The Dominion - Yugoslavia

Bosnian Serb Jailed

dru — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:17:30 +0000

Dragan Zelenovic, a Bosnian Serb, pleaded guilty to charges of war crimes gruesome war crimes committed during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. That's well and good, insofar as the claims are true.

But the fact that Serbian war criminals are singled out, while the hundreds, possibly thousands of war criminals that have been backed in various ways or in the employ of the US government are free to do as they please makes the "justice" of such a decision meaningless, and discredits the court.

Readers respond to Yugoslavia series

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 19:58:25 +0000

From the bottom of my heart, I wish to thank Dru Oja Jay for his courage to write a compelling and truthful attempt to set the record straight on what really happened (and is happening) to Yugoslavia (five part series). It will take literally decades for honest and serious historians and other true scholars to unravel the massive web of lies and deceptions that were the modus operandi of Western media coverage of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia. The massive level of highly sophisticated propaganda indicates that the Western-supported destruction of the former Yugoslavia, once a peaceful, beautiful, and multiethnic nation, was supported at the highest levels of Western governments. A natural question for the open-minded public might be "why destroy Yugoslavia?" I would like to complement Dru's excellent pieces by answering this question:

1. Have an excuse to continue NATO's continued senseless existence (since the fall of the Soviet Union) by illegally occupying and fighting a country which never attacked the West, thereby violating NATO's Charter.

2. Divide and conquer the region for Western economic exploitation. Before NATO's illegal and vicious destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999, George Soros met with various American officials and demanded the Trepca Mining Complex in Kosovo. One of the first targets of NATO during the bombing was the "Div" cigarette factory in Vranje, one of the largest in Europe which competed with Western cigarette companies. Phillip Morris has since constructed a new factory in Serbia. In every former Yugoslav republic, the vast majority of people are much worse off than they were when they lived in the former Yugoslavia.

3. Germany and the Vatican were the first national entities to illegally and prematurely recognize the Slovenia and Croatia before any issues of their treatment of minorities could be addressed. Both Germany and Vatican were responsible for much of the genocide of Serbian Orthodox Christians during WWII which has yet to be acknowledged and compensated for by either entity. Thus, historical anti-Serbian attitudes from both Germany and the Vatican have been largely responsible for the West's anti-Serbian perspectives. Remember that Germany's illegal recognition of Slovenia and Croatia was the first major foreign policy action by a newly-unified Germany.

4. Bases for US troops. As Germany has not renewed leases on US bases in Germany, the US needed a place to station troops. Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo is the largest base for US troops outside of the US.

5. Divide and conquer the entire region to have an excuse for open-ended troops that will protect a massive trans-Balkan oil-pipeline from Burgas, Bulgaria down to Vlore, Albania. The pipeline will carry oil from the Caspian Sea region to the Adriatic Sea which will then supply Europe with oil.

I could give many more reasons, but these are the most relevant. It is important to bear in mind that with the massive "success" that the corporate-controlled, Western mainstream media had in brainwashing citizens of the West, the precedent has now been established and as we predictably see, Iraq was similarly illegally and viciously attacked and the media drumbeats of imperialist intervention are now beginning their Goebbel-esque efforts to further bankrupt and bleed America dry by fighting Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.

In a true democracy, debate is free and open-ended. Western citizens never had the chance to properly debate the merits of intervention in Yugoslavia's civil wars because the media mostly censored any Serbian points of view. The media has forever shamed itself over the distorted reporting of Yugoslavia's civil wars and the ever-declining readership of corporate-controlled mainstream media is I think a symptom not of the internet by itself but that open-minded people are realizing (with the help of the internet and other "renegade" media) just how much propaganda is created and spewed forth by these self-serving institutions.

Best regards and best of luck in your very noble endeavours to challenge the omnipotent corporate media!

Michael Pravica, Ph.D.
Henderson, Nevada

Thank you for the five-part series on the former Yugoslavia.

I have family on nearly all sides of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia --
both civilian and military. This position has forced me and others like me to
recognize the complexities of the situation which you so eloquently articulated
in your writing.

I still have much to learn and will be checking your sources for more
understanding. I appreciated your thorough research and consequent honesty
which has been so lacking in most Western media.

Also, the systematic parallels that can be drawn to media coverage in places
like Haiti, Venezuela, Iraq and Afghanistan make your articles all the more
relevant in even the most broad of contexts.

Simon A. Dougherty
Scarborough, Ontario

Dru Oja Jay is one, of only a handful of world journalists, that is printing the TRUTH about former Yugoslavia, and the malicious, and wrongful demonization of Serbia, and Serbs in particular. It should serve as a testimonial, and a course of study for journalism schools around the world, with the title: "How to fabricate a war and malign a sovereign nation, fighting future terrorism in the Balkans and Europe". Mr. Jay should get a "Journalistic Oscar" for his great series on former Yugoslavia. Just wonderful. Thank you.

Vojislav Spasic
Cleveland, Ohio

The Dominion welcomes discussion, criticism, and commentary from readers. Letters can be sent to the Dominion by post or email. Letters may be edited for style, clarity and length; if there is a dispute, we will link to an unaltered version of the published letter.

Peace from Above

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 05:02:11 +0000

The final article in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia

[ Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five ]

An oil refinery destroyed by NATO bombs.

A crater left by a NATO bomb near a school.

