groups sprung up in the 1980s, supported by Enver Hoxha’s Stalino-Maoist regime in Albania. It is from these groups that the core of the Kosova Liberation Army arose in the 1990s.[22]

On the other extreme, the Serbian nationalist intelligentsia in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986 released the famous “Memorandum,” attacking the entire post-war Titoist order. It claimed the “Communist-Croat alliance” represented by Tito had set out to destroy the Serb nation by imposing an “alien” (federal) Yugoslavia upon them, and that the division into federal republics divided up the Serb nation. The Memorandum demanded that the Serbian nation must now re-establish its full “national and cultural integrity ... irrespective of the republic or province in which it finds itself.” In particular, Kosova must be crushed, to prevent the ongoing “genocide” against the local Serbs. This represented the first naked expression of the new nationalist ideology of the rising Serbian bourgeoisie, which had grown up under decades of “market socialism,” breaking through the Titoist/Communist ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ ideology that had encrusted it to date.

The wing of the Serbian bureaucracy around new leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1987 forged an alliance with this reactionary national chauvinism, and together spearheaded a countermobilisation of Kosovar Serbs with the exact opposite aim to the Albanians - to abolish Kosova’s autonomy, or reduce it to a meaningless pre-1974 variety. They believed, correctly, that there was a contradiction between Kosova being autonomous within Serbia yet having many features of a republic. In 1986, Vojislav Seselj (today leader of the extreme Chetnik Serbian Radical Party) demanded this contradiction be fixed, through reduction of autonomy, because, as he saw it, the contradiction could be interpreted as Kosova, as a federal unit, having the same right to secession as the republics.

Kosovar Serbs were mobilised on the pretext that it was their rights under attack from an “Albanian” administration in Kosova, which would seem odd considering the massive police repression of everything Albanian from 1981 onwards. The Kosovar Serbs had a very high constitutional position for the small minority they were. According to Kullashi Muhaludin from Pristina University, “Throughout the institutions, from the lowest communal level to the highest instances of state and party, the leading functions were always shared between the two nationalities. If a school director, for example, was of one nationality, his deputy would have to be from the other. Furthermore, there existed a system of rotation which, each time a mandate changed, assured that the replacement would be from the other nationality … Indeed, the rotation principle favoured the Serbs, who were always in the minority in the province.”[23]

The reason a considerable percentage of the Kosovar Serb population was able to be mobilised was that it did indeed have “grievances” - like those of white South Africans after the end of apartheid. High level autonomy, and particularly the Pristina University, had resulted in a growing percentage of jobs in government and administration being taken by Albanians. While still not equal to the Albanians’ percentage of the population, nevertheless, this was a big change given that these jobs had previously been the preserve of Serbs. This in the context of Kosova having such high unemployment was a perfect environment for nationalists. The economic flight of Serbs to greener pastures in northern Serbia and Vojvodina was interpreted as flight from an alleged campaign of violence by the Albanians.

Like in the US Deep South, the centrepiece of this propaganda was an alleged campaign by “backward, Muslim” Albanians to rape Serb women. Official statistics, however, showed that rape was at a lower level in Albania than in more advanced Serbia and Slovenia, and the overwhelming majority of victims were Albanian women. Statistics also showed only one murder of a Serb by an Albanian in the period 1982 to 1987, over a land dispute, following which the culprit was executed. More significant was the change of law by Serbian authorities which made the ethnic origins of the accused in rape cases a legally relevant factor.[24]

This campaign was supplemented by the racist conspiracy theory that the larger families which poorer Albanians had was a deliberate strategy to outbreed Serbs. The Albanian proportion of the population in Kosova continued to increase, from 70-75 percent, to over 80 percent in 1980 and some 90 percent by 1999. This occurred for the same reasons as Lebanese Muslims, Irish Catholics and Palestinians continued to increase in population all century, much to the chagrin of colonial powers and chauvinists among Lebanese Christians, Irish Protestants and Israelis, who wanted to maintain sectarian states: poor people have lots more babies, while better-off people have less. In addition, the Kosovar Serbs, like the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, had a place to go to get out of the miserable poverty of Kosova, the 3rd world of Yugoslavia, (and out of slightly less miserable Bosnia): to north Serbia, Vojvodina (or Croatia), whereas the Kosovar Albanians (and Bosnian Muslims) did not, further entrenching their majority in the province.

In 1988, Milosevic, who had purged the Serbian League of Communists of its internationalist wing and launched an IMF-backed neo-liberalisation of the economy, proposed constitutional changes abolishing Kosova’s high level autonomy. As the Kosova assembly opposed this, Milosevic forced the resignation of veteran Kosovar leader and Tito-protégé Adem Vllasi. The heroic Kosovar miners led the last major working class resistance to the Milosevic counterrevolution. The irony of many western leftists seeing the Milosevic regime as the continuation of “socialist” Yugoslavia opposed to “pro-western secessionists” is exposed most clearly in these events. As Milosevic sought to destroy the Yugoslav constitution, with its fine balance between the various nations, mobilising under reactionary Chetnik and Serbian Orthodox slogans, the Kosovar miners led a movement to defend the Yugoslav constitution in late 1988 and early 1989. In their gigantic march from the ‘Trepca’ mines near Mitrovica in the north to Pristina in November 1988, the miners chanted “Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia,” bearing portraits of Tito and red flags. They were not calling for Kosovar independence, but warned that the violent crushing of the Kosovar people would lead to the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia.

Three hated officials, who had no popular mandate, were put into the Kosova assembly by Milosevic. In February, a general strike erupted throughout Kosova. A thousand miners went on hunger strike underground for 8 days, but were tricked into coming up with the pretence that there demands would be met. The strongly western-backed federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, sent federal troops into Kosova, not to support the constitutional demands of the Kosovar working class, but to suppress them on behalf of Milosevic, in outright violation of the constitution, effectively putting an end to Yugoslavia. A state of emergency was declared, and 24 Albanians shot dead by the occupation forces. Some 2000 Albanian workers were hauled before the courts, including former leaders of the assembly. The assembly was surrounded by tanks and helicopters and under this somewhat direct threat, agreed to pass the constitutional changes and vote itself out of existence. The next day, Markovic congratulated Milosevic on this destruction of the federal order.[25]

Kosovar working class resistance continued throughout 1989 and 1990. In January and February 1990 a further 32 Kosovar demonstrators were killed. In July, Serbia abolished what was left of Kososva’s autonomy as it adopted a new constitution, reducing Kosova (and Vojvodina) to just any other administrative district of Serbia. Locked out of the Kosova assembly, the majority of legally elected Albanian delegates voted on an act of self-determination for Kosova. Serbia formerly dissolved the assembly. On September 7, Kosovar delgates met and declared the Republic of Kosova as a “democratic state of the Albanian people and of members of other nations and national minorities who are its citizens: Serbs, Muslims, Montenegrins, Croats, Turks, Romanies and others living in Kosova.”[26] In 1991, Kosovars held a referendum, in which 99 percent voted for independence.

As the constitutional changes were forced through against the will of the Kosova assembly, it was an open attack on the federal constitution. Milosevic stooges were put in charge of the fictional “assembly” that was maintained as window dressing - the first major step in transforming federal Yugoslavia into a unitary Serb-dominated state. Despite abolition of the provinces’ autonomy, the new hand-picked “representatives” of Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro maintained federal representation, meaning four federal units had essentially become one. Milosevic now had four of the eight votes on the Federal Presidency, meaning an effective control of Yugoslavia. Hence beginning the IMF-demanded constitutional changes to limit the powers of the republics over federal decisions went in tandem with laying the groundwork for Greater Serbia and the destruction of the real Yugoslav federation. Not surprisingly, therefore, restoration of Kosovar autonomy was never one of the West’s demands over the next decade.

Following the scrapping of Kosovar autonomy and its complete occupation by the federal army, a state of apartheid existed in Kosova throughout the 1990s. Albanians were expelled from all jobs in public administration, all Albanian police were sacked and all municipal and communal councils were suspended, making Kosova essentially a colony, with a powerless population ruled by an administration made up entirely of people from the small Serbian minority. Only Cyrillic script was allowed in official dealings, thousands of teachers, who continued teaching in Albanian, were sacked and school syllabuses were Serbianised. Half a million school age children were thus effectively denied an education. The same happened with Prisitna University, and all names there were changed to Cyrillic script. Hundreds of Albanian doctors were driven out of hospitals. All Albanians in the public sector – which in the still largely state-controlled economy of the time meant nearly everyone in formal employment – were sacked. In the historic Trepca mines, Albanians, who had formed 70 percent of the 23,000 strong workforce, all lost their jobs. Names of streets and other locations throughout Kosova were changed to names from Serbian nationalist mythology. For example, Pristina’s Marshall Tito Boulevarde was changed to Vidovdan Boulevarde, after a Serbian Orthodox festival. Thousands of Albanians were hauled before the courts on the most trivial of charges; a state of complete lawlessness characterised the relations between the Serbian occupation authorities and the mass of the population.

This led on to a deeper anti-Muslim ideological crusade by the Serb nationalist movement. The cream of Serbia’s writers and intellectuals, such as future prime minister Dobrica Cosic, and Vuk Draskovic, now head of the moderate Chetnik Serbian Renewal Party (SPO), pushed obscurantist and medievalist Serbian chauvinist and Muslim-hating views in their writings. It was alleged that Tito merely “created” the Muslims as yet another part of his devious project of “destroying the Serb nation” by setting up a federation. The Muslims and Albanians were called “Turks” and presented as continuers of the Ottoman Empire. The repression in Kosova and the later genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims were presented to the world as Serbia crusading in the frontline of western Christian civilisation against the “Islamic threat.”

From 1992 onwards, the independence struggle was led by Ibrahim Rugova and his Kosova Democratic League, which consisted essentially of the former Kosovar branches of the Yugoslav League of Communists. This entirely peaceful “Ghandian” struggle contrasted strongly with the bloodshed engulfing the region. The centrepiece of the struggle was a system of parallel schools, hospitals and other social and political institutions, allowing Albanians to continue take part in normal life in some form after being driven out of the system of the occupied province.

However, while gaining mass participation by Albanians, this imposed the onerous burden of double taxation – by the occupation regime, which gave them nothing in return, and by the parallel authorities. From around 1996, Rugova’s strategy was more and more challenged by more radical elements, particularly those led by Adem Demaci, known as Kosova’s Nelson Mandela for spending a total of 28 years in Serbian prisons. Demaci and others, including the growing student movement, demanded these institutions be supplemented by a more active mass protest action approach.

This entire struggle of the 1990s is a hugely inspirational story in itself, which this essay cannot detail.[27] The ultimate failure of this decade of peaceful resistance to achieve any gains, however, alongside the complete ignoring of this struggle by western powers, led to the rise of armed guerrilla movement, the Kosova Liberation Army at the end of the 1990s. This will be dealt with in the next part, but the important point here is to understand that this was not simply some “CIA-backed creation of the Albanian mafia and drug-runners” as the right-wing (and some left-wing) anti-Albanian demonisation asserts, but on the contrary was an organic outgrowth of this already existing mass independence struggle. It is hardly the first time in history that a non-violent liberation struggle turns to armed resistance when all else fails and repression prevails.

The other point to understand is that the demand for complete independence was not an innovation of the KLA. Some like to imagine that the ‘peaceful’ movement led by Rugova had a similarly “moderate” aim, in the view of those who consider independence sinful. As explained, Kosova’s declaration of independence by the Rugova-led movement took place in 1990 and there has never been any movement for autonomy or anything less than complete independence from any section of Kosovar Albanian society at any point.
In 1996, the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, carrying out research on the views of various minorities within Serbia regarding solutions to their oppression, was struck by the fact that the choice of “independence” as the only solution was supported by 100 percent of Albanians.[28] This is the simple reality that today’s critics of the right of the Kosovar people to self-determination have to deal with.

Conclusion to Part II

This second part of the series has aimed to demonstrate two things.

Firstly, the Kosovar Albanians were an oppressed people in the former Yugoslavia, and much more so under the Serbian iron heel when Yugoslavia collapsed. As an oppressed people living in a well-defined region, they have the right to self-determination, including complete independence. Moreover, considering the historic imperialist partitioning of the Albanian nation in 1913, and the fact that Albanians – the poorest nation in Europe – still live in a compact, contiguous region covering five countries, the Albanian people as a whole have the right to self-determination, meaning, if they wish, the Kosovars and other Albanian minorities should be allowed to unite with Albania.

This is their right – though whether a united Albanian nation or an independent Kosova is the better outcome will be discussed below.

Secondly, the Kosovar Albanians have resisted Serbian occupation for a century and have never recognised its legitimacy. This has to be an important aspect of the alleged ‘sovereignty” of established international borders. They have never claimed anything less than complete independence in all their struggles.

Therefore those claiming the current declaration of independence is merely an imperialist maneuver are wrong – the independence demand is and always has been overwhelming in Kosova, long before the very belated imperialist acceptance of it. The role of imperialism in the current crisis is very major, but cannot be understood in isolation from this very fundamental underpinning.

The next section will deal with the long term imperialist interest in and attitude to the Kosova question, including the war of 1999, while the third will deal with how we reached the current situation and the broader imperialist geo-strategic interests involved. A particular aspect will be the position of the Kosovar Serb minority in the newly independent state, and the question of independent multi-ethnic Kosova versus that of partition and/or united Albanian nation.





[1] Lenin, V.I., ‘The Discussion of Self-determination Summed Up’, Collected Works, Vol 22, p. 325
[2] Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, Vol 20, p. 423
[3] Ibid, p. 423.
[4] Ibid, p. 434-35
[5] Trotsky, L, “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” July 22, 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39).
[6] Quoted from Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998, p. 254, from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Washington 1914, pp. 148-186.
[7] Ibid, p. 254
[8] Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo, Pluto Press, 2000, p. 9.
[9] Holberg, A., Book review: Dimitrije Tucovic: Serbia and Albania, Published by Arbeitsgruppe Marxismus, Vienna, 1999, www.labournet.net/balkans/0003/serbrvw.html
[10] Turkish statistics of 1911, quoted by The Institute of History, Pristina, “Expulsions of Albanians and Colonisation of Kosova,” Pristina, www.kosova.com/expuls/. Indeed, the Supreme Command of the Serbian III Army did a census with similar results on March 3, 1913, ibid.
[11] Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998.
[12] Ibid, p. 282.
[13] The main collaborationist forces were the Nazi-installed genocidal Croatian Ustase, who killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and others, the Serbian puppet regime of Nedic, ruling over Belgrade as the first city to be declared ‘Judenfrei’ (free of Jews), and the Italian-backed and later German backed Serbian Cetniks who killed most of the 100,000 Bosnian Muslims who died in the war.
[14] Vickers, M, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, p. 143.
[15] Clark, p. 12.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Clark, p. 38.
[18] Vovou, S (ed), Bosnia-Herzegovina - The Battle for a Multi-Ethnic Society, Deltio Thiellis, Athens, 1996, table on p. 19.
[19] Vreme, July 15, 1991.
[20]. Amnesty International, Yugoslavia’s Ethnic Albanians, New York, 1992
[21] Interview with Kullashi Muhaludin, “Where the Crisis Began,” International Viewpoint, April 27, 1992, p20.
[22]. These groups included the Movement for the National Liberation of Kosova, the Group of Marxist-Leninists of Kosova, the Red Front, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of Yugoslavia, and the Movement for an Albanian Republic in Yugoslavia.
[23] Interview with Kullashi Muhaludin, op cit.
[24] Magas, B, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, Verso, New York/London, 1993, p. 62.
[25] Magas, op cit, p161.
[26] Poulton, H, The Balkans, op cit, p70.
[27] An excellent overall account of this struggle is Civil Resistance in Kosovo, by Howard Clark, then coordinator of War Resisters’ International, Pluto Press, 2000.
[28] Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Report on Human Rights in Serbia for 1996, Belgrade, 1997. In the opinion of the Serbian Helsinki Committee, such unanimity was impossible, hence declaring the result “invalid.” It also regarded to be invalid the fact that 100 percent of Albanians gave a figure of ‘one’ out of ‘one to ten’ as to how unequal they feel. The Helsinki Committee decided that such unanimity was impossible “unless we want to conclude that … all Albanians in Serbia feel totally unequal and oppressed and that all of them consider that the only solution to their problem is an independent Kosovo.” In reality, the fact that the Helsinki Committee even doubted that this was exactly the case only indicates how far from the Kosovar reality even well-meaning Belgraders were at the time.

Kosova Declares (Semi-) Independence

Kosova declares (semi-) independence: Yes to full self-determination for Kosova. No to continuation of colonial-ruled state

By Michael Karadjis

This article is the first in a series that will look at different aspects of the issue of Kosova’s declaration of independence, which has produced markedly different reactions among left-wing and socialist movements around the world.

This first is a broad overview of developments and the attitude we believe the left should take. The second article will tackle the general question of the right to national self-determination, and why Kosova’s situation fully accords with this right, long supported by the left. While much more will be said of the role of imperialism and other factors in coming articles – including imperialism’s role precisely in limiting Kosovar self-determination – understanding this aspect is primary to developing an overall position. The role and interests of imperialism and other issues will form another part of the series.

***

Kosova (Kosovo)* made its long-postponed declaration of independence on February 17, greeted by massive celebrations involving tens of thousands of people, euphoric that their hundred-year struggle had finally bore fruit. This very real groundswell was revealing of the very deeply grounded nature of the desire for independence among Kosovar Albanians.

Meanwhile, in the Serb-dominated north of Kosova, reactions ranged from protest demonstrations, to attacks on the Serbia-Kosova border posts, indicating their view that where they live remains part of Serbia. Independence may well turn into partition, as Kosova’s secession from Serbia faces its own mirror secession.

So far, only the United States and a handful of west European powers have recognised the new state, though the 56-nation Islamic Conference Organisation also welcomed the move; Serbia, Russia and another group of European countries have condemned it, while most nations are sitting on the fence.

This followed the breakdown of the final round of talks between Serbia and Kosovar Albanian leaders. On December 10, the ``Troika’’ – consisting of the US, the European Union (EU) and Russia, which has presided over the talks – handed their report to the UN Security Council, claiming all possibilities of “compromise” had been exhausted. The red lines of the two sides – Serbia allowing a large degree of autonomy but ruling out independence; Kosova accepting nothing less than some form of independence, however limited – were mutually irreconcilable.

However, while the Kosovar Albanians’ jubilation at the word “independence” is understandable, Kosova is not to be allowed to fully determine its own affairs. Rather, the major imperialist powers will recognise something called “supervised independence”. The colonial-style UN authority ruling Kosova since 1999 will go – and be replaced by an International Civilian Representative appointed by the European Union, with the right to veto any legislation passed by Kosova’s “independent” parliament, and even remove elected officials. A new EU-appointed police and justice mission (EULEX) will hold sway over the local police and legal institutions, and the 16,000 NATO troops that have occupied Kosova since 1999 will remain.

Thus the colonial state will essentially remain, mitigated by considerably stronger powers of the Kosovar parliament vis a vis the occupation forces. The struggle for self-determination will continue, in a new form and probably after a period as the initial euphoria dies down. For Kosovar Albanians, the gamble is whether or not the new set-up, of a relatively greater degree of independence, will facilitate or make more difficult their further struggle for full self-determination.

Right to national self-determination

The Kosovar Albanians were an oppressed people in the old Yugoslavia, and much more so in Serbia following the collapse of the Yugoslav federation in 1989-90. Kosova had a per capita income one quarter that of Serbia; Albanians constituted only one per cent of military officers of the Yugoslav army, while Serbs constituted 70 per cent; Albanians made up 70-80 per cent of political prisoners. They are a national group in a long well-defined territory that deserve the right to national self-determination.

Much mystification surrounds Kosovar independence. It is claimed Kosova is a “mere province” of Serbia that happens to have an Albanian majority, and thus its “secession” is a violation of Serbian “sovereignty”. The alleged difference between Kosova and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia is that the latter were constitutionally fully fledged federal republics, which had the right to independence, whereas Kosova merely had autonomy within the Serbian republic.

