Bosnian-American Friendship Association

It's my pleasure to pass along this Facebook page for a fairly new and very worthwhile venture:

Bosnian-American Friendship Association

I encourage anyone reading this blog to check them out.

"Bosnia and Beyond" by Jeanne Haskin [1]

I realize that this blog has been semi-dormant for the past several weeks; I will make an effort to get things moving again. Beginning with a review of Bosnia and Beyond: The "Quiet" Revolution that Wouldn't Go Quietly by Jeanne M. Haskin, a book which seems to straddle between different competing Western narratives about the Bosnian war. After paging through it, I've decided simply to read it a chapter at a time and report what I find as I go. I am doing this after sitting on a copy for a couple of weeks, unable to decide whether or not the book warranted a full review. Ultimately, I decided that it's been so long since I've blogged at all, I needed to just jump head first into the book and hope the review ends up being worth the trouble, regardless of whether or not the book is worth the trouble of reviewing. So I'm blogging without a net, so to speak.


I checked it out without knowing anything about it; I do not promise anything other than a straightforward accounting of the text as I go through it on a chapter-by-chapter basis.

Introduction

This book consists of many short chapters divided into very short sections. It seems that many of the section titles are quite self-explanatory, which makes it pretty easy for the curious reader to quicly ascertain where the author is coming from. Although the confusion doesn't quite end there, as we shall see.

The breakup of the country is placed at the feet of the West, who had imposed draconian financial restructuring terms on the country at the end of the Cold War; this argument is a familiar refrain of left-wing revisionists; Haskin even goes as far as to say that the rise of nationalist political factions (and the dearth of moderate non-nationalist political) leadership was a direct result of the "economic and political climate that the West had contrived to achieve"; a claim which goes even further than such revisionists as Diana Johnstone, who at least acknowledges the indigenous origins of the post-Tito political culture.

Yet at the same time, Haskin bluntly states that there was a genocide against the Muslims of Bosnia, carried out by the Serb leadership, and that the international community essentially tolerated it because with the exception of the United States, they either supported the incorporation of Bosnia into a Serb-dominated rump Yugoslavia, they simply preferred the Serb leadership, or they were anti-Muslim. You would never hear any of this from Diana Johnstone or any of her fellow revisionists, to put it mildly.

The book is in two parts--Part One argues that the international community established the terms by which the country was pulled apart, and then managed the destruction of the country in such a way that the Muslims of Bosnia were used as sacrificial lambs in order to create a postwar order in accordance with the new international consensus. Part Two focuses on what might have been done to prevent or stop the genocide in Bosnia, and what lessons we can learn to stop future genocide.

This could be interesting.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [17]

Chapter 28: "Let Us Be Pragmatic" Cleaning up the Maps July-August 1995

In order for the United States and its allies to achieve the peace deal they wanted and which they believed their clients could live with, the map of Bosnia needed to be "cleaned up" quite a bit. The three eastern enclaves of Srebrenica, Zepa, and Gorazde were an obstacle to this end, as was the fact that the Bosnian Serb regime still controlled much of Bosnia, and their allies in the Croatian Krajina still controlled a third of Croatia. Event during the summer of 1995 would change all that in grim fashion.

While this chapter is quite lengthy, I will not give a detailed synopsis of it because frankly if you don't know the essential outlines of what happened at Srebrenica in July of 1995, you most likely either aren't reading this blog or you have no interest in truly understanding what my mission in maintaining it is. As you might guess from the title of this chapter, the authors focus mainly on the sobering reality that the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa, if not exactly "planned" by the Bosnian government and the United States, were certainly events which proved beneficial to larger strategic goals.

The authors also understand that Washington and the international community were equally cynical in their dealings with Tudjman when Croatian forces unleashed "Operation Storm" which was clearly a creature of NATO planning and covert (and theoretically illegal) arms acquisition. The collapse of the Krajina Serbs statelet was sudden and total, as it had become little more than a corrupt paramilitary state led by craven bullies (Martic and Babic) who also turned out to be cowards who fled immediately, having done nothing of substance to prepare for the return of war. They left their people at the mercy of a well-armed and vengeful Croatian war machine, who helpfully publicized escape routes for terrified Serbs, although all too often they found that those routes, while open, weren't safe. They were exposed to abuse and attack from Croatian forces and civilians alike; and those who stayed behind--mostly those too elderly to flee--death and torture was their fate. Although the number of atrocities and deaths pales next to the numbers inflicted by the Serb nationalists, they were still part of a systematic plan which resulted in the largest single mass expulsion of people of the entire war. Within a few days, centuires of continuous Serb society in the Krajina had been completely eliminated.

Milosevic was silent through all that, even as he had pretended to be completely uninvolved in the Srebrenica operation (this book was written before later revelations of the involvement by the "Scorpions" and other Serb units had come to light). The protector of all Serbs, who had done so much to stir up and encourage the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia to take up arms, was now throwing them all aside.

The Croats were able to get away with this because they were obligated by their American sponsors to cooperate with the Bosnian government to take the war to the Serbs. They did so, and the Bosnian Army Fifth Corps took advantage of the altered balance of power to launch a successful attack out of the Bihac pocket. The collapse of the Bosnian Serb frontlines was about to happen.

"Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation" by Silber and Little [16]

Chapter 26: To the Mogadishu Line The Battle for Gorazde April 1994

Of the three government-controlled Muslim enclaves remaining in eastern Bosnia, Gorazde was the most formidable and the most obstructive from the Bosnian Serb perspective. Given the obstacle that Gorazde presented to the completion of a contiguous Serb Republic in Bosnia, reports that the Bosnian Serbs were launching a serious offensive operation should have been taken seriously. However, the initial reports were dismissed by UNPROFOR commander General Michael Rose.
The reasons for his refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation eventually would become clear to UN personnel on the scene in Gorazde, who became increasingly frustrated as their reports were not only ignored by Rose, but he continued to misrepresent them to the international media while hiding what he knew. In a word—Rose did not want NATO to repeat the air strikes which had been launched against the Serb forces around Sarajevo. He had become more concerned about maintaining neutrality and protecting his mission than anything else.
Pressure to do something finally mounted however; but Rose kept the airstrikes at such a limited and restrained level that they had no effect. It was hard to avoid at least suspecting that he had deliberately undermined the effectiveness of this strategy in order to devalue the use of air strikes in the future.
At the point the Russians became increasingly involved; at the same time, the calls for air strikes had not gone away simply because Mladic almost seemed to relish mocking the international community, this time by taking UN personnel hostage like the terrorist he was while launching extensive artillery attacks on the government-held stronghold of Tuzla. All the while, the death toll in Gorazde continued to rise.
Eventually, UN envoy was to wrest “concessions” from Karadzic, who was eager to give the international community the illusion of progress and who may have suspected that the rift between his government and the Milosevic regime was coming. These concessions were sufficient to halt the air strikes, although naturally the Serbs did not comply with them. In the end, Mladic was able to get pretty much what he wanted—it was not clear that he intended to completely take Gorazde, only to “neutralize” and contain it—and Karadzic had managed to deepen the rift between the NATO allies. The cost was high, though—the Bosnian Serbs had also managed to alienate their Russian allies and their patrons in Belgrade. The consequences of this new development would soon appear.

Chapter 27: “A Dagger in the Back” The Serbian Split June-August 1994

Karadzic and the Bosnian Serbs didn’t know it, but they had tried Milosevic’s patience as far as he felt he could afford, given the continuing damage economic sanctions and international pressure were inflicting in rump Yugoslavia. When the Western Powers represented by the “Contact Group” presented the parties (the Bosnian Serbs and the Croat-Muslim Federation) with yet another peace plan (one which gave the Serbs just under half the country but which expected them to give up secure control of the northern corridor) with their peace plan, the Bosnian government accepted it reluctantly, knowing that it wasn’t just but conceding that they knew the Bosnian Serbs would reject it. And, despite pressure from Milosevic (mostly through Yugoslavian President Zoran Lilic), they did exactly that.
Milosevic was furious, and this time the embargo he imposed on his ethnic allies was genuine, if not total (he didn’t want them to collapse militarily, he merely wanted to punish Karadzic and the other leaders who had defied him). Serbs in Serbia were mystified that the war for Serbian unity could be tossed aside so quickly, while those in Bosnia were stunned that they were being condemned for fighting the unwavering war of ethnic cleansing that Milosevic had done so much to bring about.

"In Harm's Way" by Martin Bell [21]

Chapter 23: Fainthearts Confounded

The final chapter of the book finds Bell observing and commenting on the endgame of the Bosnian war. Bell was called away from the field to provide his expertise in studio back home in Britain, where he confronted the difficulties of trying to distill the war and its denouement in short soundbites for a public which was suddenly paying attention again.

As for the war--Bell recognized the key to why the war came to a sudden end; as he reiterates over and over in this book, force works. A muscular use of force by NATO forced the Serbs to the negotiating table, and a determined show of arms by IFOR immediately following the Dayton treaty ensured that both sides kept the peace and respected the peacekeepers. There would be no more ceasefire violations, no more terrorist kidnappings of hapless UN personnel to act as human shields.

Even though it was disturbingly clear that all Dayton had accomplished was essentially to force the Bosnian Serbs to accept their own plan for de facto ethnic partition (albeit with far less territory than they would have liked), the main lesson Bell learned was this--it could have been done sooner, meaning that more lives could have been saved, less injustice would have been enshrined at Dayton, and something of the old multiethnic Bosnia might have been saved.

A lot of trouble, death, and destruction could have been avoided, and our Western values much less betrayed, had the world known in advance what Bell saw in hindsight.

CNAB Letter to the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

The Congress of North American Bosniaks has published an open letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The message--that America has a vested interest in seeing Bosnia survive as a unified, democratic, secular, and multicultural state--will not be an unfamiliar one to readers of this blog:

****************************************

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
US Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

Honorable Secretary Clinton,

On behalf of the Congress of North American Bosniaks, I am writing to express our gravest concern regarding the political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the resurgence of the ultra-nationalist rhetoric that led to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic and other Serb nationalists during that time period created an environment that was based on ethnic and religious hatred and led to the worst civilian atrocities Europe has seen since World War II.

Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence within its historical borders and was recognized by the United States, the United Nations, and the larger international community as a multi-ethnic, democratic state that could have served as a model for peaceful coexistence and tolerance as they have done for many years in its history. But evil forces of Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and other Serb leaders at the time used nationalist rhetoric that was rooted in deep hatred towards non-Serbs, especially the Bosniak Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We all know how the story unfolded, and that it was thanks to the Clinton administration, the United States government, and NATO that the war ended with the Dayton agreement.

Unfortunately, a sequel seems to be in the making, as the same ultra-nationalist rhetoric is once again being propagated by a new generation of Milosevic’s pupils, including Milorad Dodik, the current premier of Republika Srpska, Nikola Spiric, the prime minister of BiH and Nebojsa Radmanovic, the current member of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over the last few years, they have been testing the will of the United States and the European Union and purposely crippling any hopes for reforms in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by trying to create an environment where they can illegally proclaim a referendum for independence of Republika Srpska, thereby attaining Karadzic’s wartime goals.

