The Destruction of Yugoslavia
by Michael Parenti
The U.S. national security state--which has been involved throughout the
world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, and
death squads--is now launching round-the- clock aerial attacks against
Yugoslavia out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we
are asked to believe. President Clinton has bombed four countries in recent
months: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and now Yugoslavia massively.
The U.S. is also involved in proxy wars in Angola, Colombia, and various
other places. U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean, with
300 major overseas support bases. All this in the name of peace, democracy,
and humanitarianism; all to defend unspecified "U.S. national interests"
abroad, all to keep the American people safe from would-be adversaries who
supposedly are just waiting to pounce upon us.
If Clinton were so worried about oppressed minorities, as he pretends to be
about the Albanians, perhaps he would consider bombing the Czech Republic
for its mistreatment of the Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for
oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the
mass murder of a half million Tutsis in Riwanda--along with the French who
were complicit in that massacre. Instead he seems not to have noticed these
wrongs.
The White House should consider launching "humanitarian bombings" against
the Turkish people for what their leaders have done to the Kurds, or the
Indonesian people because their generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese,
or perhaps Clinton should pulverize Guatemala City for the Guatemalan
military's systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. In
such cases, however, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but
were actively complicit with the perpetrators-- whose primary dedication
has been to help Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.
Why then is the United States waging an unrestrainedly murderous assault
upon Yugoslavia?
The Third Worldization of Yugoslavia
The dismemberment and mutilation of the Yugoslav federation is part of a
concerted policy initiated by the United States and the other Western
powers in 1989. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would
not voluntarily overthrow what remained of its socialist system and install
a free-market economic order. The U.S. goal has been to transform
Yugoslavia into a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the
following characteristics:
* incapable of charting an independent course of self- development;
* natural resources completely accessible to multinational corporate
exploitation;
* an impoverished population forced to work at subsistence wages;
* dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, and automobile industries
that offer no competition with existing Western producers;
* a shattered economy wide open to transnational companies that could
invest and rebuild on their own terms.
U.S. policymakers also want a Yugoslavia whose public sector services and
social programs are abolished. Why so? For the same reason they want to
abolish our public sector services and social programs. The goal is the
privatization and Third Worldization of both Yugoslavia and the United
States. Yugoslavia was built on an idea, as Ramsey Clark once noted, namely
that the Southern Slavs would not remain weak and divided, falling out
among themselves or easy prey to outside imperial interests. United they
could form a substantial territory capable of its own economic development.
Indeed, after World War II, multi-ethnic, socialist Yugoslavia became a
viable nation and something of an economic success. Between 1960 and 1980
it had one of the most vigorous growth rates: a decent standard of living,
free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one month
free vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a life
expectancy of 72 years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry
affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, with a
not-for-profit economy that was mostly publicly owned.
This was not the kind of country global capitalism would normally tolerate.
Still, Yugoslavia was allowed to exist for 45 more years because it was
seen as a nonaligned buffer to the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact
nations.
Yugoslav leaders in the late 1960s and 1970s sought to expand the country's
industrial base and increase consumer goods both at the same time. This was
to be accomplished by borrowing from the West. But with IMF loans came an
enormous debt, and then IMF demands for restructuring, a harsh austerity
program that brought wage freezes, cutbacks in public spending, increased
unemployment, and the abolition of worker-managed enterprises. Still, much
of the economy remained in the not-for-profit public sector, including the
rich reserves of minerals and other natural resources in Kosovo and other
provinces.
Then came another blow. In November 1990, the Bush administration pressured
Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Law, which
provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within
six months would lose U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate
elections in each of the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State
Department approval of both election procedures and results. It also
required that aid go only to the separate republics, not to the Yugoslav
government. In fact, aid went to those forces whom Washington defined as
"democratic," meaning small right-wing, ultra-nationalist parties.
Reactionary and fascist organizations not seen in 45 years suddenly
reemerged with all sorts of money and arms at their command.
