>Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 16:57:10 -0400
>From: Eric Fawcett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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>To: sfp lists <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, [EMAIL PROTECTED],
> [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Subject: Yugoslavia & the globalization agenda
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>
>Paul Swann sent us a very long and informative posting, which shows how
>what has been happening in Yugoslavia can be traced back to the corporate
>globalization agenda and the calculated distortions of the media.
>
>It is incumbent on us, now that Canada is deeply involved in Yugoslavia
>[a euphemism for our assistance of the USA in their stated intention to
>destroy the infrastructure that makes it a civilised society--as they used
>to say of Vietnam, "bomb them back to the Stone Age"] to try to understand
>the country, the poor victim of our "humanitarian intervention".
>
>The document is too long to post in its entirety, so here are some
>excerpts [thanks to Jan Slakov], and the entire document will be posted
>on the Science for Peace website at www.math.yorku.ca/sfp/
>***************************************************************************
>
>Date: Tue, 6 Apr 1999 10:13:54 +0000
>From: Paul Swann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> from the "kosovo Spring" report of the International Crisis Commission
>
>
>SEEING YUGOSLAVIA THROUGH A DARK GLASS:
>Politics, Media and the Ideology of Globalization
>by Diana Johnstone
>
>Diana Johnstone was the European editor of "In These Times" from 1979 to
>1990, and press officer of the Green group in the European Parliament from
>1990 to 1996. She is the author of "The Politics of Euromissiles: Europe in
>America's World" (London/New York, Versa Schucken, 1984) and is currently
>working on a book on the former Yugoslavia. This article is an expanded
>version of a talk given on May 25, 1998, at an international conference on
>media held in Athens, Greece.
>------------------------------
>
>Years of experience in and out of both mainstream and alternative media
>have made me aware of the power of the dominant ideology to impose certain
>interpretations on international news. During the Cold War, most world
>news for American consumption had to be framed as part of the Soviet-USA
>contest. Since then, a new ideological bias frames the news. The way the
>violent fragmentation of Yugoslavia has been reported is the most stunning
>example.
>
>I must admit that it took me some time to figure this out, even though I
>had a long-standing interest in and some knowledge of Yugoslavia. I spent
>time there as a student in 1953, living in a Belgrade dormitory and
>learning the language. In 1984, in a piece for "In These Times", I warned
>that extreme decentralization, conflicting economic interests between the
>richer and poorer regions, austerity policies imposed by the IMF, and the
>decline of universal ideals were threatening Yugoslavia with
>"re-Balkanization" in the wake of Tito's death and desanctification.
>"Local ethnic interests are reasserting themselves". I wrote, "The danger
>is that these rival local interests may become involved in the rivalries
>of outside powers. This is how the Balkans in the past were a powder keg
>of world war." Writing this took no special clairvoyance. The danger of
>Yugoslavia's disintegration was quite obvious to all serious observers
>well before Slobodan Milosevic arrived on the scene.
>
>As the country was torn apart in the early nineties, I was unable to keep
>up with all that was happening. In those years, my job as press officer
>for the Greens in the European Parliament left me no time to investigate
>the situation myself. Aware that there were serious flaws in the way media
>and politicians were reacting. I wrote an article warning against
>combatting "nationalism" by taking sides for one nationalism against
>another, and against judging a complex situation by analogy with totally
>different times and places. "Every nationalism stimulates others," I
>noted, "Historical analogies should be drawn with caution and never
>allowed to obscure the facts." However, there was no stopping the tendency
>to judge the Balkans, about which most people knew virtually nothing, by
>analogy with Hitler's Germany, about which people at least imagined they
>knew a lot, and which enabled analysis to be rapidly abandoned in favour
>of moral certitude and righteous indignation.
>
>However, it was only later, when I was able to devote considerable time to
>my own research, that I realized the extent of the deception, which is in
>large part self-deception.
