-Caveat Lector-
Michael Parenti is what Noam Comsky would be if he'd have grown a pair.
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The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia
by Michael Parenti
In 1999, the U.S. national security state -- which has been involved
throughout the world in subversion, sabotage, terrorism, torture, drug
trafficking, and death squads -- launched round-the-clock aerial attacks
against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and
killing thousands of women, children, and men. All this was done out of
humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo. Or so we were asked to
believe. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four
countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia
massively. At the same time, the U.S. was involved in proxy wars in
Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other
places. And U.S. forces are deployed on every continent and ocean,
with some 300 major overseas support bases -- all in the name of
peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.
While showing themselves ready and willing to bomb Yugoslavia on
behalf of an ostensibly oppressed minority in Kosovo, U.S. leaders have
made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the
Romany people (gypsies), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic
minority in Northern Ireland, or the Hutu for the mass murder of a half
million Tutsi in Rwanda -- not to mention the French who were
complicit in that massacre. Nor have U.S. leaders considered launching
"humanitarian bombings" against the Turkish people for what their
leaders have done to the Kurds, or the Indonesian people because their
generals killed over 200,000 East Timorese and were continuing such
slaughter through the summer of 1999, or the Guatemalans for the
Guatemalan military's systematic extermination of tens of thousands of
Mayan villagers. In such cases, U.S. leaders not only tolerated such
atrocities but were actively complicit with the perpetrators -- who
usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping
Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500.
Why then did U.S. leaders wage an unrestrainedly murderous assault
upon Yugoslavia?
The Third Worldization of Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was built on an idea, namely that the Southern Slavs would
not remain weak and divided peoples, squabbling among themselves
and easy prey to outside imperial interests. Together they could form a
substantial territory capable of its own economic development. Indeed,
after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became a viable nation and an
economic success. Between 1960 and 1980 it had one of the most
vigorous growth rates: a decent standard of living, free medical care
and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with
pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a life expectancy of 72
years. Yugoslavia also offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public
transportation, housing, and utilities, with a not-for-profit economy that
was mostly publicly owned. This was not the kind of country global
capitalism would normally tolerate. Still, socialistic Yugoslavia was
allowed to exist for 45 years because it was seen as a nonaligned buffer
to the Warsaw Pact nations.
The dismemberment and mutilation of Yugoslavia was part of a
concerted policy initiated by the United States and the other Western
powers in 1989. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that
would not voluntarily overthrow what remained of its socialist system
and install a free-market economic order. In fact, Yugoslavs were proud
of their postwar economic development and of their independence from
both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The U.S. goal has been to transform
the Yugoslav nation into a Third-World region, a cluster of weak
right-wing principalities with the following characteristics:
incapable of charting an independent course of self-development;
a shattered economy and natural resources completely accessible
to multinational corporate exploitation, including the enormous
mineral wealth in Kosovo;
an impoverished, but literate and skilled population forced to work
at subsistence wages, constituting a cheap labor pool that will help
depress wages in western Europe and elsewhere;
dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, and
automobile industries, and various light industries, that offer no
further competition with existing Western producers.
U.S. policymakers also want to abolish Yugoslavia's public sector
services and social programs -- for the same reason they want to
abolish our public sector services and social programs. The ultimate
goal is the privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, as it is
the Third Worldization of the United States and every other nation. In
some respects, the fury of the West's destruction of Yugoslavia is a
backhanded tribute to that nation's success as an alternative form of
development, and to the pull it exerted on neighboring populations
both East and West.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Belgrade's leaders, not unlike the
Communist leadership in Poland, sought simultaneously to expand the
country's industrial base and increase consumer goods, a feat they
intended to accomplish by borrowing heavily from the West. But with
an enormous IMF debt came the inevitable demand for "restructuring,"
a harsh austerity program that brought wage freezes, cutbacks in
public spending, increased unemployment, and the abolition of
worker-managed enterprises. Still, much of the economy remained in
the not-for-profit public sector, including the Trepca mining complex in
Kosovo, described in the New York Times as "war's glittering prize . . .
the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans . . . worth at least
$5 billion" in rich deposits of coal, lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and
silver.1
That U.S. leaders have consciously sought to dismember Yugoslavia is
not a matter of speculation but of public record. In November 1990, the
Bush administration pressured Congress into passing the 1991 Foreign
Operations Appropriations Act, which provided that any part of
Yugoslavia failing to declare independence within six months would lose
U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate elections in each of
the six Yugoslav republics, and mandated U.S. State Department
approval of both election procedures and results as a condition for any
future aid. Aid would go only to the separate republics, not to the
Yugoslav government, and only to those forces whom Washington
defined as "democratic," meaning right-wing, free-market, separatist
parties.