A mother and child killed in the bombing.

A refugee killed en route by NATO bombs.

Houses destroyed by NATO bombs.

Belgrade burning after a night bombing raid.

In 1999, NATO planes dropped twenty thousand tonnes of bombs on targets in the former Yugoslavia, killing upwards of 3,000 human beings and injuring thousands more. Targets included power plants, hospitals, industrial infrastructure, schools, churches, historic sites, water and sewage facilities, apartment buildings, temporary housing for refugees, traveling refugees, the state television station, bridges, and socially-owned, worker-run factories. Michael Parenti, Jeremey Scahill and others have noted that buildings owned by multinational corporations remained curiously unscathed, though the Chinese Embassy was levelled by NATO bombs. One and a half tonnes of depleted uranium munitions were used in attacks. Cluster bombs were used. Bombing also resulted in the incineration of 80,000 tonnes of crude oil in a heavily populated area, and the contamination of the Danube river with hundreds of tonnes of toxic chemicals.

NATO planes, it was reported, often waited fifteen minutes after bombing a target before hitting it again, killing rescue workers.

Canada participated in the bombing, though neither the public nor parliament were consulted in the decision.

NATO's bombing campaign continues to be dubbed a "humanitarian intervention" against Serbian forces, allegedly bent on the wholesale slaughter of innocent Muslims and Croats.

"This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain. We seek no political advantage," President Clinton told television viewers.

The stated reason for the bombing was to force Serbian leaders to sign the Rambouillet agreement, which called for the unconditional NATO occupation of the whole of Yugoslavia. The "agreement," which most observers say was simply an ultimatum, would have empowered a NATO-designated official to "issue binding directives" to the governments of Yugoslavia and Kosovo. According to a source quoted by George Kenney, US State Department officials bragged that the US had "deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs would accept." While the Rambouillet document nominally sought autonomy for ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the Americans seemed to make several assumptions about what the Albanians would do with their autonomy. Among other things, the agreement called for a "free-market economy" in Kosovo and the privatization of all government-owned assets.

Writing in the Guardian, Neil Clark notes that "NATO only destroyed 14 tanks, but 372 industrial facilities were hit--including the Zastava car plant [known for its production of the 'Yugo'] at Kragujevac, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed."

In other news, Clark reports that Kosovo's Trepca mine complex--estimated to be worth $5 billion, and called "war's glittering prize" by the New York Times--was seized by 2,900 NATO troops, who used tear gas and rubber bullets to take it over. Now held "in trust" by the UN, the mine has largely been sold off to foreign investors and firms.

Reporting of this kind lends a degree of credibility to an account like that of Michael Parenti, who maintains that Yugoslavia was dismantled and attacked because it refused to submit to western interests and privatize its industry in the manner imposed on the rest of post-communist eastern Europe. (Parenti is hardly unique in holding this view, however. Former State Department official George Kenney and retired US Air Force Colonel Allan Parrington have both come to a very similar conclusion independently.) That the standard of living in such countries has declined significantly, while unemployment, crime and inequality have risen across the board seems to be little more than a footnote to official accounts.

What political agenda is the media serving by demonizing Serbs and Milosevic in particular? Is it because, as a diverse set of observers suggest, that the Serbs were demonized and bombed for having put up the toughest resistance to the imposition of a privatized free-market economy?

If and when there is a real debate in Canada about the Yugoslavian civil war, perhaps an explanation will emerge that accounts for the facts that are now available to everyone. Until then, the evidence is more favourable to the case made by people like Parenti than it is to remarkably unequivocal view that blame for the entire conflict rests on one man.

The explanation of NATO's role as "humanitarian intervention," however appealing, has the additional burden of contradicting almost every precedent of US foreign policy in the last three decades, in addition to requiring the commentator to ignore the verified facts on the ground.

The bombing itself was a serious war crime by most definitions of the term. Bill Clinton and Jean Chrétien, however, are unlikely to appear in front of a war crimes tribunal any time soon, as the tribunal itself is funded and controlled by the United States and other NATO members.

In November of 1999, Canadian lawyers David Jacobs and York University law professor Michael Mandel presented a formal request that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where Milosevic was until recently on trial, investigate sixty-seven NATO leaders (including Bill Clinton and Jean Chrétien) in the deaths of thousands of civilians. They presented three volumes of evidence to substantiate their request. Continued failure to act, they said, was a violation of the court's mandate.

Two months later, ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte made it clear that NATO leaders would not be investigated. Mandel wrote that he and his colleagues could not "understand the failure of the Tribunal to act on these and the many other complaints against the NATO leaders. The law is clear. The evidence is overwhelming."

Responding to a reporter's question about why the International Court of Justice did not have jurisdiction over NATO countries, NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea was quite plain:

The charge by Yugoslavia was brought under the genocide convention. That does not apply to NATO countries. As to whom it does apply, I think we know the answer there.

Needless to say, the press does not share Shea's refreshing honesty when it comes to NATO exceptionalism and the selective application of international law.

Further reading:

» NATO: Press Conference given by NATO Spokesman, Jamie Shea

» Michael Mandel: Meeting with Carla del Ponte on NATO's Crimes of War

» Alan Parrington: Clinton Had A Chance To Avoid Kosovo Bombing

» Noam Chomsky: Another Way For Kosovo?

