The role of the media
The fact that during
the Croatian and Bosnian wars the Western alliance manifestly did not
want to attack or bomb Serbia forced the left revisionists to search
elsewhere for evidence of the anti-Serbian conspiracy. The fact that the
Western media reported Serbian atrocities was not, of course, evidence
that such atrocities were taking place but rather of the existence of an
anti-Serb media conspiracy and, as Diana Johnstone points out, “it often
seemed that the media were dictating policy to Western governments,
rather than the other way around”.[26]
Consequently, the revelation by Western journalists and reporters of
atrocities against Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar citizens created a
climate of public opinion in which the reluctant Western leaders were
forced gradually to take action against the Serbian forces responsible.
It was the democratic media, therefore, rather than the Western
political and military leaders, which was the real carrier of the
anti-Serbian conspiracy. In the left revisionists’ world of twisted
logic and conspiracy theories, the Bosnian Muslims repeatedly shelled
their own civilians in Sarajevo so that they could blame the massacres
on the Serbs and then used the Western media to broadcast the images to
the Western public in order to create an ‘anti-Serb’ climate of opinion
and pressurise the Western leaders to intervene against the Serbs. The
Muslims are thus transformed from victims of Milosevic’s genocide and
Western indifference into diabolical puppeteers, using the Western media
to manipulate the Western public and Western leaders who consequently
become the victims along with Milosevic, Karadzic, and ‘the Serbs’.
The irony of this
grotesque line of reasoning is that the numerous Western statesmen and
military commanders who were opposed to military intervention against
the Serbian forces then become witnesses to prove the existence of the
anti-Serbian conspiracy in their own media. Parenti cites claims by US
General Charles Boyd, British General Michael Rose, French General
Philippe Morillon, EC peace mediator Lord David Owen, and other Western
military and political leaders to prove that it was really the Muslims,
not the Serbs, who were bombing and besieging Sarajevo for three and a
half years; that the Muslims were pretending to be besieged; and that
massacres of Muslim civilians in Sarajevo were carried out by the
Muslims against themselves.[27]
Thus it transpires that whereas Christiane Amanpour, Roy Gutman, Maggie
O’Kane, Ed Vulliamy, and other professional journalists and television
reporters were part of the Western-media conspiracy to “demonise the
Serbs”, virtually the entire military and diplomatic leadership of the
Western intervention in Bosnia was opposed to the conspiracy and
was motivated solely by the desire to present honestly and accurately
the facts as they really were. A second group of witnesses whom the left
revisionists draw upon are those Western journalists whom they happen to
agree with, whose articles are somehow published in the mainstream media
despite its supposed anti-Serb bias. Thus whereas O’Kane, Vulliamy,
Amanpour, and Gutman are viewed as part of the anti-Serb conspiracy,
David Binder, Misha Glenny, Robert Fisk, Edward Pearce, and Simon
Jenkins are seen as wholly objective observers free from any political
bias. Not to mention Mick Hume, former editor of the magazine Living
Marxism, which during the 1990s repeatedly denied that genocide had
taken place either in Bosnia or in Rwanda.[28]
Living Marxism was eventually forced to close after it accused
the media company ITN of inventing concentration camps in Bosnia and was
promptly sued by ITN and bankrupted, but Hume now has a regular column
in The Times (London). If Ed Vulliamy reports on a contemporary
Serbian concentration camp then this is ‘demonising the Serbs’ and proof
that the Western media is biased against ‘the Serbs’, but if Robert Fisk
writes about a Croatian concentration camp that existed half a century
earlier during World War II, as he did in The Independent at the
height of the Bosnian war,[29]
then this is proof positive that ‘the Croats’ are really the bad guys
and consequently that the rest of the media is biased against ‘the
Serbs’ for not pointing this out. It is a win-win argument.
