Kosova Independence Series Part II:

By Michael Karadjis

This is the second part of a series of articles looking at different aspects of the issue of the recently announced semi-independence of Kosova, which has produced markedly different reactions among left-wing and socialist movements around the world.

The first part was a general background to the events leading up to this independence declaration. It can be read at

http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2008_02_24_archive.html

This part will tackle the general question of the right to self-determination, and why Kosova’s situation fully accords with this right long supported by the left. While much more will be said of the role of imperialism and other factors in the following parts – including imperialism’s role precisely in limiting Kosovar self-determination – understanding this aspect is primary to developing an overall position.

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Support of the right of nations to self-determination is a long-term principle for Marxists. Lenin in particular elaborated a great deal on this issue, and his writings remain of great relevance today.

Lenin stresses that even abolishing national oppression can only become reality “with the establishment of full democracy in all spheres, including the delineation of state frontiers in accordance with the “sympathies” of the population, including complete freedom to secede.” This is not in order to create small states, but on the contrary, only this can, dialectically, “serve as a basis for developing the practical elimination of even the slightest national friction and the least national mistrust, for an accelerated drawing together and fusion of nations …”[1]

Thus this is all the more important when talking about capitalist states, the relationships between which are commonly characterised by national oppression. Lenin considered it self-evident that peoples will only revolt for independence if the conditions of national oppression are intolerable:

“From their daily experience the masses know perfectly well the value of geographical and economic ties and the advantages of a big market and a big state. They will, therefore, resort to secession only when national oppression and national friction make joint life absolutely intolerable and hinder any and all economic intercourse.”[2]

Moreover, for all practical purposes, to oppose the right of self-determination means to support the right of the stronger nation to forcibly suppress their struggles:

“… in the capitalist state, repudiation of the right to self-determination, i.e., the right of nations to secede, means nothing more than defence of the privileges of the dominant nation and police methods of administration, to the detriment of democratic methods…”[3]

Far from being a concession to the narrow bourgeois aspect of the nationalism of the oppressed, it is only the right to full secession that is capable of undermining such nationalism:

“The right to self-determination and secession seems to ‘concede’ the maximum to nationalism” but “in reality, the recognition of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum of democracy and the minimum of nationalism” because it helps promote the internationalist “class solidarity” of the workers of oppressor and oppressed nations.”[4]

But while many leftists accept this right in theory, some claim it is limited to struggles by oppressed peoples against imperialism, or at least that it depends on whether a particular struggle for national self-determination strengthens or weakens imperialist interests.

But this wasn’t how Lenin viewed it at all. When he supported Norway’s independence from Sweden it had no connection to either alleged condition. Even more starkly, 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.”[5]

When one sees Kosovar Albanians wildly waving American flags next to their own Albanian flag – which, ironically enough, imperialism has forced them to abandon – one is reminded of this quote from Trotsky: it was not the exercise of Kosovar self-determination, but precisely the denial of it to the Kosovars, that allowed US imperialism – very belatedly – to pose as their champion when it found it opportune, leading to this marked pro-imperialist shift in the consciousness of Kosovar Albanians.

There is a basic “common sense” aspect to this right: given that people will only risk a struggle for independence when they find conditions unbearable, any opposition to their struggle from leftists will not only change nothing about their struggle, but alienate the left from this entire oppressed nation. Every claim that a particular national struggle may happen to coincide with some reactionary or imperialist interest can be countered by the simple fact that it was the oppression in the first place that produced this result. The masses of this oppressed nation will not move on to a more progressive, let alone socialist, consciousness, until they have achieved their right to run their own state and learn in practice that their “own” bourgeoisie is also their enemy.

The roots of Albanian oppression and resistance

In the 19th century, the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian people had waged successful liberation struggles against the Ottoman empire and set up their own independent capitalist states – as today’s critics of Kosova might say, they carried out “illegal secession” that “violated Ottoman sovereignty.” However, a strip of the Balkans, covering the Albanian, Macedonian and Thracian regions, with a wide ethnic mixture, remained under Ottoman rule.

In 1912, the Albanian peoples rose in revolt against Ottoman rule. Aiming to grab as much territory from the retreating empire as possible, before the Albanians or other local peoples could set up their own states, the three independent Balkan states launched the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 to carve up remaining Ottoman territory. Approximately half of the Albanian ethnic territory fell to the Serbian monarchy, including Kosova, a large section of Serbian-conquered part of Macedonia (itself divided into three), the Presevo Valley in southeast Serbia and parts of Montenegro. The other half was rescued for a rump Albanian state by Austrian diplomacy.

This partition of the Albanian and Macedonian nations and the other borders drawn in blood were officially recognised by the imperialist powers at the London Conference of 1913. Serbia was a key ally of the British-French-Russian imperialist bloc in its impending clash with its German-Austrian rivals. This imperialist consecration of the division of the Albanian nation is at the heart of the conflict which has raged throughout the century.

The Kosovar 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:“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.”[6] 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.”[7]

Serbian Marxist Dimitrije Tucovic witnessed “barbaric crematoria in which hundreds of women and children are burnt alive” and claimed the clergy were urging the troops on to take revenge for the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389, when the then Serbian empire was defeated by the Ottoman empire in Kosova. “The historic task of Serbia,” he wrote “is a big lie.”[8] “For as long as the Serbs will not understand and realize that they are on foreign lands and territory, they will never be in peace or have good neighbor relations with Albanians,” Tucovic wrote. “Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans.”[9]

Tucovic was leader of the left faction of the Serbian Social-democratic Party which, together with Lenin’s Russian Bolsheviks, were among the only social-democratic parties to remain internationalist during WWI and to deny war credits to their “own” bourgeoisie. What he writes above about 1912-13 may just as well have been written about the 1980s and 1990s.

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, but from the start was a classic prison-house of nations, completely dominated by the Serbian bourgeoisie.

The worst excesses occurred in Kosova, where the largely Muslim Albanian majority were not Slavic at all, and lived in a land that Serb nationalists declared the cradle of their nation due to the presence of a large number of medieval Orthodox churches, and the famous battle against the Ottomans back in 1389.

Modern Serb nationalists claim that “Kosova has always been Serbia,” but 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.[10] 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.[11] The discrepancy in claimed Ottoman figures is almost certainly due to the fact that the Ottomans did not do censuses of ethnic groups, but only of religious affiliation – ‘Orthodox’ was assumed to be ‘Serb’ by the more generous researchers, but this would be an incorrect reading. But even according to the most generous reading, Albanians were the absolute majority.

Between the two World Wars, Albanians were ruthlessly uprooted: in one example, the entire Albanian population of upper Drenica (6,064 people) were dispossessed of their land in 1938. They were pressured into leaving for Albania or Turkey – estimates are of some 70,000 Albanians leaving during this period. However, that was not considered adequate, so in 1938, Yugoslavia made a deal with Turkey to expel another 40,000 Albanians, as Turkey wanted to use the Muslim Albanians to colonise eastern Anatolia as an outpost against its own oppressed Kurds and Armenians. A leading member of the Serbian Academy, Vaso Cubrilovic, put out a memorandum entitled “The expulsion of the Albanians” in which he claimed that if Hitler and Stalin could get away with all kinds of slaughter without anyone reacting, then what would the world care about the expulsion of a few hundred thousand Albanians?

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.[12] Given that in 1999, the then Serb population of only 10 percent of Kosova consisted of only 200,000 people, this gives an idea of how significant this colonization was.

Following these 25 years of this prison-hell, when Mussolini invaded, the Albanians initially welcomed the Italian fascist troops, like Ukrainians and many other initially welcomed Nazi troops, or like future Indonesian national hero Sukarno collaborated with the Japanese occupiers. Of course, there were also Serb collaborators, as there were among all Yugoslav nations.[13]

The Italian occupiers allowed Kosova to be reunited with Albania as their puppet state. It is estimated that some 40,000 Serbs were expelled by the Albanian collaborationist regime. Though these were overwhelmingly the Serb colonists that were driven out, as the war progressed, Albanian fascists got less discriminating and acted with ruthless brutality towards the Serb population.

However, a Kosovar Albanian Partisan movement also appeared, fighting for the right to self-determination, including unity with Communist Albania. This was inspired by the program of Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans, who opposed the unitary Serb-dominated Yugoslavia of the inter-war years, and advocated instead an equal federation of Yugoslavia’s nations, based on proletarian internationalist ideals. Yugoslav and Albanian Communist leaders Tito and Enver Hoxha had aimed for Albania to become part of this, and for a new socialist federation of all Balkan nations, beyond a mere Yugoslav federation. As such, there could be no Kosovar republic, because it would eventually be part of the Albanian republic in the new federation, alongside the six Yugoslav republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro), and perhaps Bulgaria as well.

However, this never came to pass. In the first major violation of the new impending federal order, Tito had gathered Serb Partisans together with large numbers of former royalist, Serbian-chauvinist Cetniks (who came over following two amnesties declared by Tito in late 1944) and crushed the Kosovar Partisans.

According to Miranda Vickers:

“Perhaps the worst atrocity occurred in Tivar in Montenegro, where 1,670 Albanians were herded into a tunnel which was then sealed off so that all were asphyxiated.”[14]

As relations between Yugoslavia and Albania later deteriorated, Kosova was stuck in the highly unsatisfactory situation of autonomy inside Serbia.

Kosova’s “autonomy” status signified it the Albanians as a “national minority” rather than a “nation” as their nation state was Albania. However, Albanians were the vast majority of the population of Kosova in 1945, and in sheer numbers, they were bigger than most of the “nations” of Yugoslavia, and growing. 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.

In the first twenty years, under hard-line Serb leader Rankovic, this ‘autonomy” meant little more than living under permanent terror. Even the expulsions continued: in 1953, the pact with Turkey was reactivated, and some 100,000 Albanians were forced out in the program in the 1950s.

With the fall of the Rankovic regime in 1966, the Kosovar Albanian national movement began to blossom, partly under the influence of the 60’s rebellion. Responding to this, Tito visited Kosova in 1967, and declared a complete reversal of policy. According to Tito:

“One cannot talk about equal rights when Serbs are given preference in factories … and Albanians are rejected even tough they have the same and better qualifications.”[15]

A new, more internationalist, policy was introduced, which for the first time brought Kosovar Albanians close to the same level of equality enjoyed by the six other nations under the Titoist ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ policy of the socialist federation of equal nations. Till then, Albanians had been left out of this policy largely as a concession to Serbian nationalists, who had always regarded Titoism and federation as “the destruction of the Serb nation,” because that nation did not have the absolute power it had had in capitalist Yugoslavia. By denying equality at least to the “Serb holy land” of Kosova, and giving them many positions in the repressive apparatus there, Tito had hoped to pacify these reactionary forces.

According to Clark:

“The provincial government now gained more autonomy, introduced secondary schooling in Albanian, accepted Albanian and Turkish alongside Serbo-Croatian as official languages, and began to administer the ‘ethnic keys’ that were a feature of Yugoslavia at that time. For the first time, the majority of members of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in Kosovo were Albanians.”[16]

Prisoners were released, the secret police purged, and the media allowed a field day to expose the crimes of the Rankovic era. In 1970, the University of Pristina, with courses in both Albanian and Serbo-Croatian, was opened, as was the Rilindja publishing house, for the first time bringing out many books on Albanian history and culture. Above all, Kosovar Albanians could now fly the flag of neighbouring Albania as their own flag, reflecting their actual national consciousness, and the degree to which ‘high Titoism’ was moving towards internationalism on this issue.

The new 1974 constitution upgraded Kosova’s status to what is known famously as ‘high level autonomy’, under which, while still officially an autonomous province of Serbia, it was also declared a ‘constituent element’ of the Yugoslav federation itself. Kosova had direct representation in the Yugoslav federal presidency as an equal to other republics, not via the Serbian republic. Albanians from Kosova had their turns as president and vice-president, like representatives from other republics, positions annually rotated among the eight equal constituent units of the federation. Kosova even had the same right to veto on the collective presidency as did republics. It had its own supreme court, its own central bank, its own territorial defence force, all features of a republic.

Despite these highly positive changes, Albanians still continually called for full formal republic status, as recognition of full equality. Leading Albanian Communist Mehmet Hoxha had asked in 1968 “Why do 370,000 Montenegrins have their own republic, but 1.2 million Albanians do not even have total autonomy.”[17] However, now that they did have “total autonomy-plus” after 1974, this near-republic status, while far from perfect, was the “legal” situation, and therefore the claim that Kosova was a mere “province” of Serbia, and thus that is all it can aspire to now, is false. Indeed it is important to understand that even the element of still being formally a “highly autonomous” province of Serbia was entirely connected to and conditional upon it also being a direct part of the Yugoslav federation, so when that federation later collapsed, so did this entire constitutional set-up that included “autonomy”, because mere autonomy within Serbia can only be a downgraded status compared to being a constituent unit of a greater federation, which no longer exists.

The fact that Albanians nevertheless remained dissatisfied was accentuated by Kosova’s dramatic economic situation, where unemployment hovered around 50 percent, two and a half times the Yugoslav average. Kosova’s proportion of Yugoslav GDP was only one quarter its share of the population, and its GDP per capita was one quarter that of Serbia, again revealing its absolutely oppressed state.[18] Albanians likewise were grossly under-represented in unelected state bodies: with 8 percent of the Yugoslav population, they accounted for only one percent of the officers of the Yugoslav People’s Army, while 67 per cent of officers were Serb or Montenegrin (compared to their 39 per cent of the population).[19]

Tito died in 1980, and with him, one of the key figures dedicated to preserving the delicate ethnic balance that held the federation together. 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.[20] Between 1981 and 1988, 1000 Albanian teachers were sacked for allegedly not being committed to the fight against Albanian “nationalism.”[21]

This crackdown demonstrated to the Kosovars how frail their “high level” autonomy really was. Even though this remained their official status, this new wave of heavy repression effectively put to an end the 1968-81 ‘honeymoon period’ of Albanians in Yugoslavia. This 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.[22]

On the other extreme, the Serbian nationalist intelligentsia in the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986 released the famous “Memorandum,” attacking the entire post-war Titoist order. It 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. 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, Kosova must be crushed, to prevent the ongoing “genocide” against the local Serbs. This represented the first naked expression of the new nationalist ideology of the rising Serbian bourgeoisie, which had grown up under decades of “market socialism,” breaking through the Titoist/Communist ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ ideology that had encrusted it to date.

