Crossposted at Kos
Yesterday, in ToqueDeville’s long thread over at Kos, I ended up in a semi-shouting match, into which I shouldn’t have gotten in the first place, defending the IAC. I have never worked with the IAC, though I have several friends who have, but I felt it ridiculous that the IAC, top to bottom, was being singled out as a bunch of ‘WWP (world workers party) genocide deniers’. One bone that I picked with my interlocutor was the issue of the former Yugoslavia, for which I was promtply called a ‘genocide apologist’. Well, call me what you will, but I thought I might diary my position on the the former Yugoslavian situation – as it is both something on which I wouldn’t mind constructive feedback and something which may turn some heads.
I opposed the Kosovo war, first and foremost, because I am a pacifist [as some of you may know]. It wasn’t just that though. When I was in college in the early ’90’s, there was a very active group of Croatian nationals on campus who were among my acquaintences. I had listened to them on many occasions speak of the struggle for Croatian liberation and centralized Serbian offensives against it. And at the time, I generally agreed; that is until I started investigating their claims. To my surprise, I found that Croatian nationalism was actually rooted in the resurrection of the former Ustashe movement – the Croatian fascists that had committed numerous war crimes during WWII.
As the ’90’s progressed & more tumult, death and civil war emerged in the former Yugoslavia, I began to hear the same litany of offenses against the Serbs in the MSM as I had heard from my former Croatian friends. I was suspicious, to say the least. As the situation in Bosnia worsened, I did more research about the leader of the Bosnian calls for secession, Izetbegovic. Lo and behold, I found that he was also a former fascist as well.
And then there’s Kosovo. By that time, the internet was in full force, so it was pretty easy to find information about the ‘Contras of the ’90’s’ – the KLA. It was a thuggish group of ethnic purist drug-runners, doing the bidding of the opium producers in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Needless to say, the whole thing stank to high heaven.
But what about the ‘war crimes’? What about Srebrenica? What about the ‘rape camps’? [hmm, I think we’ve heard about those again recently]. So what about them. Is there any proof. Have we found any mass graves, anywhere? Do we have any corroborating proof of the existence of ‘rape camps’? No. And that should be patently obvious by the failure of the trial of Milosevic in a, no less, rigged courtroom.
So what really happened? Well, there was a civil war. Why? What caused it? Who’s to blame? A whole hell of a lot of forces caused it and a hell of a lot of people are to blame. Were there war crimes committed? Yes, but mostly not by the Serbs. In fact, the single most inexcusable war crime of the entire decade was the Croatian assault on Krajina, where 20,000 Serbs were slaughtered and 250,000 Serbs were driven from their homes, after which Croatian leader Tudjman stated, “There can be no return to the past, to the times when Serbs were spreading cancer in the heart of Croatia, a cancer that was destroying the Croatian national being… So it is as if they have never lived here…They didn’t even have time to take with them their filthy money or their filthy underwear!” So you want to talk about ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’… hmm
But what is really to blame? Greed. With the fall of the Soviet Union, every eastern block country was forced to make a deal with the devil – sell off your public works & we’ll turn back on the spicket of money. Most agreed, except Yugoslavia – the most ethnically diverse, successful socialist state of the eastern block. There was a lot of money to be made. The Serbian leadership stood in the way & with the economic insanity insuing from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ethnically diverse state was ripe for dissolution. It was the only way it could be coralled into globalism.
Books and articles that are very informative on this issue are below:
Problems with Milosevic’s Trial
Diane Johnstone’s Fools’ Crusade
Michael Parenti on media issues
And many more.
And I leave this little rant, with a disclosure. I am not a “communist” [though I often self-depricatingly refer to myself as one]. I believe in Marx’s idea of freedom philosophically, i.e. we are all equal, self-creating beings deserving the conditions in which we can make our own lives, doing what we see fit, without the discrimination of class, race, religion, gender, or other idealogies that divide us against ourselves and each other. But I also believe Marxist economics to be a subset of capitalism [as he was himself an avowed capitalist]. Marxist economics need to be fought equally with Capitalist economics today, because they both rest in the fallacy of ‘endless resources’ & the primacy of production. These are both ideas that are leading humanity to it’s doom. So for all of you knee-jerk anti-communists out there [who have incidentally never read Marx], don’t assume that this defense Serbia has anything to do with my ‘Global Communist’ agenda.