>
>I mention a11 this to stress that I understand the immense difficulty of
>gaining a clear view of the complex situation in the Balkans. The history
>of the region and the interplay of internal political conflicts and
>external influences would be hard to grasp even without propaganda
>distortions. Nobody can be blamed for being confused. Moreover, by now,
>many people have invested so much emotion in a one-sided view of the
>situation that they are scarcely able to consider alternative
>interpretations.
>
>It is not necessarily because particular journalists or media are
>"alternative' that they are free from the dominant interpretation and the
>dominant world view. In fact, in the case of the Yugoslav tragedy, the
>irony is that "alternative" or "left' activists and writers have
>frequently taken the lead in likening the Serbs, the people who most
>wanted to continue to live in multicultural Yugoslavia, to Nazi racists,
>and in calling for military intervention on behalf of ethnically defined
>secessionist movements - all supposedly in the name of "multi-cultural
>Bosnia", a country which, unlike Yugoslavia, would have to be built from
>scratch by outsiders.
>
>The Serbs and Yugoslavia
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>Like other Christian peoples in the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs were heavily
>taxed and denied ownership of property of political power reserved for
>Muslims. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Serb farmers led a
>revolt that spread to Greece. The century-long struggle put an end to the
>Ottoman Empire.
><snip>
>
>Probably because they had been deprived of full citizens rights under the
>Ottoman Turks, and because their own society of farmers and traders was
>relatively egalitarian, Serb political leaders throughout the nineteenth
>and early twentieth centuries were extremely receptive to the progressive
>ideals of the French Revolution. While all the other liberated Balkan
>nations imported German princelings as their new kings, the Serbs promoted
>their own pig farmers into a dynasty, one of whose members translated John
>Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" into Serbian during his student days. Nowhere
>in the Balkans did Western progressive ideas exercise such attraction as
>in Serbia, no doubt due to the historic circumstances of the country's
>emergence from four hundred years of subjugation.
><snip>
>
>In 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire seized the pretext of the
>assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand to declare war and crush
>Serbia once and for all. When Austria-Hungary lost the world war it had
>thus initiated, leaders in Slovenia and Croatia chose to unite with Serbia
>in a single kingdom. This decision enabled both Slovenia and Croatia to go
>from the losing to the winning side in World War 1, thereby avoiding war
>reparations and enlarging their territory, notably on the Adriatic coast,
>and the expense of Italy. The joint Kingdom was renamed "Jugoslavia" in
>1929. The conflicts between Croats and Serbs that plagued what is called
>"the first Yugoslavia" were described by Rebecca West in her celebrated
>book, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," published in 1941.
>
>In April 1941, Serb patriots in Belgrade led a revolt against an accord
>reached between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Nazi Germany. This led to
>Nazi bombing of Belgrade, a German invasion, creation of an independent
>fascist state of Croatia (including Bosnia-Herzegovina), and attachment of
>much of the Serbian province of Kosovo to Albania, then a puppet of
>Mussolini's Italy. The Croatian Ustashe undertook a policy of genocide
>against Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies within the territory of their "Greater
>Croatia", while the Germans raised 55 divisions among the Muslims of Bosnia
>and Albania.
><snip>
>
>After World War II, the new Communist Yugoslavia tried to build
>"brotherhood and unity" on the myth that all the peoples had contributed
>equally to liberation from fascism. Mihailovic, leader of the royalist
>Serbian resistance (the first guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in
>Europe), was executed, and school children in post-war Yugoslavia learned
>more about the "fascist" nature of his Serbian nationalist Chetniks than
>they did about Albanian and Bosnian Muslims who had volunteered for the
>SS, or even about the killing of Serbs in the Jasenovac death camp run by
>Ustashe in Western Bosnia.
