By Michael Karadjis

June 2, 1999

There is considerable contention on the left about the Kosova Liberation Army’s relationship to NATO and position in the Balkans war. It is charged with being an extreme nationalist organisation that would “slaughter” the Serbs if it “came to power” and of being unrepresentative of Kosova Albanians (Kosovars).

These erroneous charges are a result of not understanding the issue of self-determination, that it is precisely the brutal oppression of the Kosovars by the Serbian chauvinist regime that has allowed imperialism to exploit Kosovar grievances in order to intervene in the region.

The overwhelming majority of Kosovars do support NATO’s war, believing (wrongly) that it was aimed at protecting them. But they are unlikely to lose these illusions in imperialism as long as they face Serb paramilitaries who conduct mass murder, rape and the eviction of more than half the Albanian population from their homes.

The efforts by sections of the Western left to whitewash this genocide and the Slobodan Milosevic regime can only drive Kosovars further into the hands of Western powers because it is only when the Kosovars are free from Serbian oppression that the will be in a position to independently see the true nature of imperialism.

False dichotomy

The charge that the KLA supports NATO’s war is only part true. It obscures the fact that it is not just the KLA supporting NATO’s attack. Jeff Richards (Write on, GLW #362) claims the KLA denounced “moderate” Kosovar leader Ibrahim Rugova when he allegedly called for a bombing halt – while he had Serbian guns pointed at his head. Yet once Rugova was released, he immediately called on NATO to continue the bombing and insisted that the refugees would feel unsafe returning to Kosova without an armed NATO-led force to protect them.

Many leftists try to depict the KLA as an isolated fringe group which could easily be bought in its entirety by the CIA, and/or as uniformly “fanatically” anti-Serb. This picture is then contrasted to the non-violent movement led for many years by Rugova. It is a false dichotomy.

Before March 1998, the KLA was a small group with a specific leadership. However, following Milosevic’s slaughtering of hundreds of Kosovars and driving thousands from their homes in Central Kosova, the KLA mushroomed into an enormous armed movement.

The bulk of the regional branches of Rugova’s Kosova Democratic League, the Parliamentary Party and the United Democratic Movement became the local KLA village guards. The KLA is thus the armed force of the bulk of the Kosovar population and contains vastly different political currents.

In the Rambouillet deal in March, the Kosovar delegation submitted to imperialist pressure to drop its historic demand for independence in exchange for “autonomy” under Serbian rule on the understanding that only by submitting to this blackmail would imperialism intervene to “protect” them from the Serb terror. This delegation included the KLA, the Kosova Democratic Party and the United Democratic Movement, the three tends representing virtually the whole of organized Albanian politics in Kosova.

The KLA in fact was the last to submit. Before it did so it carried out widespread consultation in Kosova. Under escalating Serbian attack, it seems the majority sentiment was to sign the deal. The only section of the Kosovar political leadership to oppose both scrapping the independence demand and relying on NATO was the till then political leader of the KLA, Adem Demaci, who rightly denounced “capitulation” in the face of “illusions and false promises”. He understood that it was never the aim of imperialism to defend the Kosovars against the completely expected escalation of Serbia’s ethnic cleansing under the cover of NATO’s bombs.

In supporting the bombing of Serbia, which inevitably meant Serb civilians, the Kosovar leaders also helped Milosevic drive the wedge deeper between the Serb working class being bombed and the oppressed Kosovar masses. This is the historic blind alley of narrow nationalism without class analysis.

Imperialism has completely betrayed the illusions it sowed. In the first two weeks of bombing Serbia, while Milosevic’s thugs emptied half a million from Kosova, not a single Serb tank was hit in Kosova – though targets such as passenger trains full of Serb civilians were.

Visiting a rugged corridor in Kosova near the Albanian border, which the KLA is desperately trying to hold against a Serb offensive, Christian Science Monitor reporter Jonathon Landay claimed, “There was no sign of any NATO support … even though American and British military officials were said to have visited the area last week. Yugoslav tanks, troops and artillery opposing the rebels are untouched by NATO’s bombs.”

Arms

If imperialism is really sending all the aid to the KLA that many Western leftists imagine, why is the KLA so poorly armed that it has been hardly able to defend any villages in Kosova since the genocide escalated?

Reports from all the imperialist media continue to stress opposition to arming the KLA. Richards’ charge that the Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) is aiding the KLA, based on an allegation by some newspaper called the Scotsman, may or may not be true. But MPRI spokesperson Ed Soyster responded to similar allegations by the New American, an ultra-right US rag that supports Milosevic and engages in conspiracy theories, by stating, “We’re not going to get in the middle of that thing in Kosovo … this group is something that we simply don’t want to associate with”.

Even if imperialist states did offer arms to the KLA, would the latter, which is struggling to defend Kosovars from genocide, be wrong to accept them? Would the mere receipt of arms transform the KLA from a liberation movement representing the bulk of Kosovars into a mere tool of imperialism? And would such aid signify imperialist support for the KLA’s objectives? The answer on all counts is no.

NATO and the KLA have opposite aims. The KLA, all other Kosovar political organisations and the entire Kosovar population (according to their 1991 referendum) want an independent Kosova. NATO and all its member states are determined to avoid this outcome, which they view as destabilising to the region. They want to impose the Rambouillet accord and its updated version, the G8 statement of April 6.

Rambouillet gives only a small amount of autonomy to the Kosovars. It stipulates that local police will only be entitled to one long-barrelled gun for every 15 “local” police. By contrast, the 2500 Yugoslav troops will patrol a 5-kilometre border zone around Kosova’s international borders to enforce “security”.

Also under the Rambouillet accord, 2500 of the dreaded Serbian police would remain for the first year. All other military forces are to be disarmed, the G8 statement making it explicit that this means the KLA. There is no mention of a referendum for independence after the three-year interim period, despite some misinformation around certain parts of the left.

Chris Hedges, writing in the April-May issue of the US ruling class journal Foreign Affairs, claimed: “Whatever political leadership emerges in Kosovo will come from the rebel ranks, and it will be militant, nationalist, uncompromising, and deeply suspicious of all outsiders … By attempting to include the KLA in the peace process … the Western alliance is working feverishly — even as it bombs the Serbs — to blunt the momentum toward a war of independence. “The allies want NATO troops to separate the province’s warring factions … the underlying idea behind creating a theoretically temporary, NATO-enforced military protectorate in Kosovo is … to keep Kosovo from seceding.”

If imperialism was covertly arming sections of the KLA, it would be to use them as an auxiliary for its own purposes, and then be in a position to cut them off before the KLA could use the arms to achieve its goals. This would require that only minimal arms go to the KLA since if the Kosovars have sufficient arms to defend themselves they won’t need NATO to “protect” them, let alone need to submit to NATO’s demand that they surrender their goal of independence.

It is not surprising therefore that, according to the May 26 Washington Post, “The rebel force has not persuaded Western governments to lift an arms embargo … that has blocked its access to sophisticated weaponry”.

We call on NATO to stop the bombing and get out. That ahs always been our first demand. But if NATO did stop, that would not automatically mean that the Milosevic regime would also stop its mass evictions in Kosova. In such circumstances, the Kosovars have a right to self-defence, which in practice means by the KLA.

Even while NATO is there, it is not possible to reduce the conflict to NATO versus Serbia. According to the April 21 London Independent, the KLA is “defending 250,000 civilians in the Lapski and Shalja region in the north” from a fierce Serbian offensive. Does the KLA not have the right to defend those villages from ethnic cleansing and physical destruction? Are the attacking forces there carrying out an “anti-imperialist resistance” by trying to drive the population out of this region?

Minority rights

On the KLA’s attitude to the Serb minority and the allegations about the KLA attacking Serb civilians, Demaci had long called for respect for the rights of the Serb minority and KLA leader Jakup Krasniqi has said that the Serb minority would have “all the rights of every minority in Europe”.

Unfortunately, most in the KLA have said little about this issue, but this unevenness in perspective within the KLA does not in any way compromise the Kosovars’ objective right to national liberation or the left’s responsibility to support the KLA’s struggle to achieve that goal.

Claims that the KLA committed human rights abuses equal to the Serbian forces before the NATO attack are refuted in the Helsinki Human Rights Watch’s February-September 1998 report. It states: “The vast majority of these abuses were committed by Yugoslav government forces of the Serbian special police and the Yugoslav Army … [who] have committed extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings … attacked a string of towns and villages along the border with Albania in the west, with the specific intent of depopulating the region … villages in the region were looted and systematically destroyed, and farmers’ livestock was shot, to ensure that no one could return.” By September 1998, 250,000 Kosovars had been driven from their homes.

Regarding the KLA, the report states that it “has also violated the laws of war by such actions as the taking of civilian hostages and by summary executions. Although on a lesser scale than the government abuses, these too are violations of international standards, and should be condemned”.

Regardless of whether one fully accepts this report, it should be obvious to anyone on the left that when a large-scale military machine equipped with hundreds of tanks, hundreds of fighter aircraft, thousands of artillery pieces, plus highly experienced (since Bosnia) squads of well-armed, right-wing paramilitary killers, faces a village-based liberation movement lightly armed with whatever Kalashnikovs they could loot from Albanian armouries, that the former will cause the overwhelming majority of casualties. That in itself says nothing about the latter being nice or committing no crimes. Rather, it is the same issue of the systematic violence of the oppressor versus the rag-tag violence of the oppressed, which can often lash out in also brutal ways, but it remains a question of context, and of the structural cause of the overall conflict.

While such acts by the KLA should also be condemned, do we really demand that liberation movements fully pass the democratic test before lending them critical support in their struggle for their nation’s very existence? Leftists have not make this an absolute condition for support for national liberation movements in Palestine, Kurdistan, South Africa, Ireland or Sri Lanka, yet the allegations or facts about these movement’s attacks on civilians of the opposing camp are far better documented than the allegations about the KLA.

In fact, the problem is not so much what the leadership says but the fact that the level of terror directed against the Kosovars has undoubtedly produced a vengeful streak in some Kosovars. Helsinki monitors report that KLA leaders continually condemned attacks on Serb civilians from “undisciplined elements”.

The Helsinki report quotes Krasniqi: “The KLA did not pick up weapons to fight Serb residents or journalists, but to fight against Serb terrorists and soldiers”. However, he points out, “After all this terror and destruction seen in Kosova, it is impossible to control the feelings of hate and revenge that have been planted by the enemy itself, despite our insistence that the Albanian war does not take the features of the barbarous war conducted by the enemy”.

In Palestine, Ireland, Bosnia, South Africa and other areas where the liberation struggle has involved conflict along ethnic lines, some kind of negotiated settlement with representatives of the oppressor nation has inevitably resulted. This has often been stacked against the interests of the oppressed because the forces of the oppressor remained very strong and in supporting the KLA against the occupation forces, we are advocating a stronger voice for the Kosovars at the ultimate negotiating table.

None of this, however, means that we should demand that imperialism “negotiate” on its bombing, but that it halt it immediately. It is a barbaric attack on civilians in and of itself that has nothing to do with defending Kosovars.But we must also acknowledge that no force is willing and able to force Milosevic to “negotiate” with the Kosovars other than the Kosovars themselves, armed to whatever extent is necessary to preserve some semblance of their battered nation.

Original article: Green Left Weekly, June 2 1999 greenleft.org.au

Introduction by Michael Karadjis

The massacre of 8000 defenceless Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995 stands as the most horrific crime in a long line of crimes in the Balkans during the 1990s. The prime responsibility for this slaughter lies with the former Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic, which had overthrown the multi-ethnic Yugoslav workers state led by Tito and ushered in a brutal capitalist restoration, full of Yeltsin-style mafias and oligarchs.

His regime then provided the new national chauvinist ideology for the ascendant Serbian bourgeoisie, reviving the ideology of the ‘Chetniks’, the forces who had fought against Tito’s Communist ‘Partisans’ in World War II, slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims, and collaborated with the Nazis. As ‘Greater Serbia’ ideology replaced the Titoist ‘brotherhood and unity’, wars were launched against other Yugoslav republics, principally Croatia and Bosnia, in which non-Serb populations were forcibly removed from large swathes of territory deemed to be ‘Serb territory’, despite most ‘ethnically cleansed’ territories having non-Serb majorities.

The Yugoslav army was the fourth largest military force in Europe, and though belonging to Yugoslavs of all nationalities, its entire arsenal was handed over to Greater Serbia by former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in his plan that ended the brief Serbo-Croatian war of 1991. This was passed onto the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA), the Serb nationalist armed forces in Bosnia led by the pro-Chetnik Serb Democratic Party of Radovan Karadzic, and paid by Milosevic. Control of this massive military machine gave Greater Serbia the overwhelming advantage, and thus the great majority of crimes were committed by military forces led by the right-wing Serbian nationalists.

However, the Croatian regime of Franco Tudjman competed with Milosevic in terms of chauvinism, and forces under his regime also committed serious war crimes. When their war ended in late 1991, Milosevic and Tudjman formed an alliance to partition the multi-ethnic republic of Bosnia between them, despite its majority of Bosnian Muslims and mixed Bosnians who would not fit into the chauvinist schemes of either.

This drive was supported by the European imperialist powers who drew up plan after plan for the ethnic partition of Bosnia. Above all, the imperialist powers enforced a criminal arms embargo on the beleagured Bosnian republic, preventing it acquiring arms to match the enormous Serbian military machine. Their aim was balancing Serbian and Croatian appetites by dividing the region between them, which they believed would lead to stability for investment, and keeping arms and fighters from Iran and other Muslim countries, who attempted to break the arms embargo, out of Europe.

Srebrenica was a small town in eastern Bosnia, the region running along the Serbian border. Serbian nationalists wanted this region in Greater Serbia, but its population was overwhelmingly Muslim. The terror that needed to be used to drive a million Muslims from their homes rose to a level not seen in Europe since the Second World War. However, tens of thousands of Muslims, rather than fleeing the region, were driven into a number of small Muslim enclaves inside east Bosnia, surrounded by Serb-annexed, ethnically ‘purified’ territory. One such enclave was Srebrenica.

The 8000 Muslims killed in July 1995 in that town were a fraction of those killed during the initial ‘cleansing’ of east Bosnia that drove them into the town, and of those killed in the town over three years that the surrounding, heavily armed Serb nationalist forces daily poured massive quantities of firepower into it. A number of times, starving Muslims holed up in Srebrenica broke out and raided nearby Serb villages, mostly to seize food. On some such occasions, Muslim troops also committed atrocities, if on a markedly smaller scale. While this is also to be condemned, it is important to understand the context of these desperate raids, as they are played up by Serbian nationalists and their apologists to suggest the Srebrenica massacre was mere revenge for these attacks.

The United Nations declared Srebrenica and six other besieged towns “safe areas” in 1993. This meant local Muslim militia handing over even the few arms they had held onto till then. However, it was never safe for the inhabitants, who were continually bombed and besieged for the next two and a half years.

In July 1995, the BSA entered Srebrenica. The UN troops “protecting” this “safe area” fled without a shot and allowed the Serb troops under the notorious butcher general Mladic to separate as much of the male population of all age groups as they could. Thousands of these captives were then taken away and killed. Thousands more were captured as they tried to escape through the forests and later killed, or shot escaping. In one incident, over a thousand men and boys were locked in a warehouse in nearby Kravica where Mladic’s Chetniks machined gunned them all to death and then finished them off with hand grenades.

At the end of this monstrosity, Mladic declared the Serb people had finally liberated Srebrenica from “the Turks”.

A couple of months later, the US entered the war with its own plan – the Dayton plan – for the ethnic partition of Bosnia. The main difference with previous EU plans was that it gave the Serb nationalists even more of what they wanted. Not only would they get half of Bosnia as an ethnically purified ‘Serb Republic’, but Mladic’s elimination of the troublesome, messy enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa was recognised as if nothing had happened, now included in the Serb Republic. It is hardly too cynical to say the US needed Mladic to massacre Srebrenica to push a partition ‘peace’ plan that the Serb nationalists would accept – because it gave them everything they wanted.

In total, surviving female relatives have registered 7789 people missing after the massacre, and they continue to campaign for justice. Last year, even the government of the Bosnian ‘Serb Republic’ admitted that 7800 Muslims had been slaughtered.

Greece played a specific role, having emerged as the leading imperialist power of the lower Balkans, its investors leading in Albania and Macedonia while making up a significant share in Serbia and Bulgaria. Greece’s specific strategy was to play the reactionary “Orthodox” card – the Greek and Serb people are allegedly both “Orthodox” and thus had to help each other against the “Turks”, as they called the Muslim peoples of the Balkans. The oppressed, brutalised, disarmed Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians were thus pictured as the ghost of the Ottoman Empire trying to return and again threaten Christendom. The Greek and Serb “Orthodox” peoples would be in the vanguard of the defence of Europe against this “Islamic threat.” Meanwhile, profits of the Greek and Serb mega-bourgeoisie rolled in.

Throughout the war, Greek “volunteers”, applauded the whole time by the Greek media, the Greek Orthodox Church, and all major political parties, went to Bosnia to aid the Chetniks. The end result was a team of these “volunteers” in Srebrenica in 1995, who raised the Greek flag alongside the Serbian, ancient Macedonian and Byzantine flags at the massacre site. Karadzic decorated four Greek volunteers with the “White Eagle” medal following this, the white eagle being a prominent Chetnik symbol and the name of one of the most brutal Serb chauvinist militias operating in Bosnia.

The following declaration by 163 Greek academics, journalists and political activists calls on Greece to officially apologise to the victims of Srebrenica for the role of Greek imperialism in this atrocity:

10 July 2005

On July 11th ten years will be completed since the massive massacre of 8,000 civilians in Srebrenica organized by the regime of Milosevic and its followers in Bosnia, Mladic and Karadjic. This was not the only atrocity, it was preceded by others (Vukovar, Goradze) as well as the long siege of Sarajevo that cost 11,000 dead. Croatians and Muslims also committed war crimes and now account for them before the International Criminal Tribune at The Hague.But the massacre of civilians in Srebrenica symbolizes the absolute terror and characterizes the regime which committed it.

Aimed at ethnic cleansing and organized cold-bloodedly, it is the worst mass-killing in Europe after the WWII that the international community did not prevent despite its promises to protect the population.’The tragedy of Srebrenica will always haunt us. Our responsibilities are huge. With our huge errors and our incapability of comprehending the amplitude of evil, we failed at protecting the citizens of Srebrenica who were faced with organized slaughter by the Serbian forces’ declared the Secretary General of UN Kofi Anan. ‘What happened in Srebrenica is a shame. Shame that needs to remembered by all Europeans’ had said the then president of Commission Jacques Delors. Bearing its responsibilities because its peace troops left the civilians of Srebrenica unprotected inthe hands of their executioners, the Dutch government resigned in 2002.

Contrary to what happened elsewhere, in the rest of the world and in particular in the rest of Europe, in Greece public opinion was misinformed and uncritically placed in a common psychological front with the criminal regime of Milosevic, under the pretext of Orthodoxy, the traditional Greek-Serbian friendship and alleged “anti-imperialism.” Not only this. Greek ‘volunteers’ (their public confessions have been published) have fought in Bosnia with Karadzic and Mladic and raised the Greek flag, dishonouring it in Srebrenica at the moment of the carnage.

The Greek State has the obligation to apologize publicly to the families of the 8,000 slaughtered and to call for the indictment of the Greek ‘volunteers’ who were accomplices in the crime as well as the supposedly ‘unknown’ people who manipulated them. We demand this.

The declaration is signed by 163 academics, journalists and other personalities including 5 politicians. Their names are available in the Greek version of the appeal (http://cm.greekhelsinki.gr/uploads/2005_files/ghm713_on_greek_appeal_on_srebrenica_greek.doc).

By Michael Karadjis

For years, the role of the United States in conniving with Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica has been shrouded in mystery.
When heavily armed Bosnian Serb nationalists seized the town from Dutch United Nations “peace-keepers” in July 1995, along with expelling tens of thousands of Muslims, they led away 8000 men and boys and slaughtered them in captivity, the largest single massacre in Europe since World War II.

Now the ‘smoking gun’ is being uncovered. Then assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke, recently revealed in an interview with the French magazine Paris-Match that his initial instructions from national security adviser Anthony Lake were to sacrifice the three remaining Muslim ‘enclaves’ in East Bosnia – Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde – to the Serb nationalists, led by indicted war criminals General Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.

Holbrooke claims he rejected the instructions, but in the past he has emphasised his rejection only of pressure to abandon Gorazde, leaving the question of the other two unclear – till now.
The same issue of Paris-Match also had an interview with the chief prosecutor of the Hague Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, who claims that western officials held a meeting with Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic in 1995, to discuss the plans to seize Srebrenica. She said there were minutes of the meeting and that she knew the names of the officials, but was unable to use this as evidence because they refused to confirm their attendance.

The appalling performance by the United Nations and NATO powers – which had thousands of troops all over Bosnia – in refusing to lift a finger to protect the Muslim population of Srebrenica, a UN-designated “safe area,” has long been heavily criticised.

After watching the conquest Srebrenica, the UN and NATO then did the same as Mladic’s henchman overran Zepa, another “safe area,” expelling thousands more people. While the Serb nationalists advanced on Zepa, the UN issued a warning that it would be very upset if they then turned on Gorazde, the last of the three pockets where dispossessed Muslims were still holding out. Muslims had been the majority of the population throughout all of East Bosnia before the massive wave of ethnic cleansing had driven most of them from this region in 1992.

In Gorazde, the Muslims turned on the UN, seized their arms, put up a good fight and kept out the Serb nationalists – who called themselves ‘Chetniks’ after the anti-Communist Serb fighters of World War II who fought against Tito’s Communist ‘Partisans’.

The betrayal of Srebrenica and Zepa was all the worse considering that the UN had forced the local Bosnian militia to hand over its weapons in 1993 in return for “safe area” designation. Meanwhile, throughout the war, the UN and NATO imposed an arms embargo on the whole beleaguered Bosnian Republic.

A number of aspects have long suggested that what was involved was not merely betrayal due to cluelessness, lethargy or not caring, but rather active collusion of top imperialist powers with the Serbian Chetniks and their boss, Milosevic.

The sacking and massacre of Srebrenica was followed soon after by the US-imposed Dayton Accord, which ended the war by accepting the Serb nationalist program of ethnic partition. Bosnia was divided into two halves, a “Serb Republic”, based on recognition of the results of ethnic cleansing, and a “Muslim-Croat federation.” Bosnia’s battle to retain a multi-ethnic character had been defeated.

Significantly, Srebrenica and Zepa, though only just seized and “cleansed” were quietly handed to the Serb Republic, as if nothing had just happened.

The US had been pushing this 50-50 partition of Bosnia since mid-1994, but the Bosnian Serb leadership had put up some objections. While the map already included the whole of cleansed East Bosnia in their “state,” it did not yet include the three remaining Muslim “enclaves.” The Serb nationalists wanted them, and also wanted a widening of the northern “corridor,” which cut through previously Muslim and Croat majority regions to join east Bosnia to the other half of their “state” in the north-west. Both demands were accepted by the US at Dayton.

Meanwhile, Croatia urged its Bosnian Croat satellites to sign on, which meant giving up the ethnic “state” they had also carved out of Bosnia in alliance with the Serb nationalists. They would now have to join it with Bosnian government held regions to form a “Muslim-Croat federation.” The US feared that if both Serbs and Croats had their own “states,” what would remain would be a tiny, landlocked, embittered Muslim state where a million or so ethnically cleansed Muslims would form a “Gaza in Europe” with all its attendant instability. Croatia would be entrusted by the US and Europe to police the Muslims.

In exchange for dropping the Bosnian Croat “state,” Croatian leader Franco Tudjman wanted the end of the “Serb Republic of Krajina,” about a third of Croatian territory which had been conquered and cleansed of hundreds of thousands of Croats in 1991.

What both the Serb-held Krajina and the Muslim enclaves in East Bosnia had in common was that they were odd bits of ethnic territory sticking out in the wrong places: East Bosnia, despite its Muslim majority, was near Serbia’s border, while Krajina, despite its Serb majority, was the furthest part of Croatia from Serbia.

To enhance the stability of the Milosevic-Tudjman deal to divide the region between them, the US tended to agree that the map needed some “tidying up” to reduce its ethnic “messiness.” The fact that the US gave the green light to Tudjman to seize the Krajina in August 1995, driving out its entire 150,000 strong Serb population, is well-documented.
Milosevic also gave Tudjman the green light, having little need for an economically useless piece of rugged land far from the consolidated chunk of “smaller Greater Serbia” he was being offered.

But till now little light has been shone on this US green light to Milosevic, and to the Bosnian Serb Chetniks, to seize Srebrenica and Zepa.

The revelations cast light on Holbrooke’s statement after Dayton that Milosevic was someone the US “could do business with.”

It also fits with other recent statements by Holbrooke, which reveal that behind the US intervention, formally against Karadzic’s forces, was the fear that the excesses of the Chetniks – who had conquered 70 percent of Bosnia despite Serbs being only 30 percent of the population – were leading to a radicalisation among the dispossessed Bosnian Muslims.
In a Washington Post article entitled ‘Was Bosnia worth it?’ Holbrooke asserted that if the US had not intervened in 1995, “we would probably have had to pursue Operation Enduring Freedom not only in Afghanistan but also in the deep ravines and dangerous hills of central Bosnia, where a shadowy organization we now know as Al Qaeda was putting down roots that were removed by NATO after Dayton.”

The idea that Al Qaida had more than a marginal role in the desperation of Bosnia is fanciful, and a slander against the Bosnian Muslims. However, the fact that Holbrooke feels compelled to describe in this way the growing radicalisation among the Muslims, who had been left to the slaughter in the middle of Europe for years in the 1990s, indicates the degree of worry this was causing Washington.

Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia’s foreign minister at the time, commented that “for many years, I believed that the West gave an orange light to the Serbs to take over Srebrenica, but I am now convinced that it was a green light.”

by Michael Karadjis

The massacre of over 8000 defenseless Bosnian Muslim captives by the Bosnian Serb army of General Mladic in July 1995, under the noses of the UN and NATO in the final part of the long Bosnian war, is widely regarded to be the largest massacre in Europe since 1945. Moreover, it is the only action by any side in the entire set of Balkan wars declared unquestionably an act of genocide by the International Court of Justice, in a toothless ruling that decided the rest of the Bosnian Serb campaign to eliminate the Muslim population did not quite reach that mark, a ruling widely condemned, producing a dissenting statement from the court’s vice-president, Awn Shawkat Al-Khasawneh.

Yet even the Srebrenica genocide has been actively denied by a coalition of people on the far right and left of the political spectrum. The apex of this campaign was the publication by Ed Herman, who now appears to work full time on such issues, of ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, which can be read here:

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=74&ItemID=8244

Herman’s awful piece is long and those who have the taste for that kind of thing can read it themselves. Here I will be responding to the main allegations within it without necessarily trying to quote every word. Fortunately, a member of the same camp, someone called Michel Collon, has summed up the argument neatly enough in a ridiculous ‘Milosevic media quiz’ he penned some time ago, where one of his contrived “questions” was about whether or not we were told “the truth” about Srebrenica. Here is the first part of his answer:

“No. First element. Even if it’s a matter of condemning abominable crimes, historical truth – necessary for reconciliation – is not served by the propagandistic processes that unreflexively use the term ‘genocide’, by the obfuscation of the fact that that some of the victims died in combat or by the systematic exaggeration of the numbers. Inquests have determined that many of the ‘victims’ were found some months later voting in subsequent elections or even taking part in other battles with Izetbegovic’s army. This information was and remains obscured. We won’t here go into the argument over numbers which only serious historians will be able to sort out definitively.”

I suppose it is not unusual to be getting lectures about ‘obfuscation’, ‘exaggeration’ and ‘historical truth’ by such masters of the former two and violators of the latter. And it would be difficult to find a worse example of all of this than the Herman-Collon spin on the Srebrenica massacre.


Collon of course “won’t go into the question of numbers”, but nevertheless assures his readers that these numbers were “greatly exaggerated,” and many were killed in battle, and many others turned up to vote. Leave a piece of crude propaganda and then “don’t go into it.” The lie is based on the extensive article Herman cited above.

When Herman produced this, here were a number of replies well worth reading:

Bill Weinberg:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=4&ItemID=8327

Roger Lippman:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8325

Julie Wornan: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8323

Stela Rajic:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=8366


Bill Weinberg’s excellent reply then turned into an ongoing discussion on his blog, including with Herman and others: http://www.ww4report.com/node/757

Balkan Witness, which is run by Roger Lippman, also produced a reply, which ZNet refused to publish:
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Srebrenica-missing.htm

It is difficult to know what to add to these excellent replies, and all the rest of the enormous amount of information available about this massacre (see end of this article for links). The crux of the matter is this numbers’ game of how many died. Herman and company are claiming it was probably only about 2000 rather than 8000, based on some rather ugly juggling of figures, which someone with Herman’s highly prestigious background should be expected to know far better than to producing as serious argument. I have been criticised for being too harsh on Herman, but the problem is precisely that Herman is no second-rate hack; it is the fact that we are here talking about someone with a long history of valuable work, including his collaboration with Noam Chomsky in “Manufacturing Consent’ and elsewhere, that makes this pseudo-historical work of denial of the rebrenica genocide so difficult to stomach. It gives me no pleasure to have to harshly criticise someone like Herman, but on these issues, it is essential.

Herman’s number-crunching revolves around two main claims . One is that some people initially identified as missing later turned up in Tuzla, as Collon says “voting in elections,” and yet despite this, “the same number” of around 8000 is still being used. In other words, Herman claims the original number quoted was 8000 killed, but then this was not adjusted downward to take into account those initially thought to be missing, who later allegedly turned up to vote. Never mind that in fact initial estimates were quite fuzzy and tended to be around 10,000, or even in some cases 12,000, and that the 7-8000 figures were in fact settled on later; never mind that, like in any enormous bloody event, some may well initially be wrongly listed as dead or missing, but meanwhile many others that were not originally thought dead or missing may have turned out to be, thus canceling the whole point.

The second piece of acrobatics by Herman are various figures (people can check his article themselves) that say, well such-and-such a number (from memory around 40,000) was the population of Srebrenica at the time, therefore there were this many men and women of these ages, and it is known that this many of each sex and age arrived in Tuzla, therefore 8000 dead men is simply too many. Reading such nonsense, anyone who ever actually followed the war must wonder why Herman is so determined to lower the numbers killed by his Chetnik buddies, that he feigns so naively certain that the exact pre-war population of Srebrenica can be used as a guide in such years of chaos. Any casual observer of the Bosnian conflict would have seen regular media reports that Srebrenica’s population was bursting at the seems due to huge numbers of Muslim refugees from other parts of ethnically-cleansed East Bosnia pouring in; estimates during the war regularly put the wartime population there as high as 70,000, compared to the pre-war population of some 40,000, meaning nearly half the population refugees.

