A Pariah Nation
As great clouds of toxic smoke settled over northern
Serbia from the bombing of the country�s petrochemical
and other industries, moral indignation rose among the
chorus of editorialists, columnists, and NATO officials
justifying the bombing. Causing discomfort to civilians
was no longer merely to get them to overthrow
Milosevic, but to punish them for not having done so.
"Much has been made, unwisely in my view," wrote
columnist William Pfaff, "of NATO�s being in conflict only
with Serbia�s leaders. Serbia�s leaders have been elected
by the Serbian people.... Serbian voters have kept
Slobodan Milosevic in power during the past decade. It
is not clear why they should be spared a taste of the
suffering he has inflicted on their neighbors." (8)
So, there were two possibilities. Either Milosevic was a
"dictator," and the Serbian people had to be liberated
from him by bombing. Or else, as it turns out, he was
not a dictator, and the Serbian people had to be given a
"taste of suffering" for having elected him. Either way,
Serbia must be bombed. The possibility that, if the
dictator was not a dictator, some of the other
accusations leveled against Serbia were equally
distorted, was not to be considered.
As NATO was stepping up its bombing of Yugoslavia,
Newsweek published an article by Rod Nordland entitled
"Vengeance of a Victim Race" that reached a summit of
anti-Serb racism not easily surpassed. "The Serbs are
Europe�s outsiders, seasoned haters raised on self-pity,"
this writer proclaimed. (9) "Serbs are expert haters," the
article informed readers, citing as evidence a "torrent of
gutter invective about Bill Clinton�s sex life" on
commercial TV in Serbia (without benefit of Jay Leno).
No evidence is needed when it comes to slandering a
whole nation with no legal recourse to libel suits.
For people familiar with the historic stoicism of the
Serbs, their characteristic reserve about their own
troubles and their remarkable sense of black humor�a
great antidote to self-pity�all this pontificating about
Serbs� supposed "victim" complex appears anything but
innocent.
Among the propaganda techniques used for years to
destroy any public sympathy in the West for the Serbian
people is the persistent negative characterization of
Serbian culture, national myth and mentality as uniquely
peculiar, marked by a strange delusion of being
"victims." This technique of pre-emptive denigration
prepares the public to dismiss such facts as Serbia�s
extraordinary loss of population in World War I, the
authentic genocide practiced against the Serbs by the
fascist Croatian Ustashe during World War II, and
periodic Albanian efforts to push Serbs out of Kosovo as
mere manifestations of a national mental illness. If a
person or group is earmarked for victimization, what
better way to head off foreseeable sympathy than by
proclaiming loud and long that the individual or group
always complains of being "victimized." In this way, ears
will be deafened to their cries and hearts hardened to
their fate.
Anti-Semitic propaganda portrayed Jews as self-pitying
whiners as the Nazis rounded them up for the gas
chambers.
The NATO line was to justify destroying Yugoslavia by
comparing it to Nazi Germany and Milosevic to Hitler. In
a Memorial Day address, Clinton claimed that Milosevic�s
government "like that of Nazi Germany rose to power in
part by getting people to look down on people of a given
race and ethnicity, and to believe they had ... no right
to live."
Meanwhile, the work went on of making people look
down on Serbs and even to question whether Serbs had
the right to live.
As the bombing intensified, and the more gung-ho of the
NATO warriors (notably the British) pressed for a ground
invasion, Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
came along with the ultimate justification not only for a
"taste of suffering," but also for conquest and
occupation of Serbia, by likening the displacement of
Kosovo�s civilians to the Holocaust, Milosevic to Hitler,
and the Serbian people to "Hitler�s willing executioners,"
to use the title of the book that gained him his notoriety
as "genocide expert." Goldhagen�s premise (10) is that,
like Germany and Japan in the early 1940s, Serbia in the
1990s "has been waging brutal imperial war, seeking to
conquer area after area, expelling unwanted
populations, and perpetrating mass murder."
