Showing posts with label Milosevic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Milosevic. Show all posts

Monday, April 04, 2011

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [3]

Chapter 4

This is a perfunctory synopsis of the War in Croatia.

Chatper 5

This is a perfunctory account of the outbreak of war in Bosnia; there is nothing surprising or new for any reader with even a cursory knowledge of events; except for the author's unsubstantiated claim that "the West had given up on the idea of retaining Milosevic as their man due to his refusal to enact further [economic] reform." There are no notes, citations, or evidence presented; she merely states that this is "[m]y own analysis" and leaves it at that. Her only "evidence" is that the West supported independence for Bosnia without being willing to take further measures to allow the country to defend itself. Of such reverse-reasoning are conspiracy theories made.

One other odd choice in this chapter--the author quotes Danielle Sremac, points out that her arguments amount to little more than a defense of the actions of the Bosnian Serb leadership--and then states that "Sremac's defense of the Bosnian Serbs is something to which I will give voice throughout the account of the war"! Why she feels the need to balance her account with a contrary and dubious interpretation is not explained.

Chapter 6

An account of the early phase of the war; the seige of Sarajevo and how it served to distract international attention from the massive campaign of genocide throughout the country; the public relations/propogranda campaign by the Bosnian Serb leadership and their allies/enablers (Sremac and Lewis MacKenzie here) to cloud the issue of guilt and responsibility by claiming that the Bosnian government was responsible for attacking its own people; concentration camps throughout the country; etc.

Haskin continues to quote Sremac; mostly she rebuts Sremac's assertions but sometimes concedes a point. For example, she notes that there were Croat- and Muslim-operated concentration camps, and that the Bosnian government forces sometimes committed atrocities; yet she does so in context of accepting that Sremac's "report" that the numbers of non-Serbs held was wildly inflated and the numbers of Serbs held highly underreported. Either those accounts were accurate (as accurate as they could be during wartime), or they were not; instead, Haskin gives Sremac's contrary account plenty of room (she quotes Sremac at length), and then without considering the specifics of her claims, goes on to state that there were reports of atrocities committed by Croat and Muslim forces, so therefore "this does not mean that Sremac's report is invalid." That's quite a leap, and completely ignores the context in which Sremac's "report" was given. Haskin, in short, completely avoids making critical judgements about the relative reliability and honesty of conflicting sources; a serious flaw in a book which relies on secondary sources.

Oddly, despite her decision to include the revisionist accounts by Sremac and to give space to Lewis MacKenzie's statements (even though she acknowledges that he was later a secretly paid spokesman for the Serb nationalist cause), she does not bring up the Living Marxism smear against Ed Vulliamy's reporting on the concentration camps. Given her odd editorial choice to give Sremac equal time, this came as something of a relief.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

"Why Yugoslavia Still Matters" by John Feffer

Big thanks to Roger Lippman for bringing this article from the Foreign Policy in Focus website.

Also, see the debate between Feffer and Bosnian revision Edward Hermann here.

Monday, March 02, 2009

"The Destruction of Yugoslavia" by Branka Magas--Part Four

Part Four: Systemic Collapse (1990-91)


The nine articles collected in this section detail the final collapse of socialist, Federal Yugoslavia. The demise of the League of Communists created a power vacuum at the federal center. Milosevic ruthlessly capitalized on the opportunity to assert his power as the leader of a Serb republic where the political center was moving to the Right and extreme nationalism was being openly promoted by the ruling "Socialist" party--the same "Socialist" party which was pushing for greater privatization of the economy.

Magas does a marvelous job of conveying a sense of how unsettled and anxious the country was by this point. The specter of the Army forming a new political party while nobody quite knew who the commander of the nations' military was exactly, for example, serves as a powerful reminder that Yugoslavia was vulnerable because nobody was at the helm. And make no mistake about it--this was the work of Slobodan Milosevic.