The mindset of the left revisionists allows them to disregard
all evidence of the genocidal activities of the Milosevic regime, no
matter how damning. When, following Milosevic’s extradition to The
Hague, the Serbian police began to unearth mass graves of his Albanian
victims in Serbia, Seumas Milne responded by implying that even the
government and police of democratic Serbia were part of the Western
propaganda conspiracy against the Milosevic regime, that they were
betraying their country to the capitalist Mammon and that the only real
crime was the extradition itself: “Shamelessly bought with $1.3bn of aid
for a country ravaged by sanctions and NATO bombing, Milosevic's
extradition had to be forced through by decree, in defiance of
Yugoslavia's constitutional court, by a government which knew it stood
no chance of getting the decision through parliament.” By
contrast the corpses of murdered Albanians were simply part of the
Western conspiracy: “That is presumably why - as the new Belgrade
administration dug up corpses to order - the German chancellor, Gerhard
Schröder, described the cash as a ‘dividend of democracy’.”[30]
“Where are all the bodies buried?” asks Parenti, arguing that
because only slightly more than two thousand bodies had been discovered
in Kosovo, it followed that that was the total Albanian death toll: “how
did the Serbs accomplish these mass-grave-disappearing acts?”, he asks
ironically, quoting a newspaper as saying that a forensic team “‘found
no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies.’”[31]
The ominous parallels of such arguments hardly need to be spelled out.
In the words of the white-supremacist web-site Stormfront:
“Auschwitz had no mass graves. The cremation of four million bodies
would have left 15,000 tons of ash which was never found.”[32]
While Milosevic’s crimes against the Albanians are not equivalent to
Hitler’s crimes against the Jews; what are equivalent are the
arguments used by the apologists for both dictators. Indeed, the left
revisionists’ atrocity denial recalls the fascist propaganda surrounding
the most infamous Nazi atrocity in Europe before World War II. On 26
April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis’ Condor Legion
bombed the Basque town of Guernica. The following day the Spanish
fascists issued a statement to the foreign press accusing the Basques of
blowing up their own town. They claimed in the days that followed that,
“while a few bomb fragments” had been found in Guernica, the damage was
mainly caused by Basque incendiaries in order to inspire outrage among
the foreign public, and later that Spanish Republican planes had bombed
Guernica using Basque-manufactured bombs and that the explosions were
caused by dynamite placed by the Basques in the town’s sewers. Despite
this fascist attempt at denial, the atrocity swung part of the US media
(the magazines Time, Life, and Newsweek) round to
supporting the Spanish Republicans.[33]
The left revisionists claim to object to comparisons between
the Bosnian genocide and the Holocaust on the grounds that they are
emotional and hyperbolic. Johnstone complains of the fact that because
of media exaggeration “Suddenly, Milosevic was the new Hitler”. She goes
on: “Analogies should be employed with care, especially with such
emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust. When applied to
unfamiliar situations, they can create a powerful semi-fictional version
that actually masks reality.”[34]
Mick Hume, usually proud to be politically incorrect, in this case also
professes deep concern about talk of genocide or a Holocaust in the
Balkans. He complains that the tendency for journalists to compare Serb
forces in Bosnia and Kosovo with the Nazis “with talk of ‘echoes of the
Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ carried out in ‘true Nazi Final Solution
fashion’ has seriously distorted the popular image of the Balkans today.
It has helped to brand the Serbs as the evil new Nazis.” He goes on
“This diminishing of the Final Solution is what ultimately concerns me
most about the Nazification of the Serbs.”[35]
Nevertheless, the left revisionists are quite ready to exploit the
legacy of the Holocaust in their own propaganda. A mere week after
writing the statement quoted above, Johnstone wrote that “[I]f the
Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis
down the path of genocide, that doesn't mean they have forgotten their
World War II benefactors. After all, it was thanks to Hitler's invasion
of Yugoslavia that the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ was set up in
April 1941, with Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose population was mostly Serb at
the time [sic!]) as part of its territory.” Johnstone thus draws a
parallel with Nazi aggression in the Balkans during World War II and
democratic Germany’s diplomatic support for Croatia in 1991: “And the
hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence from
Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was ‘Danke Deutschland’ in
gratitude to Germany's strong diplomatic support for Zagreb's
unnegotiated secession.”[36]
So Johnstone, who urges caution in employing “emotion-laden
subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust” when it is a question of Serbian
atrocities, is quite happy to throw out this caution when it is a
question of the Croats; her claim that “the Croatian fascists actually
led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide”
seems to imply that the Final Solution was Croatian in origin – a view
that no serious student of the Holocaust would bother even discussing.