This Harvard scholar builds a structure of assumptions
on nothing more solid than erroneous impressions
gleaned from years of distorted media coverage of the
Balkans. The house of cards goes like this: Milosevic
was an "extreme nationalist" and a "genocidal killer." He
and the Serbian people were "beholden to an ideology
which called for the conquest of Lebensraum," they
were in the grip of "dehumanizing beliefs." In pursuit of
"an eliminationist project" they set out to eliminate the
Albanian population of Kosovo, in an action reminiscent
of the Holocaust. Therefore, the only remedy is the
same remedy as that applied to Nazi Germany: Serbia
must be conquered, de-Nazified and reeducated by the
West.
These assumptions are all false. Of course, innocence is
always harder to prove than guilt. The Inquisitor knows
that everyone is guilty of something. The Serbian people
cannot all be blameless for everything, as they would
probably be the first to confess. But neither are they, or
even Milosevic, guilty of everything that has gone wrong
in the Balkans for the past decade. The disintegration of
Yugoslavia is a complex event with multiple causes
which can reasonably be debated for some time by
honest scholars. Other leaders who share responsibility
for the disaster have had an interest in putting all the
blame on their Serbian adversary. Blaming Milosevic has
distracted attention from the responsibility of all the
others.
So what was really wrong with Milosevic?
What Was Really Wrong With Milosevic
What was really wrong with Milosevic is indeed closely
related to what was really wrong with the Serbian
people as Yugoslavia began to come apart at the seams
in the 1980s. What was really wrong with the Serbian
people is that they were extremely divided. They were,
of course, geographically divided between Serbs in
Serbia and Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. They were
divided between two identities, Yugoslav and Serb.
They were divided, historically, in several ways, and
most painfully between World War II Partisans and
Chetniks (respectively, the Communist and Royalist
guerrilla movements opposing Nazi occupation�and each
other). They were sociologically divided between rural
and urban inhabitants. And finally, in the wake of
Titoism, they were politically divided between left
projects to reform socialism and "centrist" projects to
revive the parties and political traditions of the
pre-Communist past.
When a nation is deeply divided, the leader who can
succeed is the one whose ambiguity can create a
semblance of unity. The ability to be "all things to all
men" is often the key to political success. What was
really wrong with Milosevic was what was also his
biggest political asset: his ambiguity. He appeared,
when he rose to prominence, won the power struggle in
the Serbian communist party, turned it into the Serbian
Socialist Party and won the first pluralist elections in
Serbia in 1990, to be able to square all the circles. He
was the political magician who could get rid of
communist "bureaucracy" but maintain a reassuring
continuity, defend both Serbian interests and
Yugoslavism, and combine reformed socialism with
economic privatization.
Because Serbs lived not only in Serbia, but also in
Croatia and Bosnia, the disintegration of Yugoslavia was
bound to cause a crisis of Serb unity and disunity. The
Yugoslav Army wanted to preserve Yugoslavia;
Milosevic, at the time Slovenia declared its
independence, was ready to let Slovenia go and settle
for less. That "less" might, perhaps, be called "Greater
Serbia," but Milosevic himself did not proclaim "Greater
Serbia" as his goal. Rather, this was the desire of a large
part of the Serb population in Croatia and Bosnia who
feared being cut off from Serbia by the secession of
those two Republics. In 1991, Serbs in Croatia were
being attacked by Croatian nationalist militia openly
proclaiming their allegiance to the tradition of the fascist
Ustashe, thus provoking both the Yugoslav National
Army, with its Partisan tradition, and Serbian fears of a
revival of the genocide of which they had been victims
in the Ustashe-run "Independent Croatian State" set up
by the Axis powers during World War II. For a short
time, in 1991 and 1992, when events moved faster than
people�s understanding, it was unclear where defending
Yugoslavia left off, and creating a hypothetical Greater
Serbia began.
The slogan "all Serbs in one State" applied to
Yugoslavia, and implied a security which many feared
losing if they became minorities in hostile Croatian or
Muslim States. Serbs in Serbia were theoretically
sympathetic to Serb brethren in Croatia and Bosnia, but
far from united as to what, if anything, to do about the
problem. Milosevic gave the impression that he might
work out a solution with Tudjman. In the crucial years
1990 to 1992, he managed to give the impression either
that he was doing everything possible to preserve
Yugoslavia, or else that he was ready to give up
Yugoslavia and salvage a Serbia comprising
Serb-inhabited lands from the wreckage. The Yugoslav
National Army was ready only to defend the former
project; for the latter, rival paramilitary groups were
formed, in utmost confusion, as some 200,000 young
men left Serbia to avoid fighting in a fratricidal civil war.