>
>After the 1948 break with Moscow, the Yugoslav communist leadership
>emphasized its difference from the Soviet bloc by adopting a policy of
>"self-management," supposed to lead by fairly rapid stages to the
>"withering away of the State." Tito repeatedly revised the Constitution
>to strengthen local authorities, while retaining final decision-making
>power for himself. When he died in 1980, he thus left behind a hopelessly
>complicated system that could not work without his arbitration. Serbia in
>particular was unable to enact vitally necessary reforms because its
>territory had been divided up, with two "autonomous provinces," Vojvodina
>and Kosovo, able to veto measures taken by Serbia, while Serbia could not
>intervene in their affairs.
>
>In the 1980's, the rise in interest rates and unfavourable world trade
>conditions dramatically increased the foreign debt that Yugoslavia, like
>many "third world" countries, had been encouraged to run up thanks to its
>standing in the West as a socialist country not belonging to the Soviet
>bloc. The IMF arrived with its familiar austerity measures, which could
>only be taken by a central government. The leaders of the richer republics
>-Slovenia and Croatia - did not want to pay for the poorer ones. Moreover,
>in all former socialist countries, the big political question is
>privatization of State and Social property, and local communist leaders in
>Slovenia and Croatia could expect to get a greater share for themselves
>within the context of division of Yugoslavia into separate little states.
><snip>
>
>Sure of the active sympathy of Germany, Austria, and the Vatican, leaders
>in Slovenia and Croatia, prepared the fait accompli of unilateral,
>un-negotiated secession, proclaimed in 1991. Such secession was illegal,
>under Yugoslav and international law, and was certain to precipitate civil
>war. The key role of German (and Vatican) support was to provide rapid
>international recognition of the new independent republics, in order to
>transform Yugoslavia into an "aggressor on its own territory".
>
>Political Motives
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>The political motives that launched the anti-Serb propaganda campaign are
>obvious enough. Claiming that it was impossible to stay in Yugoslavia
>because the Serbs were so oppressive was the pretext for the nationalist
>leaders in Slovenia and Croatia to set up their own little statelets which,
>thanks to early and strong German support, could "jump the queue" and get
>into the richmen's European club ahead of the rest of Yugoslavia.
>
>The terrible paradox is that very many people, in the sincere desire to
>oppose racism and aggression, have in fact contributed to demonizing an
>entire people, the Serbs, thereby legitimizing both ethnic separatism and
>the new role of NATO as occupying power in the Balkans on behalf of a
>theoretical "international community."
><snip>
>
>The current campaign to demonize the Serbs began in July 1991 with a
>virulent barrage of articles in the German media, led by the influential
>conservative newspaper, the "Frankfurter Allgerneine Zeitung" (FAZ). In
>almost daily columns, FAZ editor Johann Georg Reismuller justified the
>freshly, and illegally, declared "independence" of Slovenia and Croatia by
>describing "Yugo-Serbs" as essentially Oriental "militarist Bolsheviks" who
>have "no place in the European Community". Nineteen months after German
>reunification, and for the first time since Hitler's defeat in 1945, German
>media resounded with condemnation of an entire ethnic group reminiscent of
>the pre-war propaganda against the Jews".
><snip>
>
>The Yugoslav story was complicated; anti-Serb stories had the advantage of
>being simple and available, and they provided an easy-to-use moral compass
>by designating the bad guys.
><snip>
>
>Down with the State
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>This ideology is the expression in moralistic terms of the dominant project
>for reshaping the world since the United States emerged as sole superpower
>after the defeat of communism and collapse of the Soviet Union. United
>States foreign policy for over a century has been dictated by a single
>over-riding concern: to open world markets to American capital and American
>enterprise. Today this project is triumphant as "economic globalization".
>Throughout the world, government policies are judged, approved or condemned
>decisively not by their populations but by "the markets" meaning the
>financial markets. Foreign investors, not domestic voters, decide policy.
>
>The International Monetary Fund and other such agencies are there to help
>governments adjust their policies and their societies to market imperatives.