As for Hume,
Living Marxism magazine, of which he was the editor, hosted an
exhibition in 1993 entitled ‘Genocide against the Serbs’, organised by
the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and funded by the Republic of
Serbia, showing pictures of the corpses of Serbs killed by Croatian and
Bosnian forces in the 1990s alongside pictures of the corpses of Serbs
killed by Ustashas during World War II. Pictures from the exhibition
were published in Living Marxism, which did not see fit to add
any comment of its own.[37]
Throughout the war in Croatia and Bosnia Hume and Living Marxism
constantly equated the Croats with the Nazis in order to shift the odium
away from Milosevic and his forces. Finally John Pilger, in a piece
devoted to minimising Albanian casualties during the Kosovo War,
comments that “Today, the Serbs are the unpeople. They have no
civilisation, no society, no poetry, no history. The savagery they
suffered at the hands of the Nazis in the Second World War, exceeded
only by the mass extermination of the Polish Jews, has been forgotten.”[38]
Falsifying Yugoslav history
It is of course true
that the Serb people suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazis and
their collaborators in Yugoslavia (Ustashas, Chetniks and others), but
this suffering was on a scale little or no greater than that of the
Croats, Muslims, and other Yugoslavs or of the Poles, Greeks,
Ukrainians, and East Europeans generally. It certainly was not on a par
with the fate that befell the Jews in Europe under the Nazis. Pilger
however seems to be suggesting that the Serbs, whose total World War II
losses were between 487,000 and 523,000 or approximately 7% of the total
Serb population of Yugoslavia,[39]
suffered more than the three million non-Polish Jews murdered by
the Nazis in the Holocaust, more than the Jews massacred at
Kishinev, Babi Yar, and Odessa. So while the left revisionists
strenuously object to reference to the Holocaust in relation to the fate
of the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in the 1990s, they readily draw on
the legacy of the Holocaust to highlight Serb suffering both in World
War II and in the recent wars, even at the price of historical accuracy.
In order to paint the Serbs as eternal victims equivalent to the Jews,
the left revisionists frequently mention the crimes of the Croat
fascists (Ustashas) during World War II while ignoring similar crimes
committed by Serb fascists and collaborators in the same period. It is
true that there was an Ustasha regime in power in power in Zagreb during
World War II; there was also a Serbian quisling regime in power in
Belgrade, and on 18 September 1943 the Serbian quisling leader
Milan Nedic met with Hitler and requested the establishment of a Great
Serbia within the framework of the Nazi European order.[40]
It is true that the Ustasha regime pursued a genocidal policy toward the
Serb population of the Croatian quisling state; there was also a
parallel genocide carried out by the Serb Chetniks against the Muslims
and Croats of Bosnia and Croatia.
[41]
The Ustasha regime assisted the Nazis in exterminating the Jewish
population of Croatia and Bosnia; Nedic’s Serbian police assisted the
Nazis in rounding up Serbia’s Jews.
[42]
Just as the Ustashas employed anti-Semitic propaganda, so too did the
Chetniks. A Chetnik proclamation of 1941 claimed that the
Communists were “people who are not of our blood, Serb name and our Serb
Orthodox religion” but were “Jews, Turks and Croats”.
[43]
In 1943 a group of Chetnik commanders issued a joint
proclamation to the people of Croatia and Bosnia claiming that “since we
have cleansed Serbia, Montenegro and Hercegovina, we have come to help
you to crush the pitiful remnants of the Communist international,
criminal band of Tito, Mose Pijade, Levi Vajnert and other paid Jews”
and that the Serbs had been “swindled by the Communist Jews”.