It is therefore claimed that independence for a “mere province” could encourage other minority populations to split away from sovereign states. This danger of precedent -- of encouraging other oppressed peoples to fight for their freedom -- is a major reason the imperialist powers have always opposed Kosovar independence, until a few years ago. This is an odd argument, however, coming from some on the left, which has long supported oppressed peoples such as the Kurds in Turkey and the Basques in Spain fighting for the right to self-determination, though such peoples have never constituted formal republics within those countries. As socialists, we reject the idea that oppressed peoples must be forced to live in an allegedly "sovereign" state that has conquered and subjugated them.

The resistance of the Kosovar Albanian majority to Serbian rule began when they were first brutally subjected to that rule in 1913, and has continued to now. There has never been a moment when Kosovar Albanians have accepted the legitimacy of Serbian rule, either under direct Serbian oppression in capitalist Yugoslavia, or the bogus “autonomy” in the first 20 years of the socialist Yugoslav federation after 1945.

However, their struggle achieved a major change in the constitution in 1968-1974, when Kosova, with the full support of Yugoslav leader Broz Tito, achieved the near-republic status of "high-level autonomy", including direct representation in the Yugoslav presidency as an equal to other republics, not via the Serbian republic. It had its own high court, its own central bank, its own territorial defence force, all features of a republic. While Albanians still continually called for full formal republic status, as a recognition of full equality, this high status of near-republic was the ``legal’’ situation, and therefore the claim that it is a mere “province” of Serbia is false. Indeed it is important to understand that even the element of still being formally a “highly autonomous” province of Serbia was entirely connected to and conditional upon it also being a direct part of the Yugoslav federation, so when the Yugoslav federation later collapsed, so did this entire constitutional set-up.

When the rising Serbian bourgeoisie under Slobodan Milosevic took control of the Yugoslav state apparatus in 1988-91 and crushed Kosovar self-rule with tanks, making it a mere ``province’’ of Serbia, this was an illegal move, that destroyed the Yugoslav constitution. When 99 per cent of Kosovars voted for self-determination in a referendum in 1991, this was a legal move given the destruction of Yugoslav federalism. When Serbia and Montenegro created a new state, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 (i.e., leaving out the word ``Socialist’’ which was in the name of the now deceased state), Kosova was not asked its opinion (by contrast, Montenegrins had a referendum in which they voted to join). Therefore its incorporation into this new ``Yugoslavia’’ was illegal. What’s more, this state itself dissolved in 2003, leaving simply no legal basis for Serbian sovereignty.

When a decade of entirely peaceful (“Gandhian”) resistance in the 1990’s failed to achieve any breakthrough, it gave way to an armed insurrection led by the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99 and a brutal Serbian counterinsurgency, leading to murderous air war against Serbia by NATO, afraid the situation would spin out of control and lead to regional instability. Some 10,000 Albanians were killed and 850,000 – half their entire population – were forced out of the country by the Serbian armed forces, while some 2000 Serbs were killed by NATO bombing.

Following the end of this apocalypse, since June 1999 Kosova has been ruled by a United Nations authority (UNMIK) and a NATO-led security force (K-FOR), effectively denying both the independence aspirations of the 90 per cent Albanian majority and Serbia’s goal of maintaining its authority there. UN Resolution 1244, while demanding Serbian troops exit Kosova, decreed that the region remain under the “sovereignty” of Serbia.

The Western aim had been to take control of the process to prevent the Albanian struggle leading to regional instability. The rise of the KLA had been firstly due to the implosion of Albania in 1997, when hundreds of thousands of weapons were looted from armouries, many finding their way across the border into Kosova; and secondly, due to the response of the Serbian state to its appearance. When it appeared, US envoy to the region, Robert Gelbard, declared in Kosova’s capital Pristina in March 1998 that the KLA “is beyond any question a terrorist organisation”. However, by burning and destroying entire villages and driving out their inhabitants as part of a typical US-style counterinsurgency, the Milosevic regime had managed to boost the KLA from a few hundred fighters to a 20,000-strong guerilla army with a presence throughout most of the villages of Kosova.

NATO aimed to get its own forces in to do a better job than Belgrade of controlling the situation and disarming the KLA (which it did in September 1999), and when Belgrade said no, it was made the convenient target of a new NATO doctrine on ``humanitarian intervention’’.

The underlying Western aim was explained by Chris Hedges in the US foreign policy elite's top journal Foreign Affairs in April-May 1999:

``With most ethnic Albanians concentrated in homogenous areas bordering Albania, the drive to extend Albania's borders remains feasible. That drive is not only a wider threat to European stability to also to Albanian moderation. Many KLA commanders tout themselves as a 'liberation army for all Albanians' -- precisely what frightens the NATO alliance most ... The underlying idea behind creating a theoretically temporary, NATO-enforced military protectorate in Kosovo is to buy time – even as it bombs the Serbs – for a three-year transition period in which ethnic Albanians will be allowed to elect a parliament and other governing bodies -- meeting enough of their aspirations, it is hoped, to keep Kosovo from seceding.’’

However, opposition to any form of Serbian rule hardened after the cataclysmic events of 1999. It is impossible to find any Kosovar Albanian against independence.

Meanwhile, the nine following years of legal limbo under UN colonial rule, denying Kosova development credits and investment, has left half the population unemployed, a black hole in Europe that was ripe for social explosion.

Despite claims that independence is a creation of the imperialist powers, it was not until 2006 that, recognising the unsustainability of the situation, the first voices among Western leaders began to accept the inevitability of what had been demanded by the Albanians for a century. Following a year of fruitless negotiations, in early 2007, UN negotiator Marti Ahtisaari released the plan for “supervised independence”, as a “compromise” between the mutually irreconcilable demands for autonomy or independence.

If some kind of independence was now inevitable – unless imperialist powers wanted themselves to wage a counterinsurgency war inside Europe against 2 million Albanians who would surely rise up if independence were denied – then Western powers aimed to “supervise” it in order to limit it as much as possible.

Aside from the EU “supervision”, the other main aspect of the plan – the more progressive aspect – is the wide autonomy for regions where Kosovar Serbs form a majority of the population, with control over their education, health and police systems and the majority of income made in these areas, and will be able to be directly linked to and financed by the Serbian government.

The former municipality of Mitrovica in the north will be divided into two. Serb northern Mitrovica connects the entire region to its north to the Serbian border as the largest Serb bloc, covering some 15 per cent of Kosova. Mitrovica already has its own Serbian university, hospital, school system, currency and police. This northern region contains the massive Trepca mining and metallurgy complex, allegedly worth some US$5 billion . It has been effectively partitioned from the rest of Kosova by NATO troops since they entered in June 1999.

The Kosova Protection Corps – the unarmed civil emergency and reconstruction corps which gathered many former members of the KLA, which fought for the country’s independence in 1997-99 -- will be abolished, and Kosova will be barred from joining any other state (meaning Albania). Strong minority representation has already been enshrined under UNMIK, and a new flag has been designed under EU supervision, with the map of Kosova surrounded by six stars representing six ethnic groups, absent any symbolism or even colours from the Albanian or Serb flags.

While thousands of Kosovar Albanians waved the red and black two-headed eagle flag of neighbouring Albania in their celebrations – the only flag that represents their national consciousness, and the flag that was legally theirs under Tito – now the EU decrees from above that their flag will be blue and white in order to enshrine Kosova as an officially multi-ethnic state.

The US and EU supported the plan, as did the Kosovar Albanian leadership with some reluctance. Serbia rejected it, and was backed by a Russian veto on the UN Security Council, leading to a further year of negotiations which ended in December.

While Russia’s backing of Serbia was matched by an equally strong backing of independence by US authorities, the EU was in a quandary over this situation. The EU has the most to lose from any outcome that leads to Balkan instability; it was easier for Moscow and Washington to play ``hard’’ positions as part of a greater geopolitical game. EU states also have vast strategic and economic reasons to strive for overall agreement with Russia – precisely a scenario the US finds threatening.

The EU was also divided, unwilling to come to a decision that did not have consensus of all its members. Britain tended to play along with Washington, and following the election of Sarkozy, France also moved to this camp. In contrast, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria have remained opposed to Kosovar independence.

The EU preferred a resolution through the UN, requiring enough compromise to get Belgrade’s agreement, as their EU force needs a clear mandate, so in contrast to the US, continually and strongly warned Kosova against unilateral moves. Germany in particular, with strong economic concerns in the Balkans, vast economic relations with Russia, and the centre of the EU which it does not want split, played the moderator role through the process.

With negotiations failing, however, the EU was confronted by a dilemma. The Albanian leadership made clear it would not tolerate the situation forever, and would declare independence unilaterally if no compromise was reached and independence remained blocked in the UNSC. In such a scenario, a continued EU refusal to recognise it would increase the resulting instability, with tensions between Serb and Albanian populations sharpened by such an outcome, but the EU less able to control it.

Therefore, the EU majority moved towards agreeing to recognise independence, but called on Kosovar authorities to delay their declaration for a period so that the process can be “coordinated” with the EU, allowing the new political and security forces time to establish themselves. It is hoped that this way minority Serbs will be more assured of protection and less likely to flee.

Multi-ethnic republic?

Kosova premier-elect, former KLA leader Hashim Thaci, has offered the vice-presidency to a Kosovar Serb. Four Serb parties formed a coalition and defied Belgrade by negotiating to enter into a governing coalition with Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosova (PDK). Popular Serb leader Oliver Ivanovic condemned Belgrade’s blocking of Kosovar Serbs voting at recent elections as a “catastrophe” for the Serbs, and publicly welcomed Thaci’s moves. Serbs already account for 10 per cent of the Kosovar Police Service (KPS), and the Minister of Returns is a Kosovar Serb.

Kosova’s declaration of independence declares Kosova “to be a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic republic, guided by the principles of non-discrimination and equal protection under the law. We shall protect and promote the rights of all communities in Kosovo and create the conditions necessary for their effective participation in political and decision-making processes.” There is no specific mention of the Albanian people.

However, most Kosovar Serbs remain opposed or fearful, given their real experiences of sporadic violence from Albanians since 1999. Following the mass return of the dispossessed Albanians in June 1999, a reverse wave of some 100,000 Serbs – about half their original numbers – fled Kosova. A wave of Albanian revenge killings precipitated this flight, most of whom fled in fear, given the conditions of insecurity in the legal limbo in which Kosova was left. A brief second wave of anti-Serb pogroms erupted in March 2004, when eight Serbs were killed, while 11 Albanian rioters were shot dead by NATO troops.

The current Kosovar Serb population of 130,000 now forms more like 5 per cent rather than the original 10 per cent of Kosova’s population. Their situation varies greatly: from full Serb control in north Kosova (to where Albanians have been unable to return) to the wretched barbed-wire enclosed ghetto in Orahovac and Gorazdevac, with a number of medium-sized concentrations in between, particularly Gracanica, Novo Brdo and Strpce.

There is valid criticism that international forces have been ineffective in enforcing security. NATO provides armed convoys for Serbs traveling through Albanian territory, yet the fact they are needed reveals the situation remains bad. However, it is futile to merely blame this on NATO not policing a foreign occupation more harshly. The real issue is the frustration of the Albanian desire for independence combined with the fact that most Kosovar Serb leaders speak on Belgrade’s behalf in opposing the right of self-determination of their neighbours who outnumber them ten to one, making their people a target for Albanian chauvinists. The nationalism of these Serb leaders is mirrored by that of Kosovar Albanian leaders, who, while strongly condemning attacks on Serbs, have never fully prioritised forging a partnership with Serbs to construct a multi-ethnic Kosova.

However, there have been no major outbreaks of anti-Serb violence since March 2004, and the belief among Albanians that their goal of independence is approaching is perhaps one reason for this decline of ethnic Albanian radicalisation.

The Western powers are officially recognising a united, multi-ethnic Kosova, as enshrined in the Ahtisaari Plan, which they believe will be the least destabilising alternative. Any too-strong ``Albanian’’ colouration will lead to the internal partition along the Ibar river in the north assuming an international character. But a fusion of northern Kosova with Serbia poses the question of the remainder of Kosova having the right to unite with Albania, further posing the question of the Albanian minorities living in a compact region in neighbouring Macedonia, southeast Serbia and Montenegro. Imperialism has long believed this could lead to a “nightmare scenario” of attempted border changes throughout the region, far more destabilising than if Kosovar independence – itself opposed for precisely this reason – assumes an officially multi-ethnic character.

The problem is that the poisoning of ethnic relations and solidarity between Serb and Albanian communities goes back a long way, especially since the destruction of Kosovar autonomy in 1989-90, and the brutal imperialist attack in 1999 greatly accentuated this, opening the political conditions for the Serbian government to commit an ``Al Nakba’’ on the Kosovar Albanians, while in turn the Kosovar Albanian leadership supported NATO bombing of Serbia’s working people. As such, the effort to hold together a ``multi-ethnic’’ state may be frustrated by the results of imperialism’s very actions.

Geostrategic interests?

Much emphasis has been given to the imperialist “supervision” aiming to enforce neo-liberal prescriptions and allow imperialist firms to privatise Kosova’s wealth, but given that every country in eastern Europe, including Serbia, already follows this path, it explains little. Much is also made of geostrategic interests: the US has built an enormous base at Bondsteel in Kosova, situated perfectly to overlook a pipeline for Caspian oil being built by a US-led consortium, running through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania.

However, there is no reason to believe the pro-imperialist government in Serbia would not allow such a base, if in return the US had opposed Kosovar independence. The US has bases all over the world without needing to set up a state directly under its control. The point is, however, this would have involved either an imperialist or a Serbian long-term counterinsurgency war against the armed independence struggle which would immediately break out again, threatening precisely the stability desired for pipelines and other imperialist concerns. Enforcing an officially multi-ethnic state thus remains the main aim of the occupation.

However, the fact that most Kosovar Serbs are not on board means that Kosova’s unilateral declaration, even while accepting the Ahtisaari Plan, is essentially a statement by the Albanian majority. In the north, Serbs are already refusing to cooperate with the independent Kosova authorities, declaring themselves still part of Serbia, making partition along the Ibar River the most likely outcome.

A partition may appear the ideal “compromise” between autonomy and independence, yet was ruled out by both Serbia and Kosova. Serbia’s advantages would be getting rid of two million Albanians with a high birth rate, while keeping the economic assets of the north, and gaining a small face-saver in the process.

Both the secession of the north to Serbia proper and the right of the rest of Kosova to join Albania and create an ethnic Albanian state can be viewed as the right of both communities to self-determination, blocked by imperialist ``stability’’ concerns. And both should have the right to do this, and not be blocked by imperialism, if they so desire.

However, it is arguably the worst outcome for the Kosovar Serbs: the simple fact is that only 40 per cent of Kosovar Serbs live in their already very secure northern stronghold, so its secession would abandon the majority of Serbs who live in smaller and more vulnerable enclaves surrounded by the Albanian majority throughout the south. All the famous Serbian Orthodox monasteries are also in the south. At least some kind of Serb-Albanian partnership to run an independent state still therefore appears the best overall outcome, if it were possible.

With no consensus in either the UN, the EU or NATO, none of the foreign bodies have a clear mandate to act one way or the other, apart from generally protecting security. One possible way out of the crisis is for the Ahtisaari Plan to be extended into a Bosnia-style set-up, making the Serb- and Albanian-dominated regions two confederal states within an independent Kosova.

Whatever the outcome, socialists should welcome the partial fruition of the century-long struggle of Kosovar Albanians for national self-determination, while also condemning any oppression of the Serb and other minorities by the new state. However, the actual state being formed is not an independent one, and remains a modified colonial-ruled set-up. Kosova has the right to full self-determination -- meaning all UN, EU and NATO occupation forces and governing bodies should exit Kosova and allow the Kosovar peoples, both Albanian and Serb, to determine their own futures.

However, it is possible that minority populations, fearful of the threat of violence by Albanian chauvinists, may call for some UN forces to remain in the unstable conditions of the transition for their protection, given the absolute poisoning of proletarian solidarity that has occurred over the last 20 years. This would be quite understandable as long as such forces were disconnected from running the Kosovars’ state for them. Therefore we must oppose the use of this as a justification by imperialist powers to limit Kosova’s real independence via its colonial “supervisory” bodies, and strongly distinguish between the two.

* We use the Albanian spelling ``Kosova’’ rather than the Serbian spelling ``Kosovo’’ to refer to that state. This is in recognition of the right of Kosovar people to freely determine their own name as part of their right of national self-determination, given the overwhelming majority of the population of the country are Albanian

Srebrenica: Response to left-wing apologists for genocide

Srebrenica: Response to left-wing apologists for genocide

by Michael Karadjis


The massacre of over 8000 defenseless Bosnian Muslim captives by the Bosnian Serb army of General Mladic in July 1995, under the noses of the UN and NATO in the final part of the long Bosnian war, is widely regarded to be the largest massacre in Europe since 1945. Moreover, it is the only action by any side in the entire set of Balkan wars declared unquestionably an act of genocide by the International Court of Justice, in a toothless ruling that decided the rest of the Bosnian Serb campaign to eliminate the Muslim population did not quite reach that mark, a ruling widely condemned, producing a dissenting statement from the court’s vice-president, Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh.


Yet even the Srebrenica genocide has been actively denied by a coalition of people on the far right and left of the political spectrum. The apex of this campaign was the publication by Ed Herman, who now appears to work full time on such issues, of ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, which can be read here:


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=8244


Herman’s awful piece is long and those who have the taste for that kind of thing can read it themselves. Here I will be responding to the main allegations within it without necessarily trying to quote every word. Fortunately, a member of the same camp, someone called Michel Collon, has summed up the argument neatly enough in a ridiculous ‘Milosevic media quiz’ he penned some time ago, where one of his contrived “questions” was about whether or not we were told “the truth” about Srebrenica. Here is the first part of his answer:


“No. First element. Even if it's a matter of condemning abominable crimes, historical truth - necessary for reconciliation - is not served by the propagandistic processes that unreflexively use the term 'genocide', by the obfuscation of the fact that that some of the victims died in combat or by the systematic exaggeration of the numbers. Inquests have determined that many of the 'victims' were found some months later voting in subsequent elections or even taking part in other battles with Izetbegovic's army. This information was and remains obscured. We won't here go into the argument over numbers which only serious historians will be able to sort out definitively.”


I suppose it is not unusual to be getting lectures about ‘obfuscation’, ‘exaggeration’ and ‘historical truth’ by such masters of the former two and violators of the latter. And it would be difficult to find a worse example of all of this than the Herman-Collon spin on the Srebrenica massacre.


Collon of course “won’t go into the question of numbers”, but nevertheless assures his readers that these numbers were “greatly exaggerated,” and many were killed in battle, and many others turned up to vote. Leave a piece of crude propaganda and then “don’t go into it.” The lie is based on the extensive article Herman cited above.


When Herman produced this, here were a number of replies well worth reading:


Bill Weinberg:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=4&ItemID=8327

Roger Lippman:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8325

Julie Wornan: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8323

Stela Rajic:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8366


Bill Weinberg’s excellent reply then turned into an ongoing discussion on his blog, including with Herman and others: http://www.ww4report.com/node/757

Balkan Witness, which is run by Roger Lippman, also produced a reply, which ZNet refused to publish:
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Srebrenica-missing.htm


It is difficult to know what to add to these excellent replies, and all the rest of the enormous amount of information available about this massacre (see end of this article for links). The crux of the matter is this numbers’ game of how many died. Herman and company are claiming it was probably only about 2000 rather than 8000, based on some rather ugly juggling of figures, which someone with Herman's highly prestigious background should be expected to know far better than to producing as serious argument. I have been criticised for being too harsh on Herman, but the problem is precisely that Herman is no second-rate hack; it is the fact that we are here talking about someone with a long history of valuable work, including his collaboration with Noam Chomsky in "Manufacturing Consent' and elsewhere, that makes this pseudo-historical work of denial of the rebrenica genocide so difficult to stomach. It gives me no pleasure to have to harshly criticise someone like Herman, but on these issues, it is essential.