>The shift of decision-making power away from elected governments, which is
>an essential aspect of this particular "economic globalization," is being
>accompanied by an ideological assault on the nation state as a political
>community exercising sovereignty over a defined territory. For all its
>shortcomings, the nation-state is still the political level most apt to
>protect citizens' welfare and the environment from the destructive
>expansion of global markets. Dismissing the nation-state as an anachronism,
>or condemning it as a mere expression of "nationalist" exclusivism,
>overlooks and undermines its long-standing legitimacy as the focal point of
>democratic development, in which citizens can organize to define and defend
>their interests.
>
>The irony is that many well-intentioned idealists are unwittingly helping
>to advance this project by eagerly promoting its moralistic cover a
>theoretical global democracy that should replace attempts to strengthen
>democracy at the supposedly obsolete nation-state level.
>
>Within the United States, the link between anti-nation-state ideology and
>economic globalization is blurred by the double standard of U.S. leaders
>who do not hesitate to invoke the supremacy of U.S. "national interest"
>over the very international institutions they promote in order to advance
>economic globalization. This makes it seem that such international
>institutions are a serious obstacle to U.S. global power rather than its
>expression. However, the United States has the overall military and
>political power to design and control key international institutions (e.g.,
>the IMF, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal
>Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia), as well as to undermine those it dislikes
>(UNESCO when it was attempting to promote liberation of media from
>essentially American control) or to flout international law with impunity
>(notably in its Central American "backyard"). Given the present
>relationship of forces, weakening less powerful nation-states cannot
>strengthen international democracy, but simply tighten the grip of
>transnational capital and the criminal networks that flourish in an
>environment of lawless acquisition.
>
>There is no real contradiction between asserting the primacy of U.S.
>interests and blasting the nation-state barriers that might allow some
>organized defense of the interests of other peoples. But impressed by the
>apparent contradiction, some American liberals are comforted in their
>belief that nationalism is the number one enemy of mankind, whereas
>anything that goes against it is progressive.
><snip>
>
>The New World Order
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>In fact, the break-up of Yugoslavia has served to discredit and further
>weaken the United Nations, while providing a new role for an expending
>NATO. Rather than strengthening international order, it has helped shift
>the balance of power within the international order toward the dominant
>nation-states, the United States and Germany. If somebody had announced in
>1989 that, now the Berlin Wall has come down, Germany can unite and send
>military forces back into Yugoslavia - and what is more in order to
>enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to those it imposed
>when it occupied the country in 1941 - well, quite a number of people
>might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and many
>of the very people might who have been expected to object most strongly to
>what amounts to the most significant act of historical revisionism since
>World War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse.
>
>Perhaps dazed by the end of the Cold War, much of what remains of the left
>in the early nineties abandoned its critical scrutiny of the geostrategic
>Realpolitik underlying great power policies in general and U.S. policy in
>particular and seemed to believe that the world henceforth was determined
>by purely moral considerations.
>
>This has much to do with the privatization of "the left" in the past
>twenty years or so. The United States has led the way in this trend. Mass
>movements aimed at overall political action have declined, while
>single-issue movements have managed to continue. The single-issue
>movements in turn engender nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) which,
>because of the requirements of fund-raising, need to adapt their causes to
>the mood of the times, in other words, to the dominant ideology to the
>media. Massive fund-raising is easiest for victims, using appeals to
>sentiment rather than to reason. Greenpeace has found that it can raise
>money more easily for baby seals than for combatting the development of
>nuclear weapons. This fact of life steers NGO activity in certain
>directions, away from political analysis toward sentiment. On another
>level, the NGOs offer idealistic internationalists a rare opportunity to
>intervene all around the world in matters of human rights and human
>welfare.
>
>And herein lies a new danger. Just as the "civilizing mission" of bringing
>Christianity to the heathen provided a justifying pretext for imperialist
>conquest of Asia and Africa in the past, today the protection of "human
>rights" may be the cloak for a new type of imperialist military
>intervention worldwide.