Leaving aside this juggling and bizarre logic, Herman is refuted by the simple facts, all of which he simply refuses to believe or acknowledge. The International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP), as of early 2005, had 7789 people listed as dead or missing from the massacre by relatives or friends (and there must be more missing than this because ICMP has bone samples for which there are no matches with family members’ DNA). Herman clearly assumes these relatives are co-conspirators in the “hoax” and are making it up. As of July 2005, the Red Cross had listed some 2000 confirmed dead and 5,500 missing, ie, a total of 7500. Amnesty’s figures are very similar, and its website claims “every one of the scores of Moslems we have met who left Srebrenica in 1995 has a relative or friend now among the missing” (the site also claimed 1000 Croatian Serbs were missing following Croatia’s ‘Operation Storm’ in the Krajina, a figure Herman will be happy to accept while vigorously denying the former). By July 2003, some 6000 body bags were in the possession of the ICMP (1), and more are being discovered; 2000 have already been positively identified. In 2005, the Bosnian Serb “government” itself made an official admission of 7800 killings in Srebrenica, and apologised for the massacre, much to the distress of its intellectual defenders like Herman.

Moreover, as Andras Riedlmayer shows, these numbers may be minimum numbers:

“On 5 June 2005 Bosnia’s Federal Commission for Missing Persons (Federalna Komisija za nestale osobe) issued a provisional list giving the names, parents’ names, dates of birth and unique citizen’s registration numbers of 8,106 individuals for whom it has been reliably established from multiple independent sources that they went missing and/or were killed in and around Srebrenica in the summer of 1995. A verification process is underway for another approximately 500 victims whose disappearance or death has not yet been verified from two or more independent sources.”

Thus the real numbers may be over 8500. Riedlmayer’s piece is an excellent overall summary of the situation: http://listserv.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0507&L=justwatch-l&D=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=51792

Clearly, for Herman, once again all these “names, parents’ names, dates of birth and unique citizen’s registration numbers of 8,106 individuals” are merely part of the grand hoax, all made up in order to make the Chetniks look bad. Herman simply denies all these figures with an arrogant wave of his hand, bemoaning “a failure to find (all) the executed bodies” (yet). One can only wonder what he would say to the Vietnamese, who claim there remain 300,000 Vietnamese missing in action, whose bodies have not been discovered since the war. Perhaps all a conspiracy to make the US look bad? Many many years ago, Herman and Chomsky penned an awful piece of apologia for the Khmer Rouge (in the Preface and Cambodia chapter of the otherwise very useful ‘After the Cataclysm’). They even claimed there would be Cambodian resistance to the internationalist Vietnamese fighters who came in and liberated the country, a claim absurd beyond the imagination. Since that time, the unquestionable truth of the genocide in that country, of possibly some 1.7 million deaths, is denied by very few. Though neither Herman nor Chomsky have made a clear admission of the wrongness of that piece, Chomsky has in practice written very differently since, having no qualms about using the term “genocide” for the KR and describing the Vietnamese intervention as perhaps one of the few genuine ‘humanitarian interventions’. Herman may have done the same, though I cannot say for sure as I do not follow his work as much, but if he has, what is clear is that he has never broken from that method.

At the end of this piece, a bibliography of other articles on the Srebrenica massacre will be provided for anyone who wants further detail, but for now, leaving aside the numbers’ games, the Srebrenica revisionist school also uses a number of other disingenuous arguments. Collon sums some of them up grubbily here:

“Second element. Why did the media hide the events essential to an understanding of this drama? In the beginning, this region was inhabited by Muslims AND Serbs. The latter were run off in 1993 by an ethnic cleansing committed by the Muslim nationalist troops of Izetbegovic. French general Morillon, who commanded the UN force there, charges: “On the night of the Orthodox Christmas, the holy night of January 1993, Nasser Oric led raids on Serb villages. . . . There were heads cut off, abominable massacres committed by the forces of Nasser Oric in all the neighboring villages.” (Documents of information from the French National Assembly, Srebrenica, t 2, pp. 140-154). The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later. But why systematically hide the crimes of ‘our friends’?”

Of course we all know from the western media that Muslims cut off heads, so no surprise about this piece of crude tabloidism; of course the good Christian Serbian nationalists never did such things, or anything much at all. Sigh. In any case, here we will argue politically rather than treating readers to the same crap.

Where can one start, when one wants to simply despair. “This region was inhabited by Muslims and Serbs.” Yes. Presumably “this region” refers to the whole East Bosnian region along the Drina River, the border with Serbia, not only Srebrenica. Collon then jumps to January 1993 and talks about an attack out of Srebrenica by Muslim forces on nearby Serb villages, claiming the local Serbs were thereby “ethnically cleansed” by the Muslims. And then he has the hide to claim that someone other than himself is “hiding the events essential to understanding this drama.”

The reality is the absolute reverse. Collon cannot explain why Muslims were holed up in the tiny “enclaves” of Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde in East Bosnia, permanently under siege by the massively armed Bosnian Serb Army all around them, or how these places even became “enclaves” in the first place. So now let’s explain to Collon “the events essential to understanding this drama.”

The first thing to understand is that almost the whole of East Bosnia had an overwhelming Muslim majority before the war, with a substantial minority of Serbs; in the very first stages of the genocide, in the months after its onset in April 1992, hundreds of thousands of these Muslims were driven out of most of the towns and nearly all the villages. Enormous crimes against humanity were recorded in Zvornik, Visegrad, Bijelina, Foca, Bratunac, Glogova, Sokolac and elsewhere. All vestiges of these people were eradicated; mosques leveled to the ground and replaced by car-parks. Whole books can be written about these crimes; many in fact have. Massive documentation of these crimes is available at the Hague Tribunal, the UN Commission of Experts, Amnesty International and countless other places. It is not my responsibility to have to quote it all; it is Collon’s and Herman’s responsibility to explain why they simply ignore this enormous ethnic cleansing that drove thousands of terrified refugees into places like Srebrenica and then kept them holed up there for 3.5 years, constantly besieging them, why they simply write as if it all didn’t happen, and then instead refer to the desperate subsequent retaliatory attacks out of the besieged enclaves, out of the Warsaw Ghetto, out of the Gaza Ghetto, on surrounding Serb villages, as the real initial “ethnic cleansing.”

There is no doubt that war crimes were committed on some occasions by these desperate raids out of the ghetto, particularly the famous Orthodox Christmas raid Collon refers to. In the great majority of cases, these raids aimed at stealing food for survival in the besieged enclave; most deaths were of Serb military personnel, though there certainly were civilian deaths as well, as there usually are in such desperate cases. Yes the desperate Palestinian attacks out of their Gaza and West Bank prisons also result in Israeli civilian casualties; we do not support either these attacks on Israeli civilians or those on Serb civilians, but we generally do not equate desperate actions of the ethnically cleansed, terrorized, imprisoned ghetto dwellers with the systematic crimes of the massively armed oppressor state that drove them into that situation in the first place, let alone putting the main blame on the oppressed as Herman/Collon do.

With breathtaking hypocrisy, Collon notes that “The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later, but why systematically hide the crimes of ‘our friends’?” Here he is implying that the meticulously organised capture of Srebrenica and the killing of 8000 captives in cold blood in 1995 merely represented some kind of spontaneous “desire for vengeance” by the local Serbs against the Muslims, to punish them for these earlier raids out of the ghetto. He does not mention the idea that these raids out of the ghetto themselves, apart from a desperate attempt to get food, may have included elements of “desire for vengeance” by the terrorized Muslims for the enormous terror and ethnic cleansing that drove out the bulk of the East Bosnian population, some into the Srebrenica ghetto, in 1992. In fact irony of ironies is that one of the “Serb” villages mentioned as being attacked during some of these raids was Glogova – an *originally Muslim village* that had been brutally ethnically cleansed by the Chetniks in spring 1992, and then repopulated by Serbs. In the original Chetnik attack on Glogova, it has been claimed by one source that every last inhabitant was massacred, on 9 May 1992 by the invading ‘Yugoslav’ Army units and Serb paramilitaries (Emir Suljagic, ‘The victims are interested in forgiveness, not punishment’, Dani (Sarajevo), 6 May 2005).

A more appropriate and historically truthful statement, paraphrasing Collon’s line above, would have been “The desire for vengeance (and food) by some of the terrorized and ethnically cleansed Srebrenica Muslims does not justify the crimes they committed later (ie, these occasional raids out of the ghetto), but why do Collon and his co-thinkers systematically hide the enormous initial crimes of their friends that led to this desire for vengeance, let alone then trying to explain away the much later and even larger meticulously organised crime in July 1995 as merely a further part of this cycle of “vengeance”?”

Incidentally, how many Serb civilians were killed in these desperate raids out of the ghetto? The revisionists cite Serb government figures claiming several thousand deaths. This however is absurd; of course the same people who meticulously attempt to show that overall numbers of deaths in the Bosnian war were much lower, typically want to boost the number of Serb deaths. However, they cannot have it both ways. If the revisionists are satisfied with the meticulous count being carried out by the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre, consisting of experts from all three Bosnian communities, which by late 2006 had an estimate of close to 97,207 dead in the whole Bosnian war (which the RDC claims is likely to rise no higher than 150,000 maximum, rather than the 200,000 or higher earlier believed), then do they also accept the estimates of dead from each group? According to this research, of the 97,000 confirmed dead so far, a total of 4000 Serb civilians died in *the whole of Bosnia,* alongside some 21,000 Serb troops (compared to over 33,000 Muslim civilians and over 31,000 Muslim troops, accounting for 66 percent of all deaths, and 83 percent of civilian deaths)? Not to mention that many of the Serb civilians killed were residents of multi-ethnic Sarajevo or Tuzla killed by years of Serbian Chetnik shelling into those besieged ghettos.

If only 4000 Serb civilians are known definitely so far to have died in the whole of Bosnia during the entire war, how many of these died in the Bratunac district nearby Srebrenica? On this, the Research and Documentation Centre has a very precise answer:

“The allegations that Serb casualties in Bratunac, between April 1992 and December 1995 amount to over three thousand is an evident falsification of facts. The RDC’s [Research and Documentation Center] research of the actual number of Serb victims in Bratunac has been the most extensive carried out in Bosnia and Herzegovina and proves that the overall number of victims is three to nine times smaller than indicated by Serbia and Montenegro.

“Perhaps the clearest illustration of gross exaggeration is that of Kravica, a Serb village near Bratunac attacked by the Bosnian Army on the morning of Orthodox Christmas, January 7, 1993. The allegations that the attack resulted in hundreds of civilian victims have been shown to be false. Insight into the original documentation of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) clearly shows that in fact military victims highly outnumber the civilian ones. The document entitled “Warpath of the Bratunac brigade”, puts the military victims at 35 killed and 36 wounded; the number of civilian victims of the attack is eleven.

“In addition to information received from relatives and family members of the victims and inspection of cemeteries, RDC has collected all existing primary sources, official documents and documentation of RS Ministry of Defense and Bratunac brigade of VRS, as well as research by the Serb authors. The victims have been categorized on the basis of two time-related criteria: the first was the municipality of residence at the time of the beginning of war; the second was the municipality of premature and violent death.

“After all the sources have been processed, cross-referenced and reviewed, the results showed that 119 civilians and 424 soldiers classified in the first group died in Bratunac during the war. Under the second category the number of civilians is the same (119) whereas the number of soldiers is 448. The result demonstrates that 26 members of other VRS units other than Bratunac brigade of VRS fought and died in combat in the municipality of Bratunac.”

(Research & Documentation Center, The Myth Of Bratunac: A Blatant Numbers Game, http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2006/05/myth-about-serb-casualties-around.html)

So there we have it: 119 Serb civilians killed during the whole war in that region. By contrast, attempting to calculate the number of Muslims killed in Srebrenica would have to include those killed during the initial months of the cleansing of East Bosnia in the northern summer of 1992, those killed during the constant Chetnik siege and shelling of the town from 1992 to 1995, and the 8000 killed in July 1995 alone. The numbers are clearly enormous.

The United Nations’ General Assembly Resolution 53/35 (Fifty-fourth session, Agenda item 42, The situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 15 November 1999, pages 103-104) has this to say about the occasional raids carried out by the besieged Muslims of Srebrenica:

“A third accusation leveled at the Bosniak defenders of Srebrenica is that they provoked the Serb offensive by attacking out of that safe area. Even though this accusation is often repeated by international sources, there is no credible evidence to support it. Dutchbat personnel on the ground at the time assessed that the few “raids” the Bosniaks mounted out of Srebrenica were of little or no military significance. These raids were often organized in order to gather food, as the Serbs had refused access for humanitarian convoys into the enclave. Even Serb sources approached in the context of this report acknowledged that the Bosniak forces in Srebrenica posed no significant military threat to them. The biggest attack the Bosniaks launched out of Srebrenica during the more than two years which it was designated a safe area appears to have been the raid on the village of Visnjica, on 26 June 1995, in which several houses were burned, up to four Serbs were killed and approximately 100 sheep were stolen. In contrast, the Serbs overran the enclave two weeks later, driving tens of thousands from their homes, and summarily executing thousands of men and boys. The Serbs repeatedly exaggerated the extent of the raids out of Srebrenica as a pretext for the prosecution of a central war aim: to create geographically contiguous and ethnically pure territory along the Drina, while freeing their troops to fight in other parts of the country. The extent to which this pretext was accepted at face value by international actors and observers reflected the prism of “moral equivalency” through which the conflict in Bosnia was viewed by too many for too long.”
(Quoted from http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2005/12/un-report-fall-of-srebrenica-role-of.html).

Then there is the final part of the Herman-Collon thesis:

“Third element. Like other so-called demilitarized ‘safe havens’, Srebrenica was in reality an area used by the forces of Izetbegovic to regroup, the UN protecting them from total defeat. Astonishingly, Oric’s troops retreated from Srebrenica just a week before the massacre. French general Germanos: “Oric had widely declared that they had abandoned Srebrenica because they’d wanted Srebrenica to fall. The ‘they’ was Izetbegovic.” And why? It is interesting to return to a curious UN report, written a year and a half earlier by Kofi Annan: “Izetbegovic had learned that a NATO intervention into Bosnia was possible. But it would happen only if the Serbs forced their way into Srebrenica and massacred at least 5,000 people.” A massacre predicted a year and a half before it happened! (UN Report of 28-29 November). General Morillon also informed us that “It is Izetbegovic’s people who opposed the evacuation of all those who had asked to be taken out, and there were many.” His conclusion: “Mladic fell into a trap at Srebrenica.”

Before fully answering this grotesque and self-contradictory frame-up, note the last line, the punch line in essence: “Mladic fell into a trap at Srebrenica.” In other words, when Mladic entered the town, unknown to him, there were people still there, who had not been evacuated (peacefully ethnically cleansed), and they were defenseless, because the mighty Bosnian army, which had allegedly been attacking them for years from this enclave, had not decided to be massacred, so poor old Mladic had no choice but to oblige. I suppose to a French general like Morillon, and a red-brown apologist like Collon, there is simply no alternative to a gigantic massacre when you stumble into a town full of Muslims who have the gall to be living there!

This piece from Collon above is once again direct from Herman, so let’s also add what Herman adds specifically to this. Herman claims that since Izetbegovic was so determined to get US intervention, his government “abandoned” Srebrenica by withdrawing “a military force much larger than that of the attackers,” and then retreating in such a way “that made that larger force vulnerable and caused it to suffer heavy casualties in fighting and vengeance executions,” and this “helped produce numbers that would meet the Clinton criterion” (the “Clinton criterion” means 5000 massacred Muslims, as it was from Clinton that Izetbegovic had allegedly learnt that NATO intervention would first require this number of extra dead).

We are unclear from all this confusion which is more important to Herman here: to demonstrate that the good Serb military of Mladic only killed about 2000 Muslims (given that they were rude enough to still be in town when he got “trapped” there), or that he inadvertently had no choice but to kill about 5000 Muslims who were deliberately retreating “in a certain way” to make this happen, because that was what Izetbegovic wanted him to do and planned things this way.

You have to get to the footnotes to read that Izetbegovic flatly denied this, while another person, a Srebrenica chief of police, confirms the Clinton suggestion. Note that, even if Clinton did make such a suggestion, and even if Izetbegovic did hear it and pass this information on, nowhere does anyone quoted claim that Izetbegovic or any other Bosnian leader suggest it was a good plan that should be followed through on. This is simply Herman’s and Collon’s implication. The idea that Izetbegovic, who had been “struggling for years” to get some help to end the slaughter may have been appalled at the suggestion by Clinton that more Muslims need to be slaughtered to justify any western help is not considered. It is not part of Herman’s “narrative,” which has to follow the line that if Mladic did massacre some Muslims, it was the fault of Izetbegovic, who wanted him to massacre even more.

Where there may perhaps be an argument regarding the culpability of the Bosnian government, given the lack of options after so many years of massacre, was that the withdrawal of the Bosnian Muslim Srebrenica commander, Naser Oric, several months before July 1995, may have weakened their defense. And further, though this is pure conjecture, that this act may have been a final concession by the Bosnian government to the enormous pressure from Serbia and its Chetnik allies, Croatia, and all the imperialist powers, including the US, for the ethnic dismemberment of his country. In other words, if he agreed to give up Srebrenica to the Chetniks, then they may accept a peace agreement – one based on a partition that he was opposed to, but if there was no alternative but continual massacre, then maybe the only thing left was to get as good a deal as possible.

If that were the case, it is a bizarre logic to then be putting the blame on Izetbegovic for making this concession to the Chetniks and the US, and blaming him for the massacre. If Izetbegovic had in fact agreed to give up Srebrenica without a fight, and had organised the retreat of his troops, then how is that supposed to whitewash Mladic for carrying out a massacre of 8000 captives there after the troops have retreated? While the claim by Herman and Collon that some of the retreating troops were “killed in battle” with the Chetniks, rather than being essentially defenseless, captured and killed as every other report claims, is grotesque and appalling, one wonders why *if* true there would be a “battle”, when the Bosnian government and army are here being accused of wanting to give up without a fight. Obviously what Herman and Collon mean by a “battle” is the fact that the retreating troops were shot in the back by the Chetniks, but some perhaps still had a uniform on; it was a “battle” like the “battle” between the US air force and retreating Iraqi troops at the end of the first Gulf war after Hussein’s surrender.

For any doubters, I’ll further quote here another section from the same UN General Assembly report, which deals with these issues, if not the particular slander against Izetbegovic:

“B. Role of Bosniak forces on the ground
475. Criticisms have also been leveled at the Bosniaks in Srebrenica, among them that they did not fully demilitarize and that they did not do enough to defend the enclave. To a degree, these criticisms appear to be contradictory (only “to a degree”!). Concerning the first criticism, it is right to note that the Bosnian Government had entered into demilitarization agreements with the Bosnian Serbs. They did this with the encouragement of the United Nations. While it is also true that the Bosnian fighters in Srebrenica did not fully demilitarize, they did demilitarize enough for UNPROFOR to issue a press release, on 21 April 1993, saying that the process had been a success. Specific instructions from United Nations Headquarters in New York stated that UNPROFOR should not be too zealous in searching for Bosniak weapons and, later, that the Serbs should withdraw their heavy weapons before the Bosniaks gave up their weapons. The Serbs never did withdraw their heavy weapons.

476. Concerning the accusation that the Bosniaks did not do enough to defend Srebrenica, military experts consulted in connection with this report were largely in agreement that the Bosniaks could not have defended Srebrenica for long in the face of a concerted attack supported by armour and artillery. The defenders were an undisciplined, untrained, poorly armed, totally isolated force, lying prone in the crowded valley of Srebrenica. They were ill-equipped even to train themselves in the use of the few heavier weapons that had been smuggled to them by their authorities. After over three years of siege, the population was demoralized, afraid and often hungry. The only leader of stature was absent when the attack occurred. Surrounding them, controlling all the high ground, handsomely equipped with the heavy weapons and logistical train of the Yugoslav army, were the Bosnian Serbs. There was no contest.

477. Despite the odds against them, the Bosniaks requested UNPROFOR to return to them the weapons they had surrendered under the demilitarization agreements of 1993. They requested those weapons at the beginning of the Serb offensive, but the request was rejected by the UNPROFOR because, as one commander explained, “it was our responsibility to defend the enclave, not theirs.” Given the limited number and poor quality of Bosniak weapons held by UNPROFOR, it seems unlikely that releasing those weapons to the Bosniaks would have made a significant difference to the outcome of the battle; but the Bosniaks were under attack at that time, they wanted to resist with whatever means they could muster, and UNPROFOR denied them access to some of their own weapons. With the benefit of hindsight, this decision seems to be particularly ill-advised, given UNPROFOR’s own unwillingness consistently to advocate force as a means deterring attacks on the enclave.

478. Many have accused the Bosniak forces of withdrawing from the enclave as the Serb forces advanced on the day of its fall. However, it must be remembered that on the eve of the final Serb assault the Dutchbat commander urged the Bosniaks to withdraw from defensive positions south of Srebrenica town – the direction from which the Serbs were advancing. He did so because he believed that NATO aircraft would soon be launching widespread air strikes against the advancing Serbs” (ie, something that never happened, since, as anyone not born yesterday understands, NATO had sold Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serb Army).

Finally, while Collon doesn’t use this argument, this is a useful place to reply to Herman’s additional argument that the fall of Srebrenica, and the massacre of its inhabitants, was “convenient” for the Bosnian government, which wanted nothing more than US intervention, and was willing to sacrifice its own people to get it.

For background on this, Izetbegovic and the Bosnian government had signed on, extremely reluctantly, under extreme pressure, to the US-inspired Contact Group partition plan of mid-1994, which offered a full 49 percent of Bosnia to the Chetniks as a recognized “Serb Republic” (Republika Srpska) despite the region having been “cleansed” of its non-Serb, mostly Muslim, plurality (Serbs account for 30 percent of the Bosnian population, and large parts of ‘Republika Srpska’ previously had overwhelming Muslim, Croat or mixed majorities). The other 51 percent would be a “Muslim-Croat Federation”. This was a massive victory for Serbian war aims, and a total defeat to Bosnian government war aims, which had been fighting to preserve the multi-ethnic constitution over the whole of Bosnia, and to allow for the return of refugees. This is why both Milosevic and Tudjman signed on immediately, seeing it as a great deal, especially Milosevic. Tudjman was less thrilled, because it meant giving up the Croat chauvinist statelet in Bosnia, ‘Herzeg-Bosna’, while his Serbian allies had got theirs over half the country. But his Bosnian Croat chauvinist allies had been decisively smashed by the Bosnian armed forces in late 1993, so he had no choice, and figured Croatia would effectively exercise suzerainty over the other half of Bosnia anyway.

So since Milosevic thought it was so good, why did not the Karadzic leadership of the Bosnian Serb Chetnik forces also sign on? At one level, since they had already conquered 70 percent of Bosnia due to overwhelming military superiority, why should they withdraw from any, given they were under no military pressure from the poorly armed Bosnian government forces?

However, there was another side to Karadzic’s rejection. Perhaps Karadzic would accept the 49 percent, but he wanted the borders of the new Serb Republic to be even less messy, which would require even more ethnic cleansing of people whom happened to be in the wrong areas. Above all, Karadzic and his Chetniks had two strategic aims:

The first was the widening of the northern “corridor”, through the previously Croat-Muslim majority Posavina region, which connected their conquests of previously Muslim-majority East Bosnia, along the Serbia border, with their stronghold in Banja Luka in the northwest, which had had a slight (54%) Serb majority, and which further connected to the overwhelmingly Serb region along the southwest Dinaric range (Bosnia Krajina) which adjoined the Serb Republic of Croatian Krajina. Some 160,000 Croats had already been ethnically cleansed from the Posavina to create the ‘corridor’, but widening it further would seal this situation.

The second was the elimination of three remaining “enclaves” where Muslim refugees had taken refuge within Serb-conquered East Bosnia – Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde, all surrounded by Chetnik-controlled territory. The Chetniks considered it rude that, after having expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims from East Bosnia, some tens of thousands had remained in these three pockets inside “their” republic.

Clearly, if Karadzic could secure the elimination of three small enclaves, he may be willing to sign on to 51-49. And it is possible that, given the extent of utter western betrayal, Izetbegovic had finally decided that the three small and difficult to defend enclaves may have to be sacrificed to end the slaughter. I stress “may have”. This is purely conjecture. However, it is conjecture of a far higher order to suggest that he wanted Srebrenica eliminated along with 5000 or 8000 of its inhabitants. If he made a deal, signified by the removal of Oric, it is far more likely to have been along the lines of, OK, we give up Srebrenica, you let the people out alive. The fact that the Chetniks who overran Srebrenica only let some of the people out alive, and captured and killed 8000 others, is likely to have been seen by Izetbegovic as appalling betrayal.

Who, in the end, was the fall of Srebrenica, and also neighbouring Zepa straight afterwards, therefore “convenient” for? Clearly, it was highly convenient for Karadzic’s Chetnik forces, because it allowed their “state” to do away with these troublesome enclaves. If it was so “convenient” for the Bosnian government, it is interesting that when the US imposed the 51-49 partition a few months later, Srebrenica and Zepa were inside the ‘Serb Republic”. One might think that since it was so “convenient” for Clinton, who was allegedly finally searching for an “excuse” for “more aggressive policies” after years and years of ignoring the Bosnians “struggling” to induce US intervention by all means (I’m using Herman’s self-contradictory terms), that the US would make a point of forcing the Chetniks to hand over Srebrenica to the “Muslim-Croat Federation,” to signify a US somehow making amends for refusing to come to the defense of Srebrenica and allowing such a gigantic massacre to take place. Even if the massacre was a “hoax” as Herman thinks, still, since the US pushed this hoax, one may expect it to demand the Chetniks withdraw. Yet it was never even an issue. From the very start of the new US-drawn maps, Srebrenica and Zepa were part of the Serb Republic, along with a widened northern corridor – ie precisely the two strategic aims of Karadzic in previously rejecting 51-49 had been met. This would seem extremely convenient for the Chetniks, and convenient for Clinton and the US in an entirely different way to that portrayed by the revisionist “left” and right.

And therefore, it’s not surprising that the ‘smoking gun’ – US support for the Chetnik conquest of Srebrenica – has recently surfaced. In late 2006, Richard Holbrooke, the assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration in 1995, revealed in an interview with the French magazine Paris-Match that his initial instructions from national security adviser Anthony Lake were to sacrifice the three remaining Muslim ‘enclaves’ in East Bosnia – Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde – to the Serb nationalists (http://www.forward.com/articles/report-on-bosnian-murders-fuels-debate/). Holbrooke claims he rejected the instructions, but in the past he has emphasised his rejection only of pressure to abandon Gorazde, leaving the question of the other two unclear – till now. The same issue of Paris-Match also had an interview with the chief prosecutor of the Hague Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, who claims that western officials held a meeting with Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic in 1995, to discuss the plans to seize Srebrenica. She said there were minutes of the meeting and that she knew the names of the officials, but was unable to use this as evidence because they refused to confirm their attendance. The revelations cast light on Holbrooke’s statement after Dayton that Milosevic was someone the US “could do business with.”

It also fits with other recent statements by Holbrooke, which reveal that behind the US intervention, formally against Karadzic’s forces, was the fear that the excesses of the Chetniks – who had conquered 70 percent of Bosnia despite Serbs being only 30 percent of the population – were leading to a radicalisation among the dispossessed Bosnian Muslims. In a Washington Post article entitled ‘Was Bosnia worth it?’ Holbrooke asserted that if the US had not intervened in 1995, “we would probably have had to pursue Operation Enduring Freedom not only in Afghanistan but also in the deep ravines and dangerous hills of central Bosnia, where a shadowy organization we now know as Al Qaeda was putting down roots that were removed by NATO after Dayton.”

The idea that Al Qaida had more than a marginal role in the desperation of Bosnia is fanciful, and a slander against the Bosnian Muslims. However, the fact that Holbrooke feels compelled to describe in this way the growing radicalisation among the Muslims, who had been left to the slaughter in the middle of Europe for years in the 1990s, indicates the degree of worry this was causing Washington.

Muhamed Sacirbey, Bosnia’s foreign minister at the time, commented that “for many years, I believed that the West gave an orange light to the Serbs to take over Srebrenica, but I am now convinced that it was a green light.”

Croatia’s reconquest of the Krajina

Before concluding, a discussion of the Croatian army’s retaking of its ‘Krajina’ region in August 1995, resulting in the flight or expulsion of its entire Serb population, is in order. This is for two reasons. Firstly, as will be shown below, the two events – Srebrenica and Krajina – were in reality part of a connected ‘pincer’ movement to “tidy up” the ethnic map of the region to make the Serbo-Croatian regional partition plan more viable. Secondly, both Herman and Collon make direct comparisons between the two events, in a way aimed at pushing their highly unbalanced, to put it as mildly as possible, view of this conflict.

Collon asks “Was the largest ethnic cleansing of the war committed by the Croat Army?” and provides the following answer for us:

“YES. On August 4, 1995, a hundred thousand Croat soldiers, a hundred and fifty tanks, two hundred troop transports, more than three hundred pieces of artillery, and forty missile launchers attacked the Serb population of the Krajina. More than 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave this region which they had inhabited for centuries. The worst atrocities of the war were committed: the Croat forces killed the elderly who could not flee, and burned 85% of the abandoned houses.”

It is always interesting when people who devote most of their time to being apologists for massive war crimes then go out of their way to emphasise the war crimes of someone else they do not like, forgetting entirely about all the qualifications, apologetics, numbers’ games and other arguments they’ve insisted on in order to deny or minimize the crimes of the people they like.

At the outset, I’ll say one thing: I’ve never supported Tudjman, and in fact to properly understand the 1990s, it is necessary to understand that it was not Serbo-Croatian conflict, but the Serbo-Croatian alliance, that dominated that decade in the Balkans. I feel no need whatsoever to be an apologist for Franco Tudjman’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as in this example here; it is not I, but Collon, Herman, Johnstone and Parenti who are the war crimes deniers, and their insistence that appalling crimes were committed by Tudjman in Krajina, next to their denials about the enormous crimes committed by Milosevic, Seselj, Karadzic and Mladic in Vukovar, Sarajevo, Srebrenica, the death camps, Kosova and elsewhere stands out as rank hypocrisy.