Herman's number-crunching revolves around two main claims . One is that some people initially identified as missing later turned up in Tuzla, as Collon says “voting in elections,” and yet despite this, “the same number” of around 8000 is still being used. In other words, Herman claims the original number quoted was 8000 killed, but then this was not adjusted downward to take into account those initially thought to be missing, who later allegedly turned up to vote. Never mind that in fact initial estimates were quite fuzzy and tended to be around 10,000, or even in some cases 12,000, and that the 7-8000 figures were in fact settled on later; never mind that, like in any enormous bloody event, some may well initially be wrongly listed as dead or missing, but meanwhile many others that were not originally thought dead or missing may have turned out to be, thus canceling the whole point.


The second piece of acrobatics by Herman are various figures (people can check his article themselves) that say, well such-and-such a number (from memory around 40,000) was the population of Srebrenica at the time, therefore there were this many men and women of these ages, and it is known that this many of each sex and age arrived in Tuzla, therefore 8000 dead men is simply too many. Reading such nonsense, anyone who ever actually followed the war must wonder why Herman is so determined to lower the numbers killed by his Chetnik buddies, that he feigns so naively certain that the exact pre-war population of Srebrenica can be used as a guide in such years of chaos. Any casual observer of the Bosnian conflict would have seen regular media reports that Srebrenica’s population was bursting at the seems due to huge numbers of Muslim refugees from other parts of ethnically-cleansed East Bosnia pouring in; estimates during the war regularly put the wartime population there as high as 70,000, compared to the pre-war population of some 40,000, meaning nearly half the population refugees.


Leaving aside this juggling and bizarre logic, Herman is refuted by the simple facts, all of which he simply refuses to believe or acknowledge. The International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP), as of early 2005, had 7789 people listed as dead or missing from the massacre by relatives or friends (and there must be more missing than this because ICMP has bone samples for which there are no matches with family members' DNA). Herman clearly assumes these relatives are co-conspirators in the “hoax” and are making it up. As of July 2005, the Red Cross had listed some 2000 confirmed dead and 5,500 missing, ie, a total of 7500. Amnesty’s figures are very similar, and its website claims “every one of the scores of Moslems we have met who left Srebrenica in 1995 has a relative or friend now among the missing” (the site also claimed 1000 Croatian Serbs were missing following Croatia’s ‘Operation Storm’ in the Krajina, a figure Herman will be happy to accept while vigorously denying the former). By July 2003, some 6000 body bags were in the possession of the ICMP (1), and more are being discovered; 2000 have already been positively identified. In 2005, the Bosnian Serb “government” itself made an official admission of 7800 killings in Srebrenica, and apologised for the massacre, much to the distress of its intellectual defenders like Herman.


Moreover, as Andras Riedlmayer shows, these numbers may be minimum numbers:


“On 5 June 2005 Bosnia's Federal Commission for Missing Persons (Federalna Komisija za nestale osobe) issued a provisional list giving the names, parents' names, dates of birth and unique citizen's registration numbers of 8,106 individuals for whom it has been reliably established from multiple independent sources that they went missing and/or were killed in and around Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. A verification process is underway for another approximately 500 victims whose disappearance or death has not yet been verified from two or more independent sources.”


Thus the real numbers may be over 8500. Riedlmayer’s piece is an excellent overall summary of the situation:
http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0507&L=justwatch-l&D=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=51792


Clearly, for Herman, once again all these “names, parents' names, dates of birth and unique citizen's registration numbers of 8,106 individuals” are merely part of the grand hoax, all made up in order to make the Chetniks look bad. Herman simply denies all these figures with an arrogant wave of his hand, bemoaning "a failure to find (all) the executed bodies" (yet). One can only wonder what he would say to the Vietnamese, who claim there remain 300,000 Vietnamese missing in action, whose bodies have not been discovered since the war. Perhaps all a conspiracy to make the US look bad? Many many years ago, Herman and Chomsky penned an awful piece of apologia for the Khmer Rouge (in the Preface and Cambodia chapter of the otherwise very useful 'After the Cataclysm'). They even claimed there would be Cambodian resistance to the internationalist Vietnamese fighters who came in and liberated the country, a claim absurd beyond the imagination. Since that time, the unquestionable truth of the genocide in that country, of possibly some 1.7 million deaths, is denied by very few. Though neither Herman nor Chomsky have made a clear admission of the wrongness of that piece, Chomsky has in practice written very differently since, having no qualms about using the term "genocide" for the KR and describing the Vietnamese intervention as perhaps one of the few genuine 'humanitarian interventions'. Herman may have done the same, though I cannot say for sure as I do not follow his work as much, but if he has, what is clear is that he has never broken from that method.


At the end of this piece, a bibliography of other articles on the Srebrenica massacre will be provided for anyone who wants further detail, but for now, leaving aside the numbers’ games, the Srebrenica revisionist school also uses a number of other disingenuous arguments. Collon sums some of them up grubbily here:

“Second element. Why did the media hide the events essential to an understanding of this drama? In the beginning, this region was inhabited by Muslims AND Serbs. The latter were run off in 1993 by an ethnic cleansing committed by the Muslim nationalist troops of Izetbegovic. French general Morillon, who commanded the UN force there, charges: "On the night of the Orthodox Christmas, the holy night of January 1993, Nasser Oric led raids on Serb villages. . . . There were heads cut off, abominable massacres committed by the forces of Nasser Oric in all the neighboring villages." (Documents of information from the French National Assembly, Srebrenica, t 2, pp. 140-154). The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later. But why systematically hide the crimes of 'our friends'?”


Of course we all know from the western media that Muslims cut off heads, so no surprise about this piece of crude tabloidism; of course the good Christian Serbian nationalists never did such things, or anything much at all. Sigh. In any case, here we will argue politically rather than treating readers to the same crap.


Where can one start, when one wants to simply despair. “This region was inhabited by Muslims and Serbs.” Yes. Presumably “this region” refers to the whole East Bosnian region along the Drina River, the border with Serbia, not only Srebrenica. Collon then jumps to January 1993 and talks about an attack out of Srebrenica by Muslim forces on nearby Serb villages, claiming the local Serbs were thereby “ethnically cleansed” by the Muslims. And then he has the hide to claim that someone other than himself is “hiding the events essential to understanding this drama.”


The reality is the absolute reverse. Collon cannot explain why Muslims were holed up in the tiny “enclaves” of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde in East Bosnia, permanently under siege by the massively armed Bosnian Serb Army all around them, or how these places even became “enclaves” in the first place. So now let’s explain to Collon “the events essential to understanding this drama.”


The first thing to understand is that almost the whole of East Bosnia had an overwhelming Muslim majority before the war, with a substantial minority of Serbs; in the very first stages of the genocide, in the months after its onset in April 1992, hundreds of thousands of these Muslims were driven out of most of the towns and nearly all the villages. Enormous crimes against humanity were recorded in Zvornik, Visegrad, Bijelina, Foca, Bratunac, Glogova, Sokolac and elsewhere. All vestiges of these people were eradicated; mosques leveled to the ground and replaced by car-parks. Whole books can be written about these crimes; many in fact have. Massive documentation of these crimes is available at the Hague Tribunal, the UN Commission of Experts, Amnesty International and countless other places. It is not my responsibility to have to quote it all; it is Collon’s and Herman’s responsibility to explain why they simply ignore this enormous ethnic cleansing that drove thousands of terrified refugees into places like Srebrenica and then kept them holed up there for 3.5 years, constantly besieging them, why they simply write as if it all didn’t happen, and then instead refer to the desperate subsequent retaliatory attacks out of the besieged enclaves, out of the Warsaw Ghetto, out of the Gaza Ghetto, on surrounding Serb villages, as the real initial “ethnic cleansing.”


There is no doubt that war crimes were committed on some occasions by these desperate raids out of the ghetto, particularly the famous Orthodox Christmas raid Collon refers to. In the great majority of cases, these raids aimed at stealing food for survival in the besieged enclave; most deaths were of Serb military personnel, though there certainly were civilian deaths as well, as there usually are in such desperate cases. Yes the desperate Palestinian attacks out of their Gaza and West Bank prisons also result in Israeli civilian casualties; we do not support either these attacks on Israeli civilians or those on Serb civilians, but we generally do not equate desperate actions of the ethnically cleansed, terrorized, imprisoned ghetto dwellers with the systematic crimes of the massively armed oppressor state that drove them into that situation in the first place, let alone putting the main blame on the oppressed as Herman/Collon do.


With breathtaking hypocrisy, Collon notes that “The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later, but why systematically hide the crimes of 'our friends'?” Here he is implying that the meticulously organised capture of Srebrenica and the killing of 8000 captives in cold blood in 1995 merely represented some kind of spontaneous “desire for vengeance” by the local Serbs against the Muslims, to punish them for these earlier raids out of the ghetto. He does not mention the idea that these raids out of the ghetto themselves, apart from a desperate attempt to get food, may have included elements of “desire for vengeance” by the terrorized Muslims for the enormous terror and ethnic cleansing that drove out the bulk of the East Bosnian population, some into the Srebrenica ghetto, in 1992. In fact irony of ironies is that one of the “Serb” villages mentioned as being attacked during some of these raids was Glogova - an *originally Muslim village* that had been brutally ethnically cleansed by the Chetniks in spring 1992, and then repopulated by Serbs. In the original Chetnik attack on Glogova, it has been claimed by one source that every last inhabitant was massacred, on 9 May 1992 by the invading ‘Yugoslav’ Army units and Serb paramilitaries (Emir Suljagic, ‘The victims are interested in forgiveness, not punishment’, Dani (Sarajevo), 6 May 2005).


A more appropriate and historically truthful statement, paraphrasing Collon’s line above, would have been “The desire for vengeance (and food) by some of the terrorized and ethnically cleansed Srebrenica Muslims does not justify the crimes they committed later (ie, these occasional raids out of the ghetto), but why do Collon and his co-thinkers systematically hide the enormous initial crimes of their friends that led to this desire for vengeance, let alone then trying to explain away the much later and even larger meticulously organised crime in July 1995 as merely a further part of this cycle of “vengeance”?”


Incidentally, how many Serb civilians were killed in these desperate raids out of the ghetto? The revisionists cite Serb government figures claiming several thousand deaths. This however is absurd; of course the same people who meticulously attempt to show that overall numbers of deaths in the Bosnian war were much lower, typically want to boost the number of Serb deaths. However, they cannot have it both ways. If the revisionists are satisfied with the meticulous count being carried out by the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre, consisting of experts from all three Bosnian communities, which by late 2006 had an estimate of close to 97,207 dead in the whole Bosnian war (which the RDC claims is likely to rise no higher than 150,000 maximum, rather than the 200,000 or higher earlier believed), then do they also accept the estimates of dead from each group? According to this research, of the 97,000 confirmed dead so far, a total of 4000 Serb civilians died in *the whole of Bosnia,* alongside some 21,000 Serb troops (compared to over 33,000 Muslim civilians and over 31,000 Muslim troops, accounting for 66 percent of all deaths, and 83 percent of civilian deaths)? Not to mention that many of the Serb civilians killed were residents of multi-ethnic Sarajevo or Tuzla killed by years of Serbian Chetnik shelling into those besieged ghettos.


If only 4000 Serb civilians are known definitely so far to have died in the whole of Bosnia during the entire war, how many of these died in the Bratunac district nearby Srebrenica? On this, the Research and Documentation Centre has a very precise answer:


“The allegations that Serb casualties in Bratunac, between April 1992 and December 1995 amount to over three thousand is an evident falsification of facts. The RDC's [Research and Documentation Center] research of the actual number of Serb victims in Bratunac has been the most extensive carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina and proves that the overall number of victims is three to nine times smaller than indicated by Serbia and Montenegro.

“Perhaps the clearest illustration of gross exaggeration is that of Kravica, a Serb village near Bratunac attacked by the Bosnian Army on the morning of Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1993. The allegations that the attack resulted in hundreds of civilian victims have been shown to be false. Insight into the original documentation of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) clearly shows that in fact military victims highly outnumber the civilian ones. The document entitled “Warpath of the Bratunac brigade”, puts the military victims at 35 killed and 36 wounded; the number of civilian victims of the attack is eleven.

“In addition to information received from relatives and family members of the victims and inspection of cemeteries, RDC has collected all existing primary sources, official documents and documentation of RS Ministry of Defense and Bratunac brigade of VRS, as well as research by the Serb authors. The victims have been categorized on the basis of two time-related criteria: the first was the municipality of residence at the time of the beginning of war; the second was the municipality of premature and violent death.

“After all the sources have been processed, cross-referenced and reviewed, the results showed that 119 civilians and 424 soldiers classified in the first group died in Bratunac during the war. Under the second category the number of civilians is the same (119) whereas the number of soldiers is 448. The result demonstrates that 26 members of other VRS units other than Bratunac brigade of VRS fought and died in combat in the municipality of Bratunac.”

(Research & Documentation Center, The Myth Of Bratunac: A Blatant Numbers Game, http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2006/05/myth-about-serb-casualties-around.html)


So there we have it: 119 Serb civilians killed during the whole war in that region. By contrast, attempting to calculate the number of Muslims killed in Srebrenica would have to include those killed during the initial months of the cleansing of East Bosnia in the northern summer of 1992, those killed during the constant Chetnik siege and shelling of the town from 1992 to 1995, and the 8000 killed in July 1995 alone. The numbers are clearly enormous.


The United Nations' General Assembly Resolution 53/35 (Fifty-fourth session, Agenda item 42, The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 15 November 1999, pages 103-104) has this to say about the occasional raids carried out by the besieged Muslims of Srebrenica:


“A third accusation leveled at the Bosniak defenders of Srebrenica is that they provoked the Serb offensive by attacking out of that safe area. Even though this accusation is often repeated by international sources, there is no credible evidence to support it. Dutchbat personnel on the ground at the time assessed that the few “raids” the Bosniaks mounted out of Srebrenica were of little or no military significance. These raids were often organized in order to gather food, as the Serbs had refused access for humanitarian convoys into the enclave. Even Serb sources approached in the context of this report acknowledged that the Bosniak forces in Srebrenica posed no significant military threat to them. The biggest attack the Bosniaks launched out of Srebrenica during the more than two years which it was designated a safe area appears to have been the raid on the village of Visnjica, on 26 June 1995, in which several houses were burned, up to four Serbs were killed and approximately 100 sheep were stolen. In contrast, the Serbs overran the enclave two weeks later, driving tens of thousands from their homes, and summarily executing thousands of men and boys. The Serbs repeatedly exaggerated the extent of the raids out of Srebrenica as a pretext for the prosecution of a central war aim: to create geographically contiguous and ethnically pure territory along the Drina, while freeing their troops to fight in other parts of the country. The extent to which this pretext was accepted at face value by international actors and observers reflected the prism of “moral equivalency” through which the conflict in Bosnia was viewed by too many for too long.”
(Quoted from http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2005/12/un-report-fall-of-srebrenica-role-of.html).


Then there is the final part of the Herman-Collon thesis:
“Third element. Like other so-called demilitarized 'safe havens', Srebrenica was in reality an area used by the forces of Izetbegovic to regroup, the UN protecting them from total defeat. Astonishingly, Oric's troops retreated from Srebrenica just a week before the massacre. French general Germanos: "Oric had widely declared that they had abandoned Srebrenica because they'd wanted Srebrenica to fall. The 'they' was Izetbegovic." And why? It is interesting to return to a curious UN report, written a year and a half earlier by Kofi Annan: "Izetbegovic had learned that a NATO intervention into Bosnia was possible. But it would happen only if the Serbs forced their way into Srebrenica and massacred at least 5,000 people." A massacre predicted a year and a half before it happened! (UN Report of 28-29 November). General Morillon also informed us that "It is Izetbegovic's people who opposed the evacuation of all those who had asked to be taken out, and there were many." His conclusion: "Mladic fell into a trap at Srebrenica."

Before fully answering this grotesque and self-contradictory frame-up, note the last line, the punch line in essence: “Mladic fell into a trap at Srebrenica.” In other words, when Mladic entered the town, unknown to him, there were people still there, who had not been evacuated (peacefully ethnically cleansed), and they were defenseless, because the mighty Bosnian army, which had allegedly been attacking them for years from this enclave, had not decided to be massacred, so poor old Mladic had no choice but to oblige. I suppose to a French general like Morillon, and a red-brown apologist like Collon, there is simply no alternative to a gigantic massacre when you stumble into a town full of Muslims who have the gall to be living there!


This piece from Collon above is once again direct from Herman, so let’s also add what Herman adds specifically to this. Herman claims that since Izetbegovic was so determined to get US intervention, his government “abandoned” Srebrenica by withdrawing “a military force much larger than that of the attackers,” and then retreating in such a way “that made that larger force vulnerable and caused it to suffer heavy casualties in fighting and vengeance executions,” and this “helped produce numbers that would meet the Clinton criterion” (the “Clinton criterion” means 5000 massacred Muslims, as it was from Clinton that Izetbegovic had allegedly learnt that NATO intervention would first require this number of extra dead).


We are unclear from all this confusion which is more important to Herman here: to demonstrate that the good Serb military of Mladic only killed about 2000 Muslims (given that they were rude enough to still be in town when he got “trapped” there), or that he inadvertently had no choice but to kill about 5000 Muslims who were deliberately retreating “in a certain way” to make this happen, because that was what Izetbegovic wanted him to do and planned things this way.


You have to get to the footnotes to read that Izetbegovic flatly denied this, while another person, a Srebrenica chief of police, confirms the Clinton suggestion. Note that, even if Clinton did make such a suggestion, and even if Izetbegovic did hear it and pass this information on, nowhere does anyone quoted claim that Izetbegovic or any other Bosnian leader suggest it was a good plan that should be followed through on. This is simply Herman’s and Collon’s implication. The idea that Izetbegovic, who had been “struggling for years” to get some help to end the slaughter may have been appalled at the suggestion by Clinton that more Muslims need to be slaughtered to justify any western help is not considered. It is not part of Herman’s “narrative,” which has to follow the line that if Mladic did massacre some Muslims, it was the fault of Izetbegovic, who wanted him to massacre even more.


Where there may perhaps be an argument regarding the culpability of the Bosnian government, given the lack of options after so many years of massacre, was that the withdrawal of the Bosnian Muslim Srebrenica commander, Naser Oric, several months before July 1995, may have weakened their defense. And further, though this is pure conjecture, that this act may have been a final concession by the Bosnian government to the enormous pressure from Serbia and its Chetnik allies, Croatia, and all the imperialist powers, including the US, for the ethnic dismemberment of his country. In other words, if he agreed to give up Srebrenica to the Chetniks, then they may accept a peace agreement – one based on a partition that he was opposed to, but if there was no alternative but continual massacre, then maybe the only thing left was to get as good a deal as possible.


If that were the case, it is a bizarre logic to then be putting the blame on Izetbegovic for making this concession to the Chetniks and the US, and blaming him for the massacre. If Izetbegovic had in fact agreed to give up Srebrenica without a fight, and had organised the retreat of his troops, then how is that supposed to whitewash Mladic for carrying out a massacre of 8000 captives there after the troops have retreated? While the claim by Herman and Collon that some of the retreating troops were “killed in battle” with the Chetniks, rather than being essentially defenseless, captured and killed as every other report claims, is grotesque and appalling, one wonders why *if* true there would be a “battle”, when the Bosnian government and army are here being accused of wanting to give up without a fight. Obviously what Herman and Collon mean by a “battle” is the fact that the retreating troops were shot in the back by the Chetniks, but some perhaps still had a uniform on; it was a “battle” like the “battle” between the US air force and retreating Iraqi troops at the end of the first Gulf war after Hussein’s surrender.