>
>Certainly, human rights are an essential concern of the left. Moreover,
>many individuals committed to worthy causes have turned to NGOs as the
>only available alternative to the decline of mass movements - a decline
>over which they have no control. Even a small NGO addressing a problem is
>no doubt better than nothing at all. The point is that great vigilance is
>needed, in this as in all other endeavours, to avoid letting good
>intentions be manipulated to serve quite contrary purposes.
>
>In a world now dedicated to brutal economic rivalry, where the rich get
>richer and the poor get poorer, human rights abuses can only increase.
>>From this vast array of mans inhumanity to man, Western media and
>governments are unquestionably more concerned about human rights abuses
>that obstruct the penetration of transnational capitalism, to which they
>are organically, linked, than about, say, the rights of Russian miners who
>have not been paid for a year. Media and government selectivity not only
>encourages humanitarian NGOs to follow their lead in focusing on certain
>countries and certain types of abuses, the caseby-case approach also
>distracts from active criticism of global economic structures that favour
>the basic human rights abuse of a world split between staggering wealth
>and dire poverty.
>
>Cuba is not the only country whose "human rights" may be the object of
>extraordinary concern by governments trying to replace local rulers with
>more compliant defenders of trannational interests. Such a motivation can
>by no means be ruled out in the case of the campaign against Serbia. In
>such situations, humanitarian NGOs risk being cast in the role of the
>missionaries of the past - sincere, devoted people who need to be
>"protected", this time by NATO military forces. The Somali expedition
>provided a rough rehearsal (truly scandalous if examined closely) for this
>scenario. On a much larger scale, first Bosnia, then Kosovo, provide a
>vast experimental terrain for cooperation between NGOs and NATO.
>
>There is urgent need to take care to preserve genuine and legitimate
>efforts on behalf of human rights from manipulation in the service of other
>political ends. This is indeed a delicate challenge.
>
>NGOs and NATO, hand-in-hand
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>In former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Western NGOs
>have found a justifying role for themselves alongside NATO. They gain
>funding and prestige from the situation. Local employees of Western NGOs
>gain political and financial advantages over other local people, and
>"democracy" is not the peoples choice but whatever meets with approval of
>outside donors. This breeds arrogance. among the outside benefactors, and
>cynicism among local people, who have the choice between opposing the
>outsiders or seeking to manipulate them. It is an unhealthy situation, and
>some of the most self-critical are aware of the dangers.
>
>Perhaps the most effectively arrogant NGO in regard to former Yugoslavia
>is the Vienna office of Human Rights Watch/Helsinki. On September 18,
>1997, that organization issued a long statement announcing in advance that
>the Serbian elections to be held three days later 'Will be neither free
>nor fair." This astonishing intervention was followed by a long list of
>measures that Serbia and Yugoslavia must carry- out or else", and that the
>international community must take to discipline Serbia and Yugoslavia.
>These demands indicated an extremely broad interpretation of obligatory
>standards of "human rights" as applied to Serbia, although not, obviously,
>to everybody else, since they included new media laws drafted "in full
>consultation with the independent media in Yugoslavia" as well as
>permission meanwhile to all "unlicensed but currently operating radio and
>television stations to broadcast without interference."
>
>Human Rights Watch/Helsinki concluded by calling on the Organization for
>Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to "deny Yugoslavia readmission
>to the OSCE until there are concrete improvements in the country's human
>rights record, including respect for freedom of the press, independence of
>the judiciary, and minority rights, as well as cooperation with the
>International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia".
>
>As for the demand to "respect freedom of the press," one may wonder what
>measures would satisfy HRW, in light of the fact that press freedom
>already exists in Serbia to an extent well beyond that in many other
>countries not being served with such an ultimatum. There exist in Serbia
>quite a range of media devoted to attacking the government, not only in
>SerboCroatian, but also in Albanian. As of one 1998, there were 2,319
>print publications and 101 radio and television stations in Yugoslavia,
>over twice the number that existed in 1992. Belgrade alone has 14 daily
>newspapers. The state-supported national dailies have a joint circulation
>of 180,000 compared to around 350,000 for seven leading opposition
>dailies."