» George Monbiot: Nato's Dirty War

» George Monbiot: As we knew from bombing Serbia: refineries are the key

» George Monbiot: A Discreet Deal in the Pipeline: Nato Mocked Those Who Claimed There was a Plan for Caspian Oil

» Independent Commission of Inquiry to Investigate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against the People of Yugoslavia: Selected Research Findings

» Institute for Economic Democracy: It was Yugoslavia's Turn to be destabilized

» Associated Press: Serbian town will be polluted for years following NATO strikes

» Jeremy Scahill: Rest Easy, Bill Clinton: Slobo Can't Talk Any More

» Michael Mandel, David Jacobs et alia: Notice Of The Existence Of Information Concerning Serious Violations Of International Humanitarian Law Within The Jurisdiction Of The Tribunal

» Human Rights Watch: Cluster Bombs

» Documentation of NATO bomb attacks

» More photos of NATO attack

Dru Oja Jay looks at where NATO dropped 20,000 tonnes of bombs in 1999 in the final part of the former Yugoslavia series

The Good Guys

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 01:34:01 +0000

Part four in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia

[ Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five ]

Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic meeting with officials at NATO headquarters in 1998. While demonizing Milosevic, media coverage has avoided discussing the NATO-supported leaders of the breakaway republics. photo: NATO

While a Milosevic-led Yugoslavia (consisting of Serbia, Montenegro and Vojvodina) was under sanctions that rendered it unable to hire its own western Public Relations firm, the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Bosnia and the Kosovo Liberation Army were receiving diplomatic, financial and military backing from the US and European powers. While Milosevic continues to receive thousands of column-inches of coverage that manage to avoid engaging with publicly available facts, his counterparts have received very little coverage, factual or otherwise.

Public Relations flak James Harff noted that mobilizing Jewish support for someone like Croatian president Franjo Tudjman was an impressive feat (see part 3). It also added a touch of irony to claims that Serbian forces were perpetrating a "new Nazism".

While those accusations were made, providing justification for a massive bombing campaign, Tudjman was busy perpetrating the old Nazism. In his 1989 book, Wasteland of Historical Truth, Tudjman wrote that "the establishment of Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews."

"Genocide is not only permitted," Tudjman wrote, "it is recommended, even commanded by the word of the Almighty, whenever it is useful for the survival or the restoration of the kingdom of the chosen nation, or for the preservation and spreading of its one and only correct faith." Tudjman counted Pope John Paul II among supporters of Croatian secession under his party.

During WWII, Croatian forces slaughtered over 700,000 Serbs, 45,000 Jews and at least 26,000 Roma at the Jasenovac death camp. With few exceptions, Croatian war criminals were never brought to justice; thousands of Nazi collaborators, including 500 members of the Roman Catholic clergy, fled to Austria and Italy at the end of WWII. Tudjman hailed these as independence fighters, and appointed several former Nazi collaborators to government posts.

Upon Croatia's separation in 1991, the Serbian minority in the Croatian region of Krajina itself declared independence from Croatia. In a referendum, 99.7 per cent of the 500,000 Krajina Serbs voted to re-join Yugoslavia. During four years of fighting, tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats either left or were driven out of Serbian majority areas by Serbian paramilitary groups. (A chief accusation of Milosevic's Serbia is that they supported these expulsions and the attendant atrocities, including murder and torture.) In 1995, a revitalized, US-backed Croatian army went on the counterattack. "Operation Storm," carried out with US, German and French support and training, took over all of Serbian Krajina, displacing almost the entire Serbian population, and sending over 200,000 Serbian refugees fleeing into Bosnia. Though it was the largest such displacement of the conflict, this "ethnic cleansing" went largely unreported. None of the Croatian leaders or officers responsible have been charged with war crimes.

Meanwhile, non-Croats in Croatia--especially Serbs--were subject to a range of punitive measures and systematic discrimination. In To Kill a Nation, Michael Parenti provides an overview of the Croatian situation, including restrictions on media and "confiscatory property taxes," denial "of employment" and "any effective police protection." After the conflict, Croatian Serbs were denied aid to rebuild their homes and businesses. Discrimination against Croatia's Serbian minority continues today, and only a third of Croatia's estimated 300,000 Serbs have returned.

Another lesser-known recipient of western backing was Alija Izetbegovic, who spent part of his youth as a member of the Young Muslims, a fundamentalist group that recruited Muslim units for the Nazi SS during WWII. In his book, Muslim Declaration, he wrote:

There can be no peace or coexistence between Islamic faith and non-Islamic faith and institutions. The Islamic movement must and can take power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough, not only to destroy the non-Islamic power, but to build up a new Islamic one.

According to the New York Times, a senior CIA official told Congress in a secret deposition that "There is no question that the policy of getting arms into Bosnia was of great assistance in allowing the Iranians to dig in and create good relations with the Bosnian government." The official was referring to a plan that, according to sources quoted by the Los Angeles Times, Clinton signed off on that allowed Iran to provide Izetbegovic with arms.

Izetbegovic placed second in Bosnia's 1990 Presidential election, but took power through political maneuvering. Though Bosnia's constitution stipulates a rotating presidency, Izetbegovic refused to step down. Fikret Abdic, who had the most votes in the election and remained quite popular in Bosnia, was ousted from government by Izetbegovic and demonized in the state-run media.