Another goal of U.S. policy has been media monopoly and ideological
control. In 1997, in what remained of Serbian Bosnia, the last radio
station critical of NATO policy was forcibly shut down by NATO
"peacekeepers." The story in the New York Times took elaborate pains
to explain why silencing the only existing dissident Serbian station was
necessary for advancing democratic pluralism. The Times used the term
"hardline" eleven times to describe Bosnian Serb leaders who opposed
the shutdown and who failed to see it as "a step toward bringing about
responsible news coverage in Bosnia."2
Likewise, a portion of Yugoslav television remained in the hands of
people who refused to view the world as do the U.S. State Department,
the White House, and the corporate-owned U.S. news media, and this
was not to be tolerated. The NATO bombings destroyed the two
government TV channels and dozens of local radio and television
stations, so that by the summer of 1999 the only TV one could see in
Belgrade, when I visited that city, were the private channels along with
CNN, German television, and various U.S. programs. Yugoslavia's sin
was not that it had a media monopoly but that the publicly owned
portion of its media deviated from the western media monopoly that
blankets most of the world, including Yugoslavia itself.
In 1992, another blow was delivered against Belgrade: international
sanctions. Led by the United States, a freeze was imposed on all trade
to and from Yugoslavia, with disastrous results for the economy:
hyperinflation, mass unemployment of up to 70 percent,
malnourishment, and the collapse of the health care system.3
Divide and Conquer
One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that "those who are
mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia -- not the Serbs,
Croats or Muslims, but the Western powers -- are depicted as saviors."4
While pretending to work for harmony, U.S. leaders supported the most
divisive, reactionary forces from Croatia to Kosovo.
In Croatia, the West's man-of-the-hour was Franjo Tudjman, who
claimed in a book he authored in 1989, that "the establishment of
Hitler's new European order can be justified by the need to be rid of the
Jews," and that only 900,000 Jews, not six million, were killed in the
Holocaust. Tudjman's government adopted the fascist Ustasha
checkered flag and anthem.5 Tudjman presided over the forced
evacuation of over half a million Serbs from Croatia between 1991 and
1995, replete with rapes and summary executions.6 This included the
200,000 from Krajina in 1995, whose expulsion was facilitated by
attacks from NATO war planes and missiles. Needless to say, U.S.
leaders did nothing to stop and much to assist these atrocities, while
the U.S. media looked the other way. Tudjman and his cronies now
reside in obscene wealth while the people of Croatia are suffering the
afflictions of the free market paradise. Tight controls have been
imposed on Croatian media, and anyone who criticizes President
Tudjman's government risks incarceration. Yet the White House hails
Croatia as a new democracy.
In Bosnia, U.S. leaders supported the Muslim fundamentalist, Alija
Izetbegovic, an active Nazi in his youth, who has called for strict
religious control over the media and now wants to establish an Islamic
Bosnian republic. Izetbegovic himself does not have the support of
most Bosnian Muslims. He was decisively outpolled in his bid for the
presidency yet managed to take over that office by cutting a mysterious
deal with frontrunner Fikret Abdic.7 Bosnia is now under IMF and NATO
regency. It is not permitted to develop its own internal resources, nor
allowed to extend credit or self-finance through an independent
monetary system. Its state-owned assets, including energy, water,
telecommunications, media and transportation, have been sold off to
private firms at garage sale prices.
In the former Yugoslavia, NATO powers have put aside neoimperialism
and have opted for out-and-out colonial occupation. In early 1999, the
democratically elected president of Republika Srpska, the Serb
ministate in Bosnia, who had defeated NATO's chosen candidate, was
removed by NATO troops because he proved less than fully cooperative
with NATO's "high representative" in Bosnia. The latter retains authority
to impose his own solutions and remove elected officials who prove in
any way obstructive.8 This too was represented in the western press as
a necessary measure to advance democracy.
In Kosovo, we see the same dreary pattern. The U.S. gave aid and
encouragement to violently right-wing separatist forces such as the
self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army, previously considered a terrorist
organization by Washington. The KLA has been a longtime player in the
enormous heroin trade that reaches to Switzerland, Austria, Belgium,
Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Norway, and Sweden.9 KLA
leaders had no social program other than the stated goal of cleansing
Kosovo of all non-Albanians, a campaign that had been going on for
decades. Between 1945 and 1998, the non-Albanian Kosovar
population of Serbs, Roma, Turks, Gorani (Muslim Slavs), Montenegrins,
and several other ethnic groups shrank from some 60 percent to about
20 percent. Meanwhile, the Albanian population grew from 40 to 80
percent (not the 90 percent repeatedly reported in the press),
benefiting from a higher birth rate, a heavy influx of immigrants from
Albania, and the systematic intimidation and expulsion of Serbs.
In 1987, in an early untutored moment of truth, the New York Times
reported: "Ethnic Albanians in the Government have manipulated
public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs. . . .
Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn
down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have
been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their
elders to rape Serbian girls. . . . As the Slavs flee the protracted
violence, Kosovo is becoming what ethnic Albanian nationalists have
been demanding for years . . . an 'ethnically pure' Albanian region. . .
."10 Ironically, while the Serbs were repeatedly charged with ethnic
cleansing, Serbia itself is now the only multi-ethnic society left in the
former Yugoslavia, with some twenty-six nationality groups including
thousands of Albanians who live in and around Belgrade.
Demonizing the Serbs
The propaganda campaign to demonize the Serbs fits the larger policy
of the Western powers. The Serbs were targeted for demonization
because they were the largest nationality and the one most opposed to
the breakup of Yugoslavia. None other than Charles Boyd, former
deputy commander of the U.S. European command, commented on it in
1994: "The popular image of this war in Bosnia is one of unrelenting
Serb expansionism. Much of what the Croatians call 'the occupied
territories' is land that has been held by Serbs for more that three
centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia. . . . In short
the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold
onto what was already theirs." While U.S. leaders claim they want
peace, Boyd concludes, they have encouraged a deepening of the war.11
But what of the atrocities they committed? All sides committed
atrocities, but the reporting was consistently one-sided. Grisly incidents
of Croat and Muslim atrocities against the Serbs rarely made it into the
U.S. press, and when they did they were accorded only passing
mention.12 Meanwhile Serb atrocities were played up and sometimes
even fabricated, as we shall see. Recently, three Croatian generals were
indicted by the Hague War Crimes Tribunal for the bombardment and
deaths of Serbs in Krajina and elsewhere. Where were U.S. leaders and
U.S. television crews when these war crimes were being committed?
John Ranz, chair of Survivors of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp,
USA, asks: Where were the TV cameras when hundreds of Serbs were
slaughtered by Muslims near Srebrenica?13 The official line, faithfully
parroted in the U.S. media, is that the Serbs committed all the
atrocities at Srebrenica.
Before uncritically ingesting the atrocity stories dished out by U.S.
leaders and the corporate-owned news media, we might recall the five
hundred premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from
incubators in Kuwait, a story repeated and believed until exposed as a
total fabrication years later. During the Bosnian war in 1993, the Serbs
were accused of having an official policy of rape. "Go forth and rape" a
Bosnian Serb commander supposedly publicly instructed his troops. The
source of that story never could be traced. The commander's name was
never produced. As far as we know, no such utterance was ever made.
Even the New York Times belatedly ran a tiny retraction, coyly allowing
that "the existence of 'a systematic rape policy' by the Serbs remains to
be proved."14
Bosnian Serb forces supposedly raped anywhere from 25,000 to
100,000 Muslim women. The Bosnian Serb army numbered not more
than 30,000 or so, many of whom were engaged in desperate military
engagements. A representative from Helsinki Watch noted that stories
of massive Serbian rapes originated with the Bosnian Muslim and
Croatian governments and had no credible supporting evidence.
Common sense would dictate that these stories be treated with the
utmost skepticism -- and not be used as an excuse for an aggressive
and punitive policy against Yugoslavia.
The mass rape propaganda theme was resuscitated in 1999 to justify
NATO's renewed attacks on Yugoslavia. A headline in the San Francisco
Examiner tells us: "SERB TACTIC IS ORGANIZED RAPE, KOSOVO
REFUGEES SAY." Only at the bottom of the story, in the nineteenth
paragraph, do we read that reports gathered by the Kosovo mission of
the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found no such
organized rape policy. The actual number of rapes were in the dozens
"and not many dozens," according to the OSCE spokesperson. This
same story did note that the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal sentenced a
Bosnian Croat military commander to ten years in prison for failing to
stop his troops from raping Muslim women in 1993 -- an atrocity we
heard little about when it was happening.15
The Serbs were blamed for the infamous Sarajevo market massacre of
1992. But according to the report leaked out on French TV, Western
intelligence knew that it was Muslim operatives who had bombed
Bosnian civilians in the marketplace in order to induce NATO
involvement. Even international negotiator David Owen, who worked
with Cyrus Vance, admitted in his memoir that the NATO powers knew
all along that it was a Muslim bomb.16 However, the well-timed
fabrication served its purpose of inducing the United Nations to go
along with the U.S.-sponsored sanctions.