So let’s look at Collon’s statement. He begins: “On August 4, 1995, a hundred thousand Croat soldiers, a hundred and fifty tanks, two hundred troop transports, more than three hundred pieces of artillery, and forty missile launchers attacked the Serb population of the Krajina.”

Apparently here the size of the heavy weaponry arsenal actually matters. Yet Collon obviously sees no importance in such facts when Croatia was attacked by the ‘Yugoslav’ Army with hundreds of tanks, thousands of artillery pieces, plus masses of other heavy weaponry in 1991, at a time when Croatia itself had next to no arms; nor obviously does he see any relevance in the fact that Bosnia was attacked by the ‘Yugoslav’ Army and its spin-off ‘Bosnian Serb’ Army which disposed of 330 tanks, 800 artillery pieces, 400 armoured personnel carriers and 37 military aircraft, for years on end, when Bosnia was virtually defenseless. Only some aggressors should be allowed to have such weapons, according to Collon.

The he writes: “More than 150,000 Serbs were forced to leave this region which they had inhabited for centuries.” Yes this is correct. At least Collon uses the population figures based on the actual census, and does not embellish the figure to 200 or 250 or 300 thousand or whatever, as many of his co-thinkers do, or “hundreds of thousands” as Herman does in the same article where he tries to show that not many Muslims were killed in Srebrenica.

Why did Croatia invade the Krajina and expel 150,000 Serbs? Because it was Croatian territory, that had been seized by the Serbian armed forces in 1991, brutally “cleansed” of its Croat population, and taken over as the so-called “Republika Srpska Krajina”. Obviously at some point Croatia was going to attempt to retake its territory. Of course, as socialists, we don’t have any particular obsession with “national” territory if a people in part of that territory consider themselves part of another nation which they want to join. It is Collon and company who are hypocrites, who support the right of the Serb nationalists to rip apart Croatia, create facts on the ground via expelling non-Serbs and set up a new ‘Serb republic’, but oppose the right of the already overwhelming majority Albanian population of Kosova – overwhelming majority without the need for any ethnic cleansing – to gain independence from Serbia, because this is “Serbian territory.”

But let’s leave aside their hypocrisy for the moment. We can agree that in the way Tudjman’s reactionary regime retook the Krajina, with a massive military attack, launching hundreds of missiles directly into the Krajina capital Knin, was a method that guaranteed the expulsion of the Serb population. Furthermore, it is also very clear that many people who stayed behind, mostly old people, were murdered by Croatian troops, as Collon notes. We unreservedly condemn Tudjman’s attack in Krajina.

Now that is clear, let’s go the Collon’s next point: “The worst atrocities of the war were committed” during this offensive. What cynicism. This coming from someone who has just done apologetics on the massacre of 8000 Muslim captives in Srebrenica, a month or so earlier, and on the concentration camps, and on the entire three years of genocide in Bosnia, now tells us that the expulsion – not killing – of 150,000 people, involving the killing of some 1000 people, is when the worst atrocities of the war were committed.

While this nonsense may simply be dismissed as the ravings of a hypocrite, nevertheless it actually forms part of a discourse which is usually a little more coherent – rather than the worst atrocities of the war, which is patently absurd, this discourse usually claims this was the “greatest single act of ethnic cleansing” in the whole war. What this means is that these 150,000 people fled in a few days, whereas the millions that fled their homes in Bosnia, and hundreds of thousands in Croatia in 1991, did so over a longer period of time.

In other words, it is fine to expel a million people from their homes “where they had lived for centuries” if the people at least put up a little fight first, and thus hold up their expulsion, but if they flee en masse without their political and military leadership even making the pretence of a fight, then this is much worse, even if it only involves 150,000 people, relatively middling by the standards of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans that decade.

And the simple reason they fled without a fight was that the Krajina Serbs were only ever part of a cynical game. Milosevic allowed Tudjman to overrun this region in 1995, without putting up even the pretence of a fight, as part of a greater Milosevic-Tudjman-US deal to partition Bosnia and the region in a ‘neater’ way, which resulted in the recognition of ‘Republika Srpska’ in Bosnia. This is despite the Krajina Serb leadership being massively armed with napalm and cluster bombs, which they had liberally used against neighbouring Bosnian Muslims in the completely surrounded and besieged ‘enclave’ of Bihac for years. This is evidence that Milosevic and co. had cynically set up the Krajina Serbs as cannon fodder for this later catastrophe, being merely a bargaining chip in the meantime – they were simply in the wrong area to be really of interest as part of greater Serbia, being separated from Serbia by the entire republic of Bosnia.

But if we are to condemn Tudjman’s method of retaking the Krajina, which seemed guaranteed to ensure the flight of the Serb population, then surely we should also condemn the initial ethnic cleansing of the Croats from the Krajina and the other two regions – East and West Slavonia – that were torn out of Croatia in 1991 and called a “Serb Republic.” Yet from Collon – and Herman, Johnstone, Parenti etc – total silence. So let’s here set the record straight.

Firstly, the Krajina itself, the furthest part of Croatia from Serbia, was the only part that could actually claim the right to self-determination, as the only of the three regions with a Serb majority. Yet even there Serbs were a majority of only 69 percent – much smaller than the majority status of Albanians in Kosova – and the far-right SDS (Serb Democratic Party) leaders ethnically cleansed the Croat minority of 60-70,000 people from the Krajina, an abominable act that never gets mentioned by the apologists. In fact the first case of ethnic cleansing in the whole set of Balkan wars occurred when the ‘Yugoslav’ Army, acting on behalf of the Chetniks, meticulously destroyed the Croat town of Kijevo, situated inconveniently near Serb majority regions in Krajina, and sent the entire Croat population packing in July 1991.

Western Slavonia was overwhelmingly Croat in composition, thus its capture resulted in the ethnic cleansing of another 70,000 or so Croats. There was not one region in all western Slavonia with a Serb majority. As for Eastern Slavonia, the population of the whole region originally conquered in 1991 was only 14 percent Serb, and making this region a ‘Serb state’ meant the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Croats. Late in 1991, Croatian armed forces managed to take some of this back and drive out the Serb minority, but at the end of the war, the ‘Serb state’ still covered a region that was originally only 30-35 percent Serb, so some 100,000 Croats and tens of thousands of other non-Serbs remained expelled.

Thus the carving out of a ‘Serb republic’ in Croatia meant the expulsion of some half a million Croats, the big majority of the population of the three regions altogether, and even as Croatian forces retook some of it by late 1991, there remained some 230,000 Croats ethnically cleansed. It is astonishing that the great majority of the left, even the better sections who later sympathised with Bosnia’s Muslims and have no sympathies for Serbian reaction, almost never make mention of the right to return of hundreds of thousands of Croats brutally expelled by the Serboslav army and its SDS creation from various parts of their own country, including Croat-majority regions, in 1991. This is despite the fact that they almost always, when talking about the Balkans, condemn Croatia’s ethnic cleansing of 150,000 Serbs when it retook the region four years later, as if this later terror was not directly connected to the former. Croats are simply not politically correct.

So let’s go back to Collon’s rhetoric regarding Srebrenica. As we saw, he (and Herman) pretend that the meticulously organised massacre of 8000 defenseless Muslim captives in July 1995 was merely some kind of spontaneous revenge for the occasional raids out of the Srebrenica ghetto into local Serb villages by traumatised, besieged, starving Muslims, which resulted in some civilian deaths. However, they do not see these desperate raids out of the ghetto as revenge by these terrified refugees who had been driven into the ‘enclave’ of Srebrenica in the first place by the brutal ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in East Bosnia in the summer of 1992.

Collon had said “The desire for vengeance does not excuse the crimes committed later. But why systematically hide the crimes of ‘our friends’?” So why doesn’t Collon now say, regarding Tudjman’s expulsion of the Krajina Serbs in 1995, that “the desire for revenge (ie, of the originally expelled Croats of 1991) does not excuse the crimes committed later (in 1995).” And I’d add, quoting him, “but why does he systematically hide the crimes of his friends?”

Finally, when speaking of the numbers expelled from Krajina, another factor needs to be taken into account, regarding the slow process of return. Some 300,000 Serbs were either expelled or left during the war years, of the original Croatian Serb population of 600,000. This included the 150,000 expelled from Krajina, some 20,000 expelled from Western Slavonia earlier in 1995, and over 100,000 who drifted out during the years, due to the increasingly chauvinistic atmosphere under Tudjman, or decided to leave Eastern Slavonia when it was peacefully reintegrated into Croatia in 1997. To date, some 120,000 of these 300,000 Serbs have returned to Croatia, meaning two thirds of the original Serb population now lives in Croatia, a far cry from the “ethnically clean” Croatia that the left Croat-haters envisage. In fact, a Croatian Serb party has been in a coalition government with the ruling ‘moderated’ HDZ government since its reelection in 2004, and Serb councilors have been elected in Knin, the capital of the Krajina region. Nevertheless, all this progress still leaves a huge Serb population who have not returned, and there is no doubt that one major region is the feeling of insecurity in a state where Croatian chauvinism is still rife among a section of the population and sections of the sate apparatus.

One other major problem however is housing. Many of the houses that had belonged to the Krajina Serbs are now occupied by the Posavina Croats – ie, some of the 200,000 Croats expelled by the Bosnian Serb Army and Chetniks from northern Bosnia and the Posavina ‘corridor’, which connects the west and east halves of ‘Republika Srpska’ but was originally largely Croat in population. Once again, the plight of these people, who cannot return to their homes in Bosnia, is simply not sexy enough for the Chetnikophilic wing of the left. Meanwhile, while the retaking of the Krajina resulted in the expulsion of 150,000 Serbs, and this is abominable, I will leave it to the Collons of the world to give their opinion on the fact that the retaking of the Krajina and Western Slavonia, and later the reintegration of eastern Slavonia, also allowed the return to their homes of 230,000 ethnically cleansed Croats.

What Herman had to say on this is both crasser and more detailed than Collon’s pulp here. Herman makes a big deal about comparing what he sees as the western reaction to Srebrenica massacre and to the Krajina cleansing, which occurred soon after.

Yet he appears to prefer the politics of doing the reverse of what he sees as bias. His whole essay is dedicated to showing that Srebrenica was a hoax, that not many died, that those who did probably died fighting as soldiers, that the Muslims deserved it anyway for “provoking” the Serbs, and that Izetbegovic wanted Mladic to massacre his people in any case, so Mladic is not to blame for carrying it out. Yet strangely, he makes none of these caveats regarding Krajina. Quite the opposite, he wants to believe the largest figures for people killed and cleansed, and makes no effort to look into the background as I have detailed above at all.

According to Herman, the Croatian government was delighted by Srebrenica because it “provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia.” After all the appalling playing with numbers over Srebrenica, Herman simply couldn’t care less with accuracy at all in Krajina – so the well-established figure of around 150,000, which Collon is honest enough to report, and which may indeed have risen, accordig to soem estimates, to perhaps 170,000, becomes “several hundred thousand” for Herman, a figure entirely made up.

Herman then even suggests that this operation “may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July.” Of course, this can only be suggested if you believe the lowest possible figure for the numbers killed in Srebrenica, and the highest possible figures for those killed in Krajina (which Herman naturally does), and even then would be scarcely possible. Herman quotes 1,205 Serbs killed by the Croatian army in the Krajina cleansing, a figure I have no particular quibble with, still less reason to quibble with. But interesting that his source is Veritas (http://www.veritas.org.yu/). Now if you go to the site of Veritas, you are immediately confronted with a page full of the flag of the ‘Republika Srpska Krajina’, that is, the racist Serb statelet set up in parts of Croatia conquered and ethnically cleansed of its non-Serb inhabitants between 1991 and 1995. The site describes itself as a “non-government organisation established in late 1993 by citizens of the then Republic of Serbian Krajina – RSK. Prior to the exile of Krajina population in August 1995, the organization was headquartered in Knin. Afterwards it moved to Belgrade.”

Isn’t it interesting that Herman ridicules as by definition wrong any source from the Bosnian government, and without explanation refuses to accept the very careful work of the Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo, even though it includes Serbs, Croats and Muslims, essentially because it doesn’t verify the figures he wants, but when it comes to Krajina, he has no problem immediately accepting the figures provided by an agency of the Croatian Serb Chetnik state! I could add here as well that whereas the Research and Documentation Centre has made a detailed study of Serb deaths in villages near Srebrenica, and determined that 119 civilians died through the whole war, Herman simply gives the figure of “well over a thousand Serb civilians” dying there, without question, and quite innocently puts as his source the “Yugoslav (ie Serbian) government.” Thus the break between his method of believing figures for deaths for Serbs and that for Muslims and Croats is total.

Like any rank populist, he then goes on to give a harrowing description by a UN officer of a particularly ghastly case of murder of a number of Serbs during this operation – the kind of description that one could find thousands of regarding the appalling atrocities carried out by Serbian forces, but which if one quoted them, they would be immediately accused of “demonizing” “the Serbs”. You are only allowed to “demonise” some people, not others, you see.

Apart form all this, Herman’s piece is full of basic inaccuracies, which reveal his lack of any real knowledge of this region he pretends to be a specialist in. His knowledge of anything Croatian is so lousy that he manages to confuse Eastern and Western Slavonia, he talks about an alleged slaughter or disappearance of Serbs in 1991 in “Vukovar” (ie in *Eastern* Slavonia, where the ‘Yugoslav’ Army led a horrific siege for months in 1991, leading to thousands of deaths), and then “references” this by linking to an article by a guy called Kent, on the ultra-Likudnik, Islamophobic site ‘Emperor’s Clothes’, which points to ethnic cleansing of Serbs from *Western* Slavonia, but which is mostly about the Croatian recapture of that region in 1995, rather than 1991; the head starts spinning.

For all his refusal to believe this source and that, Herman has no problem with various ultra-rightist sources. Between Bogdanovic, a reactionary Serb nationalist that Herman is extensively collaborating with (here is a good review of Bogdanovic’s film, giving an idea of his politics: http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2002/yugoslavia.php3), the neo-Confederate, League of the South, arch-racist Trifkovic, his blog ‘grayfalcon’, and another arch-Islamophobic pro-Likud Serbian ultra-right site, ‘Serbianna’, and the politically similar ‘Emperor’s Clothes’, such references account for 13 of Herman’s references, one sixth of the total, not counting the US Republican Policy Committee (which Herman recommends has a “good summary” of the view that Bosnian Muslims regularly bombed themselves, as, I suppose, Muslims tend to do in the view of such a quintessentially reactionary organisation), or various US generals and so on. The neo-Confederate Trifkovic is also highly recommended for a “good summary” of how Muslim suffering was greatly exaggerated. One feels disappointed that Herman hasn’t also referenced the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, Ariel Sharon, the white South African AWB Boer Resistance, Le Pen, Ian Paisley and other such scum who all hold similar views to his on former Yugoslavia issues. And as he notes, there are a number of other Serbian nationalists he is “indebted to,” one of which is Milivoje Ivanisevic, a former senator of the Karadzic regime in ‘Republika Srpska’, ie, the half of Bosnia officially turned in to a “Serb Republic” after the non-Serb half of the population, about a million people, had been ethnically cleansed, and all traces of centuries of Muslim culture and civilisation eradicated.

Anyway, let’s return to Collon’s final comment on the Krajina issue:

“Clinton called the offensive ‘useful’. His Secretary of State said: “The retaking of the Krajina could lead to a new strategic situation which might be favorable for us.” Worse yet: the United States advised Croatia in carrying out its offensive, according to an admission by the Croatian foreign minister. Furthermore, it was Washington that took charge of the ‘democratic’ training of this army.”

This is all very true. The US should be made to bear some of the responsibility for the atrocities that took place as part of this operation, not only the Croatian generals that are up on charges at the Hague.

However, it is worthwhile understanding why the US aided the Croatian offensive, because left at that, as it usually is, suggests that, well, the US aided Croatia against the Krajina Serbs because perhaps it likes Croats and doesn’t like Serbs. Yet this hardly squares with the revelations above, that the US also likely connived with the Bosnian Serb forces in the conquest of Srebrenica.

Neither does it concur with the US position during the massive Serboslav attack on Croatia in 1991 and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Croats then – the position then was that the US opposed recognition of Croatia, pushed an arms embargo against “all Yugoslavia”, which effectively prevented unarmed Croatia from getting arms to balance the massive arsenal of the ‘Yugoslav’ Army, via Vance brought about a peace agreement that froze the confrontation lines in Serbia’s favour, effectively recognizing the annexation of a third of Croatia, allowed the ‘Yugoslav’ Army to take all its heavy weaponry in Croatia out into Bosnia, and then continued to oppose recognition for months after the EU and Russia had recognised Croatia and Slovenia.

So what was the political situation that led to the US arming of Croatia to facilitate its reconquest of the Krajina in 1995? It is true that the US green light to the Bosnian Serb forces to take Srebrenica did not involve training and arming their forces, as in the case of Croatia’s retaking of the Krajina. That was obviously unnecessary; as the Serb nationalists controlled the great bulk of weaponry, there was little they could do with even more weapons to subjugate a little enclave full of disarmed or semi-armed Muslim refugees.

But the evidence strongly suggests that the conquests of Srebrenica (and Zepa) and then of Krajina were a pincer movement in tandem, a last bout of ethnic cleansing aimed at ethnic “tidying up” of the region in order to carry out a neater Serbo-Croatian partition of the region as the basis for the US-imposed Dayton Accord. The fact that not only was no attempt made to prevent the conquest of the Srebrenica-Zepa “safe areas,” despite strong indications the US knew it was coming, but also that from the start, the new US partition plans had ceded Srebrenica and Zepa to ‘Republika Srpska’, a key demand of the Chetniks to sign on to the US plan, indicates this.

This has all been explained above. What needs to be added to that section was that there was a quid pro quo. If the east Bosnian Muslim ‘enclaves’ were to be eliminated to create a stronger ‘Republika Srpska’, and RS’s ‘northern corridor’ between its east and west halves through the formerly largely Croat-populated Posavina was to be widened, then Serbia would also agree to forgo those conquests in the very far west of Bosnia on the Croatian Krajina border, and Krajina itself, because even though these were ironically their only conquests where there really had been an overwhelming majority Serb population before the war, they were also the conquests that were the furthest from Serbia geographically, apart form being economically useless rugged land. On the other hand, they were very valuable to Croatia – the Krajina itself was Croatian territory whose loss in 1991 had effectively cut northern Croatia off from its Dalmation coast; while for the Croatia’s Bosnian Croat puppets to take over the neighbouring far west section of Bosnia from the Serbs would allow Croatia a stronger link to the Bosnian territories already controlled by these forces, in Western Herzegovina. This explains not only the US arming of Croatia to recapture Krajina, and the US and western facilitation of the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica-Zepa, but also the complete lack of fight by the Krajina Serb leadership and the relatively quiet acceptance of the Krajina recapture by Milosevic.

So when, as Collon notes, “Clinton called the offensive ‘useful’” and “his Secretary of State said “the retaking of the Krajina could lead to a new strategic situation which might be favorable for us,” they were talking a lot of sense. The conquest of Srebrenica-Zepa also led to this same “useful new situation,” consolidated as the Dayton Accord.

One final thing that should be noted about Dayton is the fact that the attempt by the non-violent Kosovar Albanian leadership of Ibrahim Rugova to be represented at Dayton so that the Kosova issue could also be addressed was snubbed by the US, quite happy with Milosevic-Tudjman as its strategic partners. It was this snub of the Kosovar Albanians, who had been waging a “Ghandian” campaign for independence right through the 1990s, while the rest of Yugoslavia was engulfed in flames, in concert with the recognition of the gangster state of ‘Republika Srpska’ in half the UN-member state of Bosnia, despite it being nothing but a creation of enormous violence and genocide, that taught the Kosovar Albanians the “painful truth” as enunciated by a KLA commander, that “those that want freedom must fight for it.”

Footnote:

(1) Regarding these 6000 body bags, Roger Lippman at Balkan Witness points to some confusion about this:

“The figure of 6,000 bodies found to date was reported in error. In all likelihood, someone at ICMP told journalists that ICMP had 6,000 body bags from Srebrenica. It is a mistake that is easy to understand; in most cases, one would assume that a body bag containing human remains would contain an entire body. Sadly, because of the problem of secondary mass graves and commingling of remains, that is just not the case with Srebrenica victims. (Secondary mass graves are locations to which bodies from primary mass graves were removed by Serbian forces in an effort to hide the magnitude of the massacre.)

“Each body bag does not represent an individual victim. Excavators at the scene of a mass grave isolate body parts and bodies the best they can and put them into body bags. Because of the problem of commingling and secondary grave sites, parts of the same individual may be in other parts of the same grave site or in other graves. Therefore, the remains of one individual are sometimes contained in several different body bags.

“This does not diminish the number of persons who went missing from Srebrenica. As of early 2005, ICMP has on its database 7,789 named missing individuals from Srebrenica – and there are more people missing because ICMP has bone samples for which there are no matches with family members’ DNA.

“The nearest estimate of the number of exhumed bodies from Srebrenica in early 2005 is close to 4,000. No one can give a more precise figure than that. There are many more sites waiting to be exhumed – and doubtless more will be discovered.

“The erroneous figure of 6,000 bodies has been picked up and repeated by numerous other news sources, but never with proper attribution.”

http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Sreb1.htm


The following are some extra useful links on Srebrenica (on top of the links provided above to replies to Herman):

This is a very thorough report:
Srebrenica Investigation: Summary of Forensic Evidence – Execution Points and Mass Graveshttp://www.domovina.net/archive/2000/20000516_manning.pdf

I also think Bianca Jagger gives an excellent description of the entire Srebrenica ordeal, which is useful not just regarding the issue of numbers, but also other aspects of the story distorted by Ed Herman. Jagger’s articles are at http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/srebrenica/BiancaJagger1.html and http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/srebrenica/BiancaJagger2.html

This is the Bosnian Serb government’s own report admitting the crime:
http://www.domovina.net/srebrenica/page_006/rs_final_srebrenica_report.doc

Weinberg also included a list of other useful links about the Srebrenica massacre:

“Srebrenica: Anatomy of a Massacre,” Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR)http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/tri/tri_414_1_eng.txt

Dragan Obrenovic statement to ICTY
http://www.un.org/icty/obrenovic/trialc/facts_030520.htm

Momir Nikolic statement to ICTY
http://www.un.org/icty/mnikolic/trialc/facts030506.htm

IWPR story on Momir Nikolic perjury, from FreeRepublic
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/991985/posts

ICMP press release on identification of bodies
http://www.ic-mp.org/home.php?act=news&n_id=97&

Open Democracy report, “Srebrenica: ten years on”
http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-yugoslavia/srebrenica_2651.jsp

Radio Netherlands report on the Tribunal ten years after Srebrenica
http://www2.rnw.nl/rnw/en/currentaffairs/region/easterneurope/srb050708?view=Standard

BBC story on Serb Republic apology for massacre
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3999985.stm

“Serbia Struggles to Face the Truth about Srebrenica,” by Tim Judah, Crimes of War Project
http://www.crimesofwar.org//news-srebrenica2.html

Deniers of Serbia’s War Crimes, Balkan Witness
http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/Articles-deniers.htm

“Did Six Million Really Die?” Holocaust-denial numbers-fudging
http://theunjustmedia.com/Holocaust/Did%20Six%20Million%20Really%20Die.htm

By Michael Karadjis

The numbers killed in 3.5 years of savage war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995 has long been a question of controversy. Bosnian leaders usually claimed some 200,000 people, mostly Bosnian Muslims, were killed; on the other extreme, apologists for Serbian nationalism like to imagine the lowest possible figures, and then suggest these figures were fairly evenly divided among ethnic groups as would be expected in a “civil war.” As an example of the latter group, Ed Herman (Z-Magazine, February 2002, Body Counts in Imperial Service) “quotes” George Kenney’s alleged estimate of only 20-30,000 dead in Bosnia. Kenney in fact estimated between 25,000 and 65,000 dead, and it is clearly Herman who chose to provide only Kenney’s minimum figure to the Z-Net readership, yet in any case Kenney’s figures are still very low.

The reasons for people like Herman, and a significant section of the left, wanting to believe these ‘low and equal’ figures lies in their belief that the war in Bosnia was part of “imperialist intervention against Serbia”, or even part of the “imperialist dismantling of Yugoslavia.” The second claim of course is pure metaphysics, given that Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991 or at the latest early 1992, whereas the Bosnian war broke out in April 1992. Nevertheless, the first claim is just as metaphysical – the whole point is that while slaughter engulfed Bosnia for 3.5 years – with, as will be conclusively shown below, Muslims overwhelmingly the main victims – there was *no* imperialist intervention to help the Muslim, and mixed Bosnian, victims against the monstrous assault by massively armed Serb nationalist forces, themselves armed to the teeth by Serbia, which had inherited the Yugoslav army, the 4th largest armed force in Europe. Which is not to say there was not intervention; there was, but *against* Bosnia. The main forms of imperialist intervention in Bosnia, enforced by tens of thousands of NATO troops, were two-fold: enforcing a criminal arms embargo against the Bosnian republic, in the context of overwhelming military superiority of Serbia; and continually pushing one plan after another for the ethnic partition of Bosnia, ie, precisely the program the Serb nationalists and Milosevic were fighting for, the only disagreement being over ‘how much’. In the end, with the US-imposed Dayton Accord of 1995, the ‘Serb republic’ got half of Bosnia, an enormous steal, courtesy of EU and US imperialism.

So the psychological alleged “anti-imperialist” premises for wanting to believe false figures is an illusion. Now on top of this, we have the first thorough study showing the death figures and proportions are also baseless. Fortunately we have a very thorough research into this question carried out by the Research and Documentation Centre, painstakingly put together by a Bosnian team involving Serbs, Croats and Muslims along with international experts, headed by Mirsad Tokaca, available at: http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus.html

Every death has been rigorously cross-checked to rule out double reporting (possible in the chaos of war and displacement), and only those deaths that can be absolutely verified are included. This thus excludes many incomplete cases, and those who died as a result of war-related causes, ie, years of having no electricity or being starved in besieged cities, lack of medicines, cold etc, but not directly through military killing. It also excludes “persons who died at an earlier age than would normally be expected during peacetime, due to war conditions.”

As of December 2005, they had a definite count of 93,837, and in December 2006, this had risen to 97,207. The project is continuing and will continue to be extended as long as significant numbers continue to be added.

Many of the pro-Chetnik wing of the left will grab this and say, see, “only” 100,000 killed, not 200,000 as widely quoted. Let’s however remember the fact that the RDC sees these figures as an “absolute minimum,” and that these figures only cover those who died from direct military killing but not others who died as a result of war conditions (which many of these “leftists” would want included if it was a cause they supported).

In reality, the numbers that died in Bosnia as a result of war were far greater than the 97,000 to date found to have been directly killed by acts of war. In fact, a study comparing the pre-war and post-war population of Bosnia, and adding all the known Bosnians living elsewhere in the world, the total number of dead or missing comes to 229,000, of whom 75 percent were Muslims, if it is assumed that there would have been no population increase over that period. If the rate of growth that existed previous to the war is assumed, the numbers of dead or missing rise to 343,000, of whom 64 percent were Muslims (‘Demographic Consequences of the Bosnia War’, by Murat Praso, http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/bosnia/dem.html ).

That there could be such high figures is easily explained when we remember that the RDC figures very strictly exclude “persons who died at an earlier age than would normally be expected during peacetime, due to war conditions.” But is it logical to include people who died “due to war conditions” but not directly shot or bombed in the list of war victims? It really depends on consistency – it is a question of comparing figures with similar figures in other cases. To understand hw important this is, let’s take the case of East Timor.

In 2006, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation released its report on total deaths in East Timor between the Indonesian invasion in 1975 and its departure in 1999 (http://www.hrdag.org/resources/timor-leste_faqs.shtml#4). It found 183,000 people had been killed. This approximates closely to 200,000 dead widely quoted, including by Herman, to label the Indonesian action a case of genocide. Yet this report divides this 183,000 into two groups: firstly, 18,600 Timorese – only some 10 percent of the total – who were killed or disappeared (“political violence deaths”), and the remaining 90 percent who died “due to hunger and illness in excess of what would be expected due to peacetime mortality.” Note how closely the description of the vast majority of Timorese deaths due to war conditions resembles the description of the deaths *not* recorded in the RDC’s Bosnian study.

In other words, let’s be clear – and keep in mind that the Timorese figures may well underestimate the scale of killing there, as may also be true in Bosnia – from the available figures, there were 18,600 Timorese deaths directly attributable to killing in 24 years, compared to 97,000 Bosnian deaths directly due to killing in only 3.5 years.

But in any case, let’s leave aside the possible total numbers who died in Bosnia due to war-related causes, which likely are very similar to the widely quoted 200,000 or more. Let’s stick to the 100,000 or so found by the RDC. Let’s leave aside why 100,000 killed in 3.5 years becomes not very much of a big deal by the logic of the revisionists, but 5000 Palestinians killed between 2000 and 2006 is genocide etc. Just to clarify: I have no problem referring to Palestine as genocide, though, like with Bosnia, this description goes beyond the mere question of numbers dead, as we will see below re Bosnia. Let’s leave aside the question of how such craven hypocrisy is even possible. Let’s just deal with the 100,000 killed.

If you want to take that part of the package (ie, the “low” overall numbers), then you have to take the rest of package, which does not bear out the craven “civil war” fantasy at all. When judging these figures below, bear in mind that Bosniaks (Muslims) constituted 43% of Bosnia’s population, Serbs 30% and Croats 18%.

The 97,000 plus deaths to date comprise over 64,000 Bosniaks (65.8%), nearly 25,000 Serbs (25.6%) and 7700 Croats (8%), along with “others.” It is very obvious from this that Muslims (43% of the Bosnian population) are way over represented in the dead and the other two groups are underrepresented. But especially in terms of who was really killing whom, this is even clearer when civilian and military deaths are compared: The 33,000 Bosniak civilians killed constitute 83% of civilian deaths, the 4000 Serbs some 10% and the 2000 Croats 5.4%. Thus there were nearly 8.5 times the number of Bosniak civilians killed compared to Serb civilians. Put another way, over 50% of all Bosniak victims were civilians, compared to only 16% of Serb victims and 26% of Croat victims.