In his book on the Dayton peace negotiations, American diplomat Richard Holbrooke expressed his dubious opinion of Izetbegovic. "Even if Milosevic makes more concessions," Holbrooke wrote, "the Bosnians will simply raise the ante." Nonetheless, the US continued to support Izetbegovic. George Kenney wrote that Izetbegovic's "intention seemed to be to pretend to go along with negotiations while continuing the war." During the war, Izetbegovic invaded areas of Bosnia inhabited primarily by Serbs, creating, Holbrooke admitted, over one hundred thousand refugees. Nonetheless, Izetbegovic remains outside the scope of media coverage of war crimes during the war.

Bosnia and its federated Serbian counterpart, Republika Srpska, are to this day under the authority of a UN "high representative", which has the authority to remove democratically elected officials or overturn laws. There has been considerable pressure placed on the governments to implement programs of privatization and to conform to IMF policy proscriptions. Elected President Nikola Poplasen of Republika Srpska was removed by the high representative after being elected in spite of a high level of foreign financial and material support for the incumbent president, who came into office after NATO ousted Karadzic, the previous elected president. Poplasen said that he had been pressured to "break off relations" with Yugoslavia, but refused.

In Kosovo, Western governments bypassed moderate separatists like the Kosovo Democratic League and non-separatist ethnic Albanian organizations to throw support behind the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Publicly, US officials were calling the KLA a "terrorist organization" as late as 1998. It appears, however, that the KLA were receiving US assistance long before. KLA members stand accused of assassinating moderate Albanians, drug dealing, collaborating with al-Qaeda, murderous attacks on Serbian villages intended to provoke retaliation, historical ties to Nazi collaborators.

Retired Canadian General Lewis MacKenzie wrote in the National Post in 2004 that "Those of us who warned that the West was being sucked in on the side of an extremist, militant, Kosovo-Albanian independence movement were dismissed as appeasers." The former peacekeeper noted that the KLA was "universally designated a terrorist organization and known to be receiving support from Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda."

MacKenzie also commented on Canadian media coverage.

The recent dearth of news in the North American media regarding the increase in violence in Kosovo compared to the comprehensive coverage in the European press strongly suggests that we Canadians don't like to admit it when we are wrong. On the contrary, selected news clips on this side of the ocean continue to reinforce the popular spin that those dastardly Serbs are at it again.

Ironically, Slobodan Milosevic, who is frequently compared to Hitler, was among the few leaders in the war that did not have Nazi ties. Surely the media are sitting on damning evidence against him, given the monikers that have graced headlines announcing his death ("Butcher of the Balkans" is a favourite). Casual observers will have to wait until journalists decide it is time to show why Milosevic and the Serbs are guilty when NATO and the other leaders are not.

One hopes that such future explanations, though entirely hypothetical, will be forced to contend with the body of facts, including the fact that Western-funded opposition newspapers continued to operate in Belgrade while Milosevic was in office, and numerous demonstrations against him went unsuppressed. It is not accurate to say that Milosevic's government did not engage in political repression, as fighting against military forces and guerilla insurgencies is by definition a kind of political repression, a variety that countries like Canada proudly participate in today.

That said, available evidence indicates that freedom of speech was practiced by Serbian citizens of all nationalities, at least in cities like Belgrade. One Washington Post reporter found the democratically-elected Milosevic's tolerance of public criticism to be evidence of his cunning, writing that it helps "let off steam and mitigate threats to [Milosevic's] government."

In occupied Republika Srpska, by contrast, popular demonstrations against occupying NATO troops seizing radio stations were met with armed vehicles, tear gas, and warning shots. We "will not hesitate to take the necessary measures including the use of force against media inciting attacks on [NATO forces] or other international organizations," a NATO representative said. The meaning of "inciting attacks" was made clear when the television channel Kanal S was told to "immediately cease broadcasting" after playing a message from Sarajevo University students which invited viewers to "join a peaceful protest" against NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

To this day, US officials insist that the bombing of the National TV studios in Belgrade was justified. Their reasoning? It was a "ministry of lies."

No one can doubt that serious atrocities were committed by Serb forces during the war. That said, one does not need to be a supporter of Mr. Milosevic to wonder why coverage of Western-supported republics did not reach the level of scrutiny and wild speculation to which Serb actions were subject. Why are large swaths of the public record ignored, and why do the media not account for their circulation of what no one can deny were massively inflated figures and claims of mass graves with tens or hundreds of thousands of bodies? While it is possible that these exist, it is also true that they have yet to be found after a massive search.

The responsibility to provide minimal evidence for oft-repeated claims has not been met. News coverage citing the opinions of NATO leaders and their allies cannot substitute for evidence in the long term. Nonetheless, claims from government sources with an interest in the outcome of coverage are repeated, even after they are contradicted by evidence gathered by NATO or UN teams. (Evidence provided by the Yugoslavian government of NATO atrocities is, naturally, subject to the media's a priori dismissal.)

"Anyone that tries to describe what was going on [in Bosnia] in a rational manner is deemed to be some sort of pro-Serb, rather than pro-truth," says the former general MacKenzie. MacKenzie was defending former BC provincial NDP candidate Rollie Keith, who stepped down after his claim that he saw no evidence of genocide while serving as a UN observer in Kosovo received negative media attention.