The wing of the Serbian bureaucracy around new leader Slobodan Milosevic in 1987 forged an alliance with this reactionary national chauvinism, and together spearheaded a countermobilisation of Kosovar Serbs with the exact opposite aim to the Albanians – to abolish Kosova’s autonomy, or reduce it to a meaningless pre-1974 variety. 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.

Kosovar Serbs were mobilised on the pretext that it was their rights under attack from an “Albanian” administration in Kosova, which would seem odd considering the massive police repression of everything Albanian from 1981 onwards. The Kosovar Serbs had a very high constitutional position for the small minority they were. According to Kullashi Muhaludin from Pristina University, “Throughout the institutions, from the lowest communal level to the highest instances of state and party, the leading functions were always shared between the two nationalities. If a school director, for example, was of one nationality, his deputy would have to be from the other. Furthermore, there existed a system of rotation which, each time a mandate changed, assured that the replacement would be from the other nationality … Indeed, the rotation principle favoured the Serbs, who were always in the minority in the province.”[23]

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 statistics, 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. Statistics also showed only one murder of a Serb by an Albanian in the period 1982 to 1987, over a land dispute, following which the culprit was executed. More significant was the change of law by Serbian authorities which made the ethnic origins of the accused in rape cases a legally relevant factor.[24]

This campaign was supplemented by the racist conspiracy theory that the larger families which poorer Albanians had was a deliberate strategy to outbreed Serbs. The Albanian proportion of the population in Kosova continued to increase, from 70-75 percent, to over 80 percent in 1980 and some 90 percent by 1999. This occurred for the same reasons as Lebanese Muslims, Irish Catholics and Palestinians continued to increase in population all century, much to the chagrin of colonial powers and chauvinists among Lebanese Christians, Irish Protestants and Israelis, who wanted to maintain sectarian states: poor people have lots more babies, while better-off people have less. In addition, the Kosovar Serbs, like the Bosnian Serbs and Croats, had a place to go to get out of the miserable poverty of Kosova, the 3rd world of Yugoslavia, (and out of slightly less miserable Bosnia): to north Serbia, Vojvodina (or Croatia), whereas the Kosovar Albanians (and Bosnian Muslims) did not, further entrenching their majority in the province.

In 1988, Milosevic, who had purged the Serbian League of Communists of its internationalist wing and launched an IMF-backed neo-liberalisation of the economy, proposed constitutional changes abolishing Kosova’s high level autonomy. As the Kosova assembly opposed this, Milosevic forced the resignation of veteran Kosovar leader and Tito-protégé Adem Vllasi. The heroic Kosovar miners led the last major working class resistance to the Milosevic counterrevolution. The irony of many western leftists seeing the Milosevic regime as the continuation of “socialist” Yugoslavia opposed to “pro-western secessionists” is exposed most clearly in these events. As Milosevic sought to destroy the Yugoslav constitution, with its fine balance between the various nations, mobilising under reactionary Chetnik and Serbian Orthodox slogans, the Kosovar miners led a movement to defend the Yugoslav constitution in late 1988 and early 1989. In their gigantic march from the ‘Trepca’ mines near Mitrovica in the north to Pristina in November 1988, the miners chanted “Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia,” bearing portraits of Tito and red flags. They were not calling for Kosovar independence, but warned that the violent crushing of the Kosovar people would lead to the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia.

Three hated officials, who had no popular mandate, were put into the Kosova assembly by Milosevic. In February, a general strike erupted throughout Kosova. A thousand miners went on hunger strike underground for 8 days, but were tricked into coming up with the pretence that there demands would be met. The strongly western-backed federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, sent federal troops into Kosova, not to support the constitutional demands of the Kosovar working class, but to suppress them on behalf of Milosevic, in outright violation of the constitution, effectively putting an end to Yugoslavia. A state of emergency was declared, and 24 Albanians shot dead by the occupation forces. Some 2000 Albanian workers were hauled before the courts, including former leaders of the assembly. The assembly was surrounded by tanks and helicopters and under this somewhat direct threat, agreed to pass the constitutional changes and vote itself out of existence. The next day, Markovic congratulated Milosevic on this destruction of the federal order.[25]

Kosovar working class resistance continued throughout 1989 and 1990. In January and February 1990 a further 32 Kosovar demonstrators were killed. In July, Serbia abolished what was left of Kososva’s autonomy as it adopted a new constitution, reducing Kosova (and Vojvodina) to just any other administrative district of Serbia. Locked out of the Kosova assembly, the majority of legally elected Albanian delegates voted on an act of self-determination for Kosova. Serbia formerly dissolved the assembly. On September 7, Kosovar delgates met and declared the Republic of Kosova as a “democratic state of the Albanian people and of members of other nations and national minorities who are its citizens: Serbs, Muslims, Montenegrins, Croats, Turks, Romanies and others living in Kosova.”[26] In 1991, Kosovars held a referendum, in which 99 percent voted for independence.

As the constitutional changes were forced through against the will of the Kosova assembly, it was an open attack on the federal constitution. Milosevic stooges were put in charge of the fictional “assembly” that was maintained as window dressing – the first major step in transforming federal Yugoslavia into a unitary Serb-dominated state. Despite abolition of the provinces’ autonomy, the new hand-picked “representatives” of Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro maintained federal representation, meaning four federal units had essentially become one. Milosevic now had four of the eight votes on the Federal Presidency, meaning an effective control of Yugoslavia. Hence beginning the IMF-demanded constitutional changes to limit the powers of the republics over federal decisions went in tandem with laying the groundwork for Greater Serbia and the destruction of the real Yugoslav federation. Not surprisingly, therefore, restoration of Kosovar autonomy was never one of the West’s demands over the next decade.

Following the scrapping of Kosovar autonomy and its complete occupation by the federal army, a state of apartheid existed in Kosova throughout the 1990s. Albanians were expelled from all jobs in public administration, all Albanian police were sacked and all municipal and communal councils were suspended, making Kosova essentially a colony, with a powerless population ruled by an administration made up entirely of people from the small Serbian minority. Only Cyrillic script was allowed in official dealings, thousands of teachers, who continued teaching in Albanian, were sacked and school syllabuses were Serbianised. Half a million school age children were thus effectively denied an education. The same happened with Prisitna University, and all names there were changed to Cyrillic script. Hundreds of Albanian doctors were driven out of hospitals. All Albanians in the public sector – which in the still largely state-controlled economy of the time meant nearly everyone in formal employment – were sacked. In the historic Trepca mines, Albanians, who had formed 70 percent of the 23,000 strong workforce, all lost their jobs. Names of streets and other locations throughout Kosova were changed to names from Serbian nationalist mythology. For example, Pristina’s Marshall Tito Boulevarde was changed to Vidovdan Boulevarde, after a Serbian Orthodox festival. Thousands of Albanians were hauled before the courts on the most trivial of charges; a state of complete lawlessness characterised the relations between the Serbian occupation authorities and the mass of the population.

This led on to a deeper anti-Muslim ideological crusade by the Serb nationalist movement. The cream of Serbia’s writers and intellectuals, such as future prime minister Dobrica Cosic, and Vuk Draskovic, now head of the moderate Chetnik Serbian Renewal Party (SPO), pushed obscurantist and medievalist Serbian chauvinist and Muslim-hating views in their writings. 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 Muslims and Albanians were called “Turks” and presented as continuers of the Ottoman Empire. The repression in Kosova and the later genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims were presented to the world as Serbia crusading in the frontline of western Christian civilisation against the “Islamic threat.”

From 1992 onwards, the independence struggle was led by Ibrahim Rugova and his Kosova Democratic League, which consisted essentially of the former Kosovar branches of the Yugoslav League of Communists. This entirely peaceful “Ghandian” struggle contrasted strongly with the bloodshed engulfing the region. The centrepiece of the struggle was a system of parallel schools, hospitals and other social and political institutions, allowing Albanians to continue take part in normal life in some form after being driven out of the system of the occupied province.

However, while gaining mass participation by Albanians, this imposed the onerous burden of double taxation – by the occupation regime, which gave them nothing in return, and by the parallel authorities. From around 1996, Rugova’s strategy was more and more challenged by more radical elements, particularly those led by Adem Demaci, known as Kosova’s Nelson Mandela for spending a total of 28 years in Serbian prisons. Demaci and others, including the growing student movement, demanded these institutions be supplemented by a more active mass protest action approach.

This entire struggle of the 1990s is a hugely inspirational story in itself, which this essay cannot detail.[27] The ultimate failure of this decade of peaceful resistance to achieve any gains, however, alongside the complete ignoring of this struggle by western powers, led to the rise of armed guerrilla movement, the Kosova Liberation Army at the end of the 1990s. This will be dealt with in the next part, but the important point here is to understand that this was not simply some “CIA-backed creation of the Albanian mafia and drug-runners” as the right-wing (and some left-wing) anti-Albanian demonisation asserts, but on the contrary was an organic outgrowth of this already existing mass independence struggle. It is hardly the first time in history that a non-violent liberation struggle turns to armed resistance when all else fails and repression prevails.

The other point to understand is that the demand for complete independence was not an innovation of the KLA. Some like to imagine that the ‘peaceful’ movement led by Rugova had a similarly “moderate” aim, in the view of those who consider independence sinful. As explained, Kosova’s declaration of independence by the Rugova-led movement took place in 1990 and there has never been any movement for autonomy or anything less than complete independence from any section of Kosovar Albanian society at any point.

In 1996, the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, carrying out research on the views of various minorities within Serbia regarding solutions to their oppression, was struck by the fact that the choice of “independence” as the only solution was supported by 100 percent of Albanians.[28] This is the simple reality that today’s critics of the right of the Kosovar people to self-determination have to deal with.

Conclusion to Part II

This second part of the series has aimed to demonstrate two things.

Firstly, the Kosovar Albanians were an oppressed people in the former Yugoslavia, and much more so under the Serbian iron heel when Yugoslavia collapsed. As an oppressed people living in a well-defined region, they have the right to self-determination, including complete independence. Moreover, considering the historic imperialist partitioning of the Albanian nation in 1913, and the fact that Albanians – the poorest nation in Europe – still live in a compact, contiguous region covering five countries, the Albanian people as a whole have the right to self-determination, meaning, if they wish, the Kosovars and other Albanian minorities should be allowed to unite with Albania.

This is their right – though whether a united Albanian nation or an independent Kosova is the better outcome will be discussed below.

Secondly, the Kosovar Albanians have resisted Serbian occupation for a century and have never recognised its legitimacy. This has to be an important aspect of the alleged ‘sovereignty” of established international borders. They have never claimed anything less than complete independence in all their struggles.

Therefore those claiming the current declaration of independence is merely an imperialist maneuver are wrong – the independence demand is and always has been overwhelming in Kosova, long before the very belated imperialist acceptance of it. The role of imperialism in the current crisis is very major, but cannot be understood in isolation from this very fundamental underpinning.

The next section will deal with the long term imperialist interest in and attitude to the Kosova question, including the war of 1999, while the third will deal with how we reached the current situation and the broader imperialist geo-strategic interests involved. A particular aspect will be the position of the Kosovar Serb minority in the newly independent state, and the question of independent multi-ethnic Kosova versus that of partition and/or united Albanian nation.

[1] Lenin, V.I., ‘The Discussion of Self-determination Summed Up’, Collected Works, Vol 22, p. 325

[2] Lenin, ‘The Right of Nations to Self-Determination’, Collected Works, Vol 20, p. 423

[3] Ibid, p. 423.

[4] Ibid, p. 434-35

[5] Trotsky, L, “Independence of the Ukraine and Sectarian Muddleheads,” July 22, 1939, in Writings of Leon Trotsky (1938-39).

[6] Quoted from Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998, 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.

[7] Ibid, p. 254

[8] Howard Clark, Civil Resistance in Kosovo, Pluto Press, 2000, p. 9.

[9] Holberg, A., Book review: Dimitrije Tucovic: Serbia and Albania, Published by Arbeitsgruppe Marxismus, Vienna, 1999, http://www.labournet.net/balkans/0003/serbrvw.html

[10] Turkish statistics of 1911, quoted by The Institute of History, Pristina, “Expulsions of Albanians and Colonisation of Kosova,” Pristina, http://www.kosova.com/expuls/. Indeed, the Supreme Command of the Serbian III Army did a census with similar results on March 3, 1913, ibid.

[11] Malcolm, N, Kosovo: A short history, New York University Press, 1998.

[12] Ibid, p. 282.

[13] The main collaborationist forces were the Nazi-installed genocidal Croatian Ustase, who killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and others, the Serbian puppet regime of Nedic, ruling over Belgrade as the first city to be declared ‘Judenfrei’ (free of Jews), and the Italian-backed and later German backed Serbian Cetniks who killed most of the 100,000 Bosnian Muslims who died in the war.

[14] Vickers, M, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, p. 143.

[15] Clark, p. 12.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Clark, p. 38.

[18] Vovou, S (ed), Bosnia-Herzegovina – The Battle for a Multi-Ethnic Society, Deltio Thiellis, Athens, 1996, table on p. 19.