On one occasion, notes Barry Lituchy, the New York Times ran a photo
purporting to be of Croats grieving over Serbian atrocities when in fact
the murders had been committed by Bosnian Muslims. The Times
printed an obscure retraction the following week.17
We repeatedly have seen how "rogue nations" are designated and
demonized. The process is predictably transparent. First, the leaders
are targeted. Qaddafi of Libya was a "Hitlerite megalomaniac" and a
"madman." Noriega of Panama was a "a swamp rat," one of the world's
worst "drug thieves and scums," and "a Hitler admirer." Saddam
Hussein of Iraq was "the Butcher of Baghdad," a "madman," and
"worse than Hitler." Each of these leaders then had their countries
attacked by U.S. forces and U.S.-led sanctions. What they really had in
common was that each was charting a somewhat independent course of
self-development or somehow was not complying with the dictates of
the global free market and the U.S. national security state.18
Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has been described by Bill
Clinton as "a new Hitler." Yet he was not always considered so. At first,
the Western press, viewing the ex-banker as a bourgeois Serbian
nationalist who might hasten the break-up of the federation, hailed him
as a "charismatic personality." Only later, when they saw him as an
obstacle rather than a tool, did they begin to depict him as the demon
who "started all four wars." This was too much even for the managing
editor of the U.S. establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria.
He noted in the New York Times that Milosevic who rules "an
impoverished country that has not attacked its neighbors -- is no Adolf
Hitler. He is not even Saddam Hussein."19
Some opposition radio stations and newspapers were reportedly shut
down during the NATO bombing. But, during my trip to Belgrade in
August 1999, I observed nongovernmental media and opposition party
newspapers going strong. There are more opposition parties in the
Yugoslav parliament than in any other European parliament. Yet the
government is repeatedly labeled a dictatorship. Milosevic was elected
as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had
relatively few violations. As of the end of 1999, he presided over a
coalition government that included four parties. Opposition groups
openly criticized and demonstrated against his government. Yet he was
called a dictator.
The propaganda campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that
prominent personages on the Left -- who oppose the NATO policy
against Yugoslavia -- have felt compelled to genuflect before this
demonization orthodoxy.20 Thus do they reveal themselves as having
been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they criticize
on so many other issues. To reject the demonized image of Milosevic
and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim they are
faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to challenge the one-sided
propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia.
More Atrocity Stories
Atrocities (murders and rapes) occur in every war, which is not to
condone them. Indeed, murders and rapes occur in many peacetime
communities. What the media propaganda campaign against Yugoslavia
charged was that atrocities were conducted on a mass genocidal scale.
Such charges were used to justify the murderous aerial assault by
NATO forces.
Up until the bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had
taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo
Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources had put the figure at 800. In
either case, such casualties reveal a limited insurgency, not genocide.
The forced expulsion policy began after the NATO bombings, with
thousands being uprooted by Serb forces mostly in areas where the KLA
was operating or was suspected of operating. In addition, if the
unconfirmed reports by the ethnic Albanian refugees can be believed,
there was much plundering and instances of summary execution by
Serbian paramilitary forces -- who were unleashed after the NATO
bombing started.
We should keep in mind that tens of thousands fled Kosovo because of
the bombings, or because the province was the scene of sustained
ground fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA, or because they
were just afraid and hungry. An Albanian woman crossing into
Macedonia was eagerly asked by a news crew if she had been forced out
by Serb police. She responded: "There were no Serbs. We were
frightened of the [NATO] bombs."21 During the bombings, an estimated
70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of Kosovo took flight (mostly
north but some to the south), as did thousands of Roma and other
non-Albanian ethnic groups.22 Were these people ethnically cleansing
themselves? Or were they not fleeing the bombing and the ground war?
The New York Times reported that "a major purpose of the NATO effort
is to end the Serb atrocities that drove more than one million Albanians
from their homes."23 So, we are told to believe, the refugee tide was
caused not by the ground war against the KLA and not by the massive
NATO bombing but by unspecified atrocities. The bombing, which was
the major cause of the refugee problem was now seen as the solution.
The refugee problem created in part by the massive aerial attacks was
now treated as justification for such attacks, a way of putting pressure
on Milosevic to allow "the safe return of ethnic Albanian refugees."24
While Kosovo Albanians were leaving in great numbers -- usually
well-clothed and in good health, some riding their tractors, trucks, or
cars, many of them young men of recruitment age -- they were
described as being "slaughtered." Serbian attacks on KLA strongholds
and the forced expulsion of Albanian villagers were described as
"genocide." But experts in surveillance photography and wartime
propaganda charged NATO with running a "propaganda campaign" on
Kosovo that lacked any supporting evidence. State Department reports
of mass graves and of 100,000 to 500,000 missing Albanian men "are
just ludicrous," according to these independent critics.25
As with the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts, the image of mass killings
was hyped once again. The Washington Post reported that 350 ethnic
Albanians "might be buried in mass graves" around a mountain village
in western Kosovo. Such speculations were based on sources that NATO
officials refused to identify. Getting down to specifics, the article
mentions "four decomposing bodies" discovered near a large ash heap,
with no details as to who they might be or how they died.26
An ABC "Nightline" program made dramatic and repeated references to
the "Serbian atrocities in Kosovo" while offering no specifics. Ted
Kopple asked angry Albanian refugees what they had witnessed? They
pointed to an old man in their group who wore a wool hat. The Serbs
had thrown the man's hat to the ground and stepped on it, "because
the Serbs knew that his hat was the most important thing to him," they
told Kopple, who was appropriately appalled by this one example of a
"war crime" offered in the hour-long program.