For any doubters, I’ll further quote here another section from the same UN General Assembly report, which deals with these issues, if not the particular slander against Izetbegovic:


“B. Role of Bosniak forces on the ground
475. Criticisms have also been leveled at the Bosniaks in Srebrenica, among them that they did not fully demilitarize and that they did not do enough to defend the enclave. To a degree, these criticisms appear to be contradictory (only “to a degree”!). Concerning the first criticism, it is right to note that the Bosnian Government had entered into demilitarization agreements with the Bosnian Serbs. They did this with the encouragement of the United Nations. While it is also true that the Bosnian fighters in Srebrenica did not fully demilitarize, they did demilitarize enough for UNPROFOR to issue a press release, on 21 April 1993, saying that the process had been a success. Specific instructions from United Nations Headquarters in New York stated that UNPROFOR should not be too zealous in searching for Bosniak weapons and, later, that the Serbs should withdraw their heavy weapons before the Bosniaks gave up their weapons. The Serbs never did withdraw their heavy weapons.

476. Concerning the accusation that the Bosniaks did not do enough to defend Srebrenica, military experts consulted in connection with this report were largely in agreement that the Bosniaks could not have defended Srebrenica for long in the face of a concerted attack supported by armour and artillery. The defenders were an undisciplined, untrained, poorly armed, totally isolated force, lying prone in the crowded valley of Srebrenica. They were ill-equipped even to train themselves in the use of the few heavier weapons that had been smuggled to them by their authorities. After over three years of siege, the population was demoralized, afraid and often hungry. The only leader of stature was absent when the attack occurred. Surrounding them, controlling all the high ground, handsomely equipped with the heavy weapons and logistical train of the Yugoslav army, were the Bosnian Serbs. There was no contest.

477. Despite the odds against them, the Bosniaks requested UNPROFOR to return to them the weapons they had surrendered under the demilitarization agreements of 1993. They requested those weapons at the beginning of the Serb offensive, but the request was rejected by the UNPROFOR because, as one commander explained, “it was our responsibility to defend the enclave, not theirs.” Given the limited number and poor quality of Bosniak weapons held by UNPROFOR, it seems unlikely that releasing those weapons to the Bosniaks would have made a significant difference to the outcome of the battle; but the Bosniaks were under attack at that time, they wanted to resist with whatever means they could muster, and UNPROFOR denied them access to some of their own weapons. With the benefit of hindsight, this decision seems to be particularly ill-advised, given UNPROFOR’s own unwillingness consistently to advocate force as a means deterring attacks on the enclave.

478. Many have accused the Bosniak forces of withdrawing from the enclave as the Serb forces advanced on the day of its fall. However, it must be remembered that on the eve of the final Serb assault the Dutchbat commander urged the Bosniaks to withdraw from defensive positions south of Srebrenica town – the direction from which the Serbs were advancing. He did so because he believed that NATO aircraft would soon be launching widespread air strikes against the advancing Serbs” (ie, something that never happened, since, as anyone not born yesterday understands, NATO had sold Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serb Army).


Finally, while Collon doesn’t use this argument, this is a useful place to reply to Herman’s additional argument that the fall of Srebrenica, and the massacre of its inhabitants, was “convenient” for the Bosnian government, which wanted nothing more than US intervention, and was willing to sacrifice its own people to get it.


For background on this, Izetbegovic and the Bosnian government had signed on, extremely reluctantly, under extreme pressure, to the US-inspired Contact Group partition plan of mid-1994, which offered a full 49 percent of Bosnia to the Chetniks as a recognized “Serb Republic” (Republika Srpska) despite the region having been “cleansed” of its non-Serb, mostly Muslim, plurality (Serbs account for 30 percent of the Bosnian population, and large parts of ‘Republika Srpska’ previously had overwhelming Muslim, Croat or mixed majorities). The other 51 percent would be a “Muslim-Croat Federation”. This was a massive victory for Serbian war aims, and a total defeat to Bosnian government war aims, which had been fighting to preserve the multi-ethnic constitution over the whole of Bosnia, and to allow for the return of refugees. This is why both Milosevic and Tudjman signed on immediately, seeing it as a great deal, especially Milosevic. Tudjman was less thrilled, because it meant giving up the Croat chauvinist statelet in Bosnia, ‘Herzeg-Bosna’, while his Serbian allies had got theirs over half the country. But his Bosnian Croat chauvinist allies had been decisively smashed by the Bosnian armed forces in late 1993, so he had no choice, and figured Croatia would effectively exercise suzerainty over the other half of Bosnia anyway.

So since Milosevic thought it was so good, why did not the Karadzic leadership of the Bosnian Serb Chetnik forces also sign on? At one level, since they had already conquered 70 percent of Bosnia due to overwhelming military superiority, why should they withdraw from any, given they were under no military pressure from the poorly armed Bosnian government forces?


However, there was another side to Karadzic’s rejection. Perhaps Karadzic would accept the 49 percent, but he wanted the borders of the new Serb Republic to be even less messy, which would require even more ethnic cleansing of people whom happened to be in the wrong areas. Above all, Karadzic and his Chetniks had two strategic aims:

The first was the widening of the northern “corridor”, through the previously Croat-Muslim majority Posavina region, which connected their conquests of previously Muslim-majority East Bosnia, along the Serbia border, with their stronghold in Banja Luka in the northwest, which had had a slight (54%) Serb majority, and which further connected to the overwhelmingly Serb region along the southwest Dinaric range (Bosnia Krajina) which adjoined the Serb Republic of Croatian Krajina. Some 160,000 Croats had already been ethnically cleansed from the Posavina to create the ‘corridor’, but widening it further would seal this situation.


The second was the elimination of three remaining “enclaves” where Muslim refugees had taken refuge within Serb-conquered East Bosnia – Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde, all surrounded by Chetnik-controlled territory. The Chetniks considered it rude that, after having expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims from East Bosnia, some tens of thousands had remained in these three pockets inside “their” republic.


Clearly, if Karadzic could secure the elimination of three small enclaves, he may be willing to sign on to 51-49. And it is possible that, given the extent of utter western betrayal, Izetbegovic had finally decided that the three small and difficult to defend enclaves may have to be sacrificed to end the slaughter. I stress “may have”. This is purely conjecture. However, it is conjecture of a far higher order to suggest that he wanted Srebrenica eliminated along with 5000 or 8000 of its inhabitants. If he made a deal, signified by the removal of Oric, it is far more likely to have been along the lines of, OK, we give up Srebrenica, you let the people out alive. The fact that the Chetniks who overran Srebrenica only let some of the people out alive, and captured and killed 8000 others, is likely to have been seen by Izetbegovic as appalling betrayal.


Who, in the end, was the fall of Srebrenica, and also neighbouring Zepa straight afterwards, therefore “convenient” for? Clearly, it was highly convenient for Karadzic’s Chetnik forces, because it allowed their “state” to do away with these troublesome enclaves. If it was so “convenient” for the Bosnian government, it is interesting that when the US imposed the 51-49 partition a few months later, Srebrenica and Zepa were inside the ‘Serb Republic”. One might think that since it was so “convenient” for Clinton, who was allegedly finally searching for an “excuse” for “more aggressive policies” after years and years of ignoring the Bosnians “struggling” to induce US intervention by all means (I’m using Herman’s self-contradictory terms), that the US would make a point of forcing the Chetniks to hand over Srebrenica to the “Muslim-Croat Federation,” to signify a US somehow making amends for refusing to come to the defense of Srebrenica and allowing such a gigantic massacre to take place. Even if the massacre was a “hoax” as Herman thinks, still, since the US pushed this hoax, one may expect it to demand the Chetniks withdraw. Yet it was never even an issue. From the very start of the new US-drawn maps, Srebrenica and Zepa were part of the Serb Republic, along with a widened northern corridor – ie precisely the two strategic aims of Karadzic in previously rejecting 51-49 had been met. This would seem extremely convenient for the Chetniks, and convenient for Clinton and the US in an entirely different way to that portrayed by the revisionist “left” and right.


And therefore, it’s not surprising that the ‘smoking gun’ – US support for the Chetnik conquest of Srebrenica – has recently surfaced. In late 2006, Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration in 1995, revealed in an interview with the French magazine Paris-Match that his initial instructions from national security adviser Anthony Lake were to sacrifice the three remaining Muslim ‘enclaves’ in East Bosnia – Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde – to the Serb nationalists (http://www.forward.com/articles/report-on-bosnian-murders-fuels-debate/). Holbrooke claims he rejected the instructions, but in the past he has emphasised his rejection only of pressure to abandon Gorazde, leaving the question of the other two unclear – till now. The same issue of Paris-Match also had an interview with the chief prosecutor of the Hague Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, who claims that western officials held a meeting with Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic in 1995, to discuss the plans to seize Srebrenica. She said there were minutes of the meeting and that she knew the names of the officials, but was unable to use this as evidence because they refused to confirm their attendance. The revelations cast light on Holbrooke’s statement after Dayton that Milosevic was someone the US “could do business with.”


It also fits with other recent statements by Holbrooke, which reveal that behind the US intervention, formally against Karadzic’s forces, was the fear that the excesses of the Chetniks – who had conquered 70 percent of Bosnia despite Serbs being only 30 percent of the population – were leading to a radicalisation among the dispossessed Bosnian Muslims. In a Washington Post article entitled ‘Was Bosnia worth it?’ Holbrooke asserted that if the US had not intervened in 1995, “we would probably have had to pursue Operation Enduring Freedom not only in Afghanistan but also in the deep ravines and dangerous hills of central Bosnia, where a shadowy organization we now know as Al Qaeda was putting down roots that were removed by NATO after Dayton.”


The idea that Al Qaida had more than a marginal role in the desperation of Bosnia is fanciful, and a slander against the Bosnian Muslims. However, the fact that Holbrooke feels compelled to describe in this way the growing radicalisation among the Muslims, who had been left to the slaughter in the middle of Europe for years in the 1990s, indicates the degree of worry this was causing Washington.


Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia’s foreign minister at the time, commented that “for many years, I believed that the West gave an orange light to the Serbs to take over Srebrenica, but I am now convinced that it was a green light.”

Croatia’s reconquest of the Krajina

Before concluding, a discussion of the Croatian army’s retaking of its ‘Krajina’ region in August 1995, resulting in the flight or expulsion of its entire Serb population, is in order. This is for two reasons. Firstly, as will be shown below, the two events – Srebrenica and Krajina – were in reality part of a connected ‘pincer’ movement to “tidy up” the ethnic map of the region to make the Serbo-Croatian regional partition plan more viable. Secondly, both Herman and Collon make direct comparisons between the two events, in a way aimed at pushing their highly unbalanced, to put it as mildly as possible, view of this conflict.


Collon asks “Was the largest ethnic cleansing of the war committed by the Croat Army?” and provides the following answer for us:

“YES. On August 4, 1995, a hundred thousand Croat soldiers, a hundred and fifty tanks, two hundred troop transports, more than three hundred pieces of artillery, and forty missile launchers attacked the Serb population of the Krajina. More than 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave this region which they had inhabited for centuries. The worst atrocities of the war were committed: the Croat forces killed the elderly who could not flee, and burned 85% of the abandoned houses.”


It is always interesting when people who devote most of their time to being apologists for massive war crimes then go out of their way to emphasise the war crimes of someone else they do not like, forgetting entirely about all the qualifications, apologetics, numbers’ games and other arguments they’ve insisted on in order to deny or minimize the crimes of the people they like.


At the outset, I’ll say one thing: I’ve never supported Tudjman, and in fact to properly understand the 1990s, it is necessary to understand that it was not Serbo-Croatian conflict, but the Serbo-Croatian alliance, that dominated that decade in the Balkans. I feel no need whatsoever to be an apologist for Franco Tudjman’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as in this example here; it is not I, but Collon, Herman, Johnstone and Parenti who are the war crimes deniers, and their insistence that appalling crimes were committed by Tudjman in Krajina, next to their denials about the enormous crimes committed by Milosevic, Seselj, Karadzic and Mladic in Vukovar, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, the death camps, Kosova and elsewhere stands out as rank hypocrisy.


So let’s look at Collon’s statement. He begins: “On August 4, 1995, a hundred thousand Croat soldiers, a hundred and fifty tanks, two hundred troop transports, more than three hundred pieces of artillery, and forty missile launchers attacked the Serb population of the Krajina.”


Apparently here the size of the heavy weaponry arsenal actually matters. Yet Collon obviously sees no importance in such facts when Croatia was attacked by the ‘Yugoslav’ Army with hundreds of tanks, thousands of artillery pieces, plus masses of other heavy weaponry in 1991, at a time when Croatia itself had next to no arms; nor obviously does he see any relevance in the fact that Bosnia was attacked by the ‘Yugoslav’ Army and its spin-off ‘Bosnian Serb’ Army which disposed of 330 tanks, 800 artillery pieces, 400 armoured personnel carriers and 37 military aircraft, for years on end, when Bosnia was virtually defenseless. Only some aggressors should be allowed to have such weapons, according to Collon.


The he writes: “More than 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave this region which they had inhabited for centuries.” Yes this is correct. At least Collon uses the population figures based on the actual census, and does not embellish the figure to 200 or 250 or 300 thousand or whatever, as many of his co-thinkers do, or “hundreds of thousands” as Herman does in the same article where he tries to show that not many Muslims were killed in Srebrenica.


Why did Croatia invade the Krajina and expel 150,000 Serbs? Because it was Croatian territory, that had been seized by the Serbian armed forces in 1991, brutally “cleansed” of its Croat population, and taken over as the so-called “Republika Srpska Krajina”. Obviously at some point Croatia was going to attempt to retake its territory. Of course, as socialists, we don’t have any particular obsession with “national” territory if a people in part of that territory consider themselves part of another nation which they want to join. It is Collon and company who are hypocrites, who support the right of the Serb nationalists to rip apart Croatia, create facts on the ground via expelling non-Serbs and set up a new ‘Serb republic’, but oppose the right of the already overwhelming majority Albanian population of Kosova – overwhelming majority without the need for any ethnic cleansing – to gain independence from Serbia, because this is “Serbian territory.”


But let’s leave aside their hypocrisy for the moment. We can agree that in the way Tudjman’s reactionary regime retook the Krajina, with a massive military attack, launching hundreds of missiles directly into the Krajina capital Knin, was a method that guaranteed the expulsion of the Serb population. Furthermore, it is also very clear that many people who stayed behind, mostly old people, were murdered by Croatian troops, as Collon notes. We unreservedly condemn Tudjman’s attack in Krajina.


Now that is clear, let’s go the Collon’s next point: “The worst atrocities of the war were committed” during this offensive. What cynicism. This coming from someone who has just done apologetics on the massacre of 8000 Muslim captives in Srebrenica, a month or so earlier, and on the concentration camps, and on the entire three years of genocide in Bosnia, now tells us that the expulsion – not killing – of 150,000 people, involving the killing of some 1000 people, is when the worst atrocities of the war were committed.


While this nonsense may simply be dismissed as the ravings of a hypocrite, nevertheless it actually forms part of a discourse which is usually a little more coherent – rather than the worst atrocities of the war, which is patently absurd, this discourse usually claims this was the “greatest single act of ethnic cleansing” in the whole war. What this means is that these 150,000 people fled in a few days, whereas the millions that fled their homes in Bosnia, and hundreds of thousands in Croatia in 1991, did so over a longer period of time.


In other words, it is fine to expel a million people from their homes “where they had lived for centuries” if the people at least put up a little fight first, and thus hold up their expulsion, but if they flee en masse without their political and military leadership even making the pretence of a fight, then this is much worse, even if it only involves 150,000 people, relatively middling by the standards of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans that decade.


And the simple reason they fled without a fight was that the Krajina Serbs were only ever part of a cynical game. Milosevic allowed Tudjman to overrun this region in 1995, without putting up even the pretence of a fight, as part of a greater Milosevic-Tudjman-US deal to partition Bosnia and the region in a ‘neater’ way, which resulted in the recognition of ‘Republika Srpska’ in Bosnia. This is despite the Krajina Serb leadership being massively armed with napalm and cluster bombs, which they had liberally used against neighbouring Bosnian Muslims in the completely surrounded and besieged ‘enclave’ of Bihac for years. This is evidence that Milosevic and co. had cynically set up the Krajina Serbs as cannon fodder for this later catastrophe, being merely a bargaining chip in the meantime – they were simply in the wrong area to be really of interest as part of greater Serbia, being separated from Serbia by the entire republic of Bosnia.


But if we are to condemn Tudjman’s method of retaking the Krajina, which seemed guaranteed to ensure the flight of the Serb population, then surely we should also condemn the initial ethnic cleansing of the Croats from the Krajina and the other two regions – East and West Slavonia – that were torn out of Croatia in 1991 and called a “Serb Republic.” Yet from Collon – and Herman, Johnstone, Parenti etc – total silence. So let’s here set the record straight.


Firstly, the Krajina itself, the furthest part of Croatia from Serbia, was the only part that could actually claim the right to self-determination, as the only of the three regions with a Serb majority. Yet even there Serbs were a majority of only 69 percent – much smaller than the majority status of Albanians in Kosova – and the far-right SDS (Serb Democratic Party) leaders ethnically cleansed the Croat minority of 60-70,000 people from the Krajina, an abominable act that never gets mentioned by the apologists. In fact the first case of ethnic cleansing in the whole set of Balkan wars occurred when the ‘Yugoslav’ Army, acting on behalf of the Chetniks, meticulously destroyed the Croat town of Kijevo, situated inconveniently near Serb majority regions in Krajina, and sent the entire Croat population packing in July 1991.


Western Slavonia was overwhelmingly Croat in composition, thus its capture resulted in the ethnic cleansing of another 70,000 or so Croats. There was not one region in all western Slavonia with a Serb majority. As for Eastern Slavonia, the population of the whole region originally conquered in 1991 was only 14 percent Serb, and making this region a ‘Serb state’ meant the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Croats. Late in 1991, Croatian armed forces managed to take some of this back and drive out the Serb minority, but at the end of the war, the ‘Serb state’ still covered a region that was originally only 30-35 percent Serb, so some 100,000 Croats and tens of thousands of other non-Serbs remained expelled.


Thus the carving out of a ‘Serb republic’ in Croatia meant the expulsion of some half a million Croats, the big majority of the population of the three regions altogether, and even as Croatian forces retook some of it by late 1991, there remained some 230,000 Croats ethnically cleansed. It is astonishing that the great majority of the left, even the better sections who later sympathised with Bosnia’s Muslims and have no sympathies for Serbian reaction, almost never make mention of the right to return of hundreds of thousands of Croats brutally expelled by the Serboslav army and its SDS creation from various parts of their own country, including Croat-majority regions, in 1991. This is despite the fact that they almost always, when talking about the Balkans, condemn Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Serbs when it retook the region four years later, as if this later terror was not directly connected to the former. Croats are simply not politically correct.


So let’s go back to Collon’s rhetoric regarding Srebrenica. As we saw, he (and Herman) pretend that the meticulously organised massacre of 8000 defenseless Muslim captives in July 1995 was merely some kind of spontaneous revenge for the occasional raids out of the Srebrenica ghetto into local Serb villages by traumatised, besieged, starving Muslims, which resulted in some civilian deaths. However, they do not see these desperate raids out of the ghetto as revenge by these terrified refugees who had been driven into the ‘enclave’ of Srebrenica in the first place by the brutal ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in East Bosnia in the summer of 1992.


Collon had said “The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later. But why systematically hide the crimes of 'our friends'?” So why doesn’t Collon now say, regarding Tudjman’s expulsion of the Krajina Serbs in 1995, that “the desire for revenge (ie, of the originally expelled Croats of 1991) does not excuse the crimes committed later (in 1995).” And I’d add, quoting him, “but why does he systematically hide the crimes of his friends?”


Finally, when speaking of the numbers expelled from Krajina, another factor needs to be taken into account, regarding the slow process of return. Some 300,000 Serbs were either expelled or left during the war years, of the original Croatian Serb population of 600,000. This included the 150,000 expelled from Krajina, some 20,000 expelled from Western Slavonia earlier in 1995, and over 100,000 who drifted out during the years, due to the increasingly chauvinistic atmosphere under Tudjman, or decided to leave Eastern Slavonia when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia in 1997. To date, some 120,000 of these 300,000 Serbs have returned to Croatia, meaning two thirds of the original Serb population now lives in Croatia, a far cry from the “ethnically clean” Croatia that the left Croat-haters envisage. In fact, a Croatian Serb party has been in a coalition government with the ruling ‘moderated’ HDZ government since its reelection in 2004, and Serb councilors have been elected in Knin, the capital of the Krajina region. Nevertheless, all this progress still leaves a huge Serb population who have not returned, and there is no doubt that one major region is the feeling of insecurity in a state where Croatian chauvinism is still rife among a section of the population and sections of the sate apparatus.


