THE LEFT REVISIONISTS
The Left Revisionists
By Marko Attila Hoare
By Marko Attila Hoare
[Daniel's note: An extensive review of a broad array of those on the Left who downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and shift the blame to the Western alliance. Among those discussed are Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, Michael Parenti, Michel Chossudovsky, Diana Johnstone, Mick Hume, John Pilger, Harold Pinter, and Jared Israel. By Marko Hoare, November 2003]
In 2001 two events at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague put the subject of genocide in the former Yugoslavia back on the front pages of newspapers. Firstly, Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic was convicted of genocide against the Muslim [Bosniak] population of the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, the first conviction at the ICTY for this gravest of crimes. Secondly and more spectacularly, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was indicted and put on trial for genocide against the Muslim [Bosniak] and Croat population of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole.
These events at the ICTY inflamed the bitter controversies that have raged over this conflict since it broke out in 1991. Internationally, political opinion has been divided into two camps characterized by their conflicting analyses of the crisis and views of the correct international response. On the one side were those who viewed the war as a result of Serbian aggression and expansionism and who generally advocated military intervention by the West in response. On the other side were those who viewed the conflict as a civil war between competing nationalisms (Serb, Croat, Muslim [Bosniak], and Albanian) in which the Serb side was if anything less to blame than the others. They tended to blame Western interference for catalysing the conflict and to reject military intervention against Serbian forces.
For the sake of convenience, we may refer to the first camp as the ‘orthodox’ and the second as the ‘revisionist’.
The debate between these two camps has continued to dominate discourse on the former Yugoslavia in the West up till the present day. Although the events at The Hague in 2001 marked a defeat for the revisionist camp, its more determined members have responded by denying both the validity of the charges of genocide and the legitimacy of the ICTY. The revisionist analysis of the wars in the former Yugoslavia therefore constitutes one aspect of the Western response to the phenomenon of genocide in the contemporary world, one that is in some ways related to similar ‘revisionist’ analyses of the prior genocide in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the contemporaneous genocide in Rwanda.
The use of the word ‘revisionist’ to describe this current of opinion serves a dual purpose, for the revisionists seek on the one hand to oppose what they see as the mainstream, orthodox view of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and on the other to challenge the very notion that genocide took place. Thus they are in some ways the counterpart to the Holocaust revisionists. While the revisionists under consideration correctly point out that the massacres in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-95 and in Kosovo in 1998-99 are not on a scale with those of Auschwitz their arguments resemble in some ways those of the Holocaust revisionists while their own frequent exploitation of the Holocaust legacy contains some startling ambiguities.
Although the revisionist camp stretches right across the political spectrum to encompass liberals, conservatives, socialists, and members of the far right, the ideological motivation of each of these groups is very different. The current I wish to analyse here consists of people who are to the left of mainstream Social Democracy and who oppose what they see as the anti-Serbian or anti-Yugoslav policies of the Western alliance. It includes members of many different far-left traditions: left Labourites and Social Democrats; Christian Socialists; Orthodox Communists; Trotskyists; Maoists; anarchists; and others. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to them as ‘left revisionists’, meaning those who, on the basis of a radical left-wing philosophy, seek 1) to revise the negative evaluation of the Milosevic regime made by politically mainstream commentators; 2) to deny that genocide took place and downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia; and 3) to shift the blame for this violence and suffering, as well as for the break-up of Yugoslavia, on to the Western alliance. Other adherents of a radical left-wing philosophy who oppose Western military intervention in the Balkans but who also opposed the Milosevic regime do not belong to this category and are not the subjects of this essay. My purpose here is neither to discuss the merits and demerits of a left-wing philosophy, nor to analyse the events in the former Yugoslavia themselves, nor to address the advantages and disadvantages of Western military intervention. This is a study of the ideology of left revisionism itself. The present author makes no pretence at neutrality in this debate - he belongs firmly in the ‘orthodox’ camp - and this is above all a study of the extremes to which one current of Western opinion is prepared to go and the intellectual and moral somersaults it is prepared to perform, in order to avoid confronting the reality of genocide. In order to understand the erroneous analysis on which left revisionism is based, it is necessary to examine the real causes of the break-up of Yugoslavia, which lie in the policies of the Milosevic regime.
Ideology of the left revisionists
“What about the Kurds?” is viewed by the left revisionists as their clinching argument in the case against the NATO intervention in Kosovo: if Western leaders were motivated to intervene in Kosovo out of concern at the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians, why have they not intervened to protect the Kurds from Turkish oppression? Or the Palestinians from the Israelis? I wish to turn the question around and to ask “What about the Albanians?” If the left-wing revisionists are concerned with the suffering of oppressed nationalities, as they claim to be regarding the Kurds, Palestinians, and others, it needs to be explained why did they not speak out against Milosevic’s persecution of the Kosovo Albanians, or of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks], or of the Croats. It needs to be explained why Serbian or Yugoslav military intervention was less objectionable to them than American military intervention, even when it was incomparably more bloody. It needs to be asked why the six hundred or so Yugoslav civilian deaths during the Kosovo War were ‘worthy’ victims in a way that the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Bosnians killed by Serbian forces were not.
This double standard may in part be attributed to anti-Americanism or ‘anti-imperialism’, whereby members of the far left subordinate their morality to the ‘higher cause’ of opposing the United States. There is a long tradition on the far left of supporting the weaker country against the stronger on an anti-imperialist basis. V.I. Lenin wrote in 1915 that “if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia and so on, these would be ‘just’ or ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who was the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependant, and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding, and predatory ‘Great Powers’.”[1] Such a line of reasoning might conceivably have led members of the far left to support Milosevic’s Serbia as a victim of ‘American imperialism’, even to the point of ignoring or denying its crimes against the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
Simple ‘anti-imperialism’ is however insufficient to explain the motives of the left revisionists, who do not themselves couch their arguments in ‘anti-imperialist’ terms. Rather they prefer to make pedantic, legalistic quibbles over such issues as the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the authority of the UN Security Council, and the exact numbers of Albanian dead; appropriate arguments for international lawyers, perhaps, but scarcely the kind usually favoured in the polemics of the revolutionary left. The focus of the left revisionists is in fact less on denouncing the US as an evil in and of itself – though this is clearly an element - than on defending politically the Milosevic regime. Other regimes that have clashed with the Western alliance during the past decade – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere – have not received similar support from the Western left. To the best of my knowledge nobody has tried to claim that Saddam Hussein is a man of peace who respects the territorial integrity of Iraq’s neighbours or that the Taliban are champions of women’s rights and cultural diversity. Nobody, except Osama bin-Laden and eccentric chess-grandmaster Bobby Fischer, has treated the victims of the World Trade Centre bombing with the callousness and contempt with which left revisionists speak of the dead of Vukovar, Srebrenica, and Racak. The Serbia of Milosevic enjoyed the unique position in the pantheon of the ‘rogue states’ of the 1990s as the only one that was supported politically, not just defended from attack, by much of the Western left.
The left revisionists are holding on to the anti-humanist, anti-moralist, anti-democratic bathwater long after the revolutionary baby has died and its corpse decayed. Instead of being moved by the events in Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1989-91 to reevaluate their political philosophy, many of them reacted by clinging even more stubbornly to every last straw from the wreckage of the Communist Atlantis.
Milosevic and the West
One such straw was the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Its credentials as a ‘left-wing’ regime were pretty poor: Milosevic’s ruling party was called the ‘Socialist Party of Serbia’ (SPS) and had formerly been the League of Communists of Serbia, but SPS leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Borisav Jovic emphasised from the start their commitment to free-market reforms. Under their tenure the gap between rich and poor massively increased, social services were greatly reduced, free healthcare effectively ended, public transport collapsed, and a large new class of black marketeers and organised criminals created. To look to Milosevic’s Serbia as an ‘alternative’ to the capitalist West was pretty much scraping the bottom of the socialist barrel. Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb nationalist regime in Pale was even less credibly ‘progressive’: ideologically anti-Communist, Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party identifies with the monarchist and Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik movement far more openly than the Tudjman regime in Zagreb ever identified with the Ustashas. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the left revisionists, to accept that Belgrade and its proxies were committing aggression and genocide was akin to admitting that the liberals really had been right all along about the negative character of Communism. In their minds the Cold War is still being fought on the battlefields of Kosovo. Twenty-five years ago Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman complained of the poor image conveyed by the Western media of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. They wrote that “What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasising alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.”[2] Today both authors use similar arguments to downplay the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians and to shift the blame for it away from the Milosevic regime and onto the US. In Chomsky’s words, Turkey is guilty of “massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of “aggression and massacre” of “near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of “murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities.[3] By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing The Serbian killings of Albanians; they are a “response” and “reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of “targeting Serb police and civilians”; “killing six Serbian teenagers”; the “killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were “designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA.[4] When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a ‘socialist’ regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.
