You'll find the pictures to the captions in this first article
at this links - http://www.srpska-mreza.com/library/lm53/LM53.html
______________ _____________
20 Novembre 2003 20:05
The pictures they don't want you to see - Hidden side of the Yugoslav war
The pictures they don't want you to see
The British government has banned an exhibition of photographs showing
atrocities committed against Serbs in the civil war in the former
Yugoslavia. Living Marxism went to Serbia to get the full story and some of
the pictures from the forbidden exhibition. They are published in this
special section.The Belgrade-based exhibition was banned by the Department of Trade and
Industry on 13 January 1993, under sanctions imposed on Serbia by the United
Nations. Croatian and Muslim groups from the former Yugoslavia have been
allowed to stage their own exhibitions of atrocity photographs in Britain
without hindrance.Living Marxism takes no side in the Yugoslav conflict. But we have sought to
expose the distorted way in which this war has been presented to people in
the West. In particular, we have opposed the dishonest campaign to demonise
and scapegoat the Serbs----a campaign which the British ban on the
exhibition has reinforced.Publishing these pictures is part of Living Marxism's attempt to help set
the record straight. Judge for yourself who is telling the truth.
The forbidden exhibitionWhen she started working on a project about Serbs killed in the Second World
War for the Serbian Academy of Sciences in 1990, Bojana Isakovic never
imagined that two years later she would stage an exhibition about Serbs
killed in a new war.The original project involved recording the excavation and disinterment of
the bones of thousands of Serbs killed and thrown into pits by the Croatian
Ustashe regime in the Second World War. 'But when war broke out in 1991, I
just turned towards recording the current developments', says Isakovic. The
site where the bones were buried was destroyed by the Croats during the
current war. All that remains for posterity are the photographs in
Isakovic's exhibition (see picture, p22).Intended as an 'encounter between the living and the dead Serbs', the
exhibition opened at the Museum of Applied Arts in Belgrade on 29 September
1992. Isakovic says that it is a challenge to all those who want to bury the
past or rewrite history to suit their purposes in the present: 'Croatia is
trying to sanitise its history. So is Germany. Croatia is simply following
in the footsteps of Germany. Who was the first to mention the "concentration
camps" in Bosnia? Germany. And now Germany wants some kind of Nuremberg
trial for the Serbs.'Isakovic feels the British ban on the exhibition is typical of the attitude
of the Western powers which she blames for the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
She says her pictures should be shown because they tell an untold story
about the Yugoslav war.'It is understandable that the Americans and Europeans don't want to show
our pictures to their people - because they are the authors of these
pictures.'I think it is Europe that is under a blockade. We have the opportunity on
our TV to watch Sky, BBC and CNN all night long, so we know what is going on
in Europe and the United States - but you don't know what is going on here.'For two years, official England has been involved in a kind of propaganda
against the Serbs, or at least it has been hiding the truth. If people in
Britain saw the exhibition they would start asking questions. And I don't
think the British government wants this.'
Bojana Isakovic is the organiser of the exhibition, 'Genocide Against the
Serbs'
A selective silence
When the British government slapped a sanctions ban on a photo exhibition
showing atrocities against the Serbs, Joan Phillips went to Belgrade to get
the full story - and the photographs
It is embarrassing being British in Belgrade these days; embarrassing trying
to explain to angry Serbs why the British media tells so many lies about
them; embarrassing trying to explain why they are the only people in the
former Yugoslavia being made to suffer Western sanctions.It is even worse being a Western journalist in Belgrade; sitting in a press
conference with Krajina's president, Goran Hadzic, and listening to the
Serbs being assailed by other journalists for wrongdoing in Krajina when
their own people have just been massacred in their hundreds by Croatian
forces.Krajina is a Serbian enclave in Croatia where the Serbs are in a majority.
In March 1992, the Serbs of Krajina were placed under the protection of
United Nations peace-keepers. In late January 1993, however, the Croats
launched a series of military offensives to seize back land controlled by
the Serbs in Krajina.To most Serbs, the foreign media's coverage of what happened in Krajina was
incomprehensible. How could it be that the Croats could rampage through
Serbian villages killing their inhabitants, and yet the Serbs were the ones
who ended up getting a bad press? According to Hadzic, Croatian forces had
killed 830 Serbian civilians and 150 soldiers after a week of fighting. Yet
foreign reporters had little to say about any of this.Instead, they denounced the Serbs for stubbornly holding on to Krajina
(where they have always lived and where they make up a majority); for
seizing weapons from arms depots (did they expect the Serbs to confront the
laser-guided missiles of the Croats with pitchforks?); and for sabotaging a
hydro-electric dam (which developed problems only after it was seized by
Croatian forces, and was then miraculously made safe).The Western media preferred to speculate about a possible attack involving
Serbian troops from Belgrade, rather than condemn the real attack by
Croatian troops from Zagreb.Media coverage of what happened in Krajina is a case of what Bojana Isakovic
calls 'selective silence'. Isakovic is the organiser of the Belgrade
exhibition, 'Genocide Against the Serbs', which has been banned in Britain.