One other major problem however is housing. Many of the houses that had belonged to the Krajina Serbs are now occupied by the Posavina Croats – ie, some of the 200,000 Croats expelled by the Bosnian Serb Army and Chetniks from northern Bosnia and the Posavina ‘corridor’, which connects the west and east halves of ‘Republika Srpska’ but was originally largely Croat in population. Once again, the plight of these people, who cannot return to their homes in Bosnia, is simply not sexy enough for the Chetnikophilic wing of the left. Meanwhile, while the retaking of the Krajina resulted in the expulsion of 150,000 Serbs, and this is abominable, I will leave it to the Collons of the world to give their opinion on the fact that the retaking of the Krajina and Western Slavonia, and later the reintegration of eastern Slavonia, also allowed the return to their homes of 230,000 ethnically cleansed Croats.


What Herman had to say on this is both crasser and more detailed than Collon’s pulp here. Herman makes a big deal about comparing what he sees as the western reaction to Srebrenica massacre and to the Krajina cleansing, which occurred soon after.


Yet he appears to prefer the politics of doing the reverse of what he sees as bias. His whole essay is dedicated to showing that Srebrenica was a hoax, that not many died, that those who did probably died fighting as soldiers, that the Muslims deserved it anyway for “provoking” the Serbs, and that Izetbegovic wanted Mladic to massacre his people in any case, so Mladic is not to blame for carrying it out. Yet strangely, he makes none of these caveats regarding Krajina. Quite the opposite, he wants to believe the largest figures for people killed and cleansed, and makes no effort to look into the background as I have detailed above at all.


According to Herman, the Croatian government was delighted by Srebrenica because it “provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia.” After all the appalling playing with numbers over Srebrenica, Herman simply couldn’t care less with accuracy at all in Krajina – so the well-established figure of around 150,000, which Collon is honest enough to report, and which may indeed have risen, accordig to soem estimates, to perhaps 170,000, becomes “several hundred thousand” for Herman, a figure entirely made up.


Herman then even suggests that this operation “may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July.” Of course, this can only be suggested if you believe the lowest possible figure for the numbers killed in Srebrenica, and the highest possible figures for those killed in Krajina (which Herman naturally does), and even then would be scarcely possible. Herman quotes 1,205 Serbs killed by the Croatian army in the Krajina cleansing, a figure I have no particular quibble with, still less reason to quibble with. But interesting that his source is Veritas (http://www.veritas.org.yu/). Now if you go to the site of Veritas, you are immediately confronted with a page full of the flag of the ‘Republika Srpska Krajina’, that is, the racist Serb statelet set up in parts of Croatia conquered and ethnically cleansed of its non-Serb inhabitants between 1991 and 1995. The site describes itself as a “non-government organisation established in late 1993 by citizens of the then Republic of Serbian Krajina - RSK. Prior to the exile of Krajina population in August 1995, the organization was headquartered in Knin. Afterwards it moved to Belgrade.”


Isn’t it interesting that Herman ridicules as by definition wrong any source from the Bosnian government, and without explanation refuses to accept the very careful work of the Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo, even though it includes Serbs, Croats and Muslims, essentially because it doesn’t verify the figures he wants, but when it comes to Krajina, he has no problem immediately accepting the figures provided by an agency of the Croatian Serb Chetnik state! I could add here as well that whereas the Research and Documentation Centre has made a detailed study of Serb deaths in villages near Srebrenica, and determined that 119 civilians died through the whole war, Herman simply gives the figure of “well over a thousand Serb civilians” dying there, without question, and quite innocently puts as his source the “Yugoslav (ie Serbian) government.” Thus the break between his method of believing figures for deaths for Serbs and that for Muslims and Croats is total.


Like any rank populist, he then goes on to give a harrowing description by a UN officer of a particularly ghastly case of murder of a number of Serbs during this operation – the kind of description that one could find thousands of regarding the appalling atrocities carried out by Serbian forces, but which if one quoted them, they would be immediately accused of “demonizing” “the Serbs”. You are only allowed to “demonise” some people, not others, you see.


Apart form all this, Herman’s piece is full of basic inaccuracies, which reveal his lack of any real knowledge of this region he pretends to be a specialist in. His knowledge of anything Croatian is so lousy that he manages to confuse Eastern and Western Slavonia, he talks about an alleged slaughter or disappearance of Serbs in 1991 in “Vukovar” (ie in *Eastern* Slavonia, where the ‘Yugoslav’ Army led a horrific siege for months in 1991, leading to thousands of deaths), and then “references” this by linking to an article by a guy called Kent, on the ultra-Likudnik, Islamophobic site ‘Emperor’s Clothes’, which points to ethnic cleansing of Serbs from *Western* Slavonia, but which is mostly about the Croatian recapture of that region in 1995, rather than 1991; the head starts spinning.

For all his refusal to believe this source and that, Herman has no problem with various ultra-rightist sources. Between Bogdanovic, a reactionary Serb nationalist that Herman is extensively collaborating with (here is a good review of Bogdanovic’s film, giving an idea of his politics: http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2002/yugoslavia.php3), the neo-Confederate, League of the South, arch-racist Trifkovic, his blog ‘grayfalcon’, and another arch-Islamophobic pro-Likud Serbian ultra-right site, ‘Serbianna’, and the politically similar ‘Emperor’s Clothes’, such references account for 13 of Herman’s references, one sixth of the total, not counting the US Republican Policy Committee (which Herman recommends has a “good summary” of the view that Bosnian Muslims regularly bombed themselves, as, I suppose, Muslims tend to do in the view of such a quintessentially reactionary organisation), or various US generals and so on. The neo-Confederate Trifkovic is also highly recommended for a “good summary” of how Muslim suffering was greatly exaggerated. One feels disappointed that Herman hasn’t also referenced the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, Ariel Sharon, the white South African AWB Boer Resistance, Le Pen, Ian Paisley and other such scum who all hold similar views to his on former Yugoslavia issues. And as he notes, there are a number of other Serbian nationalists he is “indebted to,” one of which is Milivoje Ivanisevic, a former senator of the Karadzic regime in ‘Republika Srpska’, ie, the half of Bosnia officially turned in to a “Serb Republic” after the non-Serb half of the population, about a million people, had been ethnically cleansed, and all traces of centuries of Muslim culture and civilisation eradicated.

Anyway, let’s return to Collon’s final comment on the Krajina issue:

“Clinton called the offensive 'useful'. His Secretary of State said: "The retaking of the Krajina could lead to a new strategic situation which might be favorable for us." Worse yet: the United States advised Croatia in carrying out its offensive, according to an admission by the Croatian foreign minister. Furthermore, it was Washington that took charge of the 'democratic' training of this army.”


This is all very true. The US should be made to bear some of the responsibility for the atrocities that took place as part of this operation, not only the Croatian generals that are up on charges at the Hague.


However, it is worthwhile understanding why the US aided the Croatian offensive, because left at that, as it usually is, suggests that, well, the US aided Croatia against the Krajina Serbs because perhaps it likes Croats and doesn’t like Serbs. Yet this hardly squares with the revelations above, that the US also likely connived with the Bosnian Serb forces in the conquest of Srebrenica.


Neither does it concur with the US position during the massive Serboslav attack on Croatia in 1991 and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Croats then – the position then was that the US opposed recognition of Croatia, pushed an arms embargo against “all Yugoslavia”, which effectively prevented unarmed Croatia from getting arms to balance the massive arsenal of the ‘Yugoslav’ Army, via Vance brought about a peace agreement that froze the confrontation lines in Serbia’s favour, effectively recognizing the annexation of a third of Croatia, allowed the ‘Yugoslav’ Army to take all its heavy weaponry in Croatia out into Bosnia, and then continued to oppose recognition for months after the EU and Russia had recognised Croatia and Slovenia.


So what was the political situation that led to the US arming of Croatia to facilitate its reconquest of the Krajina in 1995? It is true that the US green light to the Bosnian Serb forces to take Srebrenica did not involve training and arming their forces, as in the case of Croatia’s retaking of the Krajina. That was obviously unnecessary; as the Serb nationalists controlled the great bulk of weaponry, there was little they could do with even more weapons to subjugate a little enclave full of disarmed or semi-armed Muslim refugees.


But the evidence strongly suggests that the conquests of Srebrenica (and Zepa) and then of Krajina were a pincer movement in tandem, a last bout of ethnic cleansing aimed at ethnic “tidying up” of the region in order to carry out a neater Serbo-Croatian partition of the region as the basis for the US-imposed Dayton Accord. The fact that not only was no attempt made to prevent the conquest of the Srebrenica-Zepa “safe areas,” despite strong indications the US knew it was coming, but also that from the start, the new US partition plans had ceded Srebrenica and Zepa to ‘Republika Srpska’, a key demand of the Chetniks to sign on to the US plan, indicates this.


This has all been explained above. What needs to be added to that section was that there was a quid pro quo. If the east Bosnian Muslim ‘enclaves’ were to be eliminated to create a stronger ‘Republika Srpska’, and RS’s ‘northern corridor’ between its east and west halves through the formerly largely Croat-populated Posavina was to be widened, then Serbia would also agree to forgo those conquests in the very far west of Bosnia on the Croatian Krajina border, and Krajina itself, because even though these were ironically their only conquests where there really had been an overwhelming majority Serb population before the war, they were also the conquests that were the furthest from Serbia geographically, apart form being economically useless rugged land. On the other hand, they were very valuable to Croatia – the Krajina itself was Croatian territory whose loss in 1991 had effectively cut northern Croatia off from its Dalmation coast; while for the Croatia’s Bosnian Croat puppets to take over the neighbouring far west section of Bosnia from the Serbs would allow Croatia a stronger link to the Bosnian territories already controlled by these forces, in Western Herzegovina. This explains not only the US arming of Croatia to recapture Krajina, and the US and western facilitation of the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica-Zepa, but also the complete lack of fight by the Krajina Serb leadership and the relatively quiet acceptance of the Krajina recapture by Milosevic.


So when, as Collon notes, “Clinton called the offensive 'useful'” and “his Secretary of State said "the retaking of the Krajina could lead to a new strategic situation which might be favorable for us," they were talking a lot of sense. The conquest of Srebrenica-Zepa also led to this same “useful new situation,” consolidated as the Dayton Accord.


One final thing that should be noted about Dayton is the fact that the attempt by the non-violent Kosovar Albanian leadership of Ibrahim Rugova to be represented at Dayton so that the Kosova issue could also be addressed was snubbed by the US, quite happy with Milosevic-Tudjman as its strategic partners. It was this snub of the Kosovar Albanians, who had been waging a “Ghandian” campaign for independence right through the 1990s, while the rest of Yugoslavia was engulfed in flames, in concert with the recognition of the gangster state of ‘Republika Srpska’ in half the UN-member state of Bosnia, despite it being nothing but a creation of enormous violence and genocide, that taught the Kosovar Albanians the “painful truth” as enunciated by a KLA commander, that “those that want freedom must fight for it.”


Footnote:

(1) Regarding these 6000 body bags, Roger Lippman at Balkan Witness points to some confusion about this:

"The figure of 6,000 bodies found to date was reported in error. In all likelihood, someone at ICMP told journalists that ICMP had 6,000 body bags from Srebrenica. It is a mistake that is easy to understand; in most cases, one would assume that a body bag containing human remains would contain an entire body. Sadly, because of the problem of secondary mass graves and commingling of remains, that is just not the case with Srebrenica victims. (Secondary mass graves are locations to which bodies from primary mass graves were removed by Serbian forces in an effort to hide the magnitude of the massacre.)

"Each body bag does not represent an individual victim. Excavators at the scene of a mass grave isolate body parts and bodies the best they can and put them into body bags. Because of the problem of commingling and secondary grave sites, parts of the same individual may be in other parts of the same grave site or in other graves. Therefore, the remains of one individual are sometimes contained in several different body bags.

"This does not diminish the number of persons who went missing from Srebrenica. As of early 2005, ICMP has on its database 7,789 named missing individuals from Srebrenica – and there are more people missing because ICMP has bone samples for which there are no matches with family members' DNA.

"The nearest estimate of the number of exhumed bodies from Srebrenica in early 2005 is close to 4,000. No one can give a more precise figure than that. There are many more sites waiting to be exhumed – and doubtless more will be discovered.

"The erroneous figure of 6,000 bodies has been picked up and repeated by numerous other news sources, but never with proper attribution."

http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Sreb1.htm



The following are some extra useful links on Srebrenica (on top of the links provided above to replies to Herman):

This is a very thorough report:
Srebrenica Investigation: Summary of Forensic Evidence – Execution Points and Mass Graveshttp://www.domovina.net/archive/2000/20000516_manning.pdf

I also think Bianca Jagger gives an excellent description of the entire Srebrenica ordeal, which is useful not just regarding the issue of numbers, but also other aspects of the story distorted by Ed Herman. Jagger’s articles are at http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/srebrenica/BiancaJagger1.html and http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/srebrenica/BiancaJagger2.html

This is the Bosnian Serb government’s own report admitting the crime:
http://www.domovina.net/srebrenica/page_006/rs_final_srebrenica_report.doc


Weinberg also included a list of other useful links about the Srebrenica massacre:

"Srebrenica: Anatomy of a Massacre," Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/tri/tri_414_1_eng.txt

Dragan Obrenovic statement to ICTY
http://www.un.org/icty/obrenovic/trialc/facts_030520.htm

Momir Nikolic statement to ICTY
http://www.un.org/icty/mnikolic/trialc/facts030506.htm

IWPR story on Momir Nikolic perjury, from FreeRepublic
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/991985/posts

ICMP press release on identification of bodies
http://www.ic-mp.org/home.php?act=news&n_id=97&

Open Democracy report, "Srebrenica: ten years on"
http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-yugoslavia/srebrenica_2651.jsp

Radio Netherlands report on the Tribunal ten years after Srebrenica
http://www2.rnw.nl/rnw/en/currentaffairs/region/easterneurope/srb050708?view=Standard

BBC story on Serb Republic apology for massacre
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3999985.stm

"Serbia Struggles to Face the Truth about Srebrenica," by Tim Judah, Crimes of War Project
http://www.crimesofwar.org//news-srebrenica2.html

Deniers of Serbia's War Crimes, Balkan Witness
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Articles-deniers.htm

"Did Six Million Really Die?" Holocaust-denial numbers-fudging
http://theunjustmedia.com/Holocaust/Did%20Six%20Million%20Really%20Die.htm

How Many, and Who, Died in Bosnia?

How Many, and Who, Died in Bosnia?

The numbers killed in 3.5 years of savage war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 has long been a question of controversy. Bosnian leaders usually claimed some 200,000 people, mostly Bosnian Muslims, were killed; on the other extreme, apologists for Serbian nationalism like to imagine the lowest possible figures, and then suggest these figures were fairly evenly divided among ethnic groups as would be expected in a “civil war.” As an example of the latter group, Ed Herman (Z-Magazine, February 2002, Body Counts in Imperial Service) “quotes” George Kenney’s alleged estimate of only 20-30,000 dead in Bosnia. Kenney in fact estimated between 25,000 and 65,000 dead, and it is clearly Herman who chose to provide only Kenney’s minimum figure to the Z-Net readership, yet in any case Kenney’s figures are still very low.

The reasons for people like Herman, and a significant section of the left, wanting to believe these ‘low and equal’ figures lies in their belief that the war in Bosnia was part of “imperialist intervention against Serbia”, or even part of the “imperialist dismantling of Yugoslavia.” The second claim of course is pure metaphysics, given that Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991 or at the latest early 1992, whereas the Bosnian war broke out in April 1992. Nevertheless, the first claim is just as metaphysical – the whole point is that while slaughter engulfed Bosnia for 3.5 years – with, as will be conclusively shown below, Muslims overwhelmingly the main victims – there was *no* imperialist intervention to help the Muslim, and mixed Bosnian, victims against the monstrous assault by massively armed Serb nationalist forces, themselves armed to the teeth by Serbia, which had inherited the Yugoslav army, the 4th largest armed force in Europe. Which is not to say there was not intervention; there was, but *against* Bosnia. The main forms of imperialist intervention in Bosnia, enforced by tens of thousands of NATO troops, were two-fold: enforcing a criminal arms embargo against the Bosnian republic, in the context of overwhelming military superiority of Serbia; and continually pushing one plan after another for the ethnic partition of Bosnia, ie, precisely the program the Serb nationalists and Milosevic were fighting for, the only disagreement being over ‘how much’. In the end, with the US-imposed Dayton Accord of 1995, the ‘Serb republic’ got half of Bosnia, an enormous steal, courtesy of EU and US imperialism.

So the psychological alleged “anti-imperialist” premises for wanting to believe false figures is an illusion. Now on top of this, we have the first thorough study showing the death figures and proportions are also baseless. Fortunately we have a very thorough research into this question carried out by the Research and Documentation Centre, painstakingly put together by a Bosnian team involving Serbs, Croats and Muslims along with international experts, headed by Mirsad Tokaca, available at: http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus.html

Every death has been rigorously cross-checked to rule out double reporting (possible in the chaos of war and displacement), and only those deaths that can be absolutely verified are included. This thus excludes many incomplete cases, and those who died as a result of war-related causes, ie, years of having no electricity or being starved in besieged cities, lack of medicines, cold etc, but not directly through military killing. It also excludes “persons who died at an earlier age than would normally be expected during peacetime, due to war conditions.”

As of December 2005, they had a definite count of 93,837, and in December 2006, this had risen to 97,207. The project is continuing and will continue to be extended as long as significant numbers continue to be added.

Many of the pro-Chetnik wing of the left will grab this and say, see, “only” 100,000 killed, not 200,000 as widely quoted. Let’s however remember the fact that the RDC sees these figures as an “absolute minimum,” and that these figures only cover those who died from direct military killing but not others who died as a result of war conditions (which many of these “leftists” would want included if it was a cause they supported).

In reality, the numbers that died in Bosnia as a result of war were far greater than the 97,000 to date found to have been directly killed by acts of war. In fact, a study comparing the pre-war and post-war population of Bosnia, and adding all the known Bosnians living elsewhere in the world, the total number of dead or missing comes to 229,000, of whom 75 percent were Muslims, if it is assumed that there would have been no population increase over that period. If the rate of growth that existed previous to the war is assumed, the numbers of dead or missing rise to 343,000, of whom 64 percent were Muslims (‘Demographic Consequences of the Bosnia War’, by Murat Praso, http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/dem.html ).

That there could be such high figures is easily explained when we remember that the RDC figures very strictly exclude “persons who died at an earlier age than would normally be expected during peacetime, due to war conditions.” But is it logical to include people who died “due to war conditions” but not directly shot or bombed in the list of war victims? It really depends on consistency – it is a question of comparing figures with similar figures in other cases. To understand hw important this is, let’s take the case of East Timor.

In 2006, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation released its report on total deaths in East Timor between the Indonesian invasion in 1975 and its departure in 1999 (http://www.hrdag.org/resources/timor-leste_faqs.shtml#4). It found 183,000 people had been killed. This approximates closely to 200,000 dead widely quoted, including by Herman, to label the Indonesian action a case of genocide. Yet this report divides this 183,000 into two groups: firstly, 18,600 Timorese – only some 10 percent of the total – who were killed or disappeared (“political violence deaths”), and the remaining 90 percent who died “due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality.” Note how closely the description of the vast majority of Timorese deaths due to war conditions resembles the description of the deaths *not* recorded in the RDC’s Bosnian study.

In other words, let’s be clear – and keep in mind that the Timorese figures may well underestimate the scale of killing there, as may also be true in Bosnia – from the available figures, there were 18,600 Timorese deaths directly attributable to killing in 24 years, compared to 97,000 Bosnian deaths directly due to killing in only 3.5 years.

