Dear Roxanne,
I am reading your
impressive work "An Indigenous People's History of the United States." While
doing so, I happened upon the introduction you wrote to Andrej Grubacic's book
"Don't Mourn, Balkanize!" I'd like to point out some instances where I disagree
with your endorsement of it, and to ask if you have had the occasion to rethink
these matters.
Serbian nationalists, and
an unfortunately large number of Western intellectuals, have excused the actions
of the Milosevic regime and its expansionist, anti-Muslim campaign to
consolidate its power. It appears that you have adopted their perspective, but
there is quite another way of looking at the situation, one much more in tune
with the bulk of your anti-colonialist work. Namely, to make common cause with
the nationalities targeted by Serbian power for death, expulsion, and
marginalization. Numerous brave progressive Serbs, like activists from
Belgrade's Humanitarian Law Center and the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights
in Serbia, have spoken out for Kosovo Albanians in the way that U.S.
progressives such as yourself have
spoken for Native Americans and others overrun by U.S. expansionism.
Your thesis is that there
was a "US/NATO determination to destroy Yugoslavia" (page 21 of your
introduction to Grubacic).
There are major problems with this perspective:
1.
Milosevic, seeking to impose his own authority over the rest of Yugoslavia in
ways that went beyond the bounds of its constitution, fomented nationalism,
ethnic hatred, and wars that led to the breakup of the country. Upon his
election as Serbian president in 1989, Milosevic economically targeted perceived
enemies of Serbian expansionism, starting with concerted rhetorical attacks on
Slovenia. Along with Croatia and Macedonia, Slovenia, seeing the writing on the
wall, withdrew from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in January 1990, and then
seceded from Yugoslavia, as was its constitutional right, in the summer of 1991.
Croatia seceded at the same time, whereupon Milosevic attempted to seize parts
of Croatia to annex to a Greater Serbia, leading to a bloody war and the
eventual independence of Croatia. He also supported the attempted destruction of
the Bosniak (Muslim) population of Bosnia, which accompanied his attempt to
divide sovereign Bosnia-Herzegovina between Croatia and Serbia. I'm sure you
have read about displacement of the Bosnian Muslim population, the siege of
Sarajevo, genocide of Bosnian Muslims from Prijedor to Srebrenica, and the
eventual partition of Bosnia, all supported logistically and politically by the
Serbian regime.
2.
Western powers had reservations about the breakup of Yugoslavia. Before the
breakup, they cautiously urged the preservation of the nation. See, for example,
the
critical review of US Ambassador Warren Zimmerman's book on the Yugoslav
breakup, by Branka Magas of
the Bosnian Institute. (Magas is an actual
scholar of ex-Yugoslavia, unlike writers such as those featured at Z
Magazine, who have made careers of denying the well-documented facts of such
Serbian crimes as the Srebrenica massacre.)
Far from promoting the breakup of Yugoslavia, Zimmermann describes how he
"helped to create the US policy of non-recognition of Slovenia and Croatia."
This policy persisted even afterEuropean
recognition at the end of 1991, well after the fait accompli. This terrain is
also covered in Yugoslavia, Death
of a Nation, by Laura Silber and Allan Little,
who describe the first Bush administration's determination not to take a
position on the Yugoslav breakup (page 201).
You approvingly quote Grubacic as
implicitly denying that there was "a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo" before
NATO intervened in March 1999 (p. 25). Are you
perhaps unaware that the Serbian destruction, murders, and deportations in
Kosovo began more than a year before the NATO bombing? And
furthermore, those Serbian atrocities that began immediately after the NATO
intervention began could not have occurred without significant logistical
planning and arrangements. A few facts:
-
In
February 1998, starting more than a year before NATO intervened, Serbian forces
commenced widespread killings of Albanians, destruction of villages,
and expulsions of the civilian population. Grubacic disregards the
extensive record of Serbian crimes in Kosovo in the year preceding
March 1999. (Report
on Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law in Kosovo in 1998, by
No Peace Without Justice, pages 25-49, February 1999)
-
Serbian
authorities killed over 1900 Albanians, burned over 40,000 houses and flats, and
looted extensively in the year before the NATO intervention. (Report
on the violation of human rights and freedoms in Kosova in the course of 1998, Council
for The Defence of
Human Rights and Freedoms, Prishtina, January 22, 1999)
-
About
460,000 people had been expelled from their towns and villages before the
beginning of NATO’s intervention. (UNHCR
Kosovo Crisis Update, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, March 30,
1999)
-
In its
March 1999 report on the situation in Kosovo, the International Helsinki
Foundation (IHF) observed:
"The IHF has for 15 months
drawn attention to the pattern of large scale attacks and reprisals of Serbian
security forces and paramilitary militia. We believe that this pattern suggests
a coherent policy aimed at a future partition of Kosovo following the decimation
of its Albanian social and political fabric — where residents have not been
killed or physically forced from their homes, they leave for fear of state
terror that uses torture, mutilation, and degradation to achieve its ends."
In 1989, Serbia terminated
the autonomous status of Kosovo. The presence of Milosevic's regime and special
police forces in Kosovo throughout the 1990s gradually took on the character of
a brutal occupation of the majority Albanian population by ethnic Serbs, well
before the violence of 1998. That occupation can accurately be described as
similar to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, with the disenfranchisement of
the indigenous majority population, closure of Albanian schools, firing of all
Albanians in positions of authority, and widespread police brutality.
And just as we oppose the
occupation of Palestine, it makes sense to stand on the side of the Albanians of
Kosovo, who were resisting similar oppression by Serbia in their land.
The Serbian war against
Bosnia and Kosovo now continues by other means, namely denial of the truth of
what happened. This is not just propaganda, but rather a campaign with a real
impact on the
lives of thousands of survivors who were displaced. The denial and historical
revision of what happened in the 1990s is a blow against justice for the victims
of genocide and torture; that is a concrete human rights violation and serves to
perpetuate the suffering of the survivors. It
is unfortunate that so many Western intellectuals have aligned themselves with
the deniers. Also note that the current Serbian regime, as all others before it
in the postwar period with the brief exception of the Dzindzic mandate,
tacitly supports the separatist aspirations of the Serb-controlled entity in
Bosnia, the "Republika Srpska," which incorporates land stolen from its recent
inhabitants no less than US land was taken from its native peoples.
I hope that you, having
written so cogently about comparable issues in the US, can see the parallels and
distance yourself from those who still give intellectual aid and comfort to the
forces that committed genocide and massive war crimes in the Yugoslav wars of
the 1990s.
I look forward to hearing
your further thoughts.
Roger Lippman