[19] Vreme, July 15, 1991.

[20]. Amnesty International, Yugoslavia’s Ethnic Albanians, New York, 1992

[21] Interview with Kullashi Muhaludin, “Where the Crisis Began,” International Viewpoint, April 27, 1992, p20.

[22]. 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.

[23] Interview with Kullashi Muhaludin, op cit.

[24] Magas, B, The Destruction of Yugoslavia, Verso, New York/London, 1993, p. 62.

[25] Magas, op cit, p161.

[26] Poulton, H, The Balkans, op cit, p70.

[27] An excellent overall account of this struggle is Civil Resistance in Kosovo, by Howard Clark, then coordinator of War Resisters’ International, Pluto Press, 2000.

[28] Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, Report on Human Rights in Serbia for 1996, Belgrade, 1997. In the opinion of the Serbian Helsinki Committee, such unanimity was impossible, hence declaring the result “invalid.” It also regarded to be invalid the fact that 100 percent of Albanians gave a figure of ‘one’ out of ‘one to ten’ as to how unequal they feel. The Helsinki Committee decided that such unanimity was impossible “unless we want to conclude that … all Albanians in Serbia feel totally unequal and oppressed and that all of them consider that the only solution to their problem is an independent Kosovo.” In reality, the fact that the Helsinki Committee even doubted that this was exactly the case only indicates how far from the Kosovar reality even well-meaning Belgraders were at the time.

February 24, 2008

Kosova declares (semi-) independence: Yes to full self-determination for Kosova. No to continuation of colonial-ruled state

By Michael Karadjis

This article is the first in a series that will look at different aspects of the issue of Kosova’s declaration of independence, which has produced markedly different reactions among left-wing and socialist movements around the world.

This first is a broad overview of developments and the attitude we believe the left should take. The second article will tackle the general question of the right to national self-determination, and why Kosova’s situation fully accords with this right, long supported by the left. While much more will be said of the role of imperialism and other factors in coming articles – including imperialism’s role precisely in limiting Kosovar self-determination – understanding this aspect is primary to developing an overall position. The role and interests of imperialism and other issues will form another part of the series.

***

Kosova (Kosovo)* made its long-postponed declaration of independence on February 17, greeted by massive celebrations involving tens of thousands of people, euphoric that their hundred-year struggle had finally bore fruit. This very real groundswell was revealing of the very deeply grounded nature of the desire for independence among Kosovar Albanians.

Meanwhile, in the Serb-dominated north of Kosova, reactions ranged from protest demonstrations, to attacks on the Serbia-Kosova border posts, indicating their view that where they live remains part of Serbia. Independence may well turn into partition, as Kosova’s secession from Serbia faces its own mirror secession.

So far, only the United States and a handful of west European powers have recognised the new state, though the 56-nation Islamic Conference Organisation also welcomed the move; Serbia, Russia and another group of European countries have condemned it, while most nations are sitting on the fence.

This followed the breakdown of the final round of talks between Serbia and Kosovar Albanian leaders. On December 10, the “Troika’’ – consisting of the US, the European Union (EU) and Russia, which has presided over the talks – handed their report to the UN Security Council, claiming all possibilities of “compromise” had been exhausted. The red lines of the two sides – Serbia allowing a large degree of autonomy but ruling out independence; Kosova accepting nothing less than some form of independence, however limited – were mutually irreconcilable.

However, while the Kosovar Albanians’ jubilation at the word “independence” is understandable, Kosova is not to be allowed to fully determine its own affairs. Rather, the major imperialist powers will recognise something called “supervised independence”. The colonial-style UN authority ruling Kosova since 1999 will go – and be replaced by an International Civilian Representative appointed by the European Union, with the right to veto any legislation passed by Kosova’s “independent” parliament, and even remove elected officials. A new EU-appointed police and justice mission (EULEX) will hold sway over the local police and legal institutions, and the 16,000 NATO troops that have occupied Kosova since 1999 will remain.

Thus the colonial state will essentially remain, mitigated by considerably stronger powers of the Kosovar parliament vis a vis the occupation forces. The struggle for self-determination will continue, in a new form and probably after a period as the initial euphoria dies down. For Kosovar Albanians, the gamble is whether or not the new set-up, of a relatively greater degree of independence, will facilitate or make more difficult their further struggle for full self-determination.

Right to national self-determination

The Kosovar Albanians were an oppressed people in the old Yugoslavia, and much more so in Serbia following the collapse of the Yugoslav federation in 1989-90. Kosova had a per capita income one quarter that of Serbia; Albanians constituted only one per cent of military officers of the Yugoslav army, while Serbs constituted 70 per cent; Albanians made up 70-80 per cent of political prisoners. They are a national group in a long well-defined territory that deserve the right to national self-determination.

Much mystification surrounds Kosovar independence. It is claimed Kosova is a “mere province” of Serbia that happens to have an Albanian majority, and thus its “secession” is a violation of Serbian “sovereignty”. The alleged difference between Kosova and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia is that the latter were constitutionally fully fledged federal republics, which had the right to independence, whereas Kosova merely had autonomy within the Serbian republic.

It is therefore claimed that independence for a “mere province” could encourage other minority populations to split away from sovereign states. This danger of precedent — of encouraging other oppressed peoples to fight for their freedom — is a major reason the imperialist powers have always opposed Kosovar independence, until a few years ago. This is an odd argument, however, coming from some on the left, which has long supported oppressed peoples such as the Kurds in Turkey and the Basques in Spain fighting for the right to self-determination, though such peoples have never constituted formal republics within those countries. As socialists, we reject the idea that oppressed peoples must be forced to live in an allegedly “sovereign” state that has conquered and subjugated them.

The resistance of the Kosovar Albanian majority to Serbian rule began when they were first brutally subjected to that rule in 1913, and has continued to now. There has never been a moment when Kosovar Albanians have accepted the legitimacy of Serbian rule, either under direct Serbian oppression in capitalist Yugoslavia, or the bogus “autonomy” in the first 20 years of the socialist Yugoslav federation after 1945.

However, their struggle achieved a major change in the constitution in 1968-1974, when Kosova, with the full support of Yugoslav leader Broz Tito, achieved the near-republic status of “high-level autonomy”, including direct representation in the Yugoslav presidency as an equal to other republics, not via the Serbian republic. It had its own high court, its own central bank, its own territorial defence force, all features of a republic. While Albanians still continually called for full formal republic status, as a recognition of full equality, this high status of near-republic was the “legal’’ situation, and therefore the claim that it is a mere “province” of Serbia is false. Indeed it is important to understand that even the element of still being formally a “highly autonomous” province of Serbia was entirely connected to and conditional upon it also being a direct part of the Yugoslav federation, so when the Yugoslav federation later collapsed, so did this entire constitutional set-up.

When the rising Serbian bourgeoisie under Slobodan Milosevic took control of the Yugoslav state apparatus in 1988-91 and crushed Kosovar self-rule with tanks, making it a mere “province’’ of Serbia, this was an illegal move, that destroyed the Yugoslav constitution. When 99 per cent of Kosovars voted for self-determination in a referendum in 1991, this was a legal move given the destruction of Yugoslav federalism. When Serbia and Montenegro created a new state, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992 (i.e., leaving out the word “Socialist’’ which was in the name of the now deceased state), Kosova was not asked its opinion (by contrast, Montenegrins had a referendum in which they voted to join). Therefore its incorporation into this new “Yugoslavia’’ was illegal. What’s more, this state itself dissolved in 2003, leaving simply no legal basis for Serbian sovereignty.

When a decade of entirely peaceful (“Gandhian”) resistance in the 1990’s failed to achieve any breakthrough, it gave way to an armed insurrection led by the Kosovar Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99 and a brutal Serbian counterinsurgency, leading to murderous air war against Serbia by NATO, afraid the situation would spin out of control and lead to regional instability. Some 10,000 Albanians were killed and 850,000 – half their entire population – were forced out of the country by the Serbian armed forces, while some 2000 Serbs were killed by NATO bombing.

Following the end of this apocalypse, since June 1999 Kosova has been ruled by a United Nations authority (UNMIK) and a NATO-led security force (K-FOR), effectively denying both the independence aspirations of the 90 per cent Albanian majority and Serbia’s goal of maintaining its authority there. UN Resolution 1244, while demanding Serbian troops exit Kosova, decreed that the region remain under the “sovereignty” of Serbia.

The Western aim had been to take control of the process to prevent the Albanian struggle leading to regional instability. The rise of the KLA had been firstly due to the implosion of Albania in 1997, when hundreds of thousands of weapons were looted from armouries, many finding their way across the border into Kosova; and secondly, due to the response of the Serbian state to its appearance. When it appeared, US envoy to the region, Robert Gelbard, declared in Kosova’s capital Pristina in March 1998 that the KLA “is beyond any question a terrorist organisation”. However, by burning and destroying entire villages and driving out their inhabitants as part of a typical US-style counterinsurgency, the Milosevic regime had managed to boost the KLA from a few hundred fighters to a 20,000-strong guerilla army with a presence throughout most of the villages of Kosova.

NATO aimed to get its own forces in to do a better job than Belgrade of controlling the situation and disarming the KLA (which it did in September 1999), and when Belgrade said no, it was made the convenient target of a new NATO doctrine on “humanitarian intervention’’.

The underlying Western aim was explained by Chris Hedges in the US foreign policy elite’s top journal Foreign Affairs in April-May 1999:

“With most ethnic Albanians concentrated in homogenous areas bordering Albania, the drive to extend Albania’s borders remains feasible. That drive is not only a wider threat to European stability to also to Albanian moderation. Many KLA commanders tout themselves as a ‘liberation army for all Albanians’ — precisely what frightens the NATO alliance most … The underlying idea behind creating a theoretically temporary, NATO-enforced military protectorate in Kosovo is to buy time – even as it bombs the Serbs – for a three-year transition period in which ethnic Albanians will be allowed to elect a parliament and other governing bodies — meeting enough of their aspirations, it is hoped, to keep Kosovo from seceding.’’

However, opposition to any form of Serbian rule hardened after the cataclysmic events of 1999. It is impossible to find any Kosovar Albanian against independence.

Meanwhile, the nine following years of legal limbo under UN colonial rule, denying Kosova development credits and investment, has left half the population unemployed, a black hole in Europe that was ripe for social explosion.

Despite claims that independence is a creation of the imperialist powers, it was not until 2006 that, recognising the unsustainability of the situation, the first voices among Western leaders began to accept the inevitability of what had been demanded by the Albanians for a century. Following a year of fruitless negotiations, in early 2007, UN negotiator Marti Ahtisaari released the plan for “supervised independence”, as a “compromise” between the mutually irreconcilable demands for autonomy or independence.

If some kind of independence was now inevitable – unless imperialist powers wanted themselves to wage a counterinsurgency war inside Europe against 2 million Albanians who would surely rise up if independence were denied – then Western powers aimed to “supervise” it in order to limit it as much as possible.

Aside from the EU “supervision”, the other main aspect of the plan – the more progressive aspect – is the wide autonomy for regions where Kosovar Serbs form a majority of the population, with control over their education, health and police systems and the majority of income made in these areas, and will be able to be directly linked to and financed by the Serbian government.

The former municipality of Mitrovica in the north will be divided into two. Serb northern Mitrovica connects the entire region to its north to the Serbian border as the largest Serb bloc, covering some 15 per cent of Kosova. Mitrovica already has its own Serbian university, hospital, school system, currency and police. This northern region contains the massive Trepca mining and metallurgy complex, allegedly worth some US$5 billion . It has been effectively partitioned from the rest of Kosova by NATO troops since they entered in June 1999.

The Kosova Protection Corps – the unarmed civil emergency and reconstruction corps which gathered many former members of the KLA, which fought for the country’s independence in 1997-99 — will be abolished, and Kosova will be barred from joining any other state (meaning Albania). Strong minority representation has already been enshrined under UNMIK, and a new flag has been designed under EU supervision, with the map of Kosova surrounded by six stars representing six ethnic groups, absent any symbolism or even colours from the Albanian or Serb flags.

While thousands of Kosovar Albanians waved the red and black two-headed eagle flag of neighbouring Albania in their celebrations – the only flag that represents their national consciousness, and the flag that was legally theirs under Tito – now the EU decrees from above that their flag will be blue and white in order to enshrine Kosova as an officially multi-ethnic state.

The US and EU supported the plan, as did the Kosovar Albanian leadership with some reluctance. Serbia rejected it, and was backed by a Russian veto on the UN Security Council, leading to a further year of negotiations which ended in December.

While Russia’s backing of Serbia was matched by an equally strong backing of independence by US authorities, the EU was in a quandary over this situation. The EU has the most to lose from any outcome that leads to Balkan instability; it was easier for Moscow and Washington to play “hard’’ positions as part of a greater geopolitical game. EU states also have vast strategic and economic reasons to strive for overall agreement with Russia – precisely a scenario the US finds threatening.

The EU was also divided, unwilling to come to a decision that did not have consensus of all its members. Britain tended to play along with Washington, and following the election of Sarkozy, France also moved to this camp. In contrast, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia, Rumania and Bulgaria have remained opposed to Kosovar independence.

The EU preferred a resolution through the UN, requiring enough compromise to get Belgrade’s agreement, as their EU force needs a clear mandate, so in contrast to the US, continually and strongly warned Kosova against unilateral moves. Germany in particular, with strong economic concerns in the Balkans, vast economic relations with Russia, and the centre of the EU which it does not want split, played the moderator role through the process.

With negotiations failing, however, the EU was confronted by a dilemma. The Albanian leadership made clear it would not tolerate the situation forever, and would declare independence unilaterally if no compromise was reached and independence remained blocked in the UNSC. In such a scenario, a continued EU refusal to recognise it would increase the resulting instability, with tensions between Serb and Albanian populations sharpened by such an outcome, but the EU less able to control it.