And even this is not the end of the story, because large numbers of Bosnians were officially listed by their families as being in the army as it was the only way to get a government subsidy. According to the RDC the civilian numbers are probably overall underreported compared to the military numbers:

“During our BBD project and other studies related to the registration of victims of war
it came to our attention that some victims reported as soldiers according to official
military lists, would be as well claimed civilians in civilian sources, and vice-versa. In
particular, some military records could have been created by authorities in response to
applications from the relatives of the deceased for the post-mortal benefits after the
deceased. Secondly, some families might have found it honourable to bury their
deceased among the defenders in military cemeteries or to publish their names on
defenders’ lists, even if the actual circumstances of death were not necessarily directly
related to combat. These practices likely lead to over-reporting of soldiers and underreporting of civilians in the sources. In consequence of these and other similar practices, civilians are in our opinion underrepresented in “Status in War”.”

Though Bosniak civilian deaths already vastly outnumber Serb/Croat deaths, it still appears likely that it is Bosniaks relatively underreported due to this problem, probably at the same overall ratio. In particular, even many of the 8000 plus Muslim men and boys slaughtered in captivity over a few days in Srebrenica in 1995 – ie the case unambiguously agreed to be “genocide” by the World Court – are here classified as “soldiers”. Tokaca explains that they in fact were not soldiers, but:

“This is a problem for the state to solve. For many families, the fact that one of its members was filed as a soldier in the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina was a matter of sheer survival. When these people were confronted with the choice between existence and a lie regarding the status of the victim, they opted for the lie. The only ones who could count on some kind of state support were members of the armed forces, or rather their families. The authorities themselves, however, have failed to confront the problem of civilian casualties. Throughout the past sixty years, in this country you could claim the status of a soldier on the basis of just two people’s testimony. I chose not to become involved with this problem.”

While it s unclear how many of these 8000 are here wrongly classified, Tokaca implies it is a significant number. Thus even just adding half this group to the Bosnian Muslim civilians their numbers jump to 9 times the number of Serb civilians killed. However you look at it, the reason the Bosnian Serb Army could overrun Srebrenica and slaughter 8000 captives was because the captives had no arms to defend themselves, not the usual definition of a “soldier”. Put another way, a surrendered soldier without a weapon would be listed as a ‘soldiers’ on the RDC list; though they were non-combatants when killed. Quite unlike Mladic’s forces that did the killing.

As the RDC explains:

“It is important to emphasize that “Status in War” does not provide correct insights in relation to victims of combat versus non-combat situations. Neither does it inform about legitimate victims of violations of the International Humanitarian Law or the Law of War. “Status in War” is a simple measure of whether or not a person was a member of a military/police formation at the time of death.”

But it does not stop there. There is no reason to assume that all Serb and Croat civilian casualties were killed by Bosnian government forces or Muslim militia. Certainly some were, no-one has ever denied that violations were also carried out by the defenders, in the same way as other oppressed and terrorized groups, such as Palestinians, Tamils, Kurds etc often resort to attacks on civilians on the other side, or even their own civilians, such as the Iraqi resistance. One is justifying any of these cases, but the issue is what the overall nature of the conflict is, and the overall picture is clear from all above.

But we need to remember also that tens of thousands of Serbs and Croats remained alongside their Muslim and mixed Bosnian friends and relatives in cities such as Sarajevo and Tuzla throughout the war, which were besieged the entire time by the Chetniks from the hills above. The daily artillery barrages into the cities from Serb chauvinists did not spare Serb civilians living there. There is thus little doubt that a significant proportion of the Serb and Croat civilian deaths were actually at the hands of the Bosnian Serb Army. For example, one fifth of all Croat civilian deaths occurred in Sarajevo (440 of over 2000), and some 1000 Serb civilians died in that city, one quarter of all Serb civilian deaths. Given the civilian casualty numbers in Sarajevo (4000 Muslims, 1000 Serbs and 440 Croats) and the original proportions of the three groups in the Sarajevo population (Muslims 50%, Serbs 28%, Croats 7%), it seems highly likely that the great bulk of these Serb and Croat civilian deaths were due to killing by the Bosnian Serb Army.

Other facts are worth noting. While Serb and Croat military deaths are higher than civilian deaths by a long margin during every month of the 3.5 year war, among Bosniaks, while this pattern also holds for the middle of the war – 1993-94 – Bosnian civilian deaths outnumber military deaths in both crucial years, 1992 (the initial genocide) and 1995 (the year of the Srebrenica genocide). In particular, Bosniak civilian deaths in the first four months of the war – April to August – are massive by comparison with most other figures of any side, except for the (again) Bosniak figures for July 1995.

Significantly, looking at Serb civilian death figures over the 43 months, the only real ‘spike’ is in September 1995 – ie right at the end of the war – when the Croatian army, having driven the Serbian occupation army (and the Serb civilian population) out of its Krajina region in August, then crossed the border into Bosnia and drove back the BSA from some heavily Serb-populated regions adjoining Croatia. This is certainly not to justify the actions of the Tudjman regime and the Croatian chauvinists, who were a carbon copy of their Serbian cousins, and in any case were allied with them against Bosnia throughout most of the war. However, the fact that 400 of the 4000 Serb civilian victims were killed right at the end of the war (600 in September and October) tells us much more about ‘what goes round comes round’ than about the causes and nature of the overall conflict.

The number of female civilians killed is also an indication, given they are less likely to be confused with soldiers. Of the 9300 female civilians killed, 7000 were Muslims (75%), 1500 Serbs (16%) and 730 were Croats (7%). Likewise, 3000 Muslim children were killed, compared to 218 Serbs and 172 Croats, thus Muslim children were killed at a rate of 15 to 1 compared to both other groups. This is even starker when the relative numbers of “soldiers” are taken into account among older children (15-18 years of age). Only 11% of Muslim child fatalities were officially soldiers, compared to 27% among Serbs and 30% among Croats.

Another major point refuting the simpleton “three sides civil war” where “all committed crimes” thesis is the fact that the extermination of Bosnian Muslims went hand in hand with cultural genocide, via the wholesale destruction of Muslim religious and cultural buildings, historic libraries and museums. According to noted authority on Islamic Studies, Michael Sells, the Chetnik forces destroyed the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with over “a million books, more than a hundred thousand manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of historical records” going up in flames. At the oriental Institute in Sarajevo, more than five thousand Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, from many parts of the Middle East, went up in flames. Much of the National Museum was destroyed (Michael Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996, pp1-3). Along with the wholesale destruction of mosques, this aimed at the complete eradication of Bosnian Muslim culture, ie cultural genocide.

The RDC gathered data about the devastation of cultural heritage and sacral complexes. According to their research, “917 sacral complexes belonging to the Islamic Community were totally destroyed, while 731 were lightly or heavily damaged,” that is, a total of 1648 Muslim mosques or other structures, attacked by (mostly) Serb but also Croat chauvinists (many were hundreds of years old, and many were turned into parking lots), compared to “311 structures of Catholic (ie Croat) Community were destroyed or damaged, as well as 34 belonging to the Orthodox (ie Serb) Community and 7 to Jewish Community” (http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus.htm). Can there still be any doubt: the number of Muslim holy places destroyed or damaged was over 5 times that of Croat holy places and *50 times* that of Serb holy places.

The “all three sides are guilty” school ought to meditate on the fact that a stroll down the main road in Sarajevo or Tuzla, before, during or after the war, would be enough to bring you to quite intact Orthodox and Catholic Churches with crowds of Serb and Croat worshippers entering and leaving. In fact it is no exaggeration to say that no Serbian Orthodox or Croatian Catholic Churches were destroyed in government controlled areas, though the main Serbian Orthodox Church in Sarajevo was damaged by shelling from the Chetnik besiegers. “Civil war” my foot.

The RDC also notes that “850 villages were totally destroyed; 214 attacks against hospitals and other health facilities were registered as well as 132 attacks against other cultural and educational facilities (libraries, schools, universities)” (http://www.idc.org.ba/aboutus.htm). It does not specify the majority ethnic group in these villages or where these other buildings were located, but is there any reason to believe that the demography of destroyed villages would be any different to that of destroyed holy houses? Absolutely not, meaning the number of “totally destroyed” Bosnian Muslim villages was some double that of Palestinian villages in 1948.

The fact that the demography of these destroyed villages would be similar to those of destroyed holy places, and destroyed people, should not come as a surprise to anyone who actually knows anything about the Bosnian war and its geography and demography, despite the totally dishonest obfuscation by the embittered revisionists.

After all, while Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zenica, Srebrenica, Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac and countless other Bosnian towns and cities full of civilians were encircled, besieged, cut off from the world, starved and bombed on a daily basis for 3.5 years by heavily armed Serb nationalists, could our pro-Chetnik friends tell us exactly which Serbian towns were besieged and bombed by Bosnian Muslim forces? None, of course. Let’s look at this question more deeply.

Serbs made up 30% of Bosnia, Croats 18%, Muslims 43% and mixed Bosnians around 10%. Within the first few months of the Bosnian war, the Serbian nationalist forces had taken control of 70% of Bosnia and ethnically cleansed a million non-Serbs who just happened to live there. They kept control of this amount of territory for 3.5 years until Bosnian government forces pushed them back to about 50% in late 1995. The US intervened at that point that the Bosnian forces were for the first time on the offensive, making sure the government forces were not able to take back any more ethnically cleansed land, as the golden 50/50 figure for the partition of Bosnia was the US and Milosevic figure.

In 1993, the Bosnian Croat nationalists, who were allied to the Bosnian Serb nationalists, also conquered about 15-20% of Bosnia, thus together the two allied chauvinist armies had 85-90% of Bosnia, while the government forces – representing the Muslim duality of the population, the mixed Bosnians who obviously couldn’t fit in either of the racist states, and large numbers of Serbs and Croats who preferred to keep living next to their Muslim neighbours and relatives rather than shift to some racist hell – only had control of some 10-15% of the country. At the end of 1993, after circumventing the imperialist arms embargo enough to acquire small numbers of Iranian arms, the Bosnian government smashed the Croat chauvinists, but they still held onto Western Herzegovina which had a solid Croat majority, maybe about 10% of the country. Thus even after this, the government forces still had no more than 20% of the country.

How is this possible? Don’t these figures in themselves tell us something about who had absolute power and who at bottom was the oppressor and aggressor? How can this situation make sense if one really thinks it was a fairly even sided “civil war” and if one wants to believe that civilian casualties were fairly evenly spread, and that “the figures and the ethnic breakdown, ratio of civilians and soldiers killed would be the expected death rates in a civil war, reflecting the balance of power on each side” as ‘one poster claimed? High time to toss revisionist rubbish where it belongs.

The final point is this: if it was just “three sides” fighting each other, then it’s strange this wasn’t also occurring in Serbia itself, with its Muslim, Croat, Hungarian and Albanian minorities, indeed where both the Sanzak Muslims and Presevo Albanians had voted in autonomy or independence referendums in 1992; the fact that it was only Bosnia and Croatia being destroyed and ripped above by massively superior Serbian regime firepower gives the neat, simple answer to this “mystery”: the wars in Bosnia and Croatia were not “civil wars”.

How did it all this happen? Because the Bosnian Serb Army had overwhelming military superiority. For example, in late 1994, they had 330 tanks, 800 artillery pieces, 400 armoured personnel carriers and 37 military aircraft, while the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina (ie government forces) had 40 tanks, “a few” artillery pieces, 30 armoured personnel carriers and no aircraft. The Bosnian Croat forces had 75 tanks, 200 artillery pieces, no APCs or aircraft. Given that through most of the war the Serb and Croat nationalists were either officially or unofficially allied, this represents enormous superiority over the government forces. Even when they were not officially allied, the Croat nationalists never carried out any joint fighting with the Bosnian government forces against the Serb nationalists except at the very beginning and very end of the war. Thus at best it was the overwhelmingly superior Serb nationalist forces versus the extremely ill-equipped government forces. Even if a pro-Serb propagandist were to dishonestly put together the Croat and government forces, they were still way, way overwhelmed by the Serb nationalists.

How did the Bosnian Serb Army “just happen” to have such absolute superiority, since it was “just a civil war between 3 ethnic groups”? Answer: because it wasn’t “just a civil war between 3 ethnic groups”. When there was one Yugoslavia, there was one army, a military machine the 4th biggest in Europe with masses of advanced weaponry. This belonged to all Yugoslavs, but when it broke up it came under the control of Serbia, as Serbs had absolutely dominated the officer caste. All non-Serb officers quit when the federal army began to be unconstitutionally used as an arm of Greater Serb war aims.

Still, how did the massive resources of the federal army, based in Serbia itself, get to the Bosnian Serb Army, which was in Bosnia?

Firstly, because it had unconstitutionally began arming the Chetnik military groups in both Croatia and Bosnia from late 1990, in order to prepare their secession from those republics.

Secondly, because at the end of the Federal government/ Serbian attack on Croatia (July-December 1991), former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance had negotiated an end to that war that allowed the Yugoslav federal army (now entirely Serbian) to take all its advanced weaponry that it had been using in Croatia to destroy that country back into “Yugoslavia”. However, at that time, Bosnia was still in “Yugoslavia”. If you look at the geography, you will see they took their weaponry into Bosnia, not Serbia, and there delivered it to the Bosnian Serb Chetnik forces, who, even months before they launched their own war, had cut out four zones inside Bosnia and taken them under their exclusive control. There can be no doubt that Vance and the US government did this in order to deliver Bosnia to Milosevic.

Thirdly, even after UN recognition of Bosnia in April 1992 and the outbreak of war there, for the first 2 months of the war it was not even theoretically a “civil war” – the Yugoslav army attacked most of the regions throughout Bosnia with its massive firepower, “softening” the areas up for the Bosnian Serb Chetniks to move in for the kill. Actually, not even they were only Bosnian Serbs – fascist militias included those of arch racist Vojislav Seselj of the Serbian Radical Party of * Serbia *, coalition partner with Milosevic’s party in government, and of Serbian mafia leader ‘Arkan’. And it was in those decisive first few months of the war that the “Bosnian Serbs” conquered the bulk of their territory.

Fourthly, even when the ‘Yugoslav’ army was officially withdrawn by Milosevic, a couple of months into the war, it left its massive weapons supplies it had brought from Croatia with the Bosnian Serb Army. In any case, there was no way of ever checking that the ‘Yugoslav’ army had all left; some suggest around 20% of them remained, and various fascist militias from Serbia definitely remained. In any case, the ‘Yugoslav’ government and army back in Serbia paid the salaries of the Bosnian Serb officers, such as Mladic, throughout the war, and continued to supply them with arms, spare parts and oil. Imagine what kind of “having nothing to do with what the Bosnian Serbs do” this is. We generally hold the US and other western governments responsible when they are arming some brutal tyrant suppressing his people. Now imagine a situation where in addition, the US was directly paying the salaries of the officers of, say, Suharto’s Indonesia, throughout the genocide there. From all these leftists, we would never hear the end of it, and quite rightly. Yet in exactly the same case – where Serbia was paying the salaries of the officers of the BSA – they all throw their hands up and look all innocent and ask what could the Serbian government of the good white European Christian man Milosevic possibly have to do with the actions of “the Bosnian Serbs” in a “civil war” in “another country”??!!

Thus this was no more a “civil” war between “Serbs” and “Muslims” where “both sides are equally guilty” than the war between the enormous, massively armed Indonesian army and the East Timorese resistance fighters was a “civil war” between “Indonesians” and “Timorese” where “both sides are equally guilty”.

Briefly on to Kosova, the revisionist set like to claim that “only” 2000 died based on some warped “body count” method. Yet they are wrong even on this. They selectively quote Del Ponte talking about over 2000 bodies being dug out of some 200 mass graves in the first summer of digging, but they “forget” that following the next summer of digging she reported 4000 bodies, but these were only those bodies in a select 529 “mass graves”, no claim was made that this was every dead body in Kosova. There was no law that said that every Albanian killed had to be placed in one of these 529 select “mass graves”. What about all the individual graves, indeed, all the individuals killed not in a grave until their relatives could return and bury them? How many were they? Yet even with actual bodies and graves, our apologists here quoting “2000” also forget the 1100 Albanian bodies found in mass graves in Serbia itself and gradually returned to Kosova, and we don’t know how many more there might be since the Serb government halted the search years ago. Just with that we have 5000 bodies, plus 3/4 of the 2500 missing, so around 7000 killed, leaving aside those not in these specific graves.

The respected British medical journal the ‘Lancet’ did the only thorough survey I know of (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673600024041/fulltext), which showed that 12,000 Albanians (specifically the Albanian toll) had been killed and 4000 missing. If say about 2000 of the missing were later returned from Serbia as prisoners or turned up late, that leaves about 14,000 deaths, of which 12,000 occurred after the NATO bombing began. This is obviously yet another good reason to oppose NATO’s aggression, which obviously brought on a far more vicious attack against the Albanians than Slobo had been politically capable of before, but that us no excuse for those who actually carried it out – 12,000 killed in 11 weeks is pretty impressive. The Lancet is hardly a sucker for US imperialism – their highly respected study on Iraq showed that by 1996, there had been 665,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths since the US invasion.

Leftists widely quote the latter study; wouldn’t it be a nice day if for once the hypocrisy could be dropped, or become a little less rank, and quote the former study as well.

By Mchael Karadjis

The issue of the death camps in Bosnia in 1992 continually arises as one of the big issues raised by various revisionists and apologists for Serbian nationalism. Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, Ed Herman have all played the game of pretending these camps were “fake”. One of their co-thinkers, Michael Collon, summarised the argument in a ridiculous ‘Milosevic media quiz’ he penned. Collon writes:

“YES. Fabricated by Bernard Kouchner and Médecins du Monde, this image showed some ‘prisoners’ held, seemingly, behind barbed wire. One of them had terribly protruding ribs … But the whole thing was faked and taken from a report by British TV channel ITN. The trickery became obvious when one viewed the footage shot at the same time by a local TV news crew. In reality, the British camera had been deliberately placed behind the two lonely strands of barbed wire that formed a fence surrounding an old enclosure for farming equipment. The ‘prisoners’ were on the ‘outside’ of the barbed wire. Free because they were refugees in this camp to escape the war and the militias who would force them to fight. In the complete film, the only prisoner who speaks English declares to the ITN journalist three times that they are being well treated and are safe. The man with the protruding ribs (gravely ill) was called to the foreground when all his mates looked to be in too good a shape. Kouchner’s montage was a gross falsehood.”

These confident assertions derive ultimately from the “research” conducted by a bizarre left-right, “red”-brown British cult called ‘Living Marxism’ (LM, about who, more below) which had appointed itself chief attorney for the far-right Serbian chauvinist regimes of Milosevic/Seselj and Karadzic. This “research” had come to a head with the publication of a famous article by one of their members, a guy called Thomas Deuchmann, titled ‘The picture that fooled the world’. This article alleged that the ITN journalists had “faked” the stories about the death camps. For the naïve among the left, and those who wanted to be convinced, this article was all that was needed.

In reality, the article is a pack of lies, based on the “evidence” of a bloke who first went to Bosnia in 1997, that is, two years after the end of the war, and five years after the events in question, by which time all the remnants of the death camps were gone. He picked up his views by talking to a couple of local Serbs, and from footage shot at the same time by a local TV news crew, that is, the footage shot by the Serbian state media, allegedly “at the time,” which however Deutchman did not see until 5 years later. I suppose, that is, after plenty of time to doctor it, or even invent it.

A great deal has been made about whether the fence was around the prisoners or an enclosure around the journalists, that the prisoners were looking into, based on which side of the fence the barbed wire was on and other such trivia. The answer appears inconclusive, but it is largely irrelevant. More relevant are the assertions deriving from this, like those Collon makes above: that the prisoners were “treated well” according to one prisoner, that the prisoners were “free because they were refugees in this camp to escape the war and the militias who would force them to fight,” and that it was only one “gravely ill” prisoner who was very thin, who they zeroed in on, while his mates were “in good shape.”

This primitive Goebbelesque stuff is an eyesore coming from anywhere on the left, and as Goebbelesque as any of the exaggerated use of the ITN material by tabloids. Anyone who wants to know about the kinds of hideous tortures and daily horrific murders that went on in these death camps only has to look at the very extensive documentation at the Hague, or Red Cross, or Amnesty, or the UN, based on the testimony of thousands of witnesses. And what this testimony shows is that Serbian-run death camps such as Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje, Sanski Most, Brcko, Foca etc represented some of the ugliest events of modern history.

“Free” indeed. Whether they were surrounded by barbed wire or not was thus irrelevant; even if they weren’t, if they had tried to escape, they would have been target practice for the sadistic guards. As for the photos, if you look at enough of them you will see loads of people as skinny as Alic; the suggestion that other prisoners were “in good shape” is abominable.

Perhaps just looking at the three photos on this page http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.com/2006/07/moral-equivalism-is-flawed.html might already show up the lie of the “single” allegedly “gravely ill” man.

Anyone who wants to read about these monstrous crimes, these concentration camps, can try these pages from the report of the UN Commission of Experts:

http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-05.htm#Debut includes Omarska
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-06.htm#Debut includes Keraterm and Trnopolje
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-07.htm#III.A.67 includes Sanski Most
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-03.htm#III.A.25 includes Foca (also a rape camp)
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-02.htm#III.A.13 includes Brcko

Anyone reading these reports will soon become aware of the level of complete moral corruption of the genocide-denying wing of the left represented by the LM cult and their followers.

I think Ed Vulliamy himself puts it most eloquently himself when describing the irrelevance of LM’s obsession with the wire being on which side of the fence, when compared to the stark reality of these death camps. Referring to the trial at which Deutchman’s bizarre LM group lost the case against ITN, he says (http://www.guardian.co.uk/itn/article/0,2763,184815,00.html):

“Of course Living Marxism was unable to offer a single witness who had been at Trnopolje, the camp they claimed to be a fake, on that putrid afternoon of August 5, 1992. Indeed, they were unable to produce any witnesses at all. Unlike any member of Living Marxism or their sympathisers, I was there with ITN’s cameras that day. We went to two camps: Omarska and Trnopolje.

“Living Marxism does not like to mention Omarska: there, we saw little, but enough: skeletal men drilled across a yard and devouring watery stew like famished dogs before being bundled out. One man said: “I do not want to tell any lies, but I cannot tell the truth.”

“The truth emerged with time. Omarska turned out to be the kind of place where one prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off another, who had a live pigeon stuffed into his mouth to stifle the screams as he died in agony. The yard at Omarska was a killing field, prisoners obliged to load the mutilated corpses of their friends on to trucks by bulldozer.

“Trnopolje was a marginally less satanic place, some of whose prisoners were transferred from other hideous camps to await forced deportation. Others were rounded up and herded there like cattle, or had even fled there to avoid the systematic shelling and burning of their homes. Unknown to us when we pulled up on the road, in disbelief at the sight before us, it was the former group that was held captive behind the now celebrated barbed wire fence.

“At the time I paid little attention to what would become Living Marxism’s myopic obsessions: such as which side of which pole the old barbed wire or fresh barbed wire was fixed. There were more important matters, such as the emaciated Fikret Alic’s (accurate and vindicated) recollections of the night he had been assigned to load the bodies of 250 men killed in one night at yet another camp.

“If it is still of any remote interest, I will say this: I now know the compound in which these terrified men were held captive to have been surrounded on one side by recently reinforced barbed wire, on two sides by a chain-link fence patrolled by menacing armed thugs and on a fourth side by a wall. But so what? This was a camp – I would say a concentration camp – and they were its inmates.

“What does it take to convince people? The war ground on, the British foreign office and Living Marxism in perfect synergy over their appeasement of the Serbs while other, worse camps were revealed. The bench in The Hague issued its judgment on Trnopolje in 1997: a verdict that described the camp as infinitely worse than anything we reported – an infernal place of rape, murder and torture. Witness after witness confirmed this. The Financial Times enthusiastically re-iterated Living Marxism’s claims of a fabrication, but published a hasty and grovelling retraction when it looked at LM’s non-evidence.”

Deutchman’s cult, the so-called ‘Living Marxism’, was a grotesque outfit, of which, at a certain point after then end of the 1990s, the entire leadership turned completely counterrevolutionary overnight. Since this would seem impossible based on the laws of probability, the only logical explanation is that they already were, and their bizarre tactics, of turning themselves into spokespeople for Serbian ethnic cleansing, were designed to make the left look ridiculous. George Monbiot does an excellent job on this group of right-wing extremists:

The Invasion of the Entryists
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1102753,00.html

Bear in mind that it was the fake propaganda of this cult that was behind much of the “information” that is now used by many of the genocide-denying wing of the “left” and right, who continually retail the same points and continually reference each other, with silly stories often going back to LM.

For the most complete description of the entire issue of the camps and the ITN story and the LM idiocy about it, people must read:

‘Atrocity, memory, photography: imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia – the case of ITN versus Living Marxism’
http://www.virtual-security.net/attrocity/atrocity1.htm#64

Anyone who hasn’t read that has simply done no justice to the story. It is superbly well-documented and argued stuff: nothing like Deuchmann’s chaff.

Now, that sections of the media may have engaged in ‘demonisation’ in the way they presented news is not in dispute: this commonly occurs. However, reporting on actual death camps is not ‘demonisation’; it is the perpetrators ‘demonising’ themselves. This goes for any conflict. The one thing that can be criticized is some of the sensationalist British media, which blew up the stories of the ITN journalists with screaming headlines about “the new Holocaust” featuring in particular the emaciated figures. The journalists themselves criticized this usage of their material. For example, Vulliamy states:

“Let no one for one minute compare Omarska to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Such a course is useless and dangerous. No one was more angry than I at headlines such as “Belsen 1992”. They merely played into the hands of those seeking to downplay and even deny what had happened in the Serbian camps.” Including, that is, the LM idiots.

But what was LM really concerned about? Was it that the exaggerated way the tabloids used it was cover for some imperialist plot to intervene in the war and launch a war against Serbia?

Some leftists mistakenly took this tabloid sensationalism for the policy of the UK ruling class. In reality, it had nothing to do with UK Tory government policy, which was cravenly pro-Serbian throughout the Bosnia war, just as much as its cheerleaders in LM, indeed the Tories and LM had the same policy; rather it was just that wing of the media which specialize in this kind of hyper sensationalist “journalism” as a rule.

Was the US preparing a war against Serbia, or even to intervene in Bosnia? Since we are talking about 1992, and US intervention in Bosnia did not occur until 1995 (and that essentially to save Milosevic’s arse and give him half of Bosnia on a plate), why would they be making propaganda back in 1992? The answer: they weren’t. And moreover: if the US had wanted to bomb in 1992, using the concentration camp images, it could have easily, with significant support, without even having to resort to much propaganda beyond the reality.

So what was actually happening at the time regarding the US and these death camps? In fact, the US government actively tried to deny their existence until the last moment, until the journalist Roy Gutman thrust them into the international media and into their faces in August 1992. They were clearly aware of these camps: a May 29 report by the International Society for Human Rights had already listed many with graphic details (International Society for Human Rights, British section, Human Rights and Serbia, 1992) and in July the Bosnian government issued a list of 105 such camps and of 9300 deaths in them (Bosnian Government Information Office, ‘List of Concentration Camps and Prisons on the Territory of the Republic of BH,’ July 28, 1992). The US government was clearly aware of this (United States, House of Representatives, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Developments in Yugoslavia and Europe – August 1992, 102nd Congress, Second Session, Washington, GPO, August 4, 1992, p6). US intelligence had also been aware of these camps before this, and the US embassy in Belgrade had sent regular wires to the State Department based on Red Cross and other information (Vulliamy, E, “Bosnia: The Crime of Appeasement,” International Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 1, 1998, p79). The Red Cross had already visited 4000 people in 10 death camps from July 9 and had reported it all to the UN (Developments in Yugoslavia and Europe – August 1992, op cit, p50-51). Even after Gutman’s revelations, the first reaction of US leaders was to deny their existence. Only once they became undeniable did western leaders demand Red Cross examination of these camps; even then they did not demand their closure.

In the US Congress on August 4, efforts by opposition members to bring up the evidence that had been amassed about the camps for months were met with the continual response by government spokesman Thomas Niles, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs, that the US government “cannot confirm” such reports as “we do not have thus far substantiated information.” When asked “Do you have confirmation that some killing and some torture has taken place?” he replied “No, I cannot confirm that.” “You cannot even confirm a single case?” “I cannot” (ibid, p7, and then continually throughout the report. The questioner was Lee Hamilton, chair of the subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East). Amazing – Niles sounds just like Parenti, Ramsey Clarke etc.

Every question throughout the session about what the US would do to ensure delivery of humanitarian relief was met with legalistic arguments about needing to get a consensus through the UN Security Council, even though the Security Council had already passed resolutions authorising the use of force, and the US has never worried about legalisms. As one congressman pointed out, “The President wasn’t worried about legalisms when it came to Saddam Hussein. President Reagan wasn’t worried about legalisms when it came to a number of countries, including Grenada. So don’t put up the shield of legalisms,” (p52). Asked about the continuing arms embargo against Bosnia, Niles replied that the delivery of food aid to Sarajevo was “the best guarantee that the Serbs will not succeed in conquering the city” (p34).

Finally, the revisionist set often claims that “all sides” had camps in which they committed atrocities. For example, Collon claims “There certainly were camps in Bosnia. Not for extermination, but rather for the preparation of prisoner exchanges. Violations of Human Rights were committed here. But why were the UN reports on this subject hidden from us? They accounted for six Croat camps, two Serb camps and one Muslim camp.”

It is difficult to know whether Collon is lying or just stupid. Only two Serb-run camps in Bosnia were there?

According to the Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Expertsestablished pursuant to security council resolution 780 (1992), “The reports reviewed alleged a total of 677 camps within BiH. Among those camps, 333 (49.2 per cent) were alleged to have been controlled by Bosnian Serbs; 83 (12.2 per cent) by Bosnian Muslims; 51 (7.5 per cent), by Croats; 31 (4.6 per cent) by both Croats and Muslims; 5 (.7 per cent), by private parties; and 174 (25.7 per cent) by unidentified forces (http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VIII-01.htm#III). Thus if we leave out the “unidentified,” then Serb forces ran two thirds of all the camps.

