[NYTr] A Serbophobe Outburst in the Nation Magazine

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Louis Proyect's prose style is not exactly economical either, so it's a
bit amusing that he complains about length here. Aside from that, this
is a very interesting article. See the original URL for some
reader comments, corrections, expanded information. - NY Transfer]

sent by Gregory Elich - activ-l - Dec 30, 2007


The Unrepentent Marxist - Dec 21, 2007
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/12/21/a-serbophobe-outburst-in-the-nation-magazine/

A Serbophobe Outburst in the Nation Magazine

by Louis Proyect

The current issue of the Nation Magazine has an extraordinarily long
article titled "Western Promises" that accuses the Western imperialists
being soft on the late Slobodan Milosevic and other Serbs. It was
written by Marc Perelman, the diplomatic correspondent of the Forward,
a Jewish-American weekly in NY with historic ties to the social
democratic leadership of the ILGWU. See:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080107/perelman

Perelman uses nearly 6000 words to make the case that the U.S. and
Britain “sabotaged” the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and allowed Serb criminals to go
scot-free. It relies heavily on the word of one Florence Hartmann, a
Serbophobe reporter for Le Monde in the early 1990s who became an
assistant to Carla Le Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the ICTY. Hartmann
is the author of one of those typically one-sided biographies of
Slobodan Milosevic that makes him out to be Satan’s Spawn. Perelman’s
article, however, relies heavily on her latest book titled “Paix et
châtiment: Les guerres secrètes de la politique et de la justice
internationales” (Peace and Punishment: The Secret Wars of Politics and
International Justice) that is not yet available in English.

Hartmann is even too much for Marcus Tanner, who covered Yugoslavia for
the Independent and hewed to their Serbophobe editorial position. In a
review of a collection of articles on Yugoslavia co-edited by fellow
Serbophobes Roy Gutman and David Rieff, Tanner dismissed Hartmann as an
untrustworthy crank:

    "Some of the articles are sermons and rants. Florence Hartmann’s
piece on Bosnia is just a series of accusations that have been bundled
together. That “Milosevic made it his mission to set Yugoslavia’s
ethnic and national groups against one another” is one of a great many
“facts” that are baldly asserted without any supporting evidence." –The
Independent (London), August 3, 1999

Why the Nation Magazine would waste 9 pages circulating ideas that
stemmed from Ms. Hartmann is somewhat beyond me, but then again they
had the “wisdom” to publish the awful Joaquin Villalobos’s attack on
Hugo Chavez. [no reference provided -NYTr]

The gist of Hartmann’s complaint is that a deal struck between the West
and the Serb Republic to divide up Bosnia resulted in the slaughter at
Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde since they fell within territory that was
to be ceded to the Serbs. Hartmann’s argument is not new as Perelman
reports:

    The story of how the city was overrun and several thousand
inhabitants were executed as UN peacekeepers watched helplessly has
been recounted many times, most grippingly by David Rohde, an American
reporter who first uncovered evidence of the massacre and whose
Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica (1997) describes the event
through the eyes of seven witnesses. Rohde concluded that the litany of
mistakes that led to the massacre was a “passive conspiracy” rather
than a cynical backroom deal.

Missing entirely from these accounts of the Srebrenica killings that
most assuredly did take place (although to describe them as “genocide”
is positively Orwellian) is the ratcheting up of tensions at the hands
of Muslim militias. You never find the name Naser Oric in the reporting
of a David Rohde or a Roy Gutman, but Bill Schiller (by no means
pro-Serb) wrote in the July 16, 1995 Toronto Star:

    On a cold and snowy night, I sat in his living room watching a
shocking video version of what might have been called Nasir Oric’s
Greatest Hits. There were burning houses, dead bodies, severed heads,
and people fleeing. Oric grinned throughout, admiring his handiwork.

    “We ambushed them,” he said when a number of dead Serbs appeared on
the screen.

    The next sequence of dead bodies had been done in by explosives:
“We launched those guys to the moon,” he boasted.

    When footage of a bullet-marked ghost town appeared without any
visible bodies, Oric hastened to announce: “We killed 114 Serbs there.”

    Later there were celebrations, with singers with wobbly voices
chanting his praises. These video reminiscences, apparently, were from
what Muslims regard as Oric’s glory days. That was before most of
eastern Bosnia fell and Srebrenica became a “safe zone” with U.N.
peacekeepers inside - and Serbs on the outside.