>
>Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less independent than in
>Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and most certainly much more so. As for "minority
>rights," it would be hard to find a country anywhere in the world where
>they are better protected in both theory and practice than in Yugoslavia.
>
>For those who remember history the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki ultimatum
>instantly brings to mind the ultimatum issued by Vienna to Belgrade after
>the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 as a pretext for the Austrian invasion
>which touched off World War I. The Serbian government gave in to all but
>one of the Habsburg demands, but was invaded anyway.
>
>The hostility of this new Vienna power, the International Helsinki
>Federation for Human Rights, toward Serbia, is evident in all its
>statements, and in those of its executive director Aaron Rhodes. In a
>March 18, 1998, column for the International Herald Tribune, he wrote that
>Albanians in Kosovo "have lived for years under conditions similar to
>those suffered by Jews in Nazi-controlled parts of Europe just before
>World War II. They have been ghettoized. They are not free but politically
>disenfranchised and deprived of basic civil liberties."
>
>The comparison could hardly be more incendiary, but the specific facts to
>back it up are absent. They are necessarily absent, since the accusation
>is totally false. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have never been "politically
>disenfranchised," and even Western diplomats have at times urged them to
>use their right to vote in order to deprive Milosevic of his electoral
>majority. But nationalist leaders have called for a boycott of Serbian
>elections since 1981 - well before Milosevic came on the scene -and ethnic
>Albanians who dare take part in legal political life are subject to
>intimidation and even murder by nationalist Albanian gunmenio.
><snip>
>
>Human Rights Watch, in contrast, by uncritically endorsing the most
>extreme anti-Serb reports and ignoring Serbian sources, helps confirm
>ethnic Albanians in their worst fantasies, while encouraging them to
>demand international intervention on their behalf rather than seek
>compromise and reconciliation with their Serbian neighbours. HRW therefore
>contributes, deliberately or inadvertently, to a deepening cycle of
>violence that eventually may justify, or require, outside intervention.
>
>This is an approach which like its partner, economic globalization, breaks
>down the defenses and authority of weaker States. It does not help to
>enforce democratic institutions at the national level. The only democracy
>it reorganizes is that of the "international community", which is summoned
>to act according to the recommendations of Human Rights Watch. This
>"international community", the IC, is in reality no democracy. Its
>decisions are formally taken at NATO meetings. The IC is not even a
>"community"; the initials could more accurately stand for "imperialist
>condominium," a joint exercise of domination by the former imperialist
>powers, torn apart and weakened by two World Wars, now brought together
>under U.S. domination with NATO as their military arm. Certainly there are
>frictions between the members of this condominium, but so long as their
>rivalries can be played out within the IC, the price will be paid by
>smaller and weaker countries.
>
>Media attention to conflicts in Yugoslavia is sporadic, dictated by Great
>Power interests, lobbies, and the institutional ambitions of
>"non-governmental organizations" - often linked to powerful governments
>whose competition with each other for financial support provides
>motivation for exaggerating the abuses they specialize in denouncing.
>
>Yugoslavia, a country once known for its independent approach to socialism
>and international relations, economically and politically by far the most
>liberal country in Eastern Central Europe, has already been torn apart by
>Western support to secessionist movements: What is left is being further
>reduced to an ungovernable chaos by a continuation of the same process.
>The emerging result is not a charming bouquet of independent little ethnic
>democracies, but rather a new type of joint colonial rule by the IC
>enforced by NATO. ("CovertAction Quarterly', Wachington D.C., Fall 1998.)
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
><snip of most notes>
>5 The role of the Washington public relations firm, Ruder Finn, is by now
>well-known, but seems to have raised few doubts as to the accuracy of the
>anti-Serb propaganda it successfully diffused.
>
>6 No one denies that many rapes occurred during the civil war in Croatia
>and Bosnia-Herzegovina, or that rape is a serious violation of human
>rights. So is war, for that matter. From the start, however, inquiry into
>rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina focused exclusively on accusations that Serbs
>were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate strategy. The most
>inflated figures, freely extricated by multiplying the number of known
>cases by large factors, were readily accepted by the media and
>international organizations. No interest was shown in detailed and
>documented reports of rapes of Serbian women by Muslims or Croats.
>
>The late Nora Beloff, former chief political correspondent of the "London
>Observer", described her own search in verification of the rape charges in
>a letter to"The Daily Telegraph" (January 19, 1993). The British Foreign
>Office conceded that the rape figures being handled about were really
>uncorroborated and referred her to the Danish government, then chairing
>the European Union. Copenhagen agreed that the reports were
>unsubstantiated, but kept repeating them. Both said that the EU has taken
>up the "rape atrocity" issue at Its December 1992 Edinburgh Summit
>exclusively on the basis of a German initiative. In turn, Fran Wild, in
>charge of the Bosnian Desk in the German Foreign Ministry, told Ms. Beloff
>that the material on Serb rapes came partly from the Izetbegovic
>government and partly from the Catholic charity Caritas in Croatia. No
>effort had been made to seek corroboration from more impartial sources.
><snip>
>
>9 Serbia is constitutionally defined as the nation of all its citizens,
>and not "of the Serbs" (in contrast to constitutional provisions of
>Croatia and Macedonia, for instance). In addition, the 1992 Constitution
>of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) as well as
>the Serbian Constitution guarantee extensive rights to national
>minorities, notably the right to education in their own mother tongue, the
>right to information media in their own language, and the right to use
>their own language in proceedings before a tribunal of other authority.
>These rights are not merely formal, but are effectively respected as is
>shown by, for instance, the satisfaction of the 400,000-strong Hungarian
>minority and the large number of newspapers published by national
>minorities in Albanian, Hungarian and other languages. Romani (Gypsies)
>are by all accounts better treated in Yugoslavia than elsewhere in the
>Balkans. Serbia has a large Muslim population of varied nationalities,
>including refugees from Bosnia and a native Serb population of converts to
>Islam in Southeastern Kosovo, known as Goranci, whose religious rights are
>fully respected, and who have no desire to leave Serbia.
><snip>
>
>11 In March 1990, during a regular official vaccination program, rumours
>were spread that Serb health workers had poisoned over 7,000 Albanian
>children by injecting them with nerve gas. There was never any proof of
>this, as no child was ever shown to suffer from anything more serious than
>mass hysteria. This was the signal for a boycott of the Serbian public
>health system. Ethnic Albanian doctors and other health workers left the
>official institutions to set up a parallel system, so vastly inferior that
>preventable childhood diseases reached epidemic proportions. In September
>1996, WHO and UNICEF undertook to assist the main Kosovar parallel health
>system, named "Mother Theresa" after the world's most famous ethnic
>Albanian, a native of Macedonia, in vaccinating 300,000 children against
>polio. The worldwide publicity campaign around this large-scale
>immunization program failed to point out that the same service has long
>been available to those children from the official health service of
>Serbia, systematically boycotted by Albanian parents. Currently, the
>parallel Kosovar system employs 239 general practitioners and 140
>specialists, compared to around 2,000 physicians employed by the Serbian
>public health system there. Serbs point out that many ethnic Albanians are
>sensible enough to turn to the government health system when they are
>seriously ill. According to official figures, 64% of the official Serb
>system health workers and 80% of the patients in Kosovo are ethnic Albanians.
>
>It is characteristic of the current age of privatization that the
>"international community" is ready to ignore a functional government
>service and even contribute to a politically inspired effort to bypass and
>ultimately destroy it. But then, Kosovo-Albanian separatists aware of the
>taste of the times, like to speak of Kosovo itself as a "non-governmental
>organization".
>