"I was shocked that someone who had merely described what was going on in Kosovo, which he saw with his own eyes, that some people interpreted that [sic] as an apologist for Milosevic," added MacKenzie.

Lieutenant General Satish Nambiar of India, who headed the UN mission in Yugoslavia, wrote that "Portraying the Serbs as evil and everybody else as good was not only counterproductive but also dishonest."

"According to my experience," wrote Nambiar, "all sides were guilty but only the Serbs would admit that they were no angels while the others would insist that they were."

Further reading

» Lt Gen Satish Nambiar (Retired): The Fatal Flaws Underlying NATO'S Intervention in Yugoslavia

» Rollie Keith: Failure of Diplomacy

» Lewis MacKenzie: National Post article on Kosovo

» Global Research: Clinton Administration supported the "Militant Islamic Base"

» Wikipedia: Operation Storm

» Stephen Gowans: Was the US behind the single greatest act of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia?

» Nebojsa Malic: Review of Richard Holbrooke's To End a War

» CBC Vancouver: NDPer quits over Milosevic comments

» CBC Vancouver: Strong military support for former NDP candidate

» Amnesty International: Croatia

» BIRN: Serb Refugees Unmoved by Gotovina Trial

» Minorities at Risk: Assessment for Serbs in Croatia

» BBC: Serb struggles for Croatian home

» Human Rights Watch: Croatia Fails Serb Refugees

» Petar Makara and Jared Israel: The Croatian Ustashi

&raqo; Oliver Kamm: Examining claims between Izetbegovic and Nazi SS

Who was NATO supporting during the war? Part four of Dru Oja Jay's series on the former Yugoslavia takes a look

The Media War

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 01:48:01 +0000

Part three in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia

[ Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five ]

James Harff, of public relations firm Ruder Finn, claimed credit for the effective demonization of Serbs and the reduction of a historically complex situation to "good guys and bad guys". "The emotive charge," said Harff of the political climate following the campaign, "was so strong that no one could go against the dominant current, except on pain of being accused of revisionism."

Extensive analysis and investigation of the public record has shown that during the series of civil wars that beset the former Yugoslavia, the Western news media provided coverage that was, by any objective standard, misleading and in many cases completely false.

Recent media reports have simply stopped referring to mass graves and death camps where hundreds of thousands of people were--according to breathless TV, radio and newspaper reports during the war--systematically raped, tortured, and killed.

Seven years later, little evidence supporting the conclusion that such vast atrocities took place has surfaced, though casual references to genocide and ethnic cleansing find themselves sharing a sentence with the name Milosevic. Evidence does show that tens of thousands of combatants and civilians died in the tragic decade-long conflict. Hundreds of thousands were displaced, forced to live in refugee camps.

The silence of the same journalists that were scrambling to tell the world about genocide on the scale of "Hitler or Stalin" not only fails to correct the misinformation that hundreds of thousands of innocents were killed, it also undermines the credibility of future reports of genocide. The media's collective credibility is further undermined by its ongoing silence about conflicts where hundreds of thousands of people are being killed, with western complicity or support: in West Papua and Congo, for example.

George Kenney, who resigned from the US State Department in 1992 to protest the Bush administration's policies in the then-disintegrating Yugoslavia, wrote in 1996 that "much of the early war was fought not on the battlefield but through high-powered (and high-priced) lobbying firms."

"Since late 1992 there has also been a splendidly effective volunteer army of journalists, think-tank analysts, Capitol Hill staff and administration hawks pushing the Bosnian, and secondarily Croatian, causes," wrote Kenney. The Yugoslavian civil war began when Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia and Macedonia seceded from Yugoslavia with US and European funding and encouragement. In the case of Croatia and Bosnia, significant Serb minorities insisted on autonomy or rejoining Yugoslavia, which was not consistent with the US-European plan. The fact that in the case of Croatia, members of the Serb minority had their rights systematically violated by the US- and German-backed government also did not matter.

In America, Kenney wrote, "it is almost impossible to be too anti-Serb."

UN and NATO investigations have shown that military and paramilitary groups on all sides--as well as NATO itself, which dropped 20,000 tonnes of bombs on Serbia--committed atrocities. However, the record also shows that news media repeatedly reported made-up atrocities attributed to Serb forces, while taking minimal interest in atrocities committed against Serbs. Evidence of crimes committed by Serbs sometimes turned out to be crimes perpetrated against Serbs, as was the case with BBC footage of a "Bosnian prisoner of war in a concentration camp" who was later identified as a Bosnian Serb in a Muslim detention camp. No evidence of Serbian "concentration camps" ever surfaced, though conditions in detention camps on all sides were predictably brutal.

In other cases, unidentified bodies were attributed to untold Serb atrocities before having been identified as belonging to a particular ethnic group or even as noncombatants.

In a shocking number of cases, estimates of thousands of victims were reported where later only a few dozen bodies were found.

The most striking example was State Department official David Scheffer's estimate--in the middle of the NATO bombing campaign--that "as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 remain unaccounted for." This alarming estimate, reported widely in the media, was later reduced when the British government circulated an estimate that 10,000 were missing. A month later, NATO-led peacekeepers told the press that a total of 2,150 bodies had been found, of which 850 were civilians. It was evidence of war crimes, but of a significantly smaller scale than had been initially reported.

