"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Two [3]

1. MANICHEAN MEDIA (continued)

Johnstone revisits the three infamous market massacres, juxtaposing the timing of each incident against supposedly crucial moments in the war. These incidents--May 27, 1992, February 5, 1994, and August 28, 1995, have been widely discussed and investigated. It is not worth the effort of engaging Johnstone's "argument" on this issue; she doesn't really have one. Any student of the Bosnian war knows that Karadzic always had an ever-changing explanation for how and why "the Muslims" had bombed their own people, and of course UN General Lewis MacKenzie was always eager to make such accusations himself. (By the way--does anyone know if General MacKenzie's pro-Serb loyalties predated his time in Bosnia? I'd be interested to know).

At any rate, this is Johnstone, and if you've been following my critique at all you can pretty much guess at the 'depth' and intellectual honesty of her analysis. Revisiting my point from yesterday's post, there are NO footnotes, no naming of names, no chronology, and most tellingly, no follow-up. I can't make this point often enough--this book was written in 2002. There is no excuse for regurgitating some of the uncertainties of wartime reporting that were inevitable at the time. Johnstone relies on then-contemporary doubts which have since been largely clarified.

The salient point here, then, is not the validity of the ridiculous claim that all three of these highly publicized bombings were orchestrated by the Bosnian Army--other observers have examined these incidents with far more balance and integrity than Johnstone is capable of. Her critique of what she considers lazy and biased media predisposition to blame everything on "the Serbs" contains no real insight per se, but her clumsy attempt at a sophisticated and nuanced analysis exposes her dishonesty, biases, and moral myopia quite succinctly.

First, she scolds the media for a failure to think critically about these massacres:

"While serious independent investigation of such incidents was beyond the capacity of journalists in war conditions, critical analysis is always possible. An unbiased analysis should take into account these considerations:"

It's always grimly amusing to read Johnstone patting herself on the back for being "unbiased." At any rate, what are these considerations? She lists five:

"1. Each of these atrocities was committed at a crucial moment for the future of the conflict: on the eve of an international decision to take punitive measures against the Bosnian Serbs. In each case the atrocity became a clinching argument for such measures. The timing could not have been worse for the Serb side, or better for the Muslim side."

Was there ever a time during the entire war when the international community wasn't contemplating taking punitive measures against the Bosnian Serbs?

"2. One element in deciding who may have committed an anonymous crime is motive. The Muslim motive would have been to trigger international action of their side. The Bosnian Serbs had nothing to gain and much to lose from those particular attacks at those particular times."

It is worth noting that the Bosnian Serb soldiers who manned the artillery pieces around Sarajevo were known for drinking continuously throughout the day.

"3. Staging attacks on one's own side for propaganda purposes is an aspect of psychological war familiar to specialists. It is called "black propaganda."

4. It may be hard to imagine that the Muslims would kill "their own people." However, in Bosnia there were several thousand mujahidin from Muslim countries, including veterans of the war in Afghanistan and Algerian islamic terrorists, for whom Sarajevo's fun-loving, often hard-drinking inhabitants were not exactly "their own people." For the sake of the cause, such foreign fighters might have few qualms about killing a number of Sarajevo civilians, few of whom were likely to be devout Muslims."

The mujahideen fighters were not known to be in Sarajevo. There were often tensions between Bosnian Muslim soldiers and the mujahideen; it is stretching your imagination to the limit to suggest that Bosnian Army soldiers--led by General Jovan Divjak, a Serb--would sit idly by while foreign fundamentalists deliberately slaughtered their fellow citizens.

Assuming, that is, that such precision was possible. Mortars are not smart bombs. The conspiracy Johnstone is alleging requires an element of precision and sophisticated ordinance that wasn't there. Finally:

"5. The Izetbegovic government, throughout the war, refused proposals to make Sarajevo a genuinely open, that is a demilitarized, city. "Beseiged Sarajevo" was a key asset in the Muslim strategy of winning foreign sympathy and support. It diverted attention from other fronts where Muslims were fighting more aggressively and with success."

Time and time again--just when I think I'm used to Johnstone's remarkable capacity to put the wagon in front of the mule, she manages to surprise me anew. Of course the Bosnian Serbs wanted to demilitarize Sarajevo--that was the first step towards partitioning the symbol of multicultural Bosnia and the capital of the republic; not to mention freeing up troops and weapons for other fronts. Why a UN member state should be expected to demilitarize its own capital--under assault from an enemy army--during a war is frankly inconceivable.

Johnstone has elsewhere quoted approvingly (and, needless to say, very selectively) from Silber and Little's Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation; it seems fitting to me to let them have the last word on this subject:

[from page 310]

"The common sense observation that if you fire around 500,000 mortar, artillery and tank rounds into a small city over twnety-two months (as the Bosnian Serbs did)--many of these randomly lobbed into civilian areas--sooner or later one will land somewhere where crowds are gathered, was swept away in the ensuing row. A walk down any side street in Sarajevo provides visible evidence that nowhere was safe from the random mortar: the city's streets are pockmarked everywhere with the distinctive splatter of the mortar impact point. The local people called these imprints "Sarajevo rose"--the color of blood. By February 1994, you could barely walk more than a few meters without passing one."

Conspiracy theorists hate to hear this, but it's true--usually, the simplist and most obvious answer is the correct one.