[44] According to Israel Gutman’s Encyclopedia of
the Holocaust, “There were many instances of Chetniks murdering Jews
or handing them over to the Germans”.
[45] None of this prevents Johnstone from
describing the Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic as an “anti-Nazi
resistance leader”.
[46] The Serbs, like the Croats, were a
nation deeply polarised during World War II; like the Croats, they
produced both murderous Nazi-collaborators and brave resistance
fighters. Many Serbs and Croats were victims; others were perpetrators
of genocide. The left-revisionist version of World War II in Yugoslavia
as a conflict between fascist Croats and anti-fascist Serbs who suffered
“like the Jews” is pure fiction.
Pilger’s comment shows how the left revisionists viewed
‘socialist’ Serbia as a kind of left-wing holy land, its people martyred
by the imperialist Antichrist. For the left revisionists the
identification of socialism, anti-imperialism, and Serb nationalism,
three forces that in reality have nothing particularly in common, has
become absolute. They are not deterred by the fact that Milosevic’s
nationalist campaign arose in opposition, not to Western imperialism,
but to the Titoist constitutional order that governed Yugoslavia until
the late 1980s and above all to its provisions regarding Kosovo.
Milosevic is in their eyes a better Communist than Tito: Parenti
complains that “Tito did little to discourage the Albanian campaign to
ethnically cleanse Kosovo of non-Albanians.”[47]
Both Parenti and Johnstone consequently endorse Milosevic’s
policy toward the Kosovo Albanians and his revision of Tito’s system. In
Johnstone’s words, Milosevic’s suppression of Kosovo’s autonomy in
1988-89 was “necessary to enable the economic liberalisation reforms;
they were enacted legally; and they left intact the political rights of
ethnic Albanians as well as a considerable degree of regional autonomy”.[48]
Like Milosevic and his acolytes, the left revisionists combine an
alleged support for ‘Yugoslavia’ with a pathological hatred for most
Yugoslavs: Croats, Albanians, Muslims, Slovenes, and sometimes even
anti-Milosevic Serbs. I noted earlier that the left revisionists do not
hold Milosevic, Karadzic, and their forces responsible for any of the
atrocities carried out in the former Yugoslavia, since all these
atrocities were provoked or engineered by the West anyway. But by a
curious sleight of hand the left revisionists portray all Croat, Muslim,
or Albanian atrocities against Serbs as in no way related to previous
aggressive policies by the Milosevic regime. Thus the Croatian
persecution of Serbs in the former Krajina following Operation Storm in
1995, or the Albanian persecution of Serbs in Kosovo following the NATO
victory in 1999, are not seen as responses to Milosevic’s
aggression against Croatia in 1990-91 and the subsequent four-year
occupation of Croatian territory or to his ten-year reign of terror in
Kosovo in 1989-99. Rather, the left revisionists portray Croat, Muslim,
and Albanian nationalism as inherently evil in a way that Serb
nationalism is not.
Parenti and Johnstone project the righteousness of the
Serbian struggle with the Albanians and other Yugoslav nations back into
the past, painting a picture of pro-Nazi Albanians, Croats, and Muslims
persecuting anti-Nazi Serbs. Parenti writes at length about what he
calls “Croatia’s Nazi past” and about the Nazi collaboration of Muslims
and Albanians.[49]
In a manner strikingly reminiscent of the way the Stalinists erased the
role of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Old Bolsheviks
from their historical account of the Russian Revolution, the left
revisionists have erased the history of the tens of thousands of Croats,
Muslims, and Albanians who fought alongside their Serb comrades against
Nazism and Fascism during the 1930s and ‘40s under the leadership of
Tito, Europe’s greatest anti-Nazi resistance leader and himself a Croat.