The radical revision of estimates after the shocking headlines was often several news cycles behind, which was exemplary of reporting during the war. In most cases, horrifying headlines and stories attributed to "government sources"--often governments with an interest in a particular outcome--were followed up with obscure corrections.

According to many sources, Bosnian Muslim leaders like President Izetbegovic were keenly aware of the impact of images of suffering on international public opinion. In the case of several high-profile massacres in Sarajevo that made headlines and rallied western support, for example, UN investigations later revealed that Bosnian Muslim forces had been responsible for slaughtering their own people. The massacres served their purpose, and western media attention focused on the "siege of Sarajevo" by Serb forces, which were held responsible for the killings.

Many atrocities against Serbs went unreported or underreported, including villages burned to the ground, describing gang rape by Croatian militias (based on the testimony of victims, not unnamed government sources), and murderous attacks--killing hundreds of Serbian civilians--by Muslim forces stationed at Srebrenica prior to the massacre of hundreds of Muslims there by Serb forces.

In the case of Srebrenica, the number of "over 8,000" missing Muslims is often cited, but the number of bodies found in a massive search of the area is under 3,000, as of last October. Only a fraction have been identified, and the bodies include soldiers and fighters on both sides killed in three years of war. One can be relatively certain that Serbian troops executed at least 153 prisoners of war in one case, which few will dispute is a horrific war crime. Evidence on the public record after extensive searches, however, does not support the much larger numbers often cited, or charges of genocide. This does not necessarily mean that larger atrocities did not take place, but simply that supporting evidence has not been found after a major investigation.

Public relations firms played a key role in the disinformation around the war. Ruder Finn was one such firm, employed at various times by Croatia, Muslim Bosnia, and the Albanian parliamentary opposition in Kosovo.

In a notable exception to media orthodoxy, the National Post's Isabel Vincent reported in 1998:

If the plight of Kosovo Albanians is today viewed around the world as an issue of self-determination for an oppressed minority group, then it is largely due to the efforts of former Ruder Finn executive James Harff, who almost single-handedly reduced a historically complex conflict to a black and white morality play, complete with oppressed good guys and bloodthirsty bad guys.

In 1993, Harff told French journalist Jacques Morlino that he was "most proud" of Ruder Finn's successful bid to mobilize major Jewish organizations like the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress. According to Morlino's transcript, Harff said that

There was every reason then for Jewish intellectuals and organizations to be hostile to the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this state of things. And we succeeded in masterly fashion... The entry into the fray of Jewish organizations on the side of the Bosnians was an extraordinary move. All at once, we were able to make public opinion equate Serbs and Nazis. The dossier was complex, nobody understood what was going on in Bosnia... But in one stroke we were able to present a simple matter, a story with good guys and bad guys. We knew that the business would be played out on this terrain... All at once, there was a very clear change of language in the press with the employment of terms with a very strong emotive value, such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc., all evoking Nazi Germany, the gas chambers and Auschwitz. The emotive charge was so strong that no one could go against the dominant current, except on pain of being accused of revisionism. We hit the bull's eye.

When Morlino pointed out that Harff didn't have any proof of claims circulated to media by Ruder Finn, Harff responded that "Our business is not to verify information. We're not equipped to do that. Our business... is to accelerate the circulation of information that is favorable to us... That's what we did. We didn't assert that there were death camps in Bosnia, we let it be known that Newsday asserted it."

Pressed by Morlino, Harff insisted, "We're professionals. We had work to do and we did it. We're not paid to practice morality."

Journalists, on the other hand, have taken great pains to point out that they practice morality. In this regard, their continued silence on the question of evidence--while repeating claims without any substantiation--is confusing.

Further Reading:

» Diana Johnstone: Srebrenica Revisited

» Source Watch: Ruder Finn's work for Croatia

» Partial transcript of James Harff's comments to Jacques Morlino

» National Post: International Media Under Attack in Serbia

» George Kenney: Kosovo: On Ends and Means

» George Kenney: Steering Clear of Balkan Shoals

» George Kenney: A Premature Death

» Michael Parenti: The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia

» Michael Parenti: The Media and their Atrocities

» Michael Parenti: The Demonization of Slobodan Milosevic

» Ruder Finn: Official Site

Part three of Dru Oja Jay's series on the former Yugoslavia looks at the role of the media in shaping the conflict.

The Origins of the War in the Balkans

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 04:45:57 +0000

Part two in a five part series on the former Yugoslavia

[ Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five ]

The former Yugoslavia. The green areas are Serbia-Montenegro's autonomous provinces: Vojvodina, Serbia, Montenegro (top to bottom).

Slobodan Milosevic isn't only charged with war crimes. The Globe's Doug Saunders says that Milosevic is "considered responsible for 250,000 deaths and the descent of the former Yugoslavia into terrible ethnic warfare."

Though Saunders does not say who "considers" Milosevic responsible, he is certainly not the only commentator to repeat the claim.

The media's failure to examine facts on the ground (or at least, their failure to tell their readers about them) extends beyond Milosevic himself to the entire history of Yugoslavia's civil war.

Between 1960 and 1980, Yugoslavia--a federation consisting of multiple ethnic groups, including Albanians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Egyptians, Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats--was, by objective measures, a prosperous country. Economic growth was vigorous, all citizens had a guaranteed right to income, a month of paid vacation, and life expectancy was seventy-two years. The federation's many national and linguistic groups coexisted peacefully through a complex system of government spanning multiple languages and semiautonomous regions.