Therefore, the EU majority moved towards agreeing to recognise independence, but called on Kosovar authorities to delay their declaration for a period so that the process can be “coordinated” with the EU, allowing the new political and security forces time to establish themselves. It is hoped that this way minority Serbs will be more assured of protection and less likely to flee.

Multi-ethnic republic?

Kosova premier-elect, former KLA leader Hashim Thaci, has offered the vice-presidency to a Kosovar Serb. Four Serb parties formed a coalition and defied Belgrade by negotiating to enter into a governing coalition with Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosova (PDK). Popular Serb leader Oliver Ivanovic condemned Belgrade’s blocking of Kosovar Serbs voting at recent elections as a “catastrophe” for the Serbs, and publicly welcomed Thaci’s moves. Serbs already account for 10 per cent of the Kosovar Police Service (KPS), and the Minister of Returns is a Kosovar Serb.

Kosova’s declaration of independence declares Kosova “to be a democratic, secular and multi-ethnic republic, guided by the principles of non-discrimination and equal protection under the law. We shall protect and promote the rights of all communities in Kosovo and create the conditions necessary for their effective participation in political and decision-making processes.” There is no specific mention of the Albanian people.

However, most Kosovar Serbs remain opposed or fearful, given their real experiences of sporadic violence from Albanians since 1999. Following the mass return of the dispossessed Albanians in June 1999, a reverse wave of some 100,000 Serbs – about half their original numbers – fled Kosova. A wave of Albanian revenge killings precipitated this flight, most of whom fled in fear, given the conditions of insecurity in the legal limbo in which Kosova was left. A brief second wave of anti-Serb pogroms erupted in March 2004, when eight Serbs were killed, while 11 Albanian rioters were shot dead by NATO troops.

The current Kosovar Serb population of 130,000 now forms more like 5 per cent rather than the original 10 per cent of Kosova’s population. Their situation varies greatly: from full Serb control in north Kosova (to where Albanians have been unable to return) to the wretched barbed-wire enclosed ghetto in Orahovac and Gorazdevac, with a number of medium-sized concentrations in between, particularly Gracanica, Novo Brdo and Strpce.

There is valid criticism that international forces have been ineffective in enforcing security. NATO provides armed convoys for Serbs traveling through Albanian territory, yet the fact they are needed reveals the situation remains bad. However, it is futile to merely blame this on NATO not policing a foreign occupation more harshly. The real issue is the frustration of the Albanian desire for independence combined with the fact that most Kosovar Serb leaders speak on Belgrade’s behalf in opposing the right of self-determination of their neighbours who outnumber them ten to one, making their people a target for Albanian chauvinists. The nationalism of these Serb leaders is mirrored by that of Kosovar Albanian leaders, who, while strongly condemning attacks on Serbs, have never fully prioritised forging a partnership with Serbs to construct a multi-ethnic Kosova.

However, there have been no major outbreaks of anti-Serb violence since March 2004, and the belief among Albanians that their goal of independence is approaching is perhaps one reason for this decline of ethnic Albanian radicalisation.

The Western powers are officially recognising a united, multi-ethnic Kosova, as enshrined in the Ahtisaari Plan, which they believe will be the least destabilising alternative. Any too-strong “Albanian’’ colouration will lead to the internal partition along the Ibar river in the north assuming an international character. But a fusion of northern Kosova with Serbia poses the question of the remainder of Kosova having the right to unite with Albania, further posing the question of the Albanian minorities living in a compact region in neighbouring Macedonia, southeast Serbia and Montenegro. Imperialism has long believed this could lead to a “nightmare scenario” of attempted border changes throughout the region, far more destabilising than if Kosovar independence – itself opposed for precisely this reason – assumes an officially multi-ethnic character.

The problem is that the poisoning of ethnic relations and solidarity between Serb and Albanian communities goes back a long way, especially since the destruction of Kosovar autonomy in 1989-90, and the brutal imperialist attack in 1999 greatly accentuated this, opening the political conditions for the Serbian government to commit an “Al Nakba’’ on the Kosovar Albanians, while in turn the Kosovar Albanian leadership supported NATO bombing of Serbia’s working people. As such, the effort to hold together a “multi-ethnic’’ state may be frustrated by the results of imperialism’s very actions.

Geostrategic interests?

Much emphasis has been given to the imperialist “supervision” aiming to enforce neo-liberal prescriptions and allow imperialist firms to privatise Kosova’s wealth, but given that every country in eastern Europe, including Serbia, already follows this path, it explains little. Much is also made of geostrategic interests: the US has built an enormous base at Bondsteel in Kosova, situated perfectly to overlook a pipeline for Caspian oil being built by a US-led consortium, running through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania.

However, there is no reason to believe the pro-imperialist government in Serbia would not allow such a base, if in return the US had opposed Kosovar independence. The US has bases all over the world without needing to set up a state directly under its control. The point is, however, this would have involved either an imperialist or a Serbian long-term counterinsurgency war against the armed independence struggle which would immediately break out again, threatening precisely the stability desired for pipelines and other imperialist concerns. Enforcing an officially multi-ethnic state thus remains the main aim of the occupation.

However, the fact that most Kosovar Serbs are not on board means that Kosova’s unilateral declaration, even while accepting the Ahtisaari Plan, is essentially a statement by the Albanian majority. In the north, Serbs are already refusing to cooperate with the independent Kosova authorities, declaring themselves still part of Serbia, making partition along the Ibar River the most likely outcome.

A partition may appear the ideal “compromise” between autonomy and independence, yet was ruled out by both Serbia and Kosova. Serbia’s advantages would be getting rid of two million Albanians with a high birth rate, while keeping the economic assets of the north, and gaining a small face-saver in the process.

Both the secession of the north to Serbia proper and the right of the rest of Kosova to join Albania and create an ethnic Albanian state can be viewed as the right of both communities to self-determination, blocked by imperialist “stability’’ concerns. And both should have the right to do this, and not be blocked by imperialism, if they so desire.

However, it is arguably the worst outcome for the Kosovar Serbs: the simple fact is that only 40 per cent of Kosovar Serbs live in their already very secure northern stronghold, so its secession would abandon the majority of Serbs who live in smaller and more vulnerable enclaves surrounded by the Albanian majority throughout the south. All the famous Serbian Orthodox monasteries are also in the south. At least some kind of Serb-Albanian partnership to run an independent state still therefore appears the best overall outcome, if it were possible.

With no consensus in either the UN, the EU or NATO, none of the foreign bodies have a clear mandate to act one way or the other, apart from generally protecting security. One possible way out of the crisis is for the Ahtisaari Plan to be extended into a Bosnia-style set-up, making the Serb- and Albanian-dominated regions two confederal states within an independent Kosova.

Whatever the outcome, socialists should welcome the partial fruition of the century-long struggle of Kosovar Albanians for national self-determination, while also condemning any oppression of the Serb and other minorities by the new state. However, the actual state being formed is not an independent one, and remains a modified colonial-ruled set-up. Kosova has the right to full self-determination — meaning all UN, EU and NATO occupation forces and governing bodies should exit Kosova and allow the Kosovar peoples, both Albanian and Serb, to determine their own futures.

However, it is possible that minority populations, fearful of the threat of violence by Albanian chauvinists, may call for some UN forces to remain in the unstable conditions of the transition for their protection, given the absolute poisoning of proletarian solidarity that has occurred over the last 20 years. This would be quite understandable as long as such forces were disconnected from running the Kosovars’ state for them. Therefore we must oppose the use of this as a justification by imperialist powers to limit Kosova’s real independence via its colonial “supervisory” bodies, and strongly distinguish between the two

by Michael Karadjis

2002

Edward Herman (Z-Magazine, February 2002, Body Counts in Imperial Service) sets out to reveal the ways in which mass killings are highlighted when such figures are in the service of western propaganda, but ignored when carried out by the same western leaders, or their clients such as Israel, Turkey and Indonesia. There is no question that such exposure is essential work for anti-imperialists to campaign against US and other western aggression as in the cases of the Gulf, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, Herman seems completely unable to remain on that fine line between justifying imperialist propaganda and war – where Hitchens etc have fallen – and scabbing on the oppressed and terrorised in places where western propaganda does sometimes suddenly find a need to exploit their suffering. Above all, this means the Kosovars and Bosniaks, whose terrorisation at the hands of the massive Serbian-Yugoslav military machine is surely equivalent to the terrorisation of the Kurds, Palestinians, Timorese and Iraqis by the massive Turkish, Israeli, Indonesian and US military machines.

Herman and others may argue that there is little point pointing out the suffering of these peoples as this is already done in the mass media. That, however, is not the problem. The problem is that Herman simply employs the same selective methods as the mass media in reverse, aiming to delegitimise the suffering and the struggles of the Kosovars and Bosniaks.

In so doing, he does a great disservice to the anti-imperialist cause. Our struggle against imperialist war and slaughter should centre on the fact that such aggression does not help the oppressed – even the cases where the oppressed are sometimes used for propaganda purposes – and that our solidarity is with all oppressed and terrorised peoples, wheter they are currently in or out of favour. Putting a minus everywhere that the US government propagandistically puts a plus does not create principled politics.

Regarding the conflicts in the Balkans, it would require us to write entire polemical books to thrash out all details of our differences. However, what appears indisputable is that previous to March 1999, in all the Balkan conflicts (Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova), one side, the Belgrade regime, possessed an absolutely overwhelming monopoly on means of state terror, with one of Europe’s largest military and police machines inherited from the former united Yugoslavia. On the other side, the West imposed an arms embargo on “all of Yugoslavia”, which meant that those republics which broke away were unable to arm themselves to resist Belgrade’s terror. The Yugoslav army had been the fourth most powerful military machine in Europe, its suppliers including the US up until the outbreak of war in 1991. The Serb republic managed to get hold of the entire arsenal, which belonged to all Yugoslavs and hence should have been divided between them, due to the Vance Plan in early 1992. As the Serbo-Croatian war was coming to an end, and Croatia was now on the offensive, the US via Cyrus Vance stepped in to force Croatia to allow the UN to occupy the zones which had been seized by the Yugoslav army, about one third of Croatia. Most of this had not been Serb-majority territory and the Croat majorities had been expelled. The UN was now to police the new border, with one third of Croatia now run by Serb nationalists.

Most crucially, Vance insisted that the Yugoslav army be allowed to take its entire arsenal, which was now scattered around Croatia and could have been divided among the republics, back to Serbia, and above all into Bosnia, which was still officially part of ‘Yugoslavia’. The JNA took from Croatia 300 tanks, 280 artillery pieces, 210 aircraft, tens of thousands of tons of equipment and supplies, and took it all into Bosnia, despite the fact that Serbian plans for Bosnia were very well known, Bosnian Serb rightist leader Karadzic had even threatened to make the Bosnian Muslims “disappear from the face of the Earth”. Croatia demanded that the JNA’s arsenals be placed under international supervision, warning that what had been done to Vukovar and Dubrovnik would be repeated on Bosnian cities, as was to occur; this was ignored by Vance and others who made “ultimatums and demands” on Croatia that JNA be allowed to withdraw its heavy weaponry to Bosnia.

The callousness with which Herman and so many apologists for Milosevic have for years made an issue of Kosovar death counts borders on the morbid. Certainly, if people like US defense secretary Cohen had suggested there were 100,000 dead, as Herman quotes, such a gigantic difference with the reality should well have been exposed as absurd propaganda. Cohen’s story of “100,000 missing” was indeed “a meaningless propaganda ploy” in the circumstances of war, when it was difficult to know who was missing and who was not, as Herman correctly states. Perhaps it was aimed at suggesting that such a number had already been killed, but that is drawing a long bow given that the realistic figure of 4600 dead was given by Cohen in the very next sentence.

However, the discussion rarely revolves around the obscure ‘100,000’ quote but over the somewhat less significant difference between around 4-5000 dead (the figure beloved by Belgrade apologists and the bulk of others who thought opposition to NATO’s terror meant we had to downplay that of Belgrade), and 10,000 dead, the figure given by the UN, which was the figure most quoted *by far* in the western media. Before looking at this in detail, let us for argument’s sake assume the lower figure to be correct.

Why, in that case, did nearly all imperialist propaganda only inflate the figures by a few thousand, surely not a very useful exaggeration? And indeed, if I am correct and the 10,000 is indeed closer to the mark, why do I believe NATO barely exaggerated the numbers at all? Could it be that with 850,000 Kosovars, half their entire population, brutally expelled from their country and languishing in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, for all the world to see (especially since they were in Europe rather than some ‘far off land’ easily ignored), that NATO simply had no need for any further propaganda other than this superb propaganda which Milosevic was handing it?

After all, if there were only 4-5000 deaths rather than 10,000, does that mean the expulsion of half the Kosovar population from their homes was any less of a crime against humanity?

No, NATO did not need any further propaganda. But surely Herman and company would have noticed that these 850,000 people were only expelled from Kosova after NATO began its terror bombing, a terror which had produced the political conditions under which it was now possible for Milosevic to do what his regime was previously incapable of. Therefore, rather than denying the extent of the attempted genocide, wouldn’t it be better for our propaganda to point out that this was a direct consequence of NATO’s actions? Why underestimate the consequences of NATO’s actions? If the real figures were 10,000 dead, then they were killed by the Yugoslav army, police and semi-fascist Serbian paramilitaries after and as a direct result of NATO’s aggression. They were part of the same region-wide catastrophe created by NATO which simultaneously was leading to the massacre of defenceless Serb civilians and the destruction of factories, power plants, bridges, trains, buses and so on in Serbia itself.