This was a nation in disarray, not a people united in an
"eliminationist project" fired up by "burning hatred."
By mid-1993, when the Yugoslav National Army formally
pulled out of Bosnia, and the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia was proclaimed comprising only Serbia and
Montenegro, but excluding the two "Serb Republics" in
the Croatian Krajina and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it was
clear that "Greater Serbia" was not on Belgrade�s
agenda, however much Serbs in the Croatian Krajina or
in Bosnia-Herzegovina might want to stay attached to
Serbia. This became even clearer in 1994, when
Belgrade went so far as to proclaim an embargo against
the Bosnian Serbs for failing to accept a western peace
plan.
During the period of Yugoslav breakup, Milosevic did
succeed in co-opting Serbian nationalism, without ever
himself espousing an extreme nationalist ideology. What
made Milosevic�s "Serbian nationalism" so unbearable to
so many critics (foreign and domestic) is not that it was
more "extreme" than any other�it definitely was
not�but that he played the nationalist card not to get
rid of socialism, but to hang onto it, or at least scraps
of it, not the least being the party apparatus, its
patronage system, and its control of key institutions
such as the police and state media.
Serbian nationalism had been such a total taboo in Tito�s
Yugoslavia that it took very minor references to "Serbian
interests" on the part of a communist party apparatchik
like Milosevic to thrill some and scandalize others.
Yugoslavs still respecting that taboo have done a lot to
denounce Milosevic to the world as an "extreme
nationalist," a term that has quite different connotations
in other countries.
Through all this, as can easily be verified by reading his
published speeches, Milosevic continued to preach a
mixture of Yugoslav multinationalism and reformist
economic optimism. (11) After Milosevic abandoned
entirely the Bosnian Serb leadership in order to reach
the Dayton settlement, the official ideology was
increasingly influenced by the avant-garde "Yugoslav
United Left (JUL)" party sponsored by his wife, Mirjana
Markovic, whose doctrine is a compendium of modern
leftist "politically correct" progressive thought and praise
of the virtues of multi-ethnic society. There is no trace
of the "dehumanizing beliefs" attributed to Milosevic and
the Serbs by Goldhagen.
Milosevic�s ambiguity enabled him to win elections, but
not to unite the Serbs, who through everything have
remained so divided that a strong and not implausible
argument for retaining the existing government has been
simply that the alternative could be civil war. Some fear
that the fall of Milosevic would profit the real extreme
nationalist, Vojislav Seselj, while the United States�
ostentatious declaration of political and financial support
to unidentified opposition leaders only confirms the
widespread impression that such a favorite of western
media as Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic is a
NATOland puppet�a role to which he unabashedly
aspires.
Much more could no doubt be said about what is wrong
with Milosevic. If using criminals for dirty tasks makes
him a criminal, then he is no doubt a criminal�as are
President Tudjman of Croatia and President Izetbegovic
of Bosnia. But then, so are a whole line of U.S.
Presidents. Milosevic is one of a world full of unsavory
leaders. But he has never preached an "eliminationalist
project" of "racial hatred" and the Serbs who voted for
him could not have thought that that was what they
were voting for. Like other voters elsewhere, whatever
they thought they were voting for, that is probably not
what they got.
Kosovo Before the Bombing
Louise Arbour�s case against Milosevic is based on the
presumption that by virtue of his position as "superior
authority" over Federal Yugoslav and Serbian forces and
agencies, he is "individually responsible" for war crimes
committed in Kosovo during the war started by NATO
bombing. Such a rigorous standard would be perfectly
acceptable if applied universally. (12) However, coming
when and as it did, Ms Arbour�s accusation could
scarcely be distinguished from the flow of wild
accusations kept up by NATO spokesmen against the
Serbs, and which later, when public attention had
turned elsewhere, turned out to be grossly exaggerated
or untrue.