As Michael Parenti writes in To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia--which documents the history of US and European intervention--Yugoslavian leaders committed a "disastrous error" in the 1970s: they borrowed money from the West. When western economies entered a recession, free trade principles gave way to economic self-preservation, and Yugoslavian exports were blocked, to devastating effect.

Earlier borrowing brought with it the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which demanded that the economy be "restructured." This process, Parenti writes, included "wage freezes, the abolition of state subsidized prices, increased unemployment, elimination of most worker-managed enterprises, and massive cuts in social spending." According to the World Bank's figures, restructuring produced six hundred thousand layoffs in 1989-90 alone.

Taking control of monetary policy by 1991, the IMF effectively broke Yugoslavia into pieces by preventing transfer payments to the republics (such as Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia) from the federal government and assigning debt to each of the member republics.

Serbia, Parenti notes, was the most hostile to IMF "reforms," with 650,000 workers (joined, in many cases, by workers of other ethnicities in Serbia and other republics) engaging in "massive walkouts and protests."

For Parenti and others, all available evidence points to a long term, deliberate campaign on the part of the US, Britain, and Germany (among others) to destabilize and divide the last socialist holdout in eastern Europe. Before the economic collapse, almost all observers agree that people from many ethnic backgrounds coexisted peacefully. The economic destruction of Yugoslavia, Parenti argues, caused different nationalities to "compete more furiously than ever for a share" of rapidly declining economic wealth. "Once the bloodletting starts, the cycle of vengeance and retribution takes on a momentum of its own."

In 1990, the US threatened to cut off aid if Yugoslavia did not hold elections, but insisted that elections be held only in the republics, not at the federal level. In 1991, the European Community organized a conference on Yugoslavia, which called for its division into "sovereign and independent republics," at which point Yugoslavian representatives were barred from attending any more of the conference meetings.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has most recently called attention to itself by financing political groups that fomented military coups against elected governments in Haiti and Venezuela, was also involved in the Yugoslavian civil war and the ensuing conflict. Allan Weinstein, one of the NED's founders, was candid about the mission of the NED, which is funded directly by the US federal government. "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA," Weinstein said in 1991.

According to research conducted by William Blum, a scholar of US interventions abroad, the NED described the mandate of its 1997-98 programs as aiming to "identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change...[and] to develop strategies for private sector growth."

Starting in 1988, the NED provided millions of dollars to "independent media," "opposition political parties," and "pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations," "student groups," "labour unions" and "think tanks" throughout the former Yugoslavia. According to testimony in Senate hearings, in the two years leading up to the Kosovo crisis, the US government provided $16.5 million for democracy promotion in Serbia alone, mostly through the NED. Proportional to population, and not accounting for lower pay scales, the equivalent amount of funding for Canadian media and political groupings would be roughly $46 million.

A Milosevic-headed Serbian government did eventually pass legislation that decreed that the media could face steep fines for circulating false information, forcing US-sponsored newspapers and radio stations to move to Montenegro. The US, however, has even less tolerance for outside funding of its democracy. Senator John Kerry, for example, found himself the subject of a firestorm of media criticism when his 2004 presidential campaign accepted a $2,000 cheque from a private citizen of South Korea (not a government group). Kerry sent the cheque back and vowed to do more thorough "background checks" on campaign donors.

The Canada Elections Act prohibits any group that receives money from a foreign source from using it for "election advertising purposes." Canada also maintains extensive regulations preventing foreign ownership of the media.

Are critics like Parenti and Blum right? How does their evidence stack up to that provided by Canadian media? This is difficult to say, because almost all news media in Canada and the US have ignored the role of the West in the demise of Yugoslavia and the United States' subsequent well-financed political interventions.

"In the eyes of the global media," writes University of Ottawa economist Michel Chossudovsky, "Western powers bear no responsibility for the impoverishment and destruction of a nation of 24 million people." Instead, the prevailing view continues to be that the US, Canada, and other NATO powers acted benevolently to end the conflict.

Meanwhile, the breakup continues. NED-funded political parties, currently governing in Serbia-Montenegro's autonomous province of Montenegro (and, since 2000, Serbia itself) are currently preparing for a referendum on secession.

Further reading:

» William Blum: Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy

» Michel Chossudovsky: Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonising Bosnia

» Cathrin Schütz: The Militarism of German Foreign Policy and the Dismantling of a State

» Jared Israel et alia: The Nuts & Bolts of a Scam... How the U.S. has Created a Corrupt Opposition in Serbia

» Post-Soviet Media Law and Policy: Media Law in Serbia-Montenegro

» James Ciment and Immanuel Ness: NED and the Empire's New Clothes

» George Szamuely: The National Evisceration of Democracy

» US Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Prospects for Democracy in Yugoslavia

» Neil Clark: The spoils of another war

» Al Giordano: Do Foreign Governments Have a "Human Right" to Buy Venezuela Elections?

» Elections Canada: Questions and Answers About Third Party Election Advertising

» Yves Engler: Market Famines and the IMF

The second part of a series by Dru Oja Jay examines the role of the west in the breakup of Yugoslavia

Milosevic the Guilty?

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 00:47:54 +0000

Part one in a five-part series on the former Yugoslavia

[ Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four | Part five ]

Guilty? If the media is going to claim that Milosevic is a genocidal monster, it should point to evidence instead of repeating accusations.