Another goal of U.S. policy has been ideological and media monopoly. In
1998, in what remained of Serbian Bosnia, the last radio station critical
of NATO policy was forcibly shut down by NATO "peacekeepers." The few U.S.
news outlets that reported this incident performed some impressive mental
gymnastics to explain why silencing the only remaining dissident Serbian
station was necessary for advancing democratic pluralism.
Still, Yugoslav television remains in the hands of people who refuse to
look at the world as do the U.S. State Department, the White House, and the
corporate-owned U.S. news media. Yugoslav television journalist Nevenka
Jovicic told me that she once asked the U.S. ambassador, "What do you want
from us?" And he replied "Your television system."
Yugoslavia allowed--until the NATO bombings began-- opposition radio
stations and dissident publications. Over twenty political parties had
their own newspapers. There are more opposition parties in the Yugoslav
parliament than in any other European parliament. Yet the federation was
repeatedly labeled a dictatorship. Slobodan Milosovic was elected three
times, twice as president of Serbia and more recently as president of
Yugoslavia, in contests that foreign observers said had relatively few
violations. Yet he is called a dictator.
In 1992, another blow was delivered against what remained of Yugoslavia:
international sanctions. Led by the United States, a freeze was imposed on
all trade to and from Yugoslavia, with disastrous results for the economy:
hyperinflation, mass unemployment of up to 70 percent, malnourishment, and
the collapse of the health care system.
Divide and Conquer
One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that "those who are
mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia--not the Serbs, Croats
or Muslims, but the Western powers--are depicted as saviors." While
pretending to work for harmony U.S. leaders have supported the most
divisive, reactionary forces from Croatia to Kosovo.
In Croatia, the West's man-of-the-hour was Franjo Tudjman, who claimed in a
book he authored in 1989 that "the establishment of Hitler's new European
order can be justified by the need to be rid of the Jews." He further
asserted that only 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the
Holocaust. Tudjman's government adopted the fascist Ustasha checkered flag
and, for its army, the straight-arm Nazi salute.
Tudjman presided over the forced evacuation of over half a million Serbs
from Croatia between 1991 and 1995, replete with rapes and summary
executions. This includes the 200,000 from Krajina in 1995, whose expulsion
was facilitated by attacks from NATO war planes and missiles. Needless to
say, U.S. leaders did nothing to stop and much to assist these atrocities.
Tudjman and his cronies now reside in obscene wealth while the people of
Croatia wallow in economic misery. The Croatian leadership has imposed a
tightly controlled one-party press on the new "democracy." Anyone who
criticizes the president risks incarceration. Yet the White House hails
Croatia as a new democracy.
In Bosnia, the U.S. supported the Muslim fundamentalist Izetbegovic, an
active Nazi collaborator in his youth, who wants to establish a religious
Islamic republic (for Muslims only), and who has called for strict Islamic
control over the media. Bosnia is now under IMF and NATO regency. It is not
permitted to develop its own internal resources, nor allowed to extend
credit or self- finance through an independent monetary system. Its
state-owned assets, including energy, water, telecommunications, media and
transportation, are being sold off to private firms at garage sale prices.
Meanwhile, the Serbian segment of Bosnia had its democratically elected
president removed by NATO troops because he was thought to be a "hardliner"
against free market reforms. This too was reported in the press as a
necessary measure to advance democracy.
In Kosovo, we see the same dreary pattern. The U.S. gives aid and
encouragement to violently right-wing separatist forces such as the
self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army, only a year ago considered a terrorist
organization by Washington. The KLA has long been a prime player in an
enormous heroin trade that reaches to Switzerland, Austria, Belgium,
Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Sweden. The KLA has no
social program other than the stated goal of cleansing Kosovo of all non-
Albanians, a campaign that had been going on for some thirty years, during
which time the non-Albanian Kosovo population (Serbs, Romany, Turks,
Macedonians, and others) has shrunk from some 60 percent in 1945 to about
25 percent in 1998.
