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.”
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
World Court Partly Absolves Serbia of Bosnia Genocide: A Kick in the Teeth to Oppressed Everywhere
World Court Partly Absolves Serbia of Bosnia Genocide: A Kick in the Teeth to Oppressed Everywhere
By Michael Karadjis
On February 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that, while genocide had been perpetrated by the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) against the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica, the government of neighbouring Serbia was not directly responsible for it, even though it armed and coordinated with the BSA and paid its officers.
Nevertheless, it also made the partly contradictory ruling that Serbia was guilty of not using its influence over the BSA to prevent the Srebrenica genocide.
It also ruled that while the BSA had committed enormous crimes against the Muslim population in the rest of Bosnia, these did not constitute genocide except in Srebrenica.
Background
The Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina originally brought these genocide charges against Serbia to the ICJ in 1993, on the basis that the Serbian regime armed and financed the BSA, that both civilian and military leaders of Serbia and the para-state of ‘Republika Srpska’ (RS, which ran the BSA), set up on the 70 percent of Bosnia on which non-Serbs were driven out of in 1992, coordinated their actions, and that the Serbian government paid the salaries of the BSA officers.
International human rights lawyer Francis Boyle helped Bosnia prepare its case. In its original version, the genocide case was launched against the United Kingdom. The then Tory UK government of John Major was the most hard-line supporter of the criminal UN Security Council arms embargo being maintained against Bosnia in the face of the genocidal assault by the BSA, which was armed to the teeth by what used to be the Yugoslav People’s Army, the fourth largest military power in Europe, now with Yugoslav break-up a completely Serbian armed force.
Bosnia decided against proceeding with the case against the UK but maintain it against the more immediate culprit, Serbia. This may have been related to enormous pressures exerted by the UK, plus an understanding of how hard it would be to prove genocide against the UK for its underhanded support to Milosevic and the BSA. The fact that the ICJ could not even find Serbia itself was directly responsible underlines that this was probably correct.
Francis Boyle, who for many years represented the Bosnian government in the ICJ suit, was also from 1991 to 1993 a legal advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and has been Attorney of Record for the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Previously he worked to prevent a war between the US and Libya in the 1990s, and in the 1990s called on Iraq to sue the US for genocide as a result of the criminal embargo which killed over a million Iraqis. He calls on Palestine to take Israel to the ICJ to charge it for genocide, and notes the very strong parallels with the Bosnia case (http://www.mediamonitors.net/francis1.html). He has taken a powerful stand against the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and has drawn up guidelines for the impeachment of the Bush regime. He has also given legal advice to Hawaian advocates of independence, has represented other peoples including the Blackfoot Nation and the Lakota Nation. Though a US citizen, he also holds honorary citizenship of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Not the Hague War Crimes Tribunal
It is important to understand that this ICJ suit was distinct from the Hague International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which has been hearing cases against dozens of Serb, Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Kosovar Albanian individuals for many years. The fact that the Hague Tribunal was set up by the UN Security Council, which includes three of the NATO powers who themselves committed grave violations of international human rights law during their bombing of Serbia in 1999, makes it appear more interested in “victors’ justice” than real justice, even though enormous crimes certainly were committed by Balkan leaders and there is certainly a popular sentiment in the Balkans for bringing the guilty to justice.
In addition, by concentrating on individuals rather than regimes, the ICTY may allow a number of people to be scapegoated while allowing the states that committed the crimes – principally the Serbian and Croatian states and the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat para-states – to be absolved as a whole.
At some level, this focus on individuals allows other Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Albanians to feel they were not collectively guilty of these crimes as entire nations – the responsible individuals are being indicted. However, this is based on a mistaken classless view that the whole people are guilty when a regime is guilty.
Bosnia’s ICJ case against the Serbian regime of Milosevic, by contrast, sought to find not just individual scapegoats such as Milosevic guilty, but the criminal regime as a whole.
It is important to underline that Bosnia received no support from the imperialist countries for its suit against Serbia, in sharp contrast to their support for the ICTY trials. There are very good reasons for this. It is always much safer for imperialism to find “bad” individuals guilty than states. If Serbia – not just Milosevic or other individuals – can be found guilty of genocide, then based on the same principles, there may be little stopping Palestine from taking the US and Israel to the ICJ, and any number of brutally repressive states, often enough US allies, could also end up in court.
As Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher - in his Genocide Politics op/ed - pointed out:
“For the court to find that Serbia was responsible for the horrible crimes committed during the Bosnian conflict and that reparations were to be paid would set a dangerous precedent under which reparations might subsequently also be sought by the Palestinians or Lebanese against the State of Israel or Iraqis and Afghans against the US and UK. To ignore the evidence of a genocide, on the other hand, would give a green light to any group of people furthering their political agenda through the use of terror. As courts frequently do, the International Court of Justice came up with a compromise. They declared that the massacre of Bosniaks at Srebrenica (under the “watchful” eyes of UN observers, by the way) was genocide, but that Serbia was not directly responsible as a state. They found that Serbia didn't do enough to stop genocide from happening, but found no evidence that they directly ordered the crime. The countries dominating the UN may have saved their own skin by this ruling, but it compounds an already complex issue even further.”
(http://flyingimam.blogspot.com/2007/02/genocide-politics.html)
What did the ICJ find?
Many reactions to this ruling indicate that those making these statements have not actually read the ruling or even the summary. Some supporters of Serbian nationalism on the left/right continuum gloat that the ruling exonerated Serbia of involvement with the massive war crimes in Bosnia; others however claim that by still insisting Serbia was guilty of not using its influence to prevent genocide, the court was obviously making a ‘political’ statement against Serbia, given the alleged “lack of evidence” of Serbian involvement elsewhere in the ruling. The more exotic even claim that even just calling Srebrenica a genocide represents an unfair ruling against “the Serbs” because the court allegedly just “had to” find some genocide involved to allegedly “satisfy” the West. This is all uninformed pseudo-political “left”/right café gossip.
There are two issues: whether Bosnian Serb nationalist forces carried out genocide against the Bosnian Muslims; and whether the neighbouring state of Serbia itself was also responsible due to its close connection to the Bosnian Serb forces.
On the first issue, the ICJ found that enormous “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” had been committed by the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA, run by the Bosnian Serb para-state Republika Srpska (RS)) against the Bosnian Muslim population; it found that the deaths in the 3.5 year Bosnia war were overwhelmingly those of what it calls in legalese the "protected group", meaning the Bosnian Muslims; it found that these “crimes against humanity” included massive ethnic cleansing to remove the Muslim population from large areas of Bosnia (ie, in order to set up an ethnically pure "Serb state" where non-Serbs lived, in the same manner of Israel in 1948 etc); included terrifying crimes at the detention camps; included surrounding cities and towns and shelling them for years and starving the population; included large-scale destruction of Bosnian Muslim religious and cultural buildings and monuments (eg, 1400 mosques were demolished, pretty much every much in the regions conquered by the Serbian and allied Croatian chauvinist forces, while zero Orthodox or Catholic churches were destroyed in the Bosnian government-controlled regions, and grand libraries and museums containing hundreds of thousands of items and manuscripts from medieval Bosnian civilisation were torched, the biggest book-burning in history). Quite clearly all these findings are consistent with the Bosnian case against the crimes of Serbian nationalism, and completely contradict the version of events promoted by the “left”/right apologists for Serbian chauvinism.
However, although all these crimes were consistent with aspects of the definition of “genocide” (ie “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” in various ways, including killing or making life unbearable for their continued survival as a group), the bar in a "genocide" trial is set so high that you do not only have to prove all these genocidal crimes were committed, it also has to be proven that the actual "intent" of all these crimes is in fact genocide. There was no dispute in the court ruling that these crimes occurred and that the BSA/RS was responsible. But only in the case of the massacre of 8000+ Muslim captives after the BSA had overrun and "cleansed" Srebrenica in July 1995 was all this allowed to be called "genocide."
While some of the strange Chetnikophilic wing of the “left” believe any finding of genocide, even at Srebrenica, is some grand conspiracy against “the Serbs” (see below), Noam Chomsky by contrast has previously noted the fact that the ‘bar’ in the Hague trials is set so high for ‘genocide’ that even Hitler would be found innocent. Moreover, he makes this correct claim in a piece reacting to the revelations of an open call by Nixon and Kissinger to bomb “anything that moves” in Cambodia. Chomsky is correctly pointing out the hypocrisy of the US where it can refer to ‘genocide’ in other places, such as by Hitler or Milosevic, even when there is no “paper trail”, but not when they do it themselves even when there is such a paper trail. It is worth quoting Chomsky here, both for the points he makes, and also to stress his tendency to be consistent as an opponent of crimes against humanity, whether carried out by Nixon/Kissinger, Hitler, Milosevic or others, in contrast to some more Manichean left ‘anti-imperialists”:
“On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record.”
“Right at this moment there is a prosecution of Milosevic going on in the international tribunal, and the prosecutors are kind of hampered because they can’t find direct orders, or a direct connection even, linking Milosevic to any atrocities on the ground. Suppose they found a statement like this. Suppose a document came out from Milosevic saying, "Reduce Kosovo to rubble. Anything that flies on anything that moves." They would be overjoyed. The trial would be over. He would be sent away for multiple life sentences–if it was a U.S. trial, immediately the electric chair. But they can’t find any such document. In fact, nobody has even found a document like that connecting Hitler to the Holocaust. Scholars have been working on it for years. I can’t remember an example of such a direct order to carry out what amounted to a huge massacre, way beyond the level of anything we call genocide when other people do it.”
(http://www.isreview.org/issues/37/chomsky.shtml)
Anyway, back to the ICJ ruling, the somewhat strange judgment partly reads that the court accepts that it has been:
"… established by overwhelming evidence that massive killings in specific areas and detention camps throughout the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina were perpetrated during the conflict. Furthermore, the evidence presented shows that the victims were in large majority members of the protected group, which suggests that they may have been systematically targeted by the killings”, but the court is "not convinced … that it has been conclusively established that the massive killings of members of the protected group were committed with the specific intent (dolus specialis) on the part of the perpetrators to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such … It has been established by fully conclusive evidence that members of the protected group were systematically victims of massive mistreatment, beatings, rape and torture causing serious bodily and mental harm, during the conflict and, in particular, in the detention camps" but “it has not been conclusively established that those atrocities, although they too may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, were committed with the specific intent ... to destroy the protected group, in whole or in part."
This is even stranger when it comes to ethnic cleansing. The ethnic cleansing of the Muslim and Croat populations from the 70 percent of Bosnia rapidly occupied by the BSA (at the beginning of the war with the direct aid of the “Yugoslav” army) began in April 1992 and completely transformed the demographic landscape. It would appear difficult to not see ethnic cleansing – with or without mass killing and all the other crimes that the ICJ accepts occurred – as a form of genocide, ie, that the destruction of the Muslim (and Croat) communities throughout much of Bosnia were not acts committed with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
Yet the ICJ decided that:
“ ‘Ethnic cleansing’ can only be a form of genocide within the meaning of the Convention, if it corresponds to or falls within one of the categories of acts prohibited by Article II of the Convention. Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area “ethnically homogeneous”, nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide. However, this does not mean that acts described as “ethnic cleansing” may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region.”
Thus the forced removal of a group of people from a region, even when combined with massive atrocities and eradication of any remnant of their culture, does not constitute “the destruction of the group” and does not “inflict(ing) on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” While this may have been the legal framework employed, it is quite clearly debatable whether morally ethnic cleansing represents the destruction of a group of people, ie, whether or not it constitutes genocide. To say the least, it does nothing to morally absolve the RS/BSA of such crimes even if it chooses to not call them “genocide.”
On the second issue, of whether or not the government of Serbia was responsible for the genocide in Bosnia (or in Srebrenica anyway), the court ruled there was overwhelming evidence that the Serbian regime of Milosevic financed and armed the BSA, that it politically and militarily coordinated actions with the RS/BSA throughout the war, at a high level, that it paid the salaries of the BSA officers, including Mladic, the general held most responsible for the Srebrenica genocide, so again this cannot be read as in any way absolving Serbia’s role in the destruction of Bosnia. However, it cannot be found guilty of the specific "intent" to commit genocide in Srebrenica, because, although it coordinated military actions with the BSA, and although it knew full well the BSA was entering Srebrenica, and that it would be carrying out ethnic cleansing there, and even that it was likely that it would commit massacres there, it was not proven that it actually knew or approved of plans to liquidate the male population there.
Nevertheless, in an obviously contradictory statement, it found the Serbian regime guilty of not doing enough to prevent its BSA cronies from carrying out the genocide, since it had influence over them. As Professor Martin Shaw from the University of Sussex comments (http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/icj_bosnia_serbia_4392.jsp):
“(This) is a curious finding, since if Serbian leaders were really in a position to influence the Bosnian-Serbian army not to massacre the Muslim [Bosniak] men of Srebrenica, that implies a degree of knowledge and influence that suggests complicity in the massacre - something which the Court denies.”
Moreover, as Antonio Cassese, the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and later the chairperson of the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, adds:
“According to the Court, Serbia was aware of the very high risk of acts of genocide and did nothing. But Serbia was not complicit, the Court argued, because "it has not been proven" that the intention of committing the acts of genocide at Srebrenica "had been brought to Belgrade's attention" … The massacre was prepared in detail and took place over the course of six days (between July 13 and 19). Is it plausible that the Serbian authorities remained in the dark while the killing was in progress and reported in the press all over the world?”
(from The ICJ ruling, Bosnia vs Serbia, shows governments can avoid liability for genocide, even if they are found to be complicit in genocide, http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2007/02/icj-ruling-bosnia-vs-serbia-dangerous.html).