And here let me ask Herman a further question: as we are in agreement in opposing NATO’s terror against Serbian civilians and Serbian civilian infrastructure, if indeed there had been 10,000 rather than 4000 killed (after NATO’s attack) would this in any way give any retrospective justification for NATO’s attack? I fail to see how it could so what’s the point? Imperialist terror has to be opposed due to its own demerits; deliberately downplaying the crimes of the opponent, when such crimes are real, ends up being reverse liberalism: if the greater numbers were true, would imperialist intervention then be OK?

Perhaps the point is that even a small difference should be exposed to show that western leaders lie. However, if this is then done by deciding that the minimum possible figures must be the correct ones, in contrast to citing maximum death figures in other cases (Afghanistan, Timor), it serves far more to reveal how much Herman wants to underestimate the suffering of a people he considers ‘unworthy’ of sympathy, since their horrendous oppression drove them into the arms of NATO – in a mirror image of imperialist media concepts of ‘unworthy’ victims.

So how many did die? According to Hague boss Carla Del Ponte, “approximately 4000” bodies had been dug up from the search of 529 “mass graves” by the end of 2000 (http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/p550-e.htm). This figure combines the 2108 bodies dug up by the end of 1999 with the further 1835 by the end of 2000. As victims of NATO bombing were unlikely to have been buried in “mass graves”, and as Yugoslav army troops killed would have been retrieved by the army, and also unlikely to be in “mass graves”, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of these 4000 were murdered Albanians. Herman does not waste time disputing this, as some others do, as he uses the fact that the number of bodies found in Kosova is “under 4000” to show this cannot “demonstrate that 4600 people had been executed,” as suggested by Cohen, or for that matter, the later figure of 10,000.

This is a strange argument, because Herman’s own polemics create problems for it. He quotes an earlier figure of 2,108 bodies by late 1999, showing that further search almost doubled the body count in one year. Does this not suggest there may be more?

In fact, Herman himself suggests this, apparently without realizing the logic of what he is saying. He writes “according to the ICRC, there were some 3500 Kosovo residents still missing in May 2001, a figure which included some 900 Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians.” Therefore, according to his figures, there could be another 2600 Albanians dead, taking the figure to some 6600. According to ICRC figures I came across at the time of Herman’s article, there were still 2915 missing Albanians, alongside 1,035 non-Albanians (646 Serbs, 67 Montenegrins, 219 Roma and 103 Bosniaks, plus a number of Goranci). As such, the total figure for killed or missing Albanians would be some 6900. Herman adds “whether these were all genuinely missing or had died is unclear.” But if they were not “genuinely missing” but “had died” then we must obviously add them to the 4000 dead. If they are still “genuinely missing” after so long the likelihood would seem to be that they are also dead.

But then there are those whose bodies have turned up in Serbia. Herman dismisses as a “story” the discovery of a refrigerator truck with dozens of Albanian bodies which had been dumped into the Danube. He confidently proclaims that no further such trucks have come to light. In fact, many further such trucks and mass graves inside Serbia did indeed come to light, with a total of some 1100 Albanian bodies. This figure is a public figure which can be found on Serbian government official sites and in Serbian media. Far from being a “story,” the Serbian government, UN and Kosova authorities have been involved for several years in a process of identifying and returning the bodies to Kosova.

This may not be the final figure – the Serbian government of Zoran Djindjic called off the search at that point. The reason is very obvious. The current western-backed Serbian government is full of former politicians, generals, police officers and mega-capitalists attached to the Milosevic regime. They were up to their eyeballs in the same crimes for which a select few have been chosen as scapegoats. In particular, Djindjic had powerful links with the Serbian Interior Ministry Police, who are credited with far more crimes in Kosova than the Yugoslav Army, linked more to Kostunica. And the embarrassing thing was that many of these trucks or graves of Kosovar Albanians were turning up on or near police grounds in Serbia.

If we add this minimum of 1100 bodies, we now have at least 7700 Albanian dead or missing, somewhere in between the lowest possible figures beloved by Herman and others, and the UN figures. But if we consider the fact that the Tribunal search teams were looking for “mass graves”, their figures would exclude the fact that returning Kosovar refugees no doubt immediately buried any dead relatives in proper individual graves. There is simply no reason to believe that most dead were buried in ‘mass graves’, let alone these designated 529 ‘mass’ graves.

Therefore, what is required is a thorough survey of the numbers killed, not merely a grotesque ‘body count’ methodology, with the well-known historical parallels of the use of such methodology. Has one been done? Fortunately, the one that has been done was carried out by the highly respected British medical journal the ‘Lancet’. Now, since the ‘Lancet’ did a similar survey in Iraq in 2006 which showed that at the time some 660,000 Iraqis had been killed since the US invasion, and this report has been widely quoted – and rightly – by Herman and his co-thinkers, then presumably Herman will be happy with the Lancet study of deaths in Kosova during the 1999 war?

So let me try. According to the study carried out by the Lancet, some 12,000 Albanians were killed in 1998-99, and another 4000 were still missing in September 1999 (4 months after the end of the war) when the study was carried out. Given that of these 4000, some 2000 turned out to be in Serbian prisons and have since returned, it suggests some 2000 missing, presumed dead, on top of 12,000 killed. This means the death toll may have been well over 10,000 Albanians. The Lancet study is at http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673600024041/fulltext. Note that its sample is much greater than that in the Iraq study.

What does any of this have to do with ‘genocide’? Is ‘genocide’ the difference between 5000 and 10,000 killed over a couple of months? A horrendous massacre, but not genocide. However, the reason many of us used the term genocide had little to do with numbers of deaths, but rather the attempt to destroy a whole people by driving them out of their country. The forced expulsion of 850,000 Albanians, nearly half their population, was what constituted attempted genocide, and there is no knowing whether or not more would have been expelled. This was combined with the destruction of 100,000 homes, and 215 mosques, a full one third of the mosques in Kosova, many going back to medieval times. An expulsion this size is similar to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by the new Zionist state in 1948. I’m not sure how many thousands were killed during the ‘Nakbah’, or ‘Catastrophe’, but it is called such because such a mass expulsion destroyed their entire society, destroyed the Palestinians as a people living in Palestine, not specifically based on the numbers killed. Chomsky in his ‘New Military Humanism’ makes this comparison explicit. On the left, we have never had any qualms about calling the Palestinian Nakbah a form of genocide, and so we shouldn’t. For the sake of consistency, the same goes for the Kosova Nakbah of 1999.

And it is here, on the attempted Kosova genocide, the Kosova Nakbah, that I have yet to see any coherent genocide revisionism, that seriously questions the organized mass expulsion of the Kosovar population by the Serboslav army and rightist paramilitaries. In ‘Fool’s Crusade’, Diana Johnstone devotes a mere one page to this, and suggests the Albanians may have gone on holidays at relatives’ houses in Albania and Macedonia to sit out the war; Parenti in ‘To Kill a Nation’ reports on a journalist who allegedly spoke to one (1) unnamed Albanian on a boat to Italy who allegedly said she had fled bombs rather than being expelled by the Serbian army. Not real heavy stuff from the two leading revisionist books.

However, it is in the case of Bosnia that Herman’s number-crunching, logic and politics is most skewed. At least in the case of Kosova, the fact that many lost sympathy for the terrorised Kosovars may be explained by their sympathy with the Serbian people being simultaneously terrorised by countries whose superiority over Yugoslavia in possession and use of means of terror was equivalent to the superiority which Yugoslavia had over the Kosovars.

In the case of Bosnia, however, there was no such US or NATO aggression; throughout the entire war it was clearly the Belgrade regime and its Bosnian Serb proxies it paid and armed that possessed and used absolute military superiority over the almost defenceless Bosnians.

Before going into the political questions, let’s look at Herman’s number-crunching. He disputes the widely quoted figures of 200,000 dead (or the unusually large figure of 250,000 given by David Rieff who he quotes), claiming “he gives no source, and is clearly regurgitating claims of Bosnian Muslim officials.” Yet later, referring to East Timor, he tells us that the Indonesian army and paramilitary forces killed over 5000 defenceless civilians even before the August 30, 1999 vote, according to Church estimates.”

So (Christian) “Church estimates” are worth quoting, especially when the killers are Muslims, but “Muslim officials” are not, especially when the killers are Christians. And we might add, alongside the “Muslim officials”, also the Christian Serb and Croat and atheist and Bosnian (of no declared nationality) officials, military leaders, clergy and so on who stood firmly alongside their Muslim allies in the Bosnian government or in defence of multi-ethnic Bosnia against the allied Serbian and Croatian right-wing chauvinists – the figures they mostly gave were also around the 200,000 mark.

Herman quotes George Kenney to the effect that the ICRC estimates 20-30,000 dead in Bosnia. Kenney in fact estimates between 25,000 and 65,000 dead, and it is clearly Herman who chooses to provide only Kenney’s minimum figure to the Z-Net readership. As for the ICRC, I have not found any figure for estimated dead in an admittedly quick search of their records on Bosnia, but I did find the figure of 20,000 for the numbers still missing, as Herman quotes. Amnesty International gives two figures for numbers missing, one of around 20,000 and one of around 27,000. Assuming the lower figure to be correct, Herman then jumps in with the following piece of “meaningless propaganda”: “which again doesn’t get us near 250,000 or genocide.”

Presumably, then, Herman believes the total number still missing equals the total number killed in the entire war. So for three and a half years, there was presumably not a single body found. Forget the thousands that the Red Cross had already reported from the concentration camps in 1992. Forget the 13,000 graves in Sarajevo, a city where all the cemeteries were full so early that parks and sports grounds and numerous other places had to be used to bury the dead. Forget the non-stop sieges by massively armed Serbian chauvinist forces who daily and endlessly poured enormous firepower into the defenceless citizenry not only of Sarajevo but also of Tuzla, Zenica, Bihac, Srebrenica, Zepa, Gorazde, Zepce, Mostar (first by the Serbian chauvinists and then by their Croat chauvinist allies) and a host of other towns. Forget the ongoing battles for three and a half years as Serbian and allied Croatian forces attempted to conquer even more non-Serb and non-Croat majority territory (most of which they had already conquered) while the Muslims and multi-ethnic populations attempted to hold them back. Is it entirely unreasonable that in three and a half years the death toll would have mounted to 150-200,000?

In Vietnam, there are 300,000 Vietnamese still missing after nearly 30 years. There are usually estimated to have been 3 million killed. That’s a rate of one in ten missing. There are also some 3-4000 Americans missing – again about the same ratio to the 50,000 Americans killed. I’d hazard a guess that these figures are about average to many conflicts. In that case, 20,000 missing and 200,000 killed seem most likely round figures. However, if we take out the particular case of the 7000 missing from Srebrenica following the June 1995 massacre, and multiply the remaining 13,000 by 10 we get a possible figure of 130,000.

Incidentally, doesn’t the figure of 300,000 Vietnamese still missing after 30 years make Herman and those who engage in this nonsense stop to think how silly it looks to decide that the latest body count in Kosova after only a few years must without doubt be the final one? Do Herman and company perhaps believe that the Vietnamese government has merely invented this figure for propaganda purposes? Has he researched the evidence? Or does he believe that Vietnamese tell the truth but Balkan Muslims lie?

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 ). Muslims were 43 percent of the population. Take your pick – my guess is somewhere in between.

(Since writing this, the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Centre has done a very thorough study of Bosnian deaths and as of 2007 the still-rising total is nearly 100,000, of who 66 percent are Muslims, and 83 percent of civilian deaths are Muslims. For elaboration on this, see my post on this site ‘How many, and who, died in Bosnia? at http://mihalisk.blogspot.com/2007/10/how-many-and-who-died-in-bosnia.html)

The most appalling point is reached when Herman talks about the Srebrenica massacre of 8000 defenceless Muslim men and boys in July 1995, surely the crowning atrocity of the entire Balkan wars. “In Srebrenica, there have been only 473 bodies recovered, and there is absolutely no credible evidence that 7500 men and boys who allegedly disappeared in this area in July 1995 were murdered.” No credible evidence. The Muslim women survivors of Srebrenica are all a bunch of liars.

It would be one thing if this statement were simply the kind of gratuitous ignorance that much of the left has prided itself on regarding this issue, basically, “the less I know, the better” attitude, so they can parade around sounding very sophisticated by voicing inanities like “all sides committed atrocities”, without the trouble of having to distinguish oppressor and oppressed, a bit like the received liberal wisdom on “both sides” committing atrocities and not compromising on Palestine. Yet Herman is in fact worse than this.

As he has just quoted the ICRC on the numbers missing in Bosnia, he would have had in his face the ICRC figure (13/7/2000) of 7439 missing from Srebrenica alone, among 20,000 missing in Bosnia. Added to the 473 bodies recovered, this gives a total figure of 7912. “No credible evidence” that these “alleged missing” have been killed. Presumably Herman thinks they are all hiding out with Karadzic and being fed by their generous Chetnik captors. Just to compare, the Amnesty International website at the same time gave a figure of 6-8000 missing in Srebrenica, and claimed “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). Since Herman wrote this, in fact 5000 bodies have now been uncovered, and in mid-2004, the Bosnian Serb government of the ethnically-cleansed ‘Republika Srpska’ formally confessed to the crime and claimed 7800 were killed by their henchmen.

Interestingly, Herman notes: ‘In 1999, when the people of Australia’s closest northern neighbour, East Timor, which had been invaded and annexed by the Indonesia dictatorship of General Suharto, finally had an opportunity to vote for independence and freedom, it was the Howard government that betrayed them. Although warned by Australia’s intelligence agencies that the Indonesian army was setting up militias to terrorise the population, Howard and his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, claimed they knew nothing; and the massacres went ahead. As leaked documents have since revealed, they did know.’