A widely circulated story in the New York Times, headlined "U.S.
REPORT OUTLINES SERB ATTACKS IN KOSOVO," tells us that the State
Department issued "the most comprehensive documentary record to
date on atrocities." The report concludes that there had been organized
rapes and systematic executions. But reading further into the article,
one finds that stories of such crimes "depend almost entirely on
information from refugee accounts. There was no suggestion that
American intelligence agencies had been able to verify, most, or even
many, of the accounts . . . and the word 'reportedly' and 'allegedly'
appear throughout the document."27
British journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed Kosovo refugees about
atrocities and found an impressive lack of evidence. One woman caught
him glancing at the watch on her wrist, while her husband told him how
all the women had been robbed of their jewelry and other possessions.
A spokesperson for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees talked of
mass rapes and what sounded like hundreds of killings in three villages.
When Gillan pressed him for more precise information, he reduced it
drastically to five or six teenage rape victims. But he admitted that he
had not spoken to any witnesses and that "we have no way of verifying
these reports."28
Gillan noted that some refugees had seen killings and other atrocities,
but there was little to suggest that they had seen it on the scale that
was being reported. Officials told him of refugees who talked of sixty or
more being killed in one village and fifty in another, but Gillan "could
not find one eye-witness who actually saw these things happening." It
was always in some other village that the mass atrocities seem to have
occurred. Yet every day western journalists reported "hundreds" of
rapes and murders. Sometimes they noted in passing that the reports
had yet to be substantiated, but then why were such stories being so
eagerly publicized?
In contrast to its public assertions, the German Foreign Office privately
denied there was any evidence that genocide or ethnic cleansing was a
component of Yugoslav policy: "Even in Kosovo, an explicit political
persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable. . . . The
actions of the [Yugoslav] security forces [were] not directed against the
Kosovo-Albanians as an ethnically defined group, but against the
military opponent and its actual or alleged supporters."29
Still, Milosevic was indicted as a war criminal, charged with the forced
expulsion of Albanian Kosovars, and with summary executions of a
hundred or so individuals. Again, alleged crimes that occurred after the
NATO bombing had started were used as justification for the bombing.
The biggest war criminals of all were the NATO political leaders who
orchestrated the aerial campaign of death and destruction.
As the White House saw it, since the stated aim of the aerial attacks
was not to kill civilians; there was no liability, only regrettable
mistakes. In other words, only the professed intent of an action
counted and not its ineluctable effects. But a perpetrator can be judged
guilty of willful murder without explicitly intending the death of a
particular victim -- as with an unlawful act that the perpetrator knew
would likely cause death. As George Kenney, a former State
Department official under the Bush Administration, put it: "Dropping
cluster bombs on highly populated urban areas doesn't result in
accidental fatalities. It is purposeful terror bombing."30
In the first weeks of the NATO occupation of Kosovo, tens of thousands
of Serbs were driven from the province and hundreds were killed by
KLA gunmen in what was described in the western press as acts of
"revenge" and "retaliation," as if the victims were deserving of such a
fate. Also numbering among the victims of "retribution" were the Roma,
Gorani, Turks, Montenegrins, and Albanians who had "collaborated"
with the Serbs by speaking Serbian, opposing separatism, and
otherwise identifying themselves as Yugoslavs. Others continued to be
killed or maimed by the mines planted by the KLA and the Serb
military, and by the large number of NATO cluster bombs sprinkled over
the land.31
It was repeatedly announced in the first days of the NATO occupation
that 10,000 Albanians had been killed by the Serbs (down from the
100,000 and even 500,000 Albanian men supposedly executed during
the war). No evidence was ever offered to support the 10,000 figure,
nor even to explain how it was so swiftly determined -- even before
NATO forces had moved into most of Kosovo.
Repeatedly unsubstantiated references to "mass graves," each
purportedly filled with hundreds or even thousands of Albanian victims
also failed to materialize. Through the summer of 1999, the media hype
about mass graves devolved into an occasional unspecified reference.
The few sites actually unearthed offered up as many as a dozen bodies
or sometimes twice that number, but with no certain evidence
regarding causes of death or even the nationality of victims. In some
cases there was reason to believe the victims were Serbs.32
Lacking evidence of mass graves, by late August 1999 the Los Angeles
Times focused on wells "as mass graves in their own right. . . . Serbian
forces apparently stuffed...many bodies of ethnic Albanians into wells
during their campaign of terror."33 Apparently? The story itself dwelled
on only one village in which the body of a 39-year-old male was found
in a well, along with three dead cows and a dog. No cause was given for
his death and "no other human remains were discovered." The well's
owner was not identified. Again when getting down to specifics, the
atrocities seem not endemic but sporadic.