In any case, despite the outcome whitewashing the genocidaires, even the judgement that a state is guilty of not doing enough to prevent genocide represents the first time a state has been found guilty of violating the UN genocide convention. As the legal representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sakib Softic, stated in the Banja Luka paper Nezavisne:
"We don't have to be disappointed as a result of ICJ judgment. First time in the history of the world, one state has been found legally responsible for violating Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In the case we collect new evidence that proves Serbia had an intention to commit genocide, we have a period of 10 years to start new proceedings at the ICJ."
In fact, given that only the lighter charge, that Serbia did not do enough to “prevent” the Srebrenica genocide, can be found against Serbia, despite its active coordination with and arming of the BSA, it may even be easier to press charges against various states, both in other conflicts and related to this conflict. Above all, the so-called “international community”, which had tens of thousands of UN troops all over Bosnia, which had disarmed the local Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica in exchange for offering to “defend” it as a “safe area”, were also surely guilty of “failing to prevent genocide.” This applies particularly to the Netherlands, whose troops were in Srebrenica, and didn’t fire a shot as Mladic’s butchers moved into the town, separated men and women, massacred the former and expelled the latter, and were later awarded medals by the Dutch government.
It is important to understand that it was not only due to the above technicalities that the ICJ made these decisions, but also due to a political deal which denied the court the very most important evidence of all – namely, the records of the Serbian Defense Council, with the minutes of the sessions Milosevic held with the military and political leadership of Serbia-Montenegro and the RS/BSA. We can only imagine the very different reaction from “the left”, whether the “Workers” Socialist Website or “Workers” World or Ed Herman or Michael Parenti if it was the US or Israel on trial and the most key piece of evidence were left out due to a deal (as of course would be most likely to occur).
These SDC records are already in the Hague, but with ICTY, not the ICJ. However, this evidence may not be used by the ICJ, under a deal made between the ICTY and the government of Serbia. This deal was reached after the ICTY, in June 2003, ordered Belgrade to hand over these transcripts. Serbia complied, but under a deal whereby the bulk of these documents would remain under seal at the court and only be used by ICTY, and not by the ICJ.
The Association Women of Srebrenica (mostly mothers of the genocide victims) condemned Chief UN Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, for this deal with Belgrade and stated that she and the Hague Judges “deserve their place at the Wall of Shame that is planned to be built next Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in Potocari” (sources: Avaz, March 2nd, 2007).
Former Yugoslav president Zoran Lilic has said the SDC records would have been very valuable for Bosnia's case, as the SDC decided in 1993 to formalise support for officers of the Bosnian Serb Army by establishing a body within the Yugoslav army called Personnel Centre 30, he claims.
Lilic’s view appears to be backed up by the ICTY decisions, which were able to use this secret evidence. In its June 16, 2004 decision, the ICTY trial chamber – with access to the SDC records – said that "there is sufficient evidence that genocide was committed in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi". This is so much wider than merely Srebrenica that it essentially covers the length and breadth of Republika Srpska. Further, they also claimed to be “satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was a participant in the joint criminal enterprise" which had "the aim and intention to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group".
“Left” confusion
While it is not surprising to see reactionary, pro-Chetnik Serbian nationalists, and their right-wing supporters, from the likes of Le Pen, to Ian Paisely, to Ann Coulter, to Ariel Sharon and so on, would gloat over the pardoning of Serbia for the largest post WWII anti-Muslim pogrom, it is more curious to see parts of “the left” joining them. I wonder how “left" groups would respond if, as Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher, or Francis Boyle, suggest, Palestinians took Israel to the ICJ or Iraqis took the US to the ICJ or Timorese took Indonesia to the ICJ and the court found them guilty of committing similar enormous crimes but ruled that they were not guilty of genocide, because specific "intent" was not proven, ie, that they cannot find a written government order to liquidate part of a group of people, that there is no paper trail leading from the US, or Israeli, or Indonesian, or Serbian regimes, because they have shredding machines (as Chomsky points out, quoted above, by the ICJ’s standards even Hitler would not have been found guilty of genocide due to this lack of a paper trail). Would "the left" likewise cheer on such an ICJ decision in these cases? What if the massacre of tens of thousands of Muslims, the ethnic cleansing of over a million Muslims, the death camps, the shelling of cities for years, and the destruction of every mosque or Muslim monument over a large area took place not in Bosnia but just next door in Italy, France or Germany? Would "the left" cheer on the perpetrators? I mean if the particular “leftists” in question had not become completely morally degenerate?
Then there is the issue of so-called “demonisation” of "the Serbs" as a people which some claim is the problem, and who see the acquittal of Serbia as a relief from such “demonisation”, or alternatively, that the “demonisation” lives on even more unjustly now that Serbia has allegedly been exonerated as a result of years of the unjust accusations that have now been “proven” false. We could say much about the super-legalistic view that a court ruling on a technicality has “proven” anything, as we saw above; and how inconsistent some are when it comes to other court rulings they consider unjust. We could also say much about the fact that if they think the ruling really exonerates Serbia then they haven’t actually read the decision. Then there is the issue of exactly what “demonisation” means. I’m not saying there has not been any, in the way the media reports the issues, particularly in 1999 and after when the imperialist powers decided to move against Serbia over the Kosova issue, ie, years after the end of the Bosnian war. The imperialist media and politicians regularly use such base methods of reporting on whoever becomes an official “enemy”. Anyone reading the Telegraph during the Indonesian terror in East Timor in 1999 leading up to Australian intervention would have to be blind to not see massive demonisation of the Indonesians. That does not alter the fact that the Indonesian regime and its Timorese tools were guilty as hell. We must certainly oppose demonisation and any suggestion that the Serbian people as a whole were responsible for the actions of a particular regime in power.
However, the implication that “the Serbs” were “demonized” by the fact that the *regime* was accused of genocide, in and of itself, is absurd. If “the Serbs” were "demonised" by pointing to the real crimes committed by their leaders, does this mean that the left "demonises" "the Americans", "the Israelis", "the Turks" etc when reporting on the crimes of these regimes?
The fact that Bosnia’s ICJ case sought to find not just individual scapegoats such as Milosevic guilty, but the criminal regime as a whole, has unfortunately been misinterpreted by sections of the liberal media, and also, more shamelessly, by sections of the revisionist “left” who ought to know better about class analysis, as an attempt to find “the whole Serbian nation” collectively guilty of genocide.
An example of this flagrant dishonesty can be found in an eccentric article by one Claire Fox, a former member of the highly eccentric and somewhat suspicious group ‘Living Marxism’, entitled ‘Justice delayed ...’ (1) (http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/claire_fox/2007/02/the_international_court_of_jus.html). Fox writes:
“This has been an unprecedented case; it's the first time a state, an "entire nation", has been charged with genocide.”
Her quotation marks around “entire nation” are her own: they represent a quote from no-one. She continues, equally dishonestly:
“Treating Serbia as guilty and a murderous nation has become second nature in all debates about humanitarian intervention … during the Balkans conflict, the Serbs were routinely demonised en masse … they were frequently described as "thugs", "fascists", "gangsters" and "rapists" by everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Red Ken Livingstone, from neo-cons to liberal journalists”
Fox of course quotes no-one, because her aim is to deliberately conflate condemnation of the actions of the Serbian regime – in the same way as we on the left regularly condemn the actions of the US, UK, Israeli, Indonesian, Turkish and so many other regimes – with condemnation of the entire Serb people, on no other basis than the fact that Fox herself does not believe the Serbian regime was guilty as charged (therefore if you disagree with her political judgement, you must be condemning the whole Serb people). If anyone describes the actions of US, or Israeli, or Turkish, or Indonesian, or Croatian, or Nigerian armed forces as the actions of thugs or gangsters, if they describe the use of rape as a weapon in war, that is all OK, fine political judgements, but if you do exactly the same against Serbian armed forces, you are immediately condemning the whole “Serb people” as thugs, gangsters and rapists. How utterly sick.
As András Riedlmayer notes
(http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0702&L=justwatch-l&D=1&O=D&P=63185):
“Many news reports, both in Serbia and abroad, are treating as completely synonymous the terms government, state, nation, people... and are thus claiming that if the ICJ rules for the plaintiffs in the case, an entire people will be judged genocidal.”
For example, he quotes Associated Press (Arthur Max, ‘World Court to deliver momentous ruling whether Serbia responsible for genocide’, February 23, 2007):
“THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Can a state commit genocide? Should an entire
nation -- not just its presidents, generals, and soldiers -- be held responsible for humanity's worst crime?”
Riedlmayer continues:
“That is pernicious nonsense. A state, like any governmental body, can be sued for malfeasance. Thus, to give an everyday example, a municipality can be sued for discrimination in employment. A court that finds the municipality guilty of those allegations does not thereby brand every resident of that municipality as a bigot. And even if the municipal administration that engaged in those illegal acts has been turned out of office by the citizens of that municipality before the case comes to judgement, the municipality as a corporate entity will still be liable to pay any compensation ordered by the court.”
Such “pernicious nonsense” is an outrageous straw argument coming from those who have no arguments. When the ICJ ruled against the US for its support for the contras and mining of Nicaraguan harbours in the 1980’s, this was not a ruling that found “the entire American people” guilty of these crimes, but the US ruling class and its regime in power.
Interestingly, for those who stress the “demonisation” issue, and for those left-liberals who think Bosnia was just a "civil war" where "all sides were guilty", where "all sides commit atrocities" (you know, like "both sides" do in Israel/Palestine, "all sides" in Iraq, "both Turks and Kurds", "all sides" in Indonesia, both “Catholics and Protestants” in Ireland etc), then this ruling, far from reducing “demonisation”, actually reinforces the potential for it in one sense. Because if it was not the fact that it was the Serbian regime - ie, the inheritor of what had been previously the Yugoslav military - the fourth most powerful military in Europe - via direct support, control, arming and financing of the BSA/RS, that allowed such an absolute superiority of the Bosnian Serb Army and para-state over the Bosnian Muslim, Croat and multiethnic populations, that allowed the BSA to actually commit genocide as agreed by the ICJ, then how did it happen so easily? By absolving Milosevic and neighbouring Serbian regime, the ICJ ruling actually throws back all the blame for "genocide" onto the Bosnian Serb rulers. And of course there is no doubt that the Bosnian Serb rulers are guilty as hell. But if this was a mere "civil war" without Belgrade's direction, then the Bosnian Serbs must have been extremely vicious, as a numerical minority in Bosnia, to achieve such unrivalled mastery and be able to impose such terror. “Maybe they really are very bad, warlike, cruel, brutal people after all,” is one possible conclusion from the ICJ ruling absolving the role of the neighbouring regime that had the absolute military superiority throughout the region. It would be exactly the same as if the pro-Indonesian Timorese militias in 1999 that killed 1-2000 Timorese did it all by themselves and their success had nothing to do with the enormous superiority in the region of the Indonesian army (I suppose I’d better not go on and call the killing of 1-2000 Timorese "genocide" since the killing of 100,000 Bosnians isn't genocide according to some of "the left" who might correct me ...)
Republika Srpska: A “state” founded on genocide and legalized by imperialism
This also leads to another political issue: by agreeing that genocide has been committed in Srebrenica, the ICJ calls into question the very existence of Republika Srpska, since this means that it was a state created by genocide (which, outside of legalese, is completely true). However, since it was only in Srebrenica and not in the rest of Bosnia, perhaps RS can argue the opposite. If it was only built on ethnic cleansing, and not genocide, then perhaps that is not too bad. Perhaps they just have to give back Srebrenica. But on the other hand again, since Serbia itself is absolved from “genocide,” since outside intervention wasn’t a factor, this actually makes the leaders of RS more guilty of genocide themselves, thus again swinging the argument against the right of RS to exist.
Haris Silajdzic, Bosniak member of Bosnia's tripartite state Presidency, claimed that the ICJ's ruling should mark the beginning of a process to erase results of genocide in Bosnia."Results of the genocide should be annulled with a new constitution to create a democratic system in accordance with Bosnia's multiethnic society as it was before the genocide." He said the current Bosnian constitution, which created two entities, the Srpska Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, was based on ethno-territorial principles and genocide, and must be dismissed as such. "Bosnia-Herzegovina must therefore purge itself of the remnants of the genocide that permeates throughout Bosnian society. We will achieve this by altering what has been founded on the genocide's outcome — the interior structure of Bosnia and its constitution," Silajdzic said.
Needless to say, that is not likely to happen. At present it is extremely unrealistic, without a much deeper process of reconciliation. As Peter Lippman, a long time supporter of Bosnia, comments, “The ICJ decision, increasing the anger on the side of victims and exonerating the guilty, doesn't help any of this.”
But another reason it won’t happen is that it is not the program of the “international community”, ie the imperialist powers, who legalized RS in all their Bosnian partition “peace plans” between 1992 and 1995, ending with the US-imposed Dayton Accord which split Bosnia in two and rewarded the genocidaires.
And the issue of what the big powers want is probably not irrelevant; the idea that politics is completely divorced from legal judgments is illusory. Again quoting Martin Shaw:
“There must be a suspicion that the court is paying some attention to the political situation in and around Serbia, where the Radical Party (headed by indicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj) remains a formidable force, and the prospect of conditional independence for Kosovo is making for renewed turbulence. It is true that a tougher verdict would have exacerbated these short-term problems in Serbia, making it more difficult for the European Union to incorporate it peacefully into the fold. But this would hardly be a reason to deny justice - one must hope that this, at least, was not behind the ICJ's timid verdict.”