But in any case, let’s leave aside the possible total numbers who died in Bosnia due to war-related causes, which likely are very similar to the widely quoted 200,000 or more. Let’s stick to the 100,000 or so found by the RDC. Let’s leave aside why 100,000 killed in 3.5 years becomes not very much of a big deal by the logic of the revisionists, but 5000 Palestinians killed between 2000 and 2006 is genocide etc. Just to clarify: I have no problem referring to Palestine as genocide, though, like with Bosnia, this description goes beyond the mere question of numbers dead, as we will see below re Bosnia. Let’s leave aside the question of how such craven hypocrisy is even possible. Let’s just deal with the 100,000 killed.

If you want to take that part of the package (ie, the “low” overall numbers), then you have to take the rest of package, which does not bear out the craven “civil war” fantasy at all. When judging these figures below, bear in mind that Bosniaks (Muslims) constituted 43% of Bosnia’s population, Serbs 30% and Croats 18%.

The 97,000 plus deaths to date comprise over 64,000 Bosniaks (65.8%), nearly 25,000 Serbs (25.6%) and 7700 Croats (8%), along with “others.” It is very obvious from this that Muslims (43% of the Bosnian population) are way over represented in the dead and the other two groups are underrepresented. But especially in terms of who was really killing whom, this is even clearer when civilian and military deaths are compared: The 33,000 Bosniak civilians killed constitute 83% of civilian deaths, the 4000 Serbs some 10% and the 2000 Croats 5.4%. Thus there were nearly 8.5 times the number of Bosniak civilians killed compared to Serb civilians. Put another way, over 50% of all Bosniak victims were civilians, compared to only 16% of Serb victims and 26% of Croat victims.

And even this is not the end of the story, because large numbers of Bosnians were officially listed by their families as being in the army as it was the only way to get a government subsidy. According to the RDC the civilian numbers are probably overall underreported compared to the military numbers:

“During our BBD project and other studies related to the registration of victims of war
it came to our attention that some victims reported as soldiers according to official
military lists, would be as well claimed civilians in civilian sources, and vice-versa. In
particular, some military records could have been created by authorities in response to
applications from the relatives of the deceased for the post-mortal benefits after the
deceased. Secondly, some families might have found it honourable to bury their
deceased among the defenders in military cemeteries or to publish their names on
defenders’ lists, even if the actual circumstances of death were not necessarily directly
related to combat. These practices likely lead to over-reporting of soldiers and underreporting of civilians in the sources. In consequence of these and other similar practices, civilians are in our opinion underrepresented in “Status in War”.”

Though Bosniak civilian deaths already vastly outnumber Serb/Croat deaths, it still appears likely that it is Bosniaks relatively underreported due to this problem, probably at the same overall ratio. In particular, even many of the 8000 plus Muslim men and boys slaughtered in captivity over a few days in Srebrenica in 1995 – ie the case unambiguously agreed to be “genocide” by the World Court – are here classified as “soldiers”. Tokaca explains that they in fact were not soldiers, but:

“This is a problem for the state to solve. For many families, the fact that one of its members was filed as a soldier in the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina was a matter of sheer survival. When these people were confronted with the choice between existence and a lie regarding the status of the victim, they opted for the lie. The only ones who could count on some kind of state support were members of the armed forces, or rather their families. The authorities themselves, however, have failed to confront the problem of civilian casualties. Throughout the past sixty years, in this country you could claim the status of a soldier on the basis of just two people’s testimony. I chose not to become involved with this problem.”

While it s unclear how many of these 8000 are here wrongly classified, Tokaca implies it is a significant number. Thus even just adding half this group to the Bosnian Muslim civilians their numbers jump to 9 times the number of Serb civilians killed. However you look at it, the reason the Bosnian Serb Army could overrun Srebrenica and slaughter 8000 captives was because the captives had no arms to defend themselves, not the usual definition of a “soldier”. Put another way, a surrendered soldier without a weapon would be listed as a 'soldiers' on the RDC list; though they were non-combatants when killed. Quite unlike Mladic’s forces that did the killing.

As the RDC explains:

“It is important to emphasize that “Status in War” does not provide correct insights in relation to victims of combat versus non-combat situations. Neither does it inform about legitimate victims of violations of the International Humanitarian Law or the Law of War. “Status in War” is a simple measure of whether or not a person was a member of a military/police formation at the time of death.”

But it does not stop there. There is no reason to assume that all Serb and Croat civilian casualties were killed by Bosnian government forces or Muslim militia. Certainly some were, no-one has ever denied that violations were also carried out by the defenders, in the same way as other oppressed and terrorized groups, such as Palestinians, Tamils, Kurds etc often resort to attacks on civilians on the other side, or even their own civilians, such as the Iraqi resistance. One is justifying any of these cases, but the issue is what the overall nature of the conflict is, and the overall picture is clear from all above.

But we need to remember also that tens of thousands of Serbs and Croats remained alongside their Muslim and mixed Bosnian friends and relatives in cities such as Sarajevo and Tuzla throughout the war, which were besieged the entire time by the Chetniks from the hills above. The daily artillery barrages into the cities from Serb chauvinists did not spare Serb civilians living there. There is thus little doubt that a significant proportion of the Serb and Croat civilian deaths were actually at the hands of the Bosnian Serb Army. For example, one fifth of all Croat civilian deaths occurred in Sarajevo (440 of over 2000), and some 1000 Serb civilians died in that city, one quarter of all Serb civilian deaths. Given the civilian casualty numbers in Sarajevo (4000 Muslims, 1000 Serbs and 440 Croats) and the original proportions of the three groups in the Sarajevo population (Muslims 50%, Serbs 28%, Croats 7%), it seems highly likely that the great bulk of these Serb and Croat civilian deaths were due to killing by the Bosnian Serb Army.

Other facts are worth noting. While Serb and Croat military deaths are higher than civilian deaths by a long margin during every month of the 3.5 year war, among Bosniaks, while this pattern also holds for the middle of the war – 1993-94 – Bosnian civilian deaths outnumber military deaths in both crucial years, 1992 (the initial genocide) and 1995 (the year of the Srebrenica genocide). In particular, Bosniak civilian deaths in the first four months of the war – April to August – are massive by comparison with most other figures of any side, except for the (again) Bosniak figures for July 1995.

Significantly, looking at Serb civilian death figures over the 43 months, the only real ‘spike’ is in September 1995 – ie right at the end of the war – when the Croatian army, having driven the Serbian occupation army (and the Serb civilian population) out of its Krajina region in August, then crossed the border into Bosnia and drove back the BSA from some heavily Serb-populated regions adjoining Croatia. This is certainly not to justify the actions of the Tudjman regime and the Croatian chauvinists, who were a carbon copy of their Serbian cousins, and in any case were allied with them against Bosnia throughout most of the war. However, the fact that 400 of the 4000 Serb civilian victims were killed right at the end of the war (600 in September and October) tells us much more about ‘what goes round comes round’ than about the causes and nature of the overall conflict.

The number of female civilians killed is also an indication, given they are less likely to be confused with soldiers. Of the 9300 female civilians killed, 7000 were Muslims (75%), 1500 Serbs (16%) and 730 were Croats (7%). Likewise, 3000 Muslim children were killed, compared to 218 Serbs and 172 Croats, thus Muslim children were killed at a rate of 15 to 1 compared to both other groups. This is even starker when the relative numbers of “soldiers” are taken into account among older children (15-18 years of age). Only 11% of Muslim child fatalities were officially soldiers, compared to 27% among Serbs and 30% among Croats.

Another major point refuting the simpleton “three sides civil war” where “all committed crimes” thesis is the fact that the extermination of Bosnian Muslims went hand in hand with cultural genocide, via the wholesale destruction of Muslim religious and cultural buildings, historic libraries and museums. According to noted authority on Islamic Studies, Michael Sells, the Chetnik forces destroyed the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with over “a million books, more than a hundred thousand manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of historical records” going up in flames. At the oriental Institute in Sarajevo, more than five thousand Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, from many parts of the Middle East, went up in flames. Much of the National Museum was destroyed (Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996, pp1-3). Along with the wholesale destruction of mosques, this aimed at the complete eradication of Bosnian Muslim culture, ie cultural genocide.
The RDC gathered data about the devastation of cultural heritage and sacral complexes. According to their research, “917 sacral complexes belonging to the Islamic Community were totally destroyed, while 731 were lightly or heavily damaged,” that is, a total of 1648 Muslim mosques or other structures, attacked by (mostly) Serb but also Croat chauvinists (many were hundreds of years old, and many were turned into parking lots), compared to “311 structures of Catholic (ie Croat) Community were destroyed or damaged, as well as 34 belonging to the Orthodox (ie Serb) Community and 7 to Jewish Community” (http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus.htm). Can there still be any doubt: the number of Muslim holy places destroyed or damaged was over 5 times that of Croat holy places and *50 times* that of Serb holy places.
The “all three sides are guilty” school ought to meditate on the fact that a stroll down the main road in Sarajevo or Tuzla, before, during or after the war, would be enough to bring you to quite intact Orthodox and Catholic Churches with crowds of Serb and Croat worshippers entering and leaving. In fact it is no exaggeration to say that no Serbian Orthodox or Croatian Catholic Churches were destroyed in government controlled areas, though the main Serbian Orthodox Church in Sarajevo was damaged by shelling from the Chetnik besiegers. “Civil war” my foot.
The RDC also notes that “850 villages were totally destroyed; 214 attacks against hospitals and other health facilities were registered as well as 132 attacks against other cultural and educational facilities (libraries, schools, universities)” (http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus.htm). It does not specify the majority ethnic group in these villages or where these other buildings were located, but is there any reason to believe that the demography of destroyed villages would be any different to that of destroyed holy houses? Absolutely not, meaning the number of “totally destroyed” Bosnian Muslim villages was some double that of Palestinian villages in 1948.
The fact that the demography of these destroyed villages would be similar to those of destroyed holy places, and destroyed people, should not come as a surprise to anyone who actually knows anything about the Bosnian war and its geography and demography, despite the totally dishonest obfuscation by the embittered revisionists.

After all, while Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica, Srebrenica, Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac and countless other Bosnian towns and cities full of civilians were encircled, besieged, cut off from the world, starved and bombed on a daily basis for 3.5 years by heavily armed Serb nationalists, could our pro-Chetnik friends tell us exactly which Serbian towns were besieged and bombed by Bosnian Muslim forces? None, of course. Let’s look at this question more deeply.

Serbs made up 30% of Bosnia, Croats 18%, Muslims 43% and mixed Bosnians around 10%. Within the first few months of the Bosnian war, the Serbian nationalist forces had taken control of 70% of Bosnia and ethnically cleansed a million non-Serbs who just happened to live there. They kept control of this amount of territory for 3.5 years until Bosnian government forces pushed them back to about 50% in late 1995. The US intervened at that point that the Bosnian forces were for the first time on the offensive, making sure the government forces were not able to take back any more ethnically cleansed land, as the golden 50/50 figure for the partition of Bosnia was the US and Milosevic figure.

In 1993, the Bosnian Croat nationalists, who were allied to the Bosnian Serb nationalists, also conquered about 15-20% of Bosnia, thus together the two allied chauvinist armies had 85-90% of Bosnia, while the government forces – representing the Muslim duality of the population, the mixed Bosnians who obviously couldn’t fit in either of the racist states, and large numbers of Serbs and Croats who preferred to keep living next to their Muslim neighbours and relatives rather than shift to some racist hell – only had control of some 10-15% of the country. At the end of 1993, after circumventing the imperialist arms embargo enough to acquire small numbers of Iranian arms, the Bosnian government smashed the Croat chauvinists, but they still held onto Western Herzegovina which had a solid Croat majority, maybe about 10% of the country. Thus even after this, the government forces still had no more than 20% of the country.

How is this possible? Don’t these figures in themselves tell us something about who had absolute power and who at bottom was the oppressor and aggressor? How can this situation make sense if one really thinks it was a fairly even sided “civil war” and if one wants to believe that civilian casualties were fairly evenly spread, and that "the figures and the ethnic breakdown, ratio of civilians and soldiers killed would be the expected death rates in a civil war, reflecting the balance of power on each side” as ‘one poster claimed? High time to toss revisionist rubbish where it belongs.

The final point is this: if it was just “three sides” fighting each other, then it’s strange this wasn’t also occurring in Serbia itself, with its Muslim, Croat, Hungarian and Albanian minorities, indeed where both the Sanzak Muslims and Presevo Albanians had voted in autonomy or independence referendums in 1992; the fact that it was only Bosnia and Croatia being destroyed and ripped above by massively superior Serbian regime firepower gives the neat, simple answer to this “mystery”: the wars in Bosnia and Croatia were not “civil wars”.

How did it all this happen? Because the Bosnian Serb Army had overwhelming military superiority. For example, in late 1994, they had 330 tanks, 800 artillery pieces, 400 armoured personnel carriers and 37 military aircraft, while the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ie government forces) had 40 tanks, “a few” artillery pieces, 30 armoured personnel carriers and no aircraft. The Bosnian Croat forces had 75 tanks, 200 artillery pieces, no APCs or aircraft. Given that through most of the war the Serb and Croat nationalists were either officially or unofficially allied, this represents enormous superiority over the government forces. Even when they were not officially allied, the Croat nationalists never carried out any joint fighting with the Bosnian government forces against the Serb nationalists except at the very beginning and very end of the war. Thus at best it was the overwhelmingly superior Serb nationalist forces versus the extremely ill-equipped government forces. Even if a pro-Serb propagandist were to dishonestly put together the Croat and government forces, they were still way, way overwhelmed by the Serb nationalists.

How did the Bosnian Serb Army “just happen” to have such absolute superiority, since it was “just a civil war between 3 ethnic groups”? Answer: because it wasn’t “just a civil war between 3 ethnic groups”. When there was one Yugoslavia, there was one army, a military machine the 4th biggest in Europe with masses of advanced weaponry. This belonged to all Yugoslavs, but when it broke up it came under the control of Serbia, as Serbs had absolutely dominated the officer caste. All non-Serb officers quit when the federal army began to be unconstitutionally used as an arm of Greater Serb war aims.

Still, how did the massive resources of the federal army, based in Serbia itself, get to the Bosnian Serb Army, which was in Bosnia?

Firstly, because it had unconstitutionally began arming the Chetnik military groups in both Croatia and Bosnia from late 1990, in order to prepare their secession from those republics.

Secondly, because at the end of the Federal government/ Serbian attack on Croatia (July-December 1991), former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had negotiated an end to that war that allowed the Yugoslav federal army (now entirely Serbian) to take all its advanced weaponry that it had been using in Croatia to destroy that country back into “Yugoslavia”. However, at that time, Bosnia was still in “Yugoslavia”. If you look at the geography, you will see they took their weaponry into Bosnia, not Serbia, and there delivered it to the Bosnian Serb Chetnik forces, who, even months before they launched their own war, had cut out four zones inside Bosnia and taken them under their exclusive control. There can be no doubt that Vance and the US government did this in order to deliver Bosnia to Milosevic.

Thirdly, even after UN recognition of Bosnia in April 1992 and the outbreak of war there, for the first 2 months of the war it was not even theoretically a “civil war” – the Yugoslav army attacked most of the regions throughout Bosnia with its massive firepower, “softening” the areas up for the Bosnian Serb Chetniks to move in for the kill. Actually, not even they were only Bosnian Serbs – fascist militias included those of arch racist Vojislav Seselj of the Serbian Radical Party of * Serbia *, coalition partner with Milosevic’s party in government, and of Serbian mafia leader ‘Arkan’. And it was in those decisive first few months of the war that the “Bosnian Serbs” conquered the bulk of their territory.

Fourthly, even when the ‘Yugoslav’ army was officially withdrawn by Milosevic, a couple of months into the war, it left its massive weapons supplies it had brought from Croatia with the Bosnian Serb Army. In any case, there was no way of ever checking that the ‘Yugoslav’ army had all left; some suggest around 20% of them remained, and various fascist militias from Serbia definitely remained. In any case, the ‘Yugoslav’ government and army back in Serbia paid the salaries of the Bosnian Serb officers, such as Mladic, throughout the war, and continued to supply them with arms, spare parts and oil. Imagine what kind of “having nothing to do with what the Bosnian Serbs do” this is. We generally hold the US and other western governments responsible when they are arming some brutal tyrant suppressing his people. Now imagine a situation where in addition, the US was directly paying the salaries of the officers of, say, Suharto’s Indonesia, throughout the genocide there. From all these leftists, we would never hear the end of it, and quite rightly. Yet in exactly the same case – where Serbia was paying the salaries of the officers of the BSA – they all throw their hands up and look all innocent and ask what could the Serbian government of the good white European Christian man Milosevic possibly have to do with the actions of “the Bosnian Serbs” in a “civil war” in “another country”??!!

Thus this was no more a “civil” war between “Serbs” and “Muslims” where “both sides are equally guilty” than the war between the enormous, massively armed Indonesian army and the East Timorese resistance fighters was a “civil war” between “Indonesians” and “Timorese” where “both sides are equally guilty”.

Briefly on to Kosova, the revisionist set like to claim that "only" 2000 died based on some warped "body count" method. Yet they are wrong even on this. They selectively quote Del Ponte talking about over 2000 bodies being dug out of some 200 mass graves in the first summer of digging, but they "forget" that following the next summer of digging she reported 4000 bodies, but these were only those bodies in a select 529 "mass graves", no claim was made that this was every dead body in Kosova. There was no law that said that every Albanian killed had to be placed in one of these 529 select "mass graves". What about all the individual graves, indeed, all the individuals killed not in a grave until their relatives could return and bury them? How many were they? Yet even with actual bodies and graves, our apologists here quoting "2000" also forget the 1100 Albanian bodies found in mass graves in Serbia itself and gradually returned to Kosova, and we don't know how many more there might be since the Serb government halted the search years ago. Just with that we have 5000 bodies, plus 3/4 of the 2500 missing, so around 7000 killed, leaving aside those not in these specific graves.

The respected British medical journal the 'Lancet' did the only thorough survey I know of (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673600024041/fulltext), which showed that 12,000 Albanians (specifically the Albanian toll) had been killed and 4000 missing. If say about 2000 of the missing were later returned from Serbia as prisoners or turned up late, that leaves about 14,000 deaths, of which 12,000 occurred after the NATO bombing began. This is obviously yet another good reason to oppose NATO's aggression, which obviously brought on a far more vicious attack against the Albanians than Slobo had been politically capable of before, but that us no excuse for those who actually carried it out - 12,000 killed in 11 weeks is pretty impressive. The Lancet is hardly a sucker for US imperialism - their highly respected study on Iraq showed that by 1996, there had been 665,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths since the US invasion.
Leftists widely quote the latter study; wouldn’t it be a nice day if for once the hypocrisy could be dropped, or become a little less rank, and quote the former study as well.

The Article that Fooled the Left

The Article that Fooled the Left

While an old topic, the issue of the death camps in Bosnia in 1992 continually arises as one of the big issues raised by various revisionists and apologists for Serbian nationalism. Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, Ed Herman have all played the game of pretending these camps were “fake”. One of their co-thinkers, Michael Collon, summarised the argument in a ridiculous ‘Milosevic media quiz’ he penned. Collon writes:

“YES. Fabricated by Bernard Kouchner and Médecins du Monde, this image showed some 'prisoners' held, seemingly, behind barbed wire. One of them had terribly protruding ribs … But the whole thing was faked and taken from a report by British TV channel ITN. The trickery became obvious when one viewed the footage shot at the same time by a local TV news crew. In reality, the British camera had been deliberately placed behind the two lonely strands of barbed wire that formed a fence surrounding an old enclosure for farming equipment. The 'prisoners' were on the 'outside' of the barbed wire. Free because they were refugees in this camp to escape the war and the militias who would force them to fight. In the complete film, the only prisoner who speaks English declares to the ITN journalist three times that they are being well treated and are safe. The man with the protruding ribs (gravely ill) was called to the foreground when all his mates looked to be in too good a shape. Kouchner's montage was a gross falsehood.”

