Note: Each article
shown below represents the opinion of the author, and not necessarily of anyone else.
On Serbian
Nationalism
The Balkans is Just Close Enough to Being Europe to Perpetually Fail at
Being Europe Interview with Aleksandar
Hemon. By Bronwyn Jones, February 16, 2020
Interview with Bill
Weinberg Andy Heintz, September 2015 (PDF)
Srebrenica denial just will not die Oliver Kamm,
The Times (London), February 7, 2013
A Letter to Noam Chomsky from a Bosnian Colleague
Midhat Riđanović, October 2011.
Also available
in Bosnian
Worse Than War - Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on
Humanity Daniel Jonah Goldhagen Includes audio interview
with the author. November 9, 2009
Iran
and Leftist Confusion Reese Erlich, ZNet, June 29, 2009
Heads in the sand Ian Williams, February 16, 2008
The Renegade
Charles Simic, New York Review of Books, December 20, 2007
Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia Reviewed by Marko Hoare, July 2007
(PDF)
Edward Said and Kosovo
David Zarnett,
Democratiya, Winter 2007
Chomsky ignores lessons of wars on Kosovo
Peter Hudis, July 2005
The Scholars' Initiative: Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies 2001-2005
Ariel Sharon's support for Milosevic Robert Fisk,
January 2006
Cushman replies
to criticisms of "Anthropology and genocide
in the Balkans" Thomas Cushman, Anthropological Theory, 2005
(PDF)
Anthropology and genocide
in the Balkans Thomas Cushman, Anthropological Theory, 2004
(PDF)
Aristotle in Belgrade Lawrence Weschler, 2004
Political
economy and political reaction: a reply to Kees van der Pijl
Martin
Shaw, 2003
The Balkan Wars and the New World
Dis/Order David Watson,
Fifth Estate, January 2002
Slobo to Expose Western Cynicism Alan
Little, IWPR, June 29, 2001 (Republished September 6, 2005)
Citizen of a Lost Country - An Interview with Bogdan Denitch Danny
Postel, May 14, 2001
FAIR Misrepresents
the Racak Massacre Roger Lippman, April 30, 2001
Reconsidering Rambouillet Alex J. Bellamy, April 2001
NATO
Intervention on Trial: The Legal Case That Was Never Made
By Paul Williams and Michael P. Scharf, Human Rights Review,
2000
Kosovo: The Devil and the Details
Roger Lippman,
Peter Lippman, and David Lippman, October 24, 2000
Mediating Denial
Martin Shaw, June 2000
How Project Censored Joined the Whitewash of Serb Atrocities David Walls May 2, 2000
(Revised for publication in New Politics, Summer 2002)
Empire and
Exterminism David Watson, New Internationalist,
May 2000
Seven Misconceptions about the Organized Atrocities in
Kosovo Michael Sells, April 15, 2000
Left Behind: The American Left and Kosovo Ian Williams,
Human Rights Review, Jan-Feb 2000
Kosovo Fascism,
Albanians' Shame Veton Surroi, Koha Ditore (Pristina),
August 25, 1999
Peace will not come easily to Kosovo Peter
Lippman, Seattle Times, August 13, 1999
Facing Up to Genocide: The Obligation to Intervene, by Holly Burkhalter,
Physicians for Human Rights, August 1999
The Left and Kosovo - Giving Ethnic
Cleansing a Chance (PDF) By Josh Wick and Marla Stone,
Tikkun Magazine, July/August 1999
Kosovo:
The Meaning of Victory By Mark Danner, July 15, 1999
Moving Serbia Towards Democracy U.S.
Institute of Peace, June 21, 1999
Serbia Under
the Threat of Fascism Interview with Bogdan
Bogdanovic, June 18, 1999
Letter to the Washington Free Press (Seattle) Roger Lippman, June 17, 1999
The GOP Right, the Belgrade Lobby, and the Neo-Confederacy Michael Sells, June 14, 1999
Protecting Kosovo's Cultural Treasures Michael Sells, June 1, 1999
You can't negotiate with a war criminal By Ian Williams,
Salon.com, May 27, 1999
What is to Be Done? By Stanley Hoffmann, New York Review of Books, May 20, 1999
Letter to the Serbian Democratic Movement
International Helsinki Federation For Human Rights, May 18, 1999
Before the Deluge: Agani's Last Interview Anthony Borden, IWPR, May 15, 1999
Why Are We In Kosovo?