One of the aims of the exhibition, which opened in Belgrade five months ago,
is to draw attention to the 'selective silence' of the world's media about
the suffering of the Serbs in this war and the Second World War.'Victims' is the word stamped on the front cover of the catalogue that
accompanies the exhibition. 'There are many other victims', says Isakovic.
'They are Croats and Muslims, we don't deny that. I am sorry for all
victims.' What she objects to is the way in which the media has managed to
sustain a deafening silence about Serbian victims of the Yugoslav conflict.Look at the photographs on these pages of Living Marxism. You see dead
Serbian civilians. Yet to read the media reports of the war in Yugoslavia
anybody would think that there were no Serbian victims. That impression can
only be reinforced by the ban on Bojana Isakovic's exhibition coming to
Britain.The day I left Britain for Belgrade my mind was on what was happening in
Krajina, so my attention was caught by the headline on the back page of the
Guardian: 'Croats continue offensive as UN investigators discover mass
grave' (26 January). Thinking that a mass grave of Serbian dead must have
just been discovered in Krajina, I scanned the article, only to discover
that the grave was in Vukovar, the dead were Croats and they had been killed
more than a year ago.In a war which has exacted a high toll of suffering on all sides, how could
anybody argue that the massacre of one group of civilians is more or less
important than that of another? Yet this is effectively what the Western
media has managed to do. Whether intended or not, the Guardian's
juxtaposition of the two stories had the effect of cancelling out what is
happening to Serbs in Krajina today and focusing attention on what happened
to Croats in Vukovar more than a year ago.What exactly did happen in Vukovar when war was raging in Croatia in late
1991? Thanks to the media, Vukovar will be remembered as a symbol of Serbian
aggression. But why did the Serbs destroy Vukovar, when almost half its
population was Serbian? An explanation has never been given. We were left to
conclude that the Serbian forces who laid waste to Vukovar were evil men.To understand what happened in Vukovar we have to fill in the background to
the media images. The Belgrade exhibition helps to redress the balance. The
problems there started in spring 1990, long before the first shell fell,
when Franjo Tudjman was elected president of Croatia on a nationalist
ticket. From this point on, the Serbian minority in Croatia had good cause
to fear for its future. Tudjman's government began by removing Serbian
street names, and ended up by removing Serbs - from their jobs, their houses
and their land.In and around Vukovar, where Serbs made up 37 per cent of the population,
and Croats 44 per cent, trouble began almost as soon as Tudjman was elected.
Following Zagreb's example, state and private firms began sacking Serbs from
their jobs. Tensions increased in Borovo Selo, on the outskirts of Vukovar,
as Croatian militants began intimidating Serbs by bombing their homes,
restaurants and shops. Signs appeared in Borovo saying 'No dogs or Serbs'.In the climate of fear and insecurity generated by Tudjman's nationalist
policies, Serbs began flooding out of Croatia into Bosnia and Serbia well
before the war began. Bojana Isakovic's exhibition shows photographs of
Serbian refugees leaving Borovo in May 1991. The war in Croatia did not
start until July 1991. By the time the battle for Vukovar began, Serbs were
already living in fear of their lives.Yet somewhere along the line, the media managed to turn the story around.
Vukovar, home to 31 000 Serbs as well as 36 000 Croats, became a symbol of
Croatian suffering. Everybody seems to have forgotten what the photographs
on these pages show: when the Yugoslav federal army marched into Vukovar it
found the streets strewn with the corpses of Serbian civilians slaughtered
by the Croats.There is little doubt that Serbian irregulars took their revenge on Croatian
civilians once they had control of the city. But the mass grave containing
dead Croats at Ovcara outside Vukovar should not obscure the fact that the
whole of Vukovar became a mass grave for Serbs while the town was under
Croatian control.The story of the persecution of the Serbs in Croatia has still not been
told. Before the war, there were 600 000 Serbs living in Croatia. Now there
are less than 100 000--and their position is far from secure as events in
Krajina testify.Meanwhile, cities in the front line of the civil war in Croatia, such as
Osijek, Karlovac and Sisak, are now to all intents and purposes Serb-free.
The same is true of towns on the Dalmatian coast, such as Zadar, Split and
Sibenik. In towns like Gospic, where hundreds of Serbs disappeared without
trace while others were butchered and burned, there are no Serbs left. Over
half of Zagreb's large Serbian community has left the city.While the Western media has maintained a selective silence about what has
happened to the Serbs, it has continually broadcast what the Serbs are
supposed to have done to everybody else.If the Serbs commit an atrocity or break any rule it is certain that we will
hear every detail. The same cannot be said about the other combatants in
this war. There are 40 000 troops of the Croatian army stationed outside the
state of Croatia, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in defiance of a UN ban on the
deployment of foreign (non-UN) forces. We hear nothing of this, and Croatia
has been subject to no sanction. Yet Serbia, which has no regular forces in
Bosnia, is constantly accused of being the aggressor there.When the West can find nothing to pin on the Serbs, it has no qualms about
making things up. Take the row about the no-fly zone over Bosnia. The
Americans have constantly accused the Serbs of violating the UN flight ban,
despite plentiful evidence that Yugoslav air force planes have not made a
single flight in the no-fly zone since it was imposed on 9 October 1992.UN observers are stationed at all airports in the federal republic of
Yugoslavia, and have access to all flight plans and planes. Awacs airborne
surveillance systems based in Hungary and the Adriatic have also confirmed
that Serbian aircraft have been abiding by the ban. Meanwhile, Croatian
planes violate the UN resolution as a matter of course. America's insistence
on enforcing the no-fly ban clearly has less to do with violations than with
giving the Serbs a hard time.Black propaganda as well as bias has distorted media reporting. For example,
in 1991 news reports informed us that Dubrovnik's old city had been razed to
the ground by the Serbian forces besieging the city. Now we find that
Dubrovnik's old city survived the siege intact. The only building completely
destroyed was the Serbian Orthodox church, which was firebombed from within.