The break-up of the former Yugoslavia had little to do with the Soviet Union. It started with the death of Tito in 1980, long before the break-up of the USSR. His administration had held together the country and suppressed inter-community rivalries that had bubbled under the surface for centuries. The position was in many ways analogous to Northern Ireland except whereas there it is a Protestant/Catholic divide, in Yugoslavia they were split three ways Catholic/Orthodox/Muslim. Old hatreds go back to ancient battles between the groups.
The Nazis exploited these ancient differences when they invaded. This BBC background piece gives more details. The Nazis exploited similar divisions in the Baltic states and had SS divisions drawn from many western European countries and even some black ones. During the break-up attrocities were committed by all sides. This is reflected in the range of inditements in the Hague trials, not just of Milosovic. His trial by the way continues despite his attempts to subvert the process by various procedural tactics and his convenient bouts of illness.
Slovenia has already become part of the EU but Croatia’s failure to respond to arrest warrents for war crimes is delaying their accession and Serbia/Montenegro is just starting negotiations that could well run into similar problems. The Kosovo dispute is rather more complex than you suggest and I agree that the KLA had to get sources of income from undesirable activities. Just the same was true of the IRA. You should be aware though that it has very little to do with Croatia. Kosovo is predominantly Muslim but there is a site of historic significance to the Serbian (Orthodox) nation within its borders. During the Kosovo/a conflict there were a lot of sites from both sides giving either disinformation or harking back to distant and relatively recent history. You had to be careful to distinguish their sympathies which could usually be identified by the spelling at the end.
If you are suggesting that no mass graves have been found from all of the conflicts, I am afraid you are factually incorrect. Thoseof the dead from Srebrenica are well known. They were buried in groups ranging from 10s to hundreds as they were killed in various locations with convenient places to hide the bodies. A ceremony of mass re-burial of the identified dead was held this year on the 10th anniversary. I don’t know if you are aware but “Srebrenica denial” is very prevalent in Serbia and recently found footage of the killings has been shown there with similar cries of “fakes” etc that Holocaust denyers have about the footage of Auchwitz.
in my diary. And please respond to them. Claiming, as you do, means nothing to me if you cannot address the serious and thorough analysis present in the articles I link.
Sorry.
[BBC background pieces and “mass re-burial” with no evidence that a massacre occurred are not evidence].
I made it clear that atrocities were committed by all sides. On the other hand, I do not, as you and your sources appear to do, then swallow the “poor misunderstood Serbs never did anything” line. Your denial of the Srebrenca massace is particuarly heinous and I question your motives for doing so. If it is a naive disbelief in any report that does not fit into a Maxist-Leninist analysis, so be it. In the meantime try this as a reason why the discovery of all the graves has been difficult:
Both quotes from this report
The Physicians for Human Rights have been helping with identification throughout the FY.
is trying to get to the truth of the matter. It is clear that there was a terrible battle at Srebrinica. Hundreds of people died. there were likely executions and war crimes committed by Serbs – given that hundreds of Bosnian Serb civilians had been killed during Bosnian Muslim raids in the previous months, one would only expect some degree of retribution. The problem however is the ‘genocide’ claims.
For one, the numbers simply don’t add up. The 8,000 consists of 5,000 missing and 3,000 presumed taken captive. Of the 5,000 missing, 3,016 of them voted in the 1996 elections – could be fraud, who knows. Even in the MSM most were acknowledged to have rejoined the Bosnian military [though on page 18 in tiny print]. Of the 3,000 taken as POW’s, there is little evidence to believe they were all killed. I don’t find the ‘mass reburial’ scenario plausible in the least. Such an effort would have taken days, and could not have gone undetected by satellite. Not to mention – it was the middle of a war zone. What army would endanger personel to spend days moving around 7,500 corpses?
I don’t deny the Serbs committed atrocities. It was a bloody war. I do deny that they committed genocide & I think that NATO has a lot to answer for given it’s involvement with Croatian and Bosnian fascists and Kosovar gangsters.