Ethnic Enmity and U.S. "Diplomacy"
Some people argue that nationalism, not class, is the real motor force
behind the Yugoslav conflict. This presumes that class and ethnicity are
mutually exclusive forces. In fact, ethnic enmity can be enlisted to
serve class interests, as the CIA tried to do with indigenous peoples in
Indochina and Nicaragua -- and more recently in Bosnia.34
When different national groups are living together with some measure
of social and material security, they tend to get along. There is
intermingling and even intermarriage. But when the economy goes into
a tailspin, thanks to sanctions and IMF destabilization, then it becomes
easier to induce internecine conflicts and social discombobulation. In
order to hasten that process in Yugoslavia, the Western powers
provided the most retrograde separatist elements with every advantage
in money, organization, propaganda, arms, hired thugs, and the full
might of the U.S. national security state at their backs. Once more the
Balkans are to be balkanized.
NATO's attacks on Yugoslavia have been in violation of its own charter,
which says it can take military action only in response to aggression
committed against one of its members. Yugoslavia attacked no NATO
member. U.S. leaders discarded international law and diplomacy.
Traditional diplomacy is a process of negotiating disputes through give
and take, proposal and counterproposal, a way of pressing one's
interests only so far, arriving eventually at a solution that may leave
one side more dissatisfied than the other but not to the point of forcing
either party to war.
U.S. diplomacy is something else, as evidenced in its dealings with
Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, and now Yugoslavia. It consists of
laying down a set of demands that are treated as nonnegotiable,
though called "accords" or "agreements," as in the Dayton Accords or
Rambouillet Agreements. The other side's reluctance to surrender
completely to every condition is labeled "stonewalling," and is publicly
misrepresented as an unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. U.S.
leaders, we hear, run out of patience as their "offers" are "snubbed."
Ultimatums are issued, then aerial destruction is delivered upon the
recalcitrant nation so that it might learn to see things the way
Washington does.
Milosevic balked because the Rambouillet plan, drawn up by the U.S.
State Department, demanded that he hand over a large, rich region of
Serbia, that is, Kosovo, to foreign occupation. The plan further
stipulated that these foreign troops shall have complete occupational
power over all of Yugoslavia, with immunity from arrest and with
supremacy over Yugoslav police and authorities. Even more revealing of
the U.S. agenda, the Rambouillet plan stated: "The economy of Kosovo
shall function in accordance with free market principles."
Rational Destruction
While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction
of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were convinced that "this
time" the U.S. national security state was really fighting the good fight.
"Yes, the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid!" they said at
the time, "but we have to do something." In fact, the bombings were
other than stupid: they were profoundly immoral. And in fact they did
work; they destroyed much of what was left of Yugoslavia, turning it
into a privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, beggar-poor country of
cheap labor, defenseless against capital penetration, so battered that it
will never rise again, so shattered that it will never reunite, not even as
a viable bourgeois country.
When the productive social capital of any part of the world is
obliterated, the potential value of private capital elsewhere is enhanced
-- especially when the crisis faced today by western capitalism is one of
overcapacity. Every agricultural base destroyed by western aerial
attacks (as in Iraq) or by NAFTA and GATT (as in Mexico and
elsewhere), diminishes the potential competition and increases the
market opportunities for multinational corporate agribusiness. To
destroy publicly-run Yugoslav factories that produced auto parts,
appliances, or fertilizer -- or a publicly financed Sudanese plant that
produced pharmaceuticals at prices substantially below their western
competitors -- is to enhance the investment value of western
producers. And every television or radio station closed down by NATO
troops or blown up by NATO bombs extends the monopolizing
dominance of the western media cartels. The aerial destruction of
Yugoslavia's social capital served that purpose.
We have yet to understand the full effect of NATO's aggression. Serbia
is one of the greatest sources of underground waters in Europe, and the
contamination from U.S. depleted uranium and other explosives is
being felt in the whole surrounding area all the way to the Black Sea. In
Pancevo alone, huge amounts of ammonia were released into the air
when NATO bombed the fertilizer factory. In that same city, a
petrochemical plant was bombed seven times. After 20,000 tons of
crude oil were burnt up in only one bombardment of an oil refinery, a
massive cloud of smoke hung in the air for ten days. Some 1,400 tons
of ethylene dichloride spilled into the Danube, the source of drinking
water for ten million people. Meanwhile, concentrations of vinyl chloride
were released into the atmosphere at more than 10,000 times the
permitted level. In some areas, people have broken out in red blotches
and blisters, and health officials predict sharp increases in cancer rates
in the years ahead.35
National parks and reservations that make Yugoslavia among thirteen of
the world's richest bio-diversity countries were bombed. The depleted
uranium missiles that NATO used through many parts of the country
have a half-life of 4.5 billion years.36 It is the same depleted uranium
that now delivers cancer, birth defects, and premature death upon the
people of Iraq. In Novi Sad, I was told that crops were dying because of
the contamination. And power transformers could not be repaired
because U.N. sanctions prohibited the importation of replacement parts.