Susan
Sontag, The New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999
Kosovo and the Left: Serbian Atrocities and U.S. Intervention
Roger Lippman, April 1999
Serbian
aim to kill all Kosovans is nothing new Fintan
O'Toole, Irish Times, April 30, 1999
The Case Against Inaction Bogdan Denitch and Ian Williams, The
Nation, April 26, 1999
The
Balkan Endgame Sonja Biserko, Helsinki Committee for Human
Rights in Serbia. April 24, 1999
The Reason Why Tony
Judt, New York Review of Books, April 22, 1999
The
UN's Surprising Support Ian Williams, Institute for War and
Peace Reporting, April 19, 1999
Wars and the Man William
Finnegan, The New Yorker, April 19, 1999
Kosovo Is Echoed Across The World Wole
Soyinka, The
London Independent, April 19, 1999
U. of Washington scholar's fears of Kosovo problem ignored Seattle Times, April 17, 1999
Against the Double Blackmail
Slavoj Zizek, April 13, 1999
Beyond victimhood?
Lawrence Weschler, The New Yorker, April 12, 1999
Statement on Genocide Holly Burkhalter, Advocacy Director, Physicians for Human Rights. April 9, 1999
Potential wealth plays hidden role in
conflict Carole Hodge, The Scotsman newspaper,
April 7, 1999
Kosovo Disaster Martin Woollacott, The Guardian (U.K.), April 2,
1999
The Amber Bubble of Cold-War Reflexes Andras Riedlmayer, April 1, 1999
Kosovar Conundrum Bogdan Denitch, L.A. Weekly, March 31, 1999
Kosovo Contradictions Anthony Borden, Institute for War and Peace Reporting. February, 1999
Kosovo Crisis Debate Pacifica Radio
KPFK, March 13, 1998
Srdja Popovic: an exiled Yugoslav speaks
Interviewed by Slobodan Drakulic,
Peace Magazine
(Toronto), March-April 1994Articles by
Roger Lippman
Summaries of articles listed
above
On Serbian
Nationalism
The Balkans is Just Close Enough to Being Europe to
Perpetually Fail at Being Europe
Intellectually, culturally, and politically, the Balkans, including its Muslims, is Europe, and
has always been Europe, and will always be Europe,
and the Western European fantasies of political
and intellectual superiority are deeply rooted in
colonialism and racism. But I don't think Europe is
capable of that. It is as wedded to its fantasies of
greatness as America is. Interview
with Aleksandar Hemon. By Bronwyn Jones, Kosovo
2.0, February
16, 2020
Interview with Bill
Weinberg The editor of
World War 4 Report
discusses the Left's responsibility to act in solidarity with victimized
populations. By Andy Heintz, September 2015 (PDF)
Srebrenica denial just will not die You
won’t find Srebrenica denial in any reputable scholarly forum but, like other
conspiracy theories, it spreads on the internet. Its most prominent advocate is
Edward Herman, who has indefatigably denied the established facts of the Srebrenica massacre. By
Oliver Kamm, The Times (London), February 7, 2013
A Letter to Noam Chomsky from a Bosnian Colleague
The writer, a Bosnian linguist, takes issue with the positions Chomsky
has expressed on the Bosnian conflict. By
Midhat Riđanović, October 2011
Also available
in Bosnian
Worse Than War - Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on
Humanity
In this new book, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen does for genocide what
he did from the Holocaust in his first best-seller, “Hitler’s Willing
Executioners.” The author argues that we shouldn’t see genocides as mysterious
aberrations of human behavior but rather as powerful political tools that can be
dealt with through effective political action and policy. To fully understand
and address the issue of genocide, Goldhagen believes we need to tackle the root
causes, beliefs and policies that make mass annihilation of one people by
another acceptable.