There is no place in their propaganda for Vladimir Copic, the Croat who
commanded the 15th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil
War; for Fadil Jahic-Spanac, the Muslim Partisan who led the Serbs of
north-east Bosnia in the struggle against the Ustashas; for Marko
Oreskovic-Krntija, the Croat Partisan who led the Serb struggle against
the Ustashas in Lika; for the vanguard role played by the
predominantly-Croat Partisan Dalmatian Brigades at the legendary battles
of Neretva and Sutjeska against the Germans and Italians in 1943; for
the 16th Muslim Brigade that fought SS forces in East Bosnia
and spearheaded the liberation of Sarajevo in 1945; for the Albanian
Partisans who fought across the length of Yugoslavia to liberate the
country from the Nazis; for the Albanian Partisan Fadilj Hodza who was
one of Milosevic’s first victims. Nor is there a place for the numerous
Serb Partisan veterans who had the courage to oppose Milosevic’s
policies: Bogdan Bogdanovic, Draza Markovic, Koca Popovic, Milos Minic,
Ljubo Babic, and many others.
‘Counter-revolutionary nations’?
Not content to erase the history of the multinational
anti-Nazi Yugoslav Partisan struggle, Johnstone goes back further into
the past in her effort to demonise the Albanians. She portrays Albanian
nationalism as originating in the desires of Albanian Islamic feudal
lords to retain their privileges, contrasting it with a Serb nationalism
she sees as originating in the desire of Serb Christian serfs for
liberty: “The ethnic Albanians who had converted to Islam by the 19th
century gained privileges (to bear arms, serve in the administration,
and collect taxes) denied the Christian population. Such privileges
stood in the way of the development of an Albanian nationalism parallel
to the 19th century Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian national liberation
movements.” In Johnstone’s eyes Albanian national revolts were
traditionally reactionary, so that “When Albanian feudal lords did
revolt, it was rather to try to retain these privileges than to achieve
an independent State of equal citizens.” By contrast, “Because they were
deprived of equal rights under Ottoman rule, the Serb leaders adopted an
egalitarian political philosophy borrowed from France as appropriate to
their national liberation struggle in the 19th century. This meant
advocacy of a state of equal citizens enjoying equal rights. The
practice certainly did not always live up to the principles. But there
is a significant and practical difference between a nation that
proclaims principles of equal citizenship and one that does not.”[50]
The message is clear: the Serbs are a ‘revolutionary’ nation and the
Albanians are a ‘counter-revolutionary’ nation. Johnstone appears wholly
ignorant of Albanian history; of the existence of Catholic and Orthodox
as well as Muslim Albanians, including some who were pioneers of
Albanian nationalism; or of the Albanian national rebellions against the
Ottomans from 1878 culminating in the successful rebellion of 1912.[51]
Indeed, the Albanians are the only Balkan nation whose national movement
has succeeded in uniting Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox down to the
present day. But there is no reason to believe that Johnstone or her
comrades are interested in learning anything positive about the
Albanians. It is as if, like the rulers of Orwell’s Oceania, the left
revisionists are rewriting the past in order to make it conform to
present policies.
Belief in the existence of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’
fit only to be exterminated was strongly upheld by Marx and Engels.