The people I spoke to were facing famine and cold in the winter ahead.
With words that might make us question his humanity, the NATO
commander, U.S. General Wesley Clark boasted that the aim of the air
war was to "demolish, destroy, devastate, degrade, and ultimately
eliminate the essential infrastructure" of Yugoslavia. Even if Serbian
atrocities had been committed, and I have no doubt that some were,
where is the sense of proportionality? Paramilitary killings in Kosovo
(which occurred mostly after the aerial war began) are no justification
for bombing fifteen cities in hundreds of around-the-clock raids for over
two months, spewing hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and
carcinogenic chemicals into the water, air, and soil, killing thousands of
Serbs, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and others, and destroying bridges,
residential areas, and over two hundred hospitals, clinics, schools, and
churches, along with the productive capital of an entire nation.
A report released in London in August 1999 by the Economist
Intelligence Unit concluded that the enormous damage NATO's aerial
war inflicted on Yugoslavia's infrastructure will cause the economy to
shrink dramatically in the next few years.37 Gross domestic product will
drop by 40 percent this year and remain at levels far below those of a
decade ago. Yugoslavia, the report predicted, will become the poorest
country in Europe. Mission accomplished.
Postscript
In mid-September 1999, the investigative journalist Diana Johnstone
emailed associates in the U.S. that former U.S. ambassador to Croatia,
Peter Galbraith, who had backed Tudjman's "operation storm" that
drove 200,000 Serbians (mostly farming families) out of the Krajina
region of Croatia four years ago, was recently in Montenegro, chiding
Serbian opposition politicians for their reluctance to plunge Yugoslavia
into civil war. Such a war would be brief, he assured them, and would
"solve all your problems." Another strategy under consideration by U.S.
leaders, heard recently in Yugoslavia, is to turn over the northern
Serbian province of Vojvodina to Hungary. Vojvodina has some
twenty-six nationalities including several hundred thousand persons of
Hungarian descent who, on the whole show no signs of wanting to
secede, and who certainly are better treated than the larger Hungarian
minorities in Rumania and Slovakia. Still, a recent $100 million
appropriation from the U.S. Congress fuels separatist activity in what
remains of Yugoslavia -- at least until Serbia gets a government
sufficiently pleasing to the free-market globalists in the West.
Johnstone concludes: "With their electric power stations ruined and
factories destroyed by NATO bombing, isolated, sanctioned and treated
as pariahs by the West, Serbs have the choice between freezing
honorably in a homeland plunged into destitution, or following the
'friendly advice' of the same people who have methodically destroyed
their country. As the choice is unlikely to be unanimous one way or the
other, civil war and further destruction of the country are probable."
Michael Parenti is the author of Against Empire, Dirty Truths, America
Besieged, and most recently, History as Mystery, all published by City
Lights Books.
NOTES:
1.New York Times, July 8, 1998.
2.New York Times, October 10, 1997.
3.For more detailed background information on the stratagems preceding the
NATO bombing,
see the collection of reports by Ramsey Clark, Sean Gervasi, Sara
Flounders, Nadja Tesich,
Michel Choussudovsky, and others in NATO in the Balkans: Voices of
Opposition (New York:
International Action Center, 1998).
4.Joan Phillips, "Breaking the Selective Silence," Living Marxism, April
1993, p. 10.
5.Financial Times (London), April 15, 1993.
6.See for instance, Yigal Chazan's report in The Guardian
(London/Manchester), August 17,
1992.
7.See Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London:
Penguin, 1995), p.
211; also Diana Johnstone, "Alija Izetbegovic: Islamic Hero of the
Western World,"
CovertAction Quarterly, Winter 1999, p. 58.
8.Michael Kelly, "The Clinton Doctrine is a Fraud, and Kosovo Proves It,"
Boston Globe, July 1,
19 99.
9.San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 1999 and Washington Times, May 3, 1999.
10.New York Times, November 1, 1987.
11.Foreign Affairs, September/October 1994.
12.For instance, Raymond Bonner, "War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops
'Cleansed' the Serbs,"
New York Times, March 21, 1999, a revealing report that has been ignored
in the relentless
propaganda campaign against the Serbs.
13.John Ranz in his paid advertisement in the New York Times, April 29,
1993.
14."Correction: Report on Rape in Bosnia," New York Times, October 23, 1993.
15.San Francisco Examiner, April 26, 1999.
16.David Owen, Balkan Odyssey, p. 262.
17.Barry Lituchy, "Media Deception and the Yugoslav Civil War," in NATO in
the Balkans, p. 205;
see also New York Times, August 7, 1993.
18.For further discussion of this point, see my Against Empire (San
Francisco: City Lights Books,
1995).