Includes audio interview with the author. (Click the arrow to the left of the
article's title.) November 9, 2009
Iran
and Leftist Confusion The writer criticizes those on the Left who
cite the long
history of U.S.
interference in Iran and conclude that the current
unrest there must be sponsored or manipulated by the Empire.
(While this is off-topic, it has an important
parallel to the discussion of those who argue that the overthrow of Milosevic in
Serbia was primarily a US operation.) By Reese Erlich, ZNet, June 29, 2009
Heads in the sand There may be practical
arguments against Kosovo's independence, but citing international law ignores
the genocide committed by Belgrade. By Ian Williams, February 16, 2008
The Renegade Smug in their
ethnocentricity, certain of their own superiority, indifferent to the cultural,
religious, and political concerns of their neighbors, all the Serbs needed in
1990 was a leader to lead them into disaster. The most repellent crimes in the
former Yugoslavia had the enthusiastic support of people whose education and
past accomplishments would lead one to believe that they would know better. The
role of the patriotic intellectual in Serbia was to make excuses for the killers
of women and children. As for journalists and political commentators, their
function was to spread lies and then prove that these lies were true. I was
being asked by my own people to become an accomplice in a crime by pretending to
understand and forgive acts that I knew were unforgivable.
By Charles Simic,
New York Review of Books, December 20, 2007
Flag on the Mountain: A Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia
Today, much of
politics involves battles over symbols and signifiers in which intellectual
rigour is largely abandoned. Ivo Zanic's book Flag on the Mountain: A
Political Anthropology of War in Croatia and Bosnia is a brilliant study of
how motifs drawn from the common post-Ottoman cultural heritage of Serbs,
Croats, and Muslims were manipulated in an often contradictory manner by
politicians and warlords from all three nationalities for the purposes of self-legitimisation
and nationalist mobilisation during the 1990s. Yet it is a study that will be of
wider interest for anyone wishing to understand the politics of symbolism and
the manipulation of ideological heritages.
Reviewed by Marko Hoare, July 2007 (PDF)
Edward Said and Kosovo
The article examines Said's position on NATO's
Kosovo intervention in great detail, discussing issues of broader interest. By
David Zarnett, Democratiya, Winter 2007
Ariel Sharon's support for Milosevic Sharon has made it
clear that there is a similarity between Milosevic's attitude towards Kosovo
and Sharon's attitude towards the Palestinians. -- Robert Fisk, January 2006
Chomsky ignores lessons of wars on Kosovo Review
of Noam Chomsky's book The New Military Humanism, criticizing Chomsky for
not making enough of Milosevic's crimes. -- Peter Hudis, July 2005
The Scholars' Initiative: Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies
[Downloadable chapters, PDF] 2001-2005 An international effort to resolve lingering questions about the decade of wars
in former Yugoslavia. The initiative created
research teams combining reputable scholars from the Balkan region with their
counterparts in the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and
elsewhere. The groups addressed historical flashpoints created by the conflicts,
with the goal of writing a history - anchored in solid scholarship -
by consensus. Among the questions considered:
· Was
the collapse of Yugoslavia inevitable?
· Is
there bias in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY)?
· What
would have happened if NATO had not intervened in Kosovo in 1999?
Anthropology and genocide in the Balkans
During the war in the former Yugoslavia and after, the history of events
included a steadfast denial of and indifference toward the crimes committed
there. This denial was perpetrated by political elites, but they did not do so
alone. In fact, the denial that genocide was occurring in the Balkans was
written by policy consultants, public intellectuals, and academic experts,
including several key anthropologists, all of whom provided the conceptual and
analytical apparatus which legitimated indifference in the face of the worst
crimes against humanity to have occurred in Europe since the Second World War.
In the case of legal and social-scientific analysis of the war, there was a
distinct class of experts who aided and abetted this indifference by providing
analytical and conceptual justifications for it. By denying the reality of
events in the Balkans, such experts provided the cultural legitimation for
indifference and non-intervention to prevent genocide and other crimes against
humanity.