In any case, since it has been ruled that genocide did occur in Srebrenica, victims of the genocide there are seeking proclamation of Srebrenica and Zepa as special political districts, which would secede from RS. Prior to the conflicts of the 1990s, Srebrenica's population (like much of east Bosnia) was over 75% Muslim, while Serbs constituted just over 22%. Today, however, it is mostly a Serb town. On March 12, 2007, a gathering took place in Srebrenica to discuss demands by several hundred Muslim returnees, and the Bosniak members of the municipal assembly, that the town be given special status. Ambassadors from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya and the Palestinian Authority came, along with a number of Bosnian politicians including the Muslim and Croat members of the Bosnian state presidency, Haris Silajdzic and Zeljko Komsic, who supported their demands. Participants concluded that state and entitiy institutions are obliged to make decisions to implement the ICJ verdict. By contrast, the Office of High Representative [OHR] retorted that this was “unconstitutional.” It claimed the call by the Bosniak members of the municipal assembly to secede from RS “exceeded the responsibilities of the municipality” as defined by the RS Constitution, and declared “the OHR is particularly concerned about the threat to unilaterally pass a decision on separation of the Municipality from the RS. If the municipal assembly were to act on this, the High Representative would have no choice but to take robust action.” It would be good to know whether the “anti-imperialist” leftists who claim to oppose imperialist intervention in the Balkans would oppose such “robust” imperialist action against the relatives of Srebrenica genocide victims for declaring their wish to secede from the state responsible for their genocide. We won’t be holding our breath.
Some reactions from Serbian progressives
While some on the western “left” are still shamelessly bleating on that any criticism of the actions of the Serbian regime represents “demonisation of the Serbs” as a whole, from within Serbia many decent people criticised the verdict for exonerating the genocidaires, in the same way as decent people in Australia and the US condemn the crimes of our own ruling classes and regimes.
Biljana Kovacevic Vuco, president of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said the verdict represented “victory for the politics of Slobodan Milosevic, the victory of Ratko Mladic, of Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia’s [ultra-nationalist] Radicals.”The verdict will not help Serbia confront its past, Aleksandar Popov, of the NGO Igman Initative said. “The Srebrenica verdict is only symbolic and does not give the complete picture of Serbia's role in the wars of the last decade,” Popov said.The head of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, Andrej Nosov, said he hoped the verdict would mean Serbia could no longer deny it had nothing to do with events in Srebrenica. “The verdict opens a moral question about what Serbia could have done to prevent genocide in Bosnia,” Nosov said. “Regardless of the verdict, Serbia has an obligation to tell the whole truth about the victims and give them justice and reparations,” he added.The president of Vojvodina’s Social Democratic League, Nenad Canak, condemned the ICJ verdict. “Let Bosnia's blood and ashes rest on the hands of all those who made such a judgment,” he said. “The only thing I can say is to remind you of the words of Primo Levi written on a wall in Dachau. 'The man who denies Auschwitz is the same one who is ready to repeat it'.”
Real role of the “international community” in Bosnia
Many of the allegedly “left” reactions to this judgement reflect the very incorrect view that these people adopted towards the entire Yugoslav conflict, ignoring what actually happened, with a preference for statements of pure metaphysics, such as the idea that imperialism “broke up Yugoslavia” or “intervened against the Serbs.” This article is not the place to go into refuting this kind of metaphysics, which I have done extensively elsewhere, but the following excerpt from an article on the ICJ judgement by Edina Becirevic, a senior lecturer at the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Criminal Justice Sciences, includes a brief but very correct and relevant summary of the actual role of the “international community” in the war in Bosnia. It ends with the birth of imperialist recognition of RS, the state born of genocide, which seems an appropriate place to conclude this essay:
“In the Bosnian war, the international community stood by and watched as Serbia unleashed aggression against the country’s non-Serb population. Governments worldwide ignored the concentration camps, genocidal rape, mass murders of non-Serbs, destruction of cultural monuments, sieges of cities and intentional starvation of civilians - in short, they pretended not to recognise genocide.
“Instead, they chose to call it a civil war and deemed the actions of the VRS and paramilitaries by the euphemistic term “ethnic cleansing”. In doing so, they justified their failure to defend the rules imposed on the world’s governments by the Genocide Convention of 1951 - which outlaws the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group “in whole or in part”.
“In those difficult days, the Bosnian government realised that the world was divided into two. There was the world of dominant western politics, with respect for military power, and then there was the world of civil society that saw the genocide in Bosnia for what it was. For a long time, these different perspectives gave the late Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic a schizophrenic profile in the eyes of the world - some regarded him as the guarantor of a stable Balkans, while others saw him as a war criminal.
“One question that has puzzled many is, “Why did the Bosnian government bring genocide charges against Serbia and Montenegro to the ICJ in 1993?” By that time, hadn’t they lost faith in the international community and the idea of justice? Or had they decided to look for it in a place where moral values should be preserved? In bringing the lawsuit, Bosnia moved its appeal for action to be taken against Serbia from the Security Council to the International Court of Justice, from the politicians to the judges. In doing so, it hoped to remind the Security Council of its obligation under the genocide convention, and to give them legal justification to use international forces.
“Faced with the prospect of the destruction of its people, the only option left for the Bosnian government was to trust the court. It had faith that its judges would preserve the values seemingly abandoned by politicians.
“According to the United Nations, the simmering conflict in Bosnia was a civil war and ethnic cleansing, and therefore the international community was under no obligation to intervene. But in July 1995, this ethnic cleansing intensified, as Bosnian Serb forces killed thousands of Bosniaks in the UN enclave of Srebrenica in a matter of days. The scale of the Srebrenica massacre, coupled with the fact that UN troops had failed to protect them, forced the international community to begin military intervention.
“Against all principles of international law, the perpetrators of the genocide were subsequently rewarded for their crime with half of the territory of Bosnia, after the formal establishment of Bosnian Serb entity Republika Srpska, RS, which continues to exist today.”
(from ‘ICJ JUDGMENT SIGNIFICANT DESPITE FLAWS’, by Edina Becirevic, from IWPR, Tribunal Update, No. 491, March 4, 2007)
Appendix: The dissenting opinion of the ICJ vice president Al-Khasawneh
It is worth also reading the dissenting opinion of the vice-president of the ICJ, Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh, which makes a great number of important points. Below are some notable excerpts; his entire statement can be read at:
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm
Beginning of excerpt:
Serbia’s international responsibility incurred as a consequence of its involvement as a principal actor or an accomplice in the genocide that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such involvement is supported, in my opinion, by massive and compelling evidence … the involvement or implication of the FRY in the genocide that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s was both more serious in nature and more extensive in territorial scope than the mere failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica conveys.
… This implies that the charge that genocide took place also in other parts of Bosnia and
Herzegovina and that the FRY was responsible not only for its failure to prevent genocide but for
being actively involved in it either as a principal or alternatively as an accomplice or by way of
conspiracy or incitement would in all probability have been proven had the Court not adopted the
methodology discussed below
In the first place, the Court was alerted by the Applicant to the existence of “redacted” sections of documents of the Supreme Defence Council of the Respondent. Regrettably, the Court failed to act although, under Article 49 of its Statue, it has the power to do so. It is a reasonable expectation that those documents would have shed light on the central questions of intent and
attributability. The reasoning given by the Court in paragraph 206 of the Judgment, “[o]n this
matter, the Court observes that the Applicant has extensive documentation and other evidence
available to it, especially from the readily accessible ICTY records . . .”, is worse than its failure to act.
The Court first considers whether the ‘Strategic Goals of the Serbian People in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (2) evidence genocidal intent, but concludes that the goals “were capable of being
achieved by the displacement of the population and by territory being acquired” (Judgment,
paragraph 372). The Court further notes that the motive of creating a Greater Serbia “did not
necessarily require the destruction of the Bosnian Muslims and other communities, but their
expulsion” (ibid.). The Court essentially ignores the facts and substitutes its own assessment of
how the Bosnian Serbs could have hypothetically best achieved their macabre Strategic Goals
The Applicant is asking the Court to look at the pattern of conduct and draw the logically necessary inferences. The jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals on this point is less amenable to artificial distinctions between the intent relevant to genocide and that relevant to ethnic cleansing than the Court. The Appeal Chamber in Krstić has clearly held that the pattern of conduct known as ethnic cleansing may be relied on as evidence of the mens rea of genocide. Coupled with population transfers, what other inference is there to draw from the
overwhelming evidence of massive killings systematically targeting the Bosnian Muslims than
genocidal intent? If the only objective was to move the Muslim population, and the Court is
willing to assume that the Bosnian Serbs did only that which is strictly necessary in order to
achieve this objective, then what to make of the mass murder?
The second argument the Court relies on bears on the conduct of the ICTY’s Prosecutor and the Tribunal’s jurisprudence on genocide. The Court rejects the Applicant’s argument that the
pattern of atrocities committed over many communities demonstrates the necessary intent because it “is not consistent with the findings of the ICTY relating to genocide or with the actions of the Prosecutor, including decisions not to charge genocide offences in possibly relevant indictments, and to enter into plea agreements” (Judgment, paragraph 374). That the ICTY has not found genocide based on patterns of conduct in the whole of Bosnia is of course not in the least surprising. The Tribunal only has jurisdiction to judge the individual criminal liability of particular persons accused before it, and the relevant evidence will therefore be limited to the sphere of operations of the accused.
Fourthly, genocide is definitionally a complex crime in the sense that unlike homicide it takes time to achieve, requires repetitiveness, and is committed by many persons and organs acting
in concert. As such, it cannot be appreciated in a disconnected manner. Unfortunately, there are
instances in the Judgment where this happens, including on crucial issues such as FRY
responsibility for the genocide at Srebrenica.
Belgrade’s knowledge of the more general operations in Srebrenica - those geared toward “taking the town” - is amply established. In addition, Carl Bildt (European negotiator) met twice with President Milošević and General Mladić together in the midst of the takeover of Srebrenica and the subsequent massacre. It is also accepted that General Mladić’s promotion to the rank of Colonel General was handled in Belgrade, and the Respondent’s claim that this last part was no more than some administrative confirmation of a decision made in Pale is unconvincing. The Secretary-General’s report on the fall of Srebrenica relates that Mr. Bildt was joined in his
meeting with President Milošević on 14 July by General Mladić - which is the period during
which the Court determined that the decision to eliminate physically the whole of the adult male
population of the Muslim community of Srebrenica was taken (Judgment, paragraph 423).
An even more disturbing feature in the Court’s reasoning is evident in its treatment of the Serbian paramilitary units known as the “Scorpions” (Judgment, paragraphs 289, 389 and 395). Thus, paragraph 389 of the Judgment considers two documents presented by the Applicant, in which there is reference to the “Scorpions” as “MUP of Serbia” and a “unit of Ministry of Interiors of Serbia”. The paragraph notes that the authenticity of the documents was disputed by the Respondent presumably because “they were copies of intercepts, but not originals”. But it is plain that if the Court insisted on original documents, it would never be able to render any judgments. Be this as it may, the other reason advanced to undermine the importance of these documents is that they are not addressed to Belgrade, the senders being “officials of the police forces of the Republika Srpska”. But this in itself does not deny their probative value. When an official of the Republika Srpska sends a telegram to his superior in which the Scorpions are described as “MUP of Serbia” or “a unit of Ministry of Interiors of Serbia”, there is no reason to doubt the veracity of this statement. Consequently, we have here a case of a unit which had been incorporated into the forces of the Respondent - though the date for that incorporation is in dispute - yet the Court concludes that they are not to be treated as de jure organs of the Respondent in 1995, notwithstanding evidence that they were perceived to be such by the Republika Srpska officials.
Equally surprising is the Court’s treatment of the statement by the Government of Serbia and Montenegro – after Milošević’s fall from power - to the effect that what happened in Srebrenica was not the work of Serbia, but of the ousted régime. This statement was in fact occasioned by the showing, on national and international television, of the shocking images of the brutal execution of six Muslim prisoners in Trnovo, near Srebrenica, by the Scorpions. The Court failed to take account of this closely connected fact in its appreciation of the status of the Scorpions.
Full dissenting statement: http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm
Full text of ICJ judgement (351 pages): http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm
Footnotes:
(1) I call ‘Living Marxism’, the main promoter of Serb chauvinist ideology among the left in the 1990s, a “suspicious” group because at a certain point after the end of the 1990s, the entire leadership instantly turned counterrevolutionary overnight, and began working in top jobs for the Economist Intelligence Unit, as consultants for the “war on terror”, as apologists for GM crops and the nuclear industry, in joint campaigns with far-right “libertarians,” you name it, they’re up there. I am afraid I cannot believe that such an instantaneous and en masse conversion can occur in reality. My only conclusion is that they were something other than legitimate before their alleged “turn.”
(2) The Strategic Goals were as follows: (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 (Judgment, paragraph 371)
By Michael Karadjis
On February 26, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that, while genocide had been perpetrated by the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) against the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica, the government of neighbouring Serbia was not directly responsible for it, even though it armed and coordinated with the BSA and paid its officers.
Nevertheless, it also made the partly contradictory ruling that Serbia was guilty of not using its influence over the BSA to prevent the Srebrenica genocide.
It also ruled that while the BSA had committed enormous crimes against the Muslim population in the rest of Bosnia, these did not constitute genocide except in Srebrenica.
Background
The Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina originally brought these genocide charges against Serbia to the ICJ in 1993, on the basis that the Serbian regime armed and financed the BSA, that both civilian and military leaders of Serbia and the para-state of ‘Republika Srpska’ (RS, which ran the BSA), set up on the 70 percent of Bosnia on which non-Serbs were driven out of in 1992, coordinated their actions, and that the Serbian government paid the salaries of the BSA officers.