Looking back on the Dayton agreement, the wartime representatives of Bosnia and Herzegovina only agreed to the Dayton agreement after a full guarantee by the United States that its sovereignty will be preserved. It was clear that the intentions were to end the war, guarantee Bosnian sovereignty, and hope for a better future for Bosnia. Instead, these Serb nationalists choose to misinterpret the agreement and use it as a tool for their agenda to accomplish “in peace” what Milosevic and Karadzic could not in war, a greater Serbia. This is, sadly, being almost completely ignored by the United States and the EU, who have sent a message that the people of Bosnia must resolve their own differences and come to an agreement on how to structure the country. While this sounds like an ideal solution, it is clear that the Serb representatives do not want to accept any solution, except that which preserves a homogeneous Serb state. This is now also fueling fires with some Croat representatives who think they should have the same. On the other hand, there is clear lack of leadership by the Bosniak representatives in dealing with these issues. Thus, the ascertainment that the destiny of Bosnian framework is up to the local politicians is only partially acceptable because the international community, with the Dayton agreement, provided them with tools which they now misappropriate for nationalist gain, by spreading propaganda of fear and hatred in order to promote a secessionist agenda.

Therefore, we ask, again, for the help of the United States in this dire time of need. Although, thankfully, there is no armed conflict at this time, it is imperative to implement sound foreign policy to prevent the injustice that Bosnia has suffered and the tragedy that has happened to its centuries’ old tradition of tolerance, diversity, and coexistence. This time, we ask not only as the former refugees from Bosnia, but also as American citizens to save Bosnia from the dark clouds that have once again begun to gather on the horizon. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason why Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot exist as a multi-ethnic, democratic, and prosperous nation that is fully integrated in Europe and a future member of NATO. One of the main obstacles to Bosnian democracy is the so called ethnic voting, which severely undermines the ability of Bosnia to function as a state.

The only question that remains is the following: is the United States still committed to fulfilling its obligation as the broker of the Dayton agreement to preserve peace, democracy, and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or will it stand by and allow these ultra-nationalist elements to disintegrate any resemblance of a functioning state and be rewarded for committing genocide? As it currently stands, Russia now has a far more involved role in Bosnia than before and threatens to undermine the U.S. efforts by promoting Serbian nationalism. We urge you to consider the gravity of the situation and realize that it is not only the moral duty of the U.S. to stop such activity, but that it is of vital national interest to the U.S. to prevent further instability in the region. Also, consider the message that inaction would send to the Muslim world, that the Bosniak people, even with all their European and secular values, have been betrayed by those who claim to promote democracy and freedom in the world.

We believe that an urgent entry of Bosnia and Herzegovina into NATO would quell the manipulation of some of its citizens and provide a strong message to all in the region that Bosnian sovereignty will never come into question. We also recommend urgent constitutional reforms that guarantee equal rights for all of its citizens, but also eliminate the undemocratic process of ethnic voting that holds the central government hostage from implementing any reforms that would lead towards euro-Atlantic integration. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Mr. Haris Alibašić, MPA
President of the CNAB Board of Directors

"Washington's War" by General Michael Rose [1]

I don't know if I'm going to review all of Washington's War: The American War of Independence to the Iraqi Insurgency or not, since the central premise of this book--that there are strong parallels between Britain in the American Revolution and the USA in the current occupation of Iraq--has no direct relation to the subject of this blog.

However, the author of this book is none other than General Sir Michael Rose, commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia from January 1994 to January 1995. This is more than an interesting coincidence--General Rose argues that his experiences in Bosnia provide him the first-hand knowledge necessary to understand the dynamic at play here. In fact, this book is in some ways an attack on the ideals of humanitarian intervention; as we shall see, when the text does address the Bosnian war specifically, it is also a work of implicit Bosnian revisionism.

I will begin to consider Rose's own text in the next post; for now, let us begin with the Foreward, by Professor Sir Michael Howard:

Foreward

This short Foreward is not nearly as clever as Professor Howard would like to believe it is; fully half is taken up with a strained description of the British military experience in the rebellious American colonies, written in a style meant to evoke the current American (and British, it must be noted) experience in post-invasion Iraq. The clumsiness of this piece of writing reveals the flaws in Rose's analysis before Rose himself has taken the stage--one can only see parallels between the British military in American, and the US coalition forces in Iraq if one ignores virtually all context, and shies away from specificity as well. By the time Howard "reveals" that is the American War of Independence, not the current Iraq war, which he is describing, only the dullest of readers will be surprised. For example, one must be completely ignorant of the fact that while the eastern coast of the USA is 3000 miles from London, it is considerably further than that from Washington, DC, to Baghdad.

However, Howard's "aha!" moment does provide a revelation of sorts--his throwaway reference to "the war that the United States has been waging in Iraq, with the British as her unhappy allies" suggests a polemic underneath the guise of historical study.

After giving credence to Rose's analysis of political incompetence in Iraq, Howard does express reservations about his belief that the US should give up and pull out of Iraq; his concern that Rose's belief that "both parties" (it will be interested to see which "party" in Iraq they are referring to) could quickly come to terms and develop a healthy relationship like the US and Britain did, or the US and Vietnam ultimately have. At least Howard recognizes the differences between the Iraqi insurgency and the revolutionary leaderships in both colonial America and--it has to be said--the Vietnamese Government.