Demonizing the Serbs
The propaganda campaign to demonize the Serbs fits the larger policy of the
Western powers. None other than Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of
the U.S. European command, commented on it in 1994:
The popular image of this war in Bosnia is one of unrelenting Serb
expansionism. Much of what the Croatians call 'the occupied territories' is
land that has been held by Serbs for more that 3 centuries. The same is
true of most Serb land in Bosnia. . . . In short the Serbs were not trying
to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs.
The U.S. [has punished] one side in this war. It has supported the
legitimacy of a leadership in the Bosnian [Muslim] government that has
become increasingly ethnocentric in its makeup, single-party in its rule,
and manipulative in its diplomacy. ... We say we want peace but we have
encouraged a deepening of the war.
Why were the Serbs targeted for demonization? They were the largest
nationality, and the one most opposed to the breakup of Yugoslavia. But
what of the atrocities they committed? All sides have committed atrocities,
but the reporting has been consistently one-sided. Grisly incidents of
Croat and Muslim atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the U.S.
press. Recently, three Croatian generals were indicted by the Hague War
Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment and deaths of Serbs in Krajina and
elsewhere. Where were the U.S. television crews when these war crimes were
being committed? And John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald
Concentration Camp, USA, asks: Where were the TV cameras when hundreds of
Serbs were slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?
Are we to trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media when they
dish out atrocity stories? Recall the five hundred premature babies whom
the Iraqis supposedly ripped from incubators in Kuwait? A most improbable
story that was repeated and believed until exposed as a total fabrication
years later.
During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs were accused of having an
official policy of rape. "Go forth and rape" a Bosnian Serb commander
supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The source of that report was
never traced to any Serb. The commander's name was never produced. As far
as we know, no such utterance was ever made. Even the New York Times
belatedly ran a tiny retraction, admitting that "the existence of 'a
systematic rape policy' by the Serbs remains to be proved."
Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 Muslim
women. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not more than 30 thousand or so, many
of whom were engaged in desperate military engagements. A representative
from Helsinki Watch noted that stories of massive Serbian rapes originated
with the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian governments and had no credible
supporting evidence. Common sense would dictate that these stories be
treated with the utmost skepticism--and not be used as the bases for an
aggressive and punitive policy against Yugoslavia.
Then there was the infamous Sarajevo market massacre. The Serbs were blamed
for it, until the story leaked out on French TV that the U.N. knew that
Muslim extremists had bombed Bosnian civilians in order to induce NATO
involvement. It was discovered that the explosion did not come from an
artillery shell but a planted bomb. Even international negotiator David
Owen, who worked with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO
powers knew all along that it was a Muslim bomb.
Barry Lituchy reports that the New York Times ran a photo purporting to be
of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact the murders had
been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times printed a tiny retraction the
following week.
We have seen how the leader of a designated rogue nation is demonized:
Qaddafi of Libya was a "Hitlerite megalomaniac" and a "madman." Noriega of
Panama was a "a swamp rat," one of the world's worst "drug thieves and
scums," and "a Hitler admirer."
Saddam Hussein of Iraq was "the Butcher of Baghdad," a "madman,"
"psychologically deformed," and "worse than Hitler." Each of these leaders
were charged with atrocities and acts of aggression then had their
countries attacked by U.S. forces. What they really had in common was that
each was charting a somewhat independent course of self-development or in
some way not complying with the dictates of global free market finance and
the U.S. national security state.
And now we have Milosovic, described as "a new Hitler," by Bill Clinton who
learns his lessons well. Milosovic was not always Hitler. At first, the
Western press, viewing the ex-banker as a bourgeois Serbian nationalist who
might hasten the break-up of Yugoslavia, hailed him as a "charismatic
personality." Only later, when they saw him as an obstacle rather than a
tool, did they begin to depict him as a demon, the instigator of great war
crimes who "started all four wars."