There is a term for this attitude: moral relativism. In its far-left variety there are two sides to its coin. On the one hand there is a holier-than-thou condemnation of every Western failing (“What about the Kurds/Palestinians/East Timorese?”), allowing the left revisionists always to damn Western policy for its moral imperfections no matter what it is. The West is therefore damned simultaneously for intervening in Kosovo and for colluding in the Turkish oppression of the Kurds and for maintaining sanctions against Iraq, though it is clear that ultimately the West cannot easily reject military intervention, sanctions, and appeasement all at the same time. Combined with this all-trumping moralism in the left-revisionist mind-set, like the opposite pole of a magnet, is a cold-blooded immoralism, according to which the left-winger is absolutely unmoved by the crimes of the Revolution performed for the greater good. More striking even than the defence or denial of crimes against humanity carried out by the left revisionists is their sheer lack of any positive vision for the future or political raison d’etre whatsoever. They should not be seen as ‘pro-Serb’, for the Serb people are unlikely to benefit from their actions. They are offering precisely nothing to the long-suffering people of Serbia in return for suffering sanctions and isolation and defending war criminals from the ICTY. Rather, they appear to view ‘resistance to Western imperialism’ as something worthwhile for its own sake, no matter how much self-destruction it results in for Serbia and how much misery it inflicts on the Serbs. The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic accused the British during World War II of “fighting to the last Serb in Yugoslavia”.[5] The same could be said of the contemporary left revisionists, but with one crucial difference: Churchill offered the Serbs something concrete in return for their sacrifices, namely liberation from Nazism, which he duly helped to bring about. By contrast, the left revisionists really are offering the Serbs nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Equally conspicuous by their absence are constructive proposals of the left revisionists regarding Kosovo’s future. For all his lofty denunciations of the West’s policy, the only alternative Chomsky can suggest for a resolution of the Kosovo question that would have avoided NATO bombing is the partition of Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians as suggested by Dobrica Cosic, the father of contemporary Serb nationalism and one of the architects of Yugoslavia’s wars.[6] As the Albanians make up at least 80% of the population of Kosovo and as the Serb villages are scattered in enclaves throughout the province, what this implies is the expulsion of the Albanian majority from half of Kosovo so that it can be settled by Serbs from elsewhere and therefore satisfy the Serb-nationalist demand for a face-saving formula short of Kosovo’s complete independence.
The left revisionists founded their analysis of Yugoslavia’s collapse on the false premise that because Serbia was in some bizarre sense a ‘socialist’ state in their eyes, the West ‘ought to be’ hostile to it, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. They therefore invented a Western conspiracy to explain the Yugoslav collapse and the subsequent defeats of Milosevic’s Serbia. In Michael Parenti’s view all opposition to Milosevic, be it from the Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], Albanians, or even the Serbian opposition, was simply the expression of such a conspiracy. According to Parenti, Western hostility to Yugoslavia was due to the fact that “after the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) [sic - Parenti means the SFRY] remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system”. Consequently “the US goal has been to transform the FRY [sic] into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities”.[7] Following the break-up the FRY resisted privatisation of its socialised industry, continues Parenti, and “as far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned, these enterprises had to be either privatised or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.”[8] In other words, the US engineered Yugoslavia’s destruction and then bombed Serbia in order to bring about the privatisation of its socialised economy. Parenti provides not a single source to back up these assertions; he omits to mention that Milosevic privatised Serbia’s telecommunications system with Britain’s Douglas Hurd acting as intermediary.
Of course, Washington in 1991 did seek the end of Communist rule in Yugoslavia, just as it had previously in Poland and Hungary. But Washington did not seek to break up Poland or Hungary. The myth that the Western powers destroyed Yugoslavia and persecuted Serbia because they were ‘socialist’ is made above all to satisfy the emotional need of the left revisionists to believe that the dictatorships they spent years defending were in some sense ‘progressive’ and hence unacceptable to the powers that be.
It is true that Serbia was subjected to a NATO assault in 1999 and that Western leaders rejoiced in Milosevic’s overthrow the following year. But to deduce from this that the West was already ‘anti-Serb’ during the Croatian war in 1991 - eight years earlier - is a bit like saying that the West viewed Saddam Hussein as an enemy during the Iran-Iraq war or Osama bin-Laden as an enemy during the Soviet-Afghan war. During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 the Milosevic regime supported the US-led drive to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait. Thus, following a meeting with US President George Bush on 1 October 1990 Borisav Jovic, at the time President of Yugoslavia, recorded that “President Bush expressed special satisfaction and gratitude to Yugoslavia for adopting the same position of condemning Iraqi aggression and the annexation of Kuwait. He is pleased and encouraged by the unity of the international community regarding the crisis in the Gulf and Iraq.” Jovic on this occasion boasted to Bush that “we [Yugoslavs] are the only Eastern European country that has almost developed and established a market economy system. Now we are at a critical point, but we will overcome it too over the next few years, which is why we need the understanding and aid of the United States with international financial institutions and in the business world.” Finally, responding to Bush’s query regarding the presence of Iraqi jets in Yugoslavia, Jovic informed him that “We have a contract from earlier, before the crisis, to repair 16 MiGs for the Iraqi air-force. They will not be delivered to Iraq now. Two of them were dismantled in the workshop, after which they were gathered up and tested or transferred to another location in order not to hinder the normal work in the workshop.” Jovic records that “President Bush thanked me for that.”[9] So much for the argument that the US victimised Serbia as a ‘socialist’ and ‘defiant’ state. The left revisionists are fond of pointing out that both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden were originally allies of the US, but they are reluctant to acknowledge Western collaboration with Milosevic because such an admission would ruin their claim of Western victimisation of ‘socialist’ Serbia.
In 1991 the American UN mediator Cyrus Vance negotiated the so-called ‘Vance Plan’ to end the conflict in Croatia involving the use of UN peacekeepers to protect Serb-held territory in Croatia; even Jovic described it as “exceptionally favourable to the Serb side”.[10] Every single Western peace plan for Bosnia was based on the premise of Bosnia’s partition; every one gave Karadzic’s Bosnian Serbs a much larger share of Bosnia than their proportion of the population would warrant. UN troops in Bosnia collaborated systematically with Ratko Mladic’s forces, helping them murder the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister in 1993; British troops in Central Bosnia killed dozens of Croat troops[11] and in his memoir of the conflict British Major Vaughan Kent-Payne describes beating up a Croat soldier.[12] UN forces drove the Bosnian Army from Mt. Igman in the autumn of 1994, using rocket launchers to destroy its trenches. Most notoriously, the West maintained an arms embargo against Bosnia which the British and French, though not the Americans, enforced rigorously to the bitter end. Meanwhile not a single NATO missile struck Serbia throughout the Croatian and Bosnian wars while Milosevic was the respected interlocutor of Douglas Hurd, David Owen, and Richard Holbrooke. The Dayton Accord of 1995 compromised the sovereignty of the Bosnian state far more than the Rambouillet treaty of 1999 threatened the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state: it abolished the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and recognised Radovan Karadzic’s ‘Republika Srpska’, with rights far greater than those ever offered to the Kosovo Albanians. The left revisionists’ ‘anti-interventionism’ does not seem to extend to these particular instances of Western intervention.
Who destroyed Yugoslavia?
The ‘anti-Serbian imperialist conspiracy’ in fact existed in only two places. One was the minds of the Serbian leadership and the commanders of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). I have read the memoirs of several top Serbian and Yugoslav political and military leaders, including Borisav Jovic, Branko Mamula, Veljko Kadijevic, Ratko Mladic, and Aleksandar Vasiljevic, who were respectively Serbia’s representative on the Yugoslav Presidency, Yugoslav Defence Minister, Yugoslav Defence Minister, commander of the Bosnian Serb army, and Yugoslav chief of military intelligence.[13] Not one provides a single fact to back up the claim that the West was working to break up Yugoslavia, but they interpret the failure of the West actively to support them with support for their enemies. The other place in which the ‘anti-Serbian conspiracy’ existed was in the minds of the left revisionists. The idea that ‘Western imperialism’ was not responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia is for the left revisionists simply unthinkable, rather as the Stalinists of the 1930s could not conceive of the failure of the USSR to fulfill a five-year plan as anything other than the result of a Trotskyist-Fascist plot. The destruction of Yugoslavia thus could only have been caused by German and/or American imperialists wishing to control this economic and strategic El Dorado. Thus Michael Barratt Brown claimed that Germany’s recognition of Croatia was part of a Drang nach Osten aimed at “control over the oil supplies of the Middle East”.[14]
In fact, two such imperialist conspiracies are posited: a conspiracy to break up Yugoslavia and a conspiracy to attack Serbia. Neither has any basis in fact. So far as the historical evidence goes, there is no doubt about ‘who killed Yugoslavia’. On 27 June 1990 Borisav Jovic, Serbia’s member of the Yugoslav Presidency (thus the number two politician in Serbia after Milosevic) and Veljko Kadijevic, Yugoslav Defence Minister and the top man in the JNA, met and agreed that they should, regarding Croatia and Slovenia, “expel them forcibly from Yugoslavia, by simply drawing borders and declaring that they have brought this upon themselves through their decisions”.[15] The next day Jovic met with Milosevic and obtained his agreement. As Jovic records on 28 June:
These events at the ICTY inflamed the bitter controversies that have raged over this conflict since it broke out in 1991. Internationally, political opinion has been divided into two camps characterized by their conflicting analyses of the crisis and views of the correct international response. On the one side were those who viewed the war as a result of Serbian aggression and expansionism and who generally advocated military intervention by the West in response. On the other side were those who viewed the conflict as a civil war between competing nationalisms (Serb, Croat, Muslim [Bosniak], and Albanian) in which the Serb side was if anything less to blame than the others. They tended to blame Western interference for catalysing the conflict and to reject military intervention against Serbian forces.
For the sake of convenience, we may refer to the first camp as the ‘orthodox’ and the second as the ‘revisionist’.
The debate between these two camps has continued to dominate discourse on the former Yugoslavia in the West up till the present day. Although the events at The Hague in 2001 marked a defeat for the revisionist camp, its more determined members have responded by denying both the validity of the charges of genocide and the legitimacy of the ICTY. The revisionist analysis of the wars in the former Yugoslavia therefore constitutes one aspect of the Western response to the phenomenon of genocide in the contemporary world, one that is in some ways related to similar ‘revisionist’ analyses of the prior genocide in Pol Pot’s Cambodia and the contemporaneous genocide in Rwanda.