International human rights lawyer Francis Boyle helped Bosnia prepare its case. In its original version, the genocide case was launched against the United Kingdom. The then Tory UK government of John Major was the most hard-line supporter of the criminal UN Security Council arms embargo being maintained against Bosnia in the face of the genocidal assault by the BSA, which was armed to the teeth by what used to be the Yugoslav People’s Army, the fourth largest military power in Europe, now with Yugoslav break-up a completely Serbian armed force.
Bosnia decided against proceeding with the case against the UK but maintain it against the more immediate culprit, Serbia. This may have been related to enormous pressures exerted by the UK, plus an understanding of how hard it would be to prove genocide against the UK for its underhanded support to Milosevic and the BSA. The fact that the ICJ could not even find Serbia itself was directly responsible underlines that this was probably correct.
Francis Boyle, who for many years represented the Bosnian government in the ICJ suit, was also from 1991 to 1993 a legal advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and has been Attorney of Record for the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Previously he worked to prevent a war between the US and Libya in the 1990s, and in the 1990s called on Iraq to sue the US for genocide as a result of the criminal embargo which killed over a million Iraqis. He calls on Palestine to take Israel to the ICJ to charge it for genocide, and notes the very strong parallels with the Bosnia case (http://www.mediamonitors.net/francis1.html). He has taken a powerful stand against the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and has drawn up guidelines for the impeachment of the Bush regime. He has also given legal advice to Hawaian advocates of independence, has represented other peoples including the Blackfoot Nation and the Lakota Nation. Though a US citizen, he also holds honorary citizenship of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Not the Hague War Crimes Tribunal
It is important to understand that this ICJ suit was distinct from the Hague International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which has been hearing cases against dozens of Serb, Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Kosovar Albanian individuals for many years. The fact that the Hague Tribunal was set up by the UN Security Council, which includes three of the NATO powers who themselves committed grave violations of international human rights law during their bombing of Serbia in 1999, makes it appear more interested in “victors’ justice” than real justice, even though enormous crimes certainly were committed by Balkan leaders and there is certainly a popular sentiment in the Balkans for bringing the guilty to justice.
In addition, by concentrating on individuals rather than regimes, the ICTY may allow a number of people to be scapegoated while allowing the states that committed the crimes – principally the Serbian and Croatian states and the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat para-states – to be absolved as a whole.
At some level, this focus on individuals allows other Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Albanians to feel they were not collectively guilty of these crimes as entire nations – the responsible individuals are being indicted. However, this is based on a mistaken classless view that the whole people are guilty when a regime is guilty.
Bosnia’s ICJ case against the Serbian regime of Milosevic, by contrast, sought to find not just individual scapegoats such as Milosevic guilty, but the criminal regime as a whole.
It is important to underline that Bosnia received no support from the imperialist countries for its suit against Serbia, in sharp contrast to their support for the ICTY trials. There are very good reasons for this. It is always much safer for imperialism to find “bad” individuals guilty than states. If Serbia – not just Milosevic or other individuals – can be found guilty of genocide, then based on the same principles, there may be little stopping Palestine from taking the US and Israel to the ICJ, and any number of brutally repressive states, often enough US allies, could also end up in court.
As Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher - in his Genocide Politics op/ed - pointed out:
“For the court to find that Serbia was responsible for the horrible crimes committed during the Bosnian conflict and that reparations were to be paid would set a dangerous precedent under which reparations might subsequently also be sought by the Palestinians or Lebanese against the State of Israel or Iraqis and Afghans against the US and UK. To ignore the evidence of a genocide, on the other hand, would give a green light to any group of people furthering their political agenda through the use of terror. As courts frequently do, the International Court of Justice came up with a compromise. They declared that the massacre of Bosniaks at Srebrenica (under the “watchful” eyes of UN observers, by the way) was genocide, but that Serbia was not directly responsible as a state. They found that Serbia didn't do enough to stop genocide from happening, but found no evidence that they directly ordered the crime. The countries dominating the UN may have saved their own skin by this ruling, but it compounds an already complex issue even further.”
(http://flyingimam.blogspot.com/2007/02/genocide-politics.html)
What did the ICJ find?
Many reactions to this ruling indicate that those making these statements have not actually read the ruling or even the summary. Some supporters of Serbian nationalism on the left/right continuum gloat that the ruling exonerated Serbia of involvement with the massive war crimes in Bosnia; others however claim that by still insisting Serbia was guilty of not using its influence to prevent genocide, the court was obviously making a ‘political’ statement against Serbia, given the alleged “lack of evidence” of Serbian involvement elsewhere in the ruling. The more exotic even claim that even just calling Srebrenica a genocide represents an unfair ruling against “the Serbs” because the court allegedly just “had to” find some genocide involved to allegedly “satisfy” the West. This is all uninformed pseudo-political “left”/right café gossip.
There are two issues: whether Bosnian Serb nationalist forces carried out genocide against the Bosnian Muslims; and whether the neighbouring state of Serbia itself was also responsible due to its close connection to the Bosnian Serb forces.
On the first issue, the ICJ found that enormous “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” had been committed by the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA, run by the Bosnian Serb para-state Republika Srpska (RS)) against the Bosnian Muslim population; it found that the deaths in the 3.5 year Bosnia war were overwhelmingly those of what it calls in legalese the "protected group", meaning the Bosnian Muslims; it found that these “crimes against humanity” included massive ethnic cleansing to remove the Muslim population from large areas of Bosnia (ie, in order to set up an ethnically pure "Serb state" where non-Serbs lived, in the same manner of Israel in 1948 etc); included terrifying crimes at the detention camps; included surrounding cities and towns and shelling them for years and starving the population; included large-scale destruction of Bosnian Muslim religious and cultural buildings and monuments (eg, 1400 mosques were demolished, pretty much every much in the regions conquered by the Serbian and allied Croatian chauvinist forces, while zero Orthodox or Catholic churches were destroyed in the Bosnian government-controlled regions, and grand libraries and museums containing hundreds of thousands of items and manuscripts from medieval Bosnian civilisation were torched, the biggest book-burning in history). Quite clearly all these findings are consistent with the Bosnian case against the crimes of Serbian nationalism, and completely contradict the version of events promoted by the “left”/right apologists for Serbian chauvinism.
However, although all these crimes were consistent with aspects of the definition of “genocide” (ie “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” in various ways, including killing or making life unbearable for their continued survival as a group), the bar in a "genocide" trial is set so high that you do not only have to prove all these genocidal crimes were committed, it also has to be proven that the actual "intent" of all these crimes is in fact genocide. There was no dispute in the court ruling that these crimes occurred and that the BSA/RS was responsible. But only in the case of the massacre of 8000+ Muslim captives after the BSA had overrun and "cleansed" Srebrenica in July 1995 was all this allowed to be called "genocide."
While some of the strange Chetnikophilic wing of the “left” believe any finding of genocide, even at Srebrenica, is some grand conspiracy against “the Serbs” (see below), Noam Chomsky by contrast has previously noted the fact that the ‘bar’ in the Hague trials is set so high for ‘genocide’ that even Hitler would be found innocent. Moreover, he makes this correct claim in a piece reacting to the revelations of an open call by Nixon and Kissinger to bomb “anything that moves” in Cambodia. Chomsky is correctly pointing out the hypocrisy of the US where it can refer to ‘genocide’ in other places, such as by Hitler or Milosevic, even when there is no “paper trail”, but not when they do it themselves even when there is such a paper trail. It is worth quoting Chomsky here, both for the points he makes, and also to stress his tendency to be consistent as an opponent of crimes against humanity, whether carried out by Nixon/Kissinger, Hitler, Milosevic or others, in contrast to some more Manichean left ‘anti-imperialists”:
“On May 27, the New York Times published one of the most incredible sentences I’ve ever seen. They ran an article about the Nixon-Kissinger interchanges. Kissinger fought very hard through the courts to try to prevent it, but the courts permitted it. You read through it, and you see the following statement embedded in it. Nixon at one point informs Kissinger, his right-hand Eichmann, that he wanted bombing of Cambodia. And Kissinger loyally transmits the order to the Pentagon to carry out "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves." That is the most explicit call for what we call genocide when other people do it that I’ve ever seen in the historical record.”
“Right at this moment there is a prosecution of Milosevic going on in the international tribunal, and the prosecutors are kind of hampered because they can’t find direct orders, or a direct connection even, linking Milosevic to any atrocities on the ground. Suppose they found a statement like this. Suppose a document came out from Milosevic saying, "Reduce Kosovo to rubble. Anything that flies on anything that moves." They would be overjoyed. The trial would be over. He would be sent away for multiple life sentences–if it was a U.S. trial, immediately the electric chair. But they can’t find any such document. In fact, nobody has even found a document like that connecting Hitler to the Holocaust. Scholars have been working on it for years. I can’t remember an example of such a direct order to carry out what amounted to a huge massacre, way beyond the level of anything we call genocide when other people do it.”
(http://www.isreview.org/issues/37/chomsky.shtml)
Anyway, back to the ICJ ruling, the somewhat strange judgment partly reads that the court accepts that it has been:
"… established by overwhelming evidence that massive killings in specific areas and detention camps throughout the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina were perpetrated during the conflict. Furthermore, the evidence presented shows that the victims were in large majority members of the protected group, which suggests that they may have been systematically targeted by the killings”, but the court is "not convinced … that it has been conclusively established that the massive killings of members of the protected group were committed with the specific intent (dolus specialis) on the part of the perpetrators to destroy, in whole or in part, the group as such … It has been established by fully conclusive evidence that members of the protected group were systematically victims of massive mistreatment, beatings, rape and torture causing serious bodily and mental harm, during the conflict and, in particular, in the detention camps" but “it has not been conclusively established that those atrocities, although they too may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, were committed with the specific intent ... to destroy the protected group, in whole or in part."
This is even stranger when it comes to ethnic cleansing. The ethnic cleansing of the Muslim and Croat populations from the 70 percent of Bosnia rapidly occupied by the BSA (at the beginning of the war with the direct aid of the “Yugoslav” army) began in April 1992 and completely transformed the demographic landscape. It would appear difficult to not see ethnic cleansing – with or without mass killing and all the other crimes that the ICJ accepts occurred – as a form of genocide, ie, that the destruction of the Muslim (and Croat) communities throughout much of Bosnia were not acts committed with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."
Yet the ICJ decided that:
“ ‘Ethnic cleansing’ can only be a form of genocide within the meaning of the Convention, if it corresponds to or falls within one of the categories of acts prohibited by Article II of the Convention. Neither the intent, as a matter of policy, to render an area “ethnically homogeneous”, nor the operations that may be carried out to implement such policy, can as such be designated as genocide. However, this does not mean that acts described as “ethnic cleansing” may never constitute genocide, if they are such as to be characterized as, for example, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, contrary to Article II, paragraph (c), of the Convention, provided such action is carried out with the necessary specific intent (dolus specialis), that is to say with a view to the destruction of the group, as distinct from its removal from the region.”
Thus the forced removal of a group of people from a region, even when combined with massive atrocities and eradication of any remnant of their culture, does not constitute “the destruction of the group” and does not “inflict(ing) on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” While this may have been the legal framework employed, it is quite clearly debatable whether morally ethnic cleansing represents the destruction of a group of people, ie, whether or not it constitutes genocide. To say the least, it does nothing to morally absolve the RS/BSA of such crimes even if it chooses to not call them “genocide.”
On the second issue, of whether or not the government of Serbia was responsible for the genocide in Bosnia (or in Srebrenica anyway), the court ruled there was overwhelming evidence that the Serbian regime of Milosevic financed and armed the BSA, that it politically and militarily coordinated actions with the RS/BSA throughout the war, at a high level, that it paid the salaries of the BSA officers, including Mladic, the general held most responsible for the Srebrenica genocide, so again this cannot be read as in any way absolving Serbia’s role in the destruction of Bosnia. However, it cannot be found guilty of the specific "intent" to commit genocide in Srebrenica, because, although it coordinated military actions with the BSA, and although it knew full well the BSA was entering Srebrenica, and that it would be carrying out ethnic cleansing there, and even that it was likely that it would commit massacres there, it was not proven that it actually knew or approved of plans to liquidate the male population there.
Nevertheless, in an obviously contradictory statement, it found the Serbian regime guilty of not doing enough to prevent its BSA cronies from carrying out the genocide, since it had influence over them. As Professor Martin Shaw from the University of Sussex comments (http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/icj_bosnia_serbia_4392.jsp):
“(This) is a curious finding, since if Serbian leaders were really in a position to influence the Bosnian-Serbian army not to massacre the Muslim [Bosniak] men of Srebrenica, that implies a degree of knowledge and influence that suggests complicity in the massacre - something which the Court denies.”
Moreover, as Antonio Cassese, the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and later the chairperson of the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, adds:
“According to the Court, Serbia was aware of the very high risk of acts of genocide and did nothing. But Serbia was not complicit, the Court argued, because "it has not been proven" that the intention of committing the acts of genocide at Srebrenica "had been brought to Belgrade's attention" … The massacre was prepared in detail and took place over the course of six days (between July 13 and 19). Is it plausible that the Serbian authorities remained in the dark while the killing was in progress and reported in the press all over the world?”
(from The ICJ ruling, Bosnia vs Serbia, shows governments can avoid liability for genocide, even if they are found to be complicit in genocide, http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2007/02/icj-ruling-bosnia-vs-serbia-dangerous.html).