-- Thomas Cushman, Anthropological Theory,
2004 (PDF)
Cushman
replies to criticisms of "Anthropology and genocide
in the Balkans" Anthropological Theory, 2005
(PDF)
Aristotle in Belgrade
On the
Serbian opposition to Milosevic -- Lawrence Weschler, 2004
Political
economy and political reaction: a reply to Kees van der Pijl
Shaw criticizes van der Pijl's argument that the crisis within Yugoslavia is to
be understood primarily not in terms of the latter's own internal
contradictions, or even in terms of the relationship between Yugoslav and
larger international structures, but primarily in terms of the
contradictions of Western power systems themselves. Martin Shaw, 2003
The Balkan Wars and the New World
Dis/Order The so-called radical movement is losing its sense of
complexity, of history, of ambivalence, and ultimately its own humanity. Most ostensible
oppositionist discourse on the Balkans has sunk to conspiracy mongering
and holocaust denial, or to the nostrums of diplomatic conflict-resolution, or to crass
and aggressive apologetics for mass murderers. Healthy ethical
reasoning is driven out by paranoia and dogmatism.--
David Watson, Fifth Estate, Spring 2002
Slobo to Expose Western Cynicism
When
Milosevic takes the stand at The Hague he will give chapter and verse on the deals he did
with those who came to try to make peace - how much they knew, how much they tacitly
agreed to. -- Alan
Little, IWPR, June 29, 2001
Citizen of a Lost Country - An Interview with Bogdan Denitch
The breakup of Yugoslavia
could have been prevented had there not been a failure of the political
class ruling in Yugoslavia, and of the American and Western European
officials who failed to deal with it. --
Danny Postel, May 14, 2001
FAIR Misrepresents the Racak
Massacre In
claiming that there
is “new evidence casting doubt on claims that the bodies were civilian victims of a
massacre,” Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting endorses a biased and error-filled
article on Racak. FAIR misrepresents the position of Dr. Helena Ranta, the forensic pathologist
who investigated the Racak massacre. FAIR's article is at odds with substantial previous
(and subsequent) credible documentation on the Racak incident. -- Roger Lippman, April 30, 2001
Reconsidering Rambouillet
The Rambouillet negotiations provide one of the greatest 'what-ifs' of the
Kosovo war. The British anti-war movement used Rambouillet to justify its
arguments against NATO. They contended that the Interim Settlement offered
there was deliberately unworkable and designed solely to offer a pretext for
bombing Yugoslavia. This article challenges that view, which has become the
orthodox position within media and academic circles. After detailing five key
anti-war arguments, Bellamy argues that Rambouillet offered the best chance for
peace in Kosovo. The article returns to Rambouillet to take up John Pilger's challenge to decipher
"what really
happened." Bellamy shows that under the Settlement, the role of KFOR would have
been limited and the supreme authorities would have been indigenous. The
article demonstrates that the Yugoslav government never accepted the core
principles of the negotiating process, such as the principle of autonomy, and
that it was this intransigence that necessitated NATO's war to save Kosovo. --
Alex J. Bellamy, April 2001
NATO Intervention on
Trial: The Legal Case That Was Never Made The failure of
the NATO countries to articulate a legal basis for their intervention in
Kosovo is puzzling in that there are in fact several compelling legal
arguments that could be made to justify the Kosovo intervention. By
Paul Williams and Michael P. Scharf, Human Rights Review, 2000
Kosovo: The Devil and
the Details A progressive visits the
scene of some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II and then writes about
it without any acknowledgement of who the victims were. We respond. -- Roger
Lippman, Peter Lippman, and David Lippman, October 24, 2000
Mediating Denial
A critical review
of Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, edited by Philip Hammond
and Edward Herman. In twenty-first century war, media are battlefields. Those who
would expose a simple 'truth' in complex situations often perpetrate a distortion quite as
fundamental as the media they criticize. So it is with this volume, with contributors
extravagantly lauded as 'the world's leading authorities' on the subject of media in
NATO's Kosovo war, and who turn out to be far from disinterested participants in the world
struggles they analyze. The review covers, among other topics, the book's denial of the
Serbian slaughter in Kosovo and its denigration of the International Criminal Tribunal for
Yugoslavia. -- Martin Shaw, June 2000
How Project Censored Joined the Whitewash of Serb Atrocities
Project Censored's coverage of Kosovo and Bosnia lacks
historical perspective and relies on biased, discredited sources. -- David Walls May 2,
2000
(Revised for publication in New Politics, Summer 2002)
Empire and
Exterminism The imperial arrogance and hypocrisy of NATO’s war, its
incompetence, its cowardly and contemptible willingness to harm civilians in order to
safeguard its pilots, were all sickening. Still, it was stunning to see solidarity
activists in the West essentially apologizing for a regime that had perpetrated genocide
in Bosnia, and that was carrying out a pogrom in Kosovo even before NATO’s ultimatum.
