| |
|
YUGOSLAVIA, THE
AVOIDABLE WAR |
Produced by: George
Bogdanich and Martin
Lettmayer.
Featuring: George
Kenney, Nora Beloff,
David Hackworth, Susan
Woodward, David Binder,
Peter Handke, James
Jatras, John R.
MacArthur, David C.
Hackworth, Gen. Lewis
MacKenzie, Gregory
Copley..
Related links: Official
site |
|
Let's take an Internet-aided walk down
this bizarre road — click any link to
check out the evidence. (My apologies
for the length of the review, much
longer than such a lousy film deserves,
but this kind of dishonesty and reliance
on biased and racist sources requires a
thorough treatment. Perhaps future
reviewers will not be hoodwinked the way
some New York reviewers were.)
The filmmaker
The film was made by George Bogdanich,
identified innocuously on the film's web
site as "an independent documentary
producer, reporter, freelance journalist
and editor." But in addition, an
Internet search shows that Bogdanich has
spent years as a Serbian-American
activist with groups identified
variously as SerbNet and
the Serbian
American Media Center. Bogdanich raised
money for the film from the
Serbian-American community.
There is nothing wrong with being a
pro-Serbian activist, but you don't then
release a three-hour propaganda film,
pretending it's objective and factual,
and fail to disclose your partisan
background. Especially in this day and
age when it's so
easy to find
out.
The sources
The film is built around interviews with
a dozen or so talking heads. Some are
respectable types such as British
diplomat Lord Carrington. (The
filmmakers play these up but they're
only a fraction of the total.) A few
appear to be left-wing NATO haters. And
about half — the ones carrying most of
the water for the Serbs — are fringy,
obscure, biased, blatantly unqualified,
and in one case an established
anti-Islamic racist. Not one person
gives a contrary view. What we're
getting is essentially the Serbian Unity
Congress reading list and speaker's
bureau.
To mention five of the film's
authorities:
Nora Beloff, with 24 screen
appearances and a dedication at the end,
is the picture's patron saint. Formerly
a correspondent for the London Observer,
she became a darling of the Serbs when
she wrote a slim out-of-print tract
which gave the film its name. Her
advocacy earned her the epitaph "a
friend of the Serbs" from the
Serbian Unity Congress when she died in
1997.
Peter Handke, identified only as
an "Austrian author," is no Balkans
expert at all — he's a poet and fiction
writer best known for the movie "Wings
of Desire." His political and historical
expertise is nil and his inclusion is
apparently based on his authorship of a
book called "A Journey to the Rivers:
Justice for Serbia" inspired by a brief
trip to Yugoslavia during which he found
the people very nice. (See reviews
on Amazon.com for more info.) His
excuse of the Serbs was denounced by
other writers, notably Salman
Rushdie and Susan Sontag.
David Binder, former Yugoslavia
correspondent for the New York Times,
professes a lifelong
affection for the Serbs and was,
like several others quoted in the film,
a well-received speaker
at the 9th Serbian Unity Congress.
He illustrated his lifelong affection in
a letter to the New York Review of
Books, referring to war-crimes kingpin
Gen. Ratko Mladic as "a
superb professional." This goes
beyond Handke's sympathy with the
Serbian common man and directly embraces
its most notorious killers.
James George Jatras is a piece of
work. Apparently an Orthodox extremist
himself, he once called Michael Dukakis
a "pagan" for not following the Orthodox
church on abortion and attacked him for
marrying a non-Christian, although he
insisted he was not being anti-Semitic.
(His open letter is on file at
Northeastern University.) This GOP
Senate aide is also the author of an
anti-Muslim screed in the obscure Chronicles
magazine and The
Christian Activist that calls Islam
a "gigantic Christian-killing machine"
and says the religion grew from "the
darkness of heathen Araby." He was also
the keynote speaker at the 9th
Serbian Unity Congress.
Chronicles magazine, which
published Jatras' rantings, is also
cited by the film in support of its
claim that Muslims blew up their own
people to arouse international sympathy,
and it is connected not only directly to
the Bosnian Serbs but also to white
Southern neo-Confederacy groups. The
magazine is run by Thomas
Fleming, who rose to prominence as
an opponent of school desegregation in
Rockford, Ill., and became a
founding member of the right-wing
neo-Confederacy group League
of the South. Its foreign-affairs
editor is Srdja Trifkovic, formerly
the official spokesman for Radovan
Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb government and
a source whom Mr. Bogdanich interviewed
for the film but apparently decided
not to use.
Any experienced journalist should be
able to recognize the hack job that's
being done here. These jokers weren't
chosen because they're the most
authoritative sources on the subject or
because they represent two different
sides of an argument. They were chosen
because they are the fringe — the only
ones going around exonerating the Serbs
of responsibility for their murderous
campaigns. If the subject were the Nazi
Holocaust, we would easily recognize
them as the deniers.
Revisionism
The Americans, the Germans, the Croats,
the Slovenes, the Bosnians, the Kosovars,
the Albanians, NATO, Hitler, Jean-Marie
Le Pen, the Iranians, the Habsburgs,
Monica Lewinsky and Osama bin Laden.
That's who's responsible for the
Yugoslavian tragedy — but never the
Serbs. In three hours, you won't hear a
single source accuse the Serbs of
anything disreputable. To name just the
two most notorious examples of genocide,
the film denies the reality of the
murderous Omarska prison camp and
obfuscates the wholesale massacres of
civilians in the city of Srebrenica.
The film's point of view is that the
Serbs were guilty only of poor public
relations and didn't do anything bad
that everybody else wasn't doing. The
war was really "a battle of images,
staged events and false numbers which
would prepare Western public opinion for
direct military intervention and new
tragedies ahead," the narrator tells us.