The Associated Press, Reuters and the CBC refer to him as the "Butcher of the Balkans." Making light of his recent death, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart referred to him as a "madman" and a "genocidal maniac". The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders said that he was "considered responsible for 250,000 deaths and the descent of the former Yugoslavia into terrible ethnic warfare." The Globe and Mail compared him to Hitler and named him a "war criminal" in an obituary. "Few of history's dictators can match this grim record," wrote the Toronto Star.

The death of former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic will, it seems, go down in history as the final verdict on his guilt as a mass murderer on the order of Stalin and Hitler.

There's only one thing missing from all the claims of Milosevic's guilt: evidence.

The Associated Press, for example, notes that all "witness testimony is on public record"--indeed, full transcripts of all testimony are available online--but their 1500 word report on Milosevic's crimes does not refer to any of it directly. In an oversight of broad and systematic proportions, precious few of the dozens of stories about Milosevic in the Canadian or American press refer directly to the hundreds of hours of witness testimony.

One can speculate about the reasons for this lack of the most elementary evidence. However, the fact that evidence is not presented in newspapers and broadcast reports threatens to undermine what journalists, politicians and intellectuals from all points on the political spectrum seem to know without any doubt: that Milosevic was a monster.

The media's assertion-based case against Milosevic could be further undermined by journalists who reported on the trial itself.

Neil Clark, covering the UN War Crimes Tribunal for the Guardian in 2003, wrote that "not only has the prosecution signally failed to prove Milosevic's personal responsibility for atrocities committed on the ground, the nature and extent of the atrocities themselves has also been called into question." In the worst massacre that Milosevic had been charged with--at Srebrenica in 1995--the prosecution "produced nothing to challenge the verdict of the five-year inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government--that there was 'no proof that orders for the slaughter came from Serb political leaders in Belgrade.'"

"The trial has heard more than 100 prosecution witnesses, and not a single one has testified that Milosevic ordered war crimes," wrote John Laughland in the British Spectator.

These kinds of verifiable claims threaten to undermine what thousands of Canadian and American journalists, politicians and intellectuals apparently know to be true. Accounts like Clark's and Laughland's are trivially easy to disprove—to prove them wrong, all that is needed is to refer to the testimony that contradicts their claims.

During the breakup of Yugoslavia, previously overlapping and coexisting ethnic groups fought over territory. During the war, it is indisputable that thousands of Muslims, Croats and Serbs were killed in massacres, battles and NATO bombing raids. And hundreds of thousands were indisputably displaced by the conflict. It remains to be proven, however, that Milosevic was singularly responsible for the humanitarian disaster. Some facts suggest otherwise. For example, many Muslim refugees—who the Serbs were accused of "ethnically cleansing"—settled in Serbia in government-funded housing, which NATO later bombed. That said, it remains possible that Milosevic is guilty of the genocide that NATO leaders accuse him of, but evidence needs to be shown of his guilt before it can be concluded. Incidentally, NATO leaders exempt themselves from prosecution in the court where Milosevic stood trial for war crimes prior his death.

Lacking evidence that Milosevic ordered war crimes to be committed, media reports speak of his "ultra-nationalist" appeals to Serbs and his desire for a "greater Serbia". Reuters, the Associated Press and many other outlets frequently refer to a 1989 speech as evidence of Milosevic's embracing of Serb nationalism. Reuters provides the following fragment without context: "They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded." The Guardian uses an even smaller fragment, describing how Milosevic "mesmerised the mob by assuring the minority Serbs in the ethnic Albanian province that no one would ever 'beat them' again."

During the same speech that is widely seen as Milosevic's defining moment as an ultra-nationalist, whipping Serbs into a frenzy that led to ethnic cleansing, Milosevic also claimed that "no place in Serbia is better suited than the field of Kosovo for saying that unity in Serbia will bring prosperity to the Serbian people in Serbia and each one of its citizens, irrespective of his national or religious affiliation."

Milosevic continued in his allegedly genocidal fever pitch:

Serbia has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is its advantage. National composition of almost all countries in the world today, particularly developed ones, has also been changing in this direction. Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully.

The entire speech, with translations by both the BBC and the US Commerce Department, is widely available. Perhaps there is other evidence available that Milosevic was a rabid nationalist and supporter of ethnic cleansing. Journalists who quote the 1989 speech to support the case, however, are either being disingenuous, or have not read the speech for themselves.

Continue reading Part II

Media Coverage:

» Doug Saunders: Spectre of Milosevic still haunts Balkans

» Reuters: Milosevic carried his defiance to the end

» Reuters: Milosevic dies in jail months before trial verdict

» Associated Press: Ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic dies in U.N. prison

Further reading:

» Wikipedia: Slobodan Milosevic

» [Greek Television]: Transcript of interview with Slobodan Milosevic

» Milosevic's 1989 speech

» Alexander Cockburn: Did Milosevic or His Accusers "Cheat Justice"? The Show Trial That Went Wrong

» Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan): Was Serbia a Practice Run for Iraq?

» Neil Clark: The Milosevic trial is a travesty

» Diana Johnstone: Srebrenica Revisited

» John Laughland: International law is an ass

In the first of a five-part series, Dru Oja Jay looks at the media's guilty verdict in the case of Slobodan Milosevic.