This entire section should be required reading for Michael Parenti and others who claim Yugoslavia was destroyed from without by Western intersts, or Diana Johnstone and all those who claim that it was the Milosevic regime which sincerely tried to keep Yugoslavia together. Their disingenuous, convoluted arguments differ in some respects (although intellectual coherence is hardly a strength of Bosnian Revisionism), but they like all baseless conspiracy theories they rely on a carefully studied, deliberate ignorance of context and foundational knowledge.

The revisionists serve two purposes: they provide rhetorical cover for certain reactionary and far-Right factions to assert their agenda under various, more palatable pretexts; they prop up this fiction by appealing to the other end of the ideological spectrum, pitching their poison both to the receptive ears and willing minds of the authoritarian (often Stalinist) Left, and among well-meaning but ill-educated leftists, progressives, liberals, and internationalist-leaning moderates and conservatives.

Johnstone's pretenses regarding the Constitutional and legal issues regarding the breakup of Yugoslavia and the role the Milosevic regime played in it would not bear the scrutiny of any individual familiar with this material. Magas does what Johnstone and other advocates of Greater Serb centralism only claim to do--take the constitution and the governing institutions of socialist Yugoslavia seriously.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [33]

CHAPTER TWENTY: THE AGGRESSION CONTINUES



It's a dour world Michael Parenti lives in. The Western campaign against innocent Yugoslavia continued (this book was published in 2000) as Milosevic held firm and Serbians refused to completely give up on socialism and state sovereignty. Yes, Parenti holds firm to this delusion to the bitter end.

This campaign of aggression and intimidation took many forms, he informs the hypothetically outraged reader. Massive financial and material support for pro-Western political parties--which he uniformly regards as Western stooges whether the locale is Serbia or Bulgaria or Ukraine or any other formally Communist country. Economic sanctions and support for Montenegrin secession--no hint that just possibly the Montenegrin people might have decided they wanted out of the failing, war-obsessed kleptocracy that Milosevic had made of his nation. Parenti throws up the alarm flags by noting that General Wesley Clark had made plans for possible military action should Montenegro breakaway against Serbian military resistance--as if the US military doesn't routinely make plans for all sorts of possible and even merely hypothetical scenarios.

Instability in Albanian-majority areas in Serbia was certainly not good news for anybody, but why Parenti thinks this should be a sign of Western plotting is far from clear. Hypothetical discussions about autonomy for Vojvodina, or even annexation by Hungary, are also thrown into the mix without any context or substantiation. I'm sure that certain elements in Hungary and among Serbia's Hungarian minority said and wrote all sorts of things during this period. What of it? Parenti has nothing further to add.

And then comes the most stunning accusation--assassination. Parenti actually suggests that the West was behind the spate of political murders in Serbia at this time, his only evidence consisting of the fact that many of the victims were members of the Socialist Party or otherwise connected to Milosevic--he being such a paragon of loyalty and integrity. I wonder if Parenti thinks George Tenet had Arkan offed?

And so this chapter sputters along, throwing disparagement at Serbia's democratic opposition and waxing nostalgic for the good old days of Soviet-backed state socialist dictatorships throughout Eastern Europe. It is a pathetically anti-climatic way to end this book, but then Parenti's vision is far too cramped and intellectually constricted to reach any rhetorical or ideological heights. All he can do is take empty, baseless potshots at an imagined capitalist edifice of his own imagining. His descent into ultra-nationalist apology is complete; his surrender to the dark shadows of conspiracy, ethnic collectivism, and paranoia is total. He is a parody of a genuine radical who has written a groveling paean to 21st-Century tribalism and anti-modernist racialism disguised as progressive social criticism. What a wasted labor this book is. What a disgrace.

Monday, May 28, 2007

Celebrated Austrian Writer and Milosevic Supporter Peter Handke Held to Account

This is an interesting article from The American Scholar magazine about Peter Handke, the critically acclaimed Austrian writer Peter Handke, who supported Milosevic and his regime for years.