Their hatred was particularly directed against the Czechs and the
Croats. In 1849 Engels called for a “war of annihilation of the Germans
against the Czechs” as the “only possible solution”; he described the
Croats as a “naturally counter-revolutionary nation” and looked forward
to the day when the Germans and Hungarians would “annihilate all these
small pig-headed nations even to their very names.”[52]
Marx and Engels also hated the Serbs. In a letter to Marx in 1876 Engels
cheered an Ottoman military victory over the Serbs: “The collapse of the
Serbs is stupendous. The campaign was intended to set the whole of
Turkey in flames, and everywhere the tinder is damp - Montenegro has
betrayed the campaign for her own private ends, Bosnia has absolutely no
intention of rebelling now that Serbia proposes to liberate her, and the
worthy Bulgarians aren't lifting a finger.” For Engels the Serbs were
little more than brigands: “The Serbian army of liberation is having to
live at its own expense and, after a swashbuckling offensive, withdrew
into its robber's lair without having been seriously defeated anywhere.”[53]
Marx and Engels sympathised with the Ottoman side and complained of
Western media bias, as they saw it, in favour of the Serbs and against
the Turks: "Not a word is said, of course, about the infamies
perpetrated by the Montenegrins and Herzegovinians. Luckily the Serbs
are getting knocked for six".[54]
Later generations of Marxists rejected the early Marxist
tendency to demonise “counter-revolutionary nations”. As a journalist
reporting on the Balkan wars of 1912-13 Leon Trotsky wrote passionately
about the atrocities committed by the Balkan Christian states against
the Albanians and other Balkan Muslims. In January 1913 Trotsky wrote
that “the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their
national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that
are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in the
systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns
and districts.” (‘Old Serbia’ being a Serbian term for Kosovo.) He
accused Russian liberal supporters of the Serbian and Bulgarian
war-effort of bearing their share of responsibility for “the ripped-open
bellies of Turkish children and the necks cut through to the bone of
aged Muslims”.[55]
The following month Trotsky, arguing that “protest against the outrages
in the Balkans cleanses the social atmosphere in our own country,
heightens the level of moral awareness among our own people”, denounced
the Russian liberal faction of Pavel Miliukov for supporting a Serbian
Army that was massacring Albanian civilians: “But since the ‘leading’
newspapers of Russia kept on singing their praises and either hushed up
or denied the exposures published in the democratic press, a certain
number of murdered Albanian babies must be put down, Mr. Deputy, to your
Slavophile account. Get your senior doorman to look for them in your
editorial office, Mr. Miliukov!” Trotsky then insisted on the imperative
of protesting against the atrocities in the Balkans: “Indignant protest
against unbridled behaviour by men armed with machine guns, rifles, and
bayonets was required for our own moral self-defence. An individual, a
group, a party or a class that is capable of ‘objectively’ picking its
nose while it watches men drunk with blood, and incited from above,
massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become
worm-eaten while it is still alive.”[56]
It is tempting to suggest that the fate Trotsky predicted for apologists
of atrocities ironically ended up applying to a large section of the far
left in the late twentieth century. Throughout his campaign to publicise
Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek atrocities against the Islamic peoples of
the Balkans, Trotsky never attributed these atrocities to any alleged
inherently evil character of the Christian Balkan nations in question
but blamed them on militarism and imperialism, of which other European
countries were also guilty.
The Bolsheviks under Lenin likewise rejected the division of
nations into “good” and “bad”, declaring in favour of an ideological
commitment to national equality and the right of all nations to
self-determination. This right of course did not apply in practice to
the nationalities of the Soviet Union, but it applied to the
nationalities enslaved by the Yugoslav state. Thus a proclamation of the
Executive Council of the Communist International of June 1920 to the
proletariat of the Balkan and Danubian nations declared that the
“Macedonian Bulgars, Albanians, Croats, Montenegrins and Bosnians are
rebelling against the rule of the bureaucratic and landowning oligarchy”
of Yugoslavia.[57]
This support for national pluralism and rejection of the concept of
“revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary” nations is reflected in a
famous passage by Tito, a Communist of the subsequent generation,
written in 1942 during the Partisan struggle against the Nazis:
“The term
'People's Liberation Struggle' would be simply a phrase, even a lie, if
it did not have, apart from its general Yugoslav character, a national
character for every nation individually; that is, if it did not mean, in
addition to the liberation of Yugoslavia, at the same time the
liberation of the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians,
Muslims, etc.”[58]
Such an
expression of equal appreciation of each individual Yugoslav nationality
is unthinkable for the left revisionists of today. While they display
the moral relativism typical of the post-1917 far left, in their
treatment of the national question they are considerably more
reactionary and have returned to the chauvinism of nineteenth-century
Marxism. Thus, if the Albanians are a “counter-revolutionary” nation
then their annihilation represents a sort of class justice equivalent to
the extermination of the bourgeoisie. The playwright Harold Pinter is
consequently more moved by the plight of Slobodan Milosevic, imprisoned
in a comfortable cell in The Hague and visited regularly by his wife and
family, than he is by the extermination of over a hundred thousand
Bosnian Muslims or the expulsion of eight hundred thousand Albanians
from their homes. For unlike these unpeople, Milosevic is seen by the
left revisionists as being on their side of the barricades. The
emotional identification of Pinter and other socialists with Milosevic
and other Yugoslav war-criminals in their struggle against the ICTY is
the other side of the walnut to their heartlessness toward Milosevic’s
victims and contempt for their suffering.