The use of the word ‘revisionist’ to describe this current of opinion serves a dual purpose, for the revisionists seek on the one hand to oppose what they see as the mainstream, orthodox view of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and on the other to challenge the very notion that genocide took place. Thus they are in some ways the counterpart to the Holocaust revisionists. While the revisionists under consideration correctly point out that the massacres in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992-95 and in Kosovo in 1998-99 are not on a scale with those of Auschwitz their arguments resemble in some ways those of the Holocaust revisionists while their own frequent exploitation of the Holocaust legacy contains some startling ambiguities.
Although the revisionist camp stretches right across the political spectrum to encompass liberals, conservatives, socialists, and members of the far right, the ideological motivation of each of these groups is very different. The current I wish to analyse here consists of people who are to the left of mainstream Social Democracy and who oppose what they see as the anti-Serbian or anti-Yugoslav policies of the Western alliance. It includes members of many different far-left traditions: left Labourites and Social Democrats; Christian Socialists; Orthodox Communists; Trotskyists; Maoists; anarchists; and others. For the sake of convenience I shall refer to them as ‘left revisionists’, meaning those who, on the basis of a radical left-wing philosophy, seek 1) to revise the negative evaluation of the Milosevic regime made by politically mainstream commentators; 2) to deny that genocide took place and downplay the violence and suffering involved in the wars in the former Yugoslavia; and 3) to shift the blame for this violence and suffering, as well as for the break-up of Yugoslavia, on to the Western alliance. Other adherents of a radical left-wing philosophy who oppose Western military intervention in the Balkans but who also opposed the Milosevic regime do not belong to this category and are not the subjects of this essay. My purpose here is neither to discuss the merits and demerits of a left-wing philosophy, nor to analyse the events in the former Yugoslavia themselves, nor to address the advantages and disadvantages of Western military intervention. This is a study of the ideology of left revisionism itself. The present author makes no pretence at neutrality in this debate - he belongs firmly in the ‘orthodox’ camp - and this is above all a study of the extremes to which one current of Western opinion is prepared to go and the intellectual and moral somersaults it is prepared to perform, in order to avoid confronting the reality of genocide. In order to understand the erroneous analysis on which left revisionism is based, it is necessary to examine the real causes of the break-up of Yugoslavia, which lie in the policies of the Milosevic regime.
Ideology of the left revisionists
“What about the Kurds?” is viewed by the left revisionists as their clinching argument in the case against the NATO intervention in Kosovo: if Western leaders were motivated to intervene in Kosovo out of concern at the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians, why have they not intervened to protect the Kurds from Turkish oppression? Or the Palestinians from the Israelis? I wish to turn the question around and to ask “What about the Albanians?” If the left-wing revisionists are concerned with the suffering of oppressed nationalities, as they claim to be regarding the Kurds, Palestinians, and others, it needs to be explained why did they not speak out against Milosevic’s persecution of the Kosovo Albanians, or of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks], or of the Croats. It needs to be explained why Serbian or Yugoslav military intervention was less objectionable to them than American military intervention, even when it was incomparably more bloody. It needs to be asked why the six hundred or so Yugoslav civilian deaths during the Kosovo War were ‘worthy’ victims in a way that the tens if not hundreds of thousands of Bosnians killed by Serbian forces were not.
This double standard may in part be attributed to anti-Americanism or ‘anti-imperialism’, whereby members of the far left subordinate their morality to the ‘higher cause’ of opposing the United States. There is a long tradition on the far left of supporting the weaker country against the stronger on an anti-imperialist basis. V.I. Lenin wrote in 1915 that “if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia and so on, these would be ‘just’ or ‘defensive’ wars irrespective of who was the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependant, and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding, and predatory ‘Great Powers’.”[1] Such a line of reasoning might conceivably have led members of the far left to support Milosevic’s Serbia as a victim of ‘American imperialism’, even to the point of ignoring or denying its crimes against the non-Serb peoples of the former Yugoslavia.
Simple ‘anti-imperialism’ is however insufficient to explain the motives of the left revisionists, who do not themselves couch their arguments in ‘anti-imperialist’ terms. Rather they prefer to make pedantic, legalistic quibbles over such issues as the sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the authority of the UN Security Council, and the exact numbers of Albanian dead; appropriate arguments for international lawyers, perhaps, but scarcely the kind usually favoured in the polemics of the revolutionary left. The focus of the left revisionists is in fact less on denouncing the US as an evil in and of itself – though this is clearly an element - than on defending politically the Milosevic regime. Other regimes that have clashed with the Western alliance during the past decade – in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and elsewhere – have not received similar support from the Western left. To the best of my knowledge nobody has tried to claim that Saddam Hussein is a man of peace who respects the territorial integrity of Iraq’s neighbours or that the Taliban are champions of women’s rights and cultural diversity. Nobody, except Osama bin-Laden and eccentric chess-grandmaster Bobby Fischer, has treated the victims of the World Trade Centre bombing with the callousness and contempt with which left revisionists speak of the dead of Vukovar, Srebrenica, and Racak. The Serbia of Milosevic enjoyed the unique position in the pantheon of the ‘rogue states’ of the 1990s as the only one that was supported politically, not just defended from attack, by much of the Western left.
The left revisionists are holding on to the anti-humanist, anti-moralist, anti-democratic bathwater long after the revolutionary baby has died and its corpse decayed. Instead of being moved by the events in Eastern Europe and the USSR in 1989-91 to reevaluate their political philosophy, many of them reacted by clinging even more stubbornly to every last straw from the wreckage of the Communist Atlantis.
Milosevic and the West
One such straw was the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Its credentials as a ‘left-wing’ regime were pretty poor: Milosevic’s ruling party was called the ‘Socialist Party of Serbia’ (SPS) and had formerly been the League of Communists of Serbia, but SPS leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Borisav Jovic emphasised from the start their commitment to free-market reforms. Under their tenure the gap between rich and poor massively increased, social services were greatly reduced, free healthcare effectively ended, public transport collapsed, and a large new class of black marketeers and organised criminals created. To look to Milosevic’s Serbia as an ‘alternative’ to the capitalist West was pretty much scraping the bottom of the socialist barrel. Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb nationalist regime in Pale was even less credibly ‘progressive’: ideologically anti-Communist, Karadzic’s Serb Democratic Party identifies with the monarchist and Nazi-collaborationist Chetnik movement far more openly than the Tudjman regime in Zagreb ever identified with the Ustashas. Nevertheless, in the eyes of the left revisionists, to accept that Belgrade and its proxies were committing aggression and genocide was akin to admitting that the liberals really had been right all along about the negative character of Communism. In their minds the Cold War is still being fought on the battlefields of Kosovo. Twenty-five years ago Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman complained of the poor image conveyed by the Western media of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. They wrote that “What filters through to the American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available, emphasising alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the crucial US role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has suffered.”[2] Today both authors use similar arguments to downplay the suffering of the Kosovo Albanians and to shift the blame for it away from the Milosevic regime and onto the US. In Chomsky’s words, Turkey is guilty of “massive atrocities” against the Kurds; Indonesia of “aggression and massacre” of “near-genocidal levels” in East Timor; Israel of “murderous and destructive” operations in Lebanon; but there is no mention of Kurdish, East Timorese, or Palestinian atrocities.[3] By contrast, Chomsky uses no such emotive language when discussing The Serbian killings of Albanians; they are a “response” and “reaction” to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) attacks. Meanwhile the KLA was guilty of “targeting Serb police and civilians”; “killing six Serbian teenagers”; the “killing of a Serb judge, police, and civilians”; and so on. The picture Chomsky consequently sketches is of atrocities by both sides and, since KLA actions were “designed to elicit a violent and disproportionate Serbian response”, the implication is that the Milosevic regime was less to blame than the KLA.[4] When a US client massacres innocent civilians it is wholly to blame; when a ‘socialist’ regime does so it is the victims who are primarily to blame.
There is a term for this attitude: moral relativism. In its far-left variety there are two sides to its coin. On the one hand there is a holier-than-thou condemnation of every Western failing (“What about the Kurds/Palestinians/East Timorese?”), allowing the left revisionists always to damn Western policy for its moral imperfections no matter what it is. The West is therefore damned simultaneously for intervening in Kosovo and for colluding in the Turkish oppression of the Kurds and for maintaining sanctions against Iraq, though it is clear that ultimately the West cannot easily reject military intervention, sanctions, and appeasement all at the same time. Combined with this all-trumping moralism in the left-revisionist mind-set, like the opposite pole of a magnet, is a cold-blooded immoralism, according to which the left-winger is absolutely unmoved by the crimes of the Revolution performed for the greater good. More striking even than the defence or denial of crimes against humanity carried out by the left revisionists is their sheer lack of any positive vision for the future or political raison d’etre whatsoever. They should not be seen as ‘pro-Serb’, for the Serb people are unlikely to benefit from their actions. They are offering precisely nothing to the long-suffering people of Serbia in return for suffering sanctions and isolation and defending war criminals from the ICTY. Rather, they appear to view ‘resistance to Western imperialism’ as something worthwhile for its own sake, no matter how much self-destruction it results in for Serbia and how much misery it inflicts on the Serbs. The Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic accused the British during World War II of “fighting to the last Serb in Yugoslavia”.[5] The same could be said of the contemporary left revisionists, but with one crucial difference: Churchill offered the Serbs something concrete in return for their sacrifices, namely liberation from Nazism, which he duly helped to bring about. By contrast, the left revisionists really are offering the Serbs nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Equally conspicuous by their absence are constructive proposals of the left revisionists regarding Kosovo’s future. For all his lofty denunciations of the West’s policy, the only alternative Chomsky can suggest for a resolution of the Kosovo question that would have avoided NATO bombing is the partition of Kosovo between Serbs and Albanians as suggested by Dobrica Cosic, the father of contemporary Serb nationalism and one of the architects of Yugoslavia’s wars.[6] As the Albanians make up at least 80% of the population of Kosovo and as the Serb villages are scattered in enclaves throughout the province, what this implies is the expulsion of the Albanian majority from half of Kosovo so that it can be settled by Serbs from elsewhere and therefore satisfy the Serb-nationalist demand for a face-saving formula short of Kosovo’s complete independence.