In any case, despite the outcome whitewashing the genocidaires, even the judgement that a state is guilty of not doing enough to prevent genocide represents the first time a state has been found guilty of violating the UN genocide convention. As the legal representative of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sakib Softic, stated in the Banja Luka paper Nezavisne:
"We don't have to be disappointed as a result of ICJ judgment. First time in the history of the world, one state has been found legally responsible for violating Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In the case we collect new evidence that proves Serbia had an intention to commit genocide, we have a period of 10 years to start new proceedings at the ICJ."
In fact, given that only the lighter charge, that Serbia did not do enough to “prevent” the Srebrenica genocide, can be found against Serbia, despite its active coordination with and arming of the BSA, it may even be easier to press charges against various states, both in other conflicts and related to this conflict. Above all, the so-called “international community”, which had tens of thousands of UN troops all over Bosnia, which had disarmed the local Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica in exchange for offering to “defend” it as a “safe area”, were also surely guilty of “failing to prevent genocide.” This applies particularly to the Netherlands, whose troops were in Srebrenica, and didn’t fire a shot as Mladic’s butchers moved into the town, separated men and women, massacred the former and expelled the latter, and were later awarded medals by the Dutch government.
It is important to understand that it was not only due to the above technicalities that the ICJ made these decisions, but also due to a political deal which denied the court the very most important evidence of all – namely, the records of the Serbian Defense Council, with the minutes of the sessions Milosevic held with the military and political leadership of Serbia-Montenegro and the RS/BSA. We can only imagine the very different reaction from “the left”, whether the “Workers” Socialist Website or “Workers” World or Ed Herman or Michael Parenti if it was the US or Israel on trial and the most key piece of evidence were left out due to a deal (as of course would be most likely to occur).
These SDC records are already in the Hague, but with ICTY, not the ICJ. However, this evidence may not be used by the ICJ, under a deal made between the ICTY and the government of Serbia. This deal was reached after the ICTY, in June 2003, ordered Belgrade to hand over these transcripts. Serbia complied, but under a deal whereby the bulk of these documents would remain under seal at the court and only be used by ICTY, and not by the ICJ.
The Association Women of Srebrenica (mostly mothers of the genocide victims) condemned Chief UN Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, for this deal with Belgrade and stated that she and the Hague Judges “deserve their place at the Wall of Shame that is planned to be built next Srebrenica Genocide Memorial in Potocari” (sources: Avaz, March 2nd, 2007).
Former Yugoslav president Zoran Lilic has said the SDC records would have been very valuable for Bosnia's case, as the SDC decided in 1993 to formalise support for officers of the Bosnian Serb Army by establishing a body within the Yugoslav army called Personnel Centre 30, he claims.
Lilic’s view appears to be backed up by the ICTY decisions, which were able to use this secret evidence. In its June 16, 2004 decision, the ICTY trial chamber – with access to the SDC records – said that "there is sufficient evidence that genocide was committed in Brcko, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Srebrenica, Bijeljina, Kljuc and Bosanski Novi". This is so much wider than merely Srebrenica that it essentially covers the length and breadth of Republika Srpska. Further, they also claimed to be “satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was a participant in the joint criminal enterprise" which had "the aim and intention to destroy a part of the Bosnian Muslims as a group".
“Left” confusion
While it is not surprising to see reactionary, pro-Chetnik Serbian nationalists, and their right-wing supporters, from the likes of Le Pen, to Ian Paisely, to Ann Coulter, to Ariel Sharon and so on, would gloat over the pardoning of Serbia for the largest post WWII anti-Muslim pogrom, it is more curious to see parts of “the left” joining them. I wonder how “left" groups would respond if, as Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher, or Francis Boyle, suggest, Palestinians took Israel to the ICJ or Iraqis took the US to the ICJ or Timorese took Indonesia to the ICJ and the court found them guilty of committing similar enormous crimes but ruled that they were not guilty of genocide, because specific "intent" was not proven, ie, that they cannot find a written government order to liquidate part of a group of people, that there is no paper trail leading from the US, or Israeli, or Indonesian, or Serbian regimes, because they have shredding machines (as Chomsky points out, quoted above, by the ICJ’s standards even Hitler would not have been found guilty of genocide due to this lack of a paper trail). Would "the left" likewise cheer on such an ICJ decision in these cases? What if the massacre of tens of thousands of Muslims, the ethnic cleansing of over a million Muslims, the death camps, the shelling of cities for years, and the destruction of every mosque or Muslim monument over a large area took place not in Bosnia but just next door in Italy, France or Germany? Would "the left" cheer on the perpetrators? I mean if the particular “leftists” in question had not become completely morally degenerate?
Then there is the issue of so-called “demonisation” of "the Serbs" as a people which some claim is the problem, and who see the acquittal of Serbia as a relief from such “demonisation”, or alternatively, that the “demonisation” lives on even more unjustly now that Serbia has allegedly been exonerated as a result of years of the unjust accusations that have now been “proven” false. We could say much about the super-legalistic view that a court ruling on a technicality has “proven” anything, as we saw above; and how inconsistent some are when it comes to other court rulings they consider unjust. We could also say much about the fact that if they think the ruling really exonerates Serbia then they haven’t actually read the decision. Then there is the issue of exactly what “demonisation” means. I’m not saying there has not been any, in the way the media reports the issues, particularly in 1999 and after when the imperialist powers decided to move against Serbia over the Kosova issue, ie, years after the end of the Bosnian war. The imperialist media and politicians regularly use such base methods of reporting on whoever becomes an official “enemy”. Anyone reading the Telegraph during the Indonesian terror in East Timor in 1999 leading up to Australian intervention would have to be blind to not see massive demonisation of the Indonesians. That does not alter the fact that the Indonesian regime and its Timorese tools were guilty as hell. We must certainly oppose demonisation and any suggestion that the Serbian people as a whole were responsible for the actions of a particular regime in power.
However, the implication that “the Serbs” were “demonized” by the fact that the *regime* was accused of genocide, in and of itself, is absurd. If “the Serbs” were "demonised" by pointing to the real crimes committed by their leaders, does this mean that the left "demonises" "the Americans", "the Israelis", "the Turks" etc when reporting on the crimes of these regimes?
The fact that Bosnia’s ICJ case sought to find not just individual scapegoats such as Milosevic guilty, but the criminal regime as a whole, has unfortunately been misinterpreted by sections of the liberal media, and also, more shamelessly, by sections of the revisionist “left” who ought to know better about class analysis, as an attempt to find “the whole Serbian nation” collectively guilty of genocide.
An example of this flagrant dishonesty can be found in an eccentric article by one Claire Fox, a former member of the highly eccentric and somewhat suspicious group ‘Living Marxism’, entitled ‘Justice delayed ...’ (1) (http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/claire_fox/2007/02/the_international_court_of_jus.html). Fox writes:
“This has been an unprecedented case; it's the first time a state, an "entire nation", has been charged with genocide.”
Her quotation marks around “entire nation” are her own: they represent a quote from no-one. She continues, equally dishonestly:
“Treating Serbia as guilty and a murderous nation has become second nature in all debates about humanitarian intervention … during the Balkans conflict, the Serbs were routinely demonised en masse … they were frequently described as "thugs", "fascists", "gangsters" and "rapists" by everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Red Ken Livingstone, from neo-cons to liberal journalists”
Fox of course quotes no-one, because her aim is to deliberately conflate condemnation of the actions of the Serbian regime – in the same way as we on the left regularly condemn the actions of the US, UK, Israeli, Indonesian, Turkish and so many other regimes – with condemnation of the entire Serb people, on no other basis than the fact that Fox herself does not believe the Serbian regime was guilty as charged (therefore if you disagree with her political judgement, you must be condemning the whole Serb people). If anyone describes the actions of US, or Israeli, or Turkish, or Indonesian, or Croatian, or Nigerian armed forces as the actions of thugs or gangsters, if they describe the use of rape as a weapon in war, that is all OK, fine political judgements, but if you do exactly the same against Serbian armed forces, you are immediately condemning the whole “Serb people” as thugs, gangsters and rapists. How utterly sick.
As András Riedlmayer notes
(http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0702&L=justwatch-l&D=1&O=D&P=63185):
“Many news reports, both in Serbia and abroad, are treating as completely synonymous the terms government, state, nation, people... and are thus claiming that if the ICJ rules for the plaintiffs in the case, an entire people will be judged genocidal.”
For example, he quotes Associated Press (Arthur Max, ‘World Court to deliver momentous ruling whether Serbia responsible for genocide’, February 23, 2007):
“THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Can a state commit genocide? Should an entire
nation -- not just its presidents, generals, and soldiers -- be held responsible for humanity's worst crime?”
Riedlmayer continues:
“That is pernicious nonsense. A state, like any governmental body, can be sued for malfeasance. Thus, to give an everyday example, a municipality can be sued for discrimination in employment. A court that finds the municipality guilty of those allegations does not thereby brand every resident of that municipality as a bigot. And even if the municipal administration that engaged in those illegal acts has been turned out of office by the citizens of that municipality before the case comes to judgement, the municipality as a corporate entity will still be liable to pay any compensation ordered by the court.”
Such “pernicious nonsense” is an outrageous straw argument coming from those who have no arguments. When the ICJ ruled against the US for its support for the contras and mining of Nicaraguan harbours in the 1980’s, this was not a ruling that found “the entire American people” guilty of these crimes, but the US ruling class and its regime in power.
Interestingly, for those who stress the “demonisation” issue, and for those left-liberals who think Bosnia was just a "civil war" where "all sides were guilty", where "all sides commit atrocities" (you know, like "both sides" do in Israel/Palestine, "all sides" in Iraq, "both Turks and Kurds", "all sides" in Indonesia, both “Catholics and Protestants” in Ireland etc), then this ruling, far from reducing “demonisation”, actually reinforces the potential for it in one sense. Because if it was not the fact that it was the Serbian regime - ie, the inheritor of what had been previously the Yugoslav military - the fourth most powerful military in Europe - via direct support, control, arming and financing of the BSA/RS, that allowed such an absolute superiority of the Bosnian Serb Army and para-state over the Bosnian Muslim, Croat and multiethnic populations, that allowed the BSA to actually commit genocide as agreed by the ICJ, then how did it happen so easily? By absolving Milosevic and neighbouring Serbian regime, the ICJ ruling actually throws back all the blame for "genocide" onto the Bosnian Serb rulers. And of course there is no doubt that the Bosnian Serb rulers are guilty as hell. But if this was a mere "civil war" without Belgrade's direction, then the Bosnian Serbs must have been extremely vicious, as a numerical minority in Bosnia, to achieve such unrivalled mastery and be able to impose such terror. “Maybe they really are very bad, warlike, cruel, brutal people after all,” is one possible conclusion from the ICJ ruling absolving the role of the neighbouring regime that had the absolute military superiority throughout the region. It would be exactly the same as if the pro-Indonesian Timorese militias in 1999 that killed 1-2000 Timorese did it all by themselves and their success had nothing to do with the enormous superiority in the region of the Indonesian army (I suppose I’d better not go on and call the killing of 1-2000 Timorese "genocide" since the killing of 100,000 Bosnians isn't genocide according to some of "the left" who might correct me ...)
Republika Srpska: A “state” founded on genocide and legalized by imperialism
This also leads to another political issue: by agreeing that genocide has been committed in Srebrenica, the ICJ calls into question the very existence of Republika Srpska, since this means that it was a state created by genocide (which, outside of legalese, is completely true). However, since it was only in Srebrenica and not in the rest of Bosnia, perhaps RS can argue the opposite. If it was only built on ethnic cleansing, and not genocide, then perhaps that is not too bad. Perhaps they just have to give back Srebrenica. But on the other hand again, since Serbia itself is absolved from “genocide,” since outside intervention wasn’t a factor, this actually makes the leaders of RS more guilty of genocide themselves, thus again swinging the argument against the right of RS to exist.
Haris Silajdzic, Bosniak member of Bosnia's tripartite state Presidency, claimed that the ICJ's ruling should mark the beginning of a process to erase results of genocide in Bosnia."Results of the genocide should be annulled with a new constitution to create a democratic system in accordance with Bosnia's multiethnic society as it was before the genocide." He said the current Bosnian constitution, which created two entities, the Srpska Republic and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, was based on ethno-territorial principles and genocide, and must be dismissed as such. "Bosnia-Herzegovina must therefore purge itself of the remnants of the genocide that permeates throughout Bosnian society. We will achieve this by altering what has been founded on the genocide's outcome — the interior structure of Bosnia and its constitution," Silajdzic said.
Needless to say, that is not likely to happen. At present it is extremely unrealistic, without a much deeper process of reconciliation. As Peter Lippman, a long time supporter of Bosnia, comments, “The ICJ decision, increasing the anger on the side of victims and exonerating the guilty, doesn't help any of this.”
But another reason it won’t happen is that it is not the program of the “international community”, ie the imperialist powers, who legalized RS in all their Bosnian partition “peace plans” between 1992 and 1995, ending with the US-imposed Dayton Accord which split Bosnia in two and rewarded the genocidaires.
And the issue of what the big powers want is probably not irrelevant; the idea that politics is completely divorced from legal judgments is illusory. Again quoting Martin Shaw:
“There must be a suspicion that the court is paying some attention to the political situation in and around Serbia, where the Radical Party (headed by indicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj) remains a formidable force, and the prospect of conditional independence for Kosovo is making for renewed turbulence. It is true that a tougher verdict would have exacerbated these short-term problems in Serbia, making it more difficult for the European Union to incorporate it peacefully into the fold. But this would hardly be a reason to deny justice - one must hope that this, at least, was not behind the ICJ's timid verdict.”