The real damage done was to the reputation of the Serbs.Or what about the case of the emaciated man pictured in the Independent as a
starving inmate of a Serbian detention camp (14 August 1992)? The caption
failed to point out that the man was all skin and bones because he was dying
of cancer. The Independent apologised the next day, but the damage had
already been done, and probably nobody saw the correction hidden away at the
bottom of an inside page. What we were never told was that the man was a
Serb, whose daughter identified him after seeing Western media reports.Some might object that it is easy to make mistakes, especially in the heat
of war. But how many mistakes does the media have to make before it becomes
clear that there is something more than accidental about the distortions in
reports of the war in Yugoslavia?Last summer's reporting of non-existent Serbian 'death camps' in Bosnia is
the most glaring example of how the media has helped to criminalise the
Serbs. The emotive pictures and reports by ITN's Penny Marshall and the
Guardian's Ed Vulliamy from Omarska and Trnopolje in August 1992 led to
comparisons between the Serbian detention camps and Nazi concentration
camps. Yet on BBC 2's Late Show, in January 1993, both reporters tried to
suggest that the 'death camp' allusions had nothing to do with them. The
Observer's Victoria Clark even had the cheek to blame 'a voyeuristic public'
for the excesses of the media.Now the media has moved on from discovering 'death camps' to inventing 'rape
camps'. Serbs have been accused of 'systematically' raping up to 60 000
Muslim women. Muslim women who gave birth in November and December 1992 say
they were held in camps and raped by Serbs, even though the war in Bosnia
only started at the end of April 1992. Are the Serbs really such a devilish
race that their children are born three months ahead of time?The way in which distortion and downright lies have been accepted as news
about the war in Yugoslavia is symptomatic of our uncritical times. It is
time to demand the truth.
Mira Kalanj, a Serbian civilian from Gospic in Croatia, was killed and
burned by Croatian forces between 16 and 18 October 1991. Her husband, Duro,
was machine-gunned in the back and then burnedA family photograph of Mira and Duro Kalanj with the eldest of their two
sons
As Croatian forces withdrew from Vukovar on 15 and 16 November 1991, they
dragged Serbian civilians from the cellars where they were hiding, and
massacred them. These Serbs were axed to death in a courtyard, after being
dragged from the cellar at 74 Nikola Demonja Street in Borovo-naselje, near
Vukovar
This three-year old Serbian boy was shot dead while hiding in the cellar at
72 Nikola Demonja Street. His mother and father, Sladana and Miroslav
Cecavac, were also killed
Between 16 and 18 October 1991, 24 Serbian civilians from Gospic in Croatia
were slaughtered. Croatian forces killed the 15 men and nine women with
guns, knives and sledgehammers,doused the bodies with petrol and set them on
fire. From October 1991 to February 1992, more than 500 Serbian civilians
from the Gospic area disappeared without trace
This photograph was seized from Saudi Arabian fighters captured in Crni Vrh
near Teslic, Bosnia. A Muslim soldier displays the severed head of Blagoje
Blagojevic, a Serb from the village of Jasenove near Teslic
A Serbian girl, suffocated to death in PVC and stuffed in a mechanic's pit,
Borovo-naselje, November 1991
The bones of Serbs thrown into pits by the Croatian fascists, the Ustashe,
during the Second World War, just before they were buried in a crypt at
Prebilovci, Herzegovina, in June 1991
Serbian women on their way to Jasenovac concentration camp in Bosnia, where
up to 600 000 Serbs, Gypsies and Jews are estimated to have been killed
during the Second World War
Stipo Kraljevic took this photograph of his fellow Croatian Ustashe soldiers
with the severed head of a Serbian villager from Ivanjska near Banja Luka,
December 1942
A Croatian Ustashe soldier with the severed head of a Serbian Chetnik
A Serbian soldier helps a wounded comrade, Vukovar 1991. He was killed going
back into the combat zone to rescue another. The wounded soldier was later
killed in action
The corpse of Milorad Dekic, a Serbian policeman from Osijek, was found in
the Danube near Susek
A Serb from Banija, killed while riding his bike, September 1991
Briton 'planted black propaganda'Robert Allen Lofthouse, from Nottingham, claims to have supplied the British
and American media with black propaganda against the Serbs in Bosnia,
according to the Belgrade news agency Tanjug.Lofthouse was captured by Serbian troops on Mount Majevica in northern
Bosnia at the end of January. They claim he was fighting as a mercenary.