It is significant that, except for the highly controversial
"Racak massacre" on January 15, (13) all the crimes
against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo charged against
Milosevic took place after the start of NATO bombing on
March 24.
Before NATO bombing, there was no "ethnic cleansing,"
much less "genocide," in Kosovo. From early 1998, when
Serbian police began their belated if brutal crackdown
on armed "Kosovo Liberation Army" (KLA) rebels, western
journalists went out on daily safari from Pristina in
armored vehicles looking for the "Serbian atrocity" story
sought by their editors. They never found anything to
beat Waco, Texas. There was some brief excitement in
August when German reporter Erich Rathfelder filed a
story of a "mass grave" with 567 bodies in Orahovac.
The story, based on a single ethnic Albanian
"eyewitness," turned out to be an invention. Two weeks
later, a real mass grave of 22 civilians found in the
village of Klecka failed to arouse media interest; the
victims were apparently Serbs and the killers the KLA.
Nor was there any interest in the three dozen civilian
corpses found in the Radonjic lake canal a fortnight
later. Even though the victims included ethnic Albanians,
they were of no interest because they had been killed
by KLA gunmen, not by Serbs. (14)
Finally, on September 29, 1998, reporters led to the
village of Gornje Obrinje found 16 bodies of ethnic
Albanian civilians, murdered several days before. It was
reported by Reuters that none of the victims, which
included a baby, had any connection to the KLA.
Western media immediately accepted Albanian
accusations that the killing had been carried out by a
"special unit" of Serbian police, ignoring Serb denials as
usual.
Whoever actually did the killing in Gornje Obrinje, it
would be preposterous to suggest that this crime was
approved by the Serbian people, for two reasons. One is
that there is not the slightest expression of approval to
be found. The other is that very many, perhaps most,
Serbian people would strongly suspect that this crime
was committed by the KLA, perhaps eliminating Albanian
civilians who failed to support them (as they were
known to have done on other occasions), precisely in
order to provoke a NATO war against Yugoslavia. Why
would Serb police murder a bunch of innocent civilians
just when U.S. leaders were looking for exactly such a
pretext to launch NATO air strikes against Serbia?
The Gornje Obrinje incident found its way quickly to the
cover of the October 12 international edition of
Newsweek, which featured a photo of the killed child
and the triple headline: "War By Massacre; Will NATO
End Kosovo�s Grief? Serbia: Europe�s Outlaw Nation."
(15) The eagerness to use this unclarified crime to call
in NATO air strikes against Serbia was evident.
Many Serbs, notably clergy of the Serbian Orthodox
Church, strongly condemned the brutality of the police
operations against the KLA. The division of opinion
within Yugoslav society on this question was largely
similar to the division of opinion one would find in any
modern society; some considered the police operations
foolishly exaggerated and almost certainly doomed to
failure, others thought the police had to do what was
necessary to restore order, and many simply worried
about the outcome of a seemingly hopeless and endless
conflict. But there was no preaching of "racial hatred" or
campaign to drive all ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo.
Milosevic and his Serbian Socialist Party consistently
stressed the virtues of "multi-national" society in Serbia.
This hardly merits comparison with Hitler, who spent his
entire career ranting against Jews and proclaiming the
racial superiority of Germans.
The Kosovo policy of Milosevic was "nationalist" insofar
as it aimed at keeping Kosovo within Serbia and
preventing the Albanian majority from driving out the
Serbian minority. There is no evidence of any plan to
drive out the Albanian majority, a project that would
never have been approved by a majority of Yugoslav
voters. Milosevic�s great fault was to pretend to know
how to solve the Kosovo problem when in fact he didn�t,
a fault now being committed by NATO.
The level of violence in Kosovo, however regrettable,
was no higher prior to NATO bombing than in many
trouble spots in the world, and according to many
observers was potentially manageable. In early 1999,
the KLA continued to step up attacks on Serb policemen
in order to provoke government retaliation and justify
NATO air strikes. On March 24, the bombing began.
Then all hell broke loose.
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