The left revisionists founded their analysis of Yugoslavia’s collapse on the false premise that because Serbia was in some bizarre sense a ‘socialist’ state in their eyes, the West ‘ought to be’ hostile to it, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. They therefore invented a Western conspiracy to explain the Yugoslav collapse and the subsequent defeats of Milosevic’s Serbia. In Michael Parenti’s view all opposition to Milosevic, be it from the Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], Albanians, or even the Serbian opposition, was simply the expression of such a conspiracy. According to Parenti, Western hostility to Yugoslavia was due to the fact that “after the overthrow of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) [sic - Parenti means the SFRY] remained the only nation in that region that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free market system”. Consequently “the US goal has been to transform the FRY [sic] into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities”.[7] Following the break-up the FRY resisted privatisation of its socialised industry, continues Parenti, and “as far as the Western free-marketeers were concerned, these enterprises had to be either privatised or demolished. A massive aerial destruction like the one delivered upon Iraq might be just the thing needed to put Belgrade more in step with the New World Order.”[8] In other words, the US engineered Yugoslavia’s destruction and then bombed Serbia in order to bring about the privatisation of its socialised economy. Parenti provides not a single source to back up these assertions; he omits to mention that Milosevic privatised Serbia’s telecommunications system with Britain’s Douglas Hurd acting as intermediary.
Of course, Washington in 1991 did seek the end of Communist rule in Yugoslavia, just as it had previously in Poland and Hungary. But Washington did not seek to break up Poland or Hungary. The myth that the Western powers destroyed Yugoslavia and persecuted Serbia because they were ‘socialist’ is made above all to satisfy the emotional need of the left revisionists to believe that the dictatorships they spent years defending were in some sense ‘progressive’ and hence unacceptable to the powers that be.
It is true that Serbia was subjected to a NATO assault in 1999 and that Western leaders rejoiced in Milosevic’s overthrow the following year. But to deduce from this that the West was already ‘anti-Serb’ during the Croatian war in 1991 - eight years earlier - is a bit like saying that the West viewed Saddam Hussein as an enemy during the Iran-Iraq war or Osama bin-Laden as an enemy during the Soviet-Afghan war. During the Gulf crisis of 1990-91 the Milosevic regime supported the US-led drive to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait. Thus, following a meeting with US President George Bush on 1 October 1990 Borisav Jovic, at the time President of Yugoslavia, recorded that “President Bush expressed special satisfaction and gratitude to Yugoslavia for adopting the same position of condemning Iraqi aggression and the annexation of Kuwait. He is pleased and encouraged by the unity of the international community regarding the crisis in the Gulf and Iraq.” Jovic on this occasion boasted to Bush that “we [Yugoslavs] are the only Eastern European country that has almost developed and established a market economy system. Now we are at a critical point, but we will overcome it too over the next few years, which is why we need the understanding and aid of the United States with international financial institutions and in the business world.” Finally, responding to Bush’s query regarding the presence of Iraqi jets in Yugoslavia, Jovic informed him that “We have a contract from earlier, before the crisis, to repair 16 MiGs for the Iraqi air-force. They will not be delivered to Iraq now. Two of them were dismantled in the workshop, after which they were gathered up and tested or transferred to another location in order not to hinder the normal work in the workshop.” Jovic records that “President Bush thanked me for that.”[9] So much for the argument that the US victimised Serbia as a ‘socialist’ and ‘defiant’ state. The left revisionists are fond of pointing out that both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden were originally allies of the US, but they are reluctant to acknowledge Western collaboration with Milosevic because such an admission would ruin their claim of Western victimisation of ‘socialist’ Serbia.
In 1991 the American UN mediator Cyrus Vance negotiated the so-called ‘Vance Plan’ to end the conflict in Croatia involving the use of UN peacekeepers to protect Serb-held territory in Croatia; even Jovic described it as “exceptionally favourable to the Serb side”.[10] Every single Western peace plan for Bosnia was based on the premise of Bosnia’s partition; every one gave Karadzic’s Bosnian Serbs a much larger share of Bosnia than their proportion of the population would warrant. UN troops in Bosnia collaborated systematically with Ratko Mladic’s forces, helping them murder the Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister in 1993; British troops in Central Bosnia killed dozens of Croat troops[11] and in his memoir of the conflict British Major Vaughan Kent-Payne describes beating up a Croat soldier.[12] UN forces drove the Bosnian Army from Mt. Igman in the autumn of 1994, using rocket launchers to destroy its trenches. Most notoriously, the West maintained an arms embargo against Bosnia which the British and French, though not the Americans, enforced rigorously to the bitter end. Meanwhile not a single NATO missile struck Serbia throughout the Croatian and Bosnian wars while Milosevic was the respected interlocutor of Douglas Hurd, David Owen, and Richard Holbrooke. The Dayton Accord of 1995 compromised the sovereignty of the Bosnian state far more than the Rambouillet treaty of 1999 threatened the sovereignty of the Yugoslav state: it abolished the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina and recognised Radovan Karadzic’s ‘Republika Srpska’, with rights far greater than those ever offered to the Kosovo Albanians. The left revisionists’ ‘anti-interventionism’ does not seem to extend to these particular instances of Western intervention.
Who destroyed Yugoslavia?
The ‘anti-Serbian imperialist conspiracy’ in fact existed in only two places. One was the minds of the Serbian leadership and the commanders of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). I have read the memoirs of several top Serbian and Yugoslav political and military leaders, including Borisav Jovic, Branko Mamula, Veljko Kadijevic, Ratko Mladic, and Aleksandar Vasiljevic, who were respectively Serbia’s representative on the Yugoslav Presidency, Yugoslav Defence Minister, Yugoslav Defence Minister, commander of the Bosnian Serb army, and Yugoslav chief of military intelligence.[13] Not one provides a single fact to back up the claim that the West was working to break up Yugoslavia, but they interpret the failure of the West actively to support them with support for their enemies. The other place in which the ‘anti-Serbian conspiracy’ existed was in the minds of the left revisionists. The idea that ‘Western imperialism’ was not responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia is for the left revisionists simply unthinkable, rather as the Stalinists of the 1930s could not conceive of the failure of the USSR to fulfill a five-year plan as anything other than the result of a Trotskyist-Fascist plot. The destruction of Yugoslavia thus could only have been caused by German and/or American imperialists wishing to control this economic and strategic El Dorado. Thus Michael Barratt Brown claimed that Germany’s recognition of Croatia was part of a Drang nach Osten aimed at “control over the oil supplies of the Middle East”.[14]
In fact, two such imperialist conspiracies are posited: a conspiracy to break up Yugoslavia and a conspiracy to attack Serbia. Neither has any basis in fact. So far as the historical evidence goes, there is no doubt about ‘who killed Yugoslavia’. On 27 June 1990 Borisav Jovic, Serbia’s member of the Yugoslav Presidency (thus the number two politician in Serbia after Milosevic) and Veljko Kadijevic, Yugoslav Defence Minister and the top man in the JNA, met and agreed that they should, regarding Croatia and Slovenia, “expel them forcibly from Yugoslavia, by simply drawing borders and declaring that they have brought this upon themselves through their decisions”.[15] The next day Jovic met with Milosevic and obtained his agreement. As Jovic records on 28 June:
Conversation with Slobodan Milosevic on the situation in the country and in Serbia. He agrees with the idea of “expelling” Slovenia and Croatia, but he asks me whether the military will carry out such an order? I tell him that it must carry out the order and that I have no doubts about that; instead, the problem is what to do about the Serbs in Croatia and how to ensure a majority on the SFRY Presidency for such a decision. Sloba had two ideas: first, that the “amputation” of Croatia be effected in such a way that the Lika-Banija and Kordun municipalities, which have created their own community, remain with us, whereby the people there later declare in a referendum whether they want to stay or go; and second, that the members of the SFRY Presidency from Slovenia and Croatia be excluded from the voting on the decision, because they do not represent the part of Yugoslavia that is adopting this decision. If the Bosnian is in favour, then we have a two-thirds majority. Sloba urges that we adopt this decision no later than one week hence if we want to save the state. Without Croatia and Slovenia, Yugoslavia will have around 17 million inhabitants and that is enough for European circumstances.[16]
The record of both meetings is contained in Jovic’s diary, published by the Serbian state-publishing house ‘Politika’ in 1995. Kadijevic’s own analysis of the break-up, published in 1993 also by Politika, confirms that from the spring of 1990 the command of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) had ceased to believe in a unified Yugoslavia and was working for the “defence of the Serb nation and its national interests in Croatia”; for “full control over Bosnia-Herzegovina” and for the “peaceful exit from the Yugoslav state of those Yugoslav nations that so wished”. [17]
In September 1990 Serbia promulgated a new constitution that recognised the “sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia”.[18] In March 1991 Milosevic declared that Serbia no longer recognised the authority of the Yugoslav Presidency, that it was forming its own independent armed forces and that “We have to ensure that we have unity in Serbia if we want as the Republic that is biggest, which is most numerous, to dictate the further course of events. Those questions of borders are, therefore, state questions. And borders, as you know, are always dictated by the strong, never by the weak. Consequently, what is essential is that we have to be strong.”[19] In June 1991 Croatia declared independence while Germany publicly reaffirmed its support for a unified Yugoslavia. In October 1991 Mihajlo Markovic, deputy president of the SPS, stated that “there will be at least three units in the new Yugoslav state: Serbia, Montenegro, and a united Bosnian and Knin Krajina”.[20] Later that month Borivoje Petrovic, Vice-President of the Serbian Parliament, claimed that all Serbs must live in a single state and that it was all the same “whether the new state is called Yugoslavia or the ‘United States of Serbia’.” [21] In November 1991 the JNA conquered the Croatian city of Vukovar. In December 1991 Germany recognised the independence of Croatia and Slovenia.