In any case, since it has been ruled that genocide did occur in Srebrenica, victims of the genocide there are seeking proclamation of Srebrenica and Zepa as special political districts, which would secede from RS. Prior to the conflicts of the 1990s, Srebrenica's population (like much of east Bosnia) was over 75% Muslim, while Serbs constituted just over 22%. Today, however, it is mostly a Serb town. On March 12, 2007, a gathering took place in Srebrenica to discuss demands by several hundred Muslim returnees, and the Bosniak members of the municipal assembly, that the town be given special status. Ambassadors from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya and the Palestinian Authority came, along with a number of Bosnian politicians including the Muslim and Croat members of the Bosnian state presidency, Haris Silajdzic and Zeljko Komsic, who supported their demands. Participants concluded that state and entitiy institutions are obliged to make decisions to implement the ICJ verdict. By contrast, the Office of High Representative [OHR] retorted that this was “unconstitutional.” It claimed the call by the Bosniak members of the municipal assembly to secede from RS “exceeded the responsibilities of the municipality” as defined by the RS Constitution, and declared “the OHR is particularly concerned about the threat to unilaterally pass a decision on separation of the Municipality from the RS. If the municipal assembly were to act on this, the High Representative would have no choice but to take robust action.” It would be good to know whether the “anti-imperialist” leftists who claim to oppose imperialist intervention in the Balkans would oppose such “robust” imperialist action against the relatives of Srebrenica genocide victims for declaring their wish to secede from the state responsible for their genocide. We won’t be holding our breath.
Some reactions from Serbian progressives
While some on the western “left” are still shamelessly bleating on that any criticism of the actions of the Serbian regime represents “demonisation of the Serbs” as a whole, from within Serbia many decent people criticised the verdict for exonerating the genocidaires, in the same way as decent people in Australia and the US condemn the crimes of our own ruling classes and regimes.
Biljana Kovacevic Vuco, president of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said the verdict represented “victory for the politics of Slobodan Milosevic, the victory of Ratko Mladic, of Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia’s [ultra-nationalist] Radicals.”The verdict will not help Serbia confront its past, Aleksandar Popov, of the NGO Igman Initative said. “The Srebrenica verdict is only symbolic and does not give the complete picture of Serbia's role in the wars of the last decade,” Popov said.The head of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, Andrej Nosov, said he hoped the verdict would mean Serbia could no longer deny it had nothing to do with events in Srebrenica. “The verdict opens a moral question about what Serbia could have done to prevent genocide in Bosnia,” Nosov said. “Regardless of the verdict, Serbia has an obligation to tell the whole truth about the victims and give them justice and reparations,” he added.The president of Vojvodina’s Social Democratic League, Nenad Canak, condemned the ICJ verdict. “Let Bosnia's blood and ashes rest on the hands of all those who made such a judgment,” he said. “The only thing I can say is to remind you of the words of Primo Levi written on a wall in Dachau. 'The man who denies Auschwitz is the same one who is ready to repeat it'.”
Real role of the “international community” in Bosnia
Many of the allegedly “left” reactions to this judgement reflect the very incorrect view that these people adopted towards the entire Yugoslav conflict, ignoring what actually happened, with a preference for statements of pure metaphysics, such as the idea that imperialism “broke up Yugoslavia” or “intervened against the Serbs.” This article is not the place to go into refuting this kind of metaphysics, which I have done extensively elsewhere, but the following excerpt from an article on the ICJ judgement by Edina Becirevic, a senior lecturer at the University of Sarajevo’s Faculty of Criminal Justice Sciences, includes a brief but very correct and relevant summary of the actual role of the “international community” in the war in Bosnia. It ends with the birth of imperialist recognition of RS, the state born of genocide, which seems an appropriate place to conclude this essay:
“In the Bosnian war, the international community stood by and watched as Serbia unleashed aggression against the country’s non-Serb population. Governments worldwide ignored the concentration camps, genocidal rape, mass murders of non-Serbs, destruction of cultural monuments, sieges of cities and intentional starvation of civilians - in short, they pretended not to recognise genocide.
“Instead, they chose to call it a civil war and deemed the actions of the VRS and paramilitaries by the euphemistic term “ethnic cleansing”. In doing so, they justified their failure to defend the rules imposed on the world’s governments by the Genocide Convention of 1951 - which outlaws the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group “in whole or in part”.
“In those difficult days, the Bosnian government realised that the world was divided into two. There was the world of dominant western politics, with respect for military power, and then there was the world of civil society that saw the genocide in Bosnia for what it was. For a long time, these different perspectives gave the late Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic a schizophrenic profile in the eyes of the world - some regarded him as the guarantor of a stable Balkans, while others saw him as a war criminal.
“One question that has puzzled many is, “Why did the Bosnian government bring genocide charges against Serbia and Montenegro to the ICJ in 1993?” By that time, hadn’t they lost faith in the international community and the idea of justice? Or had they decided to look for it in a place where moral values should be preserved? In bringing the lawsuit, Bosnia moved its appeal for action to be taken against Serbia from the Security Council to the International Court of Justice, from the politicians to the judges. In doing so, it hoped to remind the Security Council of its obligation under the genocide convention, and to give them legal justification to use international forces.
“Faced with the prospect of the destruction of its people, the only option left for the Bosnian government was to trust the court. It had faith that its judges would preserve the values seemingly abandoned by politicians.
“According to the United Nations, the simmering conflict in Bosnia was a civil war and ethnic cleansing, and therefore the international community was under no obligation to intervene. But in July 1995, this ethnic cleansing intensified, as Bosnian Serb forces killed thousands of Bosniaks in the UN enclave of Srebrenica in a matter of days. The scale of the Srebrenica massacre, coupled with the fact that UN troops had failed to protect them, forced the international community to begin military intervention.
“Against all principles of international law, the perpetrators of the genocide were subsequently rewarded for their crime with half of the territory of Bosnia, after the formal establishment of Bosnian Serb entity Republika Srpska, RS, which continues to exist today.”
(from ‘ICJ JUDGMENT SIGNIFICANT DESPITE FLAWS’, by Edina Becirevic, from IWPR, Tribunal Update, No. 491, March 4, 2007)
Appendix: The dissenting opinion of the ICJ vice president Al-Khasawneh
It is worth also reading the dissenting opinion of the vice-president of the ICJ, Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh, which makes a great number of important points. Below are some notable excerpts; his entire statement can be read at:
http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm
Beginning of excerpt:
Serbia’s international responsibility incurred as a consequence of its involvement as a principal actor or an accomplice in the genocide that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Such involvement is supported, in my opinion, by massive and compelling evidence … the involvement or implication of the FRY in the genocide that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s was both more serious in nature and more extensive in territorial scope than the mere failure to prevent genocide in Srebrenica conveys.
… This implies that the charge that genocide took place also in other parts of Bosnia and
Herzegovina and that the FRY was responsible not only for its failure to prevent genocide but for
being actively involved in it either as a principal or alternatively as an accomplice or by way of
conspiracy or incitement would in all probability have been proven had the Court not adopted the
methodology discussed below
In the first place, the Court was alerted by the Applicant to the existence of “redacted” sections of documents of the Supreme Defence Council of the Respondent. Regrettably, the Court failed to act although, under Article 49 of its Statue, it has the power to do so. It is a reasonable expectation that those documents would have shed light on the central questions of intent and
attributability. The reasoning given by the Court in paragraph 206 of the Judgment, “[o]n this
matter, the Court observes that the Applicant has extensive documentation and other evidence
available to it, especially from the readily accessible ICTY records . . .”, is worse than its failure to act.
The Court first considers whether the ‘Strategic Goals of the Serbian People in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (2) evidence genocidal intent, but concludes that the goals “were capable of being
achieved by the displacement of the population and by territory being acquired” (Judgment,
paragraph 372). The Court further notes that the motive of creating a Greater Serbia “did not
necessarily require the destruction of the Bosnian Muslims and other communities, but their
expulsion” (ibid.). The Court essentially ignores the facts and substitutes its own assessment of
how the Bosnian Serbs could have hypothetically best achieved their macabre Strategic Goals
The Applicant is asking the Court to look at the pattern of conduct and draw the logically necessary inferences. The jurisprudence of the international criminal tribunals on this point is less amenable to artificial distinctions between the intent relevant to genocide and that relevant to ethnic cleansing than the Court. The Appeal Chamber in Krstić has clearly held that the pattern of conduct known as ethnic cleansing may be relied on as evidence of the mens rea of genocide. Coupled with population transfers, what other inference is there to draw from the
overwhelming evidence of massive killings systematically targeting the Bosnian Muslims than
genocidal intent? If the only objective was to move the Muslim population, and the Court is
willing to assume that the Bosnian Serbs did only that which is strictly necessary in order to
achieve this objective, then what to make of the mass murder?
The second argument the Court relies on bears on the conduct of the ICTY’s Prosecutor and the Tribunal’s jurisprudence on genocide. The Court rejects the Applicant’s argument that the
pattern of atrocities committed over many communities demonstrates the necessary intent because it “is not consistent with the findings of the ICTY relating to genocide or with the actions of the Prosecutor, including decisions not to charge genocide offences in possibly relevant indictments, and to enter into plea agreements” (Judgment, paragraph 374). That the ICTY has not found genocide based on patterns of conduct in the whole of Bosnia is of course not in the least surprising. The Tribunal only has jurisdiction to judge the individual criminal liability of particular persons accused before it, and the relevant evidence will therefore be limited to the sphere of operations of the accused.
Fourthly, genocide is definitionally a complex crime in the sense that unlike homicide it takes time to achieve, requires repetitiveness, and is committed by many persons and organs acting
in concert. As such, it cannot be appreciated in a disconnected manner. Unfortunately, there are
instances in the Judgment where this happens, including on crucial issues such as FRY
responsibility for the genocide at Srebrenica.
Belgrade’s knowledge of the more general operations in Srebrenica - those geared toward “taking the town” - is amply established. In addition, Carl Bildt (European negotiator) met twice with President Milošević and General Mladić together in the midst of the takeover of Srebrenica and the subsequent massacre. It is also accepted that General Mladić’s promotion to the rank of Colonel General was handled in Belgrade, and the Respondent’s claim that this last part was no more than some administrative confirmation of a decision made in Pale is unconvincing. The Secretary-General’s report on the fall of Srebrenica relates that Mr. Bildt was joined in his
meeting with President Milošević on 14 July by General Mladić - which is the period during
which the Court determined that the decision to eliminate physically the whole of the adult male
population of the Muslim community of Srebrenica was taken (Judgment, paragraph 423).
An even more disturbing feature in the Court’s reasoning is evident in its treatment of the Serbian paramilitary units known as the “Scorpions” (Judgment, paragraphs 289, 389 and 395). Thus, paragraph 389 of the Judgment considers two documents presented by the Applicant, in which there is reference to the “Scorpions” as “MUP of Serbia” and a “unit of Ministry of Interiors of Serbia”. The paragraph notes that the authenticity of the documents was disputed by the Respondent presumably because “they were copies of intercepts, but not originals”. But it is plain that if the Court insisted on original documents, it would never be able to render any judgments. Be this as it may, the other reason advanced to undermine the importance of these documents is that they are not addressed to Belgrade, the senders being “officials of the police forces of the Republika Srpska”. But this in itself does not deny their probative value. When an official of the Republika Srpska sends a telegram to his superior in which the Scorpions are described as “MUP of Serbia” or “a unit of Ministry of Interiors of Serbia”, there is no reason to doubt the veracity of this statement. Consequently, we have here a case of a unit which had been incorporated into the forces of the Respondent - though the date for that incorporation is in dispute - yet the Court concludes that they are not to be treated as de jure organs of the Respondent in 1995, notwithstanding evidence that they were perceived to be such by the Republika Srpska officials.
Equally surprising is the Court’s treatment of the statement by the Government of Serbia and Montenegro – after Milošević’s fall from power - to the effect that what happened in Srebrenica was not the work of Serbia, but of the ousted régime. This statement was in fact occasioned by the showing, on national and international television, of the shocking images of the brutal execution of six Muslim prisoners in Trnovo, near Srebrenica, by the Scorpions. The Court failed to take account of this closely connected fact in its appreciation of the status of the Scorpions.
Full dissenting statement: http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm
Full text of ICJ judgement (351 pages): http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/idocket/ibhy/ibhyjudgment/ibhy_ijudgment_20070226_frame.htm
Footnotes:
(1) I call ‘Living Marxism’, the main promoter of Serb chauvinist ideology among the left in the 1990s, a “suspicious” group because at a certain point after the end of the 1990s, the entire leadership instantly turned counterrevolutionary overnight, and began working in top jobs for the Economist Intelligence Unit, as consultants for the “war on terror”, as apologists for GM crops and the nuclear industry, in joint campaigns with far-right “libertarians,” you name it, they’re up there. I am afraid I cannot believe that such an instantaneous and en masse conversion can occur in reality. My only conclusion is that they were something other than legitimate before their alleged “turn.”
(2) The Strategic Goals were as follows: (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 (Judgment, paragraph 371)
Monday, March 12, 2007
US green light to Bosnian Serbs to seize Srebrenica: The smoking gun?
US green light to Bosnian Serbs to seize Srebrenica: the smoking gun?
By Michael Karadjis
For years, the role of the United States in conniving with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica has been shrouded in mystery.
When heavily armed Bosnian Serb nationalists seized the town from Dutch United Nations “peace-keepers” in July 1995, along with expelling tens of thousands of Muslims, they led away 8000 men and boys and slaughtered them in captivity, the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II.