Milosevic as martyr
Pinter
has joined the ‘International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic’,
organised by Milosevic’s passionate admirer Jared Israel, aimed at
rescuing Milosevic from trial by the ICTY. Israel, who is reduced to
translating Milosevic’s speeches in an effort to prove his idol is not a
racist, represents the left revisionist in its purest form, without any
of the dissembling. According to a petition for Milosevic’s release from
prison issued by Israel, “Milosevic the so-called ‘ethnic cleanser’
preached multinational unity, not nationalist intolerance”; “Milosevic
conducted no persecution of Albanian civilians”; “The most notorious
‘atrocities’ for which Milosevic is accused never happened”; “Crimes
were committed in Yugoslavia - but not by Milosevic”. Not only was
Milosevic not guilty of genocide, but he was in fact a freedom fighter
against US imperialism: “Slobodan Milosevic's real offence was that he
tried to keep the 26 nationalities that comprise Yugoslavia free from US
and NATO colonization and occupation; his nation's resources,
industries, and media from being stolen by multinational corporations;
his nation's institutions from being controlled by US consultants and
advisers.” The Serbian opposition, by contrast, were merely part of the
conspiracy: “His real offence was to defend his nation's freedom and
sovereignty from a political ‘opposition’ bought and paid for by the
United States and installed into power by US specialists in
psychological operations. He and all those now under attack resisted
Western colonization to the very end, even as American naval ships
waited off the coast of Yugoslavia to ensure the ‘correct’ results in
Yugoslavia's contested elections.”[59] Thus Milosevic
becomes a Christ-like figure; a martyr on the cross, while the Serbian
opposition to him becomes the collective Judas. Similarly, Neil Clark in
the New Statesman says of Milosevic that “When faced with the
incessant violence of western-trained separatist groups, he had little
option but to use military means to try to prevent the break-up of his
country and to defend the Serbian and Roma people from being driven out
of the lands they had inhabited for centuries.” Far from being a war
criminal, Milosevic is a “prisoner of conscience” at the ICTY whose
“worst crime was to carry on being a socialist”.[60]
This sense of Milosevic as a socialist martyr and the ICTY as
a form of Inquisition permeates the thought of the left revisionists,
who view him as their man ‘fighting back’ against the Western enemy.
Milosevic, currently threatened with life imprisonment in one of the
world’s most comfortable prisons, signed the 1995 Dayton Accord that
recognised the ICTY and pledged the arrest of Bosnian Serb war
criminals. That was after his political enemy Radovan Karadzic had been
indicted by the Tribunal while Milosevic was still on friendly terms
with Washington. Now that he is in the dock himself he has decided that
the ICTY is illegitimate after all. It is not however just Milosevic’s
hypocrisy regarding the ICTY that is overlooked by the left
revisionists, nor the fact that he is receiving a fair trial, unlike the
men of Srebrenica who were massacred without a trial and whose rights
were not championed by the left revisionists. The latter ignore
the fact that in both Serbia and Croatia the ICTY is supported by the
democrats and anti-nationalists and opposed by the fascists and
criminals. In Serbia the student movement ‘Otpor’ that spearheaded
Milosevic’s overthrow, and Velimir Ilic, Mayor of Cacak and one of the
organisers of the overthrow of the regime, support the ICTY while the
supporters of Milosevic and Vojislav Seselj oppose it. This may not seem
a convincing argument to the left revisionists who no doubt view the
overthrow of Milosevic as a counterrevolution, but what of the genuine
Serbian anti-fascist left that Milosevic overthrew in 1987? It is often
forgotten today that Milosevic’s first victims, before even the
Albanians, were Serb Communists: the supporters of Dragisa Pavlovic and
Ivan Stambolic, the latter murdered by Milosevic shortly before his
overthrow. To those Serbian Communists brave enough to oppose
Milosevic’s war-mongering policies and anti-Albanian chauvinism we may
add Latinka Perovic, the liberal Communist leader purged by Tito in
1972; Bogdan Bogdanovic, former mayor of Belgrade; Draza Markovic, uncle
of Milosevic’s wife Mira Markovic; Milos Minic, prosecutor at the trial
of Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic; and many others. Then there are the
Serbian human rights activists Natasa Kandic and Sonja Biserko who stood
up for the rights of the Albanians when it was most difficult. All those
living support the ICTY; none of their voices are heard by the left
revisionists.