The Left’s largely exclusive focus on damage to Serbian civil society, its repetition
of Serb nationalist disinformation, and its willingness to downplay and deny Serb violence
against the Albanians was at least as morally numb as mindless support for the war. --
David Watson, New Internationalist,
May 2000
Seven Misconceptions about the
Organized Atrocities in Kosovo The writer responds to each of
these points. -- Michael Sells, April 15, 2000
Left Behind: The American Left and Kosovo The war in Kosovo
split the American left. However, it did not create the fissures, rather it
revealed that beneath the spurious unity of support for socialism, there were
two very different conceptions of politics. One that put humanitarian concerns
and human rights as, not only the first item on the agenda, but the reason for
having an agenda at all, and the other that saw these as occasionally and
expediently useful rallying calls for struggles against imperialism and the
ruling class. -- Ian Williams, Human Rights Review, Jan-Feb 2000
Kosovo Fascism,
Albanians' Shame Today's Albanian violence -
more than two months after the arrival of NATO forces - is more than simply an emotional
reaction. It is the organised and systematic intimidation of all Serbs simply because they
are Serbs and therefore are being held collectively responsible for what happened in
Kosovo. Such attitudes are fascist. Moreover, it was against these very same attitudes
that the people of Kosovo stood up and fought, at first peacefully and then with arms,
during the past 10 years. -- Veton Surroi, Koha Ditore (Pristina),
August 25, 1999
Peace will not come easily to Kosovo A couple of weeks ago in Pristina, the
capital of Kosovo, I observed a protest demonstration. A couple of thousand people wound
silently through the center of town carrying signs that read, "Release Our Loved
Ones," and "Act Now, Tomorrow Will Be Too Late." The demonstrators were
protesting the ongoing detention of up to 5,000 Albanian political prisoners in Serbian
jails.
All raw emotions are on display in the streets of Kosovo: joy at the first taste of
freedom, rage at the atrocities committed by Serbs during the NATO intervention, grief at
the widespread loss of family, property and livelihood, and fear of the chaos and
insecurity that the future may bring. -- Peter
Lippman, Seattle Times, August 13, 1999
Facing Up to Genocide: The Obligation to Intervene Those in the
human rights movement who had appealed for intervention to save Rwandans vowed
not to let our government sit idly by the next time mass ethnic killing began.
That "next time" for Physicians for Human Rights was Kosovo. -- Holly Burkhalter, Physicians for Human
Rights, August 1999
The Left and Kosovo - Giving Ethnic
Cleansing a Chance (PDF) The Left has drawn the wrong
conclusions and ended up on the wrong side. The Nation and Pacifica
Radio have lost their moral compass, portraying this struggle as though
their writers had no knowledge of who has been victim and who has been
victimizer for the past decade. -- Josh Wick and Marla Stone, Tikkun
Magazine, July/August 1999
Kosovo:
The Meaning of Victory A war without losses. And
indeed why should one complain about Americans surviving—about a flawless
war? But of course it wasn’t flawless. Perhaps one day there will be a
method to calculate how many Kosovars had to be displaced, how many had to
die, for the West to prosecute its “perfect” war. How many fewer might have
died if the “campaign” had targeted—or had plausibly threatened to
target—the men with guns who were killing and expelling the people America’s
President had sworn to protect? Such a war would have held risks for
Americans; their countrymen would not have liked this. Leaders who speak of
“moral imperatives,” however, should be held responsible for their words and
for persuading their people that some causes, once embraced, are worth the
risk. By Mark Danner, July 15, 1999
(More by Mark Danner
here.)
