[Peace-discuss] Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass

[David Johnson]

Lengthy but well worth the read -The intentional destabilization and
destruction of Yugoslavia by the U.S. and NATO.

 

Seeing Yugoslavia through a dark glass

By Diana Johnstone, CovertAction Quarterly, Fall 1998

Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization

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 Balkans in the 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 combating
"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 multi-cultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists, and in calling for
military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined secessionist
movements11 "Ethnically defined" because, despite the argument accepted by
the international community that it was the Republics that could invoke the
right to secede, all the political arguments surrounding recognition of
independent Slovenia and Croatia dwelt on the right of Slovenes and Croats
as such to self-determination.-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 Yugoslavia 

Like 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 combated 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 I, 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 II, 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 for 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 accompli22Recognition of the
internal administrative borders between the republics as "inviolable"
international borders was in effect legal trick, contrary to international
law, which turned the Yugoslav army into an "aggressor" within the
boundaries its soldiers had sworn to defend and which transformed the Serbs
within Croatia and Bosnia, who opposed secession from their country
-Yugoslavia, into secessionists. This recognition flagrantly violated the
principles of the 1975 Final Act (known as the Helsinki Accords) of the
Conference on, now organisation for, Security and Cooperation in Europe,
notably the territorial integrity of states and nonintervention in internal
affairs. Truncated Yugoslavia was thereupon expelled from the OSCI in 1992.
sparing its other members from having to hear Belgrade's point of view.
Indeed, the sanctions against Yugoslavia covered culture and sports, thus
eliminating for several crucial years any opportunity for Serbian Yugoslavs
to take part in international forums and events where the one-sided view of
"the Serbs" presented by their adversaries might have been challenged. 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 Motives 

The political motives that launched the anti-Serb 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 States33In Washington, the campaign on behalf of Albanian separatists
in Kosovo was spearheaded by Representative Joe Dio Gaurdi of New York, who
after loosing his congressional seat in 1988 has continued his lobbying for
the cause. An early and influential convert to the cause was Senator Robert
Dole. In Germany, the project for the political unification of all Croatian
nationalists, but communists and Ustashe, with aim of seceding and
establishing "Greater Croatia" was followed closely and sympathetically by
the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, West Germany's CIA, which hoped to gain
its own sphere of influence on the Adriatic from the breakup of Yugoslavia.
The nationalist unification which eventually brought former communist
general Franjo Tudjman to power in Zagreb with the support of the Ustashe
diaspora, got seriously under way after Tito's death in 1980, during the
years when Bonn's current foreign minister Claus Kinkel, was heading the
BND. See Erich Schmidt-Echboom, Der Schattenkrieger: Klaus Kinkel und der
BND (Dusseldorf; ECON Verlag, 1995) , 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 II
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 Allgemeine 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 I. 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 Momentum 

>From 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"44Albanians in Albania and in
Yugoslavia call themselves "Shqiptare" but recently have objected to being
called that by others. "Albanians" is an old and accepted term. Especially
when addressing international audiences in the context of the separatist
cause. Kosovo Albanians prefer to call themselves "Kosovars", which has
political implications. Logically, the term should apply to all inhabitants
of the province of Kosovo, regardless of ethnic identity, but by
appropriating it for themselves alone, the Albanian "Kosovars" imply that
Serbs and other non-Albanians are intruders. This is similar to the Muslim
parties appropriation of the term "Bosniak" which implies that the Muslim
population of Bosnia-Herzegovina is more indigenous than the Serbs and
Croats, which makes no sense, since the Bosnian Muslims are simply Serbs and
Croats who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest. , the Croatian
secessionists and the Bosnian Muslims hired an American public relations
firm, Ruder Finn, to advance their causes by demonizing the Serbs55The role
of the Washington public relations firm, Ruder Finn, is by now well-known,
but seems to have raised few doubts as to the accuracy of the anti-Serb
propaganda it successfully diffused.. Ruder Finn deliberately targeted
certain publics, notably the American Jewish community, with a campaign
likening Serbs to Nazis. Feminists were also clearly targeted by the
Croatian nationalist campaign directed out of Zagreb to brand Serbs as
rapists66No one denies that many rapes occurred during the civil war in
Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that rape is a serious violation of human
rights. So is war, for that matter. From the start, however, inquiry into
rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina focused exclusively on accusations that Serbs
were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate strategy. The most inflated
figures, freely extricated by multiplying the number of known cases by large
factors, were readily accepted by the media and international organizations.
No interest was shown in detailed and documented reports of rapes of Serbian
women by Muslims or Croats. 

