JUST THE FACTS.....MUST READ, MUST READ, MUST READ
3 OF 4
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 people's 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 [19].
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" [20].
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 Serbo-Croatian but also in Albanian. As of June 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. Six state-supported national dailies have a
joint circulation of 180,000, compared to around 350,000 for seven
leading opposition dailies [21].
Moreover, the judiciary in Serbia is certainly no less independent than
in Croatia or Muslim Bosnia, and almost 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 [22].
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
[23].
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
recent 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 gunmen [24].
In order to gain international support, inflammatory terms such
as "ghetto" and "apartheid" are used by the very Albanian nationalist
leaders who have created the separation between populations by leading
their community to boycott all institutions of the Serbian State in
order to create a de facto secession. Not only elections and schools,
but even the public health service has been boycotted, to the detriment
of the health of Kosovo Albanians, especially the children [25].
Human Rights Watch's blanket condemnation of a government which, like
it or not, was elected, in a country whose existence is threatened by
foreign-backed secessionist movements, contrasts sharply with the
traditional approach of the senior international human rights
organization, Amnesty International.
What can be considered the traditional Amnesty International approach
consists broadly in trying to encourage governments to enact and abide
by humanitarian legal standards. It does this by calling attention to
particular cases of injustice. It asks precise questions that can be
answered precisely. It tries to be fair. It is no doubt significant
that Amnesty International is a grassroots organization, which operates
under the mandate of its contributing members, and whose rules preclude
domination by any large donor.
In the case of Yugoslavia, the Human Rights Watch/Helsinki approach
differs fundamentally from that of Amnesty International in that it
clearly aims not at calling attention to specific abuses that might be
corrected, but at totally condemning the targeted State. By the
excessive nature of its accusations, it does not ally with reformist
forces in the targeted country so much as it undermines them. Its lack
of balance, its rejection of any effort at remaining neutral between
conflicting parties, encourages disintegrative polarization rather than
reconciliation and mutual understanding. For example, in its reports on
Kosovo, Amnesty International considers reports of abuses from all
sides and tries to weigh their credibility, which is difficult but
necessary, since the exaggeration of human rights abuses against
themselves is regularly employed by Albanian nationalists in Kosovo as
a means to win international support for their secessionist cause [26].
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 neighbors. 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 recognizes 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 US 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 international community, enforced by
NATO.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
FOOTNOTES
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 author of The Politics of Euromissiles:
Europe in America's World (Verso/Schocken, 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. [top]
1) "The Creeping Trend to Re-Balkanization", In These Times, 3-9
October 1984, p.9. [back]
2) "We Are All Serbo-Croats", In These Times, 3 May 1993, p.14. [back]
3) "Ethnically defined" because, despite the argument accepted by the
international community that it was the Republics that could invoke the
right to secede, all the political arguments surrounding recognition of
independent Slovenia and Croatia dwelt on the right of Slovenes and
Croats as such to self-determination. [back]
4) See Svetozar Stojanovic, "The Destruction of Yugoslavia", Fordham
International Law Journal, Volume 19, Number 2, December 1995, pp 341-
3. [back]
5) For an excellent and detailed account of the economic and
constitutional factors leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia, see Susan
Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, Brookings Institution, 1995. [back]
6) Recognition of the internal administrative borders between the
Republics as "inviolable" international borders was in effect a legal
trick, contrary to international law, which turned the Yugoslav army
into an "aggressor" within the boundaries its soldiers had sworn to
defend, and which transformed the Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia, who
opposed secession from their country, Yugoslavia, into secessionists.
This recognition flagrantly violated the principles of the 1975 Final
Act (known as the Helsinki Accords) of the Conference on, now
Organization for, Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), notably
the territorial integrity of States and nonintervention in internal
affairs. Truncated Yugoslavia was thereupon expelled from the OSCE in
1992, sparing its other members from having to hear Belgrade's point of
view. Indeed, the sanctions against Yugoslavia covered culture and
sports, thus eliminating for several crucial years any opportunity for
Serbian Yugoslavs to take part in international forums and events where
the one-sided view of "the Serbs" presented by their adversaries might
have been challenged. [back]
7) In Washington, the campaign on behalf of Albanian separatists in
Kosovo was spearheaded by Representative Joe DioGuardi of New York, who
after losing his Congressional seat has continued his lobbying for the
cause. An early and influential convert to the cause was Senator Robert
Dole. In Germany, the project for the political unification of all
Croatian nationalists, both communist and Ustashe, with the aim of
seceding and establishing "Greater Croatia", was followed closely and
sympathetically by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany's
CIA, which hoped to gain its own sphere of influence on the Adriatic
from the breakup of Yugoslavia. The nationalist unification, which
eventually brought former communist general Franjo Tudjman to power in
Zagreb with the support of the Ustashe diaspora, got seriously underway
after Tito's death in 1980, during the years when Bonn's current
foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, was heading the BND. See Erich Schmidt-
Eenboom, Der Schattenkrieger: Klaus Kinkel und der BND, ECON Verlag,
Düsseldorf, 1995. [back]
8) This point is developed by Wolfgang Pohrt, "Entscheidung in
Jugoslawien", in Bei Andruck Mord: Die deutsche Propaganda und der
Balkankrieg, edited by Wolfgang Schneider, Konkret, Hamburg, 1997. A
sort of climax was reached with the 8 July 1991 cover of the
influential weekly Der Spiegel, depicting Yugoslavia as a "prison of
peoples" with the title "Serb Terror". [back]
9) The slogan was immortalized in the 1919 play by Austrian playwright
Karl Kraus, "Die letzten Tage der Menschheit". [back]
10) Albanians in Albania and in Yugoslavia call themselves "Shqiptare"
but recently have objected to being called that by others. "Albanians"
is an old and accepted term. Especially when addressing international
audiences in the context of the separatist cause, Kosovo Albanians
prefer to call themselves "Kosovars", which has political implications.