According to the reports from Belgrade, Lofthouse has admitted supplying
both Roy Gutman of US Newsday and the BBC with false information about
camps, rapes, 'ethnic cleansing' and other atrocities carried out by the
Serbs in Bosnia.Lofthouse is said to have sent false reports and rigged TV footage to Gutman
once a month, and to the BBC once a week, with the help of men working for a
Muslim intelligence officer called Amir. For instance, he is reported to
have admitted telling Gutman and the BBC that the Bosnian Serbs were using
war gases in September 1992.Gutman's reporting for the Guardian in early August 1992 certainly lacked
the ring of authenticity. On 4 August, Gutman reported from Slavonski Samac,
Croatia, that people in Serbian camps across the River Sava in Bosanski
Samac were being tortured, killed and made to eat their own faeces. His
report was said to be based on the (uncorroborated) testimonies of former
prisoners.On 5 August, Gutman reported from an unknown location that bodies had been
cremated and turned into animal feed at a Serbian camp in Brcko.On 6 August, Gutman reported from Zagreb on how 'Serbian guards kept their
captives "in open pit"'. This was a tale of alleged atrocities at Omarska,
told by 'Hajca'. We were told that Hajca 'did not witness the killings
himself but on one occasion saw eight corpses covered with blankets'.The story of Lofthouse's confession has not been reported in the British
media. Doubtless they would argue that his black propaganda claims about
Gutman are unsubstantiated. But so too were most of Gutman's stories from
Bosnia. The Guardian was happy to print fantastic tales of people being
turned into animal feed in Serbian camps. So why not a word about any of
this?
A SELECTIVE SILENCE
CENSORSHIP AND BIAS IN THE YUGOSLAV WARA selection of photographs from the forbidden exhibition, and materials
related to the ban, can be seen at The Edge gallery and bookshop from
Thursday 25 February. Phone for details.THE EDGE, 92 Cromer Street, London WC1 Tel (071) 278 9755 Fax (071) 833 5045
Reproduced from Living Marxism issue 53, March 1993
http://www.junius.co.uk/LM/LM53/LM53_Belgrade.html
Mail: webmaster@www.junius.co.ukThursday November 20, 2003 at 12:00 pm
Indeed, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting was shared
between the two authors of the most sensational "Serb atrocity stories" of
the year: Roy Gutman of "Newsday" and John Burns of the "New York Times". In
both cases, the prize-winning articles were based on hearsay evidence of
dubious credibility. Gutman's articles, mostly based on accounts by Muslim
refugees in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, were collected in a book rather
misleadingly entitled "A Witness to Genocide", although in fact he had been
a "witness" to nothing of the sort. His allegations that Serbs were running
"death camps" were picked up by Ruder Finn and widely diffused, notably to
Jewish organizations. Burns's story was no more than an interview with a
mentally deranged prisoner in a Sarajevo jail, who confessed to crimes some
of which have been since proved never to have been committed.More On
GutmanDate : 20 Snovembre 2003 20:06
Objet : Gutman reference #2-it's Diana!!!
Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass:
Politics, Media And the Ideology of GlobalizationDiana Johnstone was the European editor of In These Times from 1979 to 1990,
and press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to
1996. She is the author of The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in America's
World (London/New York, Versa Schucken, 1984) and is currently working on a
book on the former Yugoslavia. This article is an expanded version of a talk
given on May 25, 1998, at an international conference on media held in
Athens, Greece. Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and
alternative media have made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology
to impose certain interpretations on international news.During the Cold War, most world news for American consumption had to be
framed as part of the Soviet-U.S. contest. Since then, a new ideological
bias frames the news. The way the violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has
been reported is the most stunning example. I must admit that it took me
some time to figure this out, even though I had a long-standing interest in
and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I spent time there as a student in 1953,
living in a Belgrade dormitory and learning the language. In 1984, in a
piece for "In These Times", I warned that extreme decentralization,
conflicting economic interests between the richer and poorer regions,
austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and the decline of universal ideals
were threatening Yugoslavia with "re-Balkanization" in the wake of Tito's
death and desanctification. "Local ethnic interests are reasserting
themselves". I wrote, "The danger is that these rival local interests may
become involved in the rivalries of outside powers. This is how the Balklans
in thee past were a powder keg of world war." Writing this took no special
clairvoyance. The danger of Yugoslavia's disintegration was quite obvious to
all serious observers well before Slobodan Milosevic arrived on the scene.As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to keep up
with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press officer for the
Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to investigate the
situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws in the way media and
politicians were reacting. I wrote an article warning against combatting
"nationalism" by taking sides for one nationalism against another, and
against judging a complex situation by analogy with totally different times
and places. "Every nationalism stimulates others". I noted, "Historical
analogies should be drawn with caution and never allowed to obscure the
facts." However, there was no stopping the tendency to judge the Balkans,
about which most people knew virtually nothing, by analogy with Hitler
Germany, about which people at least imagined they knew a lot, and which
enabled analysis to be rapidly abandoned in favour of moral certitude and
righteous indignation.However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable time to
my own research, that I realized the extent of the deception-which is in
large part self-deception. I mention all this to stress that I understand
the immense difficulty of gaining a clear view of the complex situation in
the Balkans. The history of the region and the interplay of internal
political conflicts and external influences would be hard to grasp even
without propaganda distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being confused.