Despite Oric’s taste for Serb blood, his forces were inexplicably
withdrawn from Srebrenica just before the Serb counter-attack. A small
UN force proved incapable of withstanding the Serb militias and the net
result was a bloodbath.

Where Hartmann sees UN and Western inaction as proof that they were
willing to cast the Muslims to the wolves as part of a process of
carving up Bosnia ethnically along the lines of the India-Pakistan
division, Diana Johnstone views it as a necessary first step in drawing
NATO into the fray. If the UN was incapable of stopping the Serb
Stalinist-Fascist-Satanist onslaught, then more powerful forces had to
be mobilized. Waving the “bloody shirt” in this fashion has become more
and more instrumental to the war aims of imperialism. Only a few years
after Srebrenica became a rallying cry of the cruise missile left,
Racak would play the same role in precipitating NATO intervention in
Kosovo. And then more recently the attack on the WTC served similar
purposes. One imagines that if there is ever an all-out nuclear war, it
will be some other incident of “genocide” that will necessitate B-52’s
being sent on their way to teach the miscreants a radioactive lesson.

If the goal of Perelman’s article is to convince readers of Serb guilt
that the ICTY overlooked, it does not do a very good job. For example,
there is much ado about the “Kula Tapes” that link Milosevic with the
“Red Berets,” a highly trained detachment of the Serb army that
operated in Croatia and Bosnia. Supposedly the U.S. sent a copy of the
tape to ICTY that concealed key information about Milosevic’s
culpability.

Perhaps people like Florence Hartmann and Marc Perelman are still stung
by the ICTY’s decision that Milosevic was not directly involved with
what they called “genocide” in Bosnia, so somebody has to be blamed for
that failure. You have to stop and ask yourself why the U.S. would
withhold such evidence when there is nothing in the tapes that has
anything to do with Western failure to come to the aid of the Bosnian
Muslims.

Contrary to Perelman and Florence Hartmann, there is substantial
evidence that Milosevic was absolutely innocent of the charges against
him as this report by Chris Stephen in the habitually anti-Milosevic
London Observer (October 10, 2004) would indicate:

    FRESH controversy has hit the war crimes trial of Slobodan
Milosevic with a claim from a senior intelligence analyst that the
Yugoslav leader is innocent of genocide.

    Dr Cees Wiebes, a professor at Amsterdam University, now says there
is no evidence linking Milosevic to the worst atrocity of the Bosnian
war, the massacre of 7,000 Muslims at the town of Srebrenica.

    Srebrenica, which was overrun by Serb forces in July 1995, forms
the basis of the genocide charge against Milosevic, but Wiebes, a
member of a Dutch government inquiry into the atrocity, said there is
nothing to link Milosevic to the crime.

    ‘In our report, which is about 7,000 pages long, we come to the
conclusion that Milosevic had no foreknowledge of the subsequent
massacres,’ he says in a radio programme, The Real Slobodan Milosevic,
to be broadcast by BBC Five Live tonight. ‘What we did find, however,
was evidence to the contrary. Milosevic was very upset when he learnt
about the massacres.’

    The prospect of the former Balkan strongman being cleared of the
most serious charge he faces is a fresh blow to an already troubled
case, which begins hearing defence evidence this week after several
months of delays.

    Any failure to prove genocide will cast a shadow not only over this
case but over the whole practicality of holding tyrants to account in
war crimes trials, most obviously in the case against Saddam Hussein.

    Wiebes headed a team of intelligence specialists commissioned by
the Dutch government to look into the massacre because its own forces
were present in the town under the UN flag.

    He had access to secret files, key diplomats and hundreds of
witnesses to a massacre in which Muslim men and boys as young as 12
were butchered by Bosnian Serb forces. But while clearly implicating
senior Serb field commanders, including General Ratko Mladic, the
former Bosnian army chief still on the run, Wiebes says Milosevic
played no part.

    He said it was understandable that Milosevic was upset ‘because in
this phase of the war he was looking for a political settlement and
this was not very good for him’.

Furthermore, if Western complicity with an alleged war criminal like
Slobodan Milosevic would get in the way of a successful prosecution,
then why in the world did the U.S. agree to allow Saddam Hussein to
stand trial? Surely, he would have been able to “expose” American
collaboration in his war with the Kurds as some leftist commentators
predicted. Unfortunately, kangaroo courts like the ones that took place
in the Hague and Baghdad are not set up for an evenhanded examination
of all the facts. Neither Milosevic nor Saddam Hussein received
adequate legal representation. And even if they had been able to bring
to light American complicity, nothing of consequence would have come
out of it since the propaganda machine of the West had already
condemned such men to become “unpersons” in the Orwellian sense.