However, Howard closes with an approving quote from the Duke of Wellington, to the effect that the hardest thing for a military commander to do is to retreat. His suggestion that this would the noblest and wisest course of action in a fragile state like Iraq, where the "party" we presumably would need to deal with is an insurgency which hardly speaks for a unified national movement, indicates that Howard and Rose are placing the cart in front of the horse. General Rose has an agenda to push, and this book will be an exercise in fitting the facts to fit the theory.

U.S. Congress passes House Resolution (H. Res. 171) on Bosnia and Herzegovina

[Following is the press release from The Bosniak-American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was released yesterday; apologies for my delay in passing it along.]

The Bosniak-American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (BAACBH) is pleased to announce that on May 12, 2009, the House of Representatives passed House Resolution 171 (H.Res. 171) on Bosnia and Herzegovina (B-H), introduced by Congressman Howard Berman on February 13, 2009. H. Res.171 expresses the sense of the House of Representatives on the need for constitutional reform in B-H and the importance of sustained U.S. engagement in partnership with the European Union (EU).

H. Res. 171 calls for an immediate and urgent constitutional reform that will enable B-H to work towards the creation of an efficient and effective state, able to meet its domestic and international obligations, particularly regarding full accession into the EU and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO.) The resolution emphasizes that the U.S. should appoint a Special Envoy to the Balkans who can work in partnership with the EU and political leaders in B-H to facilitate reforms at all levels of government and society, while also assisting the political development of other countries in the Balkan region.

The resolution strongly insists that efforts should be made domestically and at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to achieve justice for the victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Furthermore, H.Res. 171 does not recommend the closing of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) until the Peace Implementation Council (PIC) can determine that B-H reforms have met the five objectives and two conditions set by the PIC. The resolution recommends that the United States should work closely with and support the EU in the transition to a European Union Special Representative (EUSR), upon closure of OHR, to ensure that the EUSR has the authority and tools to manage affairs in a post-OHR B-H effectively.

BAACBH, formed in 2005, is a Washington, D.C. – based non-profit, non-governmental and non-partisan organization dedicated to advocating for Bosnian-Americans living in the United States and promoting peace and economic development in the Balkans by fostering democratic policy, promoting respect for human rights, and initiating educational and developmental programs.

Press Release: 15th Anniversary of US Recognition of Bosnian Independence and Sovereignty

I apologize for the three-day delay in posting this press release from the website of the Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina:

April 7, 1992: United States recognition of B-H's Independence

EDIT:

Another recent press release I neglected to pass along:

Commemorating the Seige of Sarajevo

US Concerned, Situation in Bosnia “Not Good”

A brief story from Balkan Insight on the treacherous situation in Bosnia. At least one can say the US is still involved in the country and the Obama Administration is paying some attention.

"America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11" by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier

I read several chapters of the book America Between the Wars, a history of United States foreign policy from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 2001. The premise of the book is that 9/11 didn't really "change everything", but rather that the attacks that day finally focused American attention--not just the public, but the governing elite--on new realities which had been developing since the fall of Communism.

It is an interesting and worthwhile thesis, one which places the Balkan wars of the 1990s into a larger context. In the authors' opinion (which I share), the battle between internationalist/interventionists on one side and neo-isolationist/non-interventionists on the other defined this era, and the current debates over American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan must be viewed in the context of continuing the struggle from the immediate post-Cold War period.

The authors essentially view events strictly in that framework, so the Dayton agreement is considered a "success" since the war was ended through American leadership, and improved the Clinton administration's standing globally and domestically. Little to nothing is said about Bosnia itself. Kosova gets rather more attention, since the war was, after all, Clinton's from the get-go, and the authors spend more time examining some of the ambiguities of the entire operation.

Time being in short supply for me lately, I did not finish the book, but I was pleased to see that, at the very least, the authors connected the dots between American involvement in the Balkans in the 1990s and current debates over humanitarian intervention, multilateral versus unilateral international actions, the limits of state sovereignty, and so forth.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [15]

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BRIDGE

This short chapter eloquently makes a case not only for the legitimacy of Bosnian culture, but of its worth. Bosnia was a bridge, Sells argues; the Croat nationalists of "Herceg-Bosna" knew what they were doing when they destroyed the elegant Stari Most bridge in Moster. Ian Paisley, the thuggish Ulter Unionist leader, once contemptuously said (I am paraphrasing here) that "Bridges make traitors." If one is devoted to a diminished and sterile notion of culture and cultural identity--one in which the individual is defined primarily by membership to a group, and furthermore in which the group is defined by hard and fast distinctions versus the "other"--then this is true. Bridges lead to communication and exchanges, which then lead to intermingling and a loss of "purity." The desirability of "purity", then, must never be questioned.

The Wounding Sky

Bosnia has been defined for centuries by the mixture of different peoples and faiths; Orthodox, Catholic, and Bosnian before the Ottoman period, and then Orthodox, Catholic, Islam and then Judaism (both Sephardic and Ashkenazi) after. Sells describes the Bosnian tradition of the sevdalinka love lyrics, which were written in Cyrillac, Latin, and Adzamijski script. The complex mix of gender roles in the sevdalinka, in which a woman poses as a man singing to her male lover (and which were often actually performed by male singers) parallels the complex, multilayered development of this lyric tradition.

Sevdalinkas were composed in all the languages of the Empire--Persian, Turkish, Arabic, South Slavic--and were often translated from one to another. The precious manuscripts recording this unique aspect of Bosnia's heritage were destroyed when Serb gunners deliberately targeted the Oriental Institute.

Sells writes:

"Bosnia has a culture rich in transitions and translations. Those looking for the essence of culture and language in ethnic, racial, or religious purity will find Bosnia incomprehensible. On the other hand, those who see culture as a creative process that by its very nature involves intermingling and creative tension among different elements will treasure Bosnia-Herzegovina."