Moving Serbia Towards Democracy This article
cautions against isolating Serbia or assigning collective guilt to the Serbian people. It
suggests steps to revitalize democratic forces within Yugoslavia without strengthening the
Milosevic government.
The Institute of Peace is a U.S. government agency. While we have generally avoided
posting information coming directly from the U.S. government, the article addresses the
present situation of wreckage in Serbia and takes a specific position on what kind of
sanctions to maintain against Serbia. Unfortunately, little else is available that
addresses these problems constructively. -- U.S. Institute of Peace, June 21, 1999
Serbia Under
the Threat of Fascism Former mayor of
Belgrade Bogdan Bogdanovic discusses the nature of Serbian nationalism.
-- Published
in Monitor (Podgorica, Montenegro), June 18, 1999
Letter to the Washington Free Press (Seattle) The Free Press coverage of Kosovo (May-June 1999) got it wrong
from start to finish. The front cover portrayed Kosovo in ruins, under attack by NATO
warplanes, as if the Serbian destruction of Kosovo's villages and the expulsion of its
population never happened. Not a marauding Yugoslav soldier is to be seen; no mass graves,
now being discovered daily, are depicted. The cover and stories feed the misconception,
more common among progressives than others, that this is NATO's war. -- Roger Lippman,
June 17, 1999
The GOP Right, the Belgrade
Lobby, and the Neo-Confederacy Demonstrates ideological
affinities as well as financial and political connections between the Republican right and
the Belgrade lobby, as well as links with neo-Confederate groups angry at Hispanic
immigration in Texas, who see the Yugoslav army and police action against alleged Albanian
immigrants as eminently understandable and, they imply, perhaps a model. -- Michael Sells, June 14, 1999
Protecting Kosovo's Cultural
Treasures Members of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the
Yugoslav government allege, without providing evidence, that NATO has bombed the great
medieval Serbian Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo. -- Michael Sells, June 1, 1999
You can't negotiate with a war criminal
But a circus tent of NATO opponents, from Tom Hayden to Arianna
Huffington, won't face reality. By Ian Williams, Salon.com,
May 27, 1999
What Is to Be
Done?
We have stepped into an extraordinarily complicated and
messy tragedy. The peaceful citizens of democratic countries, even when
they are stirred by compassion and shocked by atrocities, are reluctant
to wage war “for others" - self-defense is another matter. And the
Balkans seem like the archetype of a quagmire. The essence of the issue
is simple: at the end of the twentieth century, crimes against humanity
are being committed on a scale and with a brutality that one hasn’t seen
in Europe since Nazi Germany (although
Bosnia was a prelude and a warning that the NATO countries, and indeed
the UN, ignored for four years).
The fact that the US and its
allies have failed to respond to cases of genocide or ethnic
cleansing all over the world - in the Sudan, or in Cambodia, or
in Rwanda, or in the Krajina, when the Croats took it back from
the Serbs in 1995 - is not a reason for passivity in Kosovo; it
is a reason for remorse or at least self-criticism. -- Stanley Hoffmann,
New York Review of Books, May 20, 2009
Letter to the Serbian Democratic Movement
We respect your lonely and courageous struggle for
democratization in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. But unfortunately, it seems to us
that hardly any of your fellow citizens have supported a just settlement to the Kosovo
issue, and that the crisis has been caught in a downward spiral of radicalization for many
years. Thus when you say that "NATO military intervention has undermined all results
we have achieved," one must ask if these results were of such a scope and
significance to bring hope that the plight of Kosovo could be relieved by peaceful means.