Logically, the term should apply to all inhabitants of the province of
Kosovo, regardless of ethnic identity, but by appropriating it for
themselves alone, the Albanian "Kosovars" imply that Serbs and other
non-Albanians are intruders. This is similar to the Muslim party's
appropriation of the term "Bosniak", which implies that the Muslim
population of Bosnia-Herzegovina is more indigenous that the Serbs and
Croats, which makes no sense, since the Bosnian Muslims are simply
Serbs and Croats who converted to Islam after the Ottoman conquest.
[back]
11) 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. See especially:
Jacques Merlino, Les Vérités yougoslaves ne sont pas toutes bonnes à
dire, Albin Michel, Paris, 1993; and Peter Brock, "Dateline Yugoslavia:
The Partisan Press", Foreign Policy #93, Winter 1993-94. [back]
12) No one denies that many rapes occurred during the civil wars 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
accusation that Serbs were raping Muslim women as part of a deliberate
strategy. The most inflated figures, freely extrapolated 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 for 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 bandied
about were totally 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 had 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.
Despite the absence of solid and comprehensive information, a cottage
industry has since developed around the theme. See: Norma von Ragenfeld-
Feldman, "The Victimization of Women: Rape and the Reporting of Rape
in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992-1993", Dialogue, No 21, Paris, March 1997;
and Diana Johnstone, "Selective Justice in The Hague", The Nation,
September 22, 1997, pp 16-21. [back]
13) See Peter Brock, op.cit. See also, Diana Johnstone, op.cit. A
Witness to Genocide by Roy Gutman was published by Macmillan, 1993.
[back]
14) Martin Lettmayer, "Da wurde einfach geglaubt, ohne nachzufragen",
in Serbien muss sterbien: Wahrheit und Lüge im jugoslawischen
Bürgerkrieg, edited by Klaus Bittermann, Tiamat, Berlin, 1994. [back]
15) Interview with Georges Berghezan, 22 October 1997. [back]
16) Jean-Paul Picaper, Otto de Habsbourg: Mémoires d'Europe, Criterion,
Paris, 1994, pp 209-210. [back]
17) See: Barbara Delcourt & Olivier Corten, Ex-Yougoslavie: Droit
International, Politique et Idéologies, Editions Bruylant, Editions de
l'Université de Bruxelles, 1997. The authors, specialists in
international law at the Free University of Brussels, point out that
there was no basis under international law for the secession of the
Yugoslav Republics. The principle of "self-determination" was totally
inapplicable in those cases. [back]
18) The matter is complex and far from transparent, but there is some
grounds to believe that both the Western hostility to and Serbian
voters' support for Slobodan Milosevic and his ruling Serbian Socialist
Party, is the fact that his government has been slow to
privatize "social property" using the same drastic methods of "shock
treatment" applied in other former socialist countries. [back]
19) From his experience in Zagreb, British sociologist Paul Stubbs has
written critically about "Humanitarian Organizations and the Myth of
Civil Society" (ArkZin, no 55, Zagreb, January 1996): "Particularly
problematic is the assertion that NGO's are 'non-political' or
'neutral' and, hence, more progressive than governments which have
vested interests and a political 'axe to grind'. [...] This 'myth of
neutrality' might, in fact, hide the interests of a 'globalized new
professional middle class' eager to assert its hegemony in the aid and
social welfare market place. [...] The creation of a 'globalised new
professional middle class' who, regardless of their country of origin,
tend to speak a common language and share common assumptions, seems to
be a key product of the 'aid industry'. In fact, professional power is
reproduced through claims to progressive alliance with social movements
and the civil society whereas, in fact, the shift towards NGO's is part
of a new residualism in social welfare which, under the auspices of
financial institutions such a the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, challenges the idea that states can meet the welfare
needs of all. [...] A small number of Croatian psycho-socially oriented
NGOs have attained a level of funding, and a degree of influence, which
is far in excess of their level of service, number of beneficiaries,
quality of staff, and so on, and places them in marked contrast to
those providing services in the governmental sector. One Croatian NGO,
linked to a US partner organisation, has, for example, received a grant
from USAID for over 2 million US dollars to develop a training
programme in trauma work. The organisation, the bulk of whose work
[...] is undertaken by psychology and social work students, now has
prime office space in Zagreb, large numbers of computers and other
technical equipment, and is able to pay its staff more than double that
which they would obtain in the state sector. [back] |