Unfortunately, many in the West failed to grasp this.

The Execution of Culture

"In the fall of 1995, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger proclaimed that "there is no Bosnian culture." The context for Kissinger's claim was his proposal that Bosnia should be partitioned between Serbia and Croatia and the Muslims (and presumably anyone else who did not want to be part of ethnically pure Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia) should be placed in a "Muslim state." Partitioning Bosnia and putting the Muslims in a religious ghetto was the original goal of the Serb and Croat nationalists."

Other than again supporting the axiom that one can never go wrong disagreeing with America's most distinguished indicted war criminal, what can one say in response to such dismissive rubbish?

Sells dryly notes that the strongest refutation of Kissinger's statement came from Karadzic, Mladic, and the Serbian nationalists themselves, who put a great deal of energy and resources into destroying all traces of this allegedly non-existent culture. Also, there is this story:

"A Serb army officer entered the home of a Sarajevan artist, who happened to be Serb. Among the works of art, he saw a piece that depicted a page from the Qur'an. Infuriated, he had all the artwork taken out into the street, lined up, and shot to pieces with automatic weapons fire."

In order to justify the destruction of a people, you must first destroy their legitimacy. Sells recounts other episodes of genocide throughout modern history to illustrate the general truth of this observation. And then he concludes this section with a paragraph which manages to articulate something I have been grappling with for almost two years in this blog--the reason why Bosnia's fight should have been America's fight. One very big reason I believe American values were under attack in a small republic in southeast Europe in the first half of the last decade of the 20th Century. Allow me to quote the paragraph in its entirety:

"Like culture in the United States, Bosnian culture cannot be defined by the linguistic and religious criteria of nineteenth-century nationalism. Just as Americans share a language with the British and Australians, so Bosnians share a language with Serbs and Croats. Just as the United States has no single, official church, so Bosnia is made up of people of different religious confessions, and within those confessions, vastly different perspectives. If Bosnia has no culture, then the United States has no culture. If Bosnia should be partitioned into religiously pure apartheid states, then the same logic lead to the idea, proposed by the Christian Identity movement, that the United States should be divided into apartheid states of different races and religions."

Creation in the Fire

Sells recounts the art exhibition "Expo/Sarajevo 92" which was organized during the siege. He explains the great risks the artists had to take just to travel back and forth to the studio, and that the artists chose to make engravings because they are reproducible; a 'lucky' shell from Sarajevo's tormentors could destroy the display but not the works themselves. Those artists continued to create, to draw from Bosnia's rich, textured history and culture, and to celebrate life even while the world expected to nothing more than meekly survive and cower before those who wanted to carve the living body of Bosnia into neatly segmented, sterile, dead entities. The enemies of Bosnia, and the indifferent enablers of the West, wanted to believe that Bosnia would be defined by walls; those artists demonstrated yet again that it is rather defined by bridges.

A Dance

The book ends with this brief, almost poetic section. A Bosnian family--they are Serbs--living in North America throw a party for another Bosnian family who are moving to another city. The invite all the Bosnians they know--Serb, Croat, Bosniak. Everybody eats, drinks, talks, laughs. And then a sevdalinka is played. Dancing begins.

They are able to forget that they are Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim. In this bittersweet reunion mixed with farewells far from home, they reconnect with their culture. Away from the burden of being of one ethnoreligious group, they are free to be Bosnians.

--------------------

That is how the book ends. I highly recommend it; at only slightly over 150 pages it is a quick and easy read. It raises important questions about the role faith will, can, or should play in a secular, cosmopolitan democracy in the 21st Century. I suspect we will be revisiting these and related questions in my blog and in many other forums in the near future.

"The Bridge Betrayed" by Michael Sells [14]

CHAPTER SIX: MASKS OF COMPLICITY [continued]

Passive Violence and False Humanitarianism

"Western policy makers also manipulated the language of pacifism to justify an arms embargo against the Bosnians while refusing to use force to help them."

This is well-known to any reasonably informed observers of the Bosnian war; Sells notes dryly that the same Western governments engaged in and authorized arms sales to countries all over the world. Furthermore, he rightly notes that those same governments had

"...a moral and legal duty to uphold Article 51 of the UN Charter guaranteeing the right of a nation to defend itself, as well as the 1948 Geneva Convention requiring all signatory nations not only to prevent genocide but to punish it. By refusing either to allow the Bosnians to defend themselves or to use NATO power to defend them, these leaders engaged in a form of passive violence, setting the parameters within which the killing could be and was carried out with impunity."

The outrage that informed such books as David Rieff's Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West was primarily fueled by similar observations. The slightly condescending indifference towards the practical and moral implications of this faux pacifism. Sells notes that most Western churches and religious groups were complicit in this campaign as well.

The catastrophic consequences of what Sells aptly terms "passive humanitarianism"--struggling mightily to get food to civilians while leaving them at the mercy of their heavily armed tormentors--is also discussed. And Sells briefly mentions a couple of infamous incidents--the use of Muslim rape camp slaves by UN officials, and the cooperation between UN peacekeepers transporting Dr. Hakija Turajlic and his murderers.

Moral Equalizing

I doubt any readers of this blog will need a refresher course on the moral equalizing ("There are no saints in this war"; "All sides share some of the blame") frequently indulged in my Western pundits and politicians in their never-ending efforts to avoid their moral and legal responsibilities. The list of incidents and statements Sells includes is damning but hardly comprehensive--Stoltenberg repeating the Serb nationalist line that Muslims were "really" Serbs; Owen claiming that 60% of pre-war Bosnia "belonged" to "the Serbs"; Susan Woodwards pseudo-objective claims that the entire conflict was due to impersonal factors and and organizational breakdowns; and so on. And of course Peter Brock's Foreign Policy article, which gave Bosnian revisionist an actual article in an actual, reputable mainstream publication which to cite ad nauseam.