In keeping with the overall credulousness of the article, Perelman
calls on a witness even more doubtful than Florence Hartmann:

    In Srebrenica: Un génocide annoncé (Srebrenica: A Genocide
Foretold), a book published in France on the tenth anniversary of the
massacre, French writer Sylvie Matton offers some fresh acknowledgments
by senior European political and military officials–mostly French–that
the tragic fate of the enclave was no mystery. The most vivid
acknowledgment is provided by Alain Juppé, who was prime minister of
France at the time of the Srebrenica massacre. “It was widely known
that the Serbs wanted to take the enclaves and annihilate the men,”
Juppé told Matton, who then asked Juppé what he meant by “annihilate.”
“Let’s say we knew they would take no prisoners,” he answered.

After reading this, I paused for a moment with my mouth agape. Who in
their right mind would take Juppé’s word about anything? Alain Juppé
was probably the most hated politician in recent French history,
although Sarkozy seems poised to surpass him before long. The two of
them came into office with a mandate from the French ruling class to
break the powerful trade union movement and both ended up with bloody
noses in the process. In 2004, he was found guilty of stealing money
from his party, the Rally for the Republic, for which he got an
18-month suspended jail sentence and was banned from holding office for
10 years.

Fortunately, the Nation Magazine does occasionally allow the truth to
filter through on the Balkans wars. In George Kenney’s review of Noam
Chomsky’s “The New Military Humanism: Lessons From Kosovo” that
appeared nearly 8 years ago to the day, the notion of a Serb master
plan to subjugate its neighbors gets thoroughly debunked. Kenney writes:

    On March 18, the day the Rambouillet talks broke down, David
Scheffer, the State Department’s ambassador at large for war crimes
issues, proclaimed that “we have upwards to about 100,000 men that we
cannot account for” in Kosovo. Depending upon the sophistication of the
press organ involved, this statement was variously construed as a
warning or, as the New York Daily News put it in a headline the next
day, 100,000 Kosovar Men Feared Dead. The specter of mass murder
critically supported public acceptance of NATO airstrikes, which began
less than a week later, on March 24. After two months of bombing, the
Yugoslav regime was still, to the Administration’s deepening chagrin,
in the fight. By this time there were increasing murmurs of discontent
in the press regarding the effect of NATO airstrikes on unmistakably
civilian targets. Ambassador Scheffer stepped to the plate again in
mid-May, calling for “speedy investigations” of war crimes (by Serbs)
while now noting that “as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged
between 14 and 59 remain unaccounted for.” Several wire services quoted
him on different days as saying that “with the exception of Rwanda in
1994 and Cambodia in 1975, you would be hard-pressed to find a crime
scene anywhere in the world since World War II where a defenseless
civilian population has been assaulted with such ferocity and criminal
intent, and suffered so many multiple violations of humanitarian law in
such a short period of time as in Kosovo since mid-March 1999.” It was
a profoundly ignorant remark, of course, but what’s important is that
the Administration’s laserlike focus on allegations and innuendoes of
genocidal acts securely established the legitimacy of continued bombing
for an at-that-time unknown, perhaps lengthy period.

    Helpfully sensing that Washington–Scheffer and a battalion of
like-minded flacks–had gone too far out on a limb, in June and July the
British started publicizing their reduced estimate that 10,000 Albanian
Kosovars had been killed. For whatever reason that number stuck in
establishment circles. In fact, however, it appears to be still too
many. The actual number is probably somewhere in the low thousands.

    In mid-July sources from the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo,
known as KFOR, were telling the press that of 2,150 bodies found by
peacekeepers only 850 were victims of massacres. Nevertheless, still
eager to bolster the Serb=devil argument, National Security Adviser
Sandy Berger, in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations on July
26, poignantly mentioned “the village of Ljubenic, the largest
mass-grave site discovered so far from this conflict, with as many as
350 bodies.” Berger may not have been aware that the Italian in charge
of the site, Brig. Gen. Mauro Del Vecchio, had told the press several
days earlier that the exhumation had been completed at the site and
that seven bodies had been found. All press mention of Ljubenic ceases
after that point.

That’s the kind of writing that the Nation needs, not the drivel
offered up by Marc Perelman.