It would require a pretty strange sense of historical chronology to argue that Germany’s decision in December 1991 to recognise Croatia could have influenced the Serbian leadership’s decision in June 1990 “forcibly to expel” Croatia from Yugoslavia; it would be a bit like saying that World War I caused the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. There exists not a single shred of evidence anywhere that Germany ‘orchestrated’ the break up of Yugoslavia. Michel Chossudovsky alleges German support for Croatian secessionism was part of what he calls “long Western efforts to undo Yugoslavia’s experiment in market socialism and workers’ self-management and to impose the dictate of the free market.” Chossudovsky claims that the German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher “gave his go-ahead for Croatian secession”. [22] Chossudovsky’s source is an article by his ideological fellow traveler, the late Sean Gervasi. Gervasi’s source was an article in the New Yorker citing an allegation by a US diplomat. [23] In this way the left revisionists substitute third-hand hearsay for documentation. But even if it were true that Germany covertly encouraged Croatian secession contrary to official German policy, it is certainly true that the US, Britain, and France very publicly discouraged Croatia from seceding. Even Parenti admits that the US disagreed with Germany over Croatia; in fact he complains that “the United States did little to deter Germany’s efforts” in support of Croatia and that it was not until “January 1992” that “the United States had become an active player in the break-up of Yugoslavia”.[24] So at this point the Americans were not really the bad guys after all. Alleged German diplomatic intervention nevertheless serves to excuse the decision by Milosevic and the JNA to attack Croatia in 1991, just as Western recognition of Bosnian independence excused their decision to attack Bosnia in 1992 and the NATO strikes of 1999 excuse Milosevic’s decision to expel eight-hundred thousand of his own citizens from their homes. In fact, it appears the Serbian and Yugoslav leaders really are not responsible for anything they have done. Edward S. Herman and Philip Hammond speak of “the elitist and anti-democratic character of Western policy, whereby the people of the region are assumed to be incapable of self-government.”[25] Or of starting their own wars and conducting their own massacres, one might add.
The role of the media
The fact that during the Croatian and Bosnian wars the Western alliance manifestly did not want to attack or bomb Serbia forced the left revisionists to search elsewhere for evidence of the anti-Serbian conspiracy. The fact that the Western media reported Serbian atrocities was not, of course, evidence that such atrocities were taking place but rather of the existence of an anti-Serb media conspiracy and, as Diana Johnstone points out, “it often seemed that the media were dictating policy to Western governments, rather than the other way around”.[26] Consequently, the revelation by Western journalists and reporters of atrocities against Croatian, Bosnian, and Kosovar citizens created a climate of public opinion in which the reluctant Western leaders were forced gradually to take action against the Serbian forces responsible. It was the democratic media, therefore, rather than the Western political and military leaders, which was the real carrier of the anti-Serbian conspiracy. In the left revisionists’ world of twisted logic and conspiracy theories, the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] repeatedly shelled their own civilians in Sarajevo so that they could blame the massacres on the Serbs and then used the Western media to broadcast the images to the Western public in order to create an ‘anti-Serb’ climate of opinion and pressurise the Western leaders to intervene against the Serbs. The Muslims [Bosniaks] are thus transformed from victims of Milosevic’s genocide and Western indifference into diabolical puppeteers, using the Western media to manipulate the Western public and Western leaders who consequently become the victims along with Milosevic, Karadzic, and ‘the Serbs’.
The irony of this grotesque line of reasoning is that the numerous Western statesmen and military commanders who were opposed to military intervention against the Serbian forces then become witnesses to prove the existence of the anti-Serbian conspiracy in their own media. Parenti cites claims by US General Charles Boyd, British General Michael Rose, French General Philippe Morillon, EC peace mediator Lord David Owen, and other Western military and political leaders to prove that it was really the Muslims [Bosniaks], not the Serbs, who were bombing and besieging Sarajevo for three and a half years; that the Muslims [Bosniaks] were pretending to be besieged; and that massacres of Muslim [Bosniak] civilians in Sarajevo were carried out by the Muslims [Bosniaks] against themselves.[27] Thus it transpires that whereas Christiane Amanpour, Roy Gutman, Maggie O’Kane, Ed Vulliamy, and other professional journalists and television reporters were part of the Western-media conspiracy to “demonise the Serbs”, virtually the entire military and diplomatic leadership of the Western intervention in Bosnia was opposed to the conspiracy and was motivated solely by the desire to present honestly and accurately the facts as they really were. A second group of witnesses whom the left revisionists draw upon are those Western journalists whom they happen to agree with, whose articles are somehow published in the mainstream media despite its supposed anti-Serb bias. Thus whereas O’Kane, Vulliamy, Amanpour, and Gutman are viewed as part of the anti-Serb conspiracy, David Binder, Misha Glenny, Robert Fisk, Edward Pearce, and Simon Jenkins are seen as wholly objective observers free from any political bias. Not to mention Mick Hume, former editor of the magazine Living Marxism, which during the 1990s repeatedly denied that genocide had taken place either in Bosnia or in Rwanda.[28] Living Marxism was eventually forced to close after it accused the media company ITN of inventing concentration camps in Bosnia and was promptly sued by ITN and bankrupted, but Hume now has a regular column in The Times (London). If Ed Vulliamy reports on a contemporary Serbian concentration camp then this is ‘demonising the Serbs’ and proof that the Western media is biased against ‘the Serbs’, but if Robert Fisk writes about a Croatian concentration camp that existed half a century earlier during World War II, as he did in The Independent at the height of the Bosnian war,[29] then this is proof positive that ‘the Croats’ are really the bad guys and consequently that the rest of the media is biased against ‘the Serbs’ for not pointing this out. It is a win-win argument.
The mindset of the left revisionists allows them to disregard all evidence of the genocidal activities of the Milosevic regime, no matter how damning. When, following Milosevic’s extradition to The Hague, the Serbian police began to unearth mass graves of his Albanian victims in Serbia, Seumas Milne responded by implying that even the government and police of democratic Serbia were part of the Western propaganda conspiracy against the Milosevic regime, that they were betraying their country to the capitalist Mammon and that the only real crime was the extradition itself: “Shamelessly bought with $1.3bn of aid for a country ravaged by sanctions and NATO bombing, Milosevic's extradition had to be forced through by decree, in defiance of Yugoslavia's constitutional court, by a government which knew it stood no chance of getting the decision through parliament.” By contrast the corpses of murdered Albanians were simply part of the Western conspiracy: “That is presumably why - as the new Belgrade administration dug up corpses to order - the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, described the cash as a ‘dividend of democracy’.”[30] “Where are all the bodies buried?” asks Parenti, arguing that because only slightly more than two thousand bodies had been discovered in Kosovo, it followed that that was the total Albanian death toll: “how did the Serbs accomplish these mass-grave-disappearing acts?”, he asks ironically, quoting a newspaper as saying that a forensic team “‘found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies.’”[31] The ominous parallels of such arguments hardly need to be spelled out. In the words of the white-supremacist web-site Stormfront: “Auschwitz had no mass graves. The cremation of four million bodies would have left 15,000 tons of ash which was never found.”[32] While Milosevic’s crimes against the Albanians are not equivalent to Hitler’s crimes against the Jews; what are equivalent are the arguments used by the apologists for both dictators. Indeed, the left revisionists’ atrocity denial recalls the fascist propaganda surrounding the most infamous Nazi atrocity in Europe before World War II. On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis’ Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Guernica. The following day the Spanish fascists issued a statement to the foreign press accusing the Basques of blowing up their own town. They claimed in the days that followed that, “while a few bomb fragments” had been found in Guernica, the damage was mainly caused by Basque incendiaries in order to inspire outrage among the foreign public, and later that Spanish Republican planes had bombed Guernica using Basque-manufactured bombs and that the explosions were caused by dynamite placed by the Basques in the town’s sewers. Despite this fascist attempt at denial, the atrocity swung part of the US media (the magazines Time, Life, and Newsweek) round to supporting the Spanish Republicans.[33]
The left revisionists claim to object to comparisons between the Bosnian genocide and the Holocaust on the grounds that they are emotional and hyperbolic. Johnstone complains of the fact that because of media exaggeration “Suddenly, Milosevic was the new Hitler”. She goes on: “Analogies should be employed with care, especially with such emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust. When applied to unfamiliar situations, they can create a powerful semi-fictional version that actually masks reality.”[34] Mick Hume, usually proud to be politically incorrect, in this case also professes deep concern about talk of genocide or a Holocaust in the Balkans. He complains that the tendency for journalists to compare Serb forces in Bosnia and Kosovo with the Nazis “with talk of ‘echoes of the Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ carried out in ‘true Nazi Final Solution fashion’ has seriously distorted the popular image of the Balkans today. It has helped to brand the Serbs as the evil new Nazis.” He goes on “This diminishing of the Final Solution is what ultimately concerns me most about the Nazification of the Serbs.”[35] Nevertheless, the left revisionists are quite ready to exploit the legacy of the Holocaust in their own propaganda. A mere week after writing the statement quoted above, Johnstone wrote that “[I]f the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide, that doesn't mean they have forgotten their World War II benefactors. After all, it was thanks to Hitler's invasion of Yugoslavia that the ‘Independent State of Croatia’ was set up in April 1941, with Bosnia-Herzegovina (whose population was mostly Serb at the time [sic!]) as part of its territory.” Johnstone thus draws a parallel with Nazi aggression in the Balkans during World War II and democratic Germany’s diplomatic support for Croatia in 1991: “And the hit song of 1991, when Croatia once again declared its independence from Yugoslavia and began driving out Serbs, was ‘Danke Deutschland’ in gratitude to Germany's strong diplomatic support for Zagreb's unnegotiated secession.”[36] So Johnstone, who urges caution in employing “emotion-laden subjects as Hitler and the Holocaust” when it is a question of Serbian atrocities, is quite happy to throw out this caution when it is a question of the Croats; her claim that “the Croatian fascists actually led, rather than followed, the German Nazis down the path of genocide” seems to imply that the Final Solution was Croatian in origin – a view that no serious student of the Holocaust would bother even discussing. As for Hume, Living Marxism magazine, of which he was the editor, hosted an exhibition in 1993 entitled ‘Genocide against the Serbs’, organised by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and funded by the Republic of Serbia, showing pictures of the corpses of Serbs killed by Croatian and Bosnian forces in the 1990s alongside pictures of the corpses of Serbs killed by Ustashas during World War II. Pictures from the exhibition were published in Living Marxism, which did not see fit to add any comment of its own.[37] Throughout the war in Croatia and Bosnia Hume and Living Marxism constantly equated the Croats with the Nazis in order to shift the odium away from Milosevic and his forces. Finally John Pilger, in a piece devoted to minimising Albanian casualties during the Kosovo War, comments that “Today, the Serbs are the unpeople. They have no civilisation, no society, no poetry, no history. The savagery they suffered at the hands of the Nazis in the Second World War, exceeded only by the mass extermination of the Polish Jews, has been forgotten.”[38]