National Interests

Sells notes that many Western leaders made the Kissingeresque realpolitik claim that the USA and other NATO members had no "national interest" in Bosnia. He notes how international indifference to the Palestinian problem in the wake of the 1947 war still haunts us today; he also argues that indifference in Bosnia most likely emboldened Hutu extremists in Rwanda (although, of course, the "realists" would most likely respond that we had no national interests in Rwanda, either). He also points out that indifference to the plight of Bosnia's Muslims almost certainly lent credibility to Islamist and jihadist claims about Western hostility to Islam and Muslims. And what is the cost of allowing religious violence to succeed?

He closes with an over-reaching claim that some arms-producing nations might actually welcome the instability that acquiescence in Bosnia's destruction might unleash. This smacks too much of paranoia and conspiracy theories for my taste; I would have preferred for Sells to have left this paragraph out of the final draft.

Not Two Cents

The title of this final section comes from Thomas Friedman's callous and stupid comment "I don't give two cents about Bosnia. Not two cents. The people there have brought on their own troubles." Sells' verdict on this statment is concise and accurate:

"It marks the logical end of moral equalizing, the equating of the victim and the perpetrator and the devaluing of both."

Sells notes that Friedman was only stating in bald terms what many in the West were implying with comments about "Let them keep on killing one another and the problem will solve itself." Sells' argues that the solution to such moral vacuousness is to replace the general with the specific, to give the suffering a human face, such as the famous picture of the young Bosnian woman who hung herself after the fall of Srebrenica. That picture was cited by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who had been against US involvement in the region. As Sells puts it:

"It was what the picture left unsaid that allowed the senator to look beyond the linguistic masks of "warring factions" and "guilt on all sides" to the reality that this young woman was most likely not warring, not guilty, not an ancient antagonist or hater, and that her act was "not the act of someone who had the ability to fight in self-defense." "

Sells concludes by noting that it is difficult to make moral distinctions in a religious genocide since so much of our moral thinking is grounded in religious teachings to begin with. Religious leaders and teachers, he concludes, have an obligation to

"...better understand and more clearly explain the full humanity of those who embrace other religions and the variety and richness within other traditions. Another response is to begin with a basic premise--that needless, willfully inflicted human suffering cannot and should not be explained away."

How sad that after thousands of years of organized religion, such simple and fundamentally decent proposals still need to be put forward.

-------------

This concludes Chapter Six. In my next post, I will consider the final chapter.

"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.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [27]

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WHERE ARE ALL THE BODIES BURIED?

Given that Balkan revisionists often complain about being dismissed as genocide deniers (the truth hurts, don't it?), one would think that Parenti would shy away from such an obvious Holocaust denier parallel. Yet he doesn't--he really titles this chapter "Where Are All the Bodies Buried?" which brings up obvious echoes of the "Where are all the piles of ashes at Auschwitz" type claims of Holocaust deniers.

And the level of "discourse" and analysis in this chapter is on the same level as the title. As such, I won't dignify this chapter with a review at all. The fact that NATO wildly overestimated the number of dead Albanians at the beginning of the campaign is of no significance to me--frankly, I'm glad we overestimated the number of killed; it's one indication that we intervened quickly enough. Parenti's charge that NATO exaggerated the nature of Serb operations in order to justify invasion is weak: if NATO leaders chose to trumpet worst-case scenarios in order to justify an intervention to put an end to the brutalization of an entire people, I can live with that. NATO may have been guilty of sloppy Holocaust parallels (oh, the irony), but Milosevic's regime was guilty of imposing a brutal apartheid, and ultimately of attempting to expel and entire people.

And at any rate, the later revised figures have been verified. And, contrary to Parenti's snide remarks, plenty of forensic evidence has proven a coordinated campaign by Serbian forces to disguise and remove mass graves, many outside of Kosovo altogether.

Parenti compares the "inflated" death tolls to the "inflated" numbers of dead at Srebrenica. Since investigation and forensic work have since verified the number of dead at Srebrenica as well, it would behoove Parenti to release a revised edition of this book with an updated version of this chapter acknowledging that voluminous facts have come to light contradicting his revisionist version of events.

I am not holding my breath.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [26]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE GENOCIDE HYPE CONTINUES

Aside from the standard redefinition of "genocide" to exclusively denote campaigns of absolute extermination, this chapter mainly serves to discount or diminish the suffering of Albanians expelled from Kosovo while simultaneously transferring as much blame as possible to NATO for what level of suffering Parenti is willing to acknowledge. Aside from the obvious blind spots in his vision, this chapter also reveals a callousness towards refugees and other victims which would be shocking if the reader weren't already accustomed to Parenti's thinly veiled contempt for ethnic Albanians.

There is very little to comment on here, especially since I am somewhat impatient to have this horrible, dishonest, and stupid book behind me. So what follows is merely a brief summary of a few select points:

-Parenti harps quite a bit on what evidence he can muster that Serbian operations were not genocidal in intent but rather focused on "counter-insurgency" against the KLA. Aside from the obvious bias--Parenti never, as far as I've seen, doubts Serb sources--this point entirely ignores the gap between literally stated goals versus implied intent, not to mention the reality of how orders were interpreted and implemented. Balkan revisionists love to point out that Milosevic never wrote his own "Mein Kampf" -like master plan, as if this and only this (rather than actual actions) could be the only possible smoking gun.