Of course, not all these were necessarily death camps. Some may have even been the kind of holding camps that Collon describes. Referring to the 960 camps in all of former Yugoslavia (in which the breakdown of ‘ownership’ is basically similar to that of Bosnia), the report states regarding the numbers held and the severity of the crimes recorded:

“As the above statistics and following discussion indicate, the number of camps and reported violations in camps controlled by the Government of BiH and its army are the fewest among the warring factions, irrespective of the ethnic or religious background of the detainees held. The number of reported violations by the Croatian Government, the Croatian Army, and the Croatian Defence Council is larger, particularly against Serbs in Krajina and in eastern and western Slavonia and against Muslims from BiH in Herzegovina. The period of time during which those camps were operated in each of these contexts is relatively limited. The two warring factions identified above are, however, reported to have committed far fewer numbers of violations than those committed by the Serb forces and those working on their behalf, whether in Croatia or BiH. Camps operated by Serbs in BiH are by far where the largest numbers of detainees have been held and where the harshest and largest number of violations occurred.”

No-one has ever denied that Croats and Muslims also had camps, and that massive human rights violations also occurred there. The most important issue, apart from the huge difference in extent of these camps and the abuses, is that the Bosnian government immediately sent Muslim officers to the Hague when they were first accused of running a terrible camp outside Sarajevo where many Serbs and Croats were killed. In fact, for all the alleged “anti-Serb bias” of the Hague, these Muslims were the very first from former Yugoslavia to be convicted by the Hague, while Serb and Croat butchers of a dramatically higher level were – and are – still running around.

By Michael Karadjis

Jerome Fitzgerald (“Write on”, GLW #348) correctly points to the importance of history and the need to get our facts right. Unfortunately, he repeats some common views on the conflicts in Yugoslavia which lack any basis in fact.

Fitzgerald states that Kosovo has been part of Serbia for 1000 years. A host of reactionary regimes use such irrational “history” to justify rule over regions inhabited by oppressed nations.

There were no states in the modern sense 1000 years ago. The Albanians’ descendants, the Illyrians, preceded the Slavs in the region by 2000 years. In the 14th century, there was a large Serbian-ruled empire which dominated many nationalities, including Albanians — this is the origin of the idea that Kosovo has “always been part of Serbia”.

Serbia rebelled against the Ottomans in the 19th century and gained independence. The other peoples had their own movements for independence, including the Albanians. There were no “natural” or “legal” borders, just regions of greater or lesser concentrations of one or another ethnic group.

The strongest new capitalist states — Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia — seized the remaining Ottoman possessions in Europe, including Kosovo and Macedonia, in 1912-13.
Kosovo’s population was overwhelmingly Albanian and resisted furiously. The Serbian monarchy was pitiless in its suppression. According to the investigators of the Carnegie Commission: “Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind … with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians.”

Following World War I, under Anglo-French auspices, a new Yugoslav state was formed for the south Slavic peoples, headed by the Serbian monarchy. The monarchy suppressed the aspirations all other non-Serb peoples. The outlawed Communist Party called for the right to self-determination and the radical restructuring of Yugoslavia into an equal federation of all its peoples.

The Albanians were not Slavs, and they were Muslims. For those reasons, the ruling dynasty felt they were best eliminated. The Albanian population was reduced by half, as about 400,000 people fled to Albania or Turkey.

In World War II, the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia swept across every part of the country, led by Tito and his Communist partisans.

Fitzgerald claims, “the Serbs fought against Hitler’s fascists, all the others in the Balkans were on the Nazi-fascist Hitler’s side”. Unfortunately, this argument is widely believed by many on the left, who, in a most “un-left” fashion, confuse whole nations with political currents, as if nations don’t consist of different social classes.

Hence all Serbs are seen as progressive (“only Serbs” fought against Hitler), while all Croats are fascists and supposedly supported the genocidal Nazi puppet state, led by the Ustashe, in German-occupied Croatia.

In Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, there were two main puppet states, the Ustashe in Croatia and the regime of Serb General Nedic in Serbia, which contained the core of the pre-war Serb monarchical state. “Serbian” Belgrade was the first city in Europe to be declared Judenfrei (free of Jews). The regime formed an organisation called the Chetniks which terrorised its opponents.

Serbian Chetnik forces initially fought against the Ustashe regime, as its goal of a “Greater Serbia” was in conflict with the Ustashe’s “Greater Croatia”. But the Chetniks’ main enemy was the partisans and they eventually became full-scale collaborators of the Nazis.
After the war, Tito’s Communist government executed the Chetnik leader Mihailovic.
Partisans

Just as collaborators existed on all sides, so did partisans. The overwhelming bulk of resistance activity occurred in Bosnia and Croatia. According to Yugoslav statistics, at the height of the war in late 1943, there were 122,000 partisans active in Croatia, 108,000 in Bosnia, and only 22,000 in Serbia.

Of course many partisans in Croatia and Bosnia were ethnic Serbs, but many were from other nationalities — in Croatia, 61% of partisans were Croats and 28% Serbs. While figures do not exist for Bosnia, a large proportion were also Muslims, who were being slaughtered by all sides.

Only the partisans promised a Bosnian republic within their proposed Yugoslav federation. The Muslim clergy in 1941 issued resolutions condemning atrocities being carried out by Ustashe and Chetniks, and condemned persecution of Jews and Serbs. Bosnian Muslims suffered the highest per capita losses of any nationality in Yugoslavia.

Tito himself was a Croat, and current Croatian president Tudjman, whatever his right-wing sins today, was a partisan leader in the war. The last Yugoslav federal president, the Croat Stipe Mesic, had much of his family murdered by the Ustashe. In Yugoslavia’s dying days, Slobodan Milosevic slandered Mesic as Ustashe and blocked his presidency.

Tito’s Yugoslav federation was a big advance over capitalist Yugoslavia for the non-Serb nationalities, because they now had their own republics. Kosovo’s Albanians, although one of the main population groups in Yugoslavia, were not granted a republic, but merely autonomy within the Serbian republic.

However, under pressure from the rising Albanian national movement, Tito upgraded Kosovan autonomy in the 1974 constitution, allowing it equal representation with the six republics on the federal level.

This move was the target of the rising Serb nationalist movement in the late 1980s, which, as “market forces” crept into both the economic system and the ideology behind it, aimed to create a new “Greater Serbia” for the rising Serbian bourgeoisie.

Milosevic came to power on this wave, and set about destroying all his opponents who still believed in Tito’s slogan “brotherhood and unity”. The line went that the entire post-war federation was a gigantic anti-Serb plot hatched by the Vatican and the Comintern in the person of the Croat Communist Tito.

In 1989, the Milosevic forces unilaterally and illegally abolished Kosovo’s constitutional autonomy, beginning the process that led to the end of Yugoslavia.

In Kosovo, Milosevic introduced wage differentials between Serb and Albanian workers, sacked hundreds of thousands of Albanian workers from the state sector, left hundreds of Albanian doctors and thousands of Albanian teachers without jobs, and hence Albanians without these services, and made the Serb language and the Cyrillic alphabet compulsory in all official dealings. The Albanian majority have the right to fight such apartheid.

The Chetniks were revived, and this is the origin of the parties who are now Milosevic’s “Socialist” Party’s coalition partners. Milosevic’s party dumped its communist ideology in favour of nationalism.

The main Chetnik parties are the Serbian Revival Movement led by Yugoslav deputy prime minister Vuk Draskovic, which concentrates on monarchy, church and tradition, and the Serbian Radical Party led by Serbia’s vice-president Vojislav Seselj, which is violently racist.
Among the Bosnian Serbs, the party that led the genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims, the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) led by Radovan Karadzic, also harks from the Chetnik tradition. It is these forces that are “fascist”, not Serbs in general.

For example, in 1991, Seselj boasted in the Serbian parliament that his forces had gouged the eyes out of a dozen Croats and claimed the only solution was to “cut the throat of every Croat”.
Karadzic in late 1991 told the Bosnian parliament that unless Bosnia remained in Milosevic’s “Yugoslav” rump, the Bosnian Muslims “would disappear from the face of the Earth”. These fascist forces in coalition with Milosevic in the Serbian and Yugoslav governments allow him to keep power.

Serb opposition

On the other side, thousands of Serbs refuse to be drafted to fight in Kosovo, and during the Bosnian war, thousands of Serbs fought in the multi-ethnic Bosnian army alongside their Muslim and Croat comrades.

General Divjak, who led the defence of Sarajevo against the Chetniks, is a Serb. The Serb Civic Council was formed by Serbs who lived in government-controlled regions and refused to accept the Chetniks as their representatives at peace talks. The imperialist powers took no notice and only recognised the SDS.

In the part of Bosnia controlled by the SDS, half the Serb population fled so as not to be drafted into the Chetnik army. In Serbia proper, the Living in Sarajevo coalition, made up of a large assortment of anti-fascist Serbs, took action against the war. In Belgrade, 88% of draft-age men refused to heed the call-up.

Which Serbs are we with? Those anti-fascist Serbs, who continue in the partisan tradition, or those who continue the Chetnik tradition and hold power in Belgrade?

I agree with Fitzgerald’s opposition to the entry of NATO troops into Kosovo. However, when he “hopes the Serbs will fight again”, we must recognise that Serbs constitute only 10% of Kosovo’s population, so it is unclear how and where they will fight.

The illusion of many Albanians that NATO will “protect” them stems from the unbearable repression and massacres they have endured. However, the best protection is armed self-defence. Yet the role to be assigned to the NATO forces is the disarmament of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Milosevic and NATO may well come to blows over the former’s opposition to NATO troops on “his” territory, but this opposition is due to the embarrassment of seeing NATO doing his work for him!

Once NATO troops arrive, those who believe Kosovo was always part of Serbia can be assured it will remain that way. All the western powers are in total opposition to Kosovan independence — despite this being the wish of virtually the entire Albanian population.

by Michael Karadjis

Originally published in Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Issue 13, 1999, https://links.org.au/national-oppression-and-collapse-yugoslavia

Contents:

    No self-determination under socialism?

    Yugoslavia’s nations

    World War II

    Serbian postwar domination

    Rich republics?

    Recentralisation    

    The question of Kosova     

    The Croatian and Slovenian response       

    Imperialist policy  

    Bosnia

    Kosova in Greater Serbia  

    Footnotes   

The constitution of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, set up following the revolution that drove the Nazi occupation forces out of Yugoslavia in 1945, begins “The nations of Yugoslavia, proceeding from the right of every nation to self-determination, including the right to secession…” This was a formally correct, from the Leninist standpoint, approach adopted by the new Communist regime led by Tito.

In reality, this formal structure, while a huge advance for national rights over capitalist Yugoslavia, masked a growing Serbian domination of the federal bureaucracy and military high command, just as official socialism masked the rule of a Stalinist bureaucratic caste as in the rest of Eastern Europe. Essentially what occurred in the late 1980s was the culmination of this clash between Serb domination, pushed in a more naked way by the capitalist restorationist forces under Milosevic, and the official national equality of the federation.

In response to this Serb nationalist drive from the centre, the other nations of Yugoslavia began exercising their constitutional right to self-determination, first declaring their “sovereignty,” calling for the federation to became a looser confederation, and finally, when all else failed, holding independence referendums.

For Marxists, support for the right of Yugoslav nations to self-determination, regardless of their leaderships, should have been a fairly straightforward position, and not only because it was consistent with the Yugoslav constitution. Yet, for various reasons, a large section of the left either opposed it outright, essentially supporting the drive by the Milosevic regime to supposedly “hold Yugoslavia together,” or at best put an equals sign between the nationalism of the Serb regime, trying to strengthen its domination, and the nationalism of the other nations, trying to throw it off.

The peculiarities of the Yugoslav situation which led to these conclusions can be summarised as follows:

Firstly, there is the general confusion about whether the right to self-determination still applies in socialist states. What if the oppressed nations have pro-bourgeois leaderships that aim to break up the socialist state allegedly defended by the leaders of the oppressor nation?

Secondly, this problem was then transposed onto the Yugoslav situation in an incorrect way. It was assumed that the Yugoslav federal government and the Serbian Republic government were “defending socialism” while the Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian and Macedonian leaderships were more pro-capitalist. However, these assumptions are false.

Thirdly, it was commonly stated that Croatia and Slovenia were the “rich” republics who wanted to look after their own and not help the poorer republics. In trying to forcibly hold the federation together therefore, the Serbia regime was allegedly caring for the poorer republics.

Fourthly, it was assumed that western imperialism wanted to “break up” socialist Yugoslavia, and so naturally “encouraged secession” among the other republics. It was alleged that the “rich” republics would then be in a position to join the European Union without the weight of the poorer south.

Fifthly, this is all mixed with a view of history that, for much of the left, cannot help seeing “Serbs” as a whole as progressive and “Croats” as a whole as genetically fascist, due to conflicts in World War II half a century earlier. Apart from the non-Marxist view that entire nations are one thing or another, rather than being divided into different social classes and political currents, this was also a completely false reading of what happened in World War II.

A schema is then presented in which socialist Serbia tries to maintain a socialist, united Yugoslavia against imperialist backed, pro-capitalist rich republics eager to jump the queue and join the EU. The entire schema is completely false.

No Self-Determination Under Socialism?

Recognising that the balance of class forces was against the working class in the Baltic states in 1918, Lenin chose not to send the Red Army of the young Soviet republic in to help the Communist forces in these republics, where right wing regimes came to power. The Bolsheviks did not believe socialism could be imposed on the barrel of a gun; only the working classes in those states could carry out this task.

In the 1930s, following the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the revival of Great Russian oppression by the Stalinist regime, the issue again arose of the position revolutionaries would take towards movements for self-determination in the oppressed non-Russian republics. Trotsky’s view was clear. Calling for a “united, free, and independent workers’ and peasants’ Ukraine,” Trotsky pointed out that it was precisely the denial of the right to self-determination of the Ukraine by a “Communist” regime that has shifted the Ukrainian national movement to “the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques,” who had won over a section of the Ukrainian working class. On the other hand, an independent Ukraine would become “if only by virtue of its own interests, a mighty southwestern bulwark of the USSR”(1).

Yugoslavia’s Nations

There was no Yugoslavia at the beginning of the century, and no necessity for that particular state to arise, just as Marxists see no particular reason for it to exist today, other than the will of its peoples. Rather, the Balkans were a collection of many different peoples, fairly interspersed. The whole region had been under the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, but in the course of the nineteenth century, independent bourgeois states had arisen in Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia. A great swathe of the Balkans remained under Ottoman rule, including present day Albania, Kosova, Macedonia, Thrace, Bosnia and the Sanjak. In 1908, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized Bosnia, and in 1911, years of resistance by the Albanian people allowed them to set up a state on a part of Albanian ethnic territory. In 1912-13, the rest of the region was taken over by Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, oblivious to ethnic realities. Thus Serbia now incorporated the Slavic Muslim Sanjak, Kosova with its 80 percent Albanian majority, and 40 percent of Macedonia, with a solid ethnic Macedonian majority.

These borders drawn by force were officially recognised by the imperialist powers at the London Conference of 1913. Serbia was seen as a key ally of the British-French-Russian imperialist bloc in its impending clash with its German-Austrian rivals. Meanwhile, living under the Austro-Hungarian yoke were other south Slavs, the Slovenes, Croats and now Bosnians. In their own freedom struggle, the idea had emerged of the unity of all South Slavs, in a “Yugoslav” state. In practice this meant that these Hapsburg-ruled Slavic nations would unite with the expanded Serbian monarchy.

This “Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” was proclaimed in 1918 under Anglo-French auspices. It was a classic prisonhouse of nations. Macedonians were declared “South Serbs” and a ruthless campaign of forced assimilation continued for the next twenty years. Montenegro, which had been a small independent state, was abolished as a state and came under direct Serbian rule. Its population is ethnically Serb, but with a strong sense of their own identity. Similar oppression was directed against the Slavic Muslims of Bosnia and Sanjak, thousands of whom were driven to forced exile in Turkey.

The worst excesses occurred in Kosova, where the Albanian majority were not Slavic at all, and even worse were Muslim, in a land that Serb nationalists declared the cradle of their nation due to the presence of a large number of medieval Orthodox churches. While modern day Serb nationalists like to make the ridiculous claim that “Kosova has always been Serbia,” according to one reading of Turkish statistics of 1911, of the 912,902 residents of the Vilayet of Kosova, 743,040 (80.5 percent) were Albanians and 106,209 (11.5 percent) were Serbs (2). According to a more generous reading, Ottoman statistics put Orthodox Serbs at 21 percent of the population, still an absolute minority, and Austrian statistics in 1903 put it as high as 25 percent, the maximum claimed by any source (3). The discrepancy in claimed Ottoman figures is almost certainly due to the fact that the Ottomans did not do censuses of ethnic groups at all, but only of religious affiliation – ‘Orthodox’ was assumed to be ‘Serb’ by those reading the statistics.

The Albanians furiously resisted the occupation. The Serbian monarchy was pitiless in its suppression – according to the investigators of the Carnegie Commission, referring to the period immediately after the Balkan wars in 1912-13:

“Houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind – such were the means which were employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians” (4).

Another account was given by Lazer Mjeda, the Catholic Archbishop of Skopje, who noted that in Ferizaj only 3 Muslim Albanians over the age of 15 had been left alive, and that the population of Gjakova had been massacred despite surrendering. He described the scene in Prizren, which had also surrendered peacefully in the hope of being spared what was happening elsewhere in Kosova:

“The city seems like the Kingdom of Death. They knock on the doors of the Albanian houses, take away the men and shoot them immediately. In a few days the number of men killed reached 400. As for plunder, looting and rape, all that goes without saying; henceforth, the order of the day is: everything is permitted against Albanians, not only permitted, but willed and commanded” (5)

Between the two World Wars, the Albanian population dropped by half, with around 400,000 people forced to Albania or Turkey. The Yugoslav and Turkish regimes made a pact, as Turkey wanted to use the Muslim Albanians to colonise eastern Anatolia as an outpost against its own oppressed Kurds and Armenians. Albanians were ruthlessly uprooted: in one example, the entire Albanian population of upper Drenica (6,064 people) were dispossessed of their land in 1938. Some 15,000 Serb families – representing some 70,000 people, or about 10 percent of the total Kosova population – were moved in from Serbia proper as colonists and given large properties. Of 400,000 hectares of arable land in Kosova, these colonists were awarded 100,000 hectares. In 1928, Serbian official Djorje Krstic boasted that colonisation had boosted the percentage of Serbs in Kosova from 24 percent, which he claimed for 1919, to 38 percent (6).

In 1929, Serbian King Alexander dissolved parliament and the fiction of the state of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In its place was simply a unitary Yugoslavia, which the Serbian monarchy ruled with an iron fist. This resulted in increasing oppression of the Croats as well, who had previously been at least officially equal in the state. Croatian resistance was led by parties such as the Croatian Peasants Party, led by Stefan Radic, who was assassinated in parliament in 1928. Later, a right-wing nationalist group, the Ustashe, began gathering support among Croatian emigres, and gained support from Mussolini’s Italy. Ironically, the reason Mussolini was in conflict with Yugoslavia was that he had designs on the Dalmatian coast. Just how far the Ustashe was from an organization truly aiming at Croatia’s national liberation is revealed by the fact that Ante Pavelic, the Ustashe leader, agreed well in advance of World War II to cede the Dalmatian coast, part of Croatia, to Italian imperialism.

World War II

In World War II, a gigantic resistance movement against Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia swept across every part of the country, led by Tito and his Communist “Partisans.” The Communist Party advocated a new Yugoslavia, one based on an equal federation of Yugoslav nations, to replace the Serbian-ruled Yugoslav monarchy. The Partisans were drawn from all nations of Yugoslavia. While the initial group was composed largely of Serbs and Montenegrins, it rapidly spread beyond them, especially following the rapid crushing of a Partisan revolt in Serbia in late 1941. From then, the overwhelming bulk of resistance activity occurred in Bosnia and Croatia. According to Yugoslav statistics, at the height of the war in late 1943, there were 122,000 Partisans active in Croatia, 108,000 in Bosnia, and only 22,000 in Serbia (7). Of course, many Partisans in Croatia and Bosnia were ethnic Serbs. However, in Croatia 61 per cent of the Partisans were Croats, 28 per cent Serbs and the rest other nationalities (8). While figures don’t exist for Bosnia, it’s clear that a large proportion were Serbs, but a large proportion were also Muslims, as they were being slaughtered by all sides, and only the Partisans promised a Bosnian republic within their new proposed Yugoslav federation. The Muslim clergy in 1941 issued resolutions condemning atrocities being carried out by Croatian Ustashe and Serbian Chetniks, and explicitly condemned persecution of Jews and Serbs by the Ustashe (9).

While there is debate about the total numbers who died in World War II, the two most authoritative Yugoslav estimates were those made by the Serb Boguljub Kocovic and the Croat Vladimir Zerjavic, who both came out with figures of a little over a million people in all parts of Yugoslavia, both military and civilians. In both cases, the estimates of the numbers of Serbs among these is close to half the total, around 500,000, around 200,000 Croats and around 100,000 Muslims (10). With the slight differences between the two estimates, it appears that Serbs and Bosnian Muslims almost equally suffered the highest losses per head of population compared to the other nationalities.

The ignoring of the impressive Croatian contribution to the resistance by both left and right historians since World War II is all the more glaring when it is considered that Tito himself was a Croat, and current Croatian president Tudjman, whatever his right-wing sins today, was a Partisan leader in the war, and his brother was killed by the Ustashe. The last Yugoslav federal president, the Croat Stipe Mesic, had much of his family murdered by the Ustashe, even if in Yugoslavia’s dying days Milosevic scandalously slandered him as Ustashe and blocked his presidency.

Just as Partisans existed among all nationalities in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, so did collaborators. There were two main puppet states, the Ustashe in Croatia and the Nedic regime in Serbia. The Ustashe regime was called the “Independent State of Croatia” (NDH), but was neither independent, nor a state, nor in Croatia. Virtually the whole of Croatia’s Dalmatian coastline was annexed outright by Italian imperialism, and part of Croatian Slavonia given to pro-Axis Hungary. On the other hand, the whole of Bosnia was incorporated into the ‘NDH’, giving the Ustashe gangs the task of controlling this difficult mountainous region for the Nazis. The whole NDH was then divided into a German-occupied north and an Italian-occupied south.

While many Croats, after years of Serbian oppression, may have initially welcomed the idea of an “independent state,” the shine wore off rapidly. The sheer brutality of the Ustashe in its genocide against Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and Muslims and terror against Croat opponents, along with its willingness to hand over parts of Croatia, rapidly turned the mass of the Croatian population against it. Estimates of its support base among Croats range from as low as 2 percent to “barely exceeding 5 percent” of popular support, or “less than 10 percent of politically active Croats” (11) heavily based among returned émigrés. Indeed, so small was their support that the Nazis initially did not want them as their clients, despite their like-minded ideology, and approached the leader of the majority-backed Croatian Peasant Party, Vladko Macek, who refused to collaborate and was later imprisoned by the Ustashe.

Approximately half of all war-time deaths in Yugoslavia were in the NDH, where the genocidal attack on the Serb population in particular led to their historic national catastrophe, including but not exclusively at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp.

The regime of Serbian General Nedic contained the core of the pre-war Serb monarchial state. As the Nazis invaded in 1941, 545 prominent Serb leaders, businessmen and bourgeois intellectuals issued an “Appeal to the Serbian Nation,” calling for collaboration with the Nazis in order to fight the nation’s real enemy, communism (12). Its terror was similarly unlimited, and Belgrade was the first city in Europe to be declared “Judenfrei” (free of Jews). Muslims, Albanians and Gypsies were also important targets.

Aside from the Nedic regime’s own armed forces, the Serbian State Guard, it also had at its disposal several paramilitary groups, including the ‘Chetniks’ of Kosta Pecanac, ultra-right Serb nationalists who supported the eventual return of the Anglo-American backed Serbian monarchy but for the time being advocated collaboration with the Nazi occupiers against the Partisans, and the openly Serbian-Nazi ‘Zbor’ of Dimitrije Ljotic. Together these forces put some 30,000 troops at the disposal of the Nazis in Serbia, which was seeing relatively little resistance activity.

There was also a Chetnik movement theoretically independent of Nedic, led by Draga Mihailovic, operating more in the NDH. This Anglo-American backed Serb nationalist movement advocated the return of the pre-war Serbian royal family. These Chetnik forces, outside of Nedic’s control, initially opposed collaboration and fought against the Ustashe regime, as their aims for a Greater Serbia conflicted with the Ustashe aims of Greater Croatia. However, when the Croatian Partisan movement sprang up in Dalmatia, resisting the Ustashe-approved Italian annexation of Croatian territory there, the Italian occupiers began using the Chetniks against the Croatian Partisans. Before long, the Chetniks’ main war was against the Partisans, and they eventually became full-scale collaborators with the Nazis. Mihailovic was executed after the war by Tito’s regime for collaboration.

The program of even these ‘independent’ Chetniks was fascist in its own right, advocating the elimination of the Muslim population, and they massacred tens of thousands of Muslim villagers. Their aims were outlined as follows in 1941: “To cleanse the state territory of all national minorities and anti-national elements” and “to create a direct continuous border between Serbia and Montenegro and between Serbia and Slovenia, by cleansing Sandzak of its Muslim inhabitants and Bosnia of its Muslim and Croatian inhabitants” (13)

Serbian Domination of Post-War Yugoslavia

The new federation after 1945 consisted of six republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro), and two provinces (Kosova and Vojvodina), which both had autonomy within the Serbian republic. Each major nation had its own republic or province. Four republics – Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia – were clear nation states, while Montenegro was something of a second Serb republic. However, only Slovenia was relatively nationally homogenous, all the other republics having a mixture of nationalities alongside the dominant group. Borders were established as fairly as possible, but the very mixing of nationalities made it impossible to establish purely national states. Hence many Serbs, Croats, Muslims and Albanians lived outside of their assigned states. In the case of the republic of Bosnia, which was completely mixed between Muslim Slavs, Serbs and Croats, there was no dominant nation, though Muslims became the largest group.

Of the autonomous provinces in Serbia, Vojvodina had a slight Serb majority but with large Hungarian and Croatian minorities; in a sense its existence recognised the Hungarian “national minority,” not considered a “nation” because its nation state was Hungary. Similarly, Kosova’s autonomy signified the status of the Albanians as a “national minority,” whose nation state was Albania. However, there were some important differences. Firstly, unlike in Vojvodina, Albanians were the vast majority of the population of Kosova in 1945. Secondly, in sheer numbers, they were bigger than many of the “nations” of Yugoslavia, and growing.

Thirdly, Albanian Partisans had fought in World War II for the right to self-determination, including unity with Communist Albania. In the first major violation of the new impending federal order, Tito had gathered Serb Partisans together with large numbers of Chetniks (who came over following two amnesties declared by Tito in late 1944) and crushed the Kosovar Partisans. Tito and Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha had aimed for Albania to become part of the federation, which in Tito’s view would be a federation of all Balkan nations, not just those of pre-war Yugoslavia. As such, there could be no Kosovar republic, because it would eventually be part of the Albanian republic in Yugoslavia. As this never came to pass, Kosova was stuck in the highly unsatisfactory situation of autonomy inside Serbia. This lack of republican status, combined with Kosova’s drastically poorer position than all Yugoslav republics, made the Albanians an unambiguously oppressed nation in the new Yugoslavia.

While the new federation was a huge step forward for the other nations, it rapidly became Serbian-dominated at a political and military level in practice. The root of the problem was that Tito’s regime was a Stalinist regime, where the new socialist economic base was saddled by a huge central apparatus with massive privileges, as in other Eastern European states, despite a number of more liberal aspects.

It is this bureaucratic nature of the regime which explains why the formal equality of nations after 1945 eventually degenerated, once again, into Serb domination, if not to the extent of capitalist Yugoslavia. Since the bureaucracy was based in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, it became more Serbianised, while the lack of democratic structures meant that people living in the other national regions were not able to exercise political power and make decisions at the centre.

Serbs, around 40 per cent of the population, made up 78.9 percent of personnel in the federal administration, Croats made up only 8 per cent, all other groups less (14). Serbs also made up around 70 percent of the military officialdom of the Yugoslav Peoples Army (JNA) (15). Croats made up only 15 per cent, while the remaining 15-20 per cent was left for Slovenes, Bosnians, Albanians, Macedonians and smaller groups. Albanians, with 8 percent of the population, were only 1 percent of officers.

Similarly, within the Yugoslav League of Communists (LCY), between 50 and 60 per cent of members were ethnically Serb, though admittedly this had declined from well over 60 per cent earlier (16). Given that it was the only legal party, its composition reflected the relations between nationalities. Croats were 23 per cent of the population, and in 1946 made up 31 per cent of the LCY, reflecting their big role in the resistance. However, by 1978, this had fallen to 17 per cent, well below their percentage of the population. All the non-Serb nations had even smaller percentages.

Tito’s new constitution in 1974 had both positive and negative aspects. On the positive side, the formal rights of the different republics were strengthened, and above all, Kosovo and Vojvodina had their autonomous status within Serbia upgraded to a far higher level. This followed a huge upsurge in the Albanian national movement in the late 1960s, calling for republic status for Kosova. While still formally in Serbia, the two provinces were now directly equally represented in the federal government, rather than via Serbia. Like other republics, they had their own Territorial Defence Force, a kind of decentralised, partisan style popular militia set up in 1968 throughout Yugoslavia. They had their own Central Banks, Provincial Assemblies and High Courts. In addition, the Albanians got their Pristina University, so they could begin to train their own people for jobs in the provincial administration till then mostly staffed by minority Serbs.

In addition, around this time, Muslims (mainly in Bosnia and the Sandzak region of Serbia) were officially recognised as a distinct nation within Yugoslavia, as were Gypsies (Rom), the only country in the world to do so. Bosnia officially became a tri-national republic of Serbs, Croats and Muslims.

However, this decentralisation being combined with a lack of democracy, plus economic rule by the market in Yugoslavia’s system of “market socialism,” essentially gave more power and economic decision making to the local bureaucracies rather than the local people. This gave the various republican bureaucracies, including in Serbia, more of a base for nationalism, and helped increase economic disparities between republics. At the same time, it did not diminish Serbian domination at the federal level. On the contrary, by transferring important functions to republic capitals, it left federal jobs to local Serbs and upwardly mobile Serb immigrants from poorer regions (17). Ironically, this growing irrelevance of the federal government did not result in a reduction in the size of the federal bureaucracy – on the contrary, employment in the federal administration was growing at 16 per cent annually, in contrast to 2.5 to 4.5 per cent for the country as a whole, in the early 1980s (18).