Falsifying Yugoslav history
It is of course true that the Serb people suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators in Yugoslavia (Ustashas, Chetniks and others), but this suffering was on a scale little or no greater than that of the Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], and other Yugoslavs or of the Poles, Greeks, Ukrainians, and East Europeans generally. It certainly was not on a par with the fate that befell the Jews in Europe under the Nazis. Pilger however seems to be suggesting that the Serbs, whose total World War II losses were between 487,000 and 523,000 or approximately 7% of the total Serb population of Yugoslavia,[39] suffered more than the three million non-Polish Jews murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, more than the Jews massacred at Kishinev, Babi Yar, and Odessa. So while the left revisionists strenuously object to reference to the Holocaust in relation to the fate of the Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] and Albanians in the 1990s, they readily draw on the legacy of the Holocaust to highlight Serb suffering both in World War II and in the recent wars, even at the price of historical accuracy. In order to paint the Serbs as eternal victims equivalent to the Jews the left revisionists frequently mention the crimes of the Croat fascists (Ustashas) during World War II while ignoring similar crimes committed by Serb fascists and collaborators in the same period. It is true that there was an Ustasha regime in power in power in Zagreb during World War II; there was also a Serbian quisling regime in power in Belgrade, and on 18 September 1943 the Serbian quisling leader Milan Nedic met with Hitler and requested the establishment of a Great Serbia within the framework of the Nazi European order.[40] It is true that the Ustasha regime pursued a genocidal policy toward the Serb population of the Croatian quisling state; there was also a parallel genocide carried out by the Serb Chetniks against the Muslims [Bosniaks] and Croats of Bosnia and Croatia. [41] The Ustasha regime assisted the Nazis in exterminating the Jewish population of Croatia and Bosnia; Nedic’s Serbian police assisted the Nazis in rounding up Serbia’s Jews. [42] Just as the Ustashas employed anti-Semitic propaganda, so too did the Chetniks. A Chetnik proclamation of 1941 claimed that the Communists were “people who are not of our blood, Serb name and our Serb Orthodox religion” but were “Jews, Turks and Croats”. [43] In 1943 a group of Chetnik commanders issued a joint proclamation to the people of Croatia and Bosnia claiming that “since we have cleansed Serbia, Montenegro and Hercegovina, we have come to help you to crush the pitiful remnants of the Communist international, criminal band of Tito, Mose Pijade, Levi Vajnert and other paid Jews” and that the Serbs had been “swindled by the Communist Jews”. [44] According to Israel Gutman’s Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, “There were many instances of Chetniks murdering Jews or handing them over to the Germans”. [45] None of this prevents Johnstone from describing the Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic as an “anti-Nazi resistance leader”. [46] The Serbs, like the Croats, were a nation deeply polarised during World War II; like the Croats, they produced both murderous Nazi-collaborators and brave resistance fighters. Many Serbs and Croats were victims; others were perpetrators of genocide. The left-revisionist version of World War II in Yugoslavia as a conflict between fascist Croats and anti-fascist Serbs who suffered “like the Jews” is pure fiction.
Pilger’s comment shows how the left revisionists viewed ‘socialist’ Serbia as a kind of left-wing holy land, its people martyred by the imperialist Antichrist. For the left revisionists the identification of socialism, anti-imperialism, and Serb nationalism, three forces that in reality have nothing particularly in common, has become absolute. They are not deterred by the fact that Milosevic’s nationalist campaign arose in opposition, not to Western imperialism, but to the Titoist constitutional order that governed Yugoslavia until the late 1980s and above all to its provisions regarding Kosovo. Milosevic is in their eyes a better Communist than Tito: Parenti complains that “Tito did little to discourage the Albanian campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of non-Albanians.”[47] Both Parenti and Johnstone consequently endorse Milosevic’s policy toward the Kosovo Albanians and his revision of Tito’s system. In Johnstone’s words, Milosevic’s suppression of Kosovo’s autonomy in 1988-89 was “necessary to enable the economic liberalisation reforms; they were enacted legally; and they left intact the political rights of ethnic Albanians as well as a considerable degree of regional autonomy”.[48] Like Milosevic and his acolytes, the left revisionists combine an alleged support for ‘Yugoslavia’ with a pathological hatred for most Yugoslavs: Croats, Albanians, Muslims [Bosniaks], Slovenes, and sometimes even anti-Milosevic Serbs. I noted earlier that the left revisionists do not hold Milosevic, Karadzic, and their forces responsible for any of the atrocities carried out in the former Yugoslavia, since all these atrocities were provoked or engineered by the West anyway. But by a curious sleight of hand the left revisionists portray all Croat, Muslim [Bosniak], or Albanian atrocities against Serbs as in no way related to previous aggressive policies by the Milosevic regime. Thus the Croatian persecution of Serbs in the former Krajina following Operation Storm in 1995, or the Albanian persecution of Serbs in Kosovo following the NATO victory in 1999, are not seen as responses to Milosevic’s aggression against Croatia in 1990-91 and the subsequent four-year occupation of Croatian territory or to his ten-year reign of terror in Kosovo in 1989-99. Rather, the left revisionists portray Croat, Muslim [Bosniaks], and Albanian nationalism as inherently evil in a way that Serb nationalism is not.
Parenti and Johnstone project the righteousness of the Serbian struggle with the Albanians and other Yugoslav nations back into the past, painting a picture of pro-Nazi Albanians, Croats, and Muslims [Bosniaks] persecuting anti-Nazi Serbs. Parenti writes at length about what he calls “Croatia’s Nazi past” and about the Nazi collaboration of Muslims [Bosniaks] and Albanians.[49] In a manner strikingly reminiscent of the way the Stalinists erased the role of Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other Old Bolsheviks from their historical account of the Russian Revolution, the left revisionists have erased the history of the tens of thousands of Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], and Albanians who fought alongside their Serb comrades against Nazism and Fascism during the 1930s and ‘40s under the leadership of Tito, Europe’s greatest anti-Nazi resistance leader and himself a Croat. There is no place in their propaganda for Vladimir Copic, the Croat who commanded the 15th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War; for Fadil Jahic-Spanac, the Muslim [Bosniak] Partisan who led the Serbs of north-east Bosnia in the struggle against the Ustashas; for Marko Oreskovic-Krntija, the Croat Partisan who led the Serb struggle against the Ustashas in Lika; for the vanguard role played by the predominantly-Croat Partisan Dalmatian Brigades at the legendary battles of Neretva and Sutjeska against the Germans and Italians in 1943; for the 16th Muslim Brigade that fought SS forces in East Bosnia and spearheaded the liberation of Sarajevo in 1945; for the Albanian Partisans who fought across the length of Yugoslavia to liberate the country from the Nazis; for the Albanian Partisan Fadilj Hodza who was one of Milosevic’s first victims. Nor is there a place for the numerous Serb Partisan veterans who had the courage to oppose Milosevic’s policies: Bogdan Bogdanovic, Draza Markovic, Koca Popovic, Milos Minic, Ljubo Babic, and many others.
‘Counter-revolutionary nations’?
Not content to erase the history of the multinational anti-Nazi Yugoslav Partisan struggle, Johnstone goes back further into the past in her effort to demonise the Albanians. She portrays Albanian nationalism as originating in the desires of Albanian Islamic feudal lords to retain their privileges, contrasting it with a Serb nationalism she sees as originating in the desire of Serb Christian serfs for liberty: “The ethnic Albanians who had converted to Islam by the 19th century gained privileges (to bear arms, serve in the administration, and collect taxes) denied the Christian population. Such privileges stood in the way of the development of an Albanian nationalism parallel to the 19th century Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian national liberation movements.” In Johnstone’s eyes Albanian national revolts were traditionally reactionary, so that “When Albanian feudal lords did revolt, it was rather to try to retain these privileges than to achieve an independent State of equal citizens.” By contrast, “Because they were deprived of equal rights under Ottoman rule, the Serb leaders adopted an egalitarian political philosophy borrowed from France as appropriate to their national liberation struggle in the 19th century. This meant advocacy of a state of equal citizens enjoying equal rights. The practice certainly did not always live up to the principles. But there is a significant and practical difference between a nation that proclaims principles of equal citizenship and one that does not.”[50] The message is clear: the Serbs are a ‘revolutionary’ nation and the Albanians are a ‘counter-revolutionary’ nation. Johnstone appears wholly ignorant of Albanian history; of the existence of Catholic and Orthodox as well as Muslim Albanians, including some who were pioneers of Albanian nationalism; or of the Albanian national rebellions against the Ottomans from 1878 culminating in the successful rebellion of 1912.[51] Indeed, the Albanians are the only Balkan nation whose national movement has succeeded in uniting Muslims, Catholics and Orthodox down to the present day. But there is no reason to believe that Johnstone or her comrades are interested in learning anything positive about the Albanians. It is as if, like the rulers of Orwell’s Oceania, the left revisionists are rewriting the past in order to make it conform to present policies.