-As noted before, a common theme of Balkan revisionism is that refugees are fundamentally unreliable sources of information. But furthermore, we should demand a very, very high level of desperation and need before refugee status can even be granted. It is striking how often Parenti makes note of the high standard of material well-being and health most Albanian refugees displayed. They weren't destitute enough, apparently. What's more, he discounts the impact of one refugee's story thusly:

"A man told of fleeing to the railroad station to get a train out of Kosovo: "We were frightened by the police," he said (not shot, beaten, or tortured, but frightened)."

These were the same police who were shooting and beating plenty of other ethnic Albanians, but clearly this guy was just being skittish when he made a run for it. Then again, Parenti also discounts another women's story because she was merely driven from her home by police, which he claims is "not exactly an atrocity." When armed paramilitaries evict you from your home at gunpoint, I hope you'll be able to keep that in mind.

And so on...there are fourteen pages of this garbage. At the end Parenti tries to display some balance of humanity by acknowledging that

"...the refugees that Clinton spoke to certainly had endured the terrible experience of being uprooted from their homes and sent off with few possessions, in some cases being separated from loved ones."

But in Parenti's world, this is pales next to the far greater injustice committed by a NATO which had to oversell it's war to a skeptical public. It's easy to look at a complex, multifaceted issue such as international intervention in Kosovo and do nothing more than pick and choose certain inconsistencies for ridicule. Easy; but also just about the extent of Parenti's critical abilities. Normally, one must go to a campus coffeehouse to find such a mixture of self-righteous bombast and clueless simplemindedness. Reading Parenti's book is like experiencing youthful hard-left idealism shorn of its redeeming qualities--namely, youth and inexperience. Parenti is old enough to know better. But not wise enough, or sophisticated enough, or mature enough, or compassionate enough.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [25]

CHAPTER TWELVE: NATO'S WAR CRIMES

[continued]

Parenti makes a drawn-out and rather odd analogy comparing civilian casualties in wartime to pedestrians killed by a reckless driver. As Parenti tells it, since a driver who kills bystanders through reckless driving can be held liable for their deaths, then shouldn't the accidental killing of civilians during military action, specifically bombing, automatically be considered a war crime?

Unfortunately, Parenti doesn't delve any deeper into this comparison--which would be necessary, since he makes no exceptions and adds no qualifiers. He does not draw any distinction between precision guided bombs versus carpet-bombing, for example. Because Parenti has written in other places in defense of revolutionary violence, and because he certainly is no anarchist--the man has no problem with state power when the state is socialist (or, preferably, Stalinist), he should have examined this point further. I do not believe he is advocating absolute pacifism, so to leave the analogy hanging is simply lazy.

But no matter--he goes on for several pages attempting to imply that civilian casualties were intended. That is his choice of words; he is not claiming that NATO planners were indifferent to the civilian suffering on the ground in 1999, or that the military and political restraints pushed NATO to use tactics which placed pilot safety ahead of ensuring the highest standards of accuracy (which would have been a fair point to make). No--Parenti says this:

"But there is a real question as to how unintended the killing of civilians has been."

This is a very serious accusation, yet the evidence he gathers is rather weak. It may come out that NATO knowingly dropped cluster bombs onto civilian areas--I am no fan of the manner in which the Kosovo campaign was implemented--but Parenti hardly makes a convincing case.

And so this chapter goes--more quotes and occasional stray facts gathered in an attempt to reverse the guilt. Predictably enough, the fact that most of the expulsions of ethnic Albanians began after the onset of bombing is used to somehow damn NATO--as if the planning for such ethnic cleansing wasn't already in place; as if forcing over a million people out of their homes is a moral and reasonable response to military assault. But this is standard Balkan revisionism, and Parenti adds nothing new to this tired storyline.

There is a list of "Fictions" and "Facts" in which Parenti presumes to uncover various Western "deceptions". The list ends with this "fact":

"The "stiffest military challenge" in NATO's history was actually a sadistic, one-sided, gang-battering of a small country by the most powerful military forces in the world."

I defy any undergraduate to cite that "fact" in a paper.

And so the chapter ends, with yet more protestations that ethnic Albanians were not being driven from their homes in large numbers until the bombing started and the usual outrage about diplomatic hardball at Rambouillet. And then the standard list of past US crimes and foreign interventions and invasions. Noam Chomsky does this too, as does Diana Johnstone, and I can only repeat what I've written previously--for the far-left Balkan revisionists, the problem isn't that we cared too little for the people of East Timor, it is that we care too much about the Muslims of Bosnia and the Albanians of Kosovo. Because the motives of the world's most powerful nation are never pure and wholly altruistic, then those motives must be entirely suspect. And it is the motives--not the actual actions, or the effects of those actions, which matter most to Parenti and his fellow travelers.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [24]

CHAPTER TWELVE: NATO'S WAR CRIMES

[I've been busy and out of town for most of the past week--sorry it's taken me so long to get back to blogging]

Parenti has a big ax to grind--NATO, not Milosevic or Seselj or Karadzic, was the real war criminal in Yugoslavia in his version of events. To begin, he lists the laws both national and international that NATO, in his opinion, violated.

The problem with this section is not that he is incorrect--strictly speaking, Parenti sticks to the facts in these opening paragraphs (although he seems to consider the NATO Charter to be "international law"--I'm not so sure about that). His objections are all over the map and rather disjointed. He objects to the violation of Serbian sovereignty on the basis of the UN Charter (which, in better hands, could have prompted a worthwhile examination of how the UN deals with domestic crises). He also claims that the Clinton Administration violated the War Powers Act as well as bypassing Congress altogether. Again, there are merits to these objections--so it is all the more distressing that Parenti doesn't seem the least bit interested in discussing them further. He throws the information out, raw and unexamined, and assumes that his job is done. Other than another couple of legalistic paragraphs on about the War Powers Act, he has already moved on.