The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the "London
Observer", described her own search in verification of the rape charges in a
letter to "The Daily Telegraph" (January 19, 1993). The British Foreign
Office conceded that the rape figures being handled about were really
uncorroborated and referred her to the Danish government, then chairing the
European Union. Copenhagen agreed that the reports were unsubstantiated, but
kept repeating them. Both said that the EU has taken up the "rape atrocity"
issue at its December 1992 Edinburgh Summit exclusively on the basis of a
German initiative. In turn, Fran Wild, in charge of the Bosnian Desk in the
German Foreign Ministry, told Ms. Beloff that the material on Serb rapes
came partly from the Izetbegovic government and partly from the Catholic
charity Caritas in Croatia. No effort had been made to seek corroboration
from more impartial sources.. 

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 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. 

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 cause 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) Hans-Dietrich 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 Allgemeine 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 Euro-American
society since the end of the Cold War. 

Down with the State 

This 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 essential 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
supposedly obsolete nation-state level. 

Within the United States, the link between anti-nation-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 international 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 relationship 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 multi-cultural 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" quotasystem 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 II. 

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 II. It is only in the 1980's that a much milder Serbian
nationalist reaction to economic 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 Croatia77See: Barbara Delcouri & Olivier
Carten, Ex-Yougoslavie: Droit International, Politique et Ideologies
(Brussels: Editions Bruylam, Editions de l'Universite de Bruxelles, 1997).
The authors, specialists in international law at the Free University of
Brussels, point out that there was no basis under international law for the
secession of the Yugoslav Republics. The principle of "self-determination"
was totally inapplicable in those cases.. 

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. 

The New World Order 

In fact, the break-up of Yugoslavia has served to discredit and further
weaken the United Nations, while providing a new role for an expending NATO.
Rather than strengthening international order, it has helped shift the
balance of power within the international order toward the dominant
nation-states, the United States and Germany. If somebody had announced in
1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down, now Germany can unite and
send military forces back into Yugoslavia-and what is more in order to
enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to those it imposed
when it occupied the country in 1941-well, quite a number of people might
have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and many of the
very people might who have been expected to object most strongly to what
amounts to the most significant act of historical revisionism since World
War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse. 

Perhaps dazed by the end of the Cold War, much of what remains of the left
in the early nineties abandoned its critical scrutiny of the geostrategic
Realpolitik underlying great power policies in general and U.S. policy in
particular and seemed to believe that the world henceforth was determined by
purely moral considerations. 

This has much to do with the privatization of "the left" in the past twenty
years or so. The United States has led the way in this trend. Mass movements
aimed at overall political action have declined, while single-issue
movements have managed to continue. The single-issue movements in turn
engender non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which, because of the
requirements of fund- raising, need to adapt their causes to the mood of the
times, in other words, to the dominant ideology to the media. Massive
fund-raising is easiest for victims, using appeals to sentiment rather than
to reason. Greenpeace has found that it can raise money more easily for baby
seals than for combatting the development of nuclear weapons. This fact of
life steers NGO activity in certain directions, away from political analysis
toward sentiment. On another level, the NGOs offer idealistic
internationalists a rare opportunity to intervene all around the world in
matters of human rights and human welfare. 

And herein lies a new danger. Just as the "civilizing mission" of bringing
Christianity to the heathen provided a justifying pretext for imperialist
conquest of Asia and Africa in the past, today the protection of "human
rights" may be the cloak for a new type of imperialist military intervention
worldwide. 

Certainly, human rights are an essential concern of the left. Moreover, many
individuals committed to worthy causes have turned to NGOs as the only
available alternative to the decline of mass movements-a decline over which
they have no control. Even a small NGO addressing a problem is no doubt
better than nothing at all. The point is that great vigilance is needed, in
this as in all other endeavours, to avoid letting good intentions be
manipulated to serve quite contrary purposes. 

In a world now dedicated to brutal economic rivalry, where the rich get
richer and the poor get poorer, human rights abuses can only increase. From
this vast array of mans inhumanity to man, Western media and governments are
unquestionably more concerned about human rights abuses that obstruct the
penetration of transnational capitalism, to which they are organically
linked, than about, say, the rights of Russian miners who have not been paid
for a year. Media and government selectivity not only encourages
humanitarian NGOs to follow their lead in focusing on certain countries and
certain types of abuses, the case-by-case approach also distracts from
active criticism of global economic structures that favour the basic human
rights abuse of a world split between staggering wealth and dire poverty. 