He claims UN troops finally went in to end the carnage, but not till after so many Timorese had already been killed. Quite so. Funny how he can make no analogy with Bosnia. Just as the UN refused for months to defend the Timorese after a UN-called referendum, so likewise, after an EU-called referendum in Bosnia in early 1992, neither the EU nor UN did anything to protect the Bosnians for three and a half years when they immediately came under massive attack by the most massive military force in the region. The UN even set up “safe havens” in a few cities a year or so later, where they disarmed the Bosnians, promising to “protect” them themselves. They never did. The “safe havens” continued to get bombed for years. Srebrenica was one of those “safe havens”, overrun by the Chetniks in July 1995. The UN politely made way for them.

Pity Herman cannot see any analogy.

By Michael Karadjis

October 2000

The elections and popular uprising which ousted former ‘Yugoslav’ president Slobodan Milosevic have provoked varied reactions on the left. Central to the debate is the nature of the transfer of power.

Two overlapping events occurred. The first was a rearrangement of power within the ruling elite, replacing the highly tainted Milosevic with Vojislav Kostunica – a long time advocate of Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” project who had, however, stood aloof from the barbarous actions needed to create it.

The second was the dramatic entry of the masses – above all the powerful Serbian working class – onto the political scene, something not planned by the ruling elite and its western backers who wanted a smooth transition in order to maintain capitalist “law and order” and preserve much of the regime and its state apparatus intact.

Oddly, the nature of these two events has been totally confused by many on the left. Diana Johnstone, a long time apologist for Serbian nationalism, saw it this way:

“The “October surprise” was actually two events. One was a democratic election, made in Serbia. The other was a totally undemocratic putsch, made in the “international community” … The democratic election would have been sufficient to oblige Milosevic to retire … But the NATO-backed putschists wanted … a dramatic media spectacle.”

Calling the actions of hundreds of thousands of Serbian workers a “putsch” is the only way for the pro-Milosevic left to deal with seeing the working class oust a regime they, for reasons best known to themselves, consider to be “socialist.” It also helps justify their odd theory that western imperialism is in favour of a working class uprising.

Scabbing on the Serbian working-class

For others thrown into deeper disarray by the downfall of their idol, the anti-working class language is more hysterical. According to George Szamuely, “throughout the country drunken mobs have been storming the offices of factories, coalmines, banks and universities and forcing people to resign … The managers of Yugoslavia’s [sic] largest gold mine and smelter were kicked out, as were the managers at Zastava, the country’s giant carmaker. The Director of the Kolubara coalmining complex was thrown out, as was the Director of Yugoslav Coal Production.”

He doesn’t dare tell the reader that these “drunken mobs” driving out their corrupt, plutocratic “managers” all over the country are the long-suffering workers and their new strike committees in these enterprises. Johnstone likewise claimed the “unguarded building was systematically vandalized and set on fire, causing considerable damage to public property. The liberators then went on to smash shop windows and steal property in nearby shopping streets.”

This bourgeois “law and order” talk sounds remarkably like right-wing Australian prime minister John Howard’s description of the occupation of parliament house by Australian workers in 1996.

By “unguarded” she means that, after the police had fired tear gas at the masses, they became even angrier, so they simply overwhelmed the police, who gave up. No doubt these good “socialists” would have preferred the cops to have massacred the workers.

In view of what actually occurred, the best description of all this drivel is ‘scabbing on the Serbian working class.’

The industrial working class was the key force in the uprising, the occupation of parliament and the continuing “instability.” From September 29, the strikes and occupations and ousters of managers by thousands of miners at the Kolubara coal mines were the spearhead of the uprising. Tens of thousands of people from surrounding areas came to the defence of the workers when police attempted to attack their picket lines. No doubt Johnstone, Proyect, Szamuely et al would have again preferred the police to have done a better job and not left the Milosevic-era management “unguarded”.

The working class uprising went far beyond Kolubara. According to Aleksandar Ciric in Podgorica “Every day a growing number of factories and enterprises were proclaiming that they were on strike demanding the true election results. On Thursday October 5, more than one hundred large companies were on strike, including the former giant industries such as chemical industries Nevena from Leskovac and Zorka from Sabac, parts of Bor mining and melting combine, hydro electric power plant in Bajina Basta, Trajal tire factory and chemical factory Merima from Krusevac, parts of Kragujevac Zastava, Pancevo fertiliser factory and petroleum industries, Electric Company of Serbia… Railway transportation between Belgrade and Bar was interrupted, and blockades of roads interrupted transportation in the country for a few hours every day.”

Notably, many of these plants were bombed by NATO last year, particularly Zastava and Pancevo. It is the height of arrogance for the Milosevic bandwagon to write that workers bombed by NATO are now rallying to NATO’s cause because their leaders are allegedly being offered a fistful of dollars. These same industrial plants and industrial towns were already the backbone of the upsurge against Milosevic last year following the end of NATO’s war, an upsurge betrayed by the very leaders now pretending to have led the current revolt.

It is similarly offensive to claim, as some have, that coal miners, suffering under western sanctions, “closed down the mine in order to get rid of the enemy of Washington” to get sanctions lifted. Leaving aside his belief that only sanctions, not the multi-millionaire plutocracy that did fantastically well from sanctions, caused their wages to fall, it avoids the issue of why sanctions don’t work like this in other cases. Washington’s 40-year total embargo on Cuba, far more stringent than the selective sanctions on Yugoslavia, have not encouraged Cuban workers to “get rid of the enemy of Washington.” Likewise, the genocidal total embargo on Iraq has not encouraged Iraqi workers to rise up against “the enemy of Washington.” And in this case, the Hussein regime is a capitalist regime as brutal as that of Milosevic. The difference is that the Iraqi masses understand they are being punished for daring to threaten imperialist control of the oil-fields, and as part of keeping down the Arab nation so as to protect Washington’s colonial client Israel. In the Balkan’s this is reversed, with Serbia playing the Israeli role of ethnic cleanser of the region. Serbian workers have rightly decided there was nothing to be defended about a regime which had continually sent them to slaughter their fellow non-Serb workers throughout the region.

Working Class and Kostunica Regime: Clash of Interests

Far from the upsurge having been organised by a conspiracy involving Kostunica and the US government, it is precisely the working class that is trying to more fully destroy the vestiges of Milosevic’s crony capitalist tyranny, while Kostunica’s US-backed regime desperately tries to salvage as much of it as possible and keep the movement under control. Workers strike committees have become “crisis committees” pushing more than just industrial demands, many stating their only interest is the “well-being of the collective.”

The description by Jonathan Steele in the Friday October 13 Guardian reveals much about this conflict of interests. According to Steele, at the large Trudbenik construction company, the workers posted their own guards in the accountant’s office. “We need to prevent documents being removed,” explained Predrag Jelic, a member of the crisis committee. Workers with arms checking the books? Terrible to Kostunica, US imperialism and pro-Milosevic “left”, but otherwise a page straight out of Lenin’s “State and Revolution.”

A similar account is made by Argyris Malapanis in the US Militant: “Engineers and production workers (in the largest state-owned oil company) have now formed a commission of inquiry to look into the practices of the old management … If they find any evidence of embezzlement or other pilfering of company resources, the commission will bring charges against those directors.”

Kostunica and Milosevic are in complete agreement on all this: both vigorously condemn the “chaos” and “anarchy” of the factory occupations. Kostunica has attacked this process of restructuring “from the bottom up,” insisting that change come through state institutions after the new “transitional government” is created. “Some of these actions are from people who are in connection with or appear on behalf of DOS or even myself, which is not true. But all together, it’s something that worries me,” said Kostunica.”

According to Steele, Kostunica sent Nebojsa Covic, who leads one of the parties in DOS (Democratic Opposition of Serbia, the Kostunica-led coalition), to visit factories, “urging workers to get back to work and trust DOS to bring change,” but the strike committee at Trudbenik is having none of it. “We don’t need political support, and we won’t accept any demands for restraint from Covic or anyone else from DOS,” stressed Jelic.

According to Steele, “the strike committee wants to be sure that the new rulers from DOS do not just reproduce the old system by imposing so-called democrats on factories … (it) wants a proper system of accountability in the company, credible financial public accounts and no further role for party politics in factory appointments.”

The strike committee has taken over the enterprise – when managing director Dusan Djuraskovic attempted to take back control with a mixture of threats and promises, workers asked “Excuse me, who invited you here?”

A key working class force both in ensuring the electoral ouster of Milosevic and in now keeping the mobilisations on guard against the new regime is the 200,000 member independent trade union federation Nezavisnost, which last year vigorously condemned the barbarism of both NATO and the Belgrade regime. Its May Day 2000 message revealed its working class politics went beyond “factory politics” but extended to strong internationalist opposition to the Serbian nationalism which the rule of both Milosevic and Kostunica is based on:

“All of us who support ourselves from honest work must jointly and decisively stand up to terror applied against the world of labor for over a decade … Milosevic’s hand of nationalistic evil has seized us and removed us from the factory machines, from our fields, our classrooms, university amphitheaters, and our offices. Wrecked and stripped of our identity, which is created through work, with only our national omen he sent us off to destroy all those who do not belong to our nation and our religion.”

In an October 6 uprising message, Nezavisnost president Branislav Canak called on “all members of Nezavisnost and all employees in Serbia, particularly those on involuntary leaves of absence, to return to their factories, to organize workers’ watches, to prevent SPS and JUL managers from entering the firms and to protect the property from any attempt of destruction.”

“We demand from all employees, members of other trade unions … to begin today to support their own interests … the interests of free and autonomous workers’ movement, the world of labor which makes the decisions about its fate autonomously.”

Kostunica regime: Clone of Milosevic regime

It is notable that, in Steele’s account above, the person Kostunica sent to rescue the Milosevic-era management was Nebojsa Covic. In looking at who Covic and others in the Kostunica camp are, much is revealed about the new regime:

Covic is the former long-time Milosevic-party mayor of Belgrade, the third most senior person in the party, becoming an “oppositionist” from 1996. While in “opposition” he has remained managing director of a profitable tin can company.

Close to the regime is former army chief of staff Momcilo Perisic, who played the key role in Milosevic’s Bosnian war, being the general in charge of the 1995 massacre of 8000 Moslem captives in Srebrenica. He became an “oppositionist” in late 1998 due to his view that the Kosova policies of Milosevic and Seselj were suicidal. He still maintains considerable influence in the military.

In an identical position is Milosevic’s former head of internal security, Jovica Stanisic, who also went into “opposition” in 1998 while maintaining powerful influence.

Kostunica has strongly defended maintaining the position of Milosevic’s current army chief of staff, Nebojsa Pavkovic, who headed the Yugoslav army’s depredations in Kosova last year, against attempts by others in DOS to oust him. Significantly, the western controlled war-crimes tribunal left him off the list of those to be prosecuted.

Kostunica has appointed Predrag Bulatovic from the pro-Milosevic forces in Montenegro, as federal prime minister, despite the 80 per cent success of the election boycott called by the anti-Milosevic Montenegrin government.

The Serbian republican government (where their were no elections) is being reorganised, with DOS coming to an arrangement for a transitional government with Milosevic’s party, while excluding the fascistic Serbian Radical Party (Milosevic’s former coalition allies) and ousting the Interior Minister, Vlajko Stojilkovic, who had advocated force be used against the masses and who has been indicted by the Hague – a “clean-up” act.

The Serbian Orthodox Church, a bastion of Serbian nationalism, has welcomed Kostunica, as has Milosevic’s state news agency, Tanjug.

For Kostunica to restabilise the capitalist regime, he is going to need Milosevic’s armed forces to control the working class movement – even though the ranks may not be as keen as the officers. “This lawlessness has not escaped the attention of the Yugoslav military,” according to Szamuely. Kostunica met the Yugoslav Army General Staff, where “concern was expressed over certain events in the country that are not in accordance with the Constitution and the laws, and the position and role of the Yugoslav Army in resolving problems had also been considered.” To anyone familiar with the role of armed forces in suppressing workers’ struggles, this is hardly surprising. Yet Szamuely, good socialist as he is, concludes “Sounds like a clear warning to Kostunica not to engage in mob rule.”

With Kostunica’s circle consisting of former chips off the Milosevic regime, and with Kostunica trying to maintain intact as much of the former regime, state apparatus and economic “management” bodies as possible, the essentially similar nature of the two regimes is obvious. In a word, both are regimes of the Serbian capitalist class.

Those contrasting a rabidly pro-capitalist Kostunica with an allegedly socialist Milosevic fail to explain how this could be possible when the entire political-economic apparatus is the same.

Certainly, western imperialism has shown only too clearly that it was such minimalist change – the ousting merely of the tainted name Milosevic and a few close cronies – that was all they wanted. The fact that the sanctions imposed during and after the Kosova war – the air flight ban, the oil embargo and the refusal to grant reconstruction aid following the bombing – have all been lifted in a hurry is evidence enough of this. Meanwhile, the “outer ring” of sanctions – the ban on Yugoslav membership of the IMF and World Bank – are about to be lifted.

These sanctions punished the masses for the crimes of the regime, and so their ending should be welcomed. However, from the point of view of western rhetoric, it is notable that no political concessions were demanded. According to the US-based intelligence group Stratfor, “The European Union also showed little interest in linking a potential $2 billion aid package to the extradition of Milosevic to face war-crimes charges.” Neither was the release of the thousands of Kosovar Albanian political prisoners still incarcerated in Serbian jails an issue.

Milosevic: Architect of Capitalist Restoration

In reality, Milosevic’s capitalist regime enjoyed many years of collaboration with western imperialism. Far from being a socialist, it was precisely the economic liberal Milosevic who destroyed the old socialist system of workers self management, as demanded by the IMF, during his reactionary “anti-bureaucratic revolution” of 1988-89.