Moreover, by now, many people have invested so much emotion in a one-sided
view of the situation that they are scarcely able to consider alternative
interpretations.It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are
"alternative' that they are free from the dominant interpretation and the
dominant world view. In fact, in the case of the Yugoslav tragedy, the irony
is that "alternative" or "left' activists and writers have - frequently
taken the lead in likening the Serbs, the people who most wanted to continue
to live in multicultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in calling for
military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined secessionist movements
- all supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural Bosnia", a country which,
unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from scratch by outsiders.The Serbs and YugoslaviaLike other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs were heavily
taxed and denied ownership of property of political power reserved for
Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Serb farmers led a
revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long struggle put an end to the
Ottoman Empire.The Habsburg monarchy found it natural that when one empire receded, another
should advance, and sought to gain control over the lands lost to the
Ottoman Turks. Although Serbs had rallied to the Habsburgs in earlier wars
against the Turks, Serbia soon appeared to Vienna as the main obstacle to
its own expansion into the Balkans. By the end of the nineteenth century,
Vienna was seeking to fragment the Serb-inhabited lands to prevent what it
named "Greater Serbia", taking control of Bosnia-Herzegovina and fostering
the birth of Albanian nationalism (as converts to Islam, Albanian feudal
chieftains enjoyed privileges under the Ottoman Empire and combatted the
Christian liberation movements).Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens rights under the
Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and traders was
relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries were extremely receptive to the progressive ideals
of the French Revolution. While all the other liberated Balkan nations
imported German princelings as their new kings, the Serbs promoted their own
pig farmers into a dynasty, one of whose members translated John Stuart
Mill's "On Liberty' into Serbian during his student days. Nowhere in the
Balkans did Western progressive ideas exercise such attraction as in Serbia,
no doubt due to the historic circumstances of the country's emergence from
four hundred years of subjugation.Meanwhile, intellectuals in Croatia, a province of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire increasingly rankling under subordination to the Hungarian nobility,
initiated the Yugoslav movement for cultural, and eventually political,
unification of the South Slav peoples, notably the Serbs and Croats,
separated by history and religion (the Serbs having been converted to
Christianity by the Greek Orthodox Church and the Croats by the Roman
Catholic Church) but united by language. The idea of a "Southslavia" was
largely inspired by the national unification of neighbouring Italy,
occurring around the same time.In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the assassination
of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and crush Serbia once and
for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the world war it had thus initiated,
leaders in Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite with Serbia in a single
kingdom. This decision enabled both Slovenia and Croatia to go from the
losing to the winning side in World War 1, thereby avoiding war reparations
and enlarging their territory, notably on the Adriatic coast, and the
expense of Italy. The joint Kingdom was renamed "Jugoslavia" in 1929. The
conflicts between Croats and Serbs that plagued what is called "the first
Yugoslavia" were described by Rebecca West in her celebrated book, Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in 1941.In April 1941, Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an accord
reached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. This led to Nazi
bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion, creation of an independent fascist
state of Croatia (including Bosnia Herzegovina), and attachment of much of
the Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of Mussolini's
Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide against Serbs,
Jews, and Gypsies within the territory of their "Greater Croatia", while the
Germans raised 55 divisions among the Muslims of Bosnia and Albania. In
Serbia itself, the German occupants announced that one hundred Serbian
hostages would be executed for each German killed by resistance fighters.
The threat was carried out. As a result, the royalist Serbian resistance
(the first guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe) led by Draza
Mihailovic adopted a policy of holding off attacks on the Germans in
expectation of an Allied invasion. The Partisans, led by Croatian communist
Josip Broz Tito, adopted a more active strategy of armed resistance, which
made considerable gains in the predominantly Serb border regions of Croatia
and Bosnia and won support from Churchill for its effectiveness. A civil war
developed between Mihailovic's "Chetniks" and Tito's Partisans which was
also a civil war between Serbs, since Serbs were the most numerous among the
Partisans. These divisions between Serbs - torn between Serbian and Yugoslav
identity - have never been healed and help explain the deep confusion among
Serbs during the breakup of Yugoslavia.After World War 11, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to build "brotherhood
and unity" on the myth that all the peoples had contributed equally to
liberation from fascism. Mihailovic was executed, and school children in
post-war Yugoslavia learned more about the "fascist" nature of his Serbian
nationalist Chetniks than they did about Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who
had volunteered for the 55, or even about the killing of Serbs in the
Jasenovac death camp run by Ustashe in Western Bosnia.After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership
emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy of
"self-management', supposed to lead by fairly rapid stages to the "withering
away of the State'. "Tito repeatedly revised the Constitution to strengthen
local authorities, while retaining final decision-making power for himself.
