The Dismantling of Yugoslavia
Edward S. Herman and David Peterson
Vol. 59, No 5 of Monthly Review (online)
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In almost every conflict since WW2 in which the Americans have taken part they have been on the side of exploitation, oppression, torture, and slaughter (sometimes with their British gofers tagging along). That the average American and British citizen has no idea that this is so says much about the mass media; and in this society it also says much about the British government’s subservience to Uncle Sam. Thus I was not going to believe NATO’s account of the break-up of Yugoslavia. But neither did I try to understand the conflict. (There’s too much to read; we have to make choices.) I have not read the orthodox literature on the subject and my memories of what happened and how it was presented by the Anglo-American media are fuzzy. But I assumed that the Anglo-American version of events – that everything was the fault of nationalistic Serbs – was a lie: the American state always lies.
In Lobster 53 I reviewed John Laughland’s book on the disgraceful farce that was the trial of Slobodan Milosevic and wondered if he would eventually do a full-scale deconstruction of the NATO version of events. Herman and Peterson’s The Dismantling of Yugoslavia is such a deconstruction. Their text makes up the entire contents of an issue of Monthly Review, about 25,000 words I would guess.(1)
Herman and Peterson seem to me to show that the NATO version of these events, the received version, was almost entirely a lie. The chronology was a lie; the casualty figures in number and attribution were a lie; the major and minor narrative themes, all variations on Serbian nationalism and Serbian ethnic cleansing, were a lie. And these lies were recycled by a chorus of Western print and TV journalists. (Herman and Peterson name the names in a devastating series of quotations.) (2)
On page 21 Herman and Peterson describe an incident which encapsulates the way the media dealt with the story.
‘Cees Wiebes recounts an occasion in August 1995, when the “[UN Military Observers] in Zagreb organized a press conference on large-scale human rights violations by the Bosnian Croats during the recently completed Operation Storm (carried out with U.S. assistance). The room was full of journalists and things were just about to start when a official from the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb suddenly entered and announced that a press conference was about to begin at the embassy where information would be released on aerial photos of possible mass graves around Srebrenica. The room emptied immediately.’
When someone enlarges the Herman-Peterson thesis to book length, part of the extended version will be interviews with some of the non-American participants in the events. One such is Lord Carrington, in 1991 asked by the European Union to host a conference to find a peaceful solution to the threatened collapse of Yugoslavia. Carrington was interviewed in 1998 or 9 by Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Socialist Party of the Netherlands and the late Karel Glastra van Loon, a novelist and journalist, for a book they wrote. Here are some of the quotes from that interview which has recently been put on the Net (the emphases are mine).(3)
Carrington: ‘[the conference] fell apart when the Germans stated that the independence of Croatia and Slovenia would be recognised before the rest of the division was settled. Then it became impossible to come up with a common solution…..’
‘At the beginning of the meeting the Germans in fact stood alone. But with the exception of the Netherlands nobody really dared to stick their necks out to turn the matter around. And I think that the reason was that just before that it had been decided in Maastricht that we’d have a common European foreign and defence policy. It would of course have been extremely painful if two weeks later at the first meeting no common standpoint had been possible on the most important question. And so they took the stupid decision to let the Germans have their way. Despite the fact that I’d already warned them, if you do that, then you’ll soon all be in Bosnia. Because it was by then crystal clear that Izetbegovich, the Bosnian leader, had no interest in being left behind with Milosevic if Croatia and Slovenia were to leave the federation. And the Bosnian Serbs for their part had, via a referendum, already let it be known that they did not want an independent Bosnia. In other words, Izetbegovich knew that there would be war in Bosnia. And anyone could have known that. Just as it was certain that war would break out in Croatia. Which is just what happened precisely two days later……’
At this point the interviewers interjected:
‘So what you’re saying actually is that the European Community member states were prepared to risk war for the simple reason that Germany harboured sympathies for Croatia and because the other countries did not have the courage to contradict the Germans, for the sake of this brittle European unity…..’
To which Carrington replies:
‘Of course you have to be very careful about claiming that this war would not have occurred without this stupid decision…[which] certainly hastened the war, and removed the possibility of our coming to a peaceful solution……..’
‘…….it’s unfair to lay the blame for the catastrophe wholly on the Serbs…… Because it was Tudjman who declared his country’s independence, with its own constitution, without first making any arrangements for the 600,000 Serbs in Croatia. And these Serbs still remembered what had happened to their fathers and forefathers last time Croatia was independent, when 400,000 Serbs were killed. So they didn’t feel safe, and that is understandable. Consequently they, of course, reacted in a horrible manner. But that does not alter the fact that the Croats should never have done what they did. And that the European Community should never have supported them in that…..’
‘Because of the American syndrome of poor little Bosnia, the underdog which had to pander to the whims of big Serbia and Croatia – which is of course a very one-sided interpretation. Nobody had any sympathy for the Serbs, even if hundreds of thousands of Serbs were chased out of Krajina. That was done by the Croats, with the support of the Americans, and therefore was evidently not so awful. A double standard was applied throughout the entire Yugoslav conflict. And there was so much ignorance. The Americans in particular had to start with absolutely no idea what was really going on.’
Carrington was asked about the charges against the Serbian President brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
‘There was a lot of bad publicity on the horrors of the Serbs. War is a pretty nasty business. When at the end of it all you start making judgements about people’s behaviour you are bound to be a little selective, not even on purpose, but you are bound to do so. Even I am bound to do so. But it is ridiculous to say Milosevic is a war criminal. Where do you stop? Izbegovic is just as much a war criminal, and if Tudjman wasn’t dying he would be one also. And Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher…….’
After Iraq, discovering that NATO’s account of the break-up of Yugoslavia was a series of lies will hardly be a surprise (if you didn’t know this already). Look at Iraq, a few years later: dodgy dossiers; the fake yellowcake-in-Niger story; the faked al-Qaeda link to Saddam Hussein; the Office of Special Plans, Curveball, ‘stove-piping’ evidence – the whole ramshackle apparatus of conning the American public into supporting the war.
Why didn’t the equivalent disinformation operations a decade earlier get exposed? The answer appears to be that the Yugoslav events were the last European war before the Internet, the last war when it was possible for NATO to brief an entire English-speaking press corps without there being substantial, unofficial English-language sources of information to contradict them. No wonder the Pentagon has now put the Internet on its enemies list.(4)
Notes
- See also Edward Herman’s ‘Safari Journalism: Schindler’s Unholy Terror Versus the Sarajevo Safari’s Mythical Multi-Ethnic Project’ in Z Magazine, April 2008.
- For a challenge to an earlier statement of similar views see Martin Shaw’s essay at <www.martinshaw.org/degraded.htm>.
- To be found at <www.spectrezine.org/europe/LastWar4.htm>
- See Brent Jessop, ‘The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy “weapons system”’ at <www.globalresearch.ca/>. This discusses the Pentagon’s Information Operations Roadmap and it includes this: ‘DoD is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to “fight the net”.’ Was the cutting of undersea cables which shut down Net access to chunks of the Middle East in January and February the Pentagon testing this ‘fight’?