He called on the Yugoslav people to overcome their “unfounded, irrational and primitive fear of exploitation” by foreign capital and called on new profit oriented bodies which replaced the workers committees to “function on economic principles…strive to create profits and constantly struggle for their share and place in the market.” While the process was slow, as in all of eastern Europe, a Serbian capitalist class came into being, closely connected to the regime.

For example, among Serbia’s and the entire Balkan’s biggest capitalists are the Karic brothers, who started their fortune with Milosevic’s political and economic “reforms” in Kosova, and now own a private telecommunications, banking, mineral and oil empire. Not surprisingly, Boguljub Karic was a minister without profile in the Yugoslav government until late last year.

Or take the case of Vladimir Bokan, who shared a house in Athens with Milosevic’s son Marko. He owned assets in Greece worth tens of millions of dollars, the entire chain of kiosks in Belgrade and Vojvodina, a chain of retail clothing stores and a real estate company in Belgrade, a shipyard in Novi Sad, a sizable share in a chemicals and fertiliser factory and much more, while running Panama and Cyprus registered shipping companies. With so many mega-capitalists like these, how is it possible for some to still parrot on about Yugolsavia being more “socialist” than elsewhere in the region?

Following the Dayton Accord to partition Bosnia into Serbian and Croatian dominated halves – drawn up by Milosevic, Croatian leader Tudjman and the US State Department – Milosevic was seen as the “guarantor of stability” in the region. Foreign capital rushed in. The British firm Nat-West Industries, headed by former British Foreign Secretary during the Bosnian war, Douglas Hurd, signed a million dollar deal to aid the privatisation of Serbian enterprises. Following the new privatisation law of October 1997, which aimed to sell to 75 most strategic Yugoslav industries, Nat-West organised the sale of half of Serbian Telecom to Greek and Italian investors. The Trepca lead, zinc, silver, gold, cadmium complex in northern Kosova was also put on the market, with French and Greek firms buying in.

None of this leaves much room for “socialism”, and there were clearly ample opportunities for western capital. Those seeing Milosevic’s Yugoslavia as an outpost of resistance to the IMF or think western sanctions were imposed due to a “socialist” orientation of the regime turn reality on its head. Milosevic wanted IMF/World Bank money to complete the privatisation process; this was held up by Washington – making political rather than economic demands – after 1995 the only “sanctions” were precisely denial of IMF/WB membership by the US.

The political demands centred on cooperation with the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague – to hold together the fragile Bosnian Dayton Accord – and negotiations on Kosova – while not demanding a return to pre-1989 autonomy – to prevent the situation there exploding and destabilising the southern Balkans. Once Milosevic’s barbarous tactics in Kosova led to a mighty upsurge led by the Kosova Liberation Army (KLA), NATO decided to get its own forces in to control the situation – including to ensure the defeat of the KLA’s project for independent Kosova. Combined with other US concerns, above all to ensure its domination of NATO leading up to the 50th NATO Summit, a savage war was launched, in which Milosevic needed to demonised. As such, his removal and replacement by less tainted elements from the same capitalist elite became the main imperialist demand before sanctions were lifted.

In reality, “it is not just economics, stupid.” Imperialist control of the world relies on a system of political and military control where sometimes short-term profits might have to wait if a political situation threatens to unleash instability and hence threaten profits further down the line. If imperialism only launched wars and imposed sanctions because regimes were following a socialist economic course, then the last twenty years would tell us that the right-wing Haitian junta, Somalia’s heirs to Siad Barre, Noriega of Panama, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Sudanese junta and the Argentine junta were all socialist regimes.

As for the talk of the need for economic “reform” in Yugoslavia, this kind of talk has been heard by imperialist leaders with reference to all kinds third world capitalist regimes, from Suharto’s Indonesia to Turkey, where some 80 per cent of industry remains in state hands. This is where Yugoslavia fits: as Steele points out well, “Indonesia’s crony capitalism under Suharto is a more accurate parallel than the state socialism of Ceausescu.” Even South Korea has been chided for not going far enough with “reforms” in the post Asia crisis period, this allegedly being the reason for “slow recovery.” This imperialist “reform” drive is about pressure on capitalist regimes to open their economies even wider to foreign imperialist, rather than local capitalist, control.

Having said all this, however, is there a case to be made that Yugoslavia had maintained a little more “socialism” than elsewhere in eastern Europe? Measuring the amount in state and private hands is not very reliable. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development claims some 40 percent of Yugoslav GDP is produced by the private sector; several years ago the World Bank complained that 60-70 percent of Croatian industry remained in State hands and the privatisation process “had virtually stalled.” Does this mean Tudjman’s Croatia was also “socialist”?

Slovenia was the last country in eastern Europe to adopt a privatistion law, yet is heralded as the key success story. However, according to Svetlana Vasojevic and Igor Mekina in Bijelina, following the mass handout of privatisation vouchers to former employees, “the sale of unprofitable stock became practically impossible … The larger, unprofitable firms, wanted by no one, were mostly left to the state … in larger companies, the percentage of stock given to workers was minimized, the larger part being turned over to citizens, various funds and the state. Government … appointed its own people to head the funds (capital, compensation, and so on) … the economy has only been “half-privatized” … Notorious losses were revealed on the accounts of major companies such as TAM, Elan, Iskra, etc. Some were liquidated while the government still owns the others.” According to Mladjan Dinkic of the G-17 Plus organization and a DOS leader, Yugoslavia’s economy should be structured according to the Slovenian model.

Hence, the existence of a large state sector in countries like Serbia where large numbers of mega-capitalists abound is hardly unusual. Firstly, someone has to want to buy the stuff Milosevic is trying to sell; apart from investors not liking to buy industries in war zones, the question of how much investment in modern equipment old unprofitable industries need is obviously a concern. Capitalists go where profits can be made fast, especially capitalist classes rising from the dust as in eastern Europe. In Serbia’s case this has meant giant import-export companies, construction, banking, oil and various booming black market industries in preference to renovating old industries.

Workers Confront Mafia Rule

But moreover, the co-existence of private and state firms under a highly corrupt and autocratic regime is the very model for the rule of the mafia – not just Serbia and Croatia, but Yeltsin’s Russia and any number of crony capitalist regimes the world over are based on this model.

If you can “manage” a state firm via political connections, earn a giant salary regardless of whether the firm does well or not, and your brother owns a private firm, then you can strip the “state” firm of its assets and give them to your brother whose company makes mega-bucks selling it on the black market. If your brother owns a private bank, you can organise loans with ridiculously high interest to benefit the private bank at the expense of the “state” company. Because its all illegal, its hard to prove; but anyone familiar with Yugoslavia would know that stories of workers turning up for work at the car plant and finding no parts abound. The key ingredient missing, to prevent this happening, is democratic control by the workers themselves.

Malapanis reports on the role of the insurgent workers in stopping this mafia-capitalist accumulation: “While workers at these (vegetable oil) factories received very low pay, managers organized in the last decade for most production to be diverted to the black market, where company officials and middlemen made a bundle from exorbitant prices.


As part of the rebellion, workers guards formed in these factories to stop this “diversion” of products … From Monday, October 2, although the production was not stopped, our workers guards did not allow a single bottle to go out of the factory,” Canak said.

Steele gives another example: “Political connections were vital … for the company to get privileged access to capital, licences and subsidies … In the early 1990s, as a crude market economy and phoney privatisation spread through eastern Europe, Mr Milosevic joined the bandwagon. He allowed large companies to break into smaller units and fix their own commercial contracts. Union leaders were as eager as managers to exploit the new chance of riches … “The trade union secretary practically ran this company,” said Mr Jelic (about Trudbenik). Under privatisation the trade union secretary formed a company called Sind which built upper-income flats in Belgrade.” Sind paid workers DM5 an hour, while workers in the “state” enterprise got DM100 for a whole month.

When workers at the “state-owned” Genex trading giant ousted general manager Radoman Buzovic, they revealed he had been paying himself a princely salary of DM180,000 a month. The workers earn DM10.

By scabbing on the insurgent working class, the pro-Milosevic “socialists” oppose the very force that is capable of stopping legal and illegal privatisation of state assets, whether by the Milosevic or the Kostunica regime. According to George Skoric, “The (crisis) committees have been formed largely under this banner: ‘To protect the state-owned property from robbery by the ousted criminal bureaucrats.'”

Of course, this applies not only to the ousted regime but also to the new one: Nezavisnost president Canak made clear that “[Kostunica’s] economic program is seriously neo-liberal and I think, if nothing else, that would put workers and Nezavisnost in a confrontational position against him sooner or later … We will warn him first and then we will start behaving as unions are supposed to behave when their basic interests are in danger.”

While even under Tito’s bureaucratic regime, the socialist revolution was thoroughly undermined, and was then assassinated by Milosevic’s counterrevolution, the high points of the recent events has been this working class movement to resurrect – however briefly – the best traditions of that revolution and the system of workers’ self-management.

Kostunica and Greater Serbia

Meanwhile, pro-western Kostunica is trying to put back together the pieces of Milosevic’s Greater Serbia. His accommodation with the pro-Milosevic unitarist bloc in Montenegro has already been mentioned. The even more pro-western DOS leader Zoran Djindjic recently stated that 1200 Yugoslav troops would be back in Kosova by the end of the year. Kostunica, who was photographed with a Kalashnykov machine-gun in his hands in Kosova during the war in 1998 in the company of the para-military ‘Tigers’ of Captain Dragan, clearly agrees this is a good idea.

And while he was expected to pay a state visit to Sarajevo to offer recognition of Bosnia and apologise for Serbia’s role in the genocide, Kostunica’s first trip to that country was to the Republika Srpska para-state, to a reburial of a famous Serb nationalist poet who had died 60 years ago – a visit he had promised to the hard-line anti-Bosnian Serb Democratic Party.

Far from any of this annoying Kostunica’s western backers, the removal of Milosevic will mean the return of more “normal” economic and political patterns in the region, where a Serb-dominated state has been the lynchpin of western policy since 1918. This is because, as Stratfor points out, “The trade corridor from Germany and Italy to Greece will gradually reopen, physically linking Greece to the rest of the EU … the Danube – the region’s economic artery – will be cleared. Debris from bridges destroyed during the Kosovo war has blocked the river for well over a year. Once cleared, the 10 states that sit on the river’s banks will again be able to engage in large-scale trade. That very act will all but lock Yugoslavia into western Europe’s orbit. Both of these routes – the region’s two busiest – pass through downtown Belgrade.”

By Michael Karadjis

The Trepca zinc, lead, cadmium, gold and silver mining and metallurgy complex in the north of Kosova has been described as the “most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans” by Chris Hedges, the Balkan writer for the New York Times. It is valued at about US$5 billion. The Trepca complex goes way beyond raw materials. According to Hedges, “The Stari Tng mine, with its warehouses, is ringed with smelting plants, 17 metal treatment sites, freight yards, railroad lines, a power plant and the country’s largest battery plant”.

Trepca explains why the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, which has been trying to construct an “ethnically pure” Serb state over the last decade, wants to hang onto a region where 2 million Albanians form 90% of the population. The wealth of northern Kosova means far more than medieval monasteries abandoned by the Serbs many centuries ago.

The northern city of Mitrovica, Kosova’s second largest, is now firmly partitioned between a Serb-ruled north and an Albanian-ruled, completely destroyed, south. A river and a bridge solidify the border.

When Albanians, who previously formed the majority in the north, try to cross the bridge and return to their homes, they are confronted with two obstacles: Serb paramilitaries who physically abuse them, and their allies: French NATO troops, using armoured vehicles and checkpoints with barbed wire and cement blocks.

In the northern section of Mitrovica is the Trepca complex. The Serb paramilitaries have declared the whole of Kosova from their side of the river to the Serbian border, some 50 kilometres away, to be a “Serb zone”. The towns to the north, such as Leposovac, are overwhelmingly Serb in population, but northern Mitrovica and the Trepca region, before the war, were not.On August 7, 1000 Albanians tried to cross the bridge to return to their homes. They were driven back by French troops with armoured vehicles. Over the following days, hundreds of Albanians repeatedly confronted the French blockade.

Division long debated

Just before the latest war, David Owen, Britain’s chief negotiator during the Bosnian war, proposed the partition of Kosova, with every square mile “lost” by Serbia to its Albanian population to be “compensated” by the same amount of territory in “Republika Srpska” — the ethnically cleansed Serb area of Bosnia — becoming formally part of Serbia. Leading Serbian nationalist intellectuals, such as Dobrica Cosic, had been pushing this view for years.

The idea of physically separating the two peoples was put up as a solution to the seemingly endless instability of the region, caused by the clash between an independence-seeking Albanian majority, and a Serbian regime determined to deny them even autonomy. The NATO air war and the corresponding Serbian attempt to empty much of Kosova of its Albanians has cemented ethnic hatreds to a level making separation inevitable.

For Milosevic, the aim of the war was to put “facts on the ground”, so that many of the region’s ethnically cleansed villages could become the Serbian part of Kosova in such a partition.

However, NATO could not agree so blatantly, because the scale of the Albanian refugee problem threatened to further destabilise the southern Balkans. They clearly had to be taken back to Kosova. This was also necessary to NATO’s credibility.

Despite US rhetoric that a Russian zone would partition Kosova, as Serbs would gather there and Albanians would not return, it is the French NATO troops who are carrying out partition. In reality, the US concern was with overall NATO control, not partition, and the deal that brings Russian troops into parts of the French, German and US zones will have the same effect anyway.

French imperialism has long had a special relationship with Serbia. Most Bosnian Serb leaders wanted by the Hague for war crimes, including Radovan Karadzic, live in the French sector in Bosnia. A joint French-Serbian international trade bank was established in Mitrovica on July 14.