When he died in 1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly complicated system
that could not work without his arbitration". Serbia in particular was
unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its territory had been
divided up, with two "autonomous provinces," Vojvodina and Kosovo, able to
veto measures taken by Serbia, while Serbia could not intervene in their
affairs.In the 1980's, the rise in interest rates and unfavourable world trade
conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt Yugoslavia (like many
"third world" countries) had been encouraged to run up thanks to its
standing in the West as a socialist country not belonging to the Soviet
bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar austerity measures, which could only
be taken by a central government. The leaders of the richer republics
-Slovenia and Croatia - did not want to pay or the poorer ones. Moreover, in
all former socialist countries, the big political question is privatization
of State and Social property, and local communist leaders in Slovenia and
Croatia could expect to get a greater share for themselves within the
context of division of Yugoslavia into separate little states.At that stage, a gradual, negotiated dismantling of Yugoslavia into smaller
States was not impossible. It would have entailed reaching agreement on
division of assets and liabilities, and numerous adjustments to take into
account conflicting interests. If pursued openly, however, it might have
encountered popular opposition after all, very many people, perhaps a
majority, enjoyed being citizens of a large country with an enviable
international reputation. What would have been the result of a national
referendum on the question of preservation of Yugoslavia?None was ever held. The first multiparty elections in postwar Yugoslavia
were held in 1990, not nationwide in all of Yugoslavia, but separately by
each Republic - a method which in itself reinforces separatist power elites.
Sure of the active sympathy of Germany, Austria, and the Vatican, leaders in
Slovenia and Croatia, prepared the fait accompli #2 of unilateral,
unnegotiated secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was illegal,
under Yugoslav and international law, and was certain to precipitate civil
war. The key role of German (and Vatican) support was to provide rapid
international recognition of the new independent republics, in order to
transform Yugoslavia into an "aggressor on its own territory".Political MotivesThe political motives that launched the antiSerb propaganda campaign are
obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in Yugoslavia
because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for the nationalist
leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own little statelets which,
thanks to early and strong German support, could "jump the queue" and get
into the richmen's European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia.The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire to
oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to demonizing an
entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both ethnic separatism and
the new role of NATO as occupying power in the Balkans on behalf of a
theoretical "international community". Already in the 1980's, Croatian and
ethnic ALBANIAN separatist lobbies had stepped up their efforts to win
support abroad, notably in Germany and the United States, by claiming to be
oppressed by Serbs, citing "evidence" that, insofar as it had any basis in
truth, referred to the 1920-1941 Yugoslav Kingdom, not to the very different
post-World War 11 Yugoslavia.The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a
virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the influential
conservative newspaper, the "Frankfurter Allgerneine Zeitung" (FAZ). In
almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg Reismuller justified the
freshly, and illegally, declared "independence" of Slovenia and Croatia by
describing "Yugo-Serbs" as essentially Oriental "militarist Bolsheviks" who
have "no place in the European Community". Nineteen months after German
reunification, and for the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, German
media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of
the pre-war propaganda against the Jews".This German propaganda binge was the signal that times had changed
seriously. Only a few years earlier, a seemingly broad German peace movement
had stressed the need to put an end to "enemy stereotypes" (Feindbilder).
Yet the sudden ferocious emergence of the enemy stereotype of "the Serbs"
did not shock liberal of left Germans, who were soon repeating it
themselves. It might seem that the German peace movement had completed its
historic mission once its contribution to altering the image of Germany had
led Gorbachev to endorse reunification. The least one can say is that the
previous efforts at reconciliation with peoples who suffered from Nazi
invasion stopped short when it same to the Serbs.In the Bundestag, German Green leader Joschka Fisher pressed for disavowal
of "pacifism" in order to "combat Auschwitz', thereby equating Serbs with
Nazis. In a heady mood of self-righteous indignation, German politicians
across the board joined in using Germany's past guilt as a reason, not for
restraint, as had been the logic up until reunification, but on the
contrary, for "bearing their share of the military burden". In the name of
human rights, the Federal Republic of Germany abolished its ban on military
operations outside the NATO defensive area. Germany could once again be a
"normal" military power - thanks to the "Serb threat'.The near unanimity was all the more surprising in that the "enemy
stereotype" of the Serb had been dredged up from the most belligerent German
nationalism of the past. "Serbien muss sterbien" (a play on the word
sterben, to die), meaning "Serbia must die" was a famous popular war cry of
World War 1. Serbs had been singled out for slaughter during the Nazi
occupation of Yugoslavia. One would have thought that the younger generation
of Germans, seemingly so sensitive to the victims of Germany's aggressive
past, would have at least urged caution. Very few did.On the contrary, what occurred in Germany was a strange sort of mass
transfer of Nazi identity, and guilt, to the Serbs. In the case of the
Germans, this can be seen as a comforting psychological projection which
served to give Germans a fresh and welcome sense of innocence in the face of
the new "criminal" people, the Serbs, But the hate campaign against Serbs,
started in Germany, did not stop there. Elsewhere, the willingness to single
out one of the Yugoslav peoples as the villain calls for other explanations.Media MomentumFrom the start, foreign reporters were better treated in Zagreb and in
Ljubljana, whose secessionist leaders understood the prime importance of
media images in gaining international support, than in Belgrade. The
Albanian secessionists in Kosovo or "Kosovars"4, the Croatian secessionists
and the Bosnian Muslims hired an American public relations firm, Ruder Finn,
to advance their causes by demonizing the Serbs. Ruder Finn deliberately
targeted certain publics, notably the American Jewish community, with a
campaign likening Serbs to Nazis. Feminists were also clearly targeted by
theCroatian nationalist campaign directed out of Zagreb to brand Serbs as
rapists.The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the advantage of
being simple and available, and they provided an easy-to-use moral compass
by designating the bad guys. As the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina got under way
in mid-1992, American journalists who repeated unconfirmed stories of
Serbian atrocities could count on getting published with a chance of a
Pulitzer Prize. Indeed, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize r for international
reporting was shared between the two authors of the most sensational "Serb
atrocity stories" of the year: Roy Gutman of "Newsday" and John Bums of the
"New York Times". In both cases, the prize-winning articles were based on
hearsay evidence of dubious credibility. Gutman's articles, mostly based on
accounts by Muslim refugees in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, were collected
in a book rather misleadingly entitled "A Witness to Genocide", although in
fact he had been a "witness" to nothing of the sort, His allegations that
Serbs were running "death camps" were picked up by Ruder Finn and widely
diffused, notably to Jewish organizations. Burns's story was no more than an
interview with a mentally deranged prisoner in a Sarajevo jail, who
confessed to crimes some of which have been since proved never to have been
committed.On the other hand, there was no market for stories by a journalist who
discovered that reported Serbian "rape camps" did not exist (German TV
reporter Martin Lettmayer), or who included information about Muslim or
Croat crimes against Serbs (Belgian journalist Georges Berghezan for one).