These confident assertions derive ultimately from the “research” conducted by a bizarre left-right, “red”-brown British cult called ‘Living Marxism’ (LM, about who, more below) which had appointed itself chief attorney for the far-right Serbian chauvinist regimes of Milosevic/Seselj and Karadzic. This “research” had come to a head with the publication of a famous article by one of their members, a guy called Thomas Deuchmann, titled ‘The picture that fooled the world’. This article alleged that the ITN journalists had “faked” the stories about the death camps. For the naïve among the left, and those who wanted to be convinced, this article was all that was needed.

In reality, the article is a pack of lies, based on the “evidence” of a bloke who first went to Bosnia in 1997, that is, two years after the end of the war, and five years after the events in question, by which time all the remnants of the death camps were gone. He picked up his views by talking to a couple of local Serbs, and from footage shot at the same time by a local TV news crew, that is, the footage shot by the Serbian state media, allegedly “at the time,” which however Deutchman did not see until 5 years later. I suppose, that is, after plenty of time to doctor it, or even invent it.

A great deal has been made about whether the fence was around the prisoners or an enclosure around the journalists, that the prisoners were looking into, based on which side of the fence the barbed wire was on and other such trivia. The answer appears inconclusive, but it is largely irrelevant. More relevant are the assertions deriving from this, like those Collon makes above: that the prisoners were “treated well” according to one prisoner, that the prisoners were “free because they were refugees in this camp to escape the war and the militias who would force them to fight,” and that it was only one “gravely ill” prisoner who was very thin, who they zeroed in on, while his mates were “in good shape.”

This primitive Goebbelesque stuff is an eyesore coming from anywhere on the left, and as Goebbelesque as any of the exaggerated use of the ITN material by tabloids. Anyone who wants to know about the kinds of hideous tortures and daily horrific murders that went on in these death camps only has to look at the very extensive documentation at the Hague, or Red Cross, or Amnesty, or the UN, based on the testimony of thousands of witnesses. And what this testimony shows is that Serbian-run death camps such as Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Sanski Most, Brcko, Foca etc represented some of the ugliest events of modern history. “Free” indeed. Whether they were surrounded by barbed wire or not was thus irrelevant; even if they weren’t, if they had tried to escape, they would have been target practice for the sadistic guards. As for the photos, if you look at enough of them you will see loads of people as skinny as Alic; the suggestion that other prisoners were “in good shape” is abominable. Perhaps just looking at the three photos on this page http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2006/07/moral-equivalism-is-flawed.html might already show up the lie of the “single” allegedly “gravely ill” man.

Anyone who wants to read about these monstrous crimes, these concentration camps, can try these pages from the report of the UN Commission of Experts:


http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-05.htm#Debut includes Omarska
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-06.htm#Debut includes Keraterm and Trnopolje
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-07.htm#III.A.67 includes Sanski Most
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-03.htm#III.A.25 includes Foca (also a rape camp)
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-02.htm#III.A.13 includes Brcko

Anyone reading these reports will soon become aware of the level of complete moral corruption of the genocide-denying wing of the left represented by the LM cult and their followers.

I think Ed Vulliamy himself puts it most eloquently himself when describing the irrelevance of LM’s obsession with the wire being on which side of the fence, when compared to the stark reality of these death camps. Referring to the trial at which Deutchman’s bizarre LM group lost the case against ITN, he says (http://www.guardian.co.uk/itn/article/0,2763,184815,00.html):

“Of course Living Marxism was unable to offer a single witness who had been at Trnopolje, the camp they claimed to be a fake, on that putrid afternoon of August 5, 1992. Indeed, they were unable to produce any witnesses at all. Unlike any member of Living Marxism or their sympathisers, I was there with ITN's cameras that day. We went to two camps: Omarska and Trnopolje.
“Living Marxism does not like to mention Omarska: there, we saw little, but enough: skeletal men drilled across a yard and devouring watery stew like famished dogs before being bundled out. One man said: "I do not want to tell any lies, but I cannot tell the truth."
“The truth emerged with time. Omarska turned out to be the kind of place where one prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off another, who had a live pigeon stuffed into his mouth to stifle the screams as he died in agony. The yard at Omarska was a killing field, prisoners obliged to load the mutilated corpses of their friends on to trucks by bulldozer.
“Trnopolje was a marginally less satanic place, some of whose prisoners were transferred from other hideous camps to await forced deportation. Others were rounded up and herded there like cattle, or had even fled there to avoid the systematic shelling and burning of their homes. Unknown to us when we pulled up on the road, in disbelief at the sight before us, it was the former group that was held captive behind the now celebrated barbed wire fence.
“At the time I paid little attention to what would become Living Marxism's myopic obsessions: such as which side of which pole the old barbed wire or fresh barbed wire was fixed. There were more important matters, such as the emaciated Fikret Alic's (accurate and vindicated) recollections of the night he had been assigned to load the bodies of 250 men killed in one night at yet another camp.
“If it is still of any remote interest, I will say this: I now know the compound in which these terrified men were held captive to have been surrounded on one side by recently reinforced barbed wire, on two sides by a chain-link fence patrolled by menacing armed thugs and on a fourth side by a wall. But so what? This was a camp - I would say a concentration camp - and they were its inmates.
“What does it take to convince people? The war ground on, the British foreign office and Living Marxism in perfect synergy over their appeasement of the Serbs while other, worse camps were revealed. The bench in The Hague issued its judgment on Trnopolje in 1997: a verdict that described the camp as infinitely worse than anything we reported - an infernal place of rape, murder and torture. Witness after witness confirmed this. The Financial Times enthusiastically re-iterated Living Marxism's claims of a fabrication, but published a hasty and grovelling retraction when it looked at LM's non-evidence.”

Deutchman’s cult, the so-called ‘Living Marxism’, was a grotesque outfit, of which, at a certain point after then end of the 1990s, the entire leadership turned completely counterrevolutionary overnight. Since this would seem impossible based on the laws of probability, the only logical explanation is that they already were, and their bizarre tactics, of turning themselves into spokespeople for Serbian ethnic cleansing, were designed to make the left look ridiculous. George Monbiot does an excellent job on this group of right-wing extremists:

The Invasion of the Entryists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1102753,00.html

Bear in mind that it was the fake propaganda of this cult that was behind much of the “information” that is now used by many of the genocide-denying wing of the “left” and right, who continually retail the same points and continually reference each other, with silly stories often going back to LM.

For the most complete description of the entire issue of the camps and the ITN story and the LM idiocy about it, people must read:

‘Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia - the case of ITN versus Living Marxism’
http://www.virtual-security.net/attrocity/atrocity1.htm#64

Anyone who hasn’t read that has simply done no justice to the story. It is superbly well-documented and argued stuff: nothing like Deuchmann’s chaff.

Now, that sections of the media may have engaged in ‘demonisation’ in the way they presented news is not in dispute: this commonly occurs. However, reporting on actual death camps is not ‘demonisation’; it is the perpetrators ‘demonising’ themselves. This goes for any conflict. The one thing that can be criticized is some of the sensationalist British media, which blew up the stories of the ITN journalists with screaming headlines about “the new Holocaust” featuring in particular the emaciated figures. The journalists themselves criticized this usage of their material. For example, Vulliamy states:

“Let no one for one minute compare Omarska to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Such a course is useless and dangerous. No one was more angry than I at headlines such as “Belsen 1992”. They merely played into the hands of those seeking to downplay and even deny what had happened in the Serbian camps.” Including, that is, the LM idiots.

But what was LM really concerned about? Was it that the exaggerated way the tabloids used it was cover for some imperialist plot to intervene in the war and launch a war against Serbia?

Some leftists mistakenly took this tabloid sensationalism for the policy of the UK ruling class. In reality, it had nothing to do with UK Tory government policy, which was cravenly pro-Serbian throughout the Bosnia war, just as much as its cheerleaders in LM, indeed the Tories and LM had the same policy; rather it was just that wing of the media which specialize in this kind of hyper sensationalist “journalism” as a rule.

Was the US preparing a war against Serbia, or even to intervene in Bosnia? Since we are talking about 1992, and US intervention in Bosnia did not occur until 1995 (and that essentially to save Milosevic’s arse and give him half of Bosnia on a plate), why would they be making propaganda back in 1992? The answer: they weren’t. And moreover: if the US had wanted to bomb in 1992, using the concentration camp images, it could have easily, with significant support, without even having to resort to much propaganda beyond the reality.

So what was actually happening at the time regarding the US and these death camps? In fact, the US government actively tried to deny their existence until the last moment, until the journalist Roy Gutman thrust them into the international media and into their faces in August 1992. They were clearly aware of these camps: a May 29 report by the International Society for Human Rights had already listed many with graphic details (International Society for Human Rights, British section, Human Rights and Serbia, 1992) and in July the Bosnian government issued a list of 105 such camps and of 9300 deaths in them (Bosnian Government Information Office, ‘List of Concentration Camps and Prisons on the Territory of the Republic of BH,’ July 28, 1992). The US government was clearly aware of this (United States, House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Developments in Yugoslavia and Europe - August 1992, 102nd Congress, Second Session, Washington, GPO, August 4, 1992, p6). US intelligence had also been aware of these camps before this, and the US embassy in Belgrade had sent regular wires to the State Department based on Red Cross and other information (Vulliamy, E, “Bosnia: The Crime of Appeasement,” International Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 1, 1998, p79). The Red Cross had already visited 4000 people in 10 death camps from July 9 and had reported it all to the UN (Developments in Yugoslavia and Europe - August 1992, op cit, p50-51). Even after Gutman’s revelations, the first reaction of US leaders was to deny their existence. Only once they became undeniable did western leaders demand Red Cross examination of these camps; even then they did not demand their closure.

In the US Congress on August 4, efforts by opposition members to bring up the evidence that had been amassed about the camps for months were met with the continual response by government spokesman Thomas Niles, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs, that the US government “cannot confirm” such reports as “we do not have thus far substantiated information.” When asked “Do you have confirmation that some killing and some torture has taken place?” he replied “No, I cannot confirm that.” “You cannot even confirm a single case?” “I cannot” (ibid, p7, and then continually throughout the report. The questioner was Lee Hamilton, chair of the subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East). Amazing – Niles sounds just like Parenti, Ramsey Clarke etc.

Every question throughout the session about what the US would do to ensure delivery of humanitarian relief was met with legalistic arguments about needing to get a consensus through the UN Security Council, even though the Security Council had already passed resolutions authorising the use of force, and the US has never worried about legalisms. As one congressman pointed out, “The President wasn’t worried about legalisms when it came to Saddam Hussein. President Reagan wasn’t worried about legalisms when it came to a number of countries, including Grenada. So don’t put up the shield of legalisms,” (p52). Asked about the continuing arms embargo against Bosnia, Niles replied that the delivery of food aid to Sarajevo was “the best guarantee that the Serbs will not succeed in conquering the city” (p34).

Finally, the revisionist set often claims that “all sides” had camps in which they committed atrocities. For example, Collon claims “There certainly were camps in Bosnia. Not for extermination, but rather for the preparation of prisoner exchanges. Violations of Human Rights were committed here. But why were the UN reports on this subject hidden from us? They accounted for six Croat camps, two Serb camps and one Muslim camp.”

It is difficult to know whether Collon is lying or just stupid. Only two Serb-run camps in Bosnia were there?

According to the Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Expertsestablished pursuant to security council resolution 780 (1992), “The reports reviewed alleged a total of 677 camps within BiH. Among those camps, 333 (49.2 per cent) were alleged to have been controlled by Bosnian Serbs; 83 (12.2 per cent) by Bosnian Muslims; 51 (7.5 per cent), by Croats; 31 (4.6 per cent) by both Croats and Muslims; 5 (.7 per cent), by private parties; and 174 (25.7 per cent) by unidentified forces (http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-01.htm#III). Thus if we leave out the “unidentified,” then Serb forces ran two thirds of all the camps.


Of course, not all these were necessarily death camps. Some may have even been the kind of holding camps that Collon describes. Referring to the 960 camps in all of former Yugoslavia (in which the breakdown of ‘ownership’ is basically similar to that of Bosnia), the report states regarding the numbers held and the severity of the crimes recorded:

“As the above statistics and following discussion indicate, the number of camps and reported violations in camps controlled by the Government of BiH and its army are the fewest among the warring factions, irrespective of the ethnic or religious background of the detainees held. The number of reported violations by the Croatian Government, the Croatian Army, and the Croatian Defence Council is larger, particularly against Serbs in Krajina and in eastern and western Slavonia and against Muslims from BiH in Herzegovina. The period of time during which those camps were operated in each of these contexts is relatively limited. The two warring factions identified above are, however, reported to have committed far fewer numbers of violations than those committed by the Serb forces and those working on their behalf, whether in Croatia or BiH. Camps operated by Serbs in BiH are by far where the largest numbers of detainees have been held and where the harshest and largest number of violations occurred.”

No-one has ever denied that Croats and Muslims also had camps, and that massive human rights violations also occurred there. The most important issue, apart from the huge difference in extent of these camps and the abuses, is that the Bosnian government immediately sent Muslim officers to the Hague when they were first accused of running a terrible camp outside Sarajevo where many Serbs and Croats were killed. In fact, for all the alleged “anti-Serb bias” of the Hague, these Muslims were the very first from former Yugoslavia to be convicted by the Hague, while Serb and Croat butchers of a dramatically higher level were – and are - still running around.

On Fidel's advice to MIlosevic to "resist": Resistance, yes, but how?

Fidel asked the Serbian ambassador in Washington, in response to NATO’s aggression against Serbia in March 1999, to pass this message onto Milosevic:

"Even though I have no personal relationship with him, I have meditated extensively on the problems of today's world. I think that I have a sense of history, a concept of tactics and strategy in the struggle of a small country against a great superpower and I feel a deep hatred towards injustice, and so I take it upon myself to transmit to him an idea in just three words:

"Resist, resist, resist.”

(Reflections by the Commander in Chief, October 1, 2007
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2007/ing/f011007i.html)


It is good to know that Fidel had “no personal relationship” with Milosevic, but in any case the advice to resist imperialist aggression is made due to his hatred of imperialist aggression against anyone.

Well and good; the problem being, how exactly does one “resist” in these circumstances? When an imperialist army invades and occupies your country, like the US in Iraq today, or the Nazis in Yugoslavia in WWII, then resistance means fighting against the invader and occupier, as the Iraqis are today, and the Yugoslav peoples (Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Albanians etc) did in WWII.

However, when someone is not invading, but firing cruise missiles at you from Italian bases, or bombing from 15,000 feet, how do you resist? For one, I suppose you try to knock some planes out of the sky, but most small countries are unlikely to have the necessary equipment to do that successfully.

Therefore, apart from “standing firm” and doing nothing, the only real resistance can be a political resistance, involving attempting to mobilise world opinion, and the peoples of the region, against the aggressor.

Fidel suggested this might happen of its own accord, claiming "Unless the terribly brutal and unjustifiable attacks in the very heart of Europe cease, world reaction will be even greater and swifter than that triggered by the war in Vietnam.”

Of course, this prediction could hardly have been more wrong. Not remotely like Vietnam, and not remotely like the enormous anti-war movement that erupted a few years later in relation to Iraq. In most countries, just the odd few thousand, or few hundred, demonstrators. And in the Balkan region itself, virtually not a single demonstration anywhere, except Greece for very specific reasons, in defence of a neighbour being bombed. Why was this?

We can look at Cuba’s resistance in the face of 50 yeas of embargo and various other attempts to undermine and overthrow the Cuban revolution by the US. Now Cuba is also not under occupation, so cannot carry out armed resistance. But it does everything it can to win over the world’s people to at least a position of neutrality, if not full admiration and support for Cuba, with its political, social, educational and health initiatives around the world.

By sending doctors to Haiti for example, Cuba wins the hearts and minds of Haitian people. If instead, Cuba had decided to make a claim to Haiti, send the army there to throw the Haitian population into the sea, then not only would it not win people’s support, but on the contrary, imperialism would finish it off the next day.

Serbia had been fighting a counterinsurgency war against the Albanian majority in Kosova for over a year before NATO’s attack; the Albanians were reasserting their decades-long claim for independence, especially since Milosevic had abolished even the autonomy that they never accepted as enough. This is what Fidel calls Serbia’s “internal problems”, and even if we can disagree that the issue was “internal”, rather than a case of foreign occupation, we can agree with this designation in as much as it means it should be none of the business of imperialism.

However, “internal” or otherwise, the onset of NATO’s attack directly led to Milosevic and his fascist deputy, Vojislav Seselj of the pro-Le Pen Radical Party, using the cover of NATO bombs to carry out Seselj’s long term, openly declared plan: to empty Kosova of its Albanian population. Within a couple of weeks of the bombing starting, the Serbian army and paramilitaries had driven over 800,000 people – half the entire Albanian population of Kosova – out of the country. Chomsky, in his ‘New Military Humanism’, makes a very valid comparison of the size of this ethnic cleansing with that of the Nakba, Israel’s original cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948. Chomsky does this to make a very valid statement about imperialist hypocrisy; but not being an apologist, he makes no attempt to belittle the suffering of either group, nor the culpability of those carrying it out.

The complete isolation of Serbia in the region, even when under brutal attack by the Empire, exactly corresponds to the complete isolation of Israel within the Middle east from 1948 onwards. Of course the difference is the position of US imperialism, though of course British imperialism in 1948 is a different thing, as it lined up with the Arab states that attempted to salvage some of Palestine; and even the role of US imperialism in 1999 was not any long-term view, on the contrary, Milosevic had been coddled through the period of his worst crimes earlier in Bosnia, but that is all another issue.

The issue is rather, carrying out this kind of attack on another people when you yourself are under attack is unlikely to be an effective method of “resistance”, certainly not of any political resistance, least of all the kind that could galvanise a mass anti-war movement in the west to your defence – let alone being morally indefensible in itself.

Likewise, the gigantic, festering refugee camps full of hundreds of thousands of dispossessed Albanians in Macedonia and Albania looked cannily like the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, which is what they would have become if they hadn’t been able to go home. We didn’t want NATO to help them go home with more bombs on Serbian civilians – those bombs had sparked the cleansing in the firs place – but with their right to fight for themselves. But for NATO anyway, as an organisation posing as a Europe-wide “security” umbrella, there was no way it was going to let a Palestinian problem occur in Europe. In the Middle east, sure – especially as imperialism gets the benefit of having Israel there as a surrogate in the oil region; but imperialism, unfortunately for Milosevic, did not want or need an Israel in the Balkans, let alone a massive refugee problem within its own, oh s civilized, borders.

Nevertheless, the parallel with Israel was never lost on Israel itself, which always maintained its own policy in support of Serbian nationalism, whatever the twists and turns of its imperialist master, being an important weapons supplier to Serbia throughout. Israel’s attitude is well described in this series of excellent essays by Igor Primoratz, 'Israel and the war in the Balkans' at http://www.hr/darko/etf/isr1.html .

Thus it was no surprise when Ariel Sharon reacted quite out of line from the master when the US led NATO's attack on Serbia. Sharon of course came from a very different standpoint from Fidel; while Fidel stresses fighting imperialism, and avoids any specific support or mention of Milosevic's policy in Kosova or elsewhere, Sharon comes in and makes an uncharacteristic criticism of an imperialist attack precisely out of solidarity with Serbian nationalism. Sharon declared:

"Israel should not legitimise Nato’s aggression, led by the United States … Israel could be the next victim of the sort of action now going on in Kosovo … Imagine what would happen if one fine day the Arabs declared autonomy for the Galilee and links with the Palestinian Authority," Yediot Aharonot, Tel Aviv, 2 April.

Sharon went on, in a meeting with Jewish leaders in the US, to claim the Kosovo Liberation Army "had obtained significant aid from terrorist organizations backed by Iran, including the mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan, Hizbullah and Osama Bin Laden" and said an independent Kosovo would enable Islamic terrorism to spread throughout Europe.