We are in sympathy with your extremely difficult situation, but we cannot agree with the
conclusions you have drawn as to who bears primary responsibility for improving it. It is
our view that your appeal should properly be addressed to the FRY and Serbian authorities
which bear the responsibility for systematic and grave crimes of war and crimes against
humanity in Kosovo, and for the dangers you, as members of the civil sector in Serbia, are
currently facing. -- From the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and the International Helsinki
Federation for Human Rights, May 18, 1999
Before the Deluge: Agani's Last Interview. Professor Fehmi Agani - Ibrahim Rugova's deputy in the Democratic League of
Kosovo and a member of the Rambouillet negotiating delegation - discusses life for
Albanians in Kosovo during the 1974-1989 period of autonomy, and after autonomy was
revoked by Milosevic, as well as the political struggle for Kosovo's independence. Agani
was killed in early May 1999. -- Anthony Borden, IWPR, May 15, 1999
Serbian
aim to kill all Kosovans is nothing new After Milosevic came to power, on the
back of his promises to "defend" the Serbs of Kosovo, Kosovo's autonomy was
withdrawn and a systematic oppression of the Kosovars was resumed. This was not oppression
for its own sake. It was aimed at the actual removal of the Albanians. Arkan, the
notorious gangster and war criminal, who was elected to the Serbian assembly as a
"representative" of Kosovo in elections boycotted by the Albanian population,
made this quite clear. Most of the Kosovars, he explained, had come in from Albania in the
last 50 years and they ought to be regarded as "tourists". This claim is, of
course, utterly ludicrous, even by the standards of Serb nationalist rhetoric. But it's
not meant as a rational argument. It is an implicit demand for the mass expulsion of the
vast majority of the population of Kosovo. Tourists, after all, go "home," in
this case presumably to Albania. -- Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times, April 30, 1999
Why Are We In Kosovo? Those of us who spent time in Sarajevo used to say that, as the 20th
century began at Sarajevo, so will the 21st century begin at Sarajevo. If the options
before NATO all seem either improbable or unpalatable, it is because NATO's actions come
eight years too late. Milosevic should have been stopped when he was shelling Dubrovnik in
1991. -- Susan Sontag, The New York Times Magazine,
May 2, 1999
Kosovo and the Left: Serbian Atrocities and U.S.
Intervention The response of many progressives to the Serbian
repression of the people of Kosovo has been to condemn U.S. intervention, and even to
minimize the Serbian atrocities. Many people are largely unaware of what happened before
the NATO intervention. March, 1999, was not when the problem began. In 1989 Milosevic
unconstitutionally revoked the autonomous status of Kosovo and instituted a brutal
occupation very similar to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The 90% ethnic
Albanian majority was denied the right to have schools in its own language, and large
numbers of Albanian professionals were fired from their jobs. Over the past decade there
were arrests without charge, indefinite detention, disappearances, torture,
assassinations, and attacks on villages. -- Roger Lippman April 1999 (Updated June 3, 1999.)
The Case Against Inaction Sadly, some on the left are
angrier about NATO's bombing than they are about the Serbian forces' atrocities, even
though Milosevic's men have killed more in one Kosovo village than have all the
airstrikes. Those who want an immediate NATO cease-fire owe the world an explanation of
how they propose to stop and reverse the massive ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, in light of
Milosevic's history as a serial ethnic cleanser and promise-breaker. -- Bogdan Denitch and
Ian Williams, The Nation, April 26, 1999
The
Balkan Endgame By taking Kosovo and the whole Kosovo Albanian
community hostage, Milosevic triggered a reaction he did not expect and has no answer for.
Milosevic's decision to reject the Rambouillet accords finally forced the NATO powers to
define the nature of the conflicts that have plagued southeastern Europe for the past
decade. For the first time, the West recognised them clearly as a series of Serbian wars
of aggression and conquest. -- Sonja Biserko, director of the Helsinki Committee for
Human Rights in Serbia. April 24, 1999
The Reason Why We can indeed learn from history - but only if we choose the right
examples. The war in the Balkans has been the occasion for all manner of claims about the
things the past does and doesn't teach. We have been told that it is an
"age-old" conflict dating at least to 1389, and that our intervention would
change nothing: a half-truth invoked to support a self-serving falsehood. We have been
told by leftists nostalgic for cold war certainties that the US's own past misdealings
overseas make us no better than those we are attacking and that we thus have no business
judging the behavior of others: a sophistic assertion of moral equivalence that cuts the
ground from under the very universal principles upon which the left itself purports to
stand. -- Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, April 22, 1999
The
UN's Surprising Support The Security Council has not authorised
the bombing. But whatever the legalities of NATO's campaign against Yugoslavia, the action
has broad support at the UN from a number of
delegates who otherwise look askance at US military interventions. -- Ian Williams,
Institute for War and Peace Reporting, April 19, 1999