It became increasingly impossible to challenge the dominant interpretation
in major media. Editors naturally prefer to keep the story simple: one
villain, and as much blood as possible. Moreover, after the German
government forced the early recognition of Slovenian and Croatian
independence, other Western powers lined up opportunistically with the
anti-Serb position. The United States soon moved aggressively into the game
by picking its own client state - Muslim Bosnia - out of the ruins.Foreign news has always ben much easier to distort than domestic news.
Television coverage simply makes the distortion more convincing. TV crews
sent into strange places about which they know next to nothing, send back
images of violence that give millions of viewers the impression that
"everybody knows what is happening". Such an impression is worse than plain
ignorance.Today, worldwide media such as CNN openly put pressure on governments to
respond to the "public opinion" which the media themselves create. Christine
Amanpour tells the U.S. and the European Union what they should be doing in
Bosnia; to what extent this is coordinated with U.S. agencies is hard to
tell. Indeed, the whole question of which tail wags the dog is wide open. Do
media manipulate government, does government manipulate media, or are
influential networks manipulating both?Many officials of Western governments complain openly or privately of being
forced into unwise policy decisions by "the pressure of public opinion",
meaning the media. A particularly interesting testimony in this regard is
that of Otto von Habsburg, the extremely active and influential octogenarian
heir to the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, today a member of the European
Parliament from Bavaria, who has taken a great and one might say paternal
interest in the ause of Croatian independence. "if Germany recognized
Slovenia and Croatia so rapidly", Habsburg told the Bonn correspondent of
the French daily "Figaro"; "even against the will of (then German foreign
minister) HansDietrich Genscher who did not want to take that step, its
because the Bonn government was subjected to an almost irresistible pressure
of public opinion. In this regard, the German press rendered a very great
service, in particular the 'Frankfurter Allgerneine Zeitung' and Carl Gustav
Strohm, that great German journalist who works for Die Welt'.Still, the virtually universal acceptance of a one-sided view of
Yugoslavia's collapse cannot be attributed solely to political designs or to
sensationalist manipulation of the news by major media. It also owes a great
deal to the ideological uniformity prevailing among educated liberals who
have become the consensual moral conscience in Northwestern EuroAmerican
society since the end of the Cold War.Down with the StateThis ideology is the expression in moralistic terms of the dominant project
for reshaping the world since the United States emerged as sole superpower
after the defeat of communism and collapse of the Soviet Union. United
States foreign policy for over a century has been dictated by a single
overriding concern: to open world markets to American capital and American
enterprise. Today this project is triumphant as "economic globalization".
Throughout the world, government policies are judged, approved or condemned
decisively not by their populations but by "the markets" meaning the
financial markets. Foreign investors, not domestic voters, decide policy.The International Monetary Fund and other such agencies are there to help
governments adjust their policies and their societies to market imperatives.
The shift of decision-making power away from elected governments, which is
an ssential aspect of this particular "economic globalization", is being
accompanied by an ideological assault on the nation state as a political
community exercising sovereignty over a defined territory. For all its
shortcomings, the nation-state is still the political level most apt to
protect citizens' welfare and the environment from the destructive expansion
of global markets. Dismissing the nation-state as an anachronism, or
condemning it as a mere expression of "nationalist' exclusivism, overlooks
and undermines its long-standing legitimacy as the focal point of democratic
development, in which citizens can organize to define and defend their
interests.The irony is that many well-intentioned idealists are unwittingly helping to
advance this project by eagerly promoting its moralistic cover a theoretical
global democracy that should replace attempts to strengthen democracy at the
upposedly obsolete nation-state level.Within the United States, the link between antination-state ideology and
economic globalization is blurred by the double standard of U.S. leaders who
do not hesitate to invoke the supremacy of U.S. "national interest' over the
very international institutions they promote in order to advance economic
globalization. This makes it seem that such nternational institutions are a
serious obstacle to U.S. global power rather than its expression. However,
the United States has the overall military and political power to design and
control key international institutions (e.g., the IMF, the World Trade
Organization, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Former
Yugoslavia), as well as to undermine those it dislikes (UNESCO when it was
attempting to promote liberation of media from essentially American control)
or to flout international law with impunity (notably in its Central American
"backyard"). Given the present elationship of forces, weakening less
powerful nation-states cannot strengthen international democracy, but simply
tighten the grip of transnational capital and the criminal networks that
flourish in an environment of lawless acquisition.There is no real contradiction between asserting the primacy of U.S.