Similarly in Croatia the current, moderate regime of Stipe
Mesic and Ivica Racan has put on trial Croats guilty of killing Serbs in
1991, rejected Croatian irredentism in Bosnia, and reaffirmed the
Partisan legacy. It supports the ICTY. So do those anti-nationalist
Croats who defended the rights of the Serb minority when it was most
unpopular, such as Ivo Banac and Ivan Zvonimir Cicak of the Croatian
Helsinki Committee and the famous satirical newspaper Feral Tribune.
By contrast the Tudjmanites and Ustashas are opposed to it and have
mobilised mass demonstrations in defence of their war criminals. Thus
ironically the left revisionists who have spent the last ten years
demonising the Croats as fascists now align themselves with the
Croatian fascists and against the Croatian liberals. But it would
be wrong to suppose that the left revisionists know or care about this;
they oppose the ICTY for the sake of their own political agenda, not for
the sake of the Serbs and Croats. David Chandler, in his negative
assessment of the ICTY published in New Left Review, does not
even bother to discuss which political currents in Serbia and Croatia
support the Tribunal and which oppose it, as if the Tribunal has no
relevance to anything outside the left revisionists’ anti-American
crusade.[61]
So sure are they that the ICTY is part of the international conspiracy
against Europe’s last socialist state that they predicted repeatedly
that no Croat could possibly be indicted for crimes against Serbs during
Operation Storm in 1995, because the US supported this Croatian military
operation and surely would not let “its own” Tribunal indict “its own
Croats”. Chomsky claimed in 2000 that “there is little likelihood that
the Tribunal will pay attention to its 150-page ‘Indictment Operation
Storm: A Prima Facie Case’, reviewing the war crimes committed by
Croatian forces that drove some 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August
1995 with crucial US involvement”.[62]
In May 2001 the ICTY did indeed indict Croatian General Ante Gotovina, a
former favourite of Franjo Tudjman, for crimes against Serb civilians
during Operation Storm. Two and a half months later Seumas Milne wrote
of the “logistical US backing for the massacres and ethnic cleansing in
the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995” and stated confidently that “War
crimes indictments in the latter case are, needless to say, not
expected”, therefore managing to predict incorrectly something that had
already happened.[63]
The bitterness of the left-revisionist campaign to deny the
genocide in the former Yugoslavia carried out by Milosevic and the Serb
nationalists reflects a neo-Stalinist determination to champion Europe’s
last ‘socialist’ dictatorship against all the overwhelming evidence of
its murderous and corrupt nature. This involves deliberately
disregarding the responsibility of this regime for the destruction of
Yugoslavia and upholding its chauvinistic discourse on Croats, Muslims,
and Albanians. The left revisionists are neither progressives nor
genuine anti-imperialists. Their a-historical, anti-democratic worldview
and their refusal to condemn fascism or to stand up for the rights of
its victims, make them morally complicit in the crimes that have taken
place in the former Yugoslavia.
Marko Attila Hoare is a
Research Fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He
is the author of a short history of the Bosnian Army (How Bosnia
Armed, Saqi Books, London, 2004). He is currently completing a major
work on the Partisan movement of resistance in Yugoslavia during World
War II.
An extended version of this
article appears in the December 2003 edition of the Journal of
Genocide Research.