Belief in the existence of ‘counter-revolutionary nations’ fit only to be exterminated was strongly upheld by Marx and Engels. Their hatred was particularly directed against the Czechs and the Croats. In 1849 Engels called for a “war of annihilation of the Germans against the Czechs” as the “only possible solution”; he described the Croats as a “naturally counter-revolutionary nation” and looked forward to the day when the Germans and Hungarians would “annihilate all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names.”[52] Marx and Engels also hated the Serbs. In a letter to Marx in 1876 Engels cheered an Ottoman military victory over the Serbs: “The collapse of the Serbs is stupendous. The campaign was intended to set the whole of Turkey in flames, and everywhere the tinder is damp - Montenegro has betrayed the campaign for her own private ends, Bosnia has absolutely no intention of rebelling now that Serbia proposes to liberate her, and the worthy Bulgarians aren't lifting a finger.” For Engels the Serbs were little more than brigands: “The Serbian army of liberation is having to live at its own expense and, after a swashbuckling offensive, withdrew into its robber's lair without having been seriously defeated anywhere.”[53] Marx and Engels sympathised with the Ottoman side and complained of Western media bias, as they saw it, in favour of the Serbs and against the Turks: "Not a word is said, of course, about the infamies perpetrated by the Montenegrins and Herzegovinians. Luckily the Serbs are getting knocked for six".[54]
Later generations of Marxists rejected the early Marxist tendency to demonise “counter-revolutionary nations”. As a journalist reporting on the Balkan wars of 1912-13 Leon Trotsky wrote passionately about the atrocities committed by the Balkan Christian states against the Albanians and other Balkan Muslims. In January 1913 Trotsky wrote that “the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in the systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts.” (‘Old Serbia’ being a Serbian term for Kosovo.) He accused Russian liberal supporters of the Serbian and Bulgarian war-effort of bearing their share of responsibility for “the ripped-open bellies of Turkish children and the necks cut through to the bone of aged Muslims”.[55] The following month Trotsky, arguing that “protest against the outrages in the Balkans cleanses the social atmosphere in our own country, heightens the level of moral awareness among our own people”, denounced the Russian liberal faction of Pavel Miliukov for supporting a Serbian Army that was massacring Albanian civilians: “But since the ‘leading’ newspapers of Russia kept on singing their praises and either hushed up or denied the exposures published in the democratic press, a certain number of murdered Albanian babies must be put down, Mr. Deputy, to your Slavophile account. Get your senior doorman to look for them in your editorial office, Mr. Miliukov!” Trotsky then insisted on the imperative of protesting against the atrocities in the Balkans: “Indignant protest against unbridled behaviour by men armed with machine guns, rifles, and bayonets was required for our own moral self-defence. An individual, a group, a party or a class that is capable of ‘objectively’ picking its nose while it watches men drunk with blood, and incited from above, massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive.”[56] It is tempting to suggest that the fate Trotsky predicted for apologists of atrocities ironically ended up applying to a large section of the far left in the late twentieth century. Throughout his campaign to publicise Serbian, Bulgarian, and Greek atrocities against the Islamic peoples of the Balkans, Trotsky never attributed these atrocities to any alleged inherently evil character of the Christian Balkan nations in question but blamed them on militarism and imperialism, of which other European countries were also guilty.
The Bolsheviks under Lenin likewise rejected the division of nations into “good” and “bad”, declaring in favour of an ideological commitment to national equality and the right of all nations to self-determination. This right of course did not apply in practice to the nationalities of the Soviet Union, but it applied to the nationalities enslaved by the Yugoslav state. Thus a proclamation of the Executive Council of the Communist International of June 1920 to the proletariat of the Balkan and Danubian nations declared that the “Macedonian Bulgars, Albanians, Croats, Montenegrins and Bosnians are rebelling against the rule of the bureaucratic and landowning oligarchy” of Yugoslavia.[57] This support for national pluralism and rejection of the concept of “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary” nations is reflected in a famous passage by Tito, a Communist of the subsequent generation, written in 1942 during the Partisan struggle against the Nazis: “The term 'People's Liberation Struggle' would be simply a phrase, even a lie, if it did not have, apart from its general Yugoslav character, a national character for every nation individually; that is, if it did not mean, in addition to the liberation of Yugoslavia, at the same time the liberation of the Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, Muslims [Bosniaks], etc.”[58] Such an expression of equal appreciation of each individual Yugoslav nationality is unthinkable for the left revisionists of today. While they display the moral relativism typical of the post-1917 far left, in their treatment of the national question they are considerably more reactionary and have returned to the chauvinism of nineteenth-century Marxism. Thus, if the Albanians are a “counter-revolutionary” nation then their annihilation represents a sort of class justice equivalent to the extermination of the bourgeoisie. The playwright Harold Pinter is consequently more moved by the plight of Slobodan Milosevic, imprisoned in a comfortable cell in The Hague and visited regularly by his wife and family, than he is by the extermination of over a hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims [Bosniaks] or the expulsion of eight hundred thousand Albanians from their homes. For unlike these unpeople, Milosevic is seen by the left revisionists as being on their side of the barricades. The emotional identification of Pinter and other socialists with Milosevic and other Yugoslav war-criminals in their struggle against the ICTY is the other side of the walnut to their heartlessness toward Milosevic’s victims and contempt for their suffering.
Milosevic as martyr
Pinter has joined the ‘International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic’, organised by Milosevic’s passionate admirer Jared Israel, aimed at rescuing Milosevic from trial by the ICTY. Israel, who is reduced to translating Milosevic’s speeches in an effort to prove his idol is not a racist, represents the left revisionist in its purest form, without any of the dissembling. According to a petition for Milosevic’s release from prison issued by Israel, “Milosevic the so-called ‘ethnic cleanser’ preached multinational unity, not nationalist intolerance”; “Milosevic conducted no persecution of Albanian civilians”; “The most notorious ‘atrocities’ for which Milosevic is accused never happened”; “Crimes were committed in Yugoslavia - but not by Milosevic”. Not only was Milosevic not guilty of genocide, but he was in fact a freedom fighter against US imperialism: “Slobodan Milosevic's real offence was that he tried to keep the 26 nationalities that comprise Yugoslavia free from US and NATO colonization and occupation; his nation's resources, industries, and media from being stolen by multinational corporations; his nation's institutions from being controlled by US consultants and advisers.” The Serbian opposition, by contrast, were merely part of the conspiracy: “His real offence was to defend his nation's freedom and sovereignty from a political ‘opposition’ bought and paid for by the United States and installed into power by US specialists in psychological operations. He and all those now under attack resisted Western colonization to the very end, even as American naval ships waited off the coast of Yugoslavia to ensure the ‘correct’ results in Yugoslavia's contested elections.”[59] Thus Milosevic becomes a Christ-like figure; a martyr on the cross, while the Serbian opposition to him becomes the collective Judas. Similarly, Neil Clark in the New Statesman says of Milosevic that “When faced with the incessant violence of western-trained separatist groups, he had little option but to use military means to try to prevent the break-up of his country and to defend the Serbian and Roma people from being driven out of the lands they had inhabited for centuries.” Far from being a war criminal, Milosevic is a “prisoner of conscience” at the ICTY whose “worst crime was to carry on being a socialist”.[60]
This sense of Milosevic as a socialist martyr and the ICTY as a form of Inquisition permeates the thought of the left revisionists, who view him as their man ‘fighting back’ against the Western enemy. Milosevic, currently threatened with life imprisonment in one of the world’s most comfortable prisons, signed the 1995 Dayton Accord that recognised the ICTY and pledged the arrest of Bosnian Serb war criminals. That was after his political enemy Radovan Karadzic had been indicted by the Tribunal while Milosevic was still on friendly terms with Washington. Now that he is in the dock himself he has decided that the ICTY is illegitimate after all. It is not however just Milosevic’s hypocrisy regarding the ICTY that is overlooked by the left revisionists, nor the fact that he is receiving a fair trial, unlike the men of Srebrenica who were massacred without a trial and whose rights were not championed by the left revisionists. The latter ignore the fact that in both Serbia and Croatia the ICTY is supported by the democrats and anti-nationalists and opposed by the fascists and criminals. In Serbia the student movement ‘Otpor’ that spearheaded Milosevic’s overthrow, and Velimir Ilic, Mayor of Cacak and one of the organisers of the overthrow of the regime, support the ICTY while the supporters of Milosevic and Vojislav Seselj oppose it. This may not seem a convincing argument to the left revisionists who no doubt view the overthrow of Milosevic as a counterrevolution, but what of the genuine Serbian anti-fascist left that Milosevic overthrew in 1987? It is often forgotten today that Milosevic’s first victims, before even the Albanians, were Serb Communists: the supporters of Dragisa Pavlovic and Ivan Stambolic, the latter murdered by Milosevic shortly before his overthrow. To those Serbian Communists brave enough to oppose Milosevic’s war-mongering policies and anti-Albanian chauvinism we may add Latinka Perovic, the liberal Communist leader purged by Tito in 1972; Bogdan Bogdanovic, former mayor of Belgrade; Draza Markovic, uncle of Milosevic’s wife Mira Markovic; Milos Minic, prosecutor at the trial of Chetnik leader Draza Mihailovic; and many others. Then there are the Serbian human rights activists Natasa Kandic and Sonja Biserko who stood up for the rights of the Albanians when it was most difficult. All those living support the ICTY; none of their voices are heard by the left revisionists.