Before this bureaucratic decentralisation, Tito had made sure it didn’t develop into a democratic one by carrying out a massive purge of oppositionists within the party and state in the early 1970s, including much of the new generation of leaders. While Croatia gained more bureaucratic autonomy in 1974, an autonomy movement there in the early 1970s called the Croatian Spring, led by the Croatian Communists, was crushed, and henceforth the Croatian republic government became dominated by ethnic Serbs. In Croatia, only one in twenty Croats were LCY members, while one in nine from the Serb minority were (19). 40 per cent of Communist Party members and 67 per cent of the police force were Serbs (20). Where no other parties exist, party membership was an indicator of who had power.

Rich Republics?

While these figures show that political and military power had been taken by Serbs, it is often pointed out that in terms of economic power, Croatia and Slovenia were the richer republics, while in the south, Kosova, Macedonia, Bosnia and Montenegro remained chronically poor and underdeveloped. Hence, Croatian and Slovenian demands in the late 1980s for more control over their own economic wealth is often interpreted as the rich republics wanting to look after themselves and not distribute anything to the poorer republics.

Actually, the label of “rich” republics, as applied only to Slovenia and Croatia, was a sleight of hand, given that according to most analyses, Slovenia’s wealth per capita was nearly double Croatia’s, whereas Croatia was only slightly ahead of Serbia/Vojvodina. Virtually all analyses agree: for example, Slovenia with 8 per cent of the population accounted for 17 per cent of the GDP, more than double; Croatia with 20 per cent and Serbia proper with 24 per cent of the population accounted for 26 and 25 per cent of the GDP respectively, not much different. The three poor republics (Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro) had a GDP percentage well below their share of the population, while Kosova’s GDP precentage was only one quarter of its share of the popuation, again revealing its absolutely oppressed state (21). Serbia hence was one of the “rich” republics; the fact that its main victims, Kosova and Bosnia, were far poorer shows that the Serbian bureaucracy had the same competitive nature as its Croatian and Slovenian counterparts, but its domination of the federal government and JNA enabled it to do in practice in a far more dramatic way what its rivals could only dream of – by suppressing these poorer regions it was able pillage them.

Indeed, this explains why Serb nationalist fears about the decline of Serbs in Kosova and Bosnia, relative to Albanians and Muslims, are baseless: Serbs emigrated from these poor regions en masse to wealthier north Serbia for economic reasons (as did Bosnian Croats to Croatia). Poverty stricken Albanians and Bosnian Muslims however had no ‘fatherland’ to go to. And of course the higher birth rates of Albanians and Bosnian Muslims, stripped of the racism, were due to their very poverty. Nearly 16,000 people per year left Bosnia in the 1950s and 1960s, most going to Serbia; they were fleeing a republic which, after Kosova, had the highest infant mortality rate in Yugoslavia, the highest illiteracy rate and the highest proportion of people whose only education was three years of primary school (22).

The fund for developing the underdeveloped regions, by which the richer north helped subsidise the poorer south, was apparently having the opposite effect, as the gap had widened and the south remained mired in poverty. Slovenia’s GDP by the 1980s was seven times as large as that of Kosova. The reasons for this are highly complex, partly due to what happened to prices throughout the world in the 1970s and 1980s – prices rose for manufactured goods, which were produced more in the developed north, and fell for primary products, produced more in the south.

However, another reason would seem to be the diversion of considerable republican funds to the central bureaucracy in Belgrade and the overbloated JNA. An example of the lavish lifestyle of the military officialdom is the fact that while the average income in 1991 was $400, the average army officer received $2300 monthly, an apartment, medical insurance, early retirement and a pension ten times the average (23).

As examples of the diversion of funds to Belgrade, in the late 1960s, Croatia created 27 per cent of national income and earned about 50 per cent of Yugoslavia’s foreign exchange, largely due to tourism on the Dalmatian coast, yet received only 15 per cent of new investments; while Serbia created 33 per cent (24) of national income and 25 per cent of foreign exchange, yet Serb banks controlled 63 per cent of total bank assets and 81.5 per cent of foreign credits (25). This naturally created suspicion about “helping the poorer republics.” Further, of the four poorer regions, only ethnically Serb Montenegro consistently “received well above its capital investment share” even as the shares of the other LDRs were reduced (26).

Hence while the local bureaucracies in Croatia and Slovenia strove to loosen bonds of solidarity, as they, like in Serbia, moved towards capitalism in the late 1980s, this was not the dominant view among the masses who they would need to win over. Rather, what did appeal more to the masses was growing opposition to diversion of their republican funds to pay for what they saw as an overbloated, Serb-dominated, irrelevant JNA, which ate up two thirds of the federal budget (27). This attitude strengthened following the JNA’s crackdown in Kosova from 1981 onwards, essentially acting only on Serbia’s behalf. Giving money to help the Kosovar economy is one thing; giving it to help Serb troops police the Albanians another. In 1989 Croatia and Slovenia withdrew their forces from the federal occupation of Kosovo (28). It is noteworthy that Slovenia first refused to continue funding the federal defence budget, not the fund for the south; and indeed, when Milosevic suppressed the Kosova assembly in 1989, President Kucan did indeed refuse to pay Slovenia’s share for Kosova through the federal fund, but rather sent it direct to the now illegal Kosova provincial government (29), far an act of solidarity rather than of greed.

Recentralisation and Serbian Nationalism

When Tito died in 1980, Yugoslavia had inherited a 20 billion dollar foreign debt amassed by the bureaucracy. The IMF and World Bank were brought in and laid down draconian conditions of austerity and free market radicalism to try to squeeze the debt out of Yugoslav workers. The Yugoslav federal government essentially became the internal agency of these imperialist financial institutions. While a description of the economic disaster brought onto Yugoslav workers is outside the range of this article, the point is that these conditions eventually helped pave the way for various bureaucratic nationalist warlords to explain the disaster to the workers of “their” nation as all being the fault of the “enemy nations” rather than the bureaucrats themselves.

Furthermore, this process was on top of an already highly deregulated form of “market socialism” which Yugoslavia had been experimenting with since the 1960s. This had already resulted in massive unemployment and other features which were absent from other East European socialist states. Hence there was nowhere further to go other than outright restoration of capitalism.

This process took hold in 1988-89, driven through by the federal governments of Mikulic and Markovic, strongly supported by the new Serbian republic government headed by Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic gathered around him the cream of Belgrade’s liberal economists into the “Commission of the Presidency of the Republic of Serbia: The Commission for Questions of Economic Reform” (30), in May 1988 to push for the further liberalising of the economy. Its main recommendations were further opening to foreign investment (Yugoslavs must overcome their “unfounded, irrational and…primitive fear of exploitation” by foreign capital according to Milosevic), including full foreign ownership rights, deregulation of the banking system, equality of public and private ownership, greater flexibility for enterprise managers in the “self-managed” enterprises to act without restraint by the workers and related policies long advocated by the IMF and the most advanced liberals. The Workers Councils were replaced by “Social Boards” controlled by the enterprise owners and creditors. Milosevic exhorted these Boards to “function on economic principles … strive to create profits and constantly struggle for their share and place in the market” (31)

While much of the western left continues to insist that imperialism “broke up” Yugoslavia, this only reflects their continued illusions in bourgeois – not socialist – Yugoslavia. In reality, western powers continued to insist not only on the maintenance of Yugoslav unity to the bitter end, but in fact on the strengthening of the central apparatus. This was due to the demands of the IMF and World Bank for greater central authority to force repayment of the 20 billion dollar foreign debt, to carry out a “free market” transformation and privatisation of the economy, to overcome republican barriers to an unrestricted Yugoslav-wide market for the flow of western investments and goods, and to remove the republican veto on federal economic decisions dictated by the IMF (32). This stubborn insistence on centralisation eventually led to the Yugoslav break-up for the opposite reason – all the non-Serb republics could no longer bear the increasing weight of the central regime.

Political commentary in sections of the western media known to be close to government policy emphasised the need for greater central authority far more than any references to “democracy” which were made regarding other East European countries (33). The US Congress assessed that “some strengthening of federal powers” would be necessary and that “unless there is a reduction in those geographic barriers (ie republican borders), economic reform in Yugoslavia will have to wait. Such an eventuality could be catastrophic” (34)

This centralising push had an echo in the JNA, which was the strongest federal institution. The “hard-line” JNA strongly supported the neo-liberal economic reforms (35). In 1987-88 the JNA centralised its military command structure in mirror fashion, replacing the eight units based on republics with four which completely cut across republican borders.

After the IMF/federal government and the JNA, a third force was pushing for centralisation – the Serb nationalists. This was contradictory, given that Serbia is a republic itself, and nationalism would have a fragmenting rather than unifying effect. Yet the difference was Serbian domination of federal institutions – increased central powers meant increased Serbian power. This push for recentralisation thus struck at the very basis of the federation of equal nations.

Whereas the JNA argued for unity from a traditional Titoist point of view, the Serb bourgeois nationalist intelligentsia attacked the entire post-war Titoist order. In 1986, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences released its “Memorandum” which claimed the “Communist-Croat alliance” represented by Tito had set out to destroy the Serb nation by imposing an “alien” (federal) Yugoslavia upon them, and that the division into federal republics divided up the Serb nation (36). What this reflected was the naked ideology of the growing Serbian capitalist class, wanting to free itself from the shackles of the ideology of “Communism,” “federation” and “brotherhood and unity.” As with all rising bourgeois classes, naked nationalism was the ideology that could best justify its attempt to seize control of as much of Yugoslavia’s resources as possible; it was also necessary to divert the Serbian working class from the enormous class struggle it was engaged in in 1987-88, in alliance with the working classes of all Yugoslav nations, against the IMF/federal government austerity regime.

In reality, the so-called “division of the Serb nation” worked to its advantage. As Serbian academic Vojin Dimitrijevic points out, the way such alleged division worked depended “on the play of political forces…from another perspective, the proliferation of “Serb” federal units offered a chance to the Serbs, or the Leagues of Communists dominated by them, to appear in the organs of the federation under various hats” (37). This not only applied to the two autonomous provinces and ethnically Serb Montenegro, but, as we have seen, even in Croatia where its 11 per cent Serb minority dominated the regime.

Unfortunately, this Serb nationalist propaganda, that the Titoist order “divided up the Serbs,” has rubbed off onto some on the left. For example, Peter Gowan writing in New Left Review (38) claims “the Serbs were split up between Serbia proper, Croatia, Bosnia, Vojvodina and Kosovo.” While admitting this was “more in form than in fact,” he claims that this division became “more of fact than of form in the context of Yugoslavia’s break-up.” In reality, the same points could be made about the division of the Croats between Croatia, Bosnia and Vojvodina, of Muslims between Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosova, and of Albanians between Kosova, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia (let alone Albania). The only reason the supposed rights of Serb minorities elsewhere became an issue was, firstly, because, independence would reduce their position from a privileged one to an equal one, something not the case with the other nationalities; and secondly, the fact that the Serbian elelment had overwhelming military dominance meant that they could force the issue about the Serb minorities in other republics.

The assault by the Milosevic regime on the federal order and the national rights of non-Serbs in 1988-89 needs to be seen in this context. Milosevic organised large crowds around the banners of Serbian nationalism in an “anti-bureaucratic revolution” which overthrew the Communist governments in the republic of Montenegro and the provinces Kosova and Vojvodina. Among the crowds in these demonstrations were expressions of openly bourgeois and reactionary ideology, seen for the first time since World War II – Chetnik, Royalist and Serbian Orthodox banners. Reflecting the increasingly reactionary climate being fostered, these rallies included slogan such as “Oh Muslims, you black crows, Tito is no longer around to protect you!” and “We love you Slobodan because you hate the Muslims” and “I’ll be the first, who’ll be the second, to drink some Turkish blood” (39) (Yugoslav Muslims are derisively referred to as “Turks” by Serbian, Croatian and Greek chauvinists).

Milosevic put his stooges in power in these republics/provinces, while the high level autonomy of the 1974 constitution was reduced in 1989. Autonomy was abolished outright in Serbia’s 1990 constitution. Nevertheless, the seats of the formerly autonomous provinces were maintained on the Federal Presidency, giving Serbia and its satellites four out of the eight votes, a permanent deadlock. The fact that this was in accord with the recentralisation pushed by the IMF and imperialism perhaps explains why there was little fuss made by western powers over this assault, and restoration of Kosovar and Vojvodinan autonomy was never one of the West’s demands over the next decade.

The Question of Kosova

The key issue in this new Serbian nationalist push was Kosova. The 1974 constitution had left both sides unsatisfied. While giving Kosova near republic status, the Albanian majority still aimed for full republic status, which it considered would be formal recognition of its equality with other Yugoslav nations. This was accentuated by Kosova’s dramatic economic situation, where unemployment hovered around 50 percent, two and a half times the Yugoslav average. In 1981, demonstrations at Pristina University were brutally crushed by the Yugoslav military, with considerable killing. Thousands were arrested. This was followed by years of repression. Albanians, while only 8 per cent of Yugoslavia’s population, made up 75 per cent of political prisoners in the 1980s (40).

This crackdown only demonstrated to the Kosovars how frail their “high level” autonomy really was, and hence intensified their push for republic status (and, amongst a minority, for full independence or unity with Albania). An array of far left underground groups sprung up in the 1980s, supported by Enver Hoxha’s Stalino-Maoist regime in Albania. It is from these groups that the core of the Kosova Liberation Army arose in the 1990s (41).

The US ignored the massive human rights violations of the Kosovar Albanians in the 1980s due to the nature of Yugoslavia’s key role in western strategy in the Cold War as a bulwark against the Warsaw Pact, given Yugoslavia’s independence from the Soviet bloc. According to the US Congressional Research Service: “…(while) human rights in Kosovo and elsewhere in Yugoslavia has been the subject of US concern in the past, its relative importance was reduced by many other factors… the USA saw Yugoslavia as a symbol of differences within the communist world. Its human rights policy seemed liberal in comparison with the countries of the Warsaw Pact, while its foreign policy was one of non-alignment” (42)

On the other hand, the Serbian bureaucracy and the nationalist intelligentsia who had released the “Memorandum” began a countermobilisation of Kosovar Serbs in the 1980s with the exact opposite aim to the Albanians – to abolish Kosova’s autonomy, or at least to reduce it to a meaningless pre-1974 variety. In particular, they believed, correctly, that there was a contradiction between Kosova being autonomous within Serbia yet having many features of a republic. In 1986, Vojislav Seselj (today leader of the extreme Chetnik Serbian Radical Party) demanded this contradiction be fixed, through reduction of autonomy, because, as he saw it, the contradiction could be interpreted as Kosova, as a federal unit, having the same right to secession as the republics. Seselj had also called for the abolition of the Bosnian republic and its partiton between Serbia and Croatia – clearly a nationalist ahead of his times.

The reason a considerable percentage of the Kosovar Serb population was able to be mobilised was that it did indeed have “grievances” – like those of white South Africans after the end of apartheid. High level autonomy, and particularly the Pristina University, had resulted in a growing percentage of jobs in government and administration being taken by Albanians. While still not equal to the Albanians’ percentage of the population, nevertheless, this was a big change given that these jobs had previously been the preserve of Serbs. This in the context of Kosova having such high unemployment was a perfect environment for nationalists. The economic flight of Serbs to greener pastures in northern Serbia and Vojvodina was interpreted as flight from an alleged campaign of violence by the Albanians.

Like in the US Deep South, the centrepiece of this propaganda was an alleged campaign by “backward, Muslim” Albanians to rape Serb women. Official statisitcs, however, showed that rape was at a lower level in Albania than in more advanced Serbia and Slovenia, and the overwhelming majority of victims were Albanian women. The larger families which poorer Albanians tended to have was interpreted as a deliberate strategy to outbreed Serbs, in the same racist manner as the larger families and faster population growth among Lebanese Muslims, Palestinians, or Irish Catholics has been interpreted by their oppressors.

Following the bloody crushing of the heroic Kosovar miners, who, bearing portraits of Tito and red flags, led the working class resistance to Milosevic in 1989, a state of apartheid has existed in Kosova. Albanians were expelled from all jobs in public administration, all Albanian police were sacked, only Cyrillic script was allowed in official dealings, thousands of doctors and teachers were sacked and the federal army completely occupied Kosova. Thousands of Albanians have been hauled before the courts on the most trivial of charges; a state of complete lawlessness has characterised the relations between the Serbian occupation authorities and the mass of the population, a situation inevitably leading to the rise of armed resistance a decade later.

This openly racist treatment of Albanians was part and parcel of a far deeper anti-Muslim ideological crusade by the Serb nationalist movement and the cream of its writers and intellectuals, including figures such as future prime minister Dobrica Cosic, and Vuk Draskovic, now head of the moderate Chetnik and monarchist Serbian Renewal Party (SPO). It was alleged that Tito merely “created” the Muslims as yet another part of his devious project of “destroying the Serb nation” by setting up a federation. The repression in Kosova and the later genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims were presented to the world as Serbia being in the frontline of western Christian civilisation against the “Islamic threat.” The Muslims and Albanians were called “Turks” and presented as continuers of the Ottoman Empire.

The Serbian Chetnik Movement was formed in 1990 by Draskovic and his best man, the racist Vojislav Seselj, but several months later Seselj split due to what he perceived as Draskovic’s moderation and preference for peaceful struggle, and formed the extremist Chetnik Serbian Radical Party (SRS). As Draskovic’s party, now called Serbian Renaissance Party, had the largest forces and were thus more of a threat to Milosevic’s rule, the latter promoted the more extreme wing of the Chetniks, and Seselj became a coalition partner of Milosevic’s ‘Socialist Party’ from 1991 to 1993 (and later from 1998 to 2000). In 1992 came full resurrection, when a monument to World War II Chetnik leader and collaborator Draza Mihailovic was erected with huge attendance his wartime headquarters in Ravna Gora.

In a direct link not just to Mihailovic but to actual wartime Serbian Nazis, Father Momcilo Dujic, a prominent Orthodox priest who had been a member of the Nazi Zbor movement of Ljotic, and was tried in absentia in Yugoslavia in 1947 for being head of an SS unit but not extradited from the US, personally promoted Seselj to the title of ‘Vojvoda’ (Chetnik warlord) on June 28, 1989. Dujic ordered Seselj to “expel all Croats, Albanians and other foreign elements from holy Serbian soil.”

The Croatian and Slovenian Reaction

Far from rushing headlong into independence declarations, the first reaction of the other republics was to appease Milosevic’s fire. Thus in October 1988, the federal presidency, with the votes of all the republics, accepted constitutional amendments reducing the provinces’ autonomy. However, when Milosevic then pushed it through violently against the will of the Kosova asssembly in 1989, thus violating the constitution, other republics began to worry that they may be the next victim. Further, there was large scale class solidarity with the Kosova miners expressed throughout Yugoslavia. Under such pressure, the Slovenian government, League of Communists, trade unions and entire population mobilised in a united front in defence of Kosova in March 1989.

As Milosevic and the federal Markovic government tried to push IMF-backed constitutional changes in 1989 to strengthen federal powers over the republics, Slovenia came up with its own opposite amendments, reaffirming Slovenian “sovereignty” (consistent with the Yugoslav constitution) and proposing the loosening of federal powers, effectively turning Yugoslavia into a confederation of sovereign states. The Croatian government, on the ther hand, said little throughout 1988-89; this was known as the “great Croatian silence.”


In October 1989, Milosevic demanded that his travelling Serb nationalist circus, which had been organising “anti-bureaucratic revolutions” in other republics and provinces, be allowed to travel to Slovenia to hold a “Truth Meeting,” as Serb nationalist gatherings were called. When Slovenia refused, Serbia imposed trade and economic sanctions against Slovenia – the first break in the inter-Yugoslav market since 1945. After the abolition of Kosova’s autonomy and the crushing of the Albanian workers, this extraordinary move represents the next major assault on Yugoslavia, and the first step in which the Serb nationalist logic began crossing the bridge from forcibly ‘strengthening’ the federation to openly attacking it.


However, following Markovic’s introduction of an even more drastic IMF austerity and privatisation package in January 1990, which virtually stripped the republics of any cash, the three dominant republics went into revolt in their opposite directions. Part of this was fierce competition between the ruling elites over the spoils of privatisation.

The assertion often heard on the left that Croatia and Slovenia were more pro-privatisation than Serbia or the federal government is incorrect. In fact the federal government was the radical privatiser; all three republics slowed it down to keep it under their own control. As late as 1996, the World Bank complained about the fact that Croatia’s privatisation had “virtually stalled” and that the bulk of heavy industry was still in state hands (World Bank, Trends in Developing Economies, Croatia, 1996). Similarly, Slovenia had only sold 200 of the scheduled 1500 enterprises slated for privatisation by that time by 1998.

In Serbia, the League of Communists changed its name to Serbian Socialist Party, claiming to be based on west European social democracy, while in practice being based on the principles of pre-World War II Serbian reaction and the Chetnik tradition. A new constitution reduced Kosova and Vojvodina to mere provinces of Serbia like any other. Ominously, the constitution declared Serbia’s right to intervene in other republics “to defend Serbs.” It was declared that “border changes” may be necessary if republics secede. If a recentralised, Serb-dominated Yugoslavia could not be achieved, the push was on for a “Greater Serbia.” On the one hand, such a Serbia would tightly keep control over the Albanian, Muslim, Croat and Hungarian minorities within Serbia and the former autonomous provinces, yet on the other hand would incorporate the Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia, wherever they existed in a majority or a minority, any land deemed to have previously been occupied by Serbs, and any strategic territory to connect up these disparate areas, no matter who lived there. The Montenegrins and Macedonians were considered to be bogus nations who were in reality Serbs, so their republics would also be part of Greater Serbia. Only Slovenia, which had no Serb minority, and most of Croatia, would be free to leave this “Yugoslavia.”

Croatia and Slovenia held elections in April 1990, in both cases the League of Communists losing to Centre-Right coalitions. The new governments officially put forward a proposal for the transformation of the federation into a confederation. They let it be known that if Milosevic continued to obstruct such a process, they would declare independence. In December 1990, Slovenia held a referendum on independence in which around 90 percent voted in favour. Slovenian leader Kucan made it clear it would be activated in six months if no progress was made. In any case, in a secret meeting in January, Milosevic let Kucan know that he had no problem with Slovenian independence as long as Slovenia put up no obstacles to Greater Serbia. In June 1991, Croatia had its own referendum, with 94 percent of the population voting in favour.

For Marxists, such unambiguous expressions of the popular will for self-determination mean we support that right, regardless of our own opinion of whether or not its a good idea, and regardless of the nature of the leaderships. To oppose it in practice can only mean support for the “right” of the dominant nation to maintain others in their boundaries by force. It was not in the interests of Serb workers for them to massacre Croat workers to force the latter to stay in their state against their will; on the contrary, the only way Serb workers can ever break free from the ideological shackles imposed by their own ruling elite is to recognise the right of Croat and other workers to self-determination, including the right to form their own independent state. Even if Serb workers mistakenly thought there was something intrinsically progressive about maintaining the particular shape of Yugoslavia, regardless of who was ruling it, they would be unlikely to convince Croat workers of such views by bombing them.

Nevertheless, there were a number of difficult issues. The first was the nature of the regime of Franjo Tudjman and his Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). Like Milosevic, Tudjman was a former Stalinist bureaucrat turned nationalist. He was routinely referred to by Milosevic (and many western leftists) as a revival of the Ustashe, despite having been a Croatian Partisan who fought the Ustashe.

Nevertheless, it was widely felt by Croats that their secondary position in Yugoslavia resulted from they as a nation being unfairly singled out as disproportionately responsible for crimes by Nazi collaborationist forces. As such, a certain nationalist symbolism returned under Tudjman – as under Milosevic. The most controversial was when the traditional Croatian chequerboard became by itself the new flag of Croatia. This flag had been used for hundreds of years in Croatia, and had even remained as part of the flag of the Croatian republic within Titoist Yugoslavia. However, many minority Serbs saw it as a “Ustashe” flag, as the Ustashe had also used the chequerboard as part of their flag. Naturally, neither the republic flag under Tito, nor the new full chequerboard flag, included the large ‘U’ over the chequerboard that was specific to the Ustashe. However, the anxiety was not helped by Tudjman’s rapid changing of street names along nationalist lines, his rather direct methods of reversing minority Serb domination of the police and media, and his bigoted statements (43). The regime was right-wing, nationalist and anti-Communist. Marxists would oppose the regime. However, it was up to Croatian workers to change it, not up to the equally reactionary regime of Milosevic to stop Croats having the government they voted for.

The other complex issue was the 11 percent Serb minority, some 600,000 people. Much has been made of the transformation of the Serbs in Croatia from officially a “nation” to a “minority” under Tudjman, and allegations made about the denial of their right to use Cyrillic script. However, Croatia’s constitution of December 1991 proclaims Croatia to be the “national state of the Croatian nation and the state of members of other nations and minorities who are its citizens: Serbs, Muslims, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Hungarians, Jews and others…” This clearly describes the Serbs as another of Croatia’s nations. Article 12 states that “The Croatian language and the Latin script shall be in official use…In individual local units (ie where another group forms a majority) another language and the Cyrillic or some other script may, alongside with Croatian language and the Latin script, be introduced into official use…” Article 15 states that “Members of all nations and minorities shall be guaranteed freedom to express their nationality, freedom to use their language and script, and cultural autonomy” (44). Notably, Tudjman also offered the post of vice president to Jovan Raskovic, leader of the nationalist Serb Democratic Party (SDS), and Croatia’s constitution allotted 13 percent of parliamentary seats to the Serb minority.

However, what if these were just fine words, masking in reality oppression of the Serb minority? For Marxists, in the abstract, the Serb minority should have the same right to self-determination as the Croat majority, meaning their right to declare autonomy, independence or union with Serbia, if they wished. Many leftists believed that, if they grudgingly accepted Croatia’s right to self-determination, the Serb minority must have the same right, and they interpreted the Serbo-Croatian war of 1991 through this prism.

However, reality was not that simple. Regardless of Tudjman’s tactless symbolic moves, his regime was not in any position at that point to actually oppress the Serb minority. To suggest it did is to ignore who actually had armed power in Yugoslavia. Straight after the Croatian and Slovenian elections, the JNA had seized the arms of the Territorial Defence Forces of the two republics, yet another violation of the federal constitution. By contrast, the JNA was funelling arms to the right-wing, pro-Chetnik, Serb Democratic Party, which was engaged in an armed campaign for autonomy of the “Krajina,” a part of Croatia with a Serb majority of 69 percent. The only attempt by Tudjman to bring the province under control was thwarted by the JNA. Hence far from a peaceful campaign for autonomy being suppressed by Tudjman’s forces, in fact the JNA was using its massive armed superiority to rip out a part of Croatia.

As a majority in the Krajina, the Serbs had a right to autonomy. Notably, they held their referendum on autonomy in August 1990, before Croatia had put proposals for confederation of Yugoslavia. However, the referendum (simply “Vote to Decide Serb Autonomy: For/Against”) had no clear territorial dimension. Until then, Raskovic had merely spoken of “cultural autonomy,” which was then granted in December’s constitution. The Krajina leaders also declared independence from Croatia in March 1991, before Croatia declared independence in June.

There were many problems with autonomy gaining a territorial dimension, apart fom the 30 per cent Croat minority. Some Serb majority areas, such as Korenica, opposed territorial autonomy, and these areas were brought under SDS control by force. Later, Croat majority areas in the Krajina were also conquered and the Croat population expelled. The problem was, Krajina, the only part of Croatia with a Serb majority, was separated from Serbia by the entire republic of Bosnia, and hence could not in practice unite with Serbia; at the same time, it was situated right on Croatia’s main road and rail links between Zagreb and the Dalmatian coast. If it was cut right out, it would be devastating for Croatia’s economy, and the Krajina leaders made a point of cutting these links. Likewise for those Serbs in the areas who needed to forced to heel to the SDS, as in Korenica, their position was logical: given the lack of perceivable “oppression,” their economic situation was more dependent on maintaining good relations with Croatia as a whole, rather than playing some game for distant Serbia. Krajina itself had no economic value whatsoever: for Milosevic the Krajina Serbs were cannon fodder who had the double value of ideological warfare combined with a strategic position from which to surround his real intended victim: Bosnia.

Those who view Tudjman’s “refusal to grant autonomy to the Serbs” as a major contributor to the 1991 war miss the point that active autonomy in Krajina was an established fact that Tudjman could do little about. There would have been no need to go to war over it. War did not result from any Croatian attack on Krajina. Even at the outset of the war, on August 1, 1991, Tudjman declared support for an actual autonomy plan, that went beyond “cultural autonomy.” In much left commentary, the Krajina Serbs become equivalent to to Kosova Albanians; however, this not only misses the point of who really had the arms to oppress, but also that Kosova was not just an issue of minority rights but of the violation of the constitutional rights of an existing federal unit. In Krajina, by contrast, new and messy borders which did not exist would have to be drawn.

Rather, a better comparison would be with the oppression of the Croat minority in Serb-controlled Vojvodina, and of the Muslim minority in the Sanjak region of Serbia. While much fuss is made over the autonomy referendum in Krajina, little has been said of the autonomy referendum held by the Sanjak Muslims in August 1991, which was ignored by Serbian authorities. The Sanjak Muslims were subsequently subjected to Chetnik terror and large numbers fled to Bosnia. If the somewhat imaginary “oppression” of the Krajina Serbs was a reason to oppose Croatia’s right to independence, as proposed by large parts of the left, did that mean that the oppression of Albanians, Muslims, Croats and Hungarians in Serbia should have meant the denial of Serbia’s right to independence? In reality, only massive Serb military superiority allowed them to make their case more of an issue.

In any case, Krajina had little to do with the war of 1991, which was a war of conquest for Greater Serbia. The massively armed JNA flattened virtually defenceless Croatian cities far from Krajina. Historic Dubrovnik, a south Dalmatian city with a 2 percent Serb population, was continually bombed. Vukovar, a historic multi-ethnic (Croat majority) city on the Danube was completely levelled by a three month siege, during which large numbers of local Serbs fought in the Croatian army aganst the barbaric attack. Far from Krajina being attacked, Krajina itself expanded into Croat majority areas, while two other regions far from Krajina were also conquered for the ‘Serb republic’. In one of these, Western Slavonia, Serbs were a majority in only one of its eleven districts. The other, the most populous region, Eastern Slavonia, which includes Vukovar, had a population of 647,000, of which only 14 percent were Serbs, yet this is where the main theatre of war was, because this region bordered on Serbia and had oil deposits. Chetnik forces joined the JNA in large numbers here, finally resulting in the ethnic cleansing of half a million Croats. Serbs made up a total of about 25 percent of the population of the three regions as a whole. Yet even with all three regions, Serbian forces only controlled 45 percent of Croatia’s Serbs – the majority lived with Croats throughout Croatia.