Even the managing editor of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs,
Fareed Zakaria, writing in the New York Times, notes that Milosovic who
rules "an impoverished country that has not attacked its neighbors--is no
Adolf Hitler. He is not even Saddam Hussein." The Hague War Crimes Tribunal
requested that the U.S. government provide it with the necessary
documentation so that it might indict Milosovic as a war criminal. In more
than a year, no such documentation has been forthcoming. Nor is proof
necessary, for the Yugoslav president is indicted and convicted every day
by the U.S. media, which faithfully follows national security state policy
on such matters.
The process of repetition is so relentless that prominent personages on the
Left now feel compelled to genuflect before this demonization orthodoxy,
referring to unspecified and unverified Serbian "brutality" and "the
monstrous Milosovic." Thus do they reveal themselves as having been
penetrated by the very media propaganda machine they criticize on so many
other issues.
To reject the demonized image of Milosovic and of the Serbian people is not
to idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of crimes. It is
merely to challenge the one- sided propaganda that has laid the grounds for
NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia.
Up until the NATO bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had
taken 2000 lives from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources.
Yugoslavian sources had put the figure at 800. Such figures reveal a civil
war, not genocide. The forced expulsion policy began after the NATO
bombings, with thousands being uprooted by Serb forces in those southern
Kosovo areas where KLA mercenaries were operating. The bitter Serbian
reaction seems to have been: "You invite death and destruction upon us,
we'll drive you out and remove the KLA support base."
We should keep in mind that tens of thousands more are fleeing Kosovo
because it is being mercilessly bombed by NATO. An Albanian woman crossing
into Macedonia was asked by a news crew if she had been forced out by Serb
police. She responded: "There were no Serbs. We were frightened of the
[NATO] bombs." Some fifty thousand Serbian residents of Kosovo have taken
flight (mostly north but some to the south). Are the Serbs ethnically
cleansing themselves? Or are these people not fleeing the bombing?
The refugee tide caused by the bombing is now being used by U.S. warmakers
as justification for the bombing, a necessary pressure to be put on
Milosovic to allow "the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees."
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers-- usually well-clothed
and in good health, some riding their tractors, truck, or cars, many of
them young men of recruitment age--they were described as being
"slaughtered." And Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds or the forced
expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as "genocide." Experts in
surveillance photography and wartime propaganda have recently charged NATO
with "running a propaganda campaign" on Kosovo that lacks any supporting
evidence. State Department reports of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000
missing Albanian men "are just ludicrous," according to independent
critics.
In contrast to its public assertions to justify NATO's attacks, the German
Foreign Office privately continued to deny that there is any evidence that
genocide or ethnic cleansing is a component of Yugoslav policy: "Even in
Kosovo, an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is
not verifiable. . . . The actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were]
not directed against the Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group,
but against the military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters."
Ethnic Enmity and U.S. "Diplomacy"
Some people argue that it is not class but nationalism that is the real
motor force behind these conflicts. This presumes that class and ethnicity
are mutually exclusive forces. In fact, ethnic enmity can be enlisted to
serve class interests, as the CIA tried to do with the Mung people in
Vietnam and the Muskito Indians in Nicaragua. And as the CIA did in Bosnia.
It is a matter of public record that the CIA has been active in Bosnia.
Consider these headlines: The Guardian (Manchester/London), November 17
1994: "CIA AGENTS TRAINING BOSNIAN ARMY"; The London Observer, November 20,
1994: "AMERICA'S SECRET BOSNIA AGENDA"; The European, November 25, 1994:
"HOW THE CIA HELPS BOSNIA FIGHT BACK."
As for "ancient national enmities": when different national groups are
living together with some measure of social and material security, they
tend to get along. There is intermingling and even some intermarriage. But
when the economy and the social fabric starts to go into a tailspin, then
it becomes easier to induce internecine conflicts and social
discombobulation. As already noted, in Yugoslavia the most retrograde
separatist elements were given every advantage in money, organization,
propaganda, arms, and hired thugs, while operating with the knowledge that
they had the full might of the U.S. national security state to their backs.