The Apologist by Michael McDonald

The article discusses his possible motivations within the context of his literary and cultural beliefs. The subtitle of the article summarizes the main plight--should the cultural world hold artists and writers responsible for supporting heinous causes and espousing loathsome ideas?

Sunday, January 14, 2007

"Fools' Crusade" Chapter Three [20]

CHAPTER THREE: COMPARATIVE NATIONALISMS



SUCCESS STORIES

One notably theme running throughout Johnstone's book has been the viciously condescending snideness applied to the victims of the war; Slobodan Milosevic receives far more empathy than Muslim rape victims. This second section of Part 2 "Slovenia: the End of Solidarity" is essentially four pages of pointless and irrelevant innuendo disguised as an expose. The theme of this section appears to be "Let me throw in any stray fact which might shed a bad light on the Slovenes."

Her first point is that Slovenian nationalism is what she calls "bureaucratic nationalism," which means that it was driven by an entrenched elite. The entire first paragraph points out that Slovenia is a small country, so independence allowed the republic's political, economic, and cultural elites to suddenly become big fish in the new big pond of independent Slovenia. Once again, the sophisticated and nuanced Ms. Johnstone is shocked and appalled to discover that sometimes, political and business leaders do not act entirely out of altruism and idealism.

The second paragraph claims that Slovenia's transition to democracy (which she puts in quotes--no explanation why) "had much in common with that of Serbia." The parallels she draws are legitimate if, considering that we are considering two republics in the same country, rather unsurprising--politicians were usually former Communist Party leaders, she notes, although why this should be surprising in a formally one-party dictatorship is not explained. She does attempt to slip in an aside about "nationalist dissidents who had been jailed under Tito" who joined the ruling coalitions; in Slovenia's case she names the previously mentioned Janez Jansa; in Serbia's--Vojislav Seselj. Nice equivalence there. Of all the things I can think of to call Seselj, "dissident" is pretty low on the list. Technically true or not, it is clear that is yet another example of her ceaseless efforts to create false equivalences.

Another insinuation she makes--both Milan Kucan and Janez Drnovsek were former Communists, yet nobody in the West complained about this like they did with Milosevic. The point, of course, is to imply that the real problem with Milosevic was that he was a socialist; a common Bosnian revisionist theme.

The next trivia she throws out is the case of Andrej Bajuk, the Argentine expat brought in to be part of the new Slovene government. After noting his right-wing credentials (ties to the Junta in Argentina; ties to conservative Catholicism), she briskly notes that the government he was to join after gaining citizenship was voted out of office, and he was gone. No matter--she gets to smear the Slovenes as fascists by proxy. Or so she seems to believe.

The final two pages concern Slovenia's involvement--led by Jansa, the former anti-militarist turned defense minister--in arms smuggling and covert arms sales to the Croats and Bosnians. The Slovenes apparently made out like bandits. It's not the most inspiring reading; but one wishes Johnstone could summon a fraction of the outrage she displays at Slovenia profiting from violating the UN arms embargo against all of the former Yugoslavia (which, naturally, benefited the well-armed Serbs at the expense of the ill-prepared Bosnian government; and which was applied to all the former republics even after the breakup of Yugoslavia, to which it was originally applied) when she discusses moral outrages like Srebrenica. I have remarked on this many times before, but it bears repeating--for all her pretensions to sophistication and hard-headed thinking, Johnstone consistently displays a naivety about international relations which makes her very hard to take seriously.

As for the snideness I mentioned above, here is the closing paragraph of this section:

"Slovenia, reported the New York Times in March 2000, is described by experts as "a jewel," "a chocolate box," or "Eastern Europe's best-kept secret." Indeed, Slovenia has its secrets, and if they are the best kept, it may be that interest is widespread in keeping them."

Thus Johnstone takes a parting shot at a sinister conspiracy which exists only in her own mind. The hyperbole is laughable.