Now the ‘smoking gun’ is being uncovered. Then assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke, recently 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, led by indicted war criminals General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.
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 appalling performance by the United Nations and NATO powers – which had thousands of troops all over Bosnia – in refusing to lift a finger to protect the Muslim population of Srebrenica, a UN-designated “safe area,” has long been heavily criticised.
After watching the conquest Srebrenica, the UN and NATO then did the same as Mladic’s henchman overran Zepa, another “safe area,” expelling thousands more people. While the Serb nationalists advanced on Zepa, the UN issued a warning that it would be very upset if they then turned on Gorazde, the last of the three pockets where dispossessed Muslims were still holding out. Muslims had been the majority of the population throughout all of East Bosnia before the massive wave of ethnic cleansing had driven most of them from this region in 1992.
In Gorazde, the Muslims turned on the UN, seized their arms, put up a good fight and kept out the Serb nationalists – who called themselves ‘Chetniks’ after the anti-Communist Serb fighters of World War II who fought against Tito’s Communist ‘Partisans’.
The betrayal of Srebrenica and Zepa was all the worse considering that the UN had forced the local Bosnian militia to hand over its weapons in 1993 in return for “safe area” designation. Meanwhile, throughout the war, the UN and NATO imposed an arms embargo on the whole beleaguered Bosnian Republic.
A number of aspects have long suggested that what was involved was not merely betrayal due to cluelessness, lethargy or not caring, but rather active collusion of top imperialist powers with the Serbian Chetniks and their boss, Milosevic.
The sacking and massacre of Srebrenica was followed soon after by the US-imposed Dayton Accord, which ended the war by accepting the Serb nationalist program of ethnic partition. Bosnia was divided into two halves, a “Serb Republic”, based on recognition of the results of ethnic cleansing, and a “Muslim-Croat federation.” Bosnia’s battle to retain a multi-ethnic character had been defeated.
Significantly, Srebrenica and Zepa, though only just seized and “cleansed” were quietly handed to the Serb Republic, as if nothing had just happened.
The US had been pushing this 50-50 partition of Bosnia since mid-1994, but the Bosnian Serb leadership had put up some objections. While the map already included the whole of cleansed East Bosnia in their “state,” it did not yet include the three remaining Muslim “enclaves.” The Serb nationalists wanted them, and also wanted a widening of the northern “corridor,” which cut through previously Muslim and Croat majority regions to join east Bosnia to the other half of their “state” in the north-west. Both demands were accepted by the US at Dayton.
Meanwhile, Croatia urged its Bosnian Croat satellites to sign on, which meant giving up the ethnic “state” they had also carved out of Bosnia in alliance with the Serb nationalists. They would now have to join it with Bosnian government held regions to form a “Muslim-Croat federation.” The US feared that if both Serbs and Croats had their own “states,” what would remain would be a tiny, landlocked, embittered Muslim state where a million or so ethnically cleansed Muslims would form a “Gaza in Europe” with all its attendant instability. Croatia would be entrusted by the US and Europe to police the Muslims.
In exchange for dropping the Bosnian Croat “state,” Croatian leader Franco Tudjman wanted the end of the “Serb Republic of Krajina,” about a third of Croatian territory which had been conquered and cleansed of hundreds of thousands of Croats in 1991.
What both the Serb-held Krajina and the Muslim enclaves in East Bosnia had in common was that they were odd bits of ethnic territory sticking out in the wrong places: East Bosnia, despite its Muslim majority, was near Serbia’s border, while Krajina, despite its Serb majority, was the furthest part of Croatia from Serbia.
To enhance the stability of the Milosevic-Tudjman deal to divide the region between them, the US tended to agree that the map needed some “tidying up” to reduce its ethnic “messiness.” The fact that the US gave the green light to Tudjman to seize the Krajina in August 1995, driving out its entire 150,000 strong Serb population, is well-documented.
Milosevic also gave Tudjman the green light, having little need for an economically useless piece of rugged land far from the consolidated chunk of “smaller Greater Serbia” he was being offered.
But till now little light has been shone on this US green light to Milosevic, and to the Bosnian Serb Chetniks, to seize Srebrenica and Zepa.
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.”
By Michael Karadjis
For years, the role of the United States in conniving with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica has been shrouded in mystery.
When heavily armed Bosnian Serb nationalists seized the town from Dutch United Nations “peace-keepers” in July 1995, along with expelling tens of thousands of Muslims, they led away 8000 men and boys and slaughtered them in captivity, the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II.
Now the ‘smoking gun’ is being uncovered. Then assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke, recently 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, led by indicted war criminals General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.
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 appalling performance by the United Nations and NATO powers – which had thousands of troops all over Bosnia – in refusing to lift a finger to protect the Muslim population of Srebrenica, a UN-designated “safe area,” has long been heavily criticised.
After watching the conquest Srebrenica, the UN and NATO then did the same as Mladic’s henchman overran Zepa, another “safe area,” expelling thousands more people. While the Serb nationalists advanced on Zepa, the UN issued a warning that it would be very upset if they then turned on Gorazde, the last of the three pockets where dispossessed Muslims were still holding out. Muslims had been the majority of the population throughout all of East Bosnia before the massive wave of ethnic cleansing had driven most of them from this region in 1992.
In Gorazde, the Muslims turned on the UN, seized their arms, put up a good fight and kept out the Serb nationalists – who called themselves ‘Chetniks’ after the anti-Communist Serb fighters of World War II who fought against Tito’s Communist ‘Partisans’.
The betrayal of Srebrenica and Zepa was all the worse considering that the UN had forced the local Bosnian militia to hand over its weapons in 1993 in return for “safe area” designation. Meanwhile, throughout the war, the UN and NATO imposed an arms embargo on the whole beleaguered Bosnian Republic.
A number of aspects have long suggested that what was involved was not merely betrayal due to cluelessness, lethargy or not caring, but rather active collusion of top imperialist powers with the Serbian Chetniks and their boss, Milosevic.
The sacking and massacre of Srebrenica was followed soon after by the US-imposed Dayton Accord, which ended the war by accepting the Serb nationalist program of ethnic partition. Bosnia was divided into two halves, a “Serb Republic”, based on recognition of the results of ethnic cleansing, and a “Muslim-Croat federation.” Bosnia’s battle to retain a multi-ethnic character had been defeated.
Significantly, Srebrenica and Zepa, though only just seized and “cleansed” were quietly handed to the Serb Republic, as if nothing had just happened.
The US had been pushing this 50-50 partition of Bosnia since mid-1994, but the Bosnian Serb leadership had put up some objections. While the map already included the whole of cleansed East Bosnia in their “state,” it did not yet include the three remaining Muslim “enclaves.” The Serb nationalists wanted them, and also wanted a widening of the northern “corridor,” which cut through previously Muslim and Croat majority regions to join east Bosnia to the other half of their “state” in the north-west. Both demands were accepted by the US at Dayton.
Meanwhile, Croatia urged its Bosnian Croat satellites to sign on, which meant giving up the ethnic “state” they had also carved out of Bosnia in alliance with the Serb nationalists. They would now have to join it with Bosnian government held regions to form a “Muslim-Croat federation.” The US feared that if both Serbs and Croats had their own “states,” what would remain would be a tiny, landlocked, embittered Muslim state where a million or so ethnically cleansed Muslims would form a “Gaza in Europe” with all its attendant instability. Croatia would be entrusted by the US and Europe to police the Muslims.
In exchange for dropping the Bosnian Croat “state,” Croatian leader Franco Tudjman wanted the end of the “Serb Republic of Krajina,” about a third of Croatian territory which had been conquered and cleansed of hundreds of thousands of Croats in 1991.
What both the Serb-held Krajina and the Muslim enclaves in East Bosnia had in common was that they were odd bits of ethnic territory sticking out in the wrong places: East Bosnia, despite its Muslim majority, was near Serbia’s border, while Krajina, despite its Serb majority, was the furthest part of Croatia from Serbia.
To enhance the stability of the Milosevic-Tudjman deal to divide the region between them, the US tended to agree that the map needed some “tidying up” to reduce its ethnic “messiness.” The fact that the US gave the green light to Tudjman to seize the Krajina in August 1995, driving out its entire 150,000 strong Serb population, is well-documented.
Milosevic also gave Tudjman the green light, having little need for an economically useless piece of rugged land far from the consolidated chunk of “smaller Greater Serbia” he was being offered.
But till now little light has been shone on this US green light to Milosevic, and to the Bosnian Serb Chetniks, to seize Srebrenica and Zepa.
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.”
Kosova: Unofficial Independence, Unofficial Partition and Official Colonial Rule
Kosova: Unofficial Independence, Unofficial Partition and Official Colonial Rule
By Michael Karadjis
The eight years that the Kosova people have waited for the same right to independence allowed to other peoples of the former Yugoslavia some 15 years ago have finally reached … anti-climax.
Attempting to please everyone – the 90 percent Albanian majority, the anxious Serb minority, the former occupation power, Serbia, and the current western occupiers – the UN envoy, former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, created a new entity in international affairs.
On February 26, following months of negotiations between Serb and Albanian parties, Ahtisaari outlined the concept of a country that could join international organizations, have its own governing institutions and symbols of state, but was not independent.
Leading up to this proposal, the most common names given to this concept were “conditional independence” or “independence without sovereignty.” Yet in the final proposal, the word “independence,” even with a qualifier, was gone.
The “high representative” appointed by the UN since 1999 to have final say over decisions made by Kosovar bodies will go – and be replaced by one appointed by the European Union. A new internationally-appointed police force will hold sway over the local police, and the NATO troops that have occupied Kosova since 1999 will remain.
The Kosova Protection Corps – the unarmed civil emergency and reconstruction corps which gathered many former members of the Kosova Liberation Army (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).
Meanwhile, a ‘decentralisation’ plan will give increased powers for ‘municipalities’, many of them ethnic-based. Some ten new Serb-majority municipalities will be formed. These will have self-government, 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 percent of Kosova. Mitrovica already has its own Serbian university, hospital, school system, currency, police, and paramilitary “bridge-watchers,” who prevent Albanians from southern Mitrovica from crossing the bridge over the Ibar river.
This northern region contains the massive Trepca mining and metallurgy complex, allegedly worth some 5 billion dollars.
In addition, the many grand Serbian Orthodox monasteries, some dating back to medieval times, will be enclosed by protective zones, barred to members of the Albanian majority.
The central government will continue to include fixed numbers of delegates of the Serb and other minorities, and similar quotas apply to the police force. Serbs currently are allotted 20 of the 120 seats in the Kosova parliament, though only a few accept them. Some 15 percent of the Kosova Police Service consists of minority recruits. Both Albanian and Serb will be official languages, and the new national symbols, including a flag, seal and anthem, must “reflect its multi-ethnic character.”
Ahtisaari now says the question of status must be decided upon by the UN Security Council. The current plan is the blueprint on which such a vote will be based. It is likely the UNSC may vote to accept an “independent” Kosova, with all the above trappings. If not, there remains the possibility of Kosova declaring independence unilaterally.
Kosova in Yugoslavia: A republic but not a republic
While Serbia believes Kosova is still part of its territory, and any form of independence is a violation of its sovereignty, most western governments now recognize the reality that if Kosova were ever returned to Serbian rule, the unanimous and absolute hostility of the Albanian majority would re-ignite armed resistance.
However, to understand why such complex arrangements are seen as necessary by the “international community,” we have had to wade through much confusion in the media. Most commentary accepts that Kosova is Serbian territory, and that while independence may be the only realistic option, it opens a pandora’s box of claims by ethnic minorities for independent states.
As socialists, we have no problem of Kosova independence fuelling independence movements of other oppressed peoples, such as the Basques, Irish, Chechens or Kurds, or less recognized groups. However, this constant repetition obscures the fact that Kosova was never simply “a province” or “an autonomous region” of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia. While Kosova was not a full Yugoslav “republic” (like Serbia, Croatia etc), its status of “high level autonomous province” of Serbia was complemented by also being a direct member of the Yugoslav federation, with its own representative on the 8-member Yugoslav presidency, equal to the republics, its own central bank and territorial defense force and similar attributes of republics.
The Albanians were never satisfied with even this situation, as being a republic in all but name still indicated inequality. Being by far the poorest region of Yugoslavia, and the least represented in the bureaucracy and military officialdom, made this worse.
In fact, Albanians never had any choice in being subjected to Serbian rule – either originally, when capitalist Serbia conquered the region in 1913, or in 1945, when Communist leader Broz Tito had promised them a republic but later backtracked. Tito did this to prevent opposition from Serbian nationalists – who nevertheless hated Tito for granting such a high level of autonomy for Kosova.
This delicate compromise stood on tenterhooks. As “market socialism” evolved after Tito’s death into capitalist restoration, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1989 revoked Kosovar autonomy and suppressed its parliament, as he rode the wave of rising Serbian nationalism, the ideological expression of the new Serbian bourgeoisie.
Along with the sacking of the entire Albanian public-employed workforce, the brutal suppression of the Albanian miners’ strike with 24 deaths, and the enforcing of a Serbian educational curriculum, the Yugoslav constitution was abolished and the compromise collapsed. In this constitutional limbo, in 1990 the Kosova underground parliament carried out an independence referendum, carried by 99 percent of the population.
The ignoring of Kosova’s pleas for independence by western powers as Yugoslavia unraveled in 1991-92 set the stage for bloody confrontation. Following a decade of “Ghandian” resistance against this imposed apartheid, the collapse of the Albanian state in 1997 allowed a flow of looted arms into Kosova. The KLA began an armed struggle, which by early 1999 threatened to seize independence in a revolutionary manner.