Cuba is not the only country whose "human rights" may be the object of
extraordinary concern by governments trying to replace local rulers with
more compliant defenders of transnational interests. Such a motivation can
by no means be ruled out in the case of the campaign against Serbia. In such
situations, humanitarian NGOs risk being cast in the role of the
missionaries of the past-sincere, devoted people who need to be "protected",
this time by NATO military forces. The Somali expedition provided a rough
rehearsal (truly scandalous if examined closely) for this scenario. On a
much larger scale, first Bosnia, then Kosovo, provide a vast experimental
terrain for cooperation between NGOs and NATO. 

There is urgent need to take care to preserve genuine and legitimate efforts
on behalf of human rights from manipulation in the service of other
political ends. This is indeed a delicate challenge. 

NGOs and NATO, hand in hand 

In former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Western NGOs
have found a justifying role for themselves alongside NATO. They gain
funding and prestige from the situation. Local employees of Western NGOs
gain political and financial advantages over other local people, and
"democracy" is not the peoples choice but whatever meets with approval of
outside donors. This breeds arrogance among the outside benefactors, and
cynicism among local people, who have the choice between opposing the
outsiders or seeking to manipulate them. It is an unhealthy situation, and
some of the most self-critical are aware of the dangers. 

Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former Yugoslavia is
the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September 18, 1997,
that organization issued a long statement announcing in advance that the
Serbian elections to be held three days later "will be neither free nor
fair." This astonishing intervention was followed by a long list of measures
that Serbia and Yugoslavia must carry out or else", and that the
international community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia. These
demands indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory standards
of "human rights" as applied to Serbia, although not, obviously, to
everybody else, since they included new media laws drafted "in full
consultation with the independent media in Yugoslavia" as well as permission
meanwhile to all "unlicensed but currently operating radio and television
stations to broadcast without interference"88Some 400 radio and television
stations have been operating in Yugoslavia with temporary licenses or none
at all. The vast majority are in Serbia, a country of less than ten million
inhabitants on a small territory of only 54.872 square miles. 

Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to "deny Yugoslavia readmission to
the OSCE until there are concrete improvements in the country's human rights
record, including respect for freedom of the press, independence of the
judiciary, and minority rights, as well as cooperation with the
International Criminal Tribuna for the former Yugoslavia". 

As for the demand to "respect freedom of the press," one may wonder what
measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that press freedom already
exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that in many other countries not
being served with such an ultimatum. There exist in Serbia quite a range of
media devoted to attacking the government, not only in Serbo-Croatian, but
also in Albanian. As of one 1998, there were 2.319 print publications and
101 radio and television stations in Yugoslavia, over twice the number that
existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily newspapers. The state-supported
national dailies have a joint circulation of 180.000 compared to around
350.000 for seven leading opposition dailies". 

Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less independent than in
Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and most certainly much more so. As for "minority
rights," it would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world where they
are better protected in both theory and practice than in Yugoslavia99Serbia
is constitutionally defined as the nation of all its citizens, and not "of
the Serbs" (in contrast to constitutional provisions of Croatia and
Macedonia, for instance). In addition, the 1992 Constitution of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as well as the Serbian
Constitution guarantee extensive rights to national minorities, notably the
right to education in their own mother tongue, the right to information
media in their own language, and the right to use their own language in
proceedings before a tribunal of other authority. These rights are not
merely formal, but are effectively respected as is shown by, for instance,
the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian minority and the large
number of newspapers published by national minorities in Albanian, Hungarian
and other languages. Romani (Gypsies) are by all accounts better treated in
Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the Balkans. Serbia has a large Muslim
population of varied nationalities, including refugees from Bosnia and a
native Serb population of converts to Islam in Southeastern Kosovo, known as
Goranci, whose religious rights national level. The only democracy it
reorganizes is that of the "international community", which is summoned to
act according to the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This
"international community", the IC, is in reality no democracy. Its decisions
are formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC is not even a "community"; the
initials could more accurately stand for "imperialist condominium", a joint
exercise of domination by the former imperialist powers, torn apart and
weakened by two World Wars, now brought together under U.S. domination with
NATO as their military arm. Certainly there are frictions between the
members of this condominium, but so long as their rivalries can be played
out within the IC, the price will be paid by smaller and weaker countries. 

Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by Great
Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of
"non-governmental organizations"-often linked to powerful governments-whose
competition with each other for financial support provides motivation for
exaggerating the abuses they specialize in denouncing. 

Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to socialism
and international relations, economically and politically by far the most
liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has already been torn apart by
Western support to secessionist movements: What is left is being further
reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a continuation of the same process. The
emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little ethnic
democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by the IC enforced
by NATO. 

Diana 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 expended version of a talk
given on May 25, 1998, at an international conference on media held in
Athens, Greece. 

 

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