interests and blasting the nation-state barriers that might allow some
organized defense of the interests of other peoples. But impressed by the
apparent contradiction, some American liberals are comforted in their belief
that nationalism is the number one enemy of mankind, whereas anything that
goes against it is progressive.Indeed, an important asset of the anti-nation state ideology is its powerful
appeal to many liberals and progressives whose internationalism has been
disoriented by the collapse of any discernable socialist alternative to
capitalism and by the disarray of liberation struggles in the South of the
planet.In the absence of any clear analysis of the contemporary world, the
nation-state is readily identified as the cause of war, oppression, and
violations of human rights. In short, the only existing context for
institutionalized democracy is demonized as the mere expression of a
negative, exclusive ideology, .'nationalism". This contemporary libertarian
view overlooks both the persistence of war in the absence of strong States
and the historic function of the nation state as framework for the social
pact embodied in democratic forms of legislative decision-making.Condemnation of the nation-state in a structuralist rather than historical
perspective produces mechanical judgments. What is smaller than the nation
state, or what transcends the nation-state, must be better. On the smaller
scale, identities" of all kinds, or "regions", generally undefined, are
automatically considered more promising by much of the current generation.
On the larger scale, the hope for democracy is being transferred to the
European Union, or to international NGOs, or to theoretical institutions
such as the proposed International Criminal Court. In the enthusiasm for an
envisaged global utopia, certain crucial questions are being neglected,
notably: who will pay for all this? How? Who will enforce which decisions?
Until such practical matters are cleared up, brave new institutions such as
the I.C.C. risk being no more than further instruments of selective
intervention against weaker countries. But the illusion persists that
structures of international democracy can be built over the heads of States
that are not themselves genuinely supportive of such democracy.The simplistic interpretation of the Yugoslav crisis as Serbian "aggression"
against peaceful multicultural Europe, is virtually unassailable, because it
is not only credible according to this ideology but seems to confirm it.It was this ideology that made it possible for the Croatian, Slovenian, and
Albanian secessionists and their supporters in Germany and the United States
in particular to portray the Yugoslav conflict as the struggle of "oppressed
little nations" to free themselves from aggressive Serbian nationalism. In
fact, those "little nations" were by no means oppressed in Yugoslavia.
Nowhere in the world were and are the cultural rights of national minorities
so extensively developed as in Yugoslavia (including the small Yugoslavia
made up of Serbia and Montenegro). Politically, not only was Tito himself a
Croat and his chief associate, Edvard Kardelj, a Slovene, but a "national
key' quota system was rigorously applied to all top posts in the Federal
Administration and Armed Forces. The famous "self-management socialism" gave
effective control over economic enterprises to Slovenians in Slovenia,
Croatians in Croatia, and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The economic gap
between the parts of Yugoslavia which had previously belonged to the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, that is, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia's northern
province of Vojvodina, on the one hand, and the parts whose development had
been retarded by Ottoman rule (central Serbia, the Serbian province of
Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia) continued to widen throughout
both the first and second Yugoslavia. The secession movement in Slovenia was
a typical "secession of the rich from the poor" (comparable to Umberto
Bossi's attempt to detach rich northern Italy form the rest of the country,
in order to avoid paying taxes for the poor South). In Croatia, this
motivation was combined with the comeback of Ustashe elements which had gone
into exile after World War Two.The nationalist pretext of "oppression" is favoured by the economic troubles
of the 1980's, which led leaders in each Republic to shun the others, and to
overlook the benefits of the larger Federal market for all the Republics.
The first and most virulent nationalist movements arose in Croatia and
Kosovo, where separatism had been favoured by Axis occupation of the Balkans
in World War 11. It is only in the 1980's that a much milder Serbian
nationalist reaction to conomic troubles provided the opportunity for all
the others to pinpoint the universal scapegoat: Serbian nationalism. Western
public opinion, knowing little of Yugoslavia and thinking in terms of
analogies with more familiar situations, readily sympathized with Slovenian
and Croatian demands for independence. In reality, international law
interprets "self-determination" as the right to secede and form an
independent State only in certain (mostly colonial) circumstances, none of
which applied to Slovenia and Croatia.All these fact were ignored by international media. Appeals to the dominant
anti-State ideology led to frivolous acceptance in the West of the very
grave act of accepting the unnegotiated breakup of an existing nation,
Yugoslavia, by interpreting ethnic secession as a proper form of
"self-determination", which it is not. There is no parallel in recent
diplomatic annals for such an irresponsible act, and as a precedent it can
only promise endless bloody conflict around the world.