The reality is that although there was
brutality on all sides, and in fact,
Muslims and Croats have also been
indicted by the War Crimes Tribunal, the
Serbs embarked on a systematic campaign
of murder, torture and rape against
Muslim civilians and others unlike
anything seen in Europe since Nazi
Germany. It has been extensively
documented by journalists and
human-rights agencies, and confirmed by
the discovery of mass graves full of
Muslim corpses — and the filmmakers are
trying to obscure that record.
To examine just two of the films'
numerous claims:
1. Claim: The "death camps"
exposed by Newsday's Roy
Gutman were basically peaceful
holding camps. (To prove it, we see
footage of a cafeteria. It's very
clean.) Reports of abuse were based on a
picture of an emaciated inmate and a
claim by one woman, Jadranka Cigelj,
that she was raped. "Crucial details
kept changing in her account of events,"
the film says. Anyway, it adds, the
camps were shut down after four months.
(Read
the transcript and note its
insistence that the other sides were
equally to blame for prison camps, its
focus on only one of the many eyewitness
reports and on the U.S. government's
inconclusive statements, and its
deliberate omission of human-rights
documentation about Omarska and other
similar camps.)
In fact, the routine murder and torture
at the camps is thoroughly documented
through statements of the camp survivors
themselves in not only Gutman's articles
but also 80 pages of testimony in the
Helsinki Watch (Human Rights Watch)
report "War
Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Volume II".
Although the camps did not conduct an
industrialized form of mass
extermination, allowing the filmmakers
to claim that they were not
Auschwitz-style "concentration camps,"
executions were a daily event. Just one
example from 80 pages of testimony about
the camps:
The night the men were castrated,
another three or four men were
killed outside — we heard shots. The
bodies were put on a little truck
and driven away. Almost every night,
between midnight to 2:00 a.m.,
drunken guards would take away
approximately five men who never
came back.
The notorious Omarska camp was shut
down not because the Serbs had a change
of heart but because they had been
exposed by Gutman and international
human-rights monitors and the world
began to see the genocide with a new
clarity. This is what the filmmakers
refer to as bad public relations.
2. Claim: There wasn't really a
large-scale massacre in Srebrenica. The
film glosses over the subject by saying
that women and children were bused out
of the city, it claims that only a small
number of people were killed, with the
rest having been found alive later in
other locations, and it blames only an
unnamed Croat for participating in the
murders. Not once does it mention any
Serb killing anybody. And whatever the
Serbs did, the U.N., the U.S. and the
Muslims made them do it. (Read
the transcript.)
In fact, contemporary press accounts
reported that the Serbs deported many of
the women and children from Srebrenica,
then rounded up the men, removed them to
remote locations, and, according to
escapees, massacred them and buried the
bodies in mass graves. Subsequent
discovery of the mass graves confirmed
the massacres of thousands of people in
the Srebrenica area. (Extensive
information about Srebrenica is
available from the Pulitzer-winning
series in the Christian Science Monitor and
the web site compiled by Haverford
College professor Michael Sells.)
This is just a small taste of both the
war crimes that have been proven and the
film's lies and evasions about them.
There probably are a few facts in the
film (some of the quibbles about numbers
might be justified), but there is not
one single point in the entire three
hours that justifies violating the human
rights and Geneva Convention rights of
prisoners and civilians. The film is so
thoroughly biased, untruthful, and based
on selective and obscure sources, that
you shouldn't believe a single word of
it unless you can confirm it somewhere
else, not including the Serbian
Unity Congress.
Racism
What's really sad about George Bogdanich
and his backers in the Serbian-American
community is the way their duplicity and
contempt for the human rights of others
illustrate exactly the kind of racism
that underlay the war crimes that they
are now trying to cover up.
Their shameless use of the
white-Christian-power magazine
Chronicles and the Muslim-hater James
Jatras, their leering innuendos about
Muslim terrorists controlling the
Bosnian Muslim government and Arab
governments dictating U.S. policy, their
utter disregard for Muslim massacre
victims — these are only the most overt
signs of the racist attitude on the part
of the filmmakers. When Jatras invokes
Osama bin Laden and the specter of
"radical international Islam" and Nora
Beloff hints darkly about the United
States appeasing its "clients in the
Middle East" (read
the transcript), the implication is
that the simple fact of the victims'
religion makes them dangerous,
conspiratorial barbarians and justifies
the slaughter that occurred.
(I'm still trying to figure out how
these statements are compatible — why
the U.S. allies Israel, Egypt and Saudi
Arabia would urge the U.S. to support
international radical Islam, which
really does exist as a powerful faction
in each of their countries.)
Almost the same logic is true of the
film's attitude toward Croats, although
it's less overt. It cites the Croats'
alliance with the Nazis of 50 years
earlier as though it's self-evident that
the Croats of today are born as amoral
killers. Again, to the filmmakers,
ethnicity is guilt.
Meanwhile, Bogdanich is unable to admit
that his own people committed even a
single illegal act, not to mention
colossal, genocidal massacres, rape and
torture. This attitude was common among
Serbian-Americans during the wars — they
couldn't understand why the world turned
against them because they were the good
guys of World War II. They were fighting
the Muslims and the "neo-Nazi" Croats —
how could that be wrong? It is the kind
of blind group allegiance and hatred of
others that inspired Serb troops, not
exclusively but horrifyingly, to inhuman
acts.
If "Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War" is
interesting at all, it's as an example
of how readily even some of the greatest
murderers in the world can find banal
apologists like the producers of the
film and some of the people who speak in
it. Either they are deluding themselves
because they cannot face the truth of
what their countrymen and
co-religionists did, or they are
deliberate defenders of evil. |