Attacks on Serb minority

Since the retreat of the Yugoslav army and the entry of NATO troops, there have been nearly 200 murders in Kosova. A large proportion of these have been of members of the Serb and Rom (Gypsy) minorities. It is estimated that up to half the province’s 200,000 Serbs have fled, fearing revenge attacks.

The Kosova Liberation Army, which is being disarmed by NATO forces, has vigorously condemned these attacks. Following the brutal murder of 14 Serb farmers in the village of Gracko, south of Pristina, Hashim Thaci, head of the KLA and its unrecognised provisional government, declared, “We strongly condemn this act …it has nothing to do with the progressive democratic forces in Kosova …So we must cooperate closely with the international community to assist in the investigation that will lead to the capture of those who are guilty.”Thaci went on to call again for “a harmonious coexistence, tolerance and understanding between ethnic groups”.

The attacks on Serbs have a number of sources. In the main, they appear to be revenge by returning Albanian refugees, who have come back to mass graves of relatives, burned-down houses, their possessions stolen, their farm animals killed.

For example, Pec in western Kosova is a blackened hole — Albanians, who formed 80% of the pre-war population, returned to find all their houses destroyed and only Serb houses standing. An element of revenge is hardly surprising.

Some Albanians are expelling Serbs from their homes because they themselves have none — it is estimated by the UN refugee agency that up to 400,000 people do not have habitable homes, and they will not be repaired by winter. After spending billions on war, the Western powers have sent only a trickle of aid to help house rebuilding.

A UN Human Rights report has implicated units of the KLA in many attacks — but did not find evidence of any support from the KLA leadership. On the contrary, to the extent that there is any political drive behind attacks, they may be directed by elements of the KLA trying to destabilise the Thaci leadership’s moderate course, or even enemies of the KLA.

Another element is purely criminal. Such a shattered society creates a criminal element, and there is considerable evidence of organised crime crossing over from Albania, which remains in major instability since the 1997 uprising which looted the armouries and smashed the state apparatus. Increasingly, Albanian as well as Serb homes are being looted by criminal gangs with no particular ethnic bias.

According to Masar Shala, KLA-appointed mayor of Prizren, referring to the criminal gangs from Albania, “Girls are kidnapped, taken to work as prostitutes in Italy, cars are stolen or hijacked, houses are looted, and there are shootings at night”.

Serb paramilitaries

The revenge attacks and the poisoned ethnic atmosphere are creating the conditions for solidifying certain “Serb” areas, which would join Serbia proper in a future partition.

The key region is that to the north of Mitrovica containing the Trepca complex. Russian forces would patrol the southern part of the French sector in the north-west, which will de facto extend this “Serb” region.

Just south of that, in the northern part of the Italian sector, there are increasing reports of Serb paramilitary activity. The whole of Kosova’s border with Serbia and Montenegro is wide open.

On July 27, Albanian television reported that Serb paramilitary units had laid siege to the village of Moistir. Just south of there is the patriarchate of Pec, a collection of medieval churches outside the town, which Yugoslav troops, according to the UN resolution ending the war, will return to protect.

This region then borders on the Russian zone in the northern tip of the German sector. On July 17, Serb paramilitary forces murdered four Albanian farmers in this region, outside of Klina. There could thus be a solid stretch of “Serb” zones along the north and north-west.

The other major region of Serb paramilitary activity is the north-east section of the US zone, along Kosova’s eastern border with Serbia. While returning Albanians expelled many Serbs from the town of Kamenica, Serb paramilitaries have expelled many Albanians from villages to the east of Kamenica and Gninalje.

Moreover, thousands of Albanians who formed the majority in several districts in Serbia proper, bordering this region, are also being expelled, according to a UNHCR spokesperson on August 2.

Now the Russian forces are being based in the Kamenica region. This in turn would border on the region of the Gracanica Monastery just south of Pristina, to which Yugoslav forces will return, while, just to the north, Russian forces have a major base of operations in Kosovo Polje, a western region of Pristina heavily populated by Serbs. There is thus potential for another “Serb” zone in the east.On August 4, 2000 Albanians marched against the Russian troops in Kamenica, following many incidents of Russian roadblocks, including by masked men who reportedly spoke Serbian. In one case, Russian troops detained KLA commander Agim Ceku. US forces allowed the demonstration to proceed, but hovered threateningly above it in Apache helicopters.

Who is ruling Kosova?

The United Nations has set up a temporary authority in Kosova, UNMIK, which rules the province as an international protectorate. While it is supposed to prepare conditions for eventual Kosovan autonomy within Yugoslavia, in reality it is refusing to devolve any power to the Kosovan Albanian and Serb populations.The KLA and other Kosovan parties have already set up their “provisional government”, separate from the UN authority, but the UN refuses to recognise this authority — though at the municipal level it provides the only basic services.


A UN police force of 3000 is being set up from troops from many countries, supposedly to ensure security for both Albanians and Serbs, which in reality could be done only by a Kosovan police force based on both populations.Outgoing UN “interim” governor Sergio Vieira de Mello declared that if the KLA mayors are not performing according to Western dictates, “You sack them, absolutely”, with the use of force. This attitude has led to clashes between KFOR and Albanian forces.

The fundamental question is “Who owns Kosova’s resources and industries?”. Since Kosova is promised “autonomy” rather than “republic” status within Yugoslavia (like Serbia and Montenegro), Kosova’s economic assets are still owned by the Serbian republic, as UN governor Bernard Kouchner recently made clear.

Therefore, partition may not even be necessary for Serbia to maintain ownership of Trepca — but Milosevic is taking no chances with something so valuable.Furthermore, the Serbian regime has been trying to sell many of Kosova’s assets. The Greek company Mytilinios has already bought a major share in Trepca, while Greek and Italian investors were sold the right to exploit Kosova’s telephone system.

According to Yugoslavia’s official privatisation law, the workers are entitled to shares when industries are privatised — but all Albanian workers were driven out in 1989, 13,000 of them from Trepca. Giving workers their rightful shares would leave fewer for foreign partners and make it more difficult to sell the industries.In January 1998, the underground Kosova parliament denounced the “flagrant violations of the rights of Kosovar employees and citizens” and warned foreign governments and businessmen that these deals were “invalid” and that “the Albanian people will treat them as neo-colonialists and demand reparations”. It is thus in the interests of Western investors for Albanian workers to be deprived of their rights.

However, even a Kosova truncated by partition would be unlikely to be allowed independence by its imperialist masters, as everyone from NATO chief Javier Solana to Bernard Kouchner has insisted. For imperialism, independence or union with Albania of even a part of Kosova would hold the same dangers as if it were all of Kosova. Changes to international borders would encourage demands by other oppressed national minorities throughout the Balkans, above all the Albanians in Macedonia and Montenegro.

For the Kosovans, the loss of Trepca would doom economic independence. For imperialism, internal partition would be the best of both worlds: an internal separation of hostile forces, making the situation easier to control, while avoiding the destabilising effects of a change in international borders.

By Michael Karadjis

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/19539

A declaration condemning the NATO attack on Serbia was released in April by 17 organisations which have long opposed the Serb national chauvinist regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Their stance reveals how little NATO’s attack has to do with winning the “hearts and minds” of the anti-nationalist opposition in Serbia.

For the opposition groups, the war has been an unmitigated disaster. Serb national chauvinist “homogenisation” has reached a fever pitch in the war conditions and the opposition has not been able to operate freely in this oppressive atmosphere.

Women in Black, a peace group which has carried out weekly anti-chauvinist vigils for eight years, is suddenly unable to operate. Milosevic “overnight acquired a most potent ally — fear. It is all-pervasive and has silenced every dissenting voice”, according to a dissident Serb journalist.

On April 11, Slavko Curuvija, a journalist who wrote an open letter to Milosevic last year calling on him to break his coalition with the fascist Serbian Radical Party, was gunned down outside his home.

Before the NATO attack, Milosevic did not have things going his way. Around the country, parents from many cities gathered outside the office of the army’s general staff with the simple message: “Bring our sons back from Kosovo”.When nationalist parties in February attempted to organise demonstrations at the national parliament to insist on rejection of the Rambouillet accord, only a few dozen turned up. Passers-by took no notice. With 2 million Serbs out of work and pensioners owed seven months’ pension, Serbia was close to rebellion.

One of the declaration’s signatories is the independent trade union federation Nezavisnost, which has about 300,000 members. Nezavisnost has long held a staunch anti-nationalist position. During the Bosnian war, it joined Women in Black and other anti-nationalist organisations in the coalition “Living in Sarajevo”, which openly condemned Belgrade’s aggression against Bosnia and declared support for the Serb Civic Council, the mass organisation of Bosnia’s Serbs who supported Bosnia’s multi-ethnic government against the Milosevic-backed rightist forces. Only Milosevic and his allies were recognised by the West as legitimate “representatives” of Bosnian Serbs.

Targeting working-class resistance

Many of the industries where Nezavisnost is strong have been destroyed by NATO’s bombs, including the massive Zastava car plant in Kragugevic. Last year, workers there went on hunger strike against the refusal of the regime to pay them, and two years ago they launched a strike wave under the banner “the factories to the workers”.

Speaking to reporters from the US Militant, Nezavisnost leader Branislav Canak said, “Many workers joke that NATO’s special target is the independent trade union”. This is unlikely to be a joke. It is precisely working-class opposition to Milosevic that imperialism most fears.

Of course, NATO’s bombs have hit far and wide, killing and devastating indiscriminately. But if Western powers really had wanted to overthrow of Milosevic, they would have spared places known to be strongholds of the opposition. The opposite has happened.

In addition to working-class centres such as Kragugevic, NATO bombs have continually hit Novi Sad, the capital of once autonomous multi-ethnic Vojvodina province. Milosevic, who suppressed the province’s autonomy, has remarkably little support here. It was a centre of last year’s “bring our sons home” movement. Even the members of the municipal government led such protests, yet the municipal government building was hit weeks before Milosevic’s headquarters.There are reports of a rise in Serb chauvinism directed against the Vojvodina’s large Hungarian minority, who are being branded “traitors” following Hungary’s recent joining of NATO.

NATO has even bombed the Vojvodinan city Subotica, the proud multi-ethnic town that resisted for years attempts to draft it into the Bosnia slaughter, identifying instead with multi-ethnic Bosnia.

Likewise, the NATO bombing of Montenegro has played into the hands of the pro-Milosevic forces, who have been pushing to overthrow the anti-Milosevic government of the republic for more than a year. The Montenegrin government has opposed Milosevic’s brutal counterinsurgency operation in Kosova.

Declaration

Early this year, the ruling Montenegrin Democratic Party of Socialists formed an alliance with a number of Serbian opposition parties to form the Coalition for Changes. The coalition included the Civic Alliance, long opposed to Milosevic’s Kosova policy.

The opposition declaration appeared in the Greek leftist paper Epohi. It stated:

“Deeply shocked by the catastrophic NATO attacks on our country and the terrible situation of the Albanians of Kosovo, we, the representatives of non-government organisations and the trade union confederation Nezavisnost, demand that all those who created this tragedy take all necessary steps to create the conditions for the renewal of the peace process.

“For two weeks now, the strongest military, political and economic countries of the world kill people and destroy military and civilian installations, bridges, railway lines, factories, warehouses and power stations. This has resulted in a cost of first-rate dimensions. Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs, above all ethnic Albanians, have been forced to abandon their ruined houses and flee from the bombings and from the military actions of the Milosevic regime and the KLA, in the hope of finding salvation in the tragic situation of exile.

“It is obvious that all this leads to catastrophe and that a peaceful solution to the problem of Kosovo through negotiations, for which we struggled for years, is now further away than ever. Our struggle to develop democracy and civil society in Yugoslavia and to help restore its place in all international organisations, occurred despite the endless pressure on us by the Serbian regime.

“We, the representatives of groups and civilian organisations, have struggled courageously and systematically against warmongering and nationalistic politics, for respect for human rights and, in particular, against the suppression of the Kosovar Albanians.

“We have always insisted on respect for human rights and the restoration of autonomy for Kosovo. Throughout this time, the Serbian and Albanian civil society groups were the only ones who maintained contact and cooperation.“The intervention of NATO has not only destroyed everything we accomplished until now but also the very possibility of the existence of civil society in Serbia. Confronted by the current situation, we put forward the following demands in the name of humanity and in the name of the values and ideas which guide our actions:

· We demand the immediate end to all bombing and all military operations;
· We demand the renewal of the peace process with international mediation, at both the regional and the European level, as well as the United Nations;
· We demand the European Union and Russia undertake the weight of responsibility in finding a peaceful resolution to the crisis;
· We demand an end to the practice of ethnic cleansing and the repatriation of all the refugees;
· We demand support for the peace, stability and democratisation of Montenegro and every possible action that helps relieve that republic of the catastrophic results of the refugee crisis;
· We demand that the Serbian and international mass media describe with professionalism and without bias the current developments, refrain from participation in the media war and the encouragement of inter-ethnic hatred, hysteria and glorification of violence, considering this to be the only logical road out of the crisis.

“We cannot achieve the above by ourselves. We expect you to support our demands and to help us realise them through your actions and initiatives.”

Signed: Civic Alliance for Democracy, Social Justice and Support to Trade Unions; Belgrade Circle; Centre for Cultural De-pollution; Centre for Democracy and Free Elections; Centre for the Passage to Democracy; Political Initiatives; Centre EKO; European Movement of Serbia; Forum for Ethnic Relations and Foundation for the Management of Peace and Crises; Group 484; Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia; Student Union of Serbia; Union for Truth and Anti-Fascist Resistance; Weekly Video News; Women in Black; Committee of Yugoslav Lawyers for Human Rights; Trade Union Confederation Nezavisnost.

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