19.New York Times, March 28, 1999.
20.Both Noam Chomsky in his comments on Pacifica Radio, April 7, 1999, and
Alexander
Cockburn in the Nation, May 10, 1999, referred to Serbian "brutality" and
described Milosevic
as "monstrous" without offering any specifics.
21.Brooke Shelby Biggs, "Failure to Inform," San Francisco Bay Guardian, May
5, 1999, p. 25.
22.Washington Post, June 6, 1999.
23.New York Times, June 15, 1999.
24.See for instance, Robert Burns, Associated Press report, April 22, 1999.
25.Charles Radin and Louise Palmer, "Experts Voice Doubts on Claims of
Genocide: Little
Evidence for NATO Assertions," San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 1999.
26.Washington Post, July 10, 1999.
27.New York Times, May 11, 1999.
28.Audrey Gillan "What's the Story?" London Review of Books, May 27, 1999.
29.Intelligence reports from the German Foreign Office, January 12, 1999 and
October 29, 1998
to the German Administrative Courts, translated by Eric Canepa, Brecht
Forum, New York,
April 20, 1999.
30.Teach-in, Leo Baeck Temple, Los Angeles, May 23, 1999.
31.Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1999.
32.See for instance, Carlotta Gall, "Belgrade Sees Grave Site as Proof NATO
Fails to Protect
Serbs," New York Times, August 27, 1999.
33.Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1999.
34.It is a matter of public record that the CIA has been active in Bosnia.
Consider these
headlines: The Guardian (Manchester/London), November 17 1994: "CIA
AGENTS TRAINING
BOSNIAN ARMY"; The London Observer, November 20, 1994: "AMERICA'S SECRET
BOSNIA
AGENDA"; The European, November 25, 1994: "HOW THE CIA HELPS BOSNIA FIGHT
BACK."
35.Report by Steve Crawshaw in the London Independent, reprinted in the San
Francisco
Examiner, July 26, 1999.
36.See the communication from Serbian environmentalist Branka Jovanovic:
http://beograd.rockbridge.net/greens_from_belgrade.htm; March 31, 1999.
37.San Francisco Examiner, August 23, 1999.
Copyright © 2000 Michael Parenti. All rights reserved.
==================================
How to Order this Book
To Kill A Nation: The Attack on
Yugoslavia
For ten years, US and NATO forces have waged a
campaign to dismember Yugoslavia, including 78
days of round-the-clock aerial attacks in 1999 that
killed or injured upwards of six thousand people.
Drawing on a wide range of published and
unpublished material (mostly Western sources)
and observations gathered from his visit to
Yugoslavia in 1999, Michael Parenti challenges the
mainstream media demonization of Yugoslavia
and the Serbs, and uncovers the real goals behind
Western talk of "genocide," "ethnic cleansing,"
and "democracy."
To Kill A Nation reveals a decade-long disinformation campaign waged
by Western leaders and NATO officials in their pursuit of free-market
"reforms." The political and economic destabilization of that country
continues today, Parenti shows, as does the forced privatization and
Third Worldization of the entire region.
What they are saying about TO KILL A NATION: The Attack on
Yugoslavia:
"Parenti has written a brilliant critique of the news reports on
Yugoslavia published in the respectable press. Each chapter
provides a detailed refutation of the propaganda myths that
justified NATO's war. This is by far the most compelling account
in print."
— James Petras, co-author of Empire or
Republic?
"A fierce, elegantly constructed elegy not just for the lives
sacrificed in the Balkan wars, but for concepts of national
sovereignty and constitutionality ... ... he writes with a taut
cadence that exudes conviction. Extremely disturbing, but, for
the brave, jolting and necessary reading."
— Kirkus
"To Kill a Nation is the best explanation of the great crime NATO
committed and what it will mean for our future. It is full of
insights on the role of US militarism and media disinformation in
the service of corporate profits."
— Sara Flounders, editor and co-author of NATO in the
Balkans
Contents
Introduction: Whom Do We Believe?
1.Hypocritical Humanitarianism
2.Third Worldization
3.Divide and Conquer
4.Slovenia: Somewhat Out of Step
5.Croatia: New Republic, Old Reactionaries
6.Bosnia: New Colonies
7.Republika Srpska: Democracy, NATO Style
8.The Other Atrocities
9.Demonizing the Serbs
10.On to Kosovo
11.The Rambouillet Ambush
12.NATO's War Crimes
13.The Genocide Hype Continues
14.Where Are All the Bodies Buried?
15.Ethnic Cleansing, KLA-NATO Style
16.Rational Destruction: Eliminating the Competition
17.Multiculturalism in Yugoslavia
18.Yugoslavia's Future: Is It Bulgaria?
19.Privatization as a Global Goal
20.The Aggression Continues
Notes
Index
Copyright © 2001. Michael Parenti. All rights reserved.
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