NATO is in violation of its own charter, which says it can take military
action only in response to aggression committed against one of its members.
Yugoslavia has attacked no NATO member. Unable to get a mandate for war
through the U.N. Security Council, U.S. leaders simply bypassed the United
Nations altogether. And they have discarded diplomacy. Traditional
diplomacy is a process of negotiating disputes through give and take, a way
of pressing one's interests only so far, arriving eventually at a solution
that may leave one side more satisfied than the other but not to the point
of forcing either party into war.
U.S. diplomacy is something else. As evidenced in its dealings with
Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, and now Yugoslavia, it consists of laying
down a set of demands that are treated as nonnegotiable, though called
"accords" or "agreements," as in the Rambouillet agreements. The other
side's reluctance to accede to every condition is labeled "stonewalling,"
and is publicly misrepresented as an unwillingness to negotiate in good
faith. U.S. leaders, we hear, run out of patience as their "offers" are
"snubbed." Ultimatums are issued, then military destruction is delivered
upon the recalcitrants so that they might learn to see things the way
Washington does.
Actually, Milosovic accepted all the demands laid down in the Rambouillet
agreements except one: he refused to hand over a large region of the
Serbian Republic, i.e., Kosovo, to foreign occupation--nor accept the
additional stipulation that these troops could move at will into any other
part of Yugoslavia. Instead the Serbs offered to accept U.N. supervisors in
Kosovo, a proposal that went unnoticed in the U.S. media until recently.
Many liberals are discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia but
are convinced that "this time" the U.S. national security state is really
fighting the good fight. Liberals and even some progressives will say,
"Yes, the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid! But we have to do
something." In fact, the bombings are other than stupid: they are
profoundly immoral. And in fact they do work; they are destroying
Yugoslavia and turning it into a deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor
nation of cheap labor, defenseless against capital penetration, so
splintered and battered down that it will never rise again.
Consider the cry of pain sent over the Internet by Serbian environmental
activist Branka Jovanovic: "Serbia is one of the greatest sources of
underground waters in Europe and the contamination [from U.S. depleted
uranium and other explosives] will be felt in the whole surrounding area
all the way to the Black Sea." NATO chooses "extremely dangerous targets"
including ones near nuclear reactors, nuclear waste storage facilities, and
petro-chemical factories, including a chloride plant that still uses a
technology similar to what existed in Bhopal. "It is not necessary for me
to explain what the blowing up of one such factory would represent. Not
only Belgrade, situated ten kilometers away, would be endangered but the
rest of Europe too." "Four national parks have been bombed," Jovanovic
notes, "national reservations" that make Yugoslavia "among thirteen of the
world's richest bio-diversity countries." The depleted uranium missiles
that NATO is using "will bring dangerous consequences to the health not
only of soldiers but also of the whole population, and you know that toxins
and radioactivity know no nationality or borders." Jovanovic then goes on
to describe the shock and suffering of children and elderly people and the
"humanitarian catastrophe" created by the NATO bombing that will have
"severe consequences to the generations of people living in this country."
The same old arguments we heard with regard to Vietnam have resurfaced:
"Well, we can't just pull out." In fact, U.S. leaders certainly can pull
out, with just two words: "Cease fire!" and then another two words, "NATO
disband." And yes, we, the real "we" do have to do something. Call the
White House (202 456- 1111); call your misrepresentatives in the U.S.
Congress; call and write to the various media, complaining of their awful
coverage and the way they serve as mouthpieces for officialdom. Talk back,
educate, organize, agitate, demonstrate.
Against the lies and homicidal violence, the thin frail voice of reason and
democracy can become a mighty chorus and a strong resistance. We have seen
it happen before and we can make it happen again.
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geocities.com/CapitolHill)