Fearful of the consequences and aiming to impose its own diktat on the region, the US led NATO into a brutal air war against Serbia in 1999. Milosevic reacted by attempting to expel the entire population. Some 850,000 Albanians were forced across borders into refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia, posing an even worse descent into regional instability, in this case embarrassingly brought about by NATO action.
With Serbia’s surrender, Albanian refugees returned to their wrecked country, where 100,000 homes had been destroyed. As thousands of Serbian police and officials fled, thousands more Serb civilians fled with them, fearful of revenge once majority rule was established. Many more later fled the often brutal Albanian reprisal attacks. The half the Serb population which remained gathered into a number of major clusters.
After 1999: Both part of and not part of ‘Yugoslavia’
The UN imposed a “high representative” to run the province, which was occupied by tens of thousands of NATO troops. The UN resolution ending the war declared Kosova to be still part of the long-dead state ‘Yugoslavia’, ie, Serbia. Kosova’s status was left in limbo for 8 years, making it impossible to get development credits, or much investment, to restart the economy, leading to 60-70 percent unemployment.
The main justification for the foreign presence was to “protect the Serb minority.” Given the enormity of what happened outside their control in 1999, Serb civilians certainly did deserve protection. The problem was that this task was combined with that of denying the majority population its right to independence, creating growing Albanian hostility to the bloated foreign presence. Thus it was precisely the denial of independence, or any road towards it, that intensified Albanian ethnic radicalization. The fact that the leaders of the Serb minority acted as Belgrade’s tool in opposing the majority’s right to independence reinforced the anti-Serb bias of this radicalization. Meanwhile, spread thin to prevent the natives running their own country, the international forces were not very effective in protecting the minority when attacks did occur.
In 2003, the UN announced “standards before status,” whereby the Kosovars would be judged in carrying out eight major standards, mostly related to the Serb minority, before status would even be considered; even then there was no suggestion that status meant independence. This new colonialism backfired in March 2004, when unemployed Albanian gangs launched brutal attacks on Serbs, leaving 11 Albanians and 8 Serbs dead, while also attacking the occupation forces, destroying 72 UN vehicles.
However, there have been very few ethnic attacks in the years since then. This is partly due to a shift from “standards before status” to “standards with status” as the UN began to understand the problem. That is why the clarity of independence, the recognition of equality with other nations, is so important. The great powers have no more right to be judging the country’s every move than to be running other countries in the region, all of which have human rights issues.
Nevertheless, given that the Albanian leadership was unable until recent years to stem revenge violence, the desire of the minorities for large scale autonomy, including links to Belgrade, is understandable. Belgrade will likely use it to create a state within a state, but if so, the Albanian leadership has partly itself to blame, though most blame falls on the international occupation. However, the majority will not look very favourably on wide autonomous arrangements if their own right – to complete independence – is frustrated.
‘Not quite independence’ to evolve into … not quite independence
The international presence to enforce “standards” will coalesce with the long-term process of negotiations for EU membership. As all the former Yugoslav states are involved in this process, the idea is that “conditional independence” will never become full independence, but will eventually evolve into equal EU membership. As Serbia will be ahead of Kosova in the EU, it will hold a veto over membership, but Kosovar EU membership will reunite the two.
While much of this is aimed at consoling the Serbian bourgeoisie, following such a blow to the nationalism that it built its post-communist order on, western control also allows control of the privatization process. In 1997, Milosevic put the whole of Kosova up for sale. However, the underground Kosova assembly declared that any foreign companies buying in would be treated as “neo-colonialists.” Given the lack of independence and the desperate need for money and to get the economy rolling, Kosovar leaders in the last few years have had to accept bargain prices for the sale of the country’s assets.
Ironically, despite the humiliation of Serbian nationalism, the denial of Kosovar independence has been a boon for Serbian capital. With no economy of their own, every week, Albanians fill their shopping baskets with every conceivable kind of goods from Serbia. While Serbia exported 108 million euro worth of goods to Kosova in first nine months of 2003, Kosova’s exports to Serbia were worth only 3.5 million euro. This is the same relationship that Serbia and Croatia have to Bosnia – the other country “saved” by the “international community” with a similar colonial protectorate. Former Yugoslavia has been replaced by an imperialist-controlled region where the three strongest local bourgeoisie’s – those of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia – are the same states that once dominated Yugoslavia.
By Michael Karadjis
The eight years that the Kosova people have waited for the same right to independence allowed to other peoples of the former Yugoslavia some 15 years ago have finally reached … anti-climax.
Attempting to please everyone – the 90 percent Albanian majority, the anxious Serb minority, the former occupation power, Serbia, and the current western occupiers – the UN envoy, former Finnish president, Martti Ahtisaari, created a new entity in international affairs.
On February 26, following months of negotiations between Serb and Albanian parties, Ahtisaari outlined the concept of a country that could join international organizations, have its own governing institutions and symbols of state, but was not independent.
Leading up to this proposal, the most common names given to this concept were “conditional independence” or “independence without sovereignty.” Yet in the final proposal, the word “independence,” even with a qualifier, was gone.
The “high representative” appointed by the UN since 1999 to have final say over decisions made by Kosovar bodies will go – and be replaced by one appointed by the European Union. A new internationally-appointed police force will hold sway over the local police, and the NATO troops that have occupied Kosova since 1999 will remain.
The Kosova Protection Corps – the unarmed civil emergency and reconstruction corps which gathered many former members of the Kosova Liberation Army (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).
Meanwhile, a ‘decentralisation’ plan will give increased powers for ‘municipalities’, many of them ethnic-based. Some ten new Serb-majority municipalities will be formed. These will have self-government, 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 percent of Kosova. Mitrovica already has its own Serbian university, hospital, school system, currency, police, and paramilitary “bridge-watchers,” who prevent Albanians from southern Mitrovica from crossing the bridge over the Ibar river.
This northern region contains the massive Trepca mining and metallurgy complex, allegedly worth some 5 billion dollars.
In addition, the many grand Serbian Orthodox monasteries, some dating back to medieval times, will be enclosed by protective zones, barred to members of the Albanian majority.
The central government will continue to include fixed numbers of delegates of the Serb and other minorities, and similar quotas apply to the police force. Serbs currently are allotted 20 of the 120 seats in the Kosova parliament, though only a few accept them. Some 15 percent of the Kosova Police Service consists of minority recruits. Both Albanian and Serb will be official languages, and the new national symbols, including a flag, seal and anthem, must “reflect its multi-ethnic character.”
Ahtisaari now says the question of status must be decided upon by the UN Security Council. The current plan is the blueprint on which such a vote will be based. It is likely the UNSC may vote to accept an “independent” Kosova, with all the above trappings. If not, there remains the possibility of Kosova declaring independence unilaterally.
Kosova in Yugoslavia: A republic but not a republic
While Serbia believes Kosova is still part of its territory, and any form of independence is a violation of its sovereignty, most western governments now recognize the reality that if Kosova were ever returned to Serbian rule, the unanimous and absolute hostility of the Albanian majority would re-ignite armed resistance.
However, to understand why such complex arrangements are seen as necessary by the “international community,” we have had to wade through much confusion in the media. Most commentary accepts that Kosova is Serbian territory, and that while independence may be the only realistic option, it opens a pandora’s box of claims by ethnic minorities for independent states.
As socialists, we have no problem of Kosova independence fuelling independence movements of other oppressed peoples, such as the Basques, Irish, Chechens or Kurds, or less recognized groups. However, this constant repetition obscures the fact that Kosova was never simply “a province” or “an autonomous region” of Serbia in the former Yugoslavia. While Kosova was not a full Yugoslav “republic” (like Serbia, Croatia etc), its status of “high level autonomous province” of Serbia was complemented by also being a direct member of the Yugoslav federation, with its own representative on the 8-member Yugoslav presidency, equal to the republics, its own central bank and territorial defense force and similar attributes of republics.
The Albanians were never satisfied with even this situation, as being a republic in all but name still indicated inequality. Being by far the poorest region of Yugoslavia, and the least represented in the bureaucracy and military officialdom, made this worse.
In fact, Albanians never had any choice in being subjected to Serbian rule – either originally, when capitalist Serbia conquered the region in 1913, or in 1945, when Communist leader Broz Tito had promised them a republic but later backtracked. Tito did this to prevent opposition from Serbian nationalists – who nevertheless hated Tito for granting such a high level of autonomy for Kosova.
This delicate compromise stood on tenterhooks. As “market socialism” evolved after Tito’s death into capitalist restoration, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1989 revoked Kosovar autonomy and suppressed its parliament, as he rode the wave of rising Serbian nationalism, the ideological expression of the new Serbian bourgeoisie.
Along with the sacking of the entire Albanian public-employed workforce, the brutal suppression of the Albanian miners’ strike with 24 deaths, and the enforcing of a Serbian educational curriculum, the Yugoslav constitution was abolished and the compromise collapsed. In this constitutional limbo, in 1990 the Kosova underground parliament carried out an independence referendum, carried by 99 percent of the population.
The ignoring of Kosova’s pleas for independence by western powers as Yugoslavia unraveled in 1991-92 set the stage for bloody confrontation. Following a decade of “Ghandian” resistance against this imposed apartheid, the collapse of the Albanian state in 1997 allowed a flow of looted arms into Kosova. The KLA began an armed struggle, which by early 1999 threatened to seize independence in a revolutionary manner.
Fearful of the consequences and aiming to impose its own diktat on the region, the US led NATO into a brutal air war against Serbia in 1999. Milosevic reacted by attempting to expel the entire population. Some 850,000 Albanians were forced across borders into refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia, posing an even worse descent into regional instability, in this case embarrassingly brought about by NATO action.
With Serbia’s surrender, Albanian refugees returned to their wrecked country, where 100,000 homes had been destroyed. As thousands of Serbian police and officials fled, thousands more Serb civilians fled with them, fearful of revenge once majority rule was established. Many more later fled the often brutal Albanian reprisal attacks. The half the Serb population which remained gathered into a number of major clusters.
After 1999: Both part of and not part of ‘Yugoslavia’
The UN imposed a “high representative” to run the province, which was occupied by tens of thousands of NATO troops. The UN resolution ending the war declared Kosova to be still part of the long-dead state ‘Yugoslavia’, ie, Serbia. Kosova’s status was left in limbo for 8 years, making it impossible to get development credits, or much investment, to restart the economy, leading to 60-70 percent unemployment.
The main justification for the foreign presence was to “protect the Serb minority.” Given the enormity of what happened outside their control in 1999, Serb civilians certainly did deserve protection. The problem was that this task was combined with that of denying the majority population its right to independence, creating growing Albanian hostility to the bloated foreign presence. Thus it was precisely the denial of independence, or any road towards it, that intensified Albanian ethnic radicalization. The fact that the leaders of the Serb minority acted as Belgrade’s tool in opposing the majority’s right to independence reinforced the anti-Serb bias of this radicalization. Meanwhile, spread thin to prevent the natives running their own country, the international forces were not very effective in protecting the minority when attacks did occur.
In 2003, the UN announced “standards before status,” whereby the Kosovars would be judged in carrying out eight major standards, mostly related to the Serb minority, before status would even be considered; even then there was no suggestion that status meant independence. This new colonialism backfired in March 2004, when unemployed Albanian gangs launched brutal attacks on Serbs, leaving 11 Albanians and 8 Serbs dead, while also attacking the occupation forces, destroying 72 UN vehicles.
However, there have been very few ethnic attacks in the years since then. This is partly due to a shift from “standards before status” to “standards with status” as the UN began to understand the problem. That is why the clarity of independence, the recognition of equality with other nations, is so important. The great powers have no more right to be judging the country’s every move than to be running other countries in the region, all of which have human rights issues.
Nevertheless, given that the Albanian leadership was unable until recent years to stem revenge violence, the desire of the minorities for large scale autonomy, including links to Belgrade, is understandable. Belgrade will likely use it to create a state within a state, but if so, the Albanian leadership has partly itself to blame, though most blame falls on the international occupation. However, the majority will not look very favourably on wide autonomous arrangements if their own right – to complete independence – is frustrated.
‘Not quite independence’ to evolve into … not quite independence
The international presence to enforce “standards” will coalesce with the long-term process of negotiations for EU membership. As all the former Yugoslav states are involved in this process, the idea is that “conditional independence” will never become full independence, but will eventually evolve into equal EU membership. As Serbia will be ahead of Kosova in the EU, it will hold a veto over membership, but Kosovar EU membership will reunite the two.
While much of this is aimed at consoling the Serbian bourgeoisie, following such a blow to the nationalism that it built its post-communist order on, western control also allows control of the privatization process. In 1997, Milosevic put the whole of Kosova up for sale. However, the underground Kosova assembly declared that any foreign companies buying in would be treated as “neo-colonialists.” Given the lack of independence and the desperate need for money and to get the economy rolling, Kosovar leaders in the last few years have had to accept bargain prices for the sale of the country’s assets.
Ironically, despite the humiliation of Serbian nationalism, the denial of Kosovar independence has been a boon for Serbian capital. With no economy of their own, every week, Albanians fill their shopping baskets with every conceivable kind of goods from Serbia. While Serbia exported 108 million euro worth of goods to Kosova in first nine months of 2003, Kosova’s exports to Serbia were worth only 3.5 million euro. This is the same relationship that Serbia and Croatia have to Bosnia – the other country “saved” by the “international community” with a similar colonial protectorate. Former Yugoslavia has been replaced by an imperialist-controlled region where the three strongest local bourgeoisie’s – those of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia – are the same states that once dominated Yugoslavia.