In late 1991, as Croat forces managed to get their hands on some arms, they were able to take part of the conquered territory, particularly some Croat majority areas in East Slavonia, and allow some Croat refugees to return. Yet even after this counter-offensive, Serbs remained a minority of 35 percent in the part of East Slavonia still remaining under their control when the war ended. In West Slavonia, the two sides eventually did a swap: the JNA withdrew from the northern part of West Slavonia where there were more Serbs, who were subsequently driven out by Tudjman’s forces, while keeping hold of the southern part closer to the Bosnian border, despite Serbs being an absolute minority there. Thus even with Croat reconquests, some 250,000 Croats remained ethnically cleansed at the war’s end.

The massive onslaught and brutal ethnic cleansing led to a predictable brutal revenge when Croat forces reconquered regions, intensified due to the similarly reactionary and chauvinist nature of the Tudjman regime and its paramilitaries. During the war, a Ustashe militia also arose and aided the most reactionary elements among the HDZ, but at this point Tujman’s regime remained hostile, jailing its leader and even organising the assassination of the Ustashe military leader (in sharp contrast to Seselj’s place in the Milosevic regime). In the later 1990s, however, as the reactionary nature of Tudjman’s regime deepened, more and more elements of the Ustashe were gradually incorporated into he new state project.

Nevertheless, while defending the right of Krajina Serbs to autonomy in districts where they had a majority and that freely chose it, regardless of their right-wing chauvinist leadership, Marxists also had to defend Croatia, regardless of its right-wing chauvinist leadership, from this war of conquest and ethnic cleansing by Greater Serbia, especially in the main theatre of war in Eastern Slavonia.

Imperialist Policy Towards Yugoslav Collapse

What of the charge that imperialism encouraged secession in order to break up “socialist” Yugoslavia? Of course, even if that had been the case, that would not alter the right to self-determination. If imperialism wanted to encourage someone to secede, it would find much more fertile ground if the nation was nationally oppressed. If that new nation then came under imperialist influence, it would be up to the workers of that country to come to understand imperialist exploitation. Once again, the oppressors’ bombs and tanks would not do the trick.

But in any case, this view of imperialism is a complete fantasy. As we saw, the IMF and World Bank strongly pushed Yugoslav recentralisation. In particular, the US, the EC, Britain and France endlessly insisted throughout 1990 and 1991 that Yugoslavia remain united. Even proposals for a looser confederation, which may have saved Yugoslavia, were rejected, as they were in total opposition to the IMF’s needs. When Tudjman visited the White House in October 1990 to gain US support for the Croat-Slovene confederation proposal, he was told “coldly” by Bush’s National Security Adviser, Brent Snowcroft, and “permanent adviser” Henry Kissinger, that the US supported the maintenance of Yugoslav federalism and unity “at all cost” (45). Kissinger, Snowcroft and Bush’s Assistant Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, all had important business connections with Yugoslavia. During the 1991 war, the major western intiative was to impose an arms embargo on Yugoslavia, which prevented the disarmed Croats from getting arms, while the Serb-dominated JNA was one of the largest military forces in Europe.

From 1990 through to the outbreak of war in mid-1991, the US and EC released a deluge of statements stressing support for Yugoslav unity, despite what it meant in practice. The Council for Cooperation Between the EC and Yugoslavia in December 1990 declared support for the progress made “in the direction of a free market economy” and the “preservation of the unity and territorial integrity of the country,” such conditions leading to “Yugoslavia’s closer integration within a European framework” (46) The EC and US also advocated elections based on “one person, one vote” be held “at a federal level” (47), which not surprisingly was backed by Milosevic and opposed by Slovenia because with the numerical dominance of Serbs, the federal government would no longer be federal. The State Department issued a public statement yet again affirming support to the “territorial integrity” of Yugoslavia, declaring it “shall not encourage or reward secession” and that any “dismantling of Yugoslavia is likely to aggravate rather than solve ethnic tensions” (48)

In May 1991, the EC committed itself to provide $4.5 billion in aid, dependant on Yugoslavia remaining united. The IMF clearly put the strengthening of federal powers as a condition for new money (49). A week earlier, the EC had declared that maintenance of Yugoslav unity was a prerequisite for Yugoslav membership of the EC – on the very day after the Croatian referendum in which 94 per cent of voters favoured independence (50). Italian Foreign Minister Gianni di Michelis made this clearer, telling Borba that no one in Croatia or Slovenia should be under the illusion that entry to the EC would be eased by secession from Yugoslavia – that only a “united” Yugoslavia could hope to enter a “united” Europe (51).

Some in the west were more open about their support for a military solution to achieve this all-important “unity.” London’s Financial Times, which normally registers British Foreign Office opinion, claimed “the army now believes the imposition of a state of emergency is one of the few options available…(its) role in this agenda should be clear. It should immediately disarm all paramilitary groups…Once order has been restored, it should withdraw to the barracks…” (52)

On the eve of the Serbian-Yugoslav attack on Slovenia and Croatia, in June 1991, US Secretary of State George Baker visited Belgrade and insisted absolutely on Yugoslavia’s “territorial integrity and unity,” calling any unilateral secession of Croatia and Slovenia “illegal and illegitimate” which would “never” be recognised by the US – often seen as a “green light” for Milosevic to go in the offensive. On June 23, the EC unanimously voted not to recognise Croatia and Slovenia, and “to refuse all high level contacts,” if they seceded (53). The next day, it signed an agreement with Yugoslavia to lend it more than 700 million ECUs until 1995. NATO Supreme Commander, John Galvin, told Politika that NATO would not intervene in any Yugoslav war.

The following day, the two republics declared independence. One may question their timing, in the light of all these clear statements from western powers. However, to declare independence in such a context of overwhelming pressure to do the opposite reveals how completely fantastic are the claims by Yugo-nostalgic leftists that the west “broke up” Yugoslavia.

Even the JNA’s attack on Slovenia on June 25 did not end the chorus. In the UK House of Commons, Mark Lennox-Boyd, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, declared that “the Yugoslav federal army might have, under the constitution, a role in restoring order if there were widespread civil unrest” (54). When one MP claimed the right emphasis should be to call for a reformed Yugoslavia rather than “just blandly supporting the present attempts at imposing unity,” Lennox-Boyd replied “We and our western partners have a clear preference for the continuation of a single Yugoslav political entity – those words are carefully chosen…” (55). In similar vein, US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, believed that “it wasn’t accurate to talk about a JNA “invasion,” since the JNA was in its own country” (56)

Reading the article by Peter Gowan, you may be mistaken into believing that there was a major imperialist bloc, opposed to the US-UK-France bloc, who wanted to break up Yugoslavia. “The forces eager to see the break-up of Yugoslavia through independence for Slovenia and Croatia were the Vatican, Austria, Hungary, Germany and, more ambivalently, Italy” (57) It is unfortunate that his footnotes for this section, with this rogue’s gallery list, are from John Zametica, a paid publicity agent for Radovan Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb gangster “state,” and a key link between Karadzic and the British ruling class. The supposed role of the Vatican says little about imperialist policy, except perhaps for feudal “imperialism.” The attitude of Hungary’s bourgeois nationalist Antall regime, which had its eyes on Vojvodina, says even less. Austria had long borders with Slovenia, and may have had a particular economic interest quite separate from other imperialist states, yet Gowan’s only evidence, apart from obscure quotes from Zametica, was that Austria’s open support to “democratic rights” in the two republics.

As for Italy, there was nothing ambiguous. Italian Foreign Minister Gianni di Michelis made this clear, telling Belgrade journal Borba in May 1991 that no one in Croatia or Slovenia should be under the illusion that entry to the EC would be eased by secession from Yugoslavia – that only a “united” Yugoslavia could hope to enter a “united” Europe (58). Italy has since remained among the closest of west European imperialist states to Serbian and “Yugoslav” interests.

It is the charge that a newly united Germany “encouraged” Croatia’s secession that has led to the most enduring left fantasies, especially as it can be simplistically related to a version of World War II (59). For example, in Susan Woodward’s mammoth Balkan Tragedy, many pages are devoted to German assertiveness (60), without, however, being able to reveal a single fact previous to the outbreak of war in June 1991. In fact, just before that, German Foreign Minister Genscher gave one of the strongest speeches supporting Yugoslav unity at the CSCE meeting in Berlin on June 19-20 (61).

That is not to deny the expansion of German economic interests throughout Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia, or to argue for German innocence. Rather, it is precisely because Germany was the dominant economic power throughout Yugoslavia, not just in the northern republics, that the last thing it wanted was a break-up of this market, economic turmoil and new state barriers. Even if it had traditionally stronger links with the north, as long as Yugoslavia remained united, there was no barrier to its further expansion.

These links, however, no doubt made Germany more sympathetic once the war began and all hope of maintaining unity died. It is certainly true that this growing assertiveness by Germany in late 1991 was a factor in its US-UK-French rivals steadfastly opposing this recognition push. Yet while it has often been stated that Germany railroaded the rest of the EC into recognition, and that that this recognition was “premature,” in fact a grudging and belated acceptance of reality of Yugoslavia’s death is a more realistic explanation for the change. The JNA attack on Croatia had continued relentlessly since July; after Vukovar, and finally the beginnings of a Croatian fightback late in the year, it would have been difficult to imagine forcing Croatians back into “Yugoslavia.” By the end of the year a ceasefire was in place and UN troops moving in; EC recognition of Croatia and Slovenia finally took place on January 15, when the war had definitely ended. Germany’s sin – its attempt to establish itself in the inevitable new states – was merely recognising the republics three weeks ahead of schedule, on December 23. The US steadfastly refused to follow the EC into recognition, attempting for a couple of months to maintain the myth of “Yugoslavia” in order to stem the German advance.

While it is often stated that the EC recognised Croatia without heed to the rights of the Serb minority, the Badinter Commission into recognition noted that Croatia had confirmed its acceptance of the provisions of the Carrington Plan for Yugoslavia relating to “special status” for minorities, ie the Serb minority, and had for the most part incorporated them into the new “Constitutional Law of Human Rights and Freedoms and Rights of National and Ethnic Communities or Minorities in the Republic of Croatia” passed by the Croatian parliament on December 4, 1991, while nevertheless calling on Croatia to further “supplement” this law (62).

Bosnia and the National Question

Rather, what the EC recognised was a truncated Croatia. Under the US-inspired Vance Plan (former US Defence Secretary Cyrus Vance was acting for the UN), UN forces moved in to freeze the confrontation lines in Croatia, essentially leaving SDS forces in control of a third of Croatia, cleansed of its Croat inhabitants. But more crucially, Vance also allowed the JNA, by now clearly a Serbian rump, to take all the heavy weaponry, which had been the property of all Yugoslavs, into Bosnia, where it was about to be used in an infinitely more destructive way. This signalled joint US and EC policy at the time to maintain Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosova inside the Serb-dominated rump “Yugoslavia.”

These states nevertheless applied for recognition. Kosova was simply ignored, as the EC used the excuse that it had not constitutionally been a full republic and therefore had no right to secession under the Yugoslav constitution. This was despite the 97 percent vote for independence in Kosova’s 1991 referendum. Macedonia’s bid was blocked by EC member Greece’s virulently nationalist campaign, focusing on the republic’s alleged “theft” of a Greek name and incorrectly accusing it of irredentist claims against the Greek part of geographic Macedonia. While Serbia initially opposed Macedonia’s independence, even proposing it be partitioned between Serbia and Greece, it eventually settled down to a pragmatic acceptance of Macedonia as it got bogged down in Bosnia. Several years later, the US and EC recognised the state under the cumbersome name of “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.”

In Bosnia’s case, the EC attempted to hold up the process by pushing a crude ethnic partition plan, the Carrington-Cultheiro Plan, of March 1992. This plan had essentially been drawn up by local Serb and Croat right-wing nationalists, both backed by Milosevic and Tudjman. With Croatian semi-independence, the two nationalist regimes essentially joined forces over the next three years in an open attempt to divide Bosnia between them.

While the Bosnian government and army remained multi-ethnic, the Serb and Croat nationalist forces fighting it aimed to set up essentially racist, ethnic exclusivist, ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ republics in large parts of Bosnia which they were to ethnically cleanse of the inconvenience of other people, mostly Muslims, living there. The Croatian chauvinists were simply the Croat wing of Tudjman’s HDZ (though another wing of the HDZ rejected Tudjman and maintained its ministers in the multi-ethnic government), while the Serb chauvinists were the Bosnian wing of the pro-Chetnik Serb Democratic Party (SDS) which had wreaked havoc on Croatia. Its leader, Radovan Karadzic, explained in late 1991 that if Bosnia became independent, the Muslims “would disappear from the face of the Earth.” In 1993, the main street in the sector of Sarajevo under the control of the SDS was renamed Draza Mihailovic Street, after the World War II Chetnik leader; by contrast, in government-held Sarajevo, the main road still proudly bears the name ‘Tito Street’. Along with Karadzic’s SDS and its massively equipped armed forces, the genocidal attack on Bosnia’s Muslims was joined by an array of violent ultraright paramilitaries direct from Serbia, including Seselj’s own ‘Chetniks’ militia, the ‘Tigers’ militia of mafia warlord Arkan, and the ‘White Eagles’ militia of Mirko Jovic, head of another Chetnik party called Serbian Popular Renewal, who declared “we are not only interested in Serbia, but in a Christian, orthodox Serbia, with no mosques or unbelievers.”

Karadzic’s SDS, like the HDZ, had been part of the multi-ethnic Bosnian government until April 1992, supposedly representing the Serbs. It is difficult to accept the Serb and Croat nationalist claims that they were being “forced” to live in a Muslim state and to “become” minorities when their own parties were an equal part of the government alongside the Muslim-dominated Party of Democratic Action of President Izetbegovic. In April 1992, the SDS quit the government and began using its massive military arsenal to destroy the country whose government it was till then part of. When the SDS quit, Serbs from the Social Democratic Party (former Bosnian Communist Party) and another secular party, the Reform Party, stepped into the government to maintain Serb representation. These secular parties had received 28 percent of the votes in the 1990 elections, nearly as many as the SDS and far more than the HDZ, underlining the fact that not only could Bosnia not be reduced to ‘Serbs, Croats and Muslims’ but neither could its political parties be reduced to three communalist organizations.

For imperialism, the role played by the formerly united Yugoslav state, as the enforcer of stability in the region, was now taken by the two major bourgeois states emerging out of the wreck of Yugoslavia. The whole three years, the EC and finally the US pushed one or another ethnic partition plan, continually demanding the multi-ethnic Bosnian government accept its own partition as demanded by Milosevic and Tudjman. The whole time, they also enforced, with their navies in the Adriatic Sea and their armies in the occupying UN force, an arms embargo on the disarmed republic, under genocidal attack from Serbian and Croatian nationalist forces, the former using all the heavy weaponry granted them by Vance.

While the EC’s partition plan had aimed at holding up Bosnian independence, the issue was forced by the US in a dramatic policy reversal in March 1992, suddenly launching a push for recognition of Bosnia. In reality, this policy switch was related to a growing inter-imperialist conflict between major EU states and the US over the issue of the continuing relevance of NATO versus the push for a Europe only security sysytem in the post-Cold War. Suddenly coming out more aggressively against Milosevic, and helping push Bosnia into the abyss, played into the needs of asserting NATO’s new relevance.

However, it had nothing in reality to do with defending Bosnia. Having pushed for Bosnian independence, after stacking the military situation against Bosnia, the US sent nothing but loud rhetoric to aid the Bosnians once they came under massive Serbian attack in April 1992.

The question arises, who had the right to self-determination in Bosnia, the Bosnians as a whole or its separate Serb, Croat and Muslim national components? Peter Gowan is clear on his answer, claiming there was no Bosnian nation, so the component nations had the right to self-determination; he then accuses the US of essentially denying the right to self-determination to the Serb and Croat minorities. By implication, the EU was on the right track with its partition plans.

This has two major problems. Firstly, while there was officially no Bosnian nation – Bosnia was constitutionally a republic of the Serb, Croat and Muslim nations – it had in reality come into existence. The Bosnian cities and in particular the Bosnian working class were by now clearly an entity of their own. People of the three groups lived together in the same apaprtment blocs and worked together in the same factories and mines, producing for the same economy; they intermarried to a very large degree. If you are part Serb, part Muslim and part Croat, which “nation” do you belong to? For a large number, their own answer, hence their own national identity, was obvious: Bosnian. The constitution had lagged behind the reality.

The Bosnian nation was expressed in the instituions of the state. The presidency consisted of two Muslims, two Serbs, two Croats and one “Yugoslav” (which in Bosnia’s case had the specific meaning of “Bosnian”); the Bosnian army was led by one Serb, one Croat and one Muslim general; large numbers of Serbs and Croats fought in the multi-ethnic Bosnian army alongside Muslims against Serb and Croat national chauvinist forces. Indeed, the Bosnian general who led the three and a half year defence of Sarajevo from the Chetnik assault was an ethnic Serb himself, and second in command of the whole Bosnian army. As equal partners in the state, the Serb and Croat nations neither experienced oppression in independent Bosnia nor the threat of it. Clearly, Bosnia as a whole had a right to self-determination.

The other problem was where to draw dividing lines. Any map showing which areas had Serb, Croat and Muslim majorities shows a thoroughly interspersed patchwork, and even these “majorities” were usually tenuous. Interspersed between them was about a quarter of the Bosnian landmass which had no ethnic majority at all. The EC partition plans were a recipe for massive population transfer – ie ethnic cleansing. Imperialism was well aware of this: it was precisely the continuing existence of the Communist era “Brotherhood and Unity” among the Bosnian working class, embodied in these multi-ethnic institutions, that imperialism wanted to smash with these plans.

If the principle is that areas with an ethnic majority have the right to autonomy, that had already been agreed to by the Bosnian government in October 1991. If it means they have a right to independence or to join their respective “fatherlands,” the reality is that there were very few areas of any size, let alone adjoining their “fatherland” borders, that could have exercised this right (63). Hence, the right of Bosnian Serbs and Croats to self-determination was never an issue in the war; rather, it was a war of conquest and genocide, where the two regimes, above all the massively armed Serbian regime, conquered as many areas as they could, regardless of ethnic composition, and expelled over two million people and leaving over 100,000 dead – in both cases mostly Muslims. It was the right of self-determination of the Muslims and of the Bosnians as a whole that was violated.

Appearing to take the moral high ground against partition, the US dropped this once it took control of the situatiion in 1994, presenting its own more extreme partition plan. The ‘Contact Group’ of imperialist powers plus Russia was set up to split Bosnia 51-49 percent between a ‘Muslim-Croat Federation’ and a Serb Republic (‘Republika Srpska’). Miloseivc and Tudjman were in complete agreement with the US plan, as they had been with former EC plans, and the Croatian chauvinist forces had been crushed by the Bosnian army in late 1993 so had little bargaining power to say no, though they objected to the implication that they would have to give up their racist Croat state of ‘Herzeg-Bosna’ and live in a federation with the hated Muslims. Tudjman figured even if Herzeg-Bosna disappeared, with half its territory ceded to the Serb chauvinists, the other half of Bosnia would have little choice but to fall under the unofficial suzerainty of Croatia.

The Bosnian government put up its own ethnically fairer plan but it was rejected by imperialism, so Izetbegovic was led kicking and screaming into formally accepting the partition of his country. However, there was a sticking point: while Milosevic was enthusiastic about handed victory by the US, the right-wing extremist SDS forces which controlled the actual Serb military machine in Bosnia, led by Karadzic, rejected the plan. In their rejection, they were backed by Seselj in Serbia, whose SRS was kicked out of Milosevic’s coalition.

Why would the Serb chauvinist deny themselves this victory? There are two reasons. Firstly, even though 49 percent of Bosnia for their own ethnic exclusivist state was a victory (far better than their 30 percent share of scattered population), they had control of 70 percent of the country due to overwhelming military superiority – given the imperialist arms embargo against Bosnia, sheer arrogance led the SDS to ask why they should withdraw from any conquered territory. For imperialism, however, the essentially 50-50 split was necessary to ensure the stability of balance between Serbia and Croatia, while also leaving just enough space for the defeated Muslims so that they would not be squeezed into ‘Gaza in Europe’ with all its implications.

Secondly, the SDS dropped feelers that it may be willing to go down to 49 percent, if that part was at least “cleaned up.” As it was it was still “messy” – within Chetnik-controlled East Bosnia, which was formerly overwhelmingly Muslim in composition, there were three ‘enclaves’ – Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde – still under the control of the Bosnian army, where tens of thousands of ‘cleansed’ Muslims had taken refuge. The SDS wanted them out of the way. In return it was willing to give up the barren, sparsely populated ‘Bosnia Krajina’ in the far west – despite it having the most solidly Serb population in Bosnia, it was too far away, bordering Croatian Krajina, but the furthest point from Serbia within Bosnia. This region could thus be ceded to effective Croatian control.

This was the backdrop to the seizure of Srebrenica and Zepa in July 1995, without a whimper from the imperialist UN troops “protecting” these “safe zones.” When Chetnik General Mladic led his troops into Srebrenica in July, some 8,000 men and boys were taken captive and killed over the next few days in the largest massacre in Europe since World War II. Even after this genocide, as the Chetniks then marched into Zepa, NATO released a stern warning that there would be action against the Chetniks if they later marched into … Gorazde.

The US-inspired Dayton Accord of November 1995 represented the most complete version of partition, with a fully fledged Bosnian Serb republic (Republika Srpska) set up on 49 per cent of Bosnian territory, with its own army, in territory from which a million non-Serbs had been expelled. The main difference between this partition plan and all previous ones, including the US-backed Contact Group plan since 1994, was that now the just-conquered Srebrenica and Zepa were also included in Republika Srpska, as if nothing had happened, solving the SDS’s concern with “messiness.” It is hardly too cynical to suggest the US needed the Srebrenica genocide in order to be able to get the Serb chauvinists to sign onto the US partition plan by giving them everything they wanted.

While much has been written in the bourgeois media about Milosevic having been “defeated” in “four disastrous wars,” the outcome of the Bosnian war was in fact an outright victory for Milosevic and his Serb nationalist movement. Half of a UN member state had been transformed into a new Serb republic. The fact that it remained within a loose Bosnian confederation, and hence had an international border separating it from Serbia, was more in form than in fact, as the growing merger of the economies of Serbia and Republika Srpska demonstrates. If many Serbs also left the other half, which had been transformed by the US from the legal Bosnian government unoccupied region to a “Muslim-Croat federation,” this was also a victory; the aim the whole time had been to carve a Serb state out of Bosnia, and indeed those Serbs who do attempt to maintain a multi-ethnic existence with their Muslim and Croat neighbours in the other half are regarded to be traitors by the Serb nationalists.

In the context of formalising the division of the region with Croatia, Milosevic no longer had any need for the conquered territories in Croatia itself, least of all the Serb majority Krajina, which was economically worthless and territorially far outside the Serbian zone in the new more stabilised ethnic borders of the region. Hence when Tudjman retook the Krajina in August 1995, and expelled its entire 150,000 Serb inhabitants, killing around 1000 people (64), Milosevic and his Chetnik commanders there neither made any attempt at military resistance, nor made much of an issue about it. This is despite the massive armed strength of the Krajina Serb forces, who had been using napalm and cluster bombs against Bosnian Muslims in neighbouring Bihac. Hence it is also a myth that the catastrophe of the Krajina Serbs represented a defeat for Milosevic; they were never seen by Milosevic as anything but cannon-fodder, as a look at a map will show. Their demise was the result of an agreement.

In addition, for Tudjman, getting back the Krajina and all legally Croatian territories was his bottom line: the US-imposed Dayton plan for Bosnia, while legalising a ‘Serb Republic’ over half that country, abolished the ‘Croat Republic’ that Croatian chauvinists had set up in around a fifth of Bosnia. While the entire partiton was first and foremost a defeat for multi-ethnic Bosnia, and especially for its Muslim population, the abolition of ‘Herzeg-Bosna’ and the continuation of “federation” in half the republic was a sop to the Muslims and multi-ethnic forces. The hard-line Croat chauvinists see this as a major defeat, and Krajina was the minimum quid pro quo.

The figure of 150,000 Serbs expelled from Krajina is based on census figures (65). In addition, another 15-20,000 Serbs were expelled several months earlier in an equally brutal attack by Croatian forces to retake Western Slavonia. To these 170,000 Serbs can be added another 50,000 Serbs expelled by Croatian forces from ‘Bosnia Krajina’ just across the border when they continued their campaign into that region. The expulsion of these 220,000 Serbs is very close in number to the expulsion of some 230-250,000 Croats from the occupied regions of Croatia in 1991-92, which the pro-Chetnik lobby ritually ignores. Moreover, even this ‘symmetry’ takes no account of the 200,000 Croats expelled from Bosnia, mostly from the Posavina and Banja Luka regions in north Bosnia. Many of these people are now settled in homes of the expelled Krajina Serbs. UNHCR now reports that some 100,000 Serbs have returned to Croatia, but the hardest part has been in the Krajina region itself. One important reason, apart from obstruction by the Croatian government, is that the Posavina Croats settled there are unable to return to their homes in Republika Srpska. Meanwhile, the largest number of Bosnians who cannot return to either Republika Srpska or the former Herzeg-Bosna, where Croat extremists are still in effective control, are Bosnian Muslims.

The Place of Kosova in Greater Serbia

However, the exact borders of the new Greater Serbia were still unclear, this being a major source of continuing instability for the Serbian ruling class. As Vojvodina had a slight Serb majority, the abolition of its autonomy had remained fairly stable; much of the Croat minority had fled, and the Hungarian minority remained quiescent in this wealthy region. While Montenegro had remained firmly within the new “Yugoslav” federation, it was a republic in its own right, officially separate to Serbia, something which the ruling elite aimed ultimately to rationalise. Differences began to emerge between the Serbian and Montenegrin elites more over policy than any feeling of separate Montenegrin “ethnic” identity. And despite the victory of Republika Srpska, even the official international border remained an issue to be resolved in the long term.

But more serious than all this was Kosova. How could the new Greater Serbia, constructed on an unambiguously ethnic basis, continue to rule over an area which was 90 percent Albanian? Continued Serbian rule could only be a source of permanent instability.

When Milosevic finally abolished the fiction of the old Yugoslavia in 1992, setting up a new “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia” between Serbia and Montenegro and a new bourgeois constitution, the oppressed Albanians had no say in the matter, as their autonomy had already been suppressed. Hence Kosova’s inclusion in the new Yugoslavia was constitutionally invalid.

Nevertheless, when Kosovar resistance leader Ibrahim Rugova asked to be invited to the Dayton conference, to include Albanian grievances in peace discussions, he was rejected. While recognising the Bosnian Serb gangster “republic,” the US also officially recognised the borders of the new “Yugoslavia,” hence including Kosova.

It was this rejection which led to the upturn of the Albanian struggle in 1996-97. Then, the revolutionary uprising in neighbouring Albania in 1997 gave a boost to a new armed struggle led by the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), as a flood of cheap weapons from looted Albanian armouries coalesced with increasing Kosovar frustration with the failure of the peaceful resistance road of Rugova.

For imperialism, however, Serbian control of Kosova was part of the Dayton regional balance. Furthermore, any move towards independence for Kosova was seen as a major threat to the stability of other bourgeois regimes in Albania, Macedonia and throughout the southern Balkans, which it was feared would spill over to NATO members Greece and Turkey. This was all the more of a threat if carried out by an armed liberation movement outside of imperialist control. Hence the statement in Pristina in February 1998 by US envoy Robert Gelbard that the KLA “is, without any question, a terrorist organisation,” was clearly a green light for Milosevic to crack down.

The problem was, Milosevic’s brutal tactics of destroying and emptying villages only drove thousands of Kosovars to the KLA. The upsurge of the Kosovar struggle also drove the Serbian elite sharply to the right, and Seselj and his fascistic Radical Party (SRS) was brought back into the ruling coalition for the first time since 1993. The Radicals had long had the goal of “solving” their Kosova “problem” by expelling the Albanian population. Imperialism came to see that it would need its own troops in Kosova to bring stability to the region, to avoid the threat to stability from either a KLA victory or the dangerous solutions proposed by the Serbian ultra-right. While doing this, it continued to insist that Kosova cannot have independence (or even republic status apparently) but only what is in fact a weaker form of autonomy than that which Kosova enjoyed before 1989. For imperialism autonomy within Serbia is seen as the best way of stabilising the situation there without border changes which may further destabilise the region.

However, for the Serbian ruling class, the aim is not so clear. While autonomy is preferable to independence – and indeed, the US-drafted Rambouillet autonomy codifies some of the very restrictions on autonomy initially proposed by Milosevic in 1988 – the stabilisation of an ethnic state may require shedding as much of this troublesome Albanian population as possible. Throughout 1998, voices were again raised among the Serbian intelligentsia for the partition of Kosova, in particular by Dobrica Cosic, the intellectual “father” of modern Serb nationalism.

The problem remained how to draw lines and how to physically separate Kosovar Serbs and Albanians. The 1999 war, involving brutal NATO terror bombing and an unimpeded Serbian genocidal drive to expel the Kosovar Albanians from their country, appears to have achieved this result. It appears virtually impossible for the two peoples to live together in mixed areas. The most dramatic effects were seen in the exodus of a large part of the Serb population following the war’s end, fearing revenge from returning Albanian refugees, from Albanian dominated regions.

Much less, however, was said of where Serb paramilitaries, backed by French NATO troops, are preventing the return of Albanian refugees to their homes in the north. There have been several media reports on the division of Kosova’s second biggest city, Mitovica, between north and south of the river. These reports invariably refer to the north of the city as the “Serb sector,” masking the fact that its population was 80 percent Albanian before the war. The armed Serbs there have declared the whole of Kosova north of there to the Serbian border a Serbian zone.

What is rarely reported, however, is what is there. In the north of Mitrovica is the Trepca lead-zinc-gold-silver-cadmium industrial complex, worth 5 billion dollars, the largest mining and metallurgy complex in the Balkans. It is this material wealth, not the lofty propaganda about Kosova being the alleged cradle of the Serbian nation, that is what the Serbian ruling class really wants to hang onto. It was also at Trepca that Albanian miners made their heroic stand against Milosevic in 1989, resulting in the sacking of 13,000 Albanian workers.