We next discuss how NATO represents a newer and more sinister form of imperialism because it represents no particular people or geographic entity. NATO is a lot like a corporation, you see, and corporations are bad. I apologize for the glib tone--Parenti has actually quoted an interesting point--but once again the man has borrowed an insight without adding anything to it. Much of this book has the feel of a hastily-written undergraduate paper with random quotes inserted into the text post de facto in order to make the instructor happy.

Just as Parenti lacks the intellectual curiosity and even-handedness to make anything interesting of the issue state sovereignty, international interventions, and international law, he lacks the honesty necessary to discuss the issue of diplomacy. In short, he returns to the scene of Rambouillet. We already know that Parenti wants to believe that the Belgrade regime were unfairly set up; there is no need to rehash that imaginary scenario.

What follows is an odd exercise in logic; one that seems to suggest that any and all military actions by a state are fundamentally immoral, no matter what the cause or circumstance. We will consider this in the next post.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [23]

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE RAMBOUILLET AMBUSH

More blatant revisionism built on a foundation of complete disinformation. Parenti--like most Balkan revisionists--gets himself all worked up because the West did not come to Rambouillet with a willingness to negotiate. The Milosevic government went through the pretenses of being willing to negotiate--and why not, since at least some members of the government had to realize they had pushed their luck too far once again (keep in mind that Parenti claims the Racak massacre was staged).

Parenti's complaints are that the Serbs were given a take-it-or-leave it set of conditions which, if accepted, would have allowed NATO forces to ignore Yugoslav sovereignty with some impunity. And he is correct. Whether or not you think this is a bad things depends entirely on your familiarity with reality and the calibration of your moral compass.

"To Kill A Nation" by Michael Parenti [19]

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE OTHER ATROCITIES

[continued]

Having listed a number of incidents involving Croat, Muslim, and Bosnian government forces, Parenti now turns to attention to the seige of Sarajevo.

This is interesting--I would have expected him to go for broke and break out the Srebrenica denial material at this point, but Sarajevo it is. And unlike Srebrenica, there is far too much visual evidence of the siege to deny that it happened, so instead Parenti opts for the argument that it wasn't really a siege at all--or at least not a very bad one--and it was the Bosnian government's fault.

Parenti's 'evidence' for this assertion essentially boil down to two points--the Bosnian government's intermittent intransigence both with the international community and its own citizens; and the fact that, at certain (no doubt carefully chosen) points in time, life in Sarajevo was less than completely hellish. Parenti inadvertently betrays his own dishonesty in the first paragraph. First, he writes:

"The key story that set much of world opinion against the Serbs was the siege of Sarajevo which lasted, on and off, from April 1992 to February 1994."

(The "on and off" is a condescending little touch, isn't it?)

Then he approvingly quotes Charles Boyd, who noted that local markets were selling produce at reasonable prices on the day the Bosnian government was commemorating the 1,000th day of the siege.

Boyd has become quite the darling of Balkan revisionists (apparently US generals are not guilty of being imperialists if they happen to have convenient excuses) but Parenti could have at least addressed how a siege that lasted less than two years "on and off" could have made it to Day One Thousand.

And then, of course, the usual charges that Bosnian forces (always--ALWAYS--ABiH forces are referred to as "Muslim" forces; but then, he later talks about an interview on "Muslim television") systematically shelled their own citizens; that the famous marketplace bombings were actually bombs planted by "Muslim" troops; and of course that the entire siege (as it were) was entirely the fault of the Izetbegovic government, which refused to accept cease-fire and peace agreements. God forbid we blame the heavily armed troops in the surrounding mountains and hills. Parenti even praises the Serb forces for this:

"Bosnian Serb forces had offered safe passage to all civilians. With noncombatants out of the way, especially women and children, the Serbs would be able to treat Sarajevo as a purely military target."

He honestly seems to believe that this was a noble, humane, and reasonable gesture. It is worth noting that in this chapter, Parenti's previously noted pretense of relying mostly on Western sources has gone out the window--nearly all of his 'information' comes from fellow revisionists.

At the end of the chapter, Parenti cynically plays at being even-handed by admitting that "Violations of the Geneva convention can be ascribed to Serb forces, especially Chetnik paramilitary units and irregulars." He proceeds to list a series of rather random and unconnected atrocities (almost as an aside, he concedes that Serb forces bore "much of the responsibility for Sarajevo").

But this all comes after several pages of predictable and decontextualized incidents, a crude and barely-sourced attempt to snow the gullible reader. The Bosnian government forces are blasted for refusing to allow the UN access to the Sarajevo marketplace after the infamous 1994 bombing. Which begs the question--why should the UN expect to have unrestricted access, anyway? Where is Michael Parenti's concern about sovereignty now? Why should the UN be allowed to go anywhere and see anything in the Bosnian capital? He does not explain--in the former Yugoslavia, the sanctity of state sovereignty was apparently only for Serbia and the RS.

This tedious and thoroughly dishonest chapter closes with a comparison between the "moderated truths" mouthed by mealy-mouthed neutralists like Boyd, Rose, and so on versus the "barrage" of "Serb-bashing stories broadcast unceasingly around the world." This level of hyperbole and paranoia is worthy of Karadzic and Cosic at their best. In the next chapter, Parenti signs on to the Serb nationalist cause whole-heartedly.