Just as he responded to Fidel, Milosevic also responded to Sharon. In the Israeli paper "Ha' aretz" of 23 March 2001, there was a long interview to Milosevic who said "we have always had a positive attitude in the comparisons of the requirement of the Israeli people of living in peace and free being. But I must admit that, ill-fatedly, our good will has not been reciprocated from Israel in the difficult moments for the Serbian people, when this last one was exposed to every type of pressure - from those media and economic, to the army. In truth, the one who raised his own voice against Albanian separatismo, Sharon, has been an example." While hurrying to cite Sharon's example, he does not spend even a word for the Palestinian. In a comment, that accompanied the interview, Adar Primor wrote that "Milosevic has positive memories of Ariel Sharon," who "openly had dissociated the military campaign of the NATO. Sharon had put in guard from the creation of a ' Great Albania' that would have diffused the terror Muslim in all Europe, adding that Israel did not have to give legittimità to a intervenzionista military involvement of NATO ".

Being Sharon one of the last people in the world to be opposed to a war for reasons of moral or political convictions, his message was clear: an independent Kosovo would have constituted a precedent for independent Palestine and the Albanians, like the Palestinians, are only "terrorist" Muslims, http://www.ecn.org/reds/etnica/palestina/palestina0205sharon..html

On Fidel's 'Reflections' on Independence for Kosova

On Fidel’s ‘Reflections’ on Independence for Kosova

By Michael Karadjis

Fidel can say whatever he wants, of course, and I still love him. Someone who’s led a revolution, built an amazing society and resisted the US for half a century doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone.

But that doesn’t mean he can’t make mistakes, like that he made in one of his recent “Reflections,” the ‘REFLECTIONS BY THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF: The Tyrant Visits Tirana’ (June 11, 2007).’

Fidel remarked:

“We now know that Bush's strange visit to the capital of Albania really happened. There he resolutely spoke in favor of independence for Kosovo without the least respect for the interests of Serbia, Russia and the various European countries, all sensitive to the fate of the province which was the scenario for the latest NATO war. He lectured Serbia that it would receive economic aid if it would support the independence of Kosovo, the birthplace of that country's culture.”

The mistake is quite understandable. When you’re under relentless US siege, it is sensible to be friends with anyone else who currently appears to have some kind of problem with imperialism. It is also logical and correct to oppose imperialist interference anywhere, regardless of the nature of various regimes that sometimes come into conflict with imperialism.

If it was only that, it would be OK. And of course Fidel is correct to mock Bush for “craving affection” wherever he can, which just happens to be in poverty-stricken Albania, the 3rd world of Europe, because he is hated everywhere else. He is also correct to point to the fact that Bush’s rather provocative, in the circumstances, manner of declaring support for Kosovar independence was inappropriate coming from the US in particular, given the fact that many in Europe are “sensitive” to the issue of Kosova as it was “the scenario for the latest NATO war.” Given the US role in bombing the region in 1999, the only role it should have in deciding anything about Kosova or anywhere else in the region is to get out, and let the people’s there decide for themselves (which of course means that Russia also has no more right than the US to be making decisions on behalf of the Kosovars).

In all this, who couldn’t agree?

However, the problem is the people have long ago decided for themselves: the 90 percent Albanian majority has long demanded nothing short of complete independence. And by “long”, I mean for over a hundred years, about as long as the Cubans – and I’ll get back to that analogy later. It is most unfortunate that Fidel essentially puts Cuba in opposition to the pretty unanimous will of an entire nation, whether by ‘nation’ in this case we mean the 2 million Albanian Kosovars, or the 5 million-strong Albanian nation in the Balkans. It is true that Fidel is not very direct on this. Unlike some of the “anti-imperialist” heroes on the western left, Fidel wastes no time issuing apologetics for Serbian crimes against humanity in Kosova, no time trying to belittle the suffering of the Kosovars, not time trying to show that Milosevic’s Serbia was “socialist”, and does not even clearly conclude that Kosova must remain part of Serbia in perpetuity, but instead focuses on Bush.

Myths about “the birthplace of the country’s culture”

Nevertheless, by saying that Bush is trying to take Kosova from Serbia while calling Kosova “the birthplace of that country's culture,” and by claiming Serbia is losing various mineral deposits, his statements do essentially say that, for now, before further negotiations and compromises perhaps, the “controversial” issue of Kosovar independence should not become a reality.

The question of whether or not Kosova is in fact “the birthplace of Serbia's culture” is controversial itself. It is based on the fact that Kosova was the centre of a multi-national Serbian empire in the fourteenth century. However, Serbian culture was born well before that time; and the Kosova region had also been part of other multi-national empires before and after that, such as the Byzantine, Bulgarian and Ottoman. The Serbian empire in 1389 lost a battle against the Muslim Ottoman Empire in Kosova; the ant-Islamic basis of modern Serb nationalism is funded on this crusader ideology that Serbia was then, and is now, the frontier defending European Christendom against ‘Islamic barbarism’, represented today by the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanians.

The historic myth that Kosova is “the birthplace of Serbian culture”, based on events hundreds of years ago, is the exact equivalent of the Zionist myth that Jerusalem, and/or “Judea and Samaria” (the West Bank), is the “birthplace” of Jewish culture and therefore must be inside Israel. Indeed, Serbian nationalists call Kosova their “Jerusalem” in an exact identification with the Zionist myth, likewise based on mythical events in the distant past, and in both cases they lament the fact that the region has “since”, in their opinion, been taken over by Muslim peoples (Albanians or Arabs). The support by Ariel Sharon and others on the Zionist far right for Milosevic and Serbian nationalism had a strong ideological basis.

This was also the opinion of Henry Kissinger, who in testimony before the House International Relations Committee in March 1999 stated, in opposition to Clinton’s war drive at the time, that "Sending U.S. troops to Serbia would be a dangerous precedent for the United States and a violation of international law. What is being proposed is that NATO troops be deployed in the territory of a sovereign state, with a view to separating a province, which in the history of that country is the cradle of national identity.”

Based on this view, Russia would have a much stronger case for swallowing up Ukraine, which contains Kiev, which truly is the cradle of Russian civilisation. Greece could also claim Istanbul, which for a thousand years was the heart of the Greek Byzantine Empire, and has historic Greek Orthodox churches in the same way as Kosova contains medieval Serbian churches and Jerusalem ancient Jewish shrines. In India, Hindu fanatics in the 1990s destroyed a Muslim mosque which they claim had been built on the site of some medieval Hindu temple many hundreds of years ago, provoking bloody massacres all round. Meanwhile, one justification the Khmer Rouge used for their aggression against Vietnam was their claim that the Mekong Delta had been part of some medieval Khmer empire, around the same time as the famed Serbian empire in fact, but it had been taken over by the Vietnamese.

In other words, such allegedly and arguably “historic” claims, used against today’s ethnic and national realities, normally used by reactionary forces, are best avoided.

Kosova: In Serbia via raw conquest

In modern times, after 500 years of Ottoman rule, Kosova became part of a modern Serbian state via raw conquest in 1913, resulting in extremely vicious repression and terror against the Albanian population there, which was well documented at the time. This was in the era of colonial conquest, and this was essentially a small-scale replica of what was occurring elsewhere. Britain, France and the US connived in legalizing this brutal conquest, in much the same way as imperialist powers connived with the brutal Indonesian conquest of East Timor in 1975. This also represented a carving up of the Albanian nation into some 5 states, with only half the Albanians ending up in the truncated independent Albania. At no time since then has the Albanian majority in Kosova ever consented to being part of this Serbian state, and has at every opportunity attempted to throw off this yoke. This is the reality that has to be considered here. This modern reality has nothing to do with medievalist hype about alleged “birthplaces” and so on.

On large mineral deposits and typical colonies

But this off-hand remark was not Fidel’s main point. The main issues appear to be “legal” (alleged Serbian “sovereignty” and all that), but also a claim that Serbia suffers an unjustified economic loss as a result of losing Kosova. According to Fidel:

“Serbia receives a hard blow not only political but also economic. Kosovo possesses 70 percent of Serbia's energy reserves. Between 1928 and 1999, the year of the NATO war against Serbia, the province contributed 70 percent of the zinc and silver. It is estimated to have 82 percent of its possible reserves of these metals. It also has the largest reserves of bauxite, nickel and cobalt. Serbia loses factories, lands and properties, and is left only with the duty to pay for the foreign debt incurred for investments in Kosovo prior to 1998.”

Just on the last part first: Kosova will in fact be treated like all other Yugoslav republics were: they inherit both their assets and their debts.

I do not have time to check on the exact figures for the proportion of “Serbia’s” mineral wealth that is in Kosova. Certainly, according to the CIA website, natural resources in Serbia include “oil, gas, coal, iron ore, copper, lead, zinc, antimony, chromite, nickel, gold, silver, magnesium, pyrite, limestone, marble,” suggesting Serbia has a lot of minerals of its own apart from those which Kosova allegedly has a majority of; in addition, the Serbian government website tells us that:

“The Mining industry in Serbia represents the foundation of domestic industry, and therefore of the Serbian economy in general. Low-calorie coals - lignites, which are mined at the Kolubara and Kostolac sites (neither in Kosova - MK), provide 65% of the electric power in Serbia. Significantly, available data shows that one Kolubara excavation site alone- Field D, provides 32% of the electric power in Serbia. Despite the general trend of industrial production in Serbia, building material production is a significant and profitable segment of industry which has been in a continuous process of development (20% growth in the year of 2000), and is based primarily on mineral materials, i.e. on mining. The main producers of building material are the cement factories in Beocin, Kosjeric and Novi Popovac, brick factories in Kikinda, Novi Becej, Novi Pazar, Ruma, and Kanjiza (none in Kosova – MK). Excavation of technical and building stone is also a profitable mining sector, with sites near Ub, in Topola, Jelen Do, and Aranjelovac (none in Kosova – MK). Private sector initiative is most prominent in this sector - exploitation of nonmetals and building material. The Bor Mining and metallurgical complex (not in Kosova) produces copper ore in quantities that are significant on a regional level. Secondary precious metal refining is also substantial. Exploitation of industrial minerals in Serbia will soon be of great consequence. Highly profitable projects are planned partly based on estimated and partly on confirmed reserves of boron minerals, phosphates, zeolites, granite alluviums, ilmenite, zircon, etc. Foreign companies are especially interested in exploitation of industrial materials.”

Regardless of all this, it is certainly true that Kosova has a lot of mineral wealth, and the majority of “Serbia’s” wealth in several minerals. However, countries like Bolivia and the Congo are also loaded full of minerals, yet, like Kosova, are dirt poor. That’s because, like Kosova, being a quarry for industrialized countries, such as Serbia, to supply the raw materials to, only makes one a colony, as Fidel is well aware of.

Yes, Kosova has a lot of minerals. It is Serbia (like Croatia and Slovenia, the other republics of the former Yugoslavia’s rich north), however, that has the industry, the manufacturing, the processing, which adds value to those raw materials. And this applies as much to the crucial issue of electric power as anything else, particularly relevant to all that … coal … that will supposedly make Kosova … rich. Serbia’s electricity transmission system “Elektromreže Srbije” (EMS) and its public power enterprise (EPS) are the regional leaders in this field, with immense amounts of energy supply passing through this network to reach Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia and Hungary, and the transmission system in Kosovo is unable to function separately. Kosova’s coal, in other words, even that outside the Serbian-controlled north, will be sold to Serbian industry to sell power back to Kosova, in normal colonial fashion. That is why for all those decades of Kosova supplying lots of coal and other minerals to the north, by the 1980s, with 8 percent of Yugoslavia’s population, it accounted for only 2 percent of its GDP; while Serbia accounted for 24 percent of the population and 25 percent of GDP. In other words, Kosova’s per capita GDP was only one quarter of Serbia’s.

This ratio remains unchanged: GDP per capita in Serbia – now being called the Balkan Tiger - in 2006 is $6,771, with 6 percent growth, while Kosova has per capita income estimated at $1600 (2006), and of this, some 34 percent of GDP is from foreign assistance and 13 percent from remittances. Economic growth was down to -1.5% in 2005, in line with declining donor resources. Serbia, along with Croatia, is also getting the bulk of foreign investment in the region; a trickle finds its way into Kosova, despite the hype. Large Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian companies have formed cartels to take over the region; the Serb-run half of Bosnia is largely bought out by Serb companies. Meanwhile Serbian average wages at 350 Euro a month are among the highest in the region, 45 Euro higher than in Bosnia, 17 Euro higher than in Montenegro, 116 higher than in Macedonia, 46 Euro higher than in Roumania and 148 Euro higher than in Bulgaria. As for Kosova, its average wages of about 50 Euro only apply to the less than 50 percent of the working age population that actually have a job.

Perhaps even more significant is that most of *Kosova’s* mineral wealth is located precisely in the northern region near where the massive Trepca mining-metallurgy complex is located – ie, the region which has never been under control of Kosova government institutions at any time since 1999, but is run by a local Kosova Serb authority, tied directly to Belgrade, using the dinar (unlike the Euro as in the rest of Kosova), run by Serbian police, with a Serbian university, a Serbian major hospital, receiving wages and benefits from the Serbian government etc. In the Ahtissari Plan for “supervised independence” for Kosova, some ten or so autonomous Serbian municipalities are created, with wide powers and with direct links – financial, security, educational, health etc – the Belgrade. Thus even with semi-“independence”, this Serbian state-within-a-state will still control a large part, if not most, of Kosova’s mineral wealth.

What is also striking is that, while Serbia lost effective control of most of Kosova in 1999, Kosova’s lack of independence has left its economy completely dependent on imports – not surprisingly, from the countries closest to it, Serbia and Macedonia. Kosova’s imports from Macedonia average €220 million while it only exports €9 million worth of goods to that country; it imports €111 million worth from Serbia and exports €5 million worth in return, a 22 to one difference in both cases! (Of interest here is that exactly the same applies to Bosnia, the other major victim of Serbian – and its allied Croatian – nationalism in the 1990s: Bosnia is loaded full of imported goods from Serbia and Croatia).

Oppression and why some peoples “go a bit crazy”

Serbia, of course, is not an imperialist country, and like Croatia and other Balkan countries has a dependent relationship to imperialism; however, as in other cases, more powerful non-imperialist countries can still have colonial-type relations to weaker ones, and the economic relationship of Kosova to Serbia, even since 1999, is nothing if not that of a colony.

Of course we defend small countries such as Serbia that happen to come under attack by major imperialist powers, as it did in 1999, while also supporting concurrently the struggle of the Kosovar people against the massive ethnic cleansing that the Serbian army conducted. But the fact that imperialism was able to, for its own reasons at the time (another story), intervene in this region had a lot to do with the very real oppression long suffered by the Albanians at the hands of Belgrade; for many years, imperialism ignored this, in fact acquiesced completely with Belgrade.

When Fidel says that Bush’s support for independence for Kosova “made quite a few Albanians a bit crazy,” making them say such absurd things as "Bush is a symbol of democracy, the United States is a protector of peoples' freedom," we can certainly relate to the cringe. We know the US is anything other than that. However, Albanians are not genetically programmed to be pro-imperialist; their own experience tells them they were brutally oppressed, in the same way the experiences of Palestinians, Kurds and countless other peoples do. Palestinians and most other peoples do not think the US is a “protector of peoples” because its actions demonstrate the opposite. However, the opportunist stance of the US since 1999 of appearing to support Kosovar freedom gives these formerly brutally oppressed people a different perspective. The left, including wonderful countries such as Cuba, will not help to change such incorrect perspectives by simply putting an automatic plus wherever the US puts an opportunist minus; on the contrary, we must be the consistent ones, supporting the same rights to self-determination and liberation from oppression for the Kosovars as we do the Palestinians and others.

The question of “legality”

We hear much about Kosova being “legally” part of Serbia, thus independence being a “violation of international law” etc. This obfuscation needs to be demystified.

In the late 19th century, Kosovar Albanians waged a liberation struggle against the Ottoman Empire. However, as noted above, Kosova was conquered and subjugated in 1913, remaining subjugated especially under capitalist Yugoslavia (1918-1941), but also under socialist Yugoslavia after 1945. Many decades later, during the late part of the Tito era, in the 1970s, Kosova was granted a very wide degree of autonomy in socialist Yugoslavia, so that it was another Yugoslav republic in all but name; it had its own direct representation on Yugoslav federal bodies, its own central bank, its own territorial defence guard, all attributes of other Yugoslav republics, even if it still wasn’t called one. This high point was the “legal” status of Kosova.

When after 1987 the capitalist restorationist regime of Milosevic raised the new ideological banner of the “Serb nation,” rather than multinational Yugoslav working class, to the centre of politics in the late 1980s, one of its first acts was the destruction of Kosova’s constitutional status, abolition of autonomy and its suppression to a mere “Serbian province.” When Kosova’s heroic miners at Trepca struck against this in defence of the Yugoslav constitution, Milosevic sent in the army to shoot dead 24 miners. Following this collapse into illegality, and the subsequent destruction of the very basis of the Yugoslav federation as it had existed under Tito, the Kosovar Albanians held a referendum in 1990 in which over 99 percent voted for independence. This act of self-determination, in conformity with the old socialist Yugoslav constitution, represents the *legal* status of Kosova. Then began a decade of entirely peaceful resistance, the failure of which led to an armed Kosovar intifada led by the KLA in 1998.

Unfortunately, much commentary today looks to the *illegal*, *unconstitutional* arrangement established by Milosevic as representing “international legality”; we are constantly told that independence for “a part of a country with an ethnic majority” would set off similar “secessionist” movements elsewhere. This ignores the fact that Kosova is no more legally part of Serbia than East Timor was part of Indonesia.

Cuba 1898, Kosova 1999: The parallels

Of course, the US-led imperialist war on Serbia in 1999 was also illegal, as well as brutal, and we condemned it and campaigned against it; however, it is here that the parallel with Cuba and the Philippines in 1898 resides.

Indeed, it is perhaps ironic that formal Cuban independence did not happen that differently to future formal Kosovar independence. In the late 19th century, the Cubans had been waging a liberation struggle against the Spanish colonial empire; at much the same time, the Kosovar Albanians were waging a liberation struggle against the Ottoman Empire. However, in 1898, US imperialism launched a brutal imperialist war against Spain to seize some of its colonial possessions, notably including Cuba and the Philippines. Following this war, Cuba gained a kind of semi-independence under US domination, with a US military base etc. The attitude of socialists would have been to oppose the US war, but not because it was “breaking up a sovereign state” (Spain no doubt considered Cuba its “sovereign” territory), and not because it was supporting Cuban independence; on the contrary, we would have supported the Cubans’ own liberation struggle, and criticised the limits to Cuban independence under US suzerainty, as well as criticising the imperialist nature and general brutality of the US war in and of itself.

In both cases, US imperialism launched a war against a state which was oppressing other peoples, claiming to support their “liberation”; in both cases, “liberation” was the last thing on the minds of US imperialists; but likewise, in both cases, the former oppressor states also had no moral or legal leg to stand on; and in both cases, a genuine local liberation war was already in progress. Just as in Cuba this led to semi-independence under US suzerainty with a US base, so in Kosova, this now – 8 years later – looks like leading to semi-independence under EU suzerainty with a US base. In both cases I believe our only position could be for imperialist hands off, and for complete independence, the right of the peoples to rule themselves; there is nothing progressive – let alone feasible – about demanding their re-subjugation to their former oppressors.

Or another parallel: most of the Arab states were created as semi-independent states, under British or French suzerainty, following British and French war against the Ottoman Empire during World War I; the Arabs rose, but later didn’t get fully they wanted. Presumably, the “anti-imperialist” answer is not to demand the terrible British and French imperialists return the Arabs to Turkey.

As Marx said about British oppression of Ireland, “a nation oppressing another nation can never itself be free” (or something to that effect). Adem Demaci, Kosova’s ‘Nelson Mandela’, who spent 28 years in Serbian prisons for advocating independence, made a similar point: “the same mechanism which keeps by sheer violence both Albanians and other peoples in captivity, has been hindering democratisation in Serbia for 100 years.”