Similarly in Croatia the current, moderate regime of Stipe Mesic and Ivica Racan has put on trial Croats guilty of killing Serbs in 1991, rejected Croatian irredentism in Bosnia, and reaffirmed the Partisan legacy. It supports the ICTY. So do those anti-nationalist Croats who defended the rights of the Serb minority when it was most unpopular, such as Ivo Banac and Ivan Zvonimir Cicak of the Croatian Helsinki Committee and the famous satirical newspaper Feral Tribune. By contrast the Tudjmanites and Ustashas are opposed to it and have mobilised mass demonstrations in defence of their war criminals. Thus ironically the left revisionists who have spent the last ten years demonising the Croats as fascists now align themselves with the Croatian fascists and against the Croatian liberals. But it would be wrong to suppose that the left revisionists know or care about this; they oppose the ICTY for the sake of their own political agenda, not for the sake of the Serbs and Croats. David Chandler, in his negative assessment of the ICTY published in New Left Review, does not even bother to discuss which political currents in Serbia and Croatia support the Tribunal and which oppose it, as if the Tribunal has no relevance to anything outside the left revisionists’ anti-American crusade.[61] So sure are they that the ICTY is part of the international conspiracy against Europe’s last socialist state that they predicted repeatedly that no Croat could possibly be indicted for crimes against Serbs during Operation Storm in 1995, because the US supported this Croatian military operation and surely would not let “its own” Tribunal indict “its own Croats”. Chomsky claimed in 2000 that “there is little likelihood that the Tribunal will pay attention to its 150-page ‘Indictment Operation Storm: A Prima Facie Case’, reviewing the war crimes committed by Croatian forces that drove some 200,000 Serbs from Krajina in August 1995 with crucial US involvement”.[62] In May 2001 the ICTY did indeed indict Croatian General Ante Gotovina, a former favourite of Franjo Tudjman, for crimes against Serb civilians during Operation Storm. Two and a half months later Seumas Milne wrote of the “logistical US backing for the massacres and ethnic cleansing in the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995” and stated confidently that “War crimes indictments in the latter case are, needless to say, not expected”, therefore managing to predict incorrectly something that had already happened.[63]
The bitterness of the left-revisionist campaign to deny the genocide in the former Yugoslavia carried out by Milosevic and the Serb nationalists reflects a neo-Stalinist determination to champion Europe’s last ‘socialist’ dictatorship against all the overwhelming evidence of its murderous and corrupt nature. This involves deliberately disregarding the responsibility of this regime for the destruction of Yugoslavia and upholding its chauvinistic discourse on Croats, Muslims [Bosniaks], and Albanians. The left revisionists are neither progressives nor genuine anti-imperialists. Their a-historical, anti-democratic worldview and their refusal to condemn fascism or to stand up for the rights of its victims, make them morally complicit in the crimes that have taken place in the former Yugoslavia.
Marko Attila Hoare is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. He is the author of a short history of the Bosnian Army (How Bosnia Armed, Saqi Books, London, 2004). He is currently completing a major work on the Partisan movement of resistance in Yugoslavia during World War II.
An extended version of this article appears in the December 2003 edition of the Journal of Genocide Research.
[1]. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), pp. 300-301.
[2]. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “Distortions at Fourth Hand”, The Nation, June 25, 1977.
[3]. Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor, and the Standards of the West (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 11, 21, 23, 110.
[4]. Ibid, pp. 104-114.
[5]. Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 292.
[6]. Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line, p. 123.
[7]. Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (London: Verso, 2000), p. 18.
[8]. Ibid, p. 22.
[9]. Borisav Jovic, Poslednji dani SFRJ (Belgrade: Politika, 1995), pp. 198-199.
[10]. Ibid, p. 431.
[11]. Ed Vulliamy, “Shootbat squaddies’ hidden battles”, The Guardian, 2 April 1996.
[12]. Vaughan Kent-Payne, Bosnia warriors: living on the front line (London: Robert Hale, 1998), pp. 124-126.
[13]. Jovic, op. cit.; Veljko Kadijevic, Moje vidjenje raspada (Belgrade: Politika, 1993); Branko Mamula, Slucaj Jugoslavia (Podgorica: CID, 2000); Ratko Mladic, serialised memoirs in NIN (Belgrade), January-February 1994; Aleksandar Vasiljevic, serialised memoirs in NIN, June-July 1992.
14]. Michael Barratt Brown, The Yugoslav Tragedy - Lessons for Socialists (Nottingham: Socialist Renewal, 1996), p. 38.
[15]. Jovic, p. 160.
[16]. Jovic, p. 161.
[17]. Kadijevic, pp. 92-93.
[18]. Sluzbeni glasnik Republike Srbije, yr 46, no. 1, 28 September 1990.
[19]. NIN, Belgrade, 12 April 1991, pp. 40-41.
[20]. Tanjug, 1746 gmt 9 October 1991.
[21]. Tanjug, 1828 gmt 31 October 1991.
[22]. Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Yugoslavia; Colonising Bosnia”, Covert Action, no. 56, spring 1996.
[23]. John Newhouse, “The diplomatic round”, The New Yorker, 24 August 1992.
[24]. Parenti, p. 25.
[25]. Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (eds), Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 2.
[26]. Diana Johnstone, “Nato and the New World Order: Ideals and Self-Interest”, in Hammond and Herman, p. 7.
[27]. Parenti, pp. 73-80.
[28]. See for example Joan Phillips, “Bosnia: The invention of a Holocaust”, Living Marxism, September 1992; Fiona Foster, “Massacring the truth in Rwanda”, Living Marxism, December 1995.
[29]. Robert Fisk, “Cleansing Bosnia at a camp called Jasenovac”, The Independent, 15 August 1992.
[30]. Seumas Milne, “Hague is not the place to try Milosevic”, The Guardian, 2 August 2001.
[31]. Parenti, pp. 144-154.
[32]. Stormfront website (www.stormfront.org/truth_at_last/holocaust.htm).
[33]. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd ed., (London: Penguin,1977), pp. 625-627.
[34]. Diana Johnstone, “Hitler Analogies betray both past and present”, ZNet Daily Commentaries website, 28 August 1999 (www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/1999‑08/28johnstone.htm).
[35]. Mick Hume, “Nazifying the Serbs, from Bosnia to Kosovo”, in Hammond and Herman, p. 74.
[36]. Diana Johnstone, “Nazi nostalgia in Croatia”, The Emperor’s New Clothes website, 6 September 1999 (www.emperors‑clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/nostalgi.html).
[37]. Living Marxism, March 1993.
[38]. John Pilger, “Censorship by Omission”, in Hammond and Herman, p. 133.
[39]. According to the two serious demographic studies by a Serb and a Croat respectively: Bogoljub Kocovic, Zrtve drugog svetskog rata u Jugoslaviji (London: Veritas Foundation Press, 1985), pp. 65-70; Vladimir Zerjavic, Gubici stanovnistva Jugoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu (Zagreb: Jugoslavensko viktimolosko drustvo, 1989), pp. 61-63.
[40]. Milan Borkovic, Milan Nedic (Zagreb: Centar za informacije i publicitet, 1985) pp. 227-228; 275-278.
[41]. See Vladimir Dedijer and Antun Miletic (eds), Genocid nad Muslimanima 1941-1945: Zbornik dokumenata i svjedocenja (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1990).
[42]. Roy Gutman (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: MacMillan, 1990) pp. 1340-1342.
[43]. Veljko Dj. Djuric, Novi prilozi za biografiju Vojvode Jezdimira Dangica (Belgrade: Nova Srbija, 1997) pp. 22-23.
[44]. Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o Narodnooslobodilackom ratu naroda Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1983) pt 14, vol. 2, doc. 31, p. 175.
[45]. Gutman, p. 289.
[46]. Diana Johnstone, “Before and after Yugoslav elections”, ZNet Daily Commentaries website, 27 September 2000 (www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2000-09/27johnstone.htm).
[47]. Parenti, p. 96.
[48]. Diana Johnstone, “Notes on the Kosovo Problem and the International Community”, Dialogue, no. 25, spring 1998.
[49]. Parenti, pp. 44, 51, 95.
[50]. Johnstone, “Notes on the Kosovo Problem and the International Community”.
[51]. See Stavro Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening 1878-1912 (Princeton: 1967).
[52]. David Fernbach (ed.), Karl Marx - The Revolutions of 1848 - Political Writings Volume I (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 225, 232, 236.
[53]. Karl Marx Friedrich Engels - Collected Works, vol. 45 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991), pp.130-131.
[54]. Ibid., p. 140.
[55]. Leon Trotsky, The Balkan Wars 1912-1913 (Sydney: Pathfinder Press, 1980), p. 286.
[56]. Ibid., pp. 292-293.
[57]. Gordana Vlajcic, Jugoslavenska revolucija i nacionalno pitanje 1919-1927 (Zagreb: Globus, 1984), p. 318.
[58]. Bihacka Republika - Zbornik clanaka (Bihac: Izdanje Muzeja AVNOJ-a i Pounja u Bihacu, 1965), vol. 2, doc. 225, pp. 514-515.
[59]. International Action Centre website (www.iacenter.org/witchhunt.htm).
[60]. Neil Clark, “Milosevic, prisoner of conscience”, New Statesman, 11 February 2002.
[61]. David Chandler, “‘International justice?’”, in New Left Review, no. 6, November-December 2000.
[62]. Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line, p. 132.
[63]. Seumas Milne, op. cit.
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