Of course, there are medieval Serbian monasteries in Kosova, which returning Yugoslav troops will be sent to guard. And even the very status of Kosova as autonomous rather than as a republic means that however much “self-government” the Albanian majority exercises, ownership of resources is still officially vested in the Serbian republic (which has been busily trying to privatise them, including a stake by a large Greek company in Trepca – a process held up only by the unstable situation that NATO occupation hopes to address). Hence in theory, even partition may not be necessary for Serbia to maintain ownership of Trepca – but the partiton moves ensure it just in case. Like Israel and its devolution of “self-government” to Palestinian population centres while controlling ressources, Serbia would prefer to get rid of the people and keep the resources. For Kosovars, the loss of the Trepca complex would doom hopes for viable self-determination more than the destruction unleashed by the war has. For imperialism, de facto but not official partition means the best of both worlds – separation of peoples, making them easier to control and stabilising the situation, combined with maintenance of international borders.

NOTES:

(1) Trotsky, L, “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” July 22, 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39).
(2) Turkish statistics of 1911, quoted by The Institute of History, Pristina, “Expulsions of Albanians and Colonisation of Kosova,” Pristina, www.kosova.com/expuls/. Indeed, the Supreme Command of the Serbian III Army did a census with similar results on March 3, 1913, ibid
(3) Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998
(4) Quoted from ibid, p. 254, from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Washington 1914, pp. 148-186.
(5) Ibid, p. 254.
(6) ibid, p. 282
(7) Ivan Bajlo, Strength of NOV and POJ, http://www.vojska.net/ww2/yugoslavia/statistics/partisans.asp , based entirely on official Yugoslav sources: Vlado Strugar, Jugoslavija 1941-1945, Beograd: Vojnoizdavački Zavod, 1969; Nikola Anić, Sekula Joksimović, Mirko Gutić, Narodnooslobodilačka vojska Jugoslavije, Beograd: Vojnoistorijski Institut, 1982
(8) Ibid.
(9) Phillip Cohen, Serbia’s Secret War, Texas A & M University Press, 1996, p. 101
(10)Boguljub Kocovic, The Victims of World War II in Yugoslavia, Libra Books, London, 1985; Vladimir Zerjavic, Yugoslavia’s Population Losses During World War II, Yugoslav Society for the Study of Victims, Zagreb, 1989. Both being good Yugoslavs writing just before the onset of the new medievalism in Serbia and Croatia, it is notable that the Serb Kocovic estimated a slightly higher Croat death toll, while the Croat Zerjavic estimated a slightly higher number of Serb victims.
(11) Lampe, J, Yugoslavia as History, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 193, 204. According to Matteo J. Milazzo (The Chetnik Movement & the Yugoslav Resistance, Baltimore, Maryland and London, 1975), the Ustashe itself claimed to have “at most about 40,000 ‘followers’, or barely 6 percent of the population.” As Phillip Cohen notes, of the total 6.6 million population of the NDH in 1941, when you take out 1.9 million Serbs and 900,000 Muslims, we are left with under 4 million Croats – of whom 40,000 is actually about 1 percent (Cohen, footnote 52). Perhaps the 6 percent estimate was of wider popular support beyond ‘followers’. Incidentally, where Lampe (above) claims under 10 percent support of “politically active Croats,” he claims the Ustashe had 12,000 members in 1941, ie, about 0.25% of the Croat population of the NDH.
(12) Cohen, P, p. 33, Appendix A, with full list of names and positions and titles.
(13) Documents on the Treason of Draga Mihailovic, State commission for the documentation of crimes by the occupiers and their collaborators, Belgrade, 1945.
(14)Cigar, N, Genocide in Bosnia, Texas A&M University press, College Station, 1995, p212, quoting Ekonomska Politika, Belgrade, January 27, 1969. Also, Veselica, M, The Croatian National Question, London, 1980, p12, giving the figure of 73.5 percent.
(15)According to all surveys. See, for example, Hashi, I, “The Disintegration of Yugoslavia,” in Capital and Class, no. 48, Autumn 1992, p73, table from Vreme, July 15, 1991, showing 67 per cent of officers being Serb or Montenegrin (compared to their 39 per cent of the population) and another 7 per cent being “Yugoslavs,” half presumed to be Serbs. The charge that the lower proportions of Croats and Slovenes were due to their allegedly better economic opportunities compared to Serbs would be hard to reconcile with this table showing only 1 per cent of Albanian officers, compared to their 8 per cent of the population, Albanians being far and away the poorest group in Yugoslavia.
(16)Hashi, op cit, p73
(17)Woodward, S, Balkan Tragedy, The brookings Institution, Washington, 1995, p109
(18)Woodward, S, Socialist Unemployment, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, p356, quoting Zagreb daily Vjesnik, September 8, 1982
(19)Veselica, op cit, p12
(20)Malcolm, N, Bosnia; A Short History, Papermac, London, 1994, p216
(21)Vovou, S (ed), Bosnia-Herzegovina – The Battle for a Multi-Ethnic Society, Deltio Thiellis, Athens, 1996, table on p19
(22)Malcolm, op cit, p202, from 1971 census
(23)Anderson, J, “The Price of Balkan Pride,” in The Washington Post, December 29, 1991
(24)Figure for all Serbia, including provinces
(25)Plestina, D, in Allcock, Horton and Milivojevic (Ed), Yugoslavia in Transition, Berg publishers, New York, 1992, p140
(26)ibid, p144-46
(27)Gow, Legitimacy and the Military, Pinter Publishers, London, 1992, p105
(28)ibid, p103
(29)Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, op cit, p115
(30)Cohen, L, Broken Bonds, Westview Press, Boulder, 1993, p55-56
(31)Foreign Broadcast Information Bulletin-Eastern Europe (FBIS-EU), p39
(32)Woodward, op cit, p59
(33)According to The New York Times, “the political will to carry it (economic reform) through has failed because of the absence of a political centre of power,” Kamm, H, “Yugoslavia Unglued,” in The New York Times, October 11, 1988, A12; The London Financial Times in an editorial claimed “The economy is bent out of shape in many ways, partly to do with its fragmentation…along the lines of the country’s eight republics and provinces…and partly to do with the vaunted system of self-management,” Editorial, Financial Times, July 29, 1985. Neither had anything to say about democratic reform
(34)US House of Representatives, Committee on Small Business, Economic Restructuring in Eastern Europe: American Interests, 101st Congress, First Session, September 1989, p12
(35)But it despaired of the ability of the government to carry them through. Defence Minister Branko Mamula warned in 1983 that while the JNA strongly supported “economic stabilisation,” (ie the IMF program), he found it “difficult to understand…the slowness and certain inconsistencies in implementing the agreed policy and the widespread phenomena of giving preference to partial interests at the expense of general, Yugoslav ones,” Gow, J., Legitimacy and the Military, p74, quoting Mamula from Narodna Armija, December 22, 1983.
(36)Magas, B, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, Verso, London, 1995, p199, 201. The Memorandum demanded that the Serbian nation must now re-establish its full “national and cultural integrity…irrespective of the republic or province in which it finds itself.” In particular, Kosovo must be crushed, to prevent the ongoing “genocide” against the local Serbs.
(37)Dimitrijevic, V, The 1974 Constitution as a Factor in the Collapse of Yugoslavia or as a Sign of Decaying Totalitarianism, European University Institute Working Paper RSC No. 94/9, Florence, 1994, p24
(38)Gowan, P, “The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tragedy”, New Left Review, 1999
(39)Cigar, op cit, p. 34, quoting Danas, February 7, 1989, p. 33
(40)Amnesty International, Yugoslavia’s Ethnic Albanians, New York, 1992
(41)These groups included the Movement for the National Liberation of Kosova, the Group of Marxist-Leninists of Kosova, the Red Front, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of Yugoslavia, and the Movement for an Albanian Republic in Yugoslavia
(42)Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, November 2, 1989, p19
(43)Like his famous statement that he was glad his wife was neither a Serb nor a Jew.
(44)The Constitution of the Republic of Croatia, December 22, 1990
(45) Letica, S, A Memoir of the Visit to the White House, September 25, 1990, in Cushman, T and Mestrovic, S, Ed., This Time We Knew, New York University Press, New York, 1996, pp 182-185
(46) EC-Yugoslavia: Annual Meeting of the Council for Cooperation, EURO News, no 72/1990, p2. Further, at the Luxembourg meeting of the EC on March 26, 1991, the EC declared its support for a “united and democratic Yugoslavia” as part of the “new Europe.” The same month, US President Bush wrote to Markovic expressing continued support to his government, Yugoslav unity and economic reform.
(47) ibid; also Zimmerman, p55
(48) Almond, op cit, p40.
(49) As Markovic was told personally by the Director General of the IMF, Mr. Camdessy, Review of International Affairs, Belgrade, April 19, 1991, p21
(50) Almond, op cit, p47; also Review of International Affairs, Belgrade, April 19, 1991, p21
(51) Almond, op cit, p43
(52) Financial Times, London, May 8, 1991, editorial
(53) Almond, op cit, p48
(54) Hansard, House of Commons, col 1138, June 27, 1991
(55) ibid.
(56) Zimmerman, op cit, p143
(57) Gowan, op cit, p4
(58) Almond, M, Europe’s Backyard War, Mandarin, London, 1994, p43
(59) See for example Pilger, J, Distant Voices, Vintage, London, 1992, pp213-219, where he erroneously claims that Germany’s “natural market” extended only to Slovenia and Croatia and hence encouraged them to “dissociate” from Yugoslavia; Gervasi, S, “Germany, the US and the Yugoslav Crisis,” Covert Action, Winter 1992-93, pp45, 64-65
(60) Woodward, op cit, pp183-89
(61) It was after this meeting that US Secretary of State George Baker visited Belgrade and insisted absolutely on Yugoslavia’s “territorial integrity and unity,” calling any unilateral secession of Croatia and Slovenia “illegal and illegitimate” which would “never” be recognised by the US.
(62) Opinion No. 5 on the Recognition of the Republic of Croatia by the European Community and its Member States, Paris, January 11, 1992
(63) Perhaps the East Herzegovina Serbs and the West Herzegovina Croats were the only exceptions
(64) Just before this, the Krajina rulers rejected a US-Russian offer of high level autonomy, including keeping their own army!
(65) The anti-Croat, pro-Serb nationalist lobby has always played up this event, by bolstering the numbers of expelled Serbs to 300,000 or more, virtually any number that enters their heads. The purpose of this hyperbole is to make the ridiculous claim that this was “the largest act of ethnic cleansing in the whole Balkans,” which has been repeated ad nauseam. This would be news to 2.7 million Bosnian refugees.

by Michael Karadjis

July 1995

The war in Bosnia seems to be causing widespread confusion on the left. To cite a few examples, a wildly inaccurate article in the June 7 1993 issue of the Guardian claimed that the US and other Western powers “encouraged secessionists in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia” and “set out to destroy the united Yugoslavia”. The article claims it is only “the resistance of the Bosnian Serbs” that prevents the complete break-up of Yugoslavia, and this is why they are being “demonised in the west”. Among other fantasies in the unsigned article, the Serbs have the backing of a section of the Muslim population, and it is claimed that Muslims are only 33% of Bosnia’s population (they are in fact 43% while Serbs make up 30%).

This confusion is replicated in a letter to (Green Left Weekly (June 28) by C.M. Friel which asserted that GLW supports “the dismemberment of Yugoslavia” like reactionaries such as Reagan. Friel is apparently caught in a time warp, claiming that the “international ruling class” is imposing sanctions on Serbia “so as to prevent the normal functioning of a socialist economy”.

A more “balanced” view is represented in the June 2 Workers News, which claims that “all sides have blood on their hands”. The genocide against Bosnia’s Muslims is equated to the desperate attempts by the Bosnian government to regain some of the territory that has been conquered by the fascist forces.

Just in case anyone thought this head in the sand approach was truly even handed, the article states that Croatia and Bosnia have no right to self-determination, because their existence is unviable (like East Timor?) outside a united Yugoslavia. The alleged “rush” to recognise these new republics by the West is blamed for the war. The Guardian article cited above also makes the false claim that these new republics were granted “immediate recognition by western countries”.

These papers point to the “extreme right-wing nationalist” regime in Croatia while failing to mention the similar extreme right-wing nationalist regime in Serbia, and duck the issue of the far more progressive multi-ethnic Bosnian government, which includes the former Bosnian Communist Party, merely parroting the Western media’s frame-up of it as a “Muslim” government.

Here I want to take up six points at the heart of this confusion.

1. That the secession of Croatia and Bosnia led to the break-up of a united Yugoslavia.

In fact it was the right-wing nationalist regime of Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic which set out in 1987 to destroy the multinational Yugoslav federation and replace it with a “Greater Serbia” by uniting all lands where any Serbs lived (even in a minority) and forcing out everyone else.

The Kosovo region, inhabited by Albanians, had its autonomous status abolished and has since suffered under horrific occupation. Before the coming to power of Tudjman in Croatia, and long before Bosnian independence, the Serbian regime was encouraging and arming fascist forces among the Serbian minorities in these two republics and setting up armed “states within a state” which were already expelling non-Serbs. Years of this impossible situation led to Croatia and Slovenia declaring independence in 1991; even then, Bosnia still held on to its ideas for a looser Yugoslav federation until April 1992, when the pressure of Greater Serbia made this dream impossible.

Genocide was openly talked about. Bosnian Serb fascist leader Radovan Karadzic (head of the pro-Chetnik Serb Democratic Party which leads the war to destroy Bosnia) stated as early as late 1991 that if talk of Bosnian independence continued, one of the three peoples there (i.e. the Muslims) would “disappear from the face of the Earth”. His colleague in Serbia, Vojislav Seselj from the Chetnik Serbian Radical Party, a coalition partner in government with Milosevic, suggested in parliament the best way to solve the Croatia problem was to “cut the throat of every Croat.”

2. That the Serbian regime and its Bosnian Serb allies are defending a united Yugoslavia against the secessionists.

The Yugoslavia of 1918-41 was a Serb-dominated monarchical dictatorship that no-one on the left supported. However, postwar Communist Yugoslavia, led by Tito, was, for all its imperfections, an attempt to create a union of six autonomous republics (Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, Croatia and Slovenia), to which Tito added Kosovo and Vojvodina in 1974.

Milosevic and his fascist allies have destroyed this Yugoslavia in favour of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia and completely revived Chetnik ideology as state ideology. The Bosnian government has been fighting to defend the last remnants of multinational Yugoslavia: Bosnian cities such as Sarajevo and Tuzla where Serbs, Croats, Muslims and mixed Bosnians struggle side by side to preserve such a society against the fascist forces trying to wipe out its last embers.

3. That the West is trying to destroy “socialist” Yugoslavia.

Even long before Milosevic, Yugoslavia had a peculiar form of “market socialism” which gave it the distinction of having more unemployment than anywhere in capitalist Western Europe.

But it was Milosevic who completely “opened up” the Yugoslav economy, launched privatisation, leading to massive inflation, unemployment and slashing of living standards. The largest capitalist empire in the Balkans is owned by a Serb, Boguljub Karic, who owns mining, oil, banking and telecommunications interests, and built his house next door to his best friends, Milosevic and his wife. Serbia was in the vanguard of East European capitalist restoration. This was before the equally pro-capitalist regimes were elected in other Yugoslav republics.

4. That the Bosnian Serbs are fighting for their land in Bosnia and have their own right to self-determination.

The forces led by Karadzic occupy 70% of Bosnia, yet Serbs make up only 31% of Bosnia’s population. Despite this, the fascists control less than half of Bosnia’s Serbs. The rest live either in the big cities together with Muslims and Croats, under government control, or have fled to Serbia proper in order to avoid the filthy war. The Milosevic regime has often forced these people back to Bosnia to join the militias.

These Serb nationalist militias call themselves “Chetniks” after the right-wing Serbian monarchist forces which fought against Tito’s partisans during the Nazi occupation, and often collaborated with the Nazis. Even then they were known for their grisly slaughter of Muslims. They were the mirror image of the Croatian Ustasha, which collaborated with the Nazis and massacred Serbs, Jews, Muslims and Roms (Gypsies). In fact, the “pro-Serb” and “anti-Croat” wing of the left ought to meditiate on the fact that these Chetnik Serb forces are allied to the right-wing chauvinist Bosnian Croat forces in their joint attempt to carve out ethnically pure ‘Serb’ and ‘Croat’ states and destroy multi-ethnic Bosnia.

5. That the Western powers “immediately recognised” the new republics.

In fact the rivalry among imperialists led to conflicting views of what to do. Before the outbreak of the Serb-Croatian war in July 1991, no western country supported independence of the republics, including Germany. Although the Croatian referendum in June 1991 saw a 94% vote for independence, and although this was followed by six months of massive bombing of Croatian cities by the Serbian army and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Croats from one third of Croatia, still there was no recognition of Croatia.

However, given its links to Croatia and Slovenia, Germany recognised earlier than others that the enormous war and killing taking place would make it impossible for any ‘Yugoslavia’ to be forced together again, so began advocating recognition of the two republics. Finally, 6 months after the Croatian referendum and 6 months after the largest slaughter in Europe since World War II, Germany recognised Croatia and Slovenia 3 weeks before the EU was due to recognise them. It is debatable whether or not this was ‘rapid’ recognition.

Meanwhile, the US, right through the Serbo-Croatian war and into the first few months of 1992, steadfastly opposed self-determination and stated that it recognised “only one state within the boundaries of Yugoslavia.” Even Russia had recognised Croatia and Slovenia at the same time as the EU, several months before the US.

In recognising Bosnia in April 1992, the Western powers attempted to make a condition the ethnic “cantonisation” of the republic, which played perfectly into the hands of the Serb and Croat nationalists in Bosnia. Clearly, Yugoslavia had ceased to exist long before the recognition of Bosnia.

6. That the imperialist powers have openly intervened on the side of Serbia’s opponents in the Yugoslav “civil war”.

For all the bluster and the UN troops, now standing by calmly observing the “ethnic cleansing” of Srebrenica, the West has essentially not raised a finger to help the Bosnian victims of genocide. Normally, when the US wants a war because imperialist interests are threatened, it can whip up enough horror stories; in the case of Bosnia, it would only need to tell the truth. Compare three years of fumbling to the US rapid holocaust against Iraq when the right-wing regime there, for its own reasons, did in fact threaten imperialist interests.

While Serbia does not threaten imperialist interests, there are certainly differences between the imperialist powers and the Bosnian Serb fascists: above all, every Western plan to dismember Bosnia along ethnic lines has given the Serb nationalists 50% of Bosnia, whereas Karadzic and his forces want to keep the 70% they have conquered by force of overwhelming military superiority.

The West wants some stability for investments, and they see a balance between Serbia and Croatia as the best bet, hence basically support their aim to partition Bosnia between them. However, if the Karadzic forces keep 70 percent, there will be little left to both please the Croat nationalists and also allow a minimum of living space for the Muslim majority. The West knows there will be no stability if the Bosnian Muslims are forced into such a small area that a Gaza would be created in Europe. Nevertheless, the West also recognises that the Serbian regime will be the main force in the future stable order.

That is why the most effective forms of Western intervention favour the Serb nationalists. All the Western plans to dismember Bosnia along ethnic lines have been opposed in principle by Bosnia’s government but supported in principle by the Serb and Croat militias and Milosevic and Tudjman. The Serb nationalist militias only demand more territory from the plans. Notably, Milosevic, who some leftists think is some kind of ‘socialist’, is in complete agreement with the West on this; it is the most openly right-wing and Chetnik forces in Serbia and Bosnia that oppose the plans from a chauvinist-extremist point of view.

Secondly, the West imposed a criminal arms embargo against Bosnia’s government, despite the fact that Serbia inherited all the massive weaponry from the former Yugoslav army, the fourth largest in Europe, and that Serbia makes its own arms.

Every Western power at every step of the way has refused to end this real intervention. They know that with around 120,000 troops, a properly armed Bosnia would easily clear up 70,000 fascist militia.

Every other people in the world has the right to defend itself, yet no-one on the Australian left except GLW, the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance, has called for ending the imperialist arms embargo, ie the major imperialist intervention in Bosnia.

With 200,000 Bosnians killed and 2 million expelled from their homes, the left cannot afford confusion about attempted genocide. And to mislabel the perpetrators of that genocide as defenders of socialism is both tragic and absurd

by Michael Karadjis

July 1993

Two million Bosnians have been driven from their homes, and hundreds of thousands are dead. Nearly ninety per cent of Bosnia is under occupation by militias sponsored by Serbia and Croatia which openly aim to split the republic between them. This is despite the fact that Serbs only account for 30 percent of the population and Croats a mere 17 percent, while Muslims make up some 43 percent and the remainder are so completely mixed that they can only be called ‘Bosnians’. Further, many Serbs and Croats are still fighting together with their Muslim and mixed brothers and sisters against this apartheid and genocide launched by Serb and Croat chauvinist militias.

In other words, the Serb and Croat chauvinist forces have only been able to conquer such a large proportion of the country due to overwhelming military superiority. Yet the western powers continue an arms blockade against the Bosnian government.

Western governments are also still pushing various apartheid schemes to split the republic on ethnic lines. Following the collapse of the Vance-Owen plan to split Bosnia into ethnic cantons in early 1993, the western powers concluded that even more extravagantly pro-Serbian schemes were necessary.

The first was the idea to allow the Serbian and Croatian chauvinist militias to keep all the land they had conquered, while Bosnia’s Muslims, around half the population, would gain UN “protection” in “safe havens” in a number of isolated, bombed out, besieged, overcrowded cities.

These “safe havens” then underwent weeks of further siege, bombardment and strangulation by Serbian Chetniks while the UN sat and watched.

The de facto alliance between the Serbian and Croatian militias came out into the open, with a western-backed initiative by these forces in mid June 1993 to split Bosnia into three ethnic states. This was known as the ‘Owen-Stoltenberg’ Plan after the chief EU and UN negotiators. Britain’s Lord Robert Owen continues to represent the most extravagantly pro-Serbian nationalist positions, reflecting the policy of the Tory government.

Bosnian President Izetbegovic refused to attend a partition conference in Geneva organised by Serbia, Croatia, their local thugs in Bosnia and the European Community. Chief negotiator Lord Owen and other European leaders pressured the Bosnian government to “accept reality” and agree to the partition of the country. Even without the participation of the legal Bosnian government or anyone representing the Muslim and mixed communities, this European-Serbian-Croatian self-appointed team proceeded to draw up a plan to dismember the country anyway.

Bosnia’s various communities are scattered in every part of the republic. The Bosnian government is completely correct to claim that the borders of such ethnic states would be “drawn in blood” and that ethnic cleansing would be stepped up.

Sarajevo professor Naza Tanovich-Miller wrote in a recent letter to US President Clinton: “Divide what Mr President? Divide houses and apartment buildings, divide streets and villages, divide towns and cities, divide homes and bedrooms? By the 1990 census 25% of Bosnian marriages are mixed, i.e. 1.2 million people are families of mixed faiths. Where should they live Mr President?”

According to Ilhana Nurkic from the Australian Bosnian and Herzegovinan Community Association, even the talk of three states is a farce. She points out that Serbian and Croatian nationalists have launched joint operations and captured a number of towns in the very heart of Bosnia, such as Zepce and Maglaj, which were never in any Serbian or Croatian zone on any of the partition maps.

US and Europe

Two years ago, the UN Security Council banned arms sales to all sides in the Yugoslav conflict. This affected everyone except Serbia, which inherited the massive military arsenal of the former Yugoslav People’s Army, the fourth largest military force in Europe, in the ‘Vance Plan’ to end the Serbo-Croatian war of 1991 (named after former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance who negotiated this plan). Serbia also produces its own weapons. Factories in Serbia and Serbian-occupied Bosnia are still pumping out arms and ammunition.

When Germany, which has a special economic relationship with Croatia and Slovenia, broke US-European ranks and recognised these two republics at the end of 1991 following 6 months of massive bombardment of Croatia by the by-then exclusively Serb ‘Yugoslav People’s Army’, the US was opposed, seeing a strong Serbia as a counterweight to German-influenced Croatia.

Britain and France were also wary of German ambitions. Hence it is hardly surprising that these two governments have maintained the most steadfastly pro-Serbian policy throughout the Bosnian war. An indication of the rivalry was a major article in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine in early 1993, which revealed that before the war in Bosnia began, “Great Britain and France had notified Serbia that they would not intervene”.

Meanwhile, a number of well-publicised “secret” meetings between the Serbian and Croatian governments and their militias in Bosnia in early 1992, following the end of Serbo-Croatian hostilities, produced a deal to partition Bosnia between them. In fact, Serbian leader Milosevic and Croatian leader Tudjman had met as early as April 1991 to discuss the partition of Bosnia. It was in the same spirit that the European Union insisted that Bosnia be divided into ethnic cantons in early 1992 as a condition for recognition – the first EU partition plan, known as the Carrington-Cultheiro Plan, was thus drawn up even before ethnic cleansing began, so cannot be called an attempt to “recognise reality” as the later plans have attempted to be sold.

This inter-European dealing between UK- and French-backed Serbia and German-backed Croatia, just after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, was increasingly leaving the US out of the picture. This further came to a head with the announcement in May 1992 by Germany and France of plans for a 35,000 strong “Eurocorps”, a European army independent of NATO. A 180 degree change in the US position, with fierce new anti-Serbian rhetoric, began straight after this announcement.

However, this rhetoric did not lead to any actual US support for Bosnia, or even a US lifting of the criminal arms embargo. As the purpose of the rhetoric was more related to the emerging US-EU rivalry of the post-Cold War than to any real concerns with defending Bosnia, US policy then underwent about a dozen policy shifts — as one European UN diplomat put it, “US policy on Bosnia consists of a perpetual policy review.”

Before coming to power, Clinton criticised Bush for not taking action on Bosnia, and then proceeded to take an even softer approach for several months. Suddenly in April 1993, he again upped the rhetoric, pushing for air strikes and, for the first time, the lifting of the arms blockade against the Bosnian government. Both were opposed by the European states, who were trying to push through the Vance-Owen partition plan.

Since when, however, does the US need European permission to do anything?

Arms blockade

The arms blockade, preventing the besieged victims from defending their own cities, has been the most consistent form of US-European intervention in the Yugoslav conflict for the last two years.

According to Ilhana Nurkic, Bosnia could easily raise an army of 200,000, the only problem being lack of weapons. Discouraging any influx of volunteer fighters from the Islamic world, Miles Ragnz, an adviser to Bosnia’s UN mission, declared, “We certainly don’t want any foreign force to come into our country and fight, because we are ready to fight for ourselves. In Sarajevo alone we have 200,000 ready and able men and only 3000 rifles.”

By contrast, according to Ian Traynor in the Guardian, “the Bosnian Serb army is about 70,000 strong, with 300 tanks, 180 armoured vehicles and up to 40 combat aircraft and helicopters. It has a vast array of heavy artillery and weapons … If it runs short, there are abundant supplies in Serbia.” As for the Bosnian Croat militia, Traynor estimates they have “some 50,000 troops, amply supplied with anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons, a few dozen tanks, at least two aircraft, and some heavy guns. Zagreb keeps the Bosnian Croat forces well-stocked with modern machine guns and ammunition.”

Even these figures for the sizes of the nationalist militias include large numbers of fighters from Serbia and Croatia. If Bosnia’s borders with Serbia and Croatia were sealed, and the arms blockade on Bosnia were lifted, it would easily be able to deal with the nationalist militias.

For the western mass media, there is no Bosnian government, merely “Muslim forces” and a “Muslim-led government.” Yet according to Nurkic, Serbs still make up 17% of the Bosnian army, and estimates range up to 30% (and 15% Croats).

As Nurkic points out, it is hard to make such estimates because most people call themselves Bosnian, whether their religion is Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim or whatever.

Right-wing militias

Likewise, the forces fighting against the Bosnian government are not merely “Serbs” and “Croats” but rather militias based on extreme right-wing political parties. The Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), whose fighters call themselves Chetniks after the fascist forces who fought against the partisans in World War II, is the main force responsible for the genocide in Bosnia. Its constant shelling of Sarajevo and other cities kills Serbs as well as Muslims and Croats.

In Serbia itself, young people are no more interested in fighting for the Chetniks than are most of the Bosnian Serbs. Despite the atmosphere of repression and hysteria, only 24% of young men obeyed conscription orders in 1992 — only 12% in Belgrade. Meanwhile, half the Serb population of the part of Bosnia controlled by the reactionary SDS have fled to Serbia to try to escape being drafted into that party’s genocidal war against their neighbours.

The policies of the similarly reactionary nationalist Croatian Democratic Forum (HVO), linked to the Tudjman regime in Croatia, in joining the Chetniks to carve up Bosnia, are a stab in the back of the thousands of Croats ethnically cleansed by the Chetniks — but then the HVO has been responsible for similar cleansing against both Serbs and Muslims. A smaller militia has also emerged explicitly modelled on the Ustashe, the World War II brutal fascist regime installed in power by the Nazi occupiers.

After declaring its own “state” in Bosnia in mid-1992, the HVO rapidly moved to ethnically cleanse Muslims in western Hercegovina and central Bosnia, as it tried to wrest control of these regions from the Bosnian army. Three thousand Muslims were expelled from the town of Prozor. A more concerted wave of HVO ethnic cleansing was launched in early May 1993, with thousands of Muslims being expelled from Mostar and Novi Travnik.

While the Bosnian government has rejected all attempts to split Bosnia along ethnic lines, it is hardly surprising that some Muslim-dominated sections of the army have sometimes responded with their own ethnic cleansing. Aside from the desire for revenge, thousands of Muslim refugees have created a pressure to gain as much territory as possible before any “peace” is imposed over their heads.

In response to HVO ethnic cleansing, a unit of the Bosnian army recently launched an ethnic cleansing operation against Croatian villages around Travnik in central Bosnia, leaving many dead and forcing thousands to flee. While this gained prominent coverage, Nurkic reports that Bosnian President Izetbegovic called on the army to punish those responsible for any attacks on Croats, and called on the villagers to return. None of this was reported in the media.

Professor Naza Tanovich-Miller lays the blame for the situation squarely where it belongs: “By not lifting the arms embargo and by supporting apartheid [the plans to split Bosnia ethnically] … by calling all sides equally guilty, [the western governments’] guilt is as great as the aggressor’s.”