...found this interesting article suitable for the thread...LONG READ
any comments?
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part 1